"Reading requires a loner's temperment, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead."
-- David Samuels


About Me: I live in Etobicoke, Ontario with my cat, Neptune, my husband, and our 2 children. I learned about Bookcrossing during a year living in England at the end of my English degree.

I used to organize the Toronto Bookcrossersmeetings. As such, I was responsible for taking home annd releasing any unclaimed books after the meetings. Therefore the books on my bookshelf do not necessarily reflect my tastes.

I love DIY and am avid at knitting, crocheting, embroidering, and anything else that involves fibre and textiles.

Wanna see what's in my perminent collection? Check out my librarything! And for the traders, check out my Title Trader inventory, my Bookmooch inventory or my What's On My Bookshelf inventory. For my fellow environmentalist-bibliophiles, Eco-Libris is a must-visit website.

My Personal Reading Challenge (currently on hold)
I'm going to try to read 24 books in alphabetical order of author's last name. I'll try to make each book a bookcrossing book so I can move it a long when I'm finished (this is part of my attempt to make space on my overflowing bookshelves).
A - Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
B - Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
C - English as a Second Language by Megan Crane
D - Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
E - Breadwinner and Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis
F - The Jane Austen Bookclub by Karen Joy Fowler
G - Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
H? - this, this, or this.


Authors I love
- Jane Austen
- Douglas Adams
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Terry Pratchett
- Neil Gaiman
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Guy Gavriel Kay
- Jasper Fforde


As mentioned above: since I now have the financial contraints of going back to school, I will be halting my bookswapping for a while (but staying in the bookrings I've already joined). I'm keeping all the stuff below so I don't have to look up the code again when I get back into it. :)
[I love doing book swaps! If anybody wants any of my books marked Available or TBR, PM me. Please make sure that its status was set by me and not someone else before requesting so you can be sure that I still have the book. Below is my wish list:]



You can see the big version here (thanks, Cliff1976!). Don't shy away from contacting me for a swap if you don't have anything on my list. You may have my next favourite book that I've never heard of.

I collect stamps so it would be really great if anyone mailing books to me can use stamps (which are much nicer looking than a postage paid sticker). If you also collect stamps let me know and I'll be sure to put stamps on the books I send to you!

Here is a breakdown of my ratings

1-2 = Please, can I have those hours of my life back.
3-4 = It could've been worse.
5-6 = Something to read on a long train ride.
7-8 = I really enjoyed this.
9-10 = This book really impressed me. I recommend it to everyone!

You Know You're From Toronto When...

A really great parking spot can move you to tears. You can recommend about 3 good body piercing parlours. You make well over $100,000 and you still can't find a nice place to live. You realize there are far more rainbow flags in the city than Canadian Flags. When the temperature rises above zero degrees, you yell "Woohooo! Patio weather!". You enjoy watching channel 47 multicultural TV. You're guaranteed to know at least one person on every episode of Speaker's Corner. You haven't been to the CN Tower since you were six, but still have nightmares about that damn glass floor. You've had at least 3 bicycles stolen in the past 10 years. You've partied with at least one of the members of The Kids in the Hall. You've fantasized about having sex in Casa Loma. At least 3 of your friends have moved to Vancouver. You turn your nose up at any establishment frequented by the S&M crowd. (Scarborough and Mississauga). You never, never, never swim in the lake. You know "The Beaches" are really called "The Beach", but still say "The Beaches" just to annoy all the nitwits who live there. You can say "world's tallest freestanding structure" ten times fast. You know the correct answer to "Where do shopping carts go to die?" is "The Don River". You speak better Chinese than French. The word "cabbagetown" doesn't strike you as particularily amusing. Castle Frank subway station remains one of the great mysteries of the universe for you. You've had sex in a washroom on UofT campus at least once. You know where to find Dim Sum, Sushi, Curry, Pad Thai and a dildo at 3 am on a weeknight. For the last time, it's pronounced 'TRONNA'!. You consider eye contact a sign of hostility and an invasion of your privacy. It takes you half an hour to get to work by TTC and you are the envy of all your friends. You mourned the death of the Spadina Bus. You know someone who went to high school with at least one member of The Barenaked Ladies or RUSH. You laugh heartily at people who refer to highway four hundred and one. You've taken the vomit comit. You can manuver your bike across Queen st. without getting caught in the streetcar tracks. You know the difference between souvlaki, moussaka, and spanakoptia. You can name at least three locations of The Beer Store that are open till 11 PM. You have NEVER been to the Hard Rock Cafe. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Toronto.

List of the top 110 banned books (of all time). Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you’ve read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Tried reading it in Spanish, first.)
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (Whoever thinks this is a children's book wasn't paying attention!)
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (It should make Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes make more sense)
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (Tried reading it in French. Didn't last long.)
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker (Can someone point out to me the scary part?)
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (Henry Fielding = funny!)
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (I just don't like Thomas Hardy)
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (One of the best books I ever read for high school English)
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx In German!
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (Stopped part way through and hoped there wouldn't be to many questions about it on the exam. Of course, there were...)
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmu
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck (One of the worst books I ever read for high school English)
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig (Why was this banned?)
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes