To Read List 2018

2018 is officially over, and as a proud bookworm, I want to brag about the great stories I’ve experienced throughout this year.

Well, brag is too much said. I just want to share with you some good reads and admit what I had in plan to read but failed. I’m not perfect, but thanks for thinking that for a moment 🙂

You’ll notice how the titles are in several languages, but especially English. There are also a couple of titles in French and Romanian, and some of them, I admit, were reads I had to go through for high school and uni. Not all that bad, I must admit!

I’ll cross the ones I’ve managed to read with a line so that you can tell which ones were a success into accomplishing my goal and which were not.

Now without further ado, let’s hop right into the list!

1. Arta conversației de Ioana Vulpescu
2. Millenium by Stieg Larsson
3. Madame Bovary par Gustave Flaubert
4. Cathérina de Medici par Balzac
5. The Testament by John Grisham
6. Da Vinci Code par Dan Brown
7. Inferno par Dan Brown
8. Războiul liniștit de Paul McAuley (vol I & II)
9. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
10. Les Misérables par Victor Hugo
11. How to speak any language fluently by Alex Rawlings
12. Traitait sur la tolérence par Voltaire
13. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
14. The Call of Cthulu by H. P. Lovecraft
15. 1984 by George Orwell
16. Baltagul de Mihail Sadoveanu
17. Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război de Camil Petrescu
18. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Povești de seară pentru fete rebele
20. Le dernier jour d’un condamné par Victor Hugo
21. Muntele Vrăjit de Thomas Mann
22. Le démonisme est un humanisme par Mădălin Roșioru
23. Pourquoi? par Alain Spiess
24. The Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin
25. Contează pe mine de Serge Joncour
26. Animal Farm by George Orwell
27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
28. Regele șerpilor de Jeff Zentner
29. Crimă și pedeapsă de Dostoievski
30. The Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
31. Dreamwalker by J. D. Oswald
32. Gargantua et Pantagruel par François Rabelais
33. The Red Bead by Knight Kalekye
34. Crimson Curse by William McCorbin
35. Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
36. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
37. Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (Stormlight Archive)
38. A Natural History of Dragons: a Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
39. Sir Cumference and the First Round Table (A Math Adventure) by Cindy Neuschwander
40. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
41. A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
42. A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
43. A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas
44. Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
45. The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan
46. Lessons for the Young Economist by Robert P. Murphy
47. I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read
48. Psihologia educației de Corina Cace
49. The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
50. The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss
51. Profit and Loss by Ludwig von Mises
52. Entrepreneurship and Development: Cause or Consequence? by Peter J. Boettke and Christopher J. Coyne
53. What had the Government Done to our Money by Murray N. Rothbard
54. Psihologia poporului român de Rădulescu Motru
55. Polaris et autres nouvelles par H. P. Lovecraft

That makes 33/55 books read. Seen how plenty of these titles joined the list because X person said it was good and Y person heard from someone else that it was good, etc., I think that’s a pretty good percentage. I’m aiming for an even better one in 2019 of course!

Always aim for infinity and beyond 🙂

If you can also find the To Read List 2019 post here if you are curious to see what I plan to read further on.

What goals did you accomplish (or not) in 2018? It can be something books-related or not, your choice. Let me know in the comments so we can be proud of each other.

I wish you all a most beautiful 2019!

The book pile

Last night I got back home for Christmas and this morning I was stunned by my own brother and his book pile which was towering proudly on his nightstand.

The book on top he had just “stolen” from my bedroom, and just in case you don’t know, it’s the 3rd book from the Inheritance Cycle: Brisingr ❤

The rest are mostly books he’s reading for school, therefore they are in Romanian. No wonder he decided to read the whole Inheritance Cycle again. I must say I am proud of my brother, though, for sharing my love for this book series, which in case you didn’t know is my top favourite.

Also, note that he’s a much more avid reader than I am, so I say kudos to him! It is something I respect and envy with my whole heart, but it also makes me proud to know that I had taken part in building up his love for books.

And then…

I notice this other book pile that I already knew about, but keep forgetting exists.

Just take a look!

Doesn’t it look impressive? I’d say it’s a challenge worthy of my brother. Need I mention I also want to get a grab at some of his books? For example the ones in the GoT series, or some of the books he’s already read like Heroes of Olympus.

But for now, I’ll stick to reading 1984 by George Orwell and keep up with the stuff I have to read for uni. And by the way, next up is The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (finally!)

I wonder how much my brother and I will be able to read during this Christmas holiday.

Now Reading: 1984 by George Orwell

This week I started a new book, because I finally got a break from all the materials I have to read for uni. More are to come, sure, but I’ll take advantage of the Christmas holiday to read to my heart’s content whatever I please.

The book I’m reading is the famous 1984 by George Orwell. Just in case you didn’t know, the book was written earlier than the year in the title: 1949. That’s amazing, right?!

So far I’m only 40 pages through, but I am enjoying the book, even though the genre is not exactly my cup of tea. Here are some spotlights from these first 40 or so pages that might give you an insight into why this book so strangely fascinates me:

 

“Why can’t we go to the hanging?” roared the boy in his huge voice.

“Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!” chanted the little girl, still capering around.

 

Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.

 

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

 

… and of course, the unforgettable…

 

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

 

It might seem a little morbid, and you’d be very right. At the same time, however, the author’s vision is fascinating, and the way he illustrates the ideas springing from his imagination are (as far as I know) quite historically accurate. This fact in itself is scary, but in my case anyway it brings out an unfed curiosity.

What do these passages make you think about? Would you read this book? And if you have already, don’t be afraid to leave a comment with your opinion about it.

Otherwise, I wish you Merry Christmas and happy holidays! ^_^

Tabletop game day: D&D

Today I had a very geek Sunday.

There is this awesome café in Bucharest where you can play board games, so I spent all afternoon there with some friends playing lovely D&D.

For starters, I was a druid (lvl 3). The others were a rogue, a wizard, a fat monk and a “barbaribard” (barbarian + bard).

Our characters already knew each other and at the start of the campaign we were assigned a mission to scout a dangerous area. We were told that those who had gone to investigate before us never returned.

It wasn’t very surprising to find out we were actually heading for a graveyard, and then entered a mausoleum. Unmistakably there were spooky scary skeletons and zombies, all controlled by the final boss, who was something of a necromantic cleric (?). At least we got him killed and sent the word back to the village that the missing people were without a doubt dead. We had, after all, killed with our characters’ own hands the undead creatures they had become.

Now the actually fun parts within today’s session were rather related to our role playing and dice rolling. So here are the spotlights I found nice and sometimes even hilarious.

We just encountered the boss battle. Behind us there are the three chambers which we passed through safely 😀

• At the beginning after accepting the mission I spent the rest of the day transformed in a cat who snoozed in a tree.
• When reaching the graveyard, I turned into a panther and went ahead sneakily to scout the area. Skeletons rose in all directions, and a couple of skelly archers were aiming their bows down at us from the top of a cliff. My first attack was on one of those ones, and luckily I had an advantage because I still hadn’t been detected. When my panther pounced on the skelly, the skelly’s skull flew away into some nearby bushes and the enemy was dead… or more dead than he previously was anyway 🙃

  

  The figurine to the right is sitting on a box because it was actually a flying wizard. Duuuuh!

• Also during that fight, the fat monk tried to climb up the cliff in order to attack the skellies too. Unfortunately for him, he rolled a critical fail on his acrobatics check and the edge of the cliff crumbled under his feet and he fell back down. To make matters even better, on his second attempt to reach the skelly at the top he landed a critical fail on his attack. That ended up with him thrusting his quarterstaff between the skelly’s ribs and remaining stuck there. I swear I was laughing in tears when that happened, and especially when the skelly failed to attack as well. We said he even became a depressed skelly because both were unbelievably incompetent.
• A few minutes after the battle… “Which room should we go through?” was a question we soon debated. To the right, the mind room. To the left, the might room. Forward, the death room. I used my panther’s acute sense of smell to find out the middle room had nothing inside. Therefore, everyone followed the “meowing kitty” into the death chamber and reached the other side unscathed since the room didn’t live up to its name. Victory to the kitty!
• On a side note, on both combats when we rolled initiation, I was the proud member of the party who scored a glorious critical fail both times. You have surely never seen before such randomly precise dice rolling skill!
• During the boss battle my panther was killed so I transformed into a bear that got killed eventually too (boo-hoo-hoo), but at least I got the last hit in the boss with my glorious Moonbeam!

And this is the boss battle from my perspective. As you can see, I am the growling bear in the background, next to a prone zombie I was making ready to pounce on.

These are the highlights of today’s one-shot campaign, and I definitely had a lot of fun. I hope you also enjoyed finding out about it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments! ^_^

A delicious cooking fail

I’ve been wanting to try cooking cookies for over a month now, and never got around actually doing it. Until today.

YAY!

Well, half a yay really. There are good and a bad parts to my first attempt.

Negative aspects:

Before and after being taken from the baking tray xD

• the cookies crumbled when I took them from the baking trays
• I had a lot of cleaning to do afterwards

Positive aspects:

• it was a fun experience that I want to repeat and get right eventually
• the cookie crumbs turned out really delicious ❤

If you want to know the recipe I used, here’s the link to the website I found. The only difference is that I didn’t use one ingredient on the list, namely stem ginger in syrup simply because I don’t know what that is exactly and where I can find it, hehe.

If you try out the recipe yourself, do let me know how it turned out! 😀