A 25 year old spinster who loves to read, which is why I'm currently getting my Masters in Library Science. I'm also an avid knitter and foodie; so don't be surprised if those topics pop up. Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/profile/darkIknowwell
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
What speed do you read at? (Remember, it’s not a race!)
“You read 371 words per minute. That makes you 48% faster than the national average.”
You read 445 words per minute.
That makes you 78% faster than the national averageYou read 444 words per minute. That makes you 78% faster than the national average.
You read 237 words per minute.
That makes you 5% slower than the national average.
Oh god, I’m about the same speed as a 7th/8th grader….. /sobs
You read 419 words per minute.
That makes you 68% faster than the national average.
k
You read 600 words per minute.
That makes you 140% faster than the national average.o ok
You read 380 words per minute.
That makes you 52% faster than the national average.ah i thought i had gotten slower
You read 477 words per minute.
That makes you 91% faster than the national average.
oooh cool.
542 words per minute, but, as my housemate has accused me of before, if it’s an unfamiliar piece, my comprehension goes to hell. Failed the first one (which read like Orwell, I think) and aced the second, which was the opening page of Alice in Wonderland.
… um… 659 wpm, 164% faster than the national average. I did it three times (no cheating) because I thought it had to be mistaken and it stayed about the same.
I closed the tab so I dunno what the percentage is but 924wpm.
I don’t normally do these things (I’m sooooo anti-… something popular) but this was fun! 691 wpm - 176% faster than the national average.
Well, this was actually kind of interesting for me—in high school the kid who sat next to me in English used to try and figure out how many words per minute I read.
“You read 2,578 words per minute. That makes you 931% faster than the national average.”
Whaaaaat
“You read 718 words per minute. That makes you 187% faster than the national average.”
Not too shabby I suppose.
You read 355 words per minute.
That makes you 42% faster than the national average.
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
Neil Gaiman
What I didn’t yet understand was the importance of taste and timing. Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence — or perhaps it is we who change in theirs — and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.
Mark Haddon, The Right Words in the Right Order (via distantheartbeats)
You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind — when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them — before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s.
Blake Morrison, Twelve Thoughts About Reading (via distantheartbeats)
Distant Heartbeats: I Am by John Clare
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossedInto the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the…
Sara, I love that you reblogged this! Emmanuel’s To Write Love On Her Arms chapter did a whole thing about it today :)Today, March 1st, is Self-Injury Awareness Day.
Myth: People who cut and self-injure are trying to get attention.
Fact: The painful truth is that people who self-harm generally do so in secret. They aren’t trying to manipulate others or draw attention to themselves. In fact, shame and fear can make it very difficult to come forward and ask for help.
Myth: People who self-injure are crazy and/or dangerous.
Fact: It is true that many people who self-harm suffer from anxiety, depression, or a previous trauma—just like millions of others in the general population. Self-injury is how they cope. Slapping them with a “crazy” or “dangerous” label isn’t accurate or helpful.
Myth: People who self-injure want to die.
Fact: Self-injurers usually do not want to die. When they self-harm, they are not trying to kill themselves—they are trying to cope with their pain. In fact, self-injury may be a way of helping themselves go on living. However, in the long-term, people who self-injure have a much higher risk of suicide, which is why it’s so important to seek help.
Myth: If the wounds aren’t bad, it’s not that serious.
Fact: The severity of a person’s wounds has very little to do with how much he or she may be suffering. Don’t assume that because the wounds or injuries are minor, there’s nothing to worry about.
(Source: whatyoustoleicanrecreate)
Artyarns Ultra Bulky: A Review
Fiber Content: 100% Italian Merino Wool
Gauge: 3.5 sts/inch
Weight: Bulky
Yardage: 110 yds
Size: 3.5 oz (100 g)
Suggested Needle Size: US 10 (6 mm)
Care: Machine wash.
I originally bought Artyarns Ultra Bulky for a pattern I was test knitting for. As I was working on the project it quickly became apparent that the project was not doing justice to the yarn; which by the way is absolutely gorgeous. Besides loving the feel of this yarn, the other aspect that made me gravitate towards it in the yarn store was the colour; It is a sexy combination of midnight and royal blues, blacks, with hints of purple and subtle jade green.
The construction of the yarn is great, while bulky the yarn has a bit of spring to it, making it a great choice for cowls, hats or scarves. The yarn is so soft and cuddly and the feel of the Merino wool against the skin is amazing. One aspect of the yarn I wasn’t expecting but loved is its durability, which I found out by having to frog the project I was working on; but luckily my knitting with it did almost no damage to the surface of the yarn.
One of the drawbacks of this yarn is how little yardage you get and yet it still has an expensive price tag. Therefore if ever I were to need a chunky yarn for a project , and still wanted the handpainted look I’d choose Madelinetosh Tosh Chunky instead. Tosh Chunky has an amazing feel, has a vast colour selection, and it costs about the same as the Artyarns Ultra Bulky and yet has more yardage to it. If I had to choose between the two yarns; Tosh Chunky or Artyarns Ultra Bulky – Tosh Chunky would win every time.
BBC Booklist
Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott</font>
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett</font> 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce <font color=”magenta”>76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath</font> 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt <font color=”magenta”>81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens</font> 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry <font color=”magenta”>87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White</font> 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom <font color=”magenta”>89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle</font> 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad <font color=”magenta”>92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery</font> 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas <font color=”magenta”>98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare</font> <font color=”magenta”>99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl</font> 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo I know it is daft to do lists like this, but at the same time I figure why not? I want to read most of these books anyway…
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
there is a rapture on the lonely shore;
there is society where non intrudes.
By the deep sea, and music in its roar
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
Lord Byron (via anthologyofanoldsoul)
(Source: vivasaigon)
