Advance Booking

I received a couple of awards over the past month, but I haven't gotten around to acknowledging them. So I'm doing a belated handing out of the awards. So sorry for the delay!


I received the Beautiful Blogger Award from readerbuzz and from Laurel-Rain Snow. Thanks so much, it's really wonderful to be appreciated!

The rules of the Beautiful Blogger award are to pass it on to other beautiful bloggers and tell seven things about yourself.

I'd like to pass this award on to

1. Shweta from Book Journal
2. Veens from Giving Reading a Chance
3. Joann from Lakeside Musing
4. Ivana from Willing to See Less
5. Jenny from Jenny's Books

And now, 7 things about myself...

1. I love reading (duh!)
2. I love writing.
3. I want to learn to play the guitar
4. My dream is to have a little cottage by the sea
5. I'd love to have a snowy winter
6. When I was 6, I wanted to be a gardener
7. I can't swim, because I'm scared of drowning.


I received the Happy 101 Award from readerbuzz. Thanks a lot!

My charge is to list ten things that make me happy and pass on this award to five more bloggers.

1. BOOKS (this would probably occupy all ten spots, but I decided not to make it so easy)
2. Writing
3. Travelling
4. Learning new things
5. Eating mom's cooking
6. Lazing around (oh, you've no idea how happy this makes me!)
7.Watching sunsets and sunrises (very relaxing)

3. Anna from Diary of An Eccentric
4. Carol from Carol's Notebook
5.Fyrefly from Fyrefly's Book Blog

Have a happy weekend!

BBC came out with a few adaptations of Shakespeare's plays a while back, called ShakespeaRe-told, and I spent much of this week watching them on Youtube. These are a set of four movies which take four of Shakespeare's plays and retell them in a modern setting, without losing the essence of the plays. I watched The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, and I really enjoyed them a lot. Macbeth is up next, and I'm looking forward to it, since it has James McAvoy in the lead, who is one of my favorite actors.

I really love the BBC adaptations of the classics, though I haven't seen too many to be a critical judge. The first one I ever saw was Pride and Prejudice, and that was the biggest motivation for me to read the novel. A long time after that, I watched North and South, which, other than giving me a huge crush in the form of Richard Armitage, made me realize that there are a lot of Victorian authors I have never even heard of. ShakespeaRe-Told was a big boon for me because I haven't read any of the original Shakespeare plays, even in abridged form (*gasp), and this really helped me a feel of what they were about. And they introduce me to a lot of great actors, actors whose work I'd love to see more of. BBC TV serials are so great for people like me who, let's face it, are too lazy to read the original novels, and want something more concrete and memorable than a Wikipedia summary.

So, what's your favorite BBC adaptation?

And here are this week's giveaways

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Girl who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen till April 17
Alaine-Queen of Happy Endings is giving away a choice of three books till April 30