Bucket Listings

On St. Patrick's day, I saw an article on Huffington, a letter a grandfather had written to his grandchildren.  It was advice for life and I am a sucker for these sorts of things.  I linked to the original, but here are 3 pieces of advice that really spoke to me: 

• Make a Life List of all those things you want to do: travel to places; learn a skill; master a language; meet someone special. Make it long and do some things from it every year. Don't say "I'll do it tomorrow" (or next month or next year). That is the surest way to fail to do something. There is no tomorrow, and there is no "right" time to begin something except now.

• Travel: always but especially when you are young. Don't wait until you have "enough" money or until everything is "just right." That never happens. Get your passport today.

• Pick your job or profession because you love to do it. Sure, there will be some things hard about it, but a job must be a joy. Beware of taking a job for money alone -- it will cripple your soul.

I love the last one.  It's advice someone gave me once, and I feel so very grateful to be able to pursue a career I'm just crazy about.  I fall in love with medicine every day, and even when I hate it, I still love it.  As for the first two, I've added a bucket list tab.  I started my bucket list after I graduated from college, I've crossed some things out and I've added some new things (particularly from a this article from Huffington on the most underrated cities in Europe).  I loved that that grandfather said "Make it long".  Be ambitious with your bucket list, why not?  

Top Ten Books on my Spring List

Still Step 1 studying and studying for my (hopefully) last exam of M2 year (on Friday)...wish me luck!!  This week's Top Ten Tuesday is (one day late): Ten Books on my Spring 2014 To Be Read List.  My Spring TBRs probably won't be read until Summer time, but it's still fun to think about!  I need something to look forward to.  I got some of these from participants in last week's Top Ten bloghop, yay!

1. Better by Atul Gawande.  
I've read this cover-to-cover at least three times, but I think it'll be a good motivating read before 3rd year, so it's probably going to be the first book I pick up post-Step.

2. The Fault in our Stars by John Green
As seen on Beauty and the Bookshelf.  I like to read books before I see the movie, and I really want to see the movie.  I'm hearing good things, so I'm excited to read the book and immediately watch the movie afterwards. 

3. Divergent Series by Veronica Roth 
As seen on Fortune Favors the Brave  See above.  Same girl in both movies.  I don't know very much about her, but I hear she's this year's Jennifer Lawrence (I loved The Hunger Games).

4. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
I started reading this over Thanksgiving break, but then got too caught up with school, so I'm only about 100 pages in, it's good, but not addicting, so that's why I'm going to read 2 and 3 first.

5. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster  
I started reading this before college, but didn't get very far and then I got distracted by other books.

6. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol 
 I bought this one and Swann's Way in college sometime, but I've never had the time to read them.  They're both books that Professors recommended to me, and I think I'm always too intellectually exhausted when I have time to read, that I just want brain candy, but I do want to read these two!

7. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust  

8. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

9. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

10. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Have you read any of these?  What did you think?  What are you top books to read this spring/summer?  Do you have any more recommendations for me?

Top Ten All Time Favorite Books From Your English Class

First of all, I finally broke my 49% cumulative! Finally!  To commemorate this joyous occasion, I am joining a blog hop! I was inspired by Whispers of a Barefoot Medical Student, which I just discovered.  I fell in love with the blog and her Top Ten Book Lists. Top Ten Tuesdays at The Broke and the Bookish seems like the perfect blog hop given that I was an English major in college. This week's Top Ten is "Top Ten All Time Favorite Books in X Genre". Taking a break from medicine and going back to my English major roots, here are my Top Ten All Time Favorite Books "You May Have Read In Your High School English Class, but Fell in Love With Anyway":

1. Paradise Lost by John Milton.

 So this isn't technically a book, but it is one of my all time favorites. I don't reread it cover to cover often, but sometimes I flip through the dog-eared pages. 

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

4. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair 

5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. 

 Ok, this one isn't a book either, it's a play, but it's so wonderfully funny I can't help myself! 

6. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

 Duh. 

8. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. 

 It seems unfair that I only have one of the Bronte sisters on this list, because I really did love Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but Wuthering Heights trumps them both. 

10. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. 

 I think any list of classic literature has to include Dickens by definition, right?

*Outside of The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby, I didn't read any of these in my high school English class.  Nothing ruins a wonderful book quite like reading it in a high school English class, am I right?

Tell me any of your Top Ten Books you may have read in a high school english class, but fell in love with anyway!