Olivia’s Amazing New Word For The Day….

are you ready?

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Here we go….

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It’s coming…

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walloon.

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*laughs hysterically*

Top Five Least-Favorite Books of All Time

I love books, ordinarily. And I love to read. But sometimes, there is a book that is so awful or hard to understand that I never go back to re-read it. Especially books for school. This is prompted by my parents getting me a “challenging” literature program for next year. We got it yesterday, complete with 26 books to read in 36 weeks, plus journaling and daily vocabulary stuff. Plus essays and poetry. They tell me I’ll enjoy it. It’s gonna be arduous. So here are my top five least favorite books of all time, and I would love to hear yours.

Also, please don’t throw rotten fruit. 

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy- I loathed this book. It is the only book in the history of Olivia that I didn’t finish. Also, I think that the title is pronounced “Anna Karen-nina” but everybody else on the planet thinks it’s “Anna Karena”.

2. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane- I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t like this one. Or anything else by Stephen Crane. Even his poetry is depressing. And the ending is such a disappointment.

3. The Pearl, by John Stinebeck- This was also violent, and I fell into a deep depression after reading it and ate nothing but avocados for two weeks.

I made that up. But it was sad. I liked the Grapes of Wrath, also by Stinebeck, but Tortilla Flat was just about a bunch of Mexican guys getting drunk and setting houses on fire. If you do read Tortilla Flat, grappa makes an excellent vocabulary word. It means Italian brandy.

Back to the subject.

4. The Snake Dreamer, by some author I don’t remember- Bleaaarrrrggghhhhh.

5. Anything by Earnest Hemingway- is it any wonder he committed suicide? I mean, at the end of A Farewell To Arms, the girl dies and the guy walks home in the rain. What kind of letdown is that? Ben saw the title of that one, went to my dad, and told him that the book was so depressing it made him want to cut off his arm. Get it?

Tell me yours! I love comments. Comments are wonnnnnnnderful. You are getting sleeeeeepy. Your eyelids are heavvvvvyyy. Leave a commmmmmment.

And Ethan Frome was not so delightful either.

Free Rice

This is a site run by the United Nations, designed to increase your vocabulary and feed poor people at the same time.

It’s essentially a semifun (in the manner of school disguised as entertainment) game wherein a word and four possible definitions show up on your screen. You click on the one you think is correct. If you’re right, the FreeRice people donate 20 grains of rice to starving people. If you’re wrong, you try again, or stop playing and curse at your computer. Your choice.

Yesterday 110,091,680 grains of rice were sent to poor people around the world.

Check it out: FreeRice 

Now, what I want to know is, who gets to count the grains? And if starving people complain about meager portions, do the volunteers say, “Well, I’m sorry, but Matthew Johnson has a really bad vocabulary.”

On another charity-related note, because I saw a poster at church this morning and it just happened to pop into my head, the Souper Bowl of Caring is coming up, so donate your soup cans!

Five Very Cool Words You Should Know

I have decided to post these because I am sort of a wordy kind of person, and I was going through my computer files and came across my word lists from last year. Those of you who were in our SAT prep class know what I mean. Every two weeks we had to submit a list of twenty words, with setences and definitions, that we found in a book from our list of classics. These are some of my favorites.

1-Verisimilitude: The appearance of being true.

2- Cosh: a short club, or the act of hitting with a short club (doesn’t it sound innocent if you cosh your little brother, rather than hit him with a baseball bat?) Another great word with the same meaning is truncheon.

3- Grappa: a sort of Italian brandy. 

4- Frowsy: junky, messy, or shabby. Amaze your parents by using a vocabulary word to describe your room.

 And my personal favorite:

5-  Farinaceous: having a grainy or mealy texture. For some reason this one stuck in my head. It comes from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, one of my favorite books.