The heart of a flower, the wings of a butterfly

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

1. The Lord of the Rings: the first fantasy I ever read and my favorite book of all time. The first time reading it was jaw-dropping amazing, and I wish I could experience the story with such fierce intensity over and over again.

2. Lamplighter, by D.M. Cornish: the first time I read this it drove me wild and scared me silly. (Shouldn't have been reading it so late at night, lol. :P) And the cliffhanger is a killer.

3. The High King, by Lloyd Alexander -- The surprises in this story were so beautiful.

4. Harry Potter. 'Nuff said. :)

5. Isle of Swords, by Wayne Thomas Batson -- I guessed the secret long before story's end, but it was (and is) still an awesome ride.

6. The Hunger Games -- I'm not sure I ever want to read it again. I don't think it's possible for me to enjoy a reread of this, and I really don't want to try. But it was very good the first time. :)

7. Curse of the Spider King, by Wayne Thomas Batson. This was loads of fun to read the first time, but for some reason, just isn't as interesting to read again. :(

8. Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie Tolan

9. Wings, by Aprilynne Pike: I like this one a lot, even though I don't usually like paranormal romance. But I've lived in Crescent City, and on my second read the occasional little inaccuracies in the setting stuck out and bugged me.

10. The entire Fablehaven series, particularly Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary, which has a twist so shocking it left me with my mouth hanging open for a full five minutes before I could go on reading. Very cool books, these. :D

The spiders have decorated for Halloween.

I went outside on a wet, foggy morning, everything covered with dew, and discovered that there are spiderwebs everywhere. Seriously. The trees are actually draped with possibly dozens of spiderwebs, smaller, like those, or big and freakishly scary, like. . .

. . . that one. Yeah. :P I think I'm more afraid of spiderwebs than I am of spiders. With the exception of black widows and brown recluses. *shudders* I mean, I like little hopping spiders, or cute baby spiders in little webs on garden plants (they're killing the bugs! Yay!), and I know that makes me pretty weird for a girl, but big, brown, bouncy spiders hanging in places where people walk. . . at, quite possibly, nose height. . . yikes.

Fortunately, though, I'm short enough that they're often above my head. Haha. :)

A frog.

The bug is a fractal.

I have no idea what this bug is. I'm not even sure whether it's really a bug, since all it does when I poke it is quiver. It came from the top of the big ash tree in our yard -- the tree had split and needed to be cut down, and my brother spotted it when we started dragging branches out of the driveway.

Edit: I cannot believe it -- randomly surfing the web and I found another picture of the thing. It's called a Crowned Slug Caterpillar.