07.27.08
Posted in Meme, Books at 7:48 pm by Meg
I haven’t done a book oriented meme for a while and I can’t resist books.
I “saw” it at RedMolly, but for some reason she didn’t “do” all the books yet, so I went back to the source.
The RULES - because you know there has to be some.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
So there are 98 books on the list.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Girl made me read it this year. She loves it, I’m so-so
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I’ve read some of it? I just couldn’t get into it, though the Hobbit was fine and I LOVED the movies
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Which one? I read the Tanakh and parts of the new testament.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - We have it, but I’ll probably never read it.
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I started it years ago when Girl found it and a Christian friend mentioned “the problems” with it, I probably only got a third of the way into it before getting distracted.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - again, some but not all.
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 - HATED IT, HATED IT, HATED IT
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Not something I enjoyed
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 - Only a book or two of the series.
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Tried a chapter or two, that was enough. Of maybe I tried number 59…I don’t remember.
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - I really, really dislike John Irving. I tried a couple.
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Can you tell I was on Dickens kick at one point?
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - It’s one of my favorite musicals (and dramas, but I never seem to be able to get into reading it. Maybe because I know it so well?)
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Again, does some of them count?
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams - Oh, I really, really enjoyed this book as a teenager. I even read the second book. But I never got into his other stuff.
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I loved the movie from the 70s, and the book was so much more.
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
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06.29.08
Posted in COLLEGE, The nuts and bolts of it, Books at 10:51 am by Meg
If this works, you should be able to click below to view a list of everything that Boy has read over the last 4 years. Not just the ‘good’ stuff that we included in his course description.
List
Edited later: To follow up on Applestars question about why I didn’t have him list comic books and graphic novels - he ‘thinks’ he has about 3000 comic books and 200 graphic novels. Way too much to list.
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06.11.08
Posted in Books at 1:14 am by Meg
let alone a homeschooling mom.
I was not one of those girls that planned out my family while I was young, or knew/cared about what my house would like. I guess if you had asked me I probably would have informed you that I ‘expected’ to have kids at some point, but never dwelt on the idea.
I did know that I wanted a career as a professional, and definitely felt the need for it to be self-supporting.
Being an engineer met the need, and being a civil engineer meant that I had a fun job that could, in the course a day, take me from the office, to a job site, to presenting a proposal in front of a town board. I got to travel, to stay in ‘nice’ hotels at company expense (also a dive or two), and drive a company car occasionally when I traveled. I also worked a lot of 60 hour weeks, including late days and weekends - when the project needs to be done, you get it there.
When Hubby and I got together and started discussing kids, I quickly realized that like my memories of my mom, I also saw myself being home with my kids.
Okay, throw the career plans out the window.
Adding to the adjustment was our moves. The summer we got married we moved to LA - Hubby was fresh out of grad school and took a ‘one-year’ temp job while he was looking for something better. I found work there, but at the end of the year (one month after Boy was born) we moved north up to Monterey.
Now I didn’t make a lot of friends during that year anyway. The side effect of being a woman civil engineer is that you are often the only woman in the office - in this case there were 2 others: the landscape architect and the secretary. We were pleasant and friendly, but not really ‘friends.’
So I landed in yet another new town, with a month-old baby, new to being a “stay-at-home” mom, and a husband that left for the office every day. I knew NOBODY! I don’t think our street had another family on it. It was rough.
Hubby still says that it took me years to start calling myself a “homemaker” which he describes as a tangible proof of my adjustment.
All this was to give you background as to why when I was offered the chance to read and review The Stay-At-Home Survival Guide by Melissa Stanton, 
I jumped at it. It sounded like a wonderful idea that I would have appreciated having access to about 19 years ago.
I figured that I was certainly placed to appreciate where Ms. Stanton was coming from (she was a senior editor at People and Life Magazines) and to have some basis to see if she really had some sound advice.
And generally, she hit her mark.
After reading the book, I certainly feel that I could enjoy sitting down with her and continuing the conversation in person. (And yes, she does give you the feeling that she is talking to you, and that you are getting to know her and her family.)
I don’t agree with everything she’s said (but what friend do you agree 100% with, or want to), but the main point that I took away from the book is the feeling of reassurance that she is projecting to moms who are just making the transition out of the work place. I think someone just making the transition will get the idea that they aren’t doing something that is strange and that they can find their feet and survive.
And she covers just about any topic that might come up:
- The transition from career to home
- Money matters
- Having one child or many
- Sex and marriage
- Household-chore expectations
- Friendships
- Loneliness
- Coping strategies
- Creating time for yourself
- Returning to the workforce—or not
My complaints are few:
- She describes 3 phases of being a Stay-at Home Mom (a. totally stay-at-home kids, b. some home and some in school, and c. all in school) but I really felt like she didn’t say much about that third set. Maybe it’s because I’m a stay-at-home mom to older kids, but I felt the lack. (And I do realize that the target audience of this book is probably not that third group.)
- I really had trouble at first getting into the book because the first quarter seemed to constantly revolve around a whine about not having the support from our government/businesses to be able to build a career around a family. It disappeared as she got into the meat of the book, but it set my teeth on edge until I got there.
Anyway, considering (as I said) that the book is really designed for someone just becoming a stay-at-home mom (most often with at least one small child whether it is the first, second, etc.) it does make it’s goal. I also realize that for many professional woman coming home may not be what they are planning on, but be in reaction to a perceived lack in being able to balance work and children, and so the tone of the beginning of the book may not set them on edge.
So all in all, I’ll probably keep it in mind for baby shower presents and the like. 
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05.21.08
Posted in Books at 12:01 am by Meg
This evening my book group planned out it’s reading for the next 12 months. This past year I didn’t take the list too seriously. There was a fair number that I was just not interested in and it wasn’t high on my list of importance. I also only made about half of their get togethers between other commitments and busyness.
Well, this year they’ve changed a little. There used to be two book groups with some overlap of members; both groups have shrunk, so they are combining. The deal is that the “other” group met during the day (10 AM in the morning which is across from Girl’s martial arts class). So the new plan is that the combined group will alternate mornings and evenings from month to month.
I suspect that other than the summer, I’ll be missing most of the morning months. But we’ll see!
Anyway, Read the rest of this entry »
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05.20.08
Posted in The nuts and bolts of it, Books at 9:45 am by Meg
As I have hoped, Girl took the reins when it came to her “Reading List” this year. She rarely checked the list of “Recommended” books and would rattle off a list of things she had acquired an interest in. Uniformly, her desires were more than acceptable and it was simply a matter of requesting them from the library (or finding them in our collection) and deciding on a time scale for them to be finished.
The time scale did become an issue at one point when she felt that she didn’t have adequate time to be making progress and I felt that she wasn’t making time.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Collected Poems by Robert Frost
A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Hobbit by JR Tolkien
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper
Lord of the Flies by Willaim Golding
Metamorphoses by Franz Kafka
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
And her current read: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
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02.07.08
Posted in Books at 1:51 pm by Meg
It’s an involved story, that I’m not going to get into, but I ended up spending about 4 hours in a bookstore yesterday afternoon marking time. No, it wasn’t painful, not one bit.
I used the time to check out (and then ended up reading in it’s entirely) a new book by Charles Webb.
Don’t recognize the name? I didn’t either when I read the review a week or so ago. He wrote The Graduate way back when.
Home school is a 
sequel to The Graduate - complete with Mrs. Robinson.
It’s set eleven years after the original and Benjamin and Elaine have two boys that they are homeschooling (The author and his wife homeschool.) outside NYC.
But…. since this is the dark ages, they have to have special permission from the school board and now after three years of doing it successfully, the boys are being yanked back into public school.
In a panic they pull in Elaine’s mother (who hasn’t been part of their lives for a number of years) to leverage the head of the school board into letting them continue homeschooling. (BTW, this is not a book to hand to a child until you’ve read it yourself and decided if the language and situations are acceptable. It uses ‘fuck’ freely and has people switching bedmates continuously.)
At that point, the book is a slow motion roll downhill into absolute dysfunction. Pulling in not only Benjamin and Elaine’s relationship, but also another family of unschoolers (visiting from Vermont in an attempt to dislodge Mrs. Robinson) into the mess.
I found it interesting, but by the end all I could think of was ‘What a view someone is going to take away about homeschoolers!’
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02.05.08
Posted in Meme, Books at 1:39 am by Meg
Jane tagged me with this little meme and wouldn’t you know it, the closest book is one Boy was using for a college essay. (It’s still sitting here to remind me to return it to a friend.)
It’s probably just as well, because otherwise you’d be treated to the trashy fantasy novel I’ve been reading.
Here’s the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
So, from Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad:
“Warfare is not for you, child. Lend yourself
to sighs of longing and the marriage bed.
Let Ares and Athena deal with war.”
These were the colloquies in heaven.
And I’ll tag - Carrie, Justyna, Frankie, Kim, and Contemplator
On a side note - I’m finding all the memes floating around that are based on random things an interesting trend (or maybe I’m just noticing more of them lately.)
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01.21.08
Posted in Books at 12:26 am by Meg
We went to see this over the weekend. It’s been on our ‘to see’ movie list since it came out but between sickness and college applications, we didn’t see as many movies over the holidays as we had hoped.
Umm, let me give you a little background about me and this book.
I read it first when I was about Girl’s age. I’m not sure, but I know I picked it up off of my brother’s bookcase and he went off to college when I was 12. So, it was probably that year that I went into his room and started looking for things to read on his shelves.
I really, really liked it. In fact, in the 30ish years since I originally read it I have periodically cleaned out paperback books and gotten rid of them, but of the (maybe?) half dozen that I have continued to haul around, this one is still with me.
I’m not sure, but it probably gave me my love of vampire stories. (And if that statement doesn’t make sense from seeing the movie, then you can probably guess where I’m going.)
I introduced the book to Hubby. He was flying somewhere and wanted a smaller book to slip into a shirt pocket. He came home talking about all the people who had seen the title peeking out and had stopped him to tell him how much they liked the book.
Boy read it a few months ago when we first heard about the movie coming out (and it never came back to my shelves) and Girl has it now.
So we saw the movie. Now I have a love/hate relationship with movies made from books I know and like. I love that they are doing it/I hate what they end up doing.
Okay, stop here if you haven’t seen the movie and plan on it, and you’d probably ought to stop if you plan on reading the book.
Read the rest of this entry »
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