"ae" and sometimes "ä"

How did I Not Know about Bookalicio.us ?

2011-02-07T12:42:00.002-05:00

No, really? I only found it because of a post on the Bitch Feminist reading list brouhaha. It's awesome. Go, read, and enter her contest while you're at it: she's giving away fabulous loot. Also, it's a visually pleasing blog. Well, it matters to me.

Bookalicio.us Indeed.

Betsy liked my List!

2010-02-01T16:40:00.003-05:00

w00t!She sent me an email that said so.

I'm in bliss, I'm such a fangirl.

Meanwhile, we now return to playing in the snow, of which we still have a fair amount.

Arrgh!

2010-01-29T14:23:00.001-05:00

I'm still working on my top 10 children's chapter books list. Right now I've got it down to thirty, after taking off almost all my old favorites that maybe I like so much because of nostalgia, rather than innate quality. but The Teddy Bear Habit totally holds up, and I didn't read Matilda until I was in my thirties, so not so much nostalgia there.

• The True Meaning of Smekday Adam Rex
• The Shadow Thieves Anne Ursu
• The Wright 3 Blue Balliett
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret Brian Selznick
• Igraine The Brave Cornelia Funke
• Toys Go Out: Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, a Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic Emily Jenkins
• Shakespeare's Secret Elise Broach
• Fly by Night Frances Hardinge
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4) J.K. Rowling
• The Teddy Bear Habit or How to Become a Winner James Lincoln Collier
• The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy Jeanne Birdsall
• Lunch Walks Among Us (Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist) Jim Benton
• The Diamond of Drury Lane Julia Golding
• The Wall and the Wing Laura Ruby
• Sisters Eight Bk 3: Georgia's Greatness (Sisters Eight) Lauren Baratz-Logsted
• Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters Lesley M.M. Blume
• Gideon the Cutpurse(The Gideon Trilogy: Book Two) Linda Buckley-Archer
• The Willoughbys Lois Lowry
• Whales on Stilts M.T. Anderson
• Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls #1: Moving Day Meg Cabot
• The Fairy-Tale Detectives (The Sisters Grimm, #1) Michael Buckley
• Odd and the Frost Giants Neil Gaiman
• Dealing with Dragons (The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Book 1) Patricia C. Wrede
• The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2) Philip Pullman
• Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space Philip Reeve
• Matilda Roald Dahl
• The London Eye Mystery Siobhan Dowd
• The Wee Free Men Terry Pratchett
• Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog Ysabeau S. Wilce

So far, the only help the Offspring have been is to choose Georgia's Greatness as their favorite of the Sisters Eight books, because "it has the most excitement and none of that valentine stuff". Fair enough, although so far I think Dorinda's special skill is the coolest.

Choosing favorites is hard.

Once You Notice, You Can't Stop

2010-01-25T17:32:00.002-05:00

Siren song, page 203:

"The woman was tall and statuesque, with long, shiny, raven-colored hair, creamy coffee-colored skin, and big cat-like emerald eyes."

I don't know what Ursu had in mind, but the illustration at the top of the chapter is probably not it. I understand that authors have no control, and that illustrations are often commissioned without the illustrator getting to read the text. But that little picture, whatever it's called, is not of a woman with black hair and coffee skin. Sorry, I can't scan the picture, and I can't find it online, but I'll try to photograph it.

I don't get it. Why?

I got nothin

2010-01-22T19:19:00.001-05:00

I'm reading Anne Ursu's The Siren Song and loving it, because sea monsters and Greek gods behaving badly, what's not to love?

And because it's Friday, I'm feeling a little tired. So, sorry, anyone who might have dropped by hoping for something good. I'd like to amuse you, but I have nothing to offer.

Little, Brown, You've Let Me Down, Too?

2010-01-21T18:11:00.001-05:00

I 'm reading the The Mysterious Benedict Society out to the kids right now. Hey, guess what? The front cover is surprisingly white. We couldn't figure which one was supposed to be Sticky.

100 Scope Notes and Bookshelves of Doom are all over this, and Betsy Bird first brought it up at Fuse #8 before I started reading her blog.

Y'all, it's not funny.

You can view the first cover for yourself.

I'm Sure it will Come as No Surprise

2010-01-19T13:15:00.002-05:00

to anyone that when I have managed to read or reject my library book stack down to a mere three volumes, I look up my account today and discover six, count 'em, six books on hold for me.

I'm now on page 28 of No One You Know, on loaner from the fabulous woman in the next-door office. This cover shows profiles of two women, either of whom might possibly be Christine Lahti. I love Christine Lahti, so that's okay, but it makes me think I'm looking at a movie tie-in. I'm not snobbish about tie-in covers, especially not on a loaned book, but I am vaguely disappointed that I won't be able to see the movie soon starring Christine Lahti. I request that the movie-making powers-that-be fix this lack in my life.

***

In related book news (related to me, I mean), funniest parenting moment in a while: Friday night at nine o'clock I tell the five girls in my living room to start getting ready for bed. They've already had a PJ fashion show, so they're dressed, but teeth must be brushed, etcetera. A short while later I look in on them, and there they all are, spread hither and thither with a selection of flashlights and lanterns, and everybody has a book. Yeah, that's right, I let your kid stay up too late reading at my house. You're welcome.

***

The Possum is using most of her reading time for Battle of the Books books. This week she's going to get together with a classmate to film a fake news segment, including a fake commercial, about a book for class. I wouldn't be as touched by this if I hadn't just posted about writing and filming with Melissa, these several years ago. Sample bit: the two newscasters break for a commercial and start fighting. Camera comes back on to them as one is crawling up off the floor. Other newscaster holds up product and says, "Get up off your knees, honey, use Step-Saver."

As far as I can recall, I've never actually seen anyone scrub a floor on her knees, and when my beloved MIL mentioned recently that she still scrubs the kitchen on her knees, I was shocked. I couldn't have been more shocked if she told me something more deliberately shocking.

It's Party Time

2010-01-15T14:55:00.002-05:00

Tonight I will be hosting a gathering for five of the KitKatPandaBatWolf's closest friends. My husband and my oldest daughter have made plans away from the house. Six eight year-olds playing games, eating pizza and cookie cake, watching a movie and staying up late.

My friend of longest standing, Miss Melissa, was one of the attendees of my own birthday sleepover extravaganza lo, these many years ago.

I hope this goes as well, and I hope that at least one of these girls will be such a meaningful part of my daughter's life for so long.

That came out way mushier than I meant, but it is a wonderful thing to have a good friend who remembers the silliness of childhood, in our case, a love of Nancy Drew and Gone With the Wind, and The Year of the Cat, and "Tonight's the Night" and making stop-motion movies, and writing parodies of commercials. In a very real way that stuff never gets old and I hope we're still laughing together at a hundred. The cackling will be deafening if we aren't already deaf.

Are you still in touch with any friends from your childhood? What makes you laugh?

Happy Birthday!

2010-01-14T17:47:00.001-05:00

The KitKatPandaBatWolf turns eight today. The excitement will be shared in her class with a boy who's also turning eight. Cupcakes and apple juice boxes for all!

Tomorrow night she's having a winter-themed sleepover. Pizza, and a movie, and a craft project and some games. No doubt there will be cookie cake crumbs all over, and voices long after I tell them to pipe down and go to sleep. I can't wait.

It should be a big deal, this birthday business, shared interest that I have in the original event. But I really don't feel anything very profound. I am aware how quickly the Offspring are growing up, but I'm not saddened by it; I don't feel that anything is lost. On the contrary. I've always loved them, of course. But each year as they grow, and develop more interests, make more friends, add more skills to their tool belts, I just find myself liking them more. Now they recommend books, and music, and movies, and I'm probably going to share their enjoyment in all of them. Goodbye and Good Riddance to Tinky Winky.

***

Yesterday the Spouse was telling me that one of the Jonas brothers had gotten married. "it's got to be Kevin or Joe" I speculate aloud to the daughter, as we conclude that Nick is 17 or so these days. "He's 23, I think" the Spouse adds to clarify. Definitely Kevin, then.

Here's the funny part: the Spouse comes bearing this matrimonial announcement, but he mocks me for knowing their names.

I guess it's Tinky Winky all the way down.

Resolutions Failed

2010-01-13T17:05:00.001-05:00

I said I was going to devote myself to reading the books on the shelves at home. I meant it, too. I really want to read a lot of those books, as well as weed out more that I haven't wanted to read for fifteen years or more, and probably never will.

But no good resolution goes untested. The Spouse took the Possum out to run errands and go to a Girl Scouts event and dinner, so when I asked the KitKatPandaBatWolf what she wanted to do, tops on her list was visiting the new library. We had graciously been given a private tour of the downstairs, which is all children's, before the Grand Opening. We have already located, admired, and thanked my mom for the brick out front with our names on it. But last night we had the opportunity to go in and linger.

So we did. We observed everything. In the new reading area for kids we played with giant stuffed animals, and picked out books to pose them reading. The giant stuffed dog was left relaxing in a chair reading Carl's Birthday. We found the oversized Cat in the Hat that we gifted to the library years ago, and stretched him out, leaning smugly on one hand amid the Seuss books.

We went upstairs and saw the bust rows of computers, and picked up something from the teen display, I checked out the new adult titles and grabbed something, and found quite a few books by the second grade classes author-of-the-month, so we checked out those, and we found some new kids books to check out, and then, while trying to locate some American girls nonfiction titles we stumbled across the books on the states, so we each picked out a nice new one for the Possum to use for her research project. We did a little homework, we goofed, I placed requests, we said hello to all our librarian friends; I'm telling you: we reveled in that new library.

And so, my resolution went bust. But it went bust like a balloon we kept bouncing up and down on, just to hear it blow.

My Dream Has Come True

2010-01-09T21:40:00.005-05:00

Apparently we've all been good enough in aught nine, because Santa brought us Rock Band 2. Seriously, when I had an opportunity to try it out at our good friend's just after Thanksgiving, I thought I had found the best! game! ever! If only a reality show would finance our family's need to perfect Rock Band. (Okay, I wouldn't watch the show, but hey, I don't watch most of them)

Well, since Christmas day, we've been working on our act. Like the Balancing Act, we switch instruments and lead singing around. Well, we've finally gotten enough practice to make failing out less likely. We've formed a band, Taco Bat, and we've taken our act on the road. Oh, yeah, tonight we won the Battle of the Vans and scored a '75 van. We played several songs reasonably well, earning pay, and, excitingly, hats. Yes, hats! Weirdly, the Spouse's male character did not receive the same hat the three female characters.

Anyway, I'll be sure and let you know the Taco Bat tour schedule as it firms up.

***

I ask you, doesn't it seem marvelously old-fashioned and wholesome, the family band practicing together after supper in the evenings. I feel like Ma in Little House and the Prairie, or something even more retro and homespun. Well, it suits, I guess. It shows signs of being an unusually cold winter here.

Books by Numb3rs

2010-01-08T15:51:00.004-05:00

Did I mention that keeping track of my reading in various places this year made answering any questions about books challenging? Well, let me modify that. It's a pain in my little geek brain, is what it is. Numbers are approximate and mighty hard to come by because of having to copy and paste and reformat and rearrange and, oh, the agony!

But just to give you an idea of the lengths to which my book-tracking obsession goes, here are a few starter numbers.

Books read in 2009: 358
Books I never even cracked open, because something else in the stack looked more appealing: Lots
Books I started, abandoned, and then picked up again months later at which time it seemed weirdly familiar and also really good so I finally finished it: 1
Years it would take me to finish all the books on my To-Read List even if I never added any more: 12.4*

* And that's being really optimistic, because as the PandaBatWolf ages out of picture books and early chapter books, my list has slowed on adding those, shifting to many more middle grade and YA titles, which are much longer than a mere 32 pages. Much.

It's That Time of the Year

2010-01-05T19:17:00.002-05:00

The time when obsessive readers look back over their reading from the last year, and compile lists of favorites, and if they're really geeky, crunch a few numbers. Since I am both compulsive and geeky, I'll be getting around to both of those. How obsessive and geeky? Well, I just ran a list from GoodReads to see what I'd read in 2009, and I pretty much panicked.

124. No. Way.

I read aloud to the kids a lot. I read a lot of kids books and YA. I don't do anything but work and read (marry someone who likes to cook, is my advice; meal preparation really sucks time out of your life). So, really, no way. That'd be less than half my usual.

A little digging, and it looks like my reading from the first half of the year, logged at NotingBooks didn't make it into GoodReads. So, there's actual work to be done.

And, of pressing concern, Betsy Bird over at Fuse #8 is holding the The Top 100 Children's Fictional Chapter Books Poll. So, this is my promise: if I don't do anything else this year, I will at least manage to post these two lists. Meanwhile, hie thee to Ms. Bird's and vote for your favorite ten.

Oh, and thanks for dropping by. Sorry I haven't posted in eons. I was busy reading.

Reading lost

2009-07-08T09:04:00.003-04:00

I've been feeling the loss of Readerville. It's not as if I don't have plenty of people to talk books with, and yet...

I guess I'm worried that Noting:books won't be around forever, either. It isn't perfect for me (I always wanted a simple way to tag my best books), but it is sooo easy, to use, and such a nice design.

So, what to do? Finally use my blog to track my reading? Step up the LibraryThinging or the GoodReading? Go back to a spreadsheet? Nothing feels right. I just don't know what to do. Help me, internets.

Adieu, Readerville

2009-06-08T10:34:00.001-04:00

My beloved Readerville is no more. I can't say how much I'll miss you. Thank you Karen, for all your hard work over the years!

Now We all Know-

2009-04-29T16:49:00.005-04:00

Stuffed Cat Chorus

This is what the family gets up to while I'm at work.

Big W00t!

2009-04-03T12:00:00.003-04:00

Way to go Iowa! I'm hoping this brings the remaining states (like my own) one step closer to equal rights for all. Three weeks to plan those weddings, y'all, get busy!

Hat tip: Whatever

Too Much of a Muchness? I Say All Book Discussions are Good Book Discussions

2009-04-02T09:34:00.003-04:00

I was checking out Omnivoracious' (Omnivoracious's?) YA Wednesday post and they mentioned the School Library Journal Battle of the Books and Jill Wolfson's post expressing a little fed-upedness.

On the one hand, I don't blame her at all. She's right that a relatively small selection of books each year receive the attention, the reviews, the awards lists, and maybe it does seem like the beloved Neil Gaiman is sucking up all the oxygen on the planet. But as a regular reader of Neil's blog, I don't think so. He is, like other well-known author/bloggers such as Meg Cabot, Mo Willems, and John Scalzi to select a few from my blogroll, modest about success, very clear about the business of selling the books, and quite generous in mentioning and linking to others.

Everywhere I go online, I'm adding books to my TBR list (currently standing at 770, thanks for asking). Everywhere I go online, say the School Library Journal, I'm following clever comments and links to more blogs, to discover more people who can recommend the kind of books I want to read. As it is, I'm pretty much in charge of finding books for my mother, mother-in-law, husband, 9-year-old daughter, and 7-year-old daughter, so I'm always searching for pretty nearly everything. Except board books.

But what about other people? Do y'all feel like you can't get offbeat suggestions? Are the Neil Gaimans using up all the oxygen? Feel free to mention a book title you've never seen mentioned elsewhere, or a blog or website you find helpful. And if you read YA, be sure to check out Jill's book, Cold Hands, Warm Heart. Promote yourself, promote a friend, or just argue with me.

The Library-Lovin' Challenge

2009-03-27T15:05:00.000-04:00

Library friends are pledging to donate to their locals for every comment received. Go to WriterJenn to see the full list of participants, and then go forth and comment.

Hurry, many participants are closing comments in the next few days.

Hat tip to Betsy Bird at Fuse #8

Spuffyduds, are you seeing this?

The Best Picture Books of All Time

2009-03-09T16:03:00.033-04:00

Oh, dear. I love reading children’s books. My earliest memories of books are reading beginning readers to myself. Beginning Readers, I will point out here, are expressly not allowed in Elizabeth Bird’s contest. She’s running a poll at A Fuse #8 Production for the top 100 picture books of all time. Choosing couldn’t be harder if she’d asked me to pick a favorite cat, and for the same reason: the good ones are all fabulous, and utterly unlike one another.

But I’m not one to shirk a difficult task, and I always love recommending books, so here’s my shortlists. That’s right, lists. I narrowed down a little bit by eliminating all the books I love as nostalgia, either as memories of my own or the Offspring’s childhood. And I weeded out board books, along with beginning readers in hopes that they’ll get their own poll someday. But there was one decision I could not make: do I go with the list of author/illustrators who are one person, fulfilling a personal vision, or go with the list of authors and illustrators who have been brought together by an editor to fulfill a more collaborative vision?

Well, since I can’t decide, I’m going to throw my lists up here, in hopes that any readers who see this will give me a little help.

The Auteurs

These are the ones we love. Always, everything they do. We cannot any of us resist them.

1 Pssst! Adam Rex Very funny. This and Tree Ring Circus are the best for the youngest kids, while the Frankenstein books require a more interest in words and more context. So far we love Smekday best of all, which means, I hope, that we can expect plenty more wonderful books to come.

2 Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale Mo Willems Really, both the Knuffle Bunny books score highly. As much as the Piggie and Elephant and Pigeon books delight, the combination of photography and cartoon is special, and the stories are perfect, even for kids who never had a special toy.

3 Chester Mélanie Watt Still more metafiction. All of Watt’s books have captivated us, but the two starring Chester are the best. He is such a naughty cat, getting all up in the book like that.

4 Olivia Ian Falconer Olivia wears me out, but I admire her energy, her imagination, her joie de vivre. Also, the business of moving Edwin cracks me up like nothing else. I like that Olivia isn’t growing up too much. She’s a wonderful child and I love her.

5 Animalia Graeme Base This is the first book of Base’s that I discovered, and it’s still a favorite. I don’t know how many things he managed to fit into each letter, but over a decade after its release, rereadings still reveal new items. It’s hardly surprising that Base would go on to create more complicated puzzles, which we also love.

6 Bark George Jules Feiffer The artwork here is loose, and the text is minimal, but there is so much life in Feiffer’s cartoons, and such a great payoff at the end. Making the animal noises is the best fun.

7 10 Minutes to Bedtime Peggy Rathmann Another book filled with endless delight. You have to find the ten numbered hamsters in every spread, you have to see what everyone else is up to, you have to find all the references to Rathmann’s other works. So little text, and such a vivid story.

8 The Three Pigs David Wiesner More metafiction as Wiesner explores the space around a book, and behind, and between. The shift from two-dimensional art work to three is amazing, and weird, and delightful.

9 Goodnight Opus Berkeley Breathed I don’t like Goodnight Moon. I don’t remember it from my childhood, and I’m rather disappointed at the art and the slightly messed up rhythm of the text. But I dearly love what Breathed does with the trappings of childhood, both mocking and warmly acknowledging. And the bunny jammies!

10 Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? Lauren Child Very metafictional, and very fun. Child has a wonderful since of voice, best displayed in the Charlie and Lola books, and a sense of the absurd, and she does incredible art. Like others on this list, there’s an awful lot to examine and wonder at, for readers of every level.

The Collaborators

In which the total package is greater than the sum of its awesome parts.

1 Olive, the Other Reindeer Vivian Walsh and J.otto Seibold A newer Christmas classic, that has taken its place in our December rotation.

2 Slugs in Love Susan Pearson, Kevin O'Malley Not a book I would have guessed would make it to my list. But every time we read it, we find something new in the art, and the story becomes just that much funnier.

3 Moe the Dog in Tropical Paradise Diane Stanley, Elisa Primavera Our winter temperatures don’t drop down so low as Moe’s, but everyone can relate to the desire to get away from it all. Primavera makes Moe’s city a miserable, soaking, winterscape, and his tropical paradise feels saturated with warmth from the sun.

4 The Tapestry Cats Ann Turnbull, Carol Morley The princess’s stiff dresses look itchy, the fairy godmother is ethereal, and somehow goofy, too, and clearly, this queen rules.

5 Sagwa Amy Tan, Gretchen Schields A lengthy story, as picture books usually go, but just that right feel of a legend oft retold. And a story in which the heroine gets so thoroughly filthy is even better.

6 Possum Magic Mem Fox, Julie Vivas A long favorite of mine. I'm glad the kids like it too. Hush’s invisible adventures are so charming at first, and then we feel the thrill begin to pall. A delicious tour of Australia.

7 Mrs. Marlowe's Mice Frank Asch, Devin Asch Speaking of collaborators, I sincerely hope that the resistance remains strong. I admire the brave Mrs. Marlowe. She’s pure WWII heroine.

8 The Shrinking of Treehorn Florence Parry Heide, Edward Gorey This was published in some magazine I received as a child. Imagine my delight to grow up and discover even more Gorey. As different as my memory of the story was, from the reality, it holds up beautifully. What child doesn’t recognize that bemused inattentiveness, or for that matter, what parent?

9 Scarlett Angelina Wolverton-Manning Jacqueline K. Ogburn, Brian Ajhar I read this to the PandaBat's first grade class. It was a hit. They loved the set-up, and the pay-off. I even think they appreciated the tasteful illustrations. One of the best picture books ever. I wish Ogburn would write a million of them.

10 Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type Doreen Cronin, Betsy Lewin
10 Diary of a Fly Doreen Cronin, Harry Bliss Cronin is a delight to read, and this is a tied bracket for me, because Lewin’s farm is so perfect, but so are Bliss’s bugs.

Snowy Day

2009-03-05T17:03:00.008-05:00

We've had three snowfalls this year, which is unusual for us. We try to take advantage. This is the kids heading up to the house with the hill for a little tobogganing.

Looking down the hill to the river. Pretty.

Yes, making American Gothic in snow pretty much cleared out the front yard. But we got to put the snowman kit to use.

I don't recall ever seeing icicles like this on any house I've lived in.

Randomness is a word dating back to 1803 (at least)

2009-01-21T14:21:00.006-05:00

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. One of the best perks of my job is having access to the OED online.

2. I love to sing, but I really can't.

3. Even as I get less able to do things, (curse you, middle age) I derive more pleasure from doing things. I'm more physically daring than I was as a kid.

4. I'm a sorta vegetarian. I've never been a big fan of red meat, especially not as a kid, but I love seafood and poultry.

5. I'm good at remembering authors and titles of books, even when I can't remember character names or plots or even whether I've read a given book.

6. My favorite thing to do is read. My very favorite thing to do is read aloud to the kids. I give the characters distinctive voices and everything.

7. I have the best family, better than my niece Lauren's, because my in-laws are awesome, too. Finally, my dream of a Brady Bunch-like family has come true!

8. As a former Air Force brat, nothing brings me greater pleasure than just staying home.

9. I love other people's dogs, but am much too lazy to have one of my own.

10. I only like coffee if I have cream to put in it. Milk is inadequate. Which probably means I don't really like coffee. But even cream won't help Starbuck's coffee, which tastes burnt.

11. I spent three years as a college freshman, three years as a college senior, and I was kicked out of two different acting programs.

12. Sky-diving with my mother and brother is my best adventure so far.

13. It's a good day if I illicit a spit-take from one of the kids at supper. It's a great day if I make the Spouse laugh.

14. I'm obsessive about my socks. They have to match my outfit. Even though I wear my jeans long so that they don't show.

15. I think I sound like an American, if not actually a Southerner, so I'm still weirded out when people say I sound English.

16. You know what's just as cool as marshmallow guns? Foam swords.

17. Real life is sadly lacking in big production numbers and fight scenes.

18. Good implosions are just as much fun as good explosions. And, if one is feeling really stompy, you can always make a block town and go Godzilla on it.

19. I'm nonplussed when other people use "nonplussed" incorrectly.

20. My favorite video game allows me to spectacularly wreck cars, which I try not to do in real life.

21. I was shocked to learn that not everyone can point to the cardinal directions from the homes and workplaces.

22. There's lots of stuff I don't know how to do, but I'm willing to wing it. Except with cooking.

23. I have a lousy sense of smell, and therefor, taste, and I'm a bad cook. And I'm okay with that.

24. Who knew I'd be this happily married after fifteen years? This marriage thing is great.

25. My motto: "I don't know, but I can look it up."

I'm not going to tag anyone except Lauren, just because I know how long it took me to finish this. But if anyone wants to play along, be sure and let me know.

For the Spouse

2009-01-09T16:43:00.001-05:00

Video that's sure to please of

the only living mammal that can actually inject venom into its prey through specialized teeth

Sadly, there's no good close up of the poisonous fangs, or anything, it just looks like a possum. But knowing it's poisonous makes it cool.

Update

2009-01-06T16:42:00.000-05:00

I've been sick, the kids have been sick, we had another outbreak of Mr. Knacksaps, hopefully put permanently to rest by Ovide, the holidays were extremely pleasant in a low-key sort of way, the kids are now playing Scattergories with a vengeance and some glee and my work computer was taken down yesterday by no fewer than 14 different invasive agents. The very helpful gentleman who disinfected poor Ferret was given leave to re-write everything (that sometimes being easier). All the work stuff is backed up, so that's okay. Three hours after the resuscitated Ferret was returned I realized The List was not backed up elsewhere.

So, it's trivial in the greater scheme of things, but I'm really sad about the loss of that work. More than 6,000 books, and when I finished them, all gone. Well, mostly gone. I'd gotten about ten percent into Note:Books and most of the titles (but not dates read) into LibraryThing.

I'm still sick, by the bye, but now I feel really bad.

And no, I haven't gotten the holiday cards out yet, but I have them, and an address book*, and a really adorable picture of the Offspring, so email me (with contact info) if you'd like a January pick-me-up.

* Yes, an old fashioned spiral-bound book, because I lost all my addresses and phone numbers in an earlier** home-computer related disaster.

** Much earlier. Years ago. So, that's why you didn't get one last yer, either. Or the year before that. Or, you know, ever.

xkcd knows my heart's desires

2008-12-15T08:51:00.002-05:00

I want one sooo bad.

UPDATE o1/11/2009: I should mention that the beloved Mother-in-law reads my blog and gave me a very special Christmas present. We've been having a blast! Forgive the pun.

Yes, Please

2008-11-21T12:09:00.006-05:00

Steampunk live(ish): Dark Style: Postapocalyptic Edwardian Croquet

Well, now I have something concrete to aspire to.

Play Ball!

2008-11-18T12:06:00.001-05:00

It seems to me that once upon a time I told the Spouse I expected a women in professional baseball. Japanese schoolgirl to play pro baseball - Asia, World - The Independent:

"Yoshida throws a side-arm knuckleball and says she wants to follow in the footsteps of Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, who has built a successful major league career throwing a knuckleball."

Okay, maybe I didn't tell him that. But I'm still stoked. Of course, the Spouse knows me well enough to know that I would love this bit of news. Thanks, darling.

Good News/Bad News

2008-11-14T11:28:00.001-05:00

So, Hubble has found another planet, a mere 25 light years away. That's good! But when you look at the image it's not all good, as The Martian Chronicles points out.

Thank You, Rooie!!!

2008-11-12T20:33:00.006-05:00

Life resumed being difficult on Monday, when the PandaBat was sent home from school with the live bugs in her hair again. Ew. And I had to come home from work and comb out nits while the sun was strong in the den. But there was good news. The very helpful nurse at the doctor's office called in the prescription strength stuff for me* and that was comparatively much easier to use. And the mail carrier brought me a freaking huge box, which was nonetheless, quite light. And lo: the most beautiful socks of great softness and comfort, handknit with loving care and attractive packaging, including care instructions.

Well, if you've never had a pair of handknit beautiful socks of great softness and comfort bestowed upon you for a frivolous effort, then you have not yet discovered real joy. These socks are a revelation, akin to my first really good mattress**, or 400-thread-count sheets, or being able to breathe through my nose***

But wait, there's more joy to behold. Because Rooie also included a gift for the Offspring. An advent calendar, starring Olive, the Other Reindeer. We freaking LOVE J Otto Siebold. And Olive.

For this kind of pleasure you might expect to pay hundreds of dollars (my feet have had a really great day). But I got all of this, plus Amazon air bags, you know what I mean? which, it turns out, are the bubble-wrap popping experience pinnacle. An adult holds a kid's arms steady, while the kid jumps down on one of those suckers with all her weight, resulting in a BOOM that can be heard quite well outside the house, despite really good insulation and double-glazing.****

So, lice and gifties. Net win, I say.

* Lesson learned: don't screw around with the OTC stuff.

** Original Mattress Factory, and still a delight to sleep on every night

*** I told my mom I couldn't breathe through my nose, but did she believe me? No. Thankfully, the specialist did.

**** I know, because I heard the cannon-like explosions while I was out taking pictures in the sun of my front porch, because Rooie always photographs her yarn in natural light, I suppose to ge the colors right, but somehow I erased those pictures without downloading them, a tragedy undiscovered until tonight, when I finally had time to write up my thanks, what with Mondays travails throwing Monday itself and Tuesday, too, into an over-busy muddle.

President Elect Obama

2008-11-05T08:23:00.002-05:00

...has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

When I told the Offspring the results of the elections this morning, I mentioned that he is President Elect Obama until the inauguration. The PandaBat misheard, or pretended to, and started speculating as to how the eggnog-aration was done. What can I say? We like eggnog.

I'm feeling awfully proud of my state and my country this morning.

106

2008-11-04T08:22:00.004-05:00

I'm happy to report that there were no lines inside the gym where I voted, although combined with school drop-off and rain, parking was a challenge. Inside things went smoothly, with two different people taking pains to tell me that a straight party ticket DOES NOT include a vote for president or for non-partisan offices. The same two people also confirmed that I knew to vote both sides of the ballot. The woman standing by the ballot-sucking machine also pointed out to me that when I inserted my ballot, the count would change from 105 to 106.

While I didn't have anything as specific to vote on as Prop 8, I'm proud to say I voted, and want everyone to do the same, regardless of their choices. As I was leaving, a friend was entering the school with his son, who was voting for the first time. I think this is a pretty good election for someone to start with.

Adam Rex at Quail Ridge Books

2008-11-01T21:14:00.006-04:00

This is the story of an adult fan girl dragging her daughters to an author appearance. Skip, if that sort of thing makes you queasy. And be grateful I haven't run the Pressure Boys pictures yet.

The offspring and I were late to the store, and mores the pity. When we arrived, Adam Rex was drawing a picture, apparently a sort of improv on suggestions from the audience. All the seats were filled, and the audience ages ranged from let's say, 4, up to 65.

He next read one poem from Frankenstein Takes the Cake, "The Bride of Frankenstein Wrote Her Own Vows", and was very funny doing it. Then he answered a few questions from those present. When asked what he likes to draw when he's not illustrating, he told us "robots." He seems like an "I'm thinking about robots" kind of guy.

And then we queued up to get books signed. The Possum got to go first. I introduced her, although since she was the only child her age, I'm sure he had already guessed who she was. He was really sweet, he had her runner-up in the contest book all ready, and then he signed The True Meaning of Smekday for her, and talked to her a little bit. Then Pssst for me, then Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich for the PandaBat. He was a doll, and reminded me very much of a favorite teacher/neighbor who's taking a sabbatical from teaching to write a series of middle school adventure books.

Oh, and the good news, he's currently working on a YA novel. The poetry books are great on all levels, but I thought Smekday was really outstanding.

For Rooie, pictures of the signed books*:

Frankenstein Takes the Cake with Cerberus

Smekday

Pssst with a penguin**

Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich

* Because I know she loves Adam Rex as much as I do, and because she loves getting books signed as much as I do, because she introduced me to Rex's books, and because she's the first person I pointed to the haiku contest

** Because of my longstanding affection for penguins combined with the news that the next novel is for even older readers, Adam Rex is now officially my author crush. Neil Gaiman is a fabulous author, but he doesn't illustrate, too.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T20:48:00.004-04:00

Holiday greetings from Hermione Granger and a brown bat from Bats at the Library.

[Interestingly, we only had one kid come to our door. More candy for me while I read my ghost story.]

No disease metaphors, please, I'm British*

2008-10-29T20:49:00.004-04:00

The Possum, Mom, and I were all sick last weekend, particularly unfortunate as the Possum's friend was staying for the weekend. Then on Sunday I discovered the head lice, and had to treat all the humans. We've now had three days of being home sick, because of course, the Spouse and the PandaBat got the virus too, with all sunshine hours spent in front of the den windows, picking nits. In between times, the linen gets boiled.

And then last night, a crazy alarm went off at midnight. Sump pump failure. I didn't really catch it all, over the nits, but we were pumped today and are having septic work done tomorrow, also. Plus Mom had a little procedure at the hospital today.

The good news: I've got mad nit-picking skillz. Another career path not taken, along with wet-nursing.

Pretty much hating the world, except for the Greys, Rooie, and Adam Rex.

* I was speaking with a new gentleman at work last week, and he thought I sounded English. That still surprises me.

Thinking about Web 3.0

2008-10-25T10:07:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, while listening to music and organizing data, a song triggered a passing thought of an old friend from college. I googled him, and found him at FaceBook, which I promptly signed up for, just to say "Howdy! How the hell are you?" as one is wont to do. By coincidence which I do not credit to any sort of cosmic plan, I just happened to look him up on his birthday. So, again, "Happy Birthday, Clayton!"

FaceBook is, I think, much less visually annoying than MySpace, which I also joined to keep in touch with a specific friend. Of course, the idea of the blog is to create a sort of home for myself, where everyone who knows and/or loves me can keep tabs. But I want it all in one spot.

Right now, there's the blog, the blogroll, websites (which I visit less frequently if there isn't a feed), there's Readerville the journal, the forum, and the Note:Books, there's two different email addresses (at least), a Kodak account that came with the camera, and so forth. I know I'm forgetting a ton, and I know I haven't even brushed the surface of all that's available, like, oh, say fantasy football leagues. And in addition to one Lotus calendar at work, there are at least three hardcopy calendars in the house keeping track of the Offspring's activities, or most of the ones I haven't forgotten to write down.

Someday, I will have one virtual home. I'm looking forward to that.

Happy Catties

2008-10-18T21:33:00.004-04:00

Luna sleeps while Mao makes biscuits on her.

I'm typing this with Queen Luna Grey DeLisle on my lap. She's giving herself a bath and cleaning my thumbs as well. She's enjoying looking at the pictures on the computer, I think.

His Excellency Chairman Mao has gone into hiding after jumping on the kitchen counter and bringing three large noisy pans down.

They seem to be settling in nicely. We're all in love.

They're coming!

2008-10-16T14:09:00.003-04:00

The Spouse just called. We're getting kitties this afternoon! A gray boy and a gray girl, sibs, 7 months, described on the website as extra-large.

Woot!

Here's the APS picture.

Why, yes, I wanted to know exactly who he'd picked immediately. He was looking forward to surprising me. I also enjoyed looking at my ultrasound pictures, although as fetii, the Offspring weren't as photogenic as they now are.

You're never too old for something new

2008-10-07T20:37:00.003-04:00

The PandaBat entered the monster haiku contest at Adam Rex's blog. She dictated her first ever haiku to me with glee. After I hit post on the comment and walked her off toward bed she said, "Everyone will see it."

Yes, I said, everyone who goes to Adam Rex's blog to tell him how much they love his books.

She considered this, then, "I feel popular. I never felt popular before."

Meanwhile, across town, the Possum was attending her first Girl Scouts meeting. She'll go camping for the first time this weekend. The list of stuff she needs is way long. Thankfully, the marvelous Spouse will undertake to provision her, because 1) this is not a good week for me to try and cram in one more thing and 2) nothing in my life experience has prepared me for purchasing a mess kit.

Overheard

2008-10-06T13:01:00.003-04:00

This is old, but Rooie posted funny Rachelism, which reminded me of a funny Possum-ism.

No, I couldn't speak that if my life depended on it. But I'll spend the rest of the day thinking it (Possum-ism, posssssss-um-issssss-umm...it's hott in Toe-peeeka)

In the distant past, when the Possum was a scant 18 months or so, we were enjoying a beach vacation with my in-laws. (Probably a beach vacation. Maybe the mountains, though, we've done that several times, too. Possibly even the vacation when I was expanding along with the soon-to-be PandaBat.) The Possum was in the corner, playing by herself, when there was a perfect conversational lull, and we could clearly hear what she said next

Octogon saves the day!

Let that be a less to us all: never underestimate the importance of regular-sided shapes.

A New Stage

2008-10-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I began a new stage of my parenting career. The mom-in-the-car stage. The chauffeur.

We have been the kind of parents who wanted our kids to have lots of free, unstructured time. So the Possum took dance for two years, gymnastics for one, and has now been learning guitar for one year. The PandaBat followed her sister into dance for two years, and is now taking gymnastics. That's it so far. One class each per school year, and one big day camp week or two in the summer.

No more. Last Sunday we went to Girl Scouts University, spurred by fliers distributed at school. The Offspring were curious, but within about ten minutes of walking into the lobby filled with tables from the local troops, and running into many girls they know, both were clamoring to join up.

From what I can tell based on yesterday's new troop meeting, they're both going to love it. Lots of varied activities and meetings, and camping out, and excursions. Unlike the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts are inclusive and welcoming, with no religious or sexual orientation issues.

Plus, the Possum has been wanting to study fencing ever since I read her the Spiderwick Chronicles when she was four. Well, two weeks ago we observed a class and she's ready and excited for that, too.

So, suddenly, our calendar is abloom with entries. Brownies three Thursday nights a month. Junior Girl Scouts three Tuesday nights a month. Gymnastics and fencing both on Mondays. Wednesdays will continue to be library trip days. Thursday afternoons still have guitar. In addition there will be school events (the Fall Festival, the Winter Concert) and sometimes weekend camping.

And my role is to write checks and drive the car.

I'm going to need a good book light, with darkness starting earlier. Thank goodness I get great gas mileage. And on the bright side, we have plenty of time to empty the freezer before the cookies come out. Thin Mints, yum!

Witches in Fiction

2008-09-22T15:36:00.004-04:00

I started Meg Cabot's Jinx last night, which in combination with Tanglewreck (which I'm currently reading to the Possum), got me thinking about the importance of houses in magic stories. And honestly, I can't think of a magical sort of story that doesn't make the house (or, in Harry Potter, Hogwarts) an important character.

In Bell, Book and Candle and Practical Magic, in Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Bewitched, women with awesome magical powers seem perfectly content to live in their wonderful homes, and occasionally help out a girlfriend. They dress well, look fabulous, and don't have to spend any time scrubbing dirty floors.

Guys with magical powers tend toward the grandiose and messianic. It seems to me the gals have it right. Ultimate power? Ultimate headache. Okay, sure, there's a strong feminist backlash to the assumption that a woman with great powers would be happy keeping house for some putz. But if I could opt out of doing all the drudgery associated with daily life, I'd bring the spouse along to enjoy the ride...

To our Addam's Family sort of house.

Heartwarming Parent Moment

2008-09-16T20:49:00.002-04:00

Usually the Offspring get ready for bed around 7:30 (on school nights) and I divide the time between then and 8:30 evenly between the two. While I'm reading the PandaBat's book(s) to her, the Possum is reading to herself. Halfway into the time, I switch books and the PandaBat listens or goes to sleep, whichever.

Okay, so tonight I finished the Bat book from the school library, inserting the phrase "straw up its nose" wherever possible, because the info was already familiar, although the pictures were new, and that enlivened the text a bit. Also, I got to point out that the book was flawed, with pages accidentally left blank. Then it was a bit of Yolen's Sea Queens, from the Grania O'Malley section.

Switch.

I pick up Varjak Paw, ready to read the final chapters, the Possum logs the pages she's read from the second Percy Jackson book, which log is part of her homework, and the PandaBat runs across the room and grabs some Step Into Reading Books off the shelf. So, I finish off Varjak, and begin Tanglewreck, and every ten minutes or so, there's a muttered and satisfied "Done" coming from the bottom bunk, as yet another book is completed.

See, it's not even funny in the retelling, but it makes me go all mushy inside that my kids enjoy reading so much.

I'd Pay to See This

2008-09-12T10:32:00.003-04:00

Monster Scientific Apparatus Rally

But then again, I was chatting with the Offspring this morning about the Large Hadron Collider and the cool stuff physicists hope to learn from it. Yeah, that's the way I roll, close to the speed of light.

Hat tip: Pharyngula

Free Books

2008-09-09T17:30:00.000-04:00

Maud Newton: Blog: "Below John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s online, author of So You Want to Be President? and Fondling Your Muse, and creative director of the struggling TOW Books, explains why he’s rejecting the age-old strategy of sending review copies to newspapers, and offering them to you instead."

Hey, it worked for Neil Gaiman. I've downloaded So You Want to Be President? just because I found Warner's announcement so funny.

Hat tip: Readerville

Proud Parent of ....

2008-09-08T17:07:00.004-04:00

Is there any way to end that which isn't a)bragging or b)making it sound like the only good kid is one currently achieving greatness?

I'm an incredibly proud parent, even though I don't have any bumper stickers. I'm pretty much astounded by how cool the Offspring are.

I like my kids, I just don't like bumper stickers.

Career Day

2008-09-08T17:07:00.000-04:00

Sometime during the past few days, and between the sleeping sickness and the hurricane it's all a blur, the Offspring told me of their current career goals.

The PandaBat is pretty ambitious: she wants to be a world famous pop-singer as a teen, but then, afterward, on her twentieth birthday I suppose, she's going to quit that and become a panda savior of some kind. She's looking forward to learning Chinese (Cantonese? Mandarin? what's the preferred language of the Chengdu Breeding Center or the Woolong Preserve?) She mentioned a couple of other things she wants to do at the same time, none of which I can remember anymore (see sickness and hurricane, above). Being a panda vet, too, maybe?

The Possum is hoping to train dogs professionally. Not obedience, she wants to train working dogs either as helper animals, like her friend's Murphy, or as police dogs.

I'm a sick woman. 'Cause after reading World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, I'm thinking how great those dog-training skills will be.

And Back Again

2008-08-26T02:40:00.001-04:00

It's the first day of a new school year. Walloo! There were new outfits to mark the occasion (an aqua kilted dress for the Possum [yes, the first dress she's wanted in two years or so], and a black and hot pink t and scooter skirt for the PandaBat, who doesn't want her undies to show when she's climbing around). There were new school bags (an aqua messenger bag for the Possum [just like my new red messenger bag], a hot pink and black backpack for the PandaBat. There were school supplies which are so much fun to get.

And after delivering the PandaBat and the industrial size bottle of hand sanitizer to her first grade classroom, the Possum and I discovered a distressed second-grader, who we delivered to his room on the other hall. Poor guy. He seemed better for the help. Now I can't believe, as I escort the Offspring and their tons o' class stuff on the first day, that several years ago I sent the Possum on the bus for her first day of kindergarten. Poor kid. Even a visit to open house a few days before doesn't prepare anyone for the madness that is the first day.

Today I'm grateful for re-dos, after messing up the first time.

(Updated, in the spirit of do-overs, now with added picture for Debi 8/31/8)

An Open Letter to the Tooth Fairy

2008-08-18T19:11:00.001-04:00

As dictated to me by the PandaBat, who finally lost one of her lower teeth on Friday, August 15th, whilst visiting her grandparents:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I would like to trade my dollar for a Sacajawea coin. And here's my tooth.

Love,

[redacted]

[tooth drawing]

Apparently, the Tooth Fairy in charge of her home district was willing to exchange the bill for a coin. And take the tooth.

Do People Ever Hear Themselves?

2008-08-18T17:43:00.001-04:00

Overheard, one woman talking to another, probably about their weekends:

I just forgot to eat. Well, we only stopped at gas stations and McDonald's and I don't eat that stuff, so I just forgot to eat.

That "stuff"? We call it "food". And you didn't forget, you decided that starvation is preferable to eating certain foods, which, you know, if you were talking about okra I'd totally agree with for at least a few of hours. But hey, there were Pringles in those gas stations, weren't there? Maybe some Circus Peanuts to add to your color wheel of junk food?

Hmm, I wonder how starving I'd have to be before I'd eat okra? More than eight hours without food, I think. Probably I'd opt for chocolate-coated bugs first.

Some Links

2008-08-11T19:57:00.000-04:00

YouTube - 水の落ちる絵 A fountain of unusual coolness, via Alas, A Blog

I know someone who needs this book, THE DEAD MAN'S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny. Thanks, Neil Gaiman.

And since I just finished a reread (still amazingly creepy), let me also point out a Coraline movie "featurette".

Hi, Remember me?

2008-08-05T17:19:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know I haven't been here much lately. This year is proving rather trying for pretty much all of my friends and relations, and I'm trying to be there for them. By the way, even though the stress isn't mine exactly, I'm finding it a challenge to cope without either of my traditional fall backs: petting cats and smoking. Loud albums repeated endlessly through the middle of the night are right out, too. This adulthood thing can be quite the drag.

You know what I'm reduced to?
1. Unknotting tangled kite string. It's like Planarity, only I can play it while watching TV with the kids on the sofa.

2. Haunting Pet Finder for the perfect new kitten. Although, since they're all unspeakably adorable, my fancy changes from moment to moment, and then I have to go back and look at them all again.

3. Looking for the perfect shade of emerald to recover the enormous sofa. [I'd like an easy-care kid- and pet-resistant suede-like fabric in the darker color in the middle one. No, I'm not holding my breath.]

4. Trying to have some fun with the kids before theater camp and school. We saw Journey to the Center of the Earth this weekend (sadly 2-D, but still exciting) and I'm really enjoying reading to them lately: Allie Finkel and Matilda are two girls we all love. Also, I got to judge a fashion show including the neighbors with thrown-together mermaid costumes.

So, life is full and rich, even if I'm working too much, and not reading anything for adults, and spending way too much time thinking about and preparing meals with vegetables. I hope all is well with you, and that your summer is good and full of apple/orange juice pops (or margaritas, or whatever).

If you haven't checked out the fabulous new Readerville, give it a try.

Cake Wrecks: Naked Mohawk-Baby Carrot Jockeys

2008-07-31T09:35:00.001-04:00

No, really. Go look. Don't take a big sip of your drink first.

Thanks for the heads up, Bookshelves of Doom. You've made my day!

Way to sell a book

2008-06-25T20:16:00.000-04:00

I love this book trailer for Meg Waite Clayton's new book, The Wednesday Sisters, made by Ashley Clayton. Brava to you both!

Okay, one more book trailer, because this one cracks me up: Meg Cabot's Eight Grade Journal

What I'm Reading Now

2008-06-24T22:25:00.003-04:00

Mostly I'm reading No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality which is both fabulous and annoying. The fabulous part is that Rich Harris* has a wonderful mind and she demonstrates the use of it so well. Her review of the literature on personality development is clever, and engaging, and her book is set up like the mysteries she apparently enjoys. There are frequent references to both specifics, like The Daughter of Time and to the general, such as the use of red herrings.

But, understandably, the fierce reaction to her previous book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (which I also really enjoyed and thought was well reasoned) has made her defensive as hell. When she's describing the limits her health places on her activities, I really like the personal stuff, but it's hard to read so much about the attacks generated by her previous book.

Additionally, I'm reading The Shadow Thieves aloud to the Possum, and we're both loving it. And I'm reading all kinds of stuff to the PandaBat, including, last night, My Wobbly Tooth Must Not Ever Never Fall Out , in honor of her first tooth falling out. And I'm reading a manuscript aloud to them both that has lots of birds in it, by the old friend who wrote the wonderful book The Verb To Bird , which, by an uncanny coincidence also has a lot of birds in it. Finally I'm carrying Clarice Bean Spells Trouble , back and forth to work each day, although I am mostly not reading it but would like to, because the Possum really enjoyed it, and the PandaBat is very fond of the Clarice Bean pictures books, and we're all just generally crazy about Lauren Child.

* It seems to me that when a woman uses her maiden name and her husband's last name both, that one should not refer to her exclusively by his name, but one should use both, even if they aren't joined with a hyphen. The same way one would use both last names of an author in the Spanish tradition. So, "Garcia Marquez", and "Rich Harris", and "Baratz-Logsted". But I'm open to discussion, and even to finding out that I've leapt** to hasty assumptions and Rich is not her maiden name, but her middle name.

** Getting meta on my meta, I just love irregular verbs, and I hate to lose them. So I persist with my "leapt" and "slept" and what have you. Even to the point of rewriting kids books as I read them aloud. Yes, I am the sort of person who also modifies the text to make it scan better or what have you. No doubt my loathing of Goodnight Moon is in part based on the faulty rhythm of the thing.

Update 6/25/08: edited to add the wordle version, via Gaiman and Scalzi

I Never Realized Crochet Could Be Cool

2008-06-13T14:39:00.001-04:00

Astraea's Scales: This. Is. Awesome.

Way cool. If anyone would like to tackle this for me, I'd be enchanted.

via Shakespear's Sister

Readerville: It's a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood

2008-06-11T10:17:00.002-04:00

As an Air Force brat I spent my whole childhood moving. As an adult I had no greater goal than to find someplace to settle into. Much to my surprise, I ended up firmly entrenched in a small town, which was never my first choice. But I love it. Every time I run to the grocery or go out to eat or visit the library, I stop and exchange at least a few words with someone I know.

Seven and a half years ago, I was brought to visit another small town. And all the people in that town read. Everyone is always ready to talk about books. The teachers and librarians and parents can recommend titles for a beginning reader who loves pirates and princesses, and pandas, and bats. Adults and college students and younger folk can suggest enthralling fantasy series other than Harry Potter. Someone is up on the latest in archeology, or novels about plague, or romantic thrillers of the sixties and seventies, and someone else can suggest fat fiction about the war of the roses.

No matter how odd and specific my reading tastes are (Arctic exploration, monsters), not only is there someone who shares my taste, but there's someone who wants to talk about how amazing the sense of place was in The Terror.

Seven and a half years ago, six months after the launch of Readerville, I finally gave in to the friends telling me I had to try it out. (Thanks, PCashwell and sprout) Friends brought me to Readerville then, and friends bring me back every day. Stop by anytime; no one ever locks their doors.

148 out of 1001

2008-06-04T22:06:00.000-04:00

From 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Via: Charlottesville Words

Considering the nature of this list, I consider that kind of amazing. What with the first book on the list being the stupidest book I've ever read.

Okay, so it's supposed to be about the development of the novel, which is why many classic works of literature aren't included. I'm okay with that limitation. But I don't think of those Poe works as being novels. Nor do I consider Franny and Zooey a novel, The Things They Carried and I, Robot are short story collections. And isn't Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas an example of the new journalism, rather than a novel? Likewise, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Dispatches, and In Cold Blood are all journalism, aren't they? Given the high enjoyment of reading these particular works, I'm glad they're on the list. But I'm really baffled how this is supposed to work.

2000s

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan
3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
6. The Sea – John Banville
7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
9. The Master – Colm Tóibín
10. Vanishing Point – David Markson
11. The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
12. Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
13. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
14. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
15. The Colour – Rose Tremain
16. Thursbitch – Alan Garner
17. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
18. What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
20. Islands – Dan Sleigh
21. Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
22. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
23. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
24. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
25. The Double – José Saramago
26. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
27. Unless – Carol Shields
28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
29. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
30. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
31. In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
32. Shroud – John Banville
33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Youth – J.M. Coetzee
35. Dead Air – Iain Banks
36. Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
38. Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
39. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
40. Platform – Michael Houellebecq
41. Schooling – Heather McGowan
42. Atonement – Ian McEwan
43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
44. Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
45. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
46. Fury – Salman Rushdie
47. At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
48. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
50. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
51. An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
52. The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
53. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
55. The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
56. Under the Skin – Michel Faber
57. Ignorance – Milan Kundera
58. Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
59. Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
60. City of God – E.L. Doctorow
61. How the Dead Live – Will Self
62. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
64. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
65. Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
66. Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
67. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
69. Pastoralia – George Saunder

1900s
70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
73. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
74. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
77. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
79. Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
80. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
81. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
82. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
83. All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
84. The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
86. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
88. Another World – Pat Barker
89. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
91. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
92. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
94. Great Apes – Will Self
95. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
96. Underworld – Don DeLillo
97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
98. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. The Untouchable – John Banville
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
102. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
103. Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
105. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
106. Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
107. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
108. The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
109. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
110. The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
111. Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
112. The Information – Martin Amis
113. The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
114. Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
115. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
117. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
118. Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
119. The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
120. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
121. The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
123. Land – Park Kyong-ni
124. The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
125. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
126. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
127. City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
128. How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
129. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
130. Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
131. Disappearance – David Dabydeen
132. The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
133. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
134. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
135. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
136. Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
137. Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
138. Complicity – Iain Banks
139. On Love – Alain de Botton
140. What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
141. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
142. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
143. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
144. The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
145. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
146. The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
147. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
148. Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
149. The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
150. A Heart So White – Javier Marias
151. Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
152. Indigo – Marina Warner
153. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
154. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
155. Jazz – Toni Morrison
156. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
157. Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
158. The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
160. The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
161. Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
162. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
163. Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
164. Arcadia – Jim Crace
165. Wild Swans – Jung Chang
166. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
167. Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
168. Mao II – Don DeLillo
169. Typical – Padgett Powell
170. Regeneration – Pat Barker
171. Downriver – Iain Sinclair
172. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
173. Wise Children – Angela Carter
174. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
175. Amongst Women – John McGahern
176. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
177. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
178. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
179. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
180. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
181. A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
182. Like Life – Lorrie Moore
183. Possession – A.S. Byatt
184. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
185. The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
186. A Disaffection – James Kelman
187. Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
188. Moon Palace – Paul Auster
189. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
190. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
191. The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
192. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
193. The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
194. The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
197. London Fields – Martin Amis
198. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
199. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
200. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
202. Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
203. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
204. The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
205. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
206. Libra – Don DeLillo
207. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
208. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
211. The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
212. The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
213. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
214. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
215. The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
216. The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
217. Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
218. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
219. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
220. World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
221. Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
222. The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
223. Beloved – Toni Morrison
224. Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
225. Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
226. Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
228. The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
229. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
230. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
231. Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
232. Foe – J.M. Coetzee
233. The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
234. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
235. The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
236. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
239. A Maggot – John Fowles
240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
241. Contact – Carl Sagan
242. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
243. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
244. Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
245. White Noise – Don DeLillo
246. Queer – William Burroughs
247. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
248. Legend – David Gemmell
249. Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
250. The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
251. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
252. The Lover – Marguerite Duras
253. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
255. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
257. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
259. Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
260. Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
261. Shame – Salman Rushdie
262. Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
263. Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
264. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
265. Waterland – Graham Swift
266. The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
267. The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
268. The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
269. The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
270. If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
271. A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
273. Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
274. A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
275. Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
277. The Newton Letter – John Banville
278. On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
279. Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
280. The Names – Don DeLillo
281. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
282. Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
283. The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
284. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
285. Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
286. Broken April – Ismail Kadare
287. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
288. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
289. Rites of Passage – William Golding
290. Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
291. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
292. City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
294. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
295. Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
296. Shikasta – Doris Lessing
297. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
298. Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
300. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
304. Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
305. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
306. The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
307. Yes – Thomas Bernhard
308. The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
309. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
312. The Shining – Stephen King
313. Dispatches – Michael Herr
314. Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
317. The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
318. Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
319. The Public Burning – Robert Coover
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
321. Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
322. Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
323. Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
324. Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
325. W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
326. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
327. Grimus – Salman Rushdie
328. The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
329. Fateless – Imre Kertész
330. Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
331. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
332. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis
334. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
336. The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
337. Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
339. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
341. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
342. A Question of Power – Bessie Head
343. The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
344. The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
345. Crash – J.G. Ballard
346. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
347. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
348. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
349. Sula – Toni Morrison
350. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
351. The Breast – Philip Roth
352. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
353. G – John Berger
354. Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
355. House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
356. In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
357. The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
359. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
360. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
361. Rabbit Redux – John Updike
362. The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
363. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier
365. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
366. Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
368. Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
369. Troubles – J.G. Farrell
370. Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
371. The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
372. Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
373. Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
374. Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
376. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
377. The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
378. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
379. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
380. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
381. Them – Joyce Carol Oates
382. A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
383. Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
384. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
385. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
386. Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
387. Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
388. The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
391. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
392. The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
393. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
394. A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
395. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
396. Chocky – John Wyndham
397. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
398. The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
400. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
401. Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
402. The Joke – Milan Kundera
403. No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
404. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
405. A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
406. The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
407. Trawl – B.S. Johnson
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
409. The Magus – John Fowles
410. The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
412. Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
414. Things – Georges Perec
415. The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
416. August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
419. The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
420. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
421. Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
422. Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
423. Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
424. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
425. Herzog – Saul Bellow
426. V. – Thomas Pynchon
427. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
428. The Graduate – Charles Webb
429. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
430. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
431. The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
432. Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
435. The Collector – John Fowles
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
438. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
440. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
441. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
442. Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
443. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
446. A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
447. Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
448. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
449. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
453. How It Is – Samuel Beckett
454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
455. The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
457. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
458. Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
459. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
460. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
461. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
462. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
463. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
466. Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
468. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
470. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
471. The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
472. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
474. Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
475. Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
476. The End of the Road – John Barth
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
479. Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
480. Voss – Patrick White
481. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
482. Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
483. Homo Faber – Max Frisch
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
485. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
486. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
487. The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
488. Justine – Lawrence Durrell
489. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
490. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
491. The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
492. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
493. The Floating Opera – John Barth
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
498. The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
499. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
500. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
501. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
502. The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
503. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
504. I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
505. Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
506. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
507. A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
509. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
510. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
511. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
512. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
513. Watt – Samuel Beckett
514. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
515. Junkie – William Burroughs
516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
517. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
518. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
519. The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
523. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
524. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
525. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
526. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
528. The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
530. The Rebel – Albert Camus
531. Molloy – Samuel Beckett
532. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
533. The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
534. The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
535. The Third Man – Graham Greene
536. The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
537. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
538. The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
539. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
540. The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
541. The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
542. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
543. The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
544. The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
545. Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
546. The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
548. All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
549. Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
550. Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
551. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
552. Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
553. Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
554. The Victim – Saul Bellow
555. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
556. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
557. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
558. The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
559. The Plague – Albert Camus
560. Back – Henry Green
561. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
562. The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
566. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
567. Loving – Henry Green
568. Arcanum 17 – André Breton
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
570. The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
571. Transit – Anna Seghers
572. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
573. Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
575. Caught – Henry Green
576. The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
577. Embers – Sandor Marai
578. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
580. In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
581. The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
582. The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
583. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
584. Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
585. The Hamlet – William Faulkner
586. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
589. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
590. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
591. Party Going – Henry Green
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
593. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
594. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
595. Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
596. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
597. Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
598. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
600. After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
601. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
602. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
604. Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
605. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
606. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
607. Murphy – Samuel Beckett
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
611. The Years – Virginia Woolf
612. In Parenthesis – David Jones
613. The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
614. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
615. To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
616. Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
617. Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
618. The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
620. Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
621. Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
622. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
624. Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
625. Independent People – Halldór Laxness
626. Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
627. The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
628. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
630. England Made Me – Graham Greene
631. Burmese Days – George Orwell
632. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
633. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
634. Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
635. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
637. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
639. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
640. Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
642. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
644. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
645. A Day Off – Storm Jameson
646. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
647. A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
648. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
651. To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
653. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
654. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
655. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
656. Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
657. The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
658. Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
659. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
661. Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
662. Passing – Nella Larsen
663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
664. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
665. Living – Henry Green
666. The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
668. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
669. The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
670. Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
672. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
673. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
674. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
676. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
677. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
678. The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
679. Quartet – Jean Rhys
680. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
681. Quicksand – Nella Larsen
682. Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
683. Nadja – André Breton
684. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
685. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
687. Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
688. Amerika – Franz Kafka
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
690. Blindness – Henry Green
691. The Castle – Franz Kafka
692. The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
693. The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
694. One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
695. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
696. The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
697. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
698. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
700. The Counterfeiters – André Gide
701. The Trial – Franz Kafka
702. The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
703. The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
705. The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
706. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
707. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
708. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
709. The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
710. Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
711. Cane – Jean Toomer
712. Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
713. Amok – Stefan Zweig
714. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
715. The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
716. Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
717. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
718. The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
719. Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
720. The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
721. Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
722. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
723. Ulysses – James Joyce
724. The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
725. Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
726. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
727. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
728. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
729. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
730. Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
731. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
732. The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
733. Summer – Edith Wharton
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
735. Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
737. Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
738. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
739. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
740. The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
741. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
742. The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
744. Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
745. Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
746. Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
748. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
749. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
750. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
751. The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
753. Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
754. Howards End – E.M. Forster
755. Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
756. Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
757. Martin Eden – Jack London
758. Strait is the Gate – André Gide
759. Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
760. The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
761. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
762. The Iron Heel – Jack London
763. The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
764. The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
765. Mother – Maxim Gorky
766. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
767. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
768. Young Törless – Robert Musil
769. The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
770. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
771. Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
772. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
773. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
774. Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
775. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
776. The Ambassadors – Henry James
777. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
778. The Immoralist – André Gide
779. The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
781. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
782. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
783. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
785. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

1800s
786. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
787. The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
791. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
792. What Maisie Knew – Henry James
793. Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
795. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
796. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
798. Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
799. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
800. The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
801. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
802. Born in Exile – George Gissing
803. Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
805. News from Nowhere – William Morris
806. New Grub Street – George Gissing
807. Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
808. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
810. The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
811. La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
812. By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
813. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
814. The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
815. Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
816. Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
817. The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
818. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
819. She – H. Rider Haggard
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
822. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
823. King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
824. Germinal – Émile Zola
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
826. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
827. Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
828. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
830. A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
832. The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
833. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
834. Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
835. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
836. Nana – Émile Zola
837. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
838. The Red Room – August Strindberg
839. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
841. Drunkard – Émile Zola
842. Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
843. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
844. The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
845. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
846. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
847. The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
849. In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
850. The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
851. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
852. Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
853. Middlemarch – George Eliot
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
855. King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
856. He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
857. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
858. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
859. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
860. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
862. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
864. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
865. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
869. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
870. Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
871. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
872. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
874. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
875. Silas Marner – George Eliot
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
877. On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
878. Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
881. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
882. Max Havelaar – Multatuli
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
884. Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
885. Adam Bede – George Eliot
886. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
887. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
888. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
890. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
891. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
892. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
893. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
895. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
899. Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
900. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
901. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
903. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
907. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
910. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
912. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
914. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
915. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
917. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
919. The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
920. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
921. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
923. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
924. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
925. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
926. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
927. The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
928. Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
929. The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
930. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
934. Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
935. Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
939. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
941. Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
942. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth

1700s
943. Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
944. The Nun – Denis Diderot
945. Camilla – Fanny Burney
946. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
947. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
948. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
949. The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
950. The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
951. Justine – Marquis de Sade
952. Vathek – William Beckford
953. The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
954. Cecilia – Fanny Burney
955. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
957. Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
958. Evelina – Fanny Burney
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
960. Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
961. The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
962. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
963. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
964. The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
965. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
966. Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
967. Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
968. Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
969. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
970. Candide – Voltaire
971. The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
972. Amelia – Henry Fielding
973. Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
974. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
975. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
976. Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
977. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
978. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
979. Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
980. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
981. Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
982. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
983. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
984. Roxana – Daniel Defoe
985. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
986. Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
988. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700
989. Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
990. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
991. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
993. The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
995. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
997. The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
998. Aithiopika – Heliodorus
999. Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
1000. Metamorphoses – Ovid
1001. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Advise Me, Please

2008-06-04T19:54:00.000-04:00

For five years now, since I read her The Spiderwick Chronicles, the Possum has been interested in fencing (lessons? classes? coaching? see, I don't even know what learning it is called). Before I sign her up for anything, I want any hints, tips, suggestions, etc. y'all have to offer. My knowledge of swordplay is limited to stage fighting. What does one look for in a fencing school? Is nine too young? I am totally ignorant, so feel free to enlighten me with whatever, or whomever, you know.

Thanks.

Essay - Doctor Recalls Abortion Complications Before Roe v. Wade - NYTimes.com

2008-06-03T18:28:00.000-04:00

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

Kudos to Waldo L. Fielding for saying it so well.

My Father is David Sedaris' Mother

2008-05-20T20:29:00.002-04:00

In Reflections: Letting Go He describes how she reacts when he takes up smoking:

My mother, however, looked at the bright side. “Now I’ll know what to put in your Christmas stocking!” She put them in my Easter basket as well, entire cartons.

My father used to buy me cartons (Benson & Hedges), cut off the UPCs, and then at some later time in the year, give me the gift earned by those UPCs. I got a wine and cheese set, and some lovely/futuristic coffee beakers and a French Press. Of course, when we cleaned out the house after his death, we also found that he was keeping the carton boxes from his own brand (rather than just UPCs) for the possibility of offers to come. He was getting rather hoardy after retirement. There were lots of birdless cages not-yet-cleaned-out, too.

When I'm pining, I'll try and remember Tina's words, from the end of Sedaris' essay.

Via Bitch, Ph.D.

I Think I've Got It

2008-05-13T20:33:00.000-04:00

In the week before Mother's Day, the Possum asks what I'd like. "Well," says I, "I'd like The Golden Compass, and I'd like to sit down and watch it, together." And just to be sure, I told the Spouse.

Happily, for Mother's Day, I got The Golden Compass, and movie candy (my favorites: Junior Mints, Circus Peanuts, and Whoppers), and the leisure time to sit and watch a movie I wanted to see with my family on the enormous sofa under the faux-mink throw of decadence. If life gets better than snuggling with the Offspring while watching armored polar bears fight, then I don't think I'm ready for it.

Also, it turned out to be a good choice, because I was too ill over the weekend to do much else anyways.

Solar System Visualizer

2008-05-09T23:25:00.001-04:00

Cool and sciency!

Thanks, Live Granades

Signs I'm getting Really Old

2008-05-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

The Spouse forwarded this link to me.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

as performed by the Western Branch Freshmen Orchestra.

The WolfOwl Competes

2008-05-05T17:23:00.008-04:00

That's her, the one in pink.

In April her tap/ballet class went to competition dancing to Waltz of the Flowers. As the only entry in their age group, they won first place. That's her, in the middle, in a red jacket, with her trophy.

I'm really impressed, because they had a lot of extra rehearsals. They worked hard (students and teachers), and I'm proud of her.

I'm also proud of the Foxcelot, who was patient and generous while her sister literally took center stage.

The recital itself is amazingly long. We stayed until the bitter end on Sunday, all four and a half hours of it. That's probably a bit much for a kindergartener.

She behaved better than I did. The Spouse and I tend to get rather punchy the last half hour or so. Fortunately, the balcony has emptied out by that time so no one was offended, except my beloved MIL.

Next year perhaps I'll remember that there is no where to eat after five. This is only my fourth recital; I can't be blamed. At least I remembered all the costumes, three this year: for ballet, praise dance, and tap.

The Offspring are amazing. Even when they aren't an image by Degas.

Because the recital is held on campus, I got to hear how much the WolfOwl is looking forward to attending college. Mostly for the cool gothic buildings, and the gargoyles. She's really quite thrilled at the idea of being able to take such specific courses as, say Pre-Columbian American History. They better be offering such a thing in twelve years, or there will be trouble.

On Books, and Not Reading Them

2008-04-28T23:33:00.000-04:00

Invite me to do a meme, challenge me, and I'll fail to get around to it. But just happen to post a bookish meme (a list!) and I am all over it. Good to see you blogging, Kristjan, I miss your font around the 'Ville.

The books listed below are "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." What I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
* Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History o f Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel [finished, but I hated it]
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

I don't often finish a book I'm not really enjoying. Every once in a while I'll plow through something I dislike, just to be able to say in excruciating detail why I dislike it. Atwood's a fine writer, but she didn't know what she was talking about it Oryx & Crake, and it showed.

The Russians are clearly not a big hit with me.

By the bye, I'm reading Stumbling on Happiness, which I've been looking forward to forever it seems. It's amazingly good. Gilbert has a polished lecture style (I'm guessing), with jokes and light asides, even as he loads the reader up with all the research. It's not meant to be any sort of self-help book, but it is helpful, I think, to understand why in times of great stress, my daydreams would all be about decorating my dream home (a very human desire for control, particularly when I feel out of control of life events).

More on The Pressure Boys Reunion

2008-04-28T22:25:00.000-04:00

Raleigh's News & Observer ran a long article on Sunday.Pressure Men:

"Kick-starting the Pressure Boys back to life has not been simple. Frontman Plymale, guitarist Settle and saxophonist Stafford live in the Triangle, but the other three in the reunion are scattered across the country. Trumpet player Je Widenhouse lives in Asheville, and drummer Rob Ladd and bassist Jack Campbell both reside in California. So they're having to rehearse when they can (including this week)."

Be sure and check out the audio slide show. Kudos to the Spouse, for making it all sound awesome.

More on The Pressure Boys, the fabulous collection Songs for Sixty Five Roses, and the two bands The Pressure Boys and Sneakers

I can hardly wait for Friday night's show. Here's my life: I'm worried about being too tired for the concert, because I'll be at my daughter's dance recital dress rehearsal all evening. The Offspring are too young to attend the show, sadly.

Speaking of Readerville

2008-04-18T17:29:00.003-04:00

And aren't I always? Come see my list of recommended steampunk reads.

I don't know if it's acceptable to trackback to one's self, but I'm doing it anyway, as practice.

Update 4/22: So much for that practice. How 'bout this: Steampunk at Readerville

Two Months

2008-03-21T22:34:00.000-04:00

That's how long it's been since I had a smoke.

I still want one.

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1891

Is It Just a Matter of Time, Sharona?

2008-03-20T22:03:00.004-04:00

I am not going to publish a picture, but I looked in the mirror just now, and my reflection was wearing the exact same hair as in my 1979 school picture. Those days, I spent a lot of time with the hair brush and the blow dryer to get these fabulous wings. This morning, I did nothing to my growing-out cut, except ignore it.

To my folly.

Never gonna stop.

YouTube - dancing walrus

2008-03-12T21:48:00.000-04:00

Now this is dancing with a star.

This is my first embedding. Hope it works okay.

Well Played, Twin Cities!

2008-02-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

Smoking ban workaround in bars: Hold "theater nights" - Boing Boing: "The Star Tribune reports that dozens of bars in the Twin Cities are holding 'theater nights' and declaring everyone in the bar to be an actor. By law, performers are allowed to smoke during theatrical performances. (The law in California is similar. I once saw Art Spiegelman give his presentation about the history of comic books and he chained-smoked his way through it.)"

Via Alas! A Blog

A Stair With a View

2008-02-22T18:35:00.000-05:00

Architecture: Stairs Bookcase Actually Makes Me Want to Move to London Me, too.

Okay, everything makes me want to live in London, except my family.

Via Cville Words

How It Works

2008-02-22T18:03:00.001-05:00

I think I love XKCD

Via Shapely Prose

Give It Away

2008-02-11T18:29:00.000-05:00

Tor Books is giving away freebies.

Watch the Skies:

"Once you register, you'll receive our newsletter and a link to download a digital book. And you'll receive a link to another new book every week."

Hat tip to John Scalzi

Stuff That Makes Me Cackle

2008-02-05T21:58:00.000-05:00

(Another entertaining food-company name, which I similarly encountered walking to work many years ago, is the Puritan Ice Cream Company. That may not turn a native New Englander's head, but it sure sounded odd to this Midwesterner. I started a contest with some of my friends come up with the best Puritan ice cream flavors--I forget all of them, but some of the better entries were Straight & Narrow Rocky Road, Chocolate Mather, Sorbet in the Hands of an Angry God, and of course Preachers & Cream.)

Also, I just read Miss Conduct's bio, and realized she's married to Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes. I bet they're a fun couple.

On a related note, I managed to make the Spouse snort his german chocolate pie tonight. I was simply pointing out that the light glancing off the WolfOwl's blue Jello made it gleam the same color as her headband. It's a good day when I make someone else snort at dinner. And a full blown spit take is bliss.

The Pressure Boys Reunion

2008-01-28T20:47:00.000-05:00

FYI, The Cat's Cradle is in Carrboro.

Dumb Like a Stump

2008-01-24T08:13:00.000-05:00

Friendly Coworker: What's wrong?

Me: I broke my toe.

FC: No, you didn't!

Me: Yeah, I did.

FC: What did you kick?

Me: A snowman.

FC: No, you didn't!

Me: Yeah, I did.

(updated to add the snowman)

That's him. That's the guy.

It's Back, It's Beautiful, and It's In My Bloglines

2008-01-18T14:38:00.000-05:00

It's The Readerville Journal 2.0!

Congratulations to Karen Templer for bringing the Journal back. This just makes me insanely happy. All over the internets there is happy book dancing. I'm enough of a geek to be thrilled when I can get fabulous writing about a subject I'm interested in, delivered right into my Bloglines reader.

Plus, I really love Speedy.

What is the atheist version of "godspeed"? Leave a suggestion, if you've got one.

D'Arc Humor

2008-01-18T13:26:00.000-05:00

I'd have posted my review sooner if an entire household of sickness hadn't slowed me down. But here it is, finally:

Ren D’Arc suffers an Edward Gorey sort of tragedy when her mother is killed by a stack of Harry Potter books. I’m still cackling over that. Then her grieving father uproots her from NYC, fleeing to the suburbs. Adventures ensue. I love Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s writing for the same reason that I love John Hughes’ brat pack films: fully-realized, quirky, and intriguing secondary characters. Thankfully, Lauren’s suburbs aren’t so uniformly bland and white as Hughes’, so Ren manages to surround herself with a diverse group of people. How Ren finds her way into a new school, new friends, new challenges, and a new adult support system makes for engaging reading on its own. The fillip of a mystery to solve a la Nancy Drew adds a whiff of danger, and provides momentum to the story. Secrets of my Suburban Life is a delightful read.

Congratulations Lauren!

2008-01-08T13:11:00.000-05:00

Woot!

Lauren Baratz-Logsted has a new book released today, and I want everyone to give her some love. Give her lots of love. Give her balloons and champagne. She's fun, she'll enjoy a party.

I've had Secrets of My Suburban Life on order for six months. Ren's mother is crushed by a stack of Harry Potter tomes. Take that, Nancy Drew's (unnamed) mom. In her new, motherless, suburban life, Ren gets involved in a mystery. That's all I know so far. Two days after the book arrives I'll be able to post more.

Lauren became a good friend through Readerville, naturally, where I've discovered and enthused about her books repeatedly. She's done me the great honor of permitting me to be an early reader of several of her manuscripts, both her work for adults and for kids. The single greatest shared reading experience of last year (and probably my life) was reading aloud from the manuscript of the first book in her new series for kids, collectively entitled The Sisters Eight. I had been reporting back to Lauren each night with what the girls loved, and what they wanted more of, and what they thought was coming, and that feedback showed up in later chapters. When the girls discovered that their ideas and suggestions had been incorporated into the books, when they heard me reading out thoughts they had had, filtered and given form by a witty writer, their delight was unspeakable. We howled with laughter. We punched the pillows, we kicked the mattress. We laughed until it hurt.

The frosting in Annie's Adventures: that was the WolfOwl's idea.

(We're currently reading the fourth manuscript in the series. It's also fabulous)

So, I consider Lauren to be the literary godmother of the Offspring, and I fully expect her to get top billing in the acknowledgements of the Possum's first published work. And I'm okay with that.

I love Lauren more than anyone I've never met, and I wish her all the success in the world. Big smooches, dear.

*Joella's post-exam litter seems like an apt image. We all need more "booze-soaked old school feminism".

(Update 1/10/2008) Book has arrived. Now, if I can only put everything else on hold, I can read it.

A Short Course in Epidemiology

2007-11-15T17:30:00.000-05:00

Once again, Sandy Szwarc undertakes to explain the science of epidemiology, and why so much of what is reported as news really turns out to be noise. Junkfood Science: Math phobia — Is that evidence for real?:

"Most worries among the public would already be assuaged if more people simply understood that relative risks less than 3 (200%) have long been recognized as untenable. Just imagine how many popular fears and health agendas would disintegrate in an instant if the public realized that relative risks less than 10 — that’s 10-fold or 900% as high — with p-values >0.01 are often not real, tenable and are generally explained by confounding factors."

Happy Birthday, Junkfood Science!

I Choose Extinction

2007-10-15T19:30:00.000-04:00

Pro-science: The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme: "The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

A blogging and scientific experiment.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...:, or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...”.

*You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from, e.g. Pro-science to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
---------

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My parent is Pro-Science.

This branch is withered. Sorry, Kristjan.

Pikachu Octopus

2007-10-06T16:11:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I had to post this, because I keep telling people about it, and it takes me forever to find it. I thought maybe if I stored it safely in my blog, I'd be able to find it again. Pharyngula had this up in July. That makes me a very slow blogger, I guess.

It's pure Cute Overload, isn't it?

Enjoy, Liam, this cute is for you; the Science Blogs' Pokemon is for you, Colin.

We're Back in School

2007-08-31T18:00:00.000-04:00

Ahhh. It's been a tricky week. Kindergartners were split with half starting Monday and half starting Tuesday. Woof Woof Woofie went Monday, visited the doc for another x-ray (cast off in two weeks!) on Tuesday, missed Wednesday to have ear tubes inserted, and so is only completing her third day of school this week.

What a difference four years makes. When we sent the Possum off, we blithely put her on the school bus for the three block trip each morning. Had the bus schedule not changed to something really inconvenient, we'd probbly have stuck to it. She didn't tell us much about school or how it was going, so it was the first discussion with her teacher at six or nine weeks before we found out how miserable she had been, crying every day.

But third grade is great. Of twenty-two students, she's already had classes with seven, and she's got her best friend from second grade in there.

While the Possum isn't embarrassed to have her mother walk her to class, Woof Woof Woofie is. That's right: on her second day she asked me not to walk right beside her, and this morning she wanted to be dropped off out front. They're great kids and endlessly fascinating in the ways they resemble one another, as well as the ways they differ. Which is exactly what I liked about having two kittens from the same litter thirteen years ago. Cat ownership was good preparation after all.

Beware the Evil Grapefruit

2007-07-18T08:12:00.000-04:00

The article said something like this: "Avoid Deadly Grapefruit". No, that was just how it came across to some readers. Somehow between the actual article in British Journal of Cancer and the press release, and then the newspaper article, though, that's what it became. Reading the actual paper in the journal is difficult for most people not just because Sturgeon's Law is true of research papers, but also because access to medical journals is limited for people who don't work near a medical research library. I read the paper, and it's pretty much Bullsh*t, although not as bad as the newspaper version made it sound.

Epidemiological studies can be helpful at revealing further avenues of inquiry, but they are not proof of anything. The other epidemiological study that invariably comes out saying the opposite will also get big headlines, but the clinical study that disproves both of them will be ignored.

"In epidemiologic research, relative risks [RR] of less than 2 are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors not evident"

National Cancer Institute, "Abortion and Possible Risk for Breast Cancer: Analysis and Inconsistencies," October 26, 1994

In this study, the only patients with a RR greater than 2 were the ones currently taking estrogen/progestin therapy. The highest RR for the greatest consumption of grapefruit? 1.30. Any lower and the headline would have been saying that "Grapefruit Saves Lives".

So, the really interesting stuff from this particular study (in my opinion) didn't make news:

This finding of a reduced effect of grapefruit in women with a higher BMI is similar to the lower effect of ET on breast cancer risk in women with a higher BMI

That is, these meaningless increases in risk are even less meaningful for fatter women. That's a relief, isn't it?

Consistent with other studies on postmenopausal oestrogen use, we found an increase in breast cancer risk, particularly among current EPT users.

And post-menopausal hormone use really is risky, just like everyone else was saying.

I Hope I Become More Like My Mother

2007-07-17T22:01:00.000-04:00

Her bookshelves:

And again:

Versus my best:

You may judge which tree the fruit is falling closest to, since this is the bookcase of the Offspring:

Zombies by Mail

2007-07-16T20:50:00.000-04:00

Lame, I know. Anyway, the gifted, charming, and culinarily canny Rax designed these fabulous t-shirts. So I wanted to post the pictures promptly as a big "thank you!"

I provide the zombies, you provide the captions.

Fishy, Fishy

2007-07-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

Charlotte Observer | 07/03/2007 | A reel big surprise:
Piranha in Catawba:

"Melton noticed something very different when he opened the fish's mouth with his pocketknife: 'It had a whole bunch of teeth. Then it just bit down and left an impression in the blade of my knife.'"

If this were fiction, credibility would be strained.

Update: It's not a piranha

Melton said wildlife officials told him that "by taking that fish out of the water, I had done a good thing."

School's Out!

2007-06-10T20:56:00.000-04:00

As of Friday, the formal education is over for the summer. And that means our annual haircuts yesterday. And local dairy ice cream. The Possum before

and after

Woof Woof Wolfie before

and after

me, likewise

and also,

I'd like to thank everyone who offered suggestions, and apologize for not turning out better on the basis of that help.

re:LibraryThing

2007-06-05T21:56:00.001-04:00

Okay, I love it, and it's pretty handy. There are features I'd like, so it's not perfect, but what is? To my amusement, I happened to notice, over there, on the left, that little box says "recent books from my library".

It's funny, go those are all books I read more than twenty years ago, but only recently added to LibraryThing.

Yeah, it's a geeky book joke.

Also, I really need to trim my blogroll.

A Domestic Manifesto

2007-06-05T21:55:00.000-04:00

frontstepdesign: Manifesto:

"What I do, as an Architect and a person, is learn how to create a wonderful domestic life. 'Wonder' in this case, means not only pretty - and pretty* is very important! - but also helpful."

I am so there, only without the architecture training or the devotion to the cause or the creativity. It's an updated version of the William Morris quote I love:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

As an only peripherally connected aside: now that we have a composting bin, it's really encouraging to see how much compost we generate. All those fruits and veggies we eat, are tangible, and useful.

Real Life

2007-06-05T21:54:00.000-04:00

I'm tired. What I would like to do after work is put my feet up, eat cake or cookie dough, and read some Terry Pratchett that I got for my birthday. Someone bringing me slippers and a cocktail would be lovely, too.

What I do, however, is come home, run around the yard for an hour being a Spice Girl or a Sailor Scout or Shaggy (my Shaggy voice is pretty good, zoinks!), fighting evil with swim noodles and breaks for boogie boarding in Hawaii (because superheroes need surfing vacations too), fix a mediocre supper of some kind of pasta (I am still just learning to cook [I know], if The Spouse is working, or serve as chef's assistant if he isn't. Eat, put away the leftovers, dole out desserts and allergy meds to the Offspring, and then get them into their jammies, watch them brush their teeth and try not to crack up about something, apply fluoride, get them into bed (all three of us in Woof Woof Wolfie's bunk for books and it's crowded, all elbows and knees), read to them for an hour from two of the endless series of Henry and Mudge books (now with spin off series of Annie and Snowball) or the other new Rylant series, The High-Rise Private Eyes and either The Miserable Mill or Matilda or Thodosia and The Serpents of Chaos (the Possum's choices these days), after which I will put out the light and lie still, hissing like a goose occasionally when someone who shall remain nameless will not be still in that top bunk and is making an astounding amount of racket, contorting her body into impossible shapes trying to find a comfortable position and get the pillows just right. Finally, when I have just started to doze off myself, but have been jerked awake by an untimely mattress squeak, I will realize that Woof Woof Wolfie is out cold and I may find my shoes and creep from the room, after almost-but-not-quite forgetting to pass out the good-night kisses, and then I can retire to the screen porch for ten minutes of peace and a smoke.

Ah.

At which point I will realize that while still tired, I am no longer sleepy, and that there is a load of laundry that's been moldering in the washing machine for 24 hours, which desperately needs a rinse, and when I go to put it in the drier, I'll discover a load that's been wrinkling in there for 24 hours, and by the time I get that folded and weighted down (in order to replace the random creases with proper ones), I'll be too exhausted to read a word, but too wired to go to sleep without pharmacological assistance.

And somewhere in there I manage to fit in gathering whatever permission slips and checks are necessary for second grade tomorrow, bringing in the mail and Mom's newspaper, chatting with my beloved Spouse about the news of the day and upcoming special scheduling events and the weather (he's very knowledgeable about the weather, and just think how much more fun it will be when he gets his birthday weather station up! we'll be rolling in data and the exact time of sunset!) and movies we've seen recently (mostly animated and G rated) or twenty years ago when we both worked separately in theaters. And I'll have a conversation with Mom about her garden, and extended family news, and what a wonderful husband I'm lucky to have. And I'll feed the cats and pet them.

This is my life and it is exhausting and I love it. I'm insanely lucky to have all this.

A Little Help, Please

2007-06-05T21:49:00.000-04:00

I'm sure there must be a way to work on a draft of a post, save it, come back, edit it, and reset the date and time so that it posts as today, rather than sometime in the distant past when I first got an idea.

Can anyone explain that to me for Blogger, or provide a link? I really don't feel like hunting that down tonight.

Doh. Post Options, right below the composing box.

Nevermind.

2007-06-01T17:55:00.000-04:00

Spreading a Little Happiness

2007-05-16T09:18:00.000-04:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Happiness wins science book prize:

"A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award. "

Two years ago in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004, I read a piece by Jon Gertner on Affective Forecasting. It's not often that I can pinpoint a paradigm shift in my own thinking, but since reading that article, reading more on the topic, and blogging on it, I can be fairly exact. I'm delighted that Gilbert won the prize, and I'm very eager to read the book.

Castle Waiting: The Accessories

2007-05-07T10:37:00.000-04:00

I don't recall having encountered this before: the author is offering a dust-jacket, color plates, a library card set, and a charm to go on the ribbon bound into the book.

The whole set is very appealing. I'm a sucker for all book-related stuff, and I adore library cards, particularly when they aren't kept in pockets in the designated books. (I like to use them as book marks, and if the library book is old enough, there's a bookmark storage pocket built right in.) Medley's having fun with Castle Waiting, like Jaspar Fforde in the Next books, with ads for toast, and his website with the Book Upgrade Centre. I'm looking forward to the next Next almost as much as I'm looking forward to the final Potter.

Not that every author should try doing jacket design or extensive web pages. For the vast majority of authors, all those who are not also visual artists, I would think that any time spent trying to come up with the clever ideas would be poorly spent. There are so many possibilities for doing these sorts of things badly, and even if they are done well, you're still going to annoy some people. Besides which, it all takes time away from the really important stuff: getting the books out.

What do y'all think?

It's All About Meme

2007-04-20T22:17:00.000-04:00

Pro-science asks : Why do I blog?.

Let me count the whys:

1) Because I am always posting comments on other blogs that are way too long, and still having more to say. Really, way, way, way too long. So part of blogging is to edit my ideas down a bit, and part is just having all the space I need.

2) To keep the occasional friend and relation up on the cuteness that is the Offspring. Without actually forcing them to look at pictures or respond with strained laughs and rictus smiles. Really, no one has to click or comment.

3) Like the rest of my life, I can imagine exactly how great it could be if I only had more time. Unlike boxes of books I'm never going to read, it's incredibly easy to keep an infrequently updated blog. No dusting required.

4) To share my blogroll, because there are so many insanely skilled bloggers out there, and I figure every little link helps.

5) To get in the last word.*

* "mochila" [moh-chill-ah]

Five reasons, so I'll tag five blogs:

Insane Troll Logic by my doppelgangirl
Mimi Smartypants
MOM: Not Otherwise Specified
Faux Real
Atheist in a Minivan (no Possum relation, thanks for asking)

If There is a "New Atheism"...

2007-04-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

does that mean that there can be Fundamentalist Atheists, insisting on returning to the old ways of disbelief?

I love Pro-Science because I agree on every major issue, natch, blut also because he really takes the time to elucidate the issues. Kristjan does awesome fisking on ID in particular, science in general, and he brings a clear-eyed disinterest to American politics.

Plus he gave me the link to the coyote in the Loop.

No Voter Left Behind

2007-04-04T13:34:00.000-04:00

How about this: high stakes testing in every district in the nation, performed by international observers. Any district which can't prove that it has 1) registered all eligible voters, 2) provided all possible aid to assist said voters in voting and 3) counted all those votes, will have their federal representative taken away, and the voters will be reassigned to some other district. They'll also have all federal funding taken away.

That should improve things, right?

We're Like this

2007-03-27T11:21:00.000-04:00

Last nice at bedtime Woof Woof Woofie was most taken with the word "stupidhead" repeating it over and over. Then for reasons I can't recall, the Possum said "mochila", which the Offspring and I agreed, sounded much more like a small furry rodent, suitable (only) for wearing around a woman's neck and/or shoulders, rather than a "backpack". It was necessary to spend a great deal of time playing in the bathroom with fur stoles from the dress-up box and repeating the word "mochila" in as many sentences and silly posh accents as possible. And, of course, to attack one another with the end of the stole where a face would be if this were the Ghostbusters movie where the fur attacks the woman.