Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Thanksgiving Eve

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I've been trying to decide why this is, and I've come up with a couple of reasons (over-analyzing yet again).

1. Growing up it was the most "drama-free" of the major holidays, at least in my child-like perception. Christmas always had bigger hopes and bigger let-downs, but Thanksgiving was almost always good. We always ate the exact same things- it wouldn't be Turkey Day without cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes... so of course I'll be bringing them tomorrow. Did you know I crave tradition?
2. Thanksgiving marks the beginning of party season, and being an avid party thrower, I like that I can savor the day and still look forward to more, since boring ol' January is still eons away.
3. Thanksgiving is a more unassuming holiday that often is almost overlooked, and as a fighter of injustice, I like to champion its cause. I will not put up my tree until the fourth Friday in November.
4. It is a good reminder to be thankful for the many blessings the LORD has given to Eric and to me. Because they're a lot. And really, if we're being thankful- which means, as I teach my kindergarteners, "We are happy to have it, and we want to say thank you."- it's all kind of meaningless with out having Someone to be saying thank you too.

Tomorrow, I will not be playing football to wet my appetite- can I get a shout-out for 10 degrees Fahrenheit!- but I will be joining friends and friends of friends for a Thanksgiving feast of epic proportions.

What am I thankful for? That Eric agreed to get up and watch the Macy's parade with me in the morning!

Saturday, November 20, 2010

No Blog November

And just like that one month and 3 days later, I'm back with a mediocre blog post. Where have I been, you either faithful checker or person who has me on their blog roll asks. Well, folks I have been here. I thought November would be a lovely, relaxing month but the answer to that was... well No. This month shall hereafter be called Vember.

Unless you are a literary person, you might want to skip the rest of this post... but reading books has been something I've been wanting to do more of... and so I will do "one of those posts." Because after a somewhat exhausting month, thinking of books makes me feel happy... and pine for a fireplace.

So here's the BBC book list- let's see how I fare- in the spirit of this exercise I will bold ones read, italicize ones started, and do nothing (but perhaps read) to the rest.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Liked the second movie better-
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - We can thank Eric for this-
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Used to be my favorite book in HS-
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - umm YES! On book five- yes I'm running late for the movie-
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Absolutely favorite book of all time-
6 The Bible - Though the answer should be yes, I'm pretty sure it's no... book supersedes a favorite list-
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Yes, long long ago-
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Nope, but that was a great year-
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Haha... collective freshman English groan-
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Loved it as a girl-
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - Thanks to Ms. Love my Senior HS English teacher, I can expound on the roads motif in this quite depressing novel-
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I prefer the abridged ones... -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - See Eric note-
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Odd huh-
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - I loved this book! But really disliked her 2nd novel.-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - So funny story- I've read this twice. The first time was in 6th grade. I found it on my parents' bookshelf. It went way over my head. Made more sense in HS-
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - 42-
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Who never take a bath...-
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Weird, weird, weird, weird, weird. -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - But I love the Disney ride! -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -This might be my favorite one-
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Smiling with fondness-
34 Emma - Jane Austen - I don't know? Sometimes they run together in the mind-
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -See book 34-
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -Sweet! Two for the price of one!-
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - Loved Thousand Splendid Suns even better-
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - Just the movie-
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Just the movie-
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - I always like Paddington better-
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Oink!-
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - ahh... Gilbert-
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -Gosh, I hated the ending of this movie!-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Just finished for October's bookclub!-
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - but of course-
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Nah, this might be my favorite one-
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Excellent-
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -Actually, I have-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Not gonna happen-
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Eric does a great impression-
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - I can thank my prolific childhood reading for this-
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - Started once. Finished with the movie-
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - I think we might be reading this for bookclub-
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - But of course. Trumpet of the Swans, even better-
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -I heart S.H.-
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - I detest this book.-
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - Thanks to my parents' bookshelf-
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - A certain HS cram session comes back to me-
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl - I really have never loved this book. Is that odd?-
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Love. love. love. love. love.-

So, what should I read next?