Books! I Love Them!

I've been reading a lot recently, both fiction and non-fiction. Finally got around to reading Salt, Sugar, Fat and was suitably horrified by what I learned. (Did you know that a half cut of Prego Traditional tomato sauce has as much sugar as three Oreos??) I'm in the middle of Michael Pollan's Cooked right now and enjoying it. I had been hesitating for some silly reason, but then saw it at the library.

But tonight, as soon as I finish writing this, I will open up a book I am very excited to start:

I love, love, love good speculative fiction, including some very dark dystopias. Margaret Atwood's trilogy, ending with MaddAddam, is definitely on the list of very dark dystopias. In anticipation of reading this final book, I reread the first two over the past couple weeks and found them just as good the second time around. (Might have been the third time around for Year of the Flood. Not sure about that.)

So now I'll bid you good-night so I can start reading! I just hope I can stop...

The Missing Picture

Michael claims the picture was on the computer all the time. I still have my doubts. Either way, here is Darcy reading at the library on Monday afternoon:

And here's a picture from the hike Michael and I took a few hours before the library trip:

It's a little washed out, but that's a cute red eft hanging out on the moss. We took a "hike" a few weeks ago that ended up being a tiptoe through the over-200 efts on the trail. This time, we saw a dozen or so. Very nice amphibians they are.

My Mis-spent Youth, Or The Book Quest Continues

I swear to you that I was a good student in high school. Let me just start there. I went to class, did my homework (albeit often at the last minute), I didn't give my teachers much sass except for those times that sass was well-deserved (I'm looking at you, 10th grade English teacher from hell), and every summer I made my way through my assigned summer reading lists. 

Except for the summer of '85, apparently, when I spent a month with my good friend EB with her father's cousins in England. The summer before junior year, which in New York, is the year of English literature in English class. I mention this because one of my big gaps in the list of 100 books is good British classics. As a Jane Austen fan(atic), it surprised me that there were so many British authors I'd just glossed over. I remember having a conversation with my parents in high school in which they both assured me that I'd love Thomas Hardy. But in the summer of 1985, while walking galumphing labs on Lord Bath's private roads and visiting Liverpool and Kew Gardens, the summer reading list sort of slipped my mind.

I took it with me to England, along with a big suitcase of good intentions. But when I actually brought it out to show my lovely hostess, she patted my arm and said we could probably find most of them on books on tape so I could listen to them on trains. And so it was that I listened to about two thirds of a Tess of the D'Urbervilles so abridged that it took up only two cassettes, and called my reading list done. The shame.

But now I have a second chance to make things right. While I have not yet read Tess, the second book I read on my Kindle was another of Hardy's novels, Far from the Madding Crowd. The first was A Tale of Two Cities, which won the Christmas straw poll for everyone's favorite Dickens' novel. Both of these classics were on the unread portion of my list. And now they've been read and enjoyed and given a star on the printed list that I've been toting around since Cima House. I'll never look at people knitting in public the same way again.

But it's not just classic English novels that have been crossed off the list. The first vacation rental had an eclectic, but very interesting collection of books, and I managed to read Memoirs of a Geisha and Notes from a Small Island while we were there. Memoirs is one of those books that make you wonder how a member of one sex can get inside the head of a member of the other sex so well. (Although I think Wally Lamb does that almost better than anyone else.) I enjoyed Small Island, too, but none of Bill Bryson's books have captured me quite as much as A Walk in the Woods and its discussion of bear-human treaties, or lack thereof.

I thought there was another book that I was able to cross off at the second vacation rental, but it's not jumping out at me right now. I did, of course, read the Dickens there, but it wasn't thanks to the owners, who mostly had mystery-thrillers on their copious bookshelves.

Right now, I'm in the midst of a mad rush of reading. I'm rereading Pride and Prejudice for its 200th birthday, reread all of the Hunger Game books and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets Nest over the last week, and I'm going through all of Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books two at a time from the library. I didn't love the first one when I read it, but I love all of her non-Mary Russell books so much that I thought they deserved another try. It was the right decision.

Some of the most exciting reading I'm doing these days, though, is the slowest reading. Most of my rereading happens at the rate of a book a day or a day and a half, in the case of Hornets Nest, but each evening, we are reading about half a chapter of the first Harry Potter with Darcy. We'll pause for a long while between each of the books so she will be old enough by the time we get to Book 4, but it's exciting to introduce her to that world.

And what are you reading?

Return Of The Book Quest

Ok. So about three years ago, I saw this list of 100 books that people were passing around Facebook to see how many they'd read. I consider myself reasonably well-read and was surprised by how many I had NOT read from the list, so I started to remedy that problem. You can read about the beginning of that quest here. It includes the list.


I have strayed from my quest, but decided to return to it this week. The reason? Our library isn't all that great. I'm trying hard to use it and love it this summer, but loving it is not always easy to do. They often (maybe even usually) don't have the books I'm looking for, so I decided that I should think about looking for different books. Books on the list. You see where this is going?


I finished Atonement, by Ian McEwan, this morning. It took me a little while to get into the story when I started it, but the ending is incredibly powerful, as is a lot of the middle. It is a story from the lead up to and very beginning of World War II in England. The central conflict is a lie that changes the paths of everyone enmeshed in it forever. I definitely recommend it and it illustrates perfectly the benefits of going through this list. I can't imagine picking up Atonement without the list. It has none of the characteristics that make me pick up completely random books and read them with no prior connection or recommendation. I'm usually drawn to a quirky title or book jacket (yes, I know I shouldn't judge, but I do!) and then find something on the leaf description that seals the deal.


I was debating between a few other books on the list, but then saw Neal Stephenson's Anathem on the shelf and felt compelled to reread it. Amazing book, truly. 


I know this post doesn't include the requisite picture of Darcy. We're stay-cationing at the house of friends this week and I don't have the card reader. Otherwise, I'd share a great picture of Darcy with a giant banana slug outside our house. But while searching for the original book-quest post, I came across this post with Darcy still in full curly-hair mode, so take a walk down memory lane and remember the younger, dinosaur-obsessed Darcy Jo.

Coincidence? I Think Not!

The Moomintrolls are taking over! Just the other day, I was writing about the glorious wonders of the Moomintroll books. Tonight, after a lovely Thai meal, we browsed in a couple used bookstores to draw out our date night a bit. And there, on a few shelves of new books, were FOUR of the Moomintroll books. With accolades on the covers by Neil Gaiman of all people. One of them was one I haven't ever read, but it is Buy Nothing Day and we'd already skirted the concept by buying a meal.

Children's Books I Love

Yesterday's post title, In Which My Husband Has A Wish, is an homage to some of my favorite children's books. Books, quite frankly, that almost nobody seems to know about. It might be because they're Norwegian (I believe). I was introduced by my first-generation Norwegian-Australian third-grade teacher. I own very ratty copies purchased many, many years ago at the Barnes and Noble Annex for one dollar each. I know this because they both have their price stickers still on them. The list price was a buck and a quarter. I got a bargain.

What are these wonderful books? I'll let this post be a Thanksgiving treasure hunt. It's about time I had a truly interactive blog post. My blog title was in the format of the chapter titles/headings. My hint for the treasure hunt is this: "Chapter IV: In which owing to the Hattifatteners' night attack the Snork Maiden loses her hair, and in which the most remarkable discovery is made on Lonely Island."

Do you know these books from your childhood and recognize the description? Or are you just good at Googling? Either way, try to Name That Book/Those Books in the comments!

Just How Big Are These Trees?

Darcy loves the redwoods. She also loves and misses the Joshua trees, so frequently tells me that Crescent City has redwood trees, but Cima house had Joshua trees. And it's all true -- both places have some very special trees. She likes to pretend to be a redwood by standing on her tip toes and reaching her hands really high over her head. She doesn't quite reach their heights. All the pictures in this post were taken on the same day in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park (hope I got that right; all this jurisdictional stuff has me confused). As soon as we got out of the car, Darcy ran over to hug this redwood.

We had lunch on this bench. I know that it looks like a small bench. It isn't. We all three sat on it with our lunches spread out, too. It's a goodly-sized bench.

Even as you get further away, a big redwood is still really, really big. Notice that it's instant darkness behind it as you get into more redwoods. On a sunny day, in the middle of the day, if we're driving through old-growth redwoods, our car will automatically turn on the full headlights. Because it's confused and thinks it is suddenly night. Not much light gets through the canopy.

It's hard to get a whole tree into the picture, but this is the rest of the tree from the other pictures. I did my best. Unless I had crossed into the (STAY OUT!!) elk meadow, I couldn't get any further back.

Even when they're lying down, redwoods are still big. This one's a little taller than Michael, which wouldn't be that impressive at the base of the trunk, but this cut is probably twenty or thirty feet from the roots. We were admiring mushrooms. I needed the flash. On that bright, sunny afternoon you see in the previous pictures.

In other news, the rain has returned to Crescent City after two weeks of sunshine. The clear skies brought very cold temperatures and we learned that our pellet stove doesn't really do much when it's in the thirties unless we keep it on all day long. And our central heat doesn't like to come downstairs, apparently. So we can have the stove on and be warm in the living room and almost-warm in the kitchen. Or we can have the central heat on and be warm upstairs. Not both.

And in book news, I am still on my quest, but I got stuck on Swallows and Amazons (or is it Amazons and Swallows?). I thought this was one I was going to really enjoy. I first heard about it in a NY Times poll asking people for the Harry Potter of their childhood. People raved about this series of books and I couldn't find it in my library at the time. I found a used copy on our drive here from Cima, but I haven't gotten past the second chapter yet. I don't really know why. I think I've read a couple more since I last updated my quest, but I'll have to look at my master list to see what they were. I've got Bleak House on deck because someone gave me the BBC production to watch on DVD and I don't want to see it before I read it.

Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.

Almost Forgot The Book Update

I know you're all at the edge of your seat waiting for an update on my book list quest. I finished Great Expectations last night, the first of almost a half-dozen books by Dickens that I need to read. I enjoyed it. The story was good (with a lot of coincidence thrown into the plot, but that's ok), the pace was quick, there was humor. All good.

I'm half way through the introduction to The Grapes of Wrath now. I usually save the introduction for after I read the book because they too often give away the whole plot, so what's the point of reading the book? But I know the basic story of this one, having seen the movie a few times. I decided I'd get educated before starting the story this time.

Practicing For Crescent City (And Other News)

We had an overcast, cool, off-and-on damp day the other day. We never managed to get real precipitation for more than a minute or two at a time, but it felt like a practice day for our new life in Crescent City. Darcy passed the test with flying colors; it was everything I could do to get her to come inside once her hair was verging on wet rat.

Her sleeveless dress might not be appropriate in the northern rain, but she's got the right attitude! She started out with just the hat and moved on to the umbrella when she wanted to play peek-a-boo. It wasn't at all to keep the rain off her, just for the play.

As you can see behind her, our summer rains have left a green wash behind. The video for Mojave says that the water from summer storms runs off quickly and "does little for the fabric of life" in the desert, but you couldn't prove that around our house. There are several kinds flowering plants that are in a second full burst of bloom. A lot of the green on the ground is just grass from the hay seeds in our resident cows' poop, I will admit that. But there are a lot of natives having a second hurrah these days.

In other news, Michael will officially work for Redwood National Park as of October 11th, so our move should start the 12th or 13th and take three to five days, most likely. The movers will be done in a day, if our experience in King Salmon is any measure. Then we'll drive north. And drive north. And then drive north some more. We'll keep everyone posted.

On the book front, I've just finished Rebecca today. Somehow, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca have always been linked, loosely, in my head, and I still think that's not unrealistic. Rebecca had a modernized element of suspense, with the sinister housekeeper playing a more active role than the insane wife in Jane Eyre. I felt this book ended rather abruptly, but I need to go back and re-read the prologue to see if that sheds a bit more light on what happened next. I like it in a fairly vague way. Not something I'll feel compelled to read again, and I read a lot of books multiple times.

Next up is Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(For those of you paying attention, Dickens should be coming up next, but I've requested it through the Bookmobile, so when I was at the library in Las Vegas yesterday, I skipped ahead.)

I Confessed To My Librarian

In a further effort to make myself follow through on my reading quest, I confessed to my librarian at the Bookmobile this morning. She is keen to see the list and make sure I get the books I need. Next up is Dickens. Yikes!

I loved The Color Purple, by the way. Finished it yesterday afternoon.

Big news is on the horizon. Watch this space for a big announcement in the next two days. We're in the middle of some heavy-duty decision-making.

Fun In Baker? It Turns Out To Be Possible!

Please forgive the lack of photos; I didn't think to grab the camera for our temporary residence in Baker. I probably should have, given our activities last night.

I was on the phone with Amy, planning the menu for a fungus conference we're going to cater for in October. I mentioned that we were thinking of checking out the Baker Community Pool in the evening. Pool? Did somebody say pool? A little over an hour later, Amy and family were at our door, ready to swim. Michael had to work late, unfortunately, but the rest of us headed over to the pool, which lives across from the high school and share its parking lot.

There were more people working there than swimming, but for a buck each per adult, it was hard to beat the surprising cool water, diving board, and very shallow end that Darcy could stand up in. We swam, dove, and splashed for a while and then headed back to Baker House for a big veggie dinner and some dancing to the I Like Yaks song.

Two future social events are coming out of this as well. On Wednesday, with the other adult residents of the Granites away, we're going to watch a kids movie projected onto the side of a building. Movie still to be determined, but there will be lots of popcorn. On Saturday, I might go with Amy and Matthew when they head to Vegas to contradance. Yes, you read that right -- there is contradancing in Las Vegas! Woo-hooo! Who would have thought it possible?? If this Saturday doesn't work out, I'll probably try another week, as it's a twice-a-month dance. I miss contradancing.

In other news, I've finished Wuthering Heights and didn't love it. I didn't even like it, except for the last four or five chapters. Bleah. I've started The Color Purple. I know I saw the movie a long time ago, but I don't remember all that much of it, so the novel still has the capacity to surprise me and I'm not constantly comparing it to the film because I just don't have a clear picture of that. I like it. There are actually many miserable characters (either in misery or handing it out), as there were in Wuthering Heights, but it feels that there is hope for better (within the characters, not just in the narrative) in The Color Purple and that was absent in most of Wuthering Heights.

The Book List (And My Quest Begins)

Those of you on Facebook have probably seen or been tagged to copy this list into a note and mark which books you have read. I have no idea where this list came from originally or exactly what it is supposed to represent, but I was surprised at how many of these books I haven't read. Most particularly, to be blunt, how many of the books that were probably on my summer reading lists in high school I have managed not to read.

(An aside: I looked at the summer reading list shelf at the library yesterday while looking for the next book in my quest [it wasn't there, but on a nearby "Classics" shelf]. My how summer reading lists have changed! It is no longer peopled mostly by dead white men and women. Many of the authors are alive and well and still writing, which was not true of most of my summer reading lists.)

So I am beginning a quest to fill in the blanks. With a few exceptions (I don't feel the need to sit down and read the entire Bible or every scrap of anything Shakespeare ever wrote, although I'll hit some high points I've missed), my plan is to read all the books on this list that I haven't yet read. I'm not presenting a marked list here, but you can figure it out if you follow the notes I'll make on my quest.

I had planned to go more or less in order, but I didn't have the list with me yesterday and had to just get a second book that I knew was on the list and unread. So last week, while in Simi Valley, I read Jane Eyre. I enjoyed it, or at least the parts that you're supposed to enjoy. I think the malnourishment and neglect Jane encountered at the boarding school were not meant to be enjoyed. The introduction to Wuthering Heights taught me that two Bronte sisters died of malnutrition while away at boarding school. Easy to see where Charlotte came by those scenes, once you know that.

I'm almost half way through Wuthering Heights now and enjoying it much less than Jane Eyre. It's a little over-dramatic and gloomy for me so far. If there's a sympathetic character in the book, he or she has not been introduced to me yet. On deck is the out-of-order The Color Purple.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy-
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
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

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
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
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

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
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
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo