My First Meme

OK, lame, I know. My brain is blank tonight, or at least it's not full of anything coherent and resembling a story or essay. It's kind of like an old coffee can in the basement with a bunch of random bolts and hinges and extra pieces for things you've assembled but maybe not all that well.

Anyway, I've seen this book list meme a few places and just kept it on the back burner for later. My biggest issue with these kinds of lists or quizzes is that I have to add commentary to them all the time. It's not enough to simply put the title in italics or whatever; I've gotta blather on. It's my specialty. So we'll see how I do here.

OK, I stole this particular version from Grace.

Supposedly, the average adult has read 6 out of the 100 books of all time as chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts. Bloggers, having nothing better to do, have turned this into a game.

Basically, you take the NEA list and

1. Bold all the books you've read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read (or have started to read but didn't finish?).
3. Underline those you have read more than once. (I'm just going to turn them purple because it's easier.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [I remember I didn't like it the first time through. I almost didn't finish, but it was for English class, and I had to do a book project on it.]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [I love this book!]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [I love this one, too...oh, Scout!]
6 The Bible [I've attempted this one numerous times. I've read much of the Old Testament, and I've read the Gospels.]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [Yeah, I know. I haven't read it. I don't know why, either.]
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [I love Orwell. This book freaks me out every time, too!]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [and I didn't enjoy it! SHHHH!]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, I've read a LOT of his works, but maybe not all...]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [although I read the newer one...can't remember what it was called?]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [I just reread this again last spring. I like Holden...]
19 The Time Traveller'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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [I think I was suffering from PTSD when I finished this. Bleak!]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo
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 [why is the complete Chronicles AND tLtWatW on the list?]
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 [I teach this every year, so...]
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [OK, why is this book on the list? I mean, it was okay as far as that kind of action-y type books go, but on a list with Shakespeare and whatnot? Uhhhh...no.]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 [This book FREAKED me out the first time I read it!]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
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-time - Mark Haddon [This book didn't really wow me, either.]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [in Spanish!]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [this is on my shelf right now.]
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [I've read everything Kerouac wrote. I'm goofy like that.]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [I've read more than half?]
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 [OK, I really, really wanted to finish it. I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, and I just couldn't hold on...]
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 [started it, ran out of motivation]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [no, but I did read Tuesdays with Morrie and one other one by him...or I think I listened to them on tape. Yeah...it's all coming back to me now.]
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

Daddy keeps all his wenches in the basement...

I'm pretty sure Jabber was talking about tools, but you just never know. The basement, it seems, is a pretty happenin' place.

Today Jabber said, very slyly, "Daddy has a secret hide-out, you know." Sure enough, he was talking about the basement.

It all started with the workbench. Then the TV. Random strips of carpeting. Some more furniture picked up for free from the sides of the street. Then a whole wall of organizational moment, when David decided to put in shelves. Now two, no three, more workbenches, and a reloading hobby that pretty much keeps him occupied for as much time as he'd like, and then some.

At least he does the laundry while he's down there. The basement is not really a fun place for me, except on those days where it's so goddamn hot out that I feel the need to touch my bare feet onto clammy cement floors just to combat spontaneous combustion. Every so often, I also may be forced to drag my ass down there and pedal my exercise bike for a bit, next to the crumbling chimney and a mystery bucket that was filled with something like rock salt but one day mysteriously (hence the term "mystery bucket") melted or something and is now a five gallon bucket of icky liquid. Why don't we dispose of said bucket? Well, is it hazardous waste? I don't think it's compost.

Anyway, I pretty much limit my trips to the basement for necessities, like when I realize I have to wrap a present and didn't send David down for the gift bags, or like this afternoon I had to go down and figure out why the air conditioner wasn't acting like it was plugged in (because it wasn't).

But to the boys, the basement is the ultimate hide-out, a top-secret clubhouse where Mom is not allowed. In the basement, things happen that Mom doesn't get to know about. (That's why Daddy keeps all his wenches there, I guess.) Like tonight Jabberwock went downstairs with Daddy to give Mama some time to rest her vocal cords from screaming at the two boys who Would. Not. Stop. Fighting. So, while Mama and Monkey were reading peacefully from I-Spy Little Wheels and One Little Duck on the front porch swing, Jabber and Dad were in the basement watching Justice League and standing on chairs (and falling off of the chairs when they got so excited about the episode of the Justice League, but I think that's actually one of those things I'm not supposed to know about).

As you may recall, Jabber managed to finagle himself a rather nice set of tools at a silent auction this past spring, so he was busily fixing things and making things right all over the basement. So the question came up whether, in the event that the Justice League (Superman and other heroes, I guess...I'm fuzzy on the details...and in fact asked, "Oh, who's that glowing guy? only to be met with a disdainful, "The Green Lantern. DUH.") should need Jabberwock's help to battle the ever-threatening "Bad Guys," would his Daddy allow him to use his tools to fight with them.

I'd like to think that if he asked this question of me, that I would discuss some things with him about how fighting isn't always the best solution, maybe discussed some of my ideas about diplomacy, or at least tried to get him to wait for a few years before allowing himself to get drafted by this strange Justice League of people in strange clothing and of questionable radioactive status.

But see, in the basement, the answer was just, "Oh, absolutely."