Gris's Journal

Book Thing

Well, as everyone else seems to be following the meme, here's my bid for becoming one with the bloggy consciousness. This list (which originally comes from CollegeBoard.com's 101 Great Books Recommended for H.S. Students & Readers of All Ages has been making the rounds of blogs (including my friend KT's, who got it from her friend, who got it from... well, you get the idea). It's not the best of lists, but it's not the worst of lists, either (thank you, author #21). The idea is to boldface or otherwise highlight everything one has read, so let's give this a shot...

The Book Thing List:

Beowulf (thrice in the original Anglo Saxon, and three translations)
Achebe, Chinua — Things Fall Apart
Agee, James — A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane — Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James — Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel — Waiting for Godot (...and still waiting...)
Bellow, Saul — The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily — Wuthering Heights (not that I remember much of it)
Camus, Albert — The Stranger (HATED this. HATED HATED HATED.)
Cather, Willa — Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey — The Canterbury Tales (In the original and in "translation")
Chekhov, Anton — The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate — The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph — Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore — The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen — The Red Badge of Courage
Dante — Inferno (The entire Commedia, actually)
de Cervantes, Miguel — Don Quixote (LONG. Good, but LONG.)
Defoe, Daniel — Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles — A Tale of Two Cities (Paid by the word, and it SHOWS)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor — Crime and Punishment (Started, but never finished it.)
Douglass, Frederick — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore — An American Tragedy (No, but I might, now... Sister Carrie was excellent)
Dumas, Alexandre — The Three Musketeers (And 20 Years After, and Man in the Iron Mask, and...)
Eliot, George — The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph — Invisible Man (Not to be confused with H.G. Wells' Invisible Man, which I did, but finished reading this one anyway ^_~)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo — Selected Essays (He should be required citizenship reading)
Faulkner, William — As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William — The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry — Tom Jones (read one volume of it, for a class)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott — The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave — Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox — The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von — Faust (Nope, read Marlowe's version)
Golding, William — Lord of the Flies (My advice, skip the book and watch Survivor instead. It's more realistic.)
Hardy, Thomas — Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel — The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph — Catch 22 (No, but it's on my List)
Hemingway, Ernest — A Farewell to Arms
Homer — The Iliad
Homer — The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor — The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale — Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous — Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik — A Doll's House
James, Henry — The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry — The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (No, but I read over 40 pages of Finnegan's Wake-- does that count?)
Kafka, Franz — The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong — The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper — To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair — Babbitt
London, Jack — The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas — The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García — One Hundred Years of Solitude (No, but this is on my reading stack at the moment)
Melville, Herman — Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman — Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur — The Crucible
Morrison, Toni — Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery — A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene — Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George — Animal Farm (George, you're too clever for yourself)
Pasternak, Boris — Doctor Zhivago (No, but I liked the movie music :D)
Plath, Sylvia — The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan — Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel — Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas — The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria — All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond — Cyrano de Bergerac (And I still start crying 30 pages from the end)
Roth, Henry — Call It Sleep (Who needs sleep?)
Salinger, J.D. — The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William — Hamlet
Shakespeare, William — Macbeth
Shakespeare, William — A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William — Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard — Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary — Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon — Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles — Antigone
Sophocles — Oedipus Rex (And why aren't all three of his Theban plays here, hm?)
Steinbeck, John — The Grapes of Wrath (great writer, but so bloody DEPRESSING!)
Stevenson, Robert Louis — Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher — Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan — Gulliver's Travels (It was a "selections from" version-- only some of the stories)
Thackeray, William — Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David — Walden (A 350 page SHOPPING LIST! No book has so made me want to Thoreau up.)
Tolstoy, Leo — War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan — Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire — Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. — Slaughterhouse-Five (on my List)
Walker, Alice — The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith — The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora — Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt — Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar — The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee — The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia — To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard — Native Son

Wow, an awful lot of the moderns in this list (mind you, I count "modern" as "anything after 1700"), awful lot of Dead White Males... and unless you count the Russians as "Asian" this list could stand some major globalization. Were it not for my Early American and Victorian Lit classes (required "balance" for my English major), I probably wouldn't have read a large number of these titles. (And, admittedly, would have missed out on some great literature as well as some things I would have been happy to miss.) On the other hand, I was a little surprised at how many of these I had read by the end of high school.

Really modern "art"

Jeremy, this one's all your fault.

Click on for my own attempt at a cut-and-paste Picasso from Mr. Picassohead. (Warning, it's in Flash, I believe, and seems to be a little browser-picky. Mozilla at work retched at it, but Mozilla at home is fine. IE worked, wonder of wonders.)

Aerobatics

Right. So, it all started when my parents signed up for a two-week trip to France.

They're going on an organ tour (that is, the musical instrument, not interior body parts), and were scheduled to fly from Newark to Detroit around 6pm Sunday evening (where they would meet up with the rest of the tour group) and continue on to Paris. (Yes, I know. If you look at a map, Newark to Detroit is the WRONG DIRECTION if you're trying to get to Paris. But this is airline physics.)

My part in all this was to deliver them to the airport about two hours before their flight, drop them off at the curb, and wave merrily goodbye, which I duly accomplished around 4pm without mishap. (Well, minor mishap. I missed my exit on the way back home and had to spend several minutes driving anxiously through the suburban wilds of New Jersey, but I found my way again soon enough.)

I got home, logged on, and pulled up the airline page a couple hours later just to double-check their flight had gotten off on time.

(You know what happens next. If it had, this wouldn't be worthy of a blog entry, now would it?)

It hadn't.

At about 6:30, the site informed me, their plane had taxied away from the gate, but had not yet taken off. At about 8:30 (an hour before they were originally due to connect with their outbound flight in Detroit), they were listed as weather-delayed. Checked the weather-- nothing in Newark. Rain in Detroit. Well, alright, perhaps they were circling Detroit....

At about 9, Dad called.

It *wasn't* just rain in Detroit. It was rain-and-heavy-thunderstorms-and-nasty-wind-shear, and while their Paris flight somehow got *out*, none of the other flights were getting *in,* and Mom and Dad's flight had been cancelled. The "lucky" part was that the other half of the tour group also got their flight cancelled.

The "unlucky" part, of course, was that they were NOT on their way to France, and needed me to come pick them (and an emergency houseguest, another of their stranded tour group) up in the Land Whale (i.e., minivan) and bring them back home so they could get some rest and try again tomorrow.

And, of course, I was working today-- no home limo service from me today. Their flight today was scheduled for 6, they intended to drive down to the commuter lot and take the airport shuttle (which is kind of pricey and slow, and thus not their first choice).

At 11, my mother called. "The tour leader found a more direct flight than the one the airline arranged for us, but I only know the airline it's on. Can you find it for me?" A reference librarian's job is never done. (And yes.)

At 11:45, my mother called again. "The airline can arrange the switch once we're at the airport, but they won't do it over the phone. We may or may not be able to get our flight. Call you later and let you know!"

Sigh.

So I spent the rest of my day waiting for a message from my mom, which never came. When I got home, the answering machine was blinking. "Hi, we're calling from the plane. We're on the right flight, but it's a little delayed. Please don't forget to go pick up the car!"

So they're on their way, at last. They'll arrive around 7:30 am Paris time (2:30 am our time-- poor Dad) and start their tour, having missed the first two days.

Tomorrow, I get to hitch a ride at 8:30am to go get their car.

Sigh.

And oh yeah... and the second time I was driving back from the airport, with guest and parents in tow? I missed my exit *again.* >_<