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1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
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 (I read the first one, does that count?)
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
(more…)

Eddie’s birthday went ok. I wasn’t able to buy him anything before the party becuse the last thing that I want to do on the way home from work is stop and try to figure out just what the hell to get him, so he’s gotten nothing from me except a claddagh ring at the 2nd flea market we visited.

We did manage to score some great books at both flea markets. I’m kicking myself for not grabbing a copy of some old hardcover called The Modern Sex Handbook (or Modern Handbook of Sex, I can’t remember which it was), but I did score a 1936 copy of Gone with the Wind, a 1960’s illustrated sexual encyclopedia that describes lesbians as having a psychological imbalance and female arrousal as “voluptuousness”, and a 1934 almanac put out by Dr. Miles Medical Company that consisted of calendars, planting suggestions for every part of the year, and an equal part of advertisements for Nervine. Eddie found a tiny little memoir of Elizabeth Fry that looked interesting, and snagged a collection of Ian Flemming’s James Bond series for $5. Someday I’ll get around to posting pictures and a list of all these fun antique books we’ve been buying up.

Santa brought me a pony after 25 years of asking for one. He brought 3 of them actually. I got a 3-pack of re-released original My Little Ponies, which are now safely set up on the bookshelf where the ferret can’t steal them. Chaucer got me a copy of Die Hard 2 to go with the original that Eddie had bought a couple of weeks ago, and I got The Pillars of the Earth from Pickle. Eddie got me some toys, the King’s Quest Collection, and a copy of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (terrifically funny from what I’ve read so far), some Hello Kitty notepaper, and I got a bunch of clothes from other folks.

Everyone liked the snowflakes and angels that I’d crocheted, and breakfast at Dad’s was painless. The animals enjoyed their toys; Pickle has already hidden one of the jingly balls Eddie got her, and Chaucer spent about 5 minutes licking the catnip mouse he was given.

I got thoroughly sunburnt during the ferry trip to scatter Nanny’s ashes. You’d think that under the circumstances I’d be more careful considering that she did die of cancer and all, but I had other things on my mind, such as, “this box of Nanny is much heavier than I expected,” and “I shouldn’t have stood downwind,” and “oh my god I think I just inhaled her!”

My family has started going through Nanny’s things. It’s sad and fantastic all at once, like opening a big, tragic treasure chest. I found a cookie tin filled with letters that my great-grandfather got from his family while he was in France and Germany during World War I, and my mother found a box of letters that my Uncle Rick wrote home during his boot camp on Parris Island. We found my grandmother’s baby book, first communion and confirmation certificates, pictures of relatives and people we don’t know, unsent greeting cards, and boxes upon boxes of general household records such as what bills were paid and who was getting Christmas cards that year. One of the books we found was The Farm and Household Cyclopaedia (ca. 1888) - with 249 illustrations - which is pretty fun to read and see what fun household hints they used back then. I’ll try to find some good passages to post later.