If you haven't checked your calendars yet...

Today is July 1st.

That means it is exactly TWO WEEKS until

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

opens at a theater near you! (Well, a theater near you if you are in America, at least - not sure about the international release dates.)

You can bet your sweet bippy I'm going to be parked in a comfy, reclining seat with a big ole bag of popcorn on my lap, gazing in wonder at the most recently filmed scenes of Harry and Co. on the 15th. I am also fairly certain I'll be crying at certain points, after all I did sob rather heavily at certain points in the book...

I'll be going with my BFF, with whom I've seen every other HP movie so far (and every one on its opening day except for Chamber of Secrets, which opened while Hubby and I were in L.A. for me to tape my big Jeopardy! appearance, so he and I saw it opening day out there and then I saw it with her again when we got home) and with whom I waited up until midnight at Barnes & Noble back when Deathly Hallows came out.......




Oh yeah, I'm way, way excited. Aren't you?

An awesome bedtime story

A most awesome bedtime story reading occurred in Kiddo's room a little while ago. This was the book read:



It was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, but that's not why it made for such an awesome bedtime story. Neither was the fact that the book's subject was snow when, in fact, it was warm enough outside today to melt all but the most stubborn remnants of our snowpack, and even a good portion of the ice on the pond. Nope, the thing that made tonight's awesome bedtime story so dang awesome was the reader. It wasn't me, it wasn't Hubby, it was Kiddo.

Yep. Kiddo read me the book. (Well, technically, she was reading it to Ectobert and Cloudy, the two members of her SAE - that'd be the Stuffed Animal Entourage - who chose tonight's selection. I mean, she read it to "all the guys" and Mommy, too, but it was for Ectobert and Cloudy. Daddy heard it from the hall outside her room where he was busily painting, too.) She read all 60-something pages of it, with only two words hanging her up (one was know as she didn't know about the whole silent K thing, and the other was another - I totally thought appetite would trip her up but nope, she sounded that one right out). She really, truly read the book.

It was awesome. Best. Storytime. Ever!!

Stuff

I have too much stuff. Physically (hello, cellulite!), mentally (hello, thoughts that won't stop running through my head at night) and especially around me. Confession time: I'm a pack rat. Well, not in the negative sense of the word - I don't hoard old newspapers and magazines and things that out to long since have been thrown away for decades so that one day I'm discovered like this person was... I do, however, have a highly sensitive sense of nostalgia, which leads me to hold on to certain stuff.

Stuff has been on my mind lately, so much so that I'm not even sleeping soundly. You see, my days are now consumed by stuff, because we're in the midst of step one of selling our house and moving: decluttering. (Funny how Blogger doesn't recognize "declutter" as a word, because my own brain has issues with it as well!)

Over the weekend, we rented a storage unit up the road and began the process of decluttering our house. We've lived in this house for nine years now, and let me tell you, that is plenty of time for a sentimental sort like myself to amass a lot of stuff. Heaps of it. Stuff crammed onto bookshelves (and let's not forget all the books themselves, either, as Hubby and I both are Bookworms Extraordinaire and Kiddo is quite a bookworm as well), stuff squeezed into drawers, stuff jammed into cabinets, under beds and on top of other stuff. Now, with the decluttering? It is so not pretty.

Hubby and I used to be quite good at moving. Back in the early days of Hubby-n-me, we moved a lot - between 1994 and 2000, we moved six times, winding up here in our first owned home in January of 2000. During that period, there wasn't much chance to accumulate stuff, and our belongings were regularly purged as well, the better to fit our stuff into the back of first our Festiva, then our Tercel, along with the smallest U-Haul we could get away with for maximum affordability. We'd donate books to the local Friends of the Library, drop boxes of clothes and linens off at Goodwill, etc. We were lean and mean and had room to spare in our bookcases, hutches, cabinets and drawers.

Well, now we've had nine years in one place (with a lovely, large basement) in which to collect stuff. Also, five years ago we added Kiddo to the mix, and Sweet Godmother of Wilma Flintstone (™ Anna Lefler), did the stuff just exponentially explode! Let's face it, when one has a child in one's home, the stuff starts flowing in pretty much at birth (bottles, onesies, burp cloths, diapers, diaper accoutrements, rattles, teething toys, binkies, et cetera et cetera et cetera....)


Oh sorry, got carried away on a wave of musical nostalgia there. I'm back now. Shall we dance? No, no, back to the topic at hand.... Stuff. So, there's baby stuff that takes over your entire world. Then, as the baby grows into a child, not only do the number of toys and books and clothing and shoes and mittens and hats and DVDs and stuffed animals grow as well, but so does the art work. Dear me, the art work. The precious scribblings that eventually mature into actual pictures that resemble actual things and people (well, assuming said people have gigantic heads from which their arms protrude and no bodies beyond legs that may or may not include feet)... then they start school and the art projects become multi-dimensional and take up even more space... and then there are the photographs. Oh, the photographs. Now, Kiddo is an only child. Lucky for us, in this regard, as I have, and I am only ever-so-slightly exaggerating here, ninety thousand framed photographs of her hanging on our walls and displayed on shelves and end tables and the piano and, heck, on any mostly-flat surface in my house. (I also have several nieces and nephews, so there are actually additional kiddos who occupy frame space too.) I mean, I had lots of photos in frames before I became a mom; pictures of Hubby and me, our family and friends, even beloved pets... but since Kiddo was born? Egads.

And now, all the stuff? It must go. Tucked into boxes, hauled off to the storage unit, never to see the light of day again until the summer (or late spring, if we're really lucky). Oh, the agony. The good news is that Hubby is not nearly as much of a stuff aficionado as I am, so we aren't hopelessly mired in things. He also is much more likely to get rid of something, to just throw it straight out into the garbage without a second thought, than I. (I must steel myself against looking into the bag after bag after bag he carries out to the garbage bin in the garage. I will confess, in previous moves, I've been known to Dumpster Dive in my own home to rescue some picture or memento or another from the trash.) It is true, most of the stuff Hubby tosses out is stuff I never miss, stuff I haven't thought of in years, but that doesn't mean he's right, right? And you never know when you might need one of those things........

Beyond the hassle of actually boxing stuff up (and the aches of actually loading and unloading it thereafter) is the time-suck involved. Again, this is an area where Hubby does a better, speedier and more efficient job than I. I spent a good hour yesterday thumbing through a pile of random, old things that I'd managed to save for decades now (and which had been living on the topmost shelf of the bookcase that stood in our bedroom for the past nine years, but now is off in the storage unit, leaving a weirdly blank wall in its place). Case in point, this photo, which is a Polaroid (I don't think they're even making Polaroid film any more...) of me surrounded by my sisters, brothers and one of my best friends, taken sometime during the winter of my senior year of high school (oh, and while I'm on the subject of stuff, the dresser you can partially see on the right hand side of the picture? Hubby and I just moved that out of our basement and off to the storage unit yesterday...):
or this newspaper clipping also from my senior year of high school (note: it was January. I was wearing white pants. WHITE PANTS. Granted, they had a black pinstripe, but seriously? White? In January? I don't know that I can even use "it was the 80s!" as an excuse there... I mean, yes, we hadn't been told our picture was going to be taken for the paper that day, but still, I chose to wear white pants in January of my own free will and thought I looked good that way. WTH was I thinking?) (I wish that I could say those white pants were the worst of my youthful fashion transgressions - other than the hair, of course - but alas, I am having horrific flashbacks right now to a different pair of pants. A pair of cream colored, corduroy, jodhpur-style pants. That I wore with knee-high, high heeled, black leather "riding" boots. Thinking I looked good, hip and fashionable. Oh Sweet Godmother of Wilma Flintstone. Why am I even considering going to my upcoming 20th reunion?!) (also note: I blacked out the names of the other kids in the photo here because they may not be so keen on having ancient pictures of themselves bandied about the interwebz):

or this picture, which my youngest brother (then 6 years old) drew for me to hang up in my dorm room my freshman year of college (he and I share a common love of Garfield, which Kiddo now has developed herself):

Yep, I've saved them all for decades. How could I throw them out now? I couldn't, so into a box and off to storage they went yesterday, along with two mismatched socks that Kiddo wore when she was first born, that are so insanely tiny that I can't believe a human being could ever really be small enough to wear them. Kiddo didn't believe it either, when I showed them to her before tucking them into the box. And to think that even though they were "preemie" sized, they still were so large on her that the heel part went halfway up her leg... *sigh* Whoops, sorry, carried away by nostalgia again, my bad.

Other stuff, I am trying really hard to get rid of, though. (Beyond the cellulite - though I must tell you about the Zumba class I did for the first time last Friday morning. That's another post though.) Stuff like old Christmas cards. I never throw away Christmas cards, or at least, not easily. The record for oldest card I came across during this weekend's decluttering? 1991. In my defense, it was a photo card... I also have wedding cards (hello, 1995), congratulatory cards from Kiddo's birth and subsequent baby showers (by being born 5.5 weeks early as she was, she managed to be a guest at all of her baby showers), her baptism, Mother's Day cards (okay, at least those only go back to 2003), anniversary cards, etc. I found in one stash a few cards and notes that Hubby gave me back when we were first dating. Awwwwwwww. I showed a few of them to Hubby when he came upstairs to check on my progress - or more accurately, as he suspected, lack thereof, and he just rolled his eyes. Romance and nostalgia really are the stuff-keeping enemies of Operation Declutter.

So, in closing, 2009 is turning out to be the Year of the Great Decluttering here in Heather's world. Just promise you won't laugh if you spot me rooting through the trash bags to reclaim some of my stuff, or sneaking off to the storage unit to visit my stuff in the months to come, mmmkay? As you can see from what I've already shared above, if I've known you (IRL) for any length of time, the odds are quite good that I still have photos you might not want me to make public...!

What about you guys? Is anyone else a victim of nostalgia and sentimentality like I am? Any other pack rats (no pejorative connotation intended) besides me? What do you do with old cards and letters? Should I try to sell some of the more valuable stuff on Craiglist or Ebay, or just go ahead and freecycle it all like Hubby wants to get rid of it faster? Anyone want to buy a ladies' Movado Museum watch, never worn, new in box? (I would've worn it but the dang strap is too delicate and short for my ginormous man-hand wrist.) What was your worst teenage fashion mistake, and would you care to share a photo of it with the blogosphere? *grin*

Saturday stuff, including the giveaway winner!

First things first, the giveaway winner! I found that random number generator thingamabob and duly entered the numbers in, and it told me the lucky winner is:


Number 7 would be Annikke, who has a blog called Mom is in the Fishbowl that is very cute and fun to read (although Kiddo thought it was about Nemo based on her header). Congratulations, Annikke! I hope you and your family enjoy the Jazzy Fairy Tales CD! For those of you who didn't win, the Jazz For Young Children website has a shop with all their offerings, so I strongly encourage you to check them out for the kids on your holiday shopping list! It's a great, unique gift idea that helps introduce kids to some new genres of music in a fun and entertaining way. My daughter is positively hooked!

Oh, and another quick Kiddo-school update: the woman who was my top choice has accepted the position as Kiddo's sensory diet aide and begins on Wednesday. WOO-HOOOOOO!!!! I'm so hopeful that she will be a great match and will do an excellent job with everything! She is a grad student with an ultimate goal of becoming an elementary school psychologist, and while she makes me feel quite old in comparison (how can a grad student look so young?!?), she seemed to be kind, smart, energetic and quick on the uptake, all good things for working with Kiddo. She said she is familiar with SPD and also took the handout I'd prepared for the school about SPD (specifically, Kiddo's subtype thereof) so that should help her hit the ground running, at least in terms of the "whys" even if she needs to be trained from scratch in the "hows" of the sensory diet. I am feeling more confident about this young woman than I have about any of the folks I've met thus far who have been in the position. Fingers crossed that it all goes well from now until June!!

In other business, my Down-Under friend Givinya De Elba did a meme and threw it out there for anyone who chooses, so I'm choosing! I actually had chosen to do this yesterday, then we had a power outage or surge or something that knocked the computer and cable out for just long enough for this to disappear, but I'm redoing it because it was fun! I also am rolling an emailed meme into this one as they had some overlapping questions but also some unique ones. Here goes the combomeme!

Ten Years Ago I:

* was working in a job that I loved at a non-profit agency with a great team of coworkers, a fantastic boss and hardly any pay.
* last went on a European vacation - Hubby and I spent the first half of our trip driving around the UK in a rental car (and out of that period, I drove for approximately 20 minutes, being utterly unable to get the hang of the whole "wrong side of the road" thing - I kept fouling up the turns especially and was utterly confounded by the one roundabout I encountered while behind the wheel) and the second half in London, where we crashed on a friend's pull-out couch and did all the touristy stuff, like the Changing of the Guard and visiting the Tower of London. All stuff I'd done on previous trips but still quite enjoyable to do again, especially as it was just me and Hubby and not me as a teenager jammed into the back seat of a two-door car with my two younger sisters and all of our assorted luggage like it was the previous time I did the "driving around the UK" trip.
* got a royal flush while playing poker at the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas.
* met my BFF (not counting Hubby, of course) while taking a creative writing course.
* saw The Lion King on Broadway and was totally blown away.

Five Years Ago I:

* became a mother.
* stopped working a paying job for the first time since I was 19 years old.
* went on my last childless vacation, which ended abruptly when Kiddo was born a little over five weeks early.
* appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy!.
* wrote my first will.

Five Things on Tomorrow's To-Do List:

* take Kiddo to a playdate after church while Hubby goes on a "playdate" of his own - he's been invited to a card game and I believe there is also some football watching involved...
* finish the ambitious closet purge I began a couple of weeks ago and managed to abandon about a third of the way through.
* put away all the laundry I did yesterday, that is now towering in a clean and folded mountain atop my dresser and/or in laundry baskets waiting to go into Kiddo's room.
* sort through massive piles of paperwork that I keep shifting from one spot to another without actually ever quite sorting through.
* finish the Christmas gifts I'm working on for the grandparents.

Five Snacks I Enjoy:

* popcorn (preferably air-popped, with butter and salt)
* pretzels
* fresh fruit - in the summer, nothing beats berries of any sort. In the fall, apples - espcially Jonagolds which are my favorite. This time of year, I will eat Clementine oranges until I am literally sick to my stomach. Oh, how I love Clementines!
* Cheez Doodles (puffed, not "crunchy" or "crispy" or whatever that other kind is called)
* chocolate (pretty much in any way, shape or form)

Five Things I Would Do if I Were a Millionaire (I'm going to assume by this that I have millionS - plural, I mean, if I'm going to dream, might as well dream big, eh?):

* Ensure that Kiddo's educational fund is sufficiently large.
* Buy a new house, that has a playroom/rec room for all Kiddo's stuff so we can have a coffee table instead of a mini-trampoline in the living room, for example, and my picture display table instead of her ginormous easel, that sort of thing. Basically, a room so that my living room is no longer decorated in "Fisher Price" or "Little Tykes" with accents of "Disney Princess" and "Dinosaurs-n-Safari Animals" too. Also big enough so that we have a separate home office and guest room, so there's no need to snake your way carefully through all the computer equipment to get to sleep if you are visiting us...
* Ensure that our parents are able to retire comfortably.
* Support the charities and foundations I care about.
* Share the wealth with my siblings to help my nieces' and nephews' educational funds, etc.

Five Places I Have Lived:

* Branchburg, New Jersey
* Lakewood, New York
* Lebanon, New Hampshire
* Zoagli, Italy
* Biddeford Pool, Maine

Five Jobs I've Had:

* Production Office Manager for a video/tv/film production company
* Nanny
* Secretary/Administrative Assistant
* Clerk in the gourmet foods section of a grocery store
* Job Developer for a supported employment program

Five Places I've Never Been That I'd Like to Visit Someday:

* Hawaii
* Australia
* Scandinavia
* Africa
* Greece

Five of my Favorite Holiday Songs:

* O Holy Night (especially the version done by the Oak Ridge Boys)
* Silent Night (again, love the Oak Ridge Boys version, complete with the reading of the Christmas story from Luke - one of my favorite readings from the Bible)
* The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) (nobody does this better than the Velvet Fog himself, Mel Torme)
* Have Yourself a Merry, Little Christmas (Ella Fitzgerald does an amazing rendition of this, and Judy Garland's version is pretty dang amazing too)
* Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season (done by none other than Andy Williams - any other version just sounds wrong somehow!)

Five Books I've Read Over and Over Again:

* A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
* The Autobiography of King Henry VIII by Margaret George
* the entire Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
* Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
* The Bible

Ten Movies I'll Watch Over and Over Again (not sure why this one is 10 and not 5 but I'll take it!):

* The Princess Bride
* The Sting
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
* Goodfellas
* Braveheart
* Out of Africa
* Sense and Sensibility (the Emma Thompson version)
* Truly, Madly, Deeply
* any of the Monty Python movies but especially Holy Grail and Life of Brian
* since this is the holiday season, I'll give a shout-out to A Christmas Story

Anyone else want to give this one a shot? Consider yourselves tagged! I shall leave you with a little snippet of one of my top ten movies, then I'm off to eat some of the turkey and rice soup Hubby has been making today with some of the leftovers from our Thanksgiving turkey - it was 16 pounds which is a lot for three people (well two and a half as Kiddo doesn't eat much turkey) so we had a lot of leftovers to freeze and use later! The soup smells soooo delicious that it has had my stomach rumbling all afternoon. Not even four Clementines have taken the edge off - my belly wants SOUP!

Book recommendation

Our public library does a reader review thing, where they paste a sheet of paper inside the back cover of a book for readers to rate and comment on the book when they've finished it. From time to time, I will check out a book solely based on the ratings and comments. Usually, I tend to agree with the majority opinion - I only will select a "random" book if the rating average is at least a 7. The book I just read this afternoon was one of these selections. However, this was the first time I'd flipped a book open to the reader review page and seen such unanimously high marks given. Twelve of the thirteen spots for reviews were completed, and the lowest rating given, on a scale of 1-10, was a 10. Most of the reviews were a 10++ or higher (there was a 10++++++ at the upper end) and the comments were all similarly raves. How could I not give the book a try?

So, I read it today and am pleased to report that it lived up to the buzz from the back cover reviewers. It is a novel, not really traditional "chick lit" and not romance and not mystery, just a good, old fashioned story. I love discovering new-to-me authors and plan to check out more of her books (she's written several others) when I head to the library tomorrow to return this week's stack.

The book, which I'll gladly recommend to you now (as I know you're all dying of suspense, right?) is The Queen of the Big Time by Adriana Trigiani. If you're looking for a good weekend read or a waiting-in-the-carpool-lane/at-football-or-hockey-practice read, this would be an excellent choice! If you do read it, let me know what you think of it. In the meantime, I'm about to fill in that last reviewer's spot inside the back of the book with my verdict.

The Big Read

My friend Alex posted about The Big Read from the NEA over on her blog. Purportedly, the NEA has come up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. The object of this meme is to highlight the ones you've read and share the list on your blog. Well, I consider myself to be a fairly well-read person, what with being a bookworm and majoring in English and Textual Studies back in college and all, so I wanted to give this a shot. Here goes - the ones I've read are bolded:

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 Faulks

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

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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-time - 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 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

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

Well, I've read 51 out of the 100 books on this particular meme list, if you count the entire Harry Potter collection as one book. Also, I'd quibble about including "the Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as one book. I love Shakespeare and have read several of his plays, possibly even most of them. And why does Hamlet count separately? As Alex said over on her blog, I am a bit confused. So confused, in fact, that I googled the NEA's Big Read and nowhere on their site did I find this exact list, which is widely circulating on the blogosphere as it turns out. (Thanks, Google!) I wonder where this list originated, then....?

Anyhow, on the NEA's site, I did find the list of books in their Big Read initiative so far. They include (and I've bolded the ones I've read from these, as well) The NEA will be adding more books to their list in upcoming weeks, too:

Bless Me, Ultima- Rudolfo Anaya
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
My Antonia - Willa Cather
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Washington Square - Henry James
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula LeGuin
The Thief and the Dogs - Naguib Mahfouz
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Old School - Tobias Wolff

Well, I'm 8 for 18 on that list as it stands so far. Still better than the "average adult" who has supposedly only read six of the books above, I suppose.

It seems to me that someone, somewhere, has come up with a list or adapted a list (perhaps from the BBC's Big Read list from 2003?) to use in this post/meme, but it makes the fact that the list is confusing make a little more sense, if you get what I mean. I certainly could think of many more books that would be deemed worthy of appearing on any such list, you know?

Ah, the blogosphere - someone posts something and it just spreads like wildfire, accurate or not. Perhaps Snopes will debunk it sometime soon.......

Bookworm

I am, and have always been, a bookworm. Back in the days of more unfettered discretionary income, I loved nothing more than browsing the shelves at the bookstore, and I vastly preferred to spend said discretionary income at B&N instead of on, say, clothes, shoes or handbags. (What's wrong with me? Books instead of shoes? What kind of female am I? I know, I know, I'm a big word nerd, what can I say?)

Once I stopped working to be home with the kiddo, there was no more such thing as "unfettered discretionary income" so I dug out my sadly neglected library card and became a library junkie once more. I got my first library card when I was in kindergarten, which was a banner day in my childhood. I'm such a bookworm that I actually made a deal with our elementary school librarian to allow me to check out MORE than the maximum number of books allowed to students per 2 week period; I'd fill my backpack with as many books as it could hold and devour them in short order, always returning them on time - they didn't have a chance to become overdue when I was through with them and on to the next pile of books.

As a kid, I read through entire sections of the library, semi-systematically working my way through the Dewey Decimal System. The 900s were my favorite through elementary and middle school. I adored reading biographies of anyone and everyone. There was this series in our elementary school library of biographies of famous Americans, and inside the front and back cover were these illustrations of various milestones in the featured person's life, in chronological order. I'd memorize those pages and then mark my progress as I reached each part of the book that matched one of those illustrations. It never bothered me to know what was coming before I got there - I've always been a fan of spoilers, I guess! They never really spoil the experience for me. The 300s were good, too, as were the 700s.

In my later years, I've stuck mainly to fiction. I read a lot of chick lit, historical fiction, mystery and suspense, and whatever one might consider Stephen King these days - not quite horror anymore, is it? (I may've mentioned this before, but in case I haven't: No book has ever scared me more than Stephen King's It. I read it the year it came out, borrowed in hardcover from a friend, and was convinced for weeks afterward that I'd hear voices coming up out of the sink in my bathroom, which was at the very back of the house. So, as a teenage girl, I gladly gave up the use of my very own bathroom in favor of the heavier traveled bathroom in the front of the house that was shared by both of my sisters or my parents' master bath. Eventually I convinced myself it was safe to go back into my own bathroom alone, but even to this day, I wouldn't be surprised to hear something sinister burbling up through those back pipes...) I do read some nonfiction, too, if a subject or title catches my eye. I generally check out fewer books now than I did as a child, reading an average of just four to six in a two week period. Something about having a kid in the house seems to eat up many of the hours I once spent buried in a book...

I also developed a bit of an obsession with reading reference books as a kid. From the dictionary to the encyclopedias, I was endlessly fascinated with learning new things. (This has likely contributed to my sometimes awe-inspiring ability to answer trivia game questions, not to mention going on Jeopardy. Of course, having an insanely sharp long-term memory helps in this regard as well.) This obsession hasn't waned in my older age, either. When I was studying for my Jeopardy appearance, I gleefully purchased the latest edition of the World Almanac, and I've been known to drive Hubby crazy by reading the atlas during long car trips. As it turns out, he isn't nearly as excited as I am to learn the highest elevation of a particular state or that state's motto or largest lake... Most recently, I've been driving him nuts with our newly acquired Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I've had to give up keeping it on my nightstand for bedtime reading for fear of being kicked out to the guest room. Humph.

I love to discover new authors. Well, not new as in brand new, but new to me. My most recent discovery is Kristin Hannah. I came across one of her books on the new release shelf, checked it out and read it in a matter of a few hours. I felt that thrill I always do when I turned to the page listing other works by the same author and realized she's written several other books. I've been bingeing on her books for over a month now, and have worked my way through her catalog. She's not quite "chick lit" but isn't heavy reading either. I think I've cried at least once reading every one of her books. She's like Danielle Steel used to be back in the 80s (um, that is meant as a compliment - I used to love Danielle Steel back before her plots became entirely predictable and the characters were always the same). I've also recently discovered Jodi Picoult (I know, she's written a zillion books, but somehow I never read her until this past fall) and I've been catching up on the backlog of other authors I've read in the past, like Tami Hoag, Jonathan Kellerman and Catherine Coulter as well.

Once I "discover" a new-to-me author, I stay with them, making a point of reading their latest book as soon as it comes out. Well, as soon as it comes out and my turn comes up on the library hold request list - it took me over two months before my number was up for Jennifer Weiner's Certain Girls. I fear I will be old and gray before I get my turn with Jeff Alexander's new book, A TV Guide to Life. It's times like these, when I'm impatiently checking the library's website several times a day to check the status of my place on the holds list as it much-too-slowly creeps towards #1, that I long for the days of unfettered discretionary income... I can just see it now, though: "Sorry, kiddo, there won't be any college for you. You see, Mommy is a book junkie and spent what was supposed to go into your 529 plan on books........" I am planning to return to the world of Working Outside the Home in the fall when the kiddo starts kindergarten (unless Ed McMahon drops by with an oversized check full of zeroes, and I hear he's been having some financial issues of his own lately...), so perhaps then I'll feel more comfortable with spending money on new books instead of spending patience at the library waiting for a hold to come in for me.

Speaking of the kiddo, she is completely turning into Bookworm, the Next Generation. Shortly after her fifth birthday last month, we went to the public library, where she marched up to the librarian and requested her very own card. She'd been counting down for over a year now, asking me each time we visited the library if she could get her own card yet, so she knew that as soon as she was five, she could have her own card. Now she does, in a green, leather pouch that she carried around for days (I also have the keytag version of her card on my keychain, just in case that card ever gets lost amidst the stuff in her room), and she's already checked out several books and even placed her first hold request (for a Disney Princess story collection, of course). I couldn't be more proud! Hubby and I are both thrilled that she has already developed a fierce passion for books, even if she's at the beginning stages of actually reading on her own yet.

So, tell me - what are your favorite genres? Who are your favorite authors? I'm always looking for tips and suggestions! Please leave a comment and share!

*yawwwwn* the perils of being a bookworm

I did it again last night. I stayed up much later than I should've in order to finish the book I was reading. Last night's book of choice was Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Certain Girls. I had been waiting rather impatiently since April for my turn on the library's hold list and once I had the book in my hot little hands, I had to read it as fast as possible. Well, that tends to be true for just about any book I'm enjoying...

I've been a bookworm since I first began reading as a preschooler. In my childhood, I spent many a night bargaining to be allowed to stay up late enough to read "just one more chapter" and then reading way more than just one. I cannot tell you how many mornings over my lifetime I've been yawning and bleary-eyed because I didn't get enough sleep thanks to a book. Today is no exception - I wound up getting a little over four hours of sleep last night and now I'm drinking soda at 6:30am to try and wake the heck up. (Yeah, I know - soda first thing in the morning? Ew! I don't drink coffee, however, so soda is the caffeinating beverage of choice for me when necessary!) Not to mention the times when the book I was reading was Nancy Drew or, later on, Stephen King and I'd wind up sleeping not only less, but fitfully thanks to nightmares from the book I'd been reading! When I'd borrowed It from a friend who was a huge King fan, it scared me so much that I wouldn't sleep with the book in my room. I'd read and read and read, then when I couldn't stay awake a moment longer, I'd get up, creep to the other side of the house and leave the book in the guest room closest to my parents' bedroom. Somehow that was supposed to keep me safe, ya know...

I still bargain to read "just one more chapter" these days, but now instead of bargaining with my parents, it is with myself, or Hubby if I'm reading in bed after he's gone to sleep. I'll tell myself "okay, just to the end of this next section to find out what happens." Then I'll get there and want to know what happens next, so it's "one more chapter, that's IT!" Then I'll realize that I'm within 100 pages of the end of the book, and that's when I'm sunk - I can read 100 pages in under an hour unless I'm reallllllly tired, so if I see that I'm that close to the end, I will invariably stay up to finish. This was bad enough when it meant yawning my way through a day of school, but now I'm just getting too darn old to handle such late nights with any regularity. You'd think I would've learned by now to just put the book down, you know? I'm hopeless!

So, if you happen to catch me yawning hugely or looking half-dead on any given day, chances are that it is because I was burning the midnight oil with my nose stuck in a book.