Sucker for Book Lists

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Bonnie of Bonnie's Books posted a list from The Magic Lasso's blog listing Entertainment Weekly's The New Classics: The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008. I couldn't resist italicizing the ones that I'd read. 23 I think. I've rated them with stars, though one star does not mean bad, just not excellent. At the time of completion I might have rated some higher; these stars are after sometimes considerably elapsed time. TBR means on my 'to be read' list.

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)****
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000) **
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001) **
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)****
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)****
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)***
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)****
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)*****
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)*
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004) Did not finish
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)**
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)**
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)****
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)**
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)****
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998) TBR
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001) Husband loved it
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987) didn't like
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993) TBR
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)*
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)*****
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)****
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)****
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)***
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998) I should read, but've seen the movie
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995) I should read, but've seen the movie
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)*
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)* didn't like
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)* didn't like that much
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

The Time Traveler's Wife should definitely be on this list, as should The Firm, and surely something by Anne Tyler.

Garden Tour May 2008

Please come visit my garden tour on Flickr. Click here.

Notes and Quotes and Wisdom from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

p. 27 (an image drawn for the author of what she should look like by a yoga master)
Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart..."To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way you will know God."


p. 29 ...and prayer? The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught.


p. 104 (The author and a friend in Italy were discussing the theory that every place had a single word to describe it.)

Giulio asked, "What's the word in New York City?"
I thought about this for a moment, then decided. "It's a verb, of course, I think it's ACHIEVE."
(Which is subtly but significantly different from the word in Los Angeles, I believe, which is also a verb: SUCCEED. Later I will share this whole theory with my Swedish friend Sofie, and she will offer her opinion that the word on the streets of Stockholm is CONFORM, which depresses both of us.)
I asked Giulio, "What's the word in Naples?" He knows the south of Italy well.
"FIGHT," he decides, "What was the word in your family when you were growing up?"
That one was difficult. I was trying to think of a single word that somehow combines both FRUGAL and IRREVERENT. But Giulio was already on to the next and most obvious question: "What's your word?"
Now that, I definitely could not answer.
And still, after weeks of thinking about it, I can't answer it any better now. I know some words that it definitely isn't. It's now MARRIAGE, that's evident. It's now FAMILY (though this was the word of the town I'd lived in for a few years with my husband, and since I did not fit with that word, this was a big cause of my suffering.) It's not DEPRESSION anymore, thank heavens. I'm not concerned that I share Stockholm's word of CONFORM. But I don't feel that I'm entirely inhabiting New York City's ACHIEVE anymore, either, though that had indeed been my word all throughout my twenties. My word might be SEEK. (Then again, let's be honest--it might just as easily be HIDE.) Over the last months in Italy my word has largely been PLEASURE, but that word doesn't match every single part of me, or I wouldn't be so eager to get myself to India. My word might be DEVOTION, though this makes me sound like more a goody-goody than I am and doesn't take into account how much wine I've been drinking.
I don't know the answer, and I suppose that's what this year of journeying is all about. Finding my word.


p. 120 (a chant for meditation) Om. Na. Mah. Shi. Va. Ya. Om Namah Shivayah. I honor the divinity that resides within me.

p. 121 "Why do we practice yoga?" he asked again. "Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?"
Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as "union." It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means "to yoke," to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-;ole discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union...The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, "Wow...my hip really aches."

p. 124 Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga.

p. 206 Sean, my Yogic Irish dairy farmer, explained it ot me this way. "Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine," he said. "You want to stay near the core of the thing--right in the hub of the wheel--not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness--that's your heart. That's where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace."

p. 286 At one time in history, if a man had been my suitor, my father might have sat that man down with a long list of questions to establish whether this would be an appropriate match. He would have wanted to know, "How will you provide for my daughter? What is your reputation in this community? How is your health? Where will you take her to live? What are your debts and assets? What are the strengths of your character? My father would not have just given me away in marriage to anybody for the mere fact that I was in love with the fellow. But in modern life, when I made the decision to marry, my modern father didn't become involved at all. He would have no more interfered with that decision than he would have told me how to style my hair.
I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian. Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too. And this is why I sent myself to bed that night alone. Because I felt it was too soon for me to be receiving a gentleman suitor.


p. 124 The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicated w hether a sould has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:

1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.
2. To have been born with--or to have developed--a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
3. To have found a living spiritual master.


p. 124 "Take seriously. Make punctual. Be cool and easy. Remember--everything you do, you do for God. And everything God does, He do for you."

Sunbeans

A simple thing to scratch the earth;

to plant a seed and wait for birth.

A tender, tiny, spindly shoot.

I blink an eye, it swells in girth.

Beneath in dark it drives a root.

A tiny thread, a tendril foot.

And mouth and throat to sip and screen;

weak as a web, strong as a boot.

Its head like wings with eyes unseen.

The face turns skyward, blushes green.

The sunshine magic now ensues.

Rays of star change into bean.

Rains fall soft, the day glows blue.

The wonder grows; at last comes due.

And time again for seeds and fruit.

And time again for seeds and truth.

Food for Thought

An interesting article from Gourmet magazine about the current year's Farm Bill. Click here. I found it on the Slow Food USA blog. I liked the quote from the farmer in South Dakota. He says he has a problem with growing corn. Most corn is fed to animals. He prefers to farm to feed people and let cattle eat grass.

Another nugget found on the blog was really disheartening. A list of big food conglomerates that are behind some of my favorite brands (Naked Juice!) in the organic grocery store I enthusiastically shop at these days. Click here.

I am looking forward to summer and my deliveries from the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm that I subscribe to starts delivery. You can read about it here. By the way, Lettie's deliveries look just like the photo above.

And there is a link to Slow Food USA if you are interested in the organization that promotes all that fast food is not. It is a little political and at tiems extremist and unlocal to me, but I like the idea behind it.

Measure of a Mountain

I ordered this book from Amazon because I wanted to know more about the absolutely amazing chunk of snow covered ice and pumice called Mount Rainier. I first became enamored by it before even setting foot on Washington State soil. As I flew in from the Middle South to visit my Pacific Northwesterner sister two Septembers ago, I sat by the window, watching the green and brown patchwork of our country slide slowly (apparently) beneath me. On the approach to my destination (Seattle) the land turned brown and bumpy, with occasional snow on the peaks and the oceans moisture began to form clouds obscuring the ground. Typical Pacific Northwest, I thought. Then suddenly the snow covered caldera of Rainier punching its lone 14400 foot caldera through the layer of clouds. Wow. From that moment on it felt almost as if the mountain was stalking me. I was out of familiar territory (by a few thousand miles) and kept finding the mountain appearing in unexpected places, between two buildings, on a long stretch of highway, then just as suddenly disappearing, invisible though I knew I'd seen it from a certain point of view before, even a matter of hours before. Sometimes it was like another moon, others a cloud, or unmistakably what it is--the largest and most dangerous volcano in the United States of America. I actually went to Rainier on that visit, and was in awe of its size and beauty. The the clouds had come down by the time my sister and I got there. We drove to Paradise and parked at the lodge that was being renovated at the time, then walked up a trail through at least 20 black tailed deer munching elderberries (I think) like they knew winter was on the way. This was September and we walked up as far as the snow line almost to the cloud line and stared into the mist for a glimpse. It gave me a strange feeling. I knew it was massive. I knew it was there, right there. And every few minutes there would appear a snatch of black, a bare rock in the icecap where staring up it seemed to me like there should have been sky. Rainier was teasing me. I didn't see the peak until we were almost back in Olympia when all the sudden the mist was gone. The author describes it this way:

"The sight of it has nearly killed me. More than once its spell has been broken by the headlights of an oncoming car bearing down on my southbound self speeding along the northbound lane. The mountain never appears in the same place with the same face twice. It possesses a Cheshire talent for appearing and disappearing at will. From the highest hill it may lie shrouded in mist, only to show itself an hour later from the middle of Puget Sound. People who have lived in the Pacific Northwest all their lives still stop and stare when Rainier reveals itself. ...We've got mountains like Iowa's got flat. And yet the local vernacular admits only one "Mountain," and when Rainier rises we tell each other, "The Mountain is out."


(Alison in the alpine meadow on Rainier's southern slope. The peak is to my back, the mountains behind her are part of the Cascades.)

And so I bought the book to find out more. I am returning to Rainier this summer with the rest of my family. We are going to spend the night at Paradise Lodge, the newly renovated NPS inn, and I can't wait. I read The Measure of a Mountain because I want to make the most of the brief time we have there. In short, I want them to love it as much as I do.

I loved the book, but found it was more one man's quest for the guts to climb the mountain and the chronicle of him actually doing it. There is some history, some interesting points, but not exactly what I was looking for. It was one man's view of the mountain, what loves, fascinations, and challenges he found there. I'm an adventure writing junkie, so I thoroughly enjoyed it. It didn't hurt that the author is a talented writer. Bruce Barcott, is a contributor to Outside Magazine, a publication I love.

I think I'll just have to get a guidebook, or talk to a ranger, or just get out and walk when I get there. They can't help but love it. And if they don't...then I'll love it for them.

Another Personality Test

I found this one here: Bonnie's Books
Not that surprising, but she and I have the same result.

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises. Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!) You excel in: Higher education You get along best with: The Comma

What Punctuation Mark Are You?