I can't begin to describe how tired I am.
The last few weeks have been busy as work. When you're a fundraiser, there really isn't a "slow" time of year, but calendar and fiscal year ends tend to keep you busier than you could possibly imagine. Between the back and forth about mailings, the conference I attended last week, the students in and out of my office making last minute phonathon calls and freaking out about finals, and the constant checking of totals to make sure we stay ahead of last year's numbers............. Whew.
I love my job. Seriously. I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.
I will be home for Christmas in 10 days. The entire family is going home. My sister Abby, her FIANCE* Eric, their puppy Ellie, their cat Shmoe, Lady Bug, and me... all of us... road tripping home to Wisconsin... in a Honda CRV. I have never needed that chaotic family togetherness more.
On to the real reason for the tiredness. I don't want this whole post to be negative or sound like I'm a Debbie Downer but it's been a really rough week for my family. My uncle's house burned down yesterday. He, his wife, and their two sons have nowhere to live, nothing to wear, none of their tangible memories. It's devastating - I can't even imagine what they're going through.
That being said, I feel so incredibly blessed right now. All of them made it out without a problem. They may not have any physical belongings but they are alive and healthy and safe and that's what's most important.
Friends from all parts of my life have stepped up and offered to help. People at work have been bringing things in and enlisting their friends help. My best friends from Minnesota are collecting things at work and from friends and family and sending them packages of essentials, blankets, and little gifts. Friends who I have barely spoken to in years have ordered them new clothes, are sending gift cards, and are offering more items than they could possibly take. I can't begin to described how loved we all feel. In less than 48 hours, our friends and family have rallied together and are providing for some of the most precious people in my life. The people that are helping them have never met my uncle, aunt, or cousins. Many of the people who have offered help have never met me.
Sometimes we look around this world and we see the bad things. I've worked in public schools where kids only have one pair of shoes that they make last all year. And heard stories from refugees about the horrible things they've seen. I've seen people die much too young because of needless tragedies that could have been avoided. But then something happens and we are reminded that humans are inherently good. That when someone needs something, we will drop everything to help people we've never even met just because someone who knows someone who knows the person in need once did something that touched us. We all roll our eyes at technology and how we're addicted to Facebook and how it's our lifeline to our friends. But with one little Facebook status, I was able to reach hundreds of people who are at very least sending positive thoughts all towards my family when they need it most. And all of the physical goods are of course important and they need that. But just knowing that my family is important to all of those people, that so many people are willing to help, is overwhelming... and amazing... I've said both of those words probably 500 times today.
*Squeeeeee! My sister got engaged last weekend. In the midst of some really long and hard days, my baby sister who I think is one of the most incredible people ever is getting married... to a man who I am proud to call my brother. None of that in-law crap. If my half-brother is a real brother in my family, than so is my brother-in-law. Congrats you two. I'm so happy for you. There will be many more posts about your lives together and the wedding planning to come. I'm sorry you only got a footnote in this post. You deserve a billboard, not a footnote.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
This Has Been a Wonderful Couple of Book Weeks
So I obviously posted this morning but it wasn't about anything I've read lately. Honestly, I haven't had time to update in a while because I've been hurrying home to read more. Fall is officially here (well, back at home winter is officially here but down here in Kentucky, I'm content with fall for now) and I've spent lots of nights laying on the couch with a fire going, a glass of wine in my hand, Lady Bug curled up on my feet and wonderful read spread out in front of me. I know I mentioned that in one of my last real post but seriously. I am so incredibly content with my life lately that it was worth mentioning again.
So in my post about The Thirteenth Tale, I went on and on about what a good book it was because I loved reading other people's stories. That book, combined with some recommendations from friends and family, has gotten me a new genre trend - books about libraries or books. I read three in a row that fit that bill and I loved each and every one of them.
The first book after The Thirteenth Tale that I devoured (well, it was really brownies or cookies that I was devouring probably but the book was just as delicious in it's own way) was The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. Add it to the book club recommendations. It's about a woman, Nell, and her granddaughter, Cassandra, and their separate journeys to discover who Nell really was. As a child, Nell was discovered on a boat dock in Australia and brought up by a family that was not her own. Life, and later death, intervened before she could solve her own mystery so her granddaughter picks up when she left off and ultimately discovers her family heritage after her grandmother's death. The book does a wonderful job of telling the story from all of the perspectives and time periods involved and conjures up incredible images of stories that are waiting to be deciphered. One of the only things that Nell has to help solve her mystery is a book of fairy tales that she arrived with in Australia. The fairy tales themselves are a clue and tell the stories of lost princesses, scary old witches, homely but kind hearted crones... It gives me chills just thinking of how artfully these stories are crafted into this book.
After finishing that book cuddled in my bed on Saturday morning, I opened up The Shadow of the Wind, yet another book that tells the story of a mysterious book. This story talks about a magical, if not sad, place that I wish really existed - the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I want a job someday guarding those books so they are not forgotten. Seriously. Anywho, the eerie tale that follows about a boy who "adopts" one of these forgotten books and subsequently goes on a quest to discover why it has all but disappeared is one that will suck you in on a rainy Saturday night and not let you out of its grasp until you reach the end and learn all of the gritty details sometime in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday. I loved this book. Very rarely do I read a book and think that I need to own it so that I can pass it along to everyone who is willing to read it, but this is one of those books.
Alright, that was sort of brief but it's 5:30 and I don't want to sit at my desk any longer. Just wanted to mention a couple of wonderful reads for those of you who are going to be settling for the holidays and want something to read.
Oh yeah! And I couple of movie recommendations too...
Happy Thanksgiving friends!
So in my post about The Thirteenth Tale, I went on and on about what a good book it was because I loved reading other people's stories. That book, combined with some recommendations from friends and family, has gotten me a new genre trend - books about libraries or books. I read three in a row that fit that bill and I loved each and every one of them.
The first book after The Thirteenth Tale that I devoured (well, it was really brownies or cookies that I was devouring probably but the book was just as delicious in it's own way) was The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. Add it to the book club recommendations. It's about a woman, Nell, and her granddaughter, Cassandra, and their separate journeys to discover who Nell really was. As a child, Nell was discovered on a boat dock in Australia and brought up by a family that was not her own. Life, and later death, intervened before she could solve her own mystery so her granddaughter picks up when she left off and ultimately discovers her family heritage after her grandmother's death. The book does a wonderful job of telling the story from all of the perspectives and time periods involved and conjures up incredible images of stories that are waiting to be deciphered. One of the only things that Nell has to help solve her mystery is a book of fairy tales that she arrived with in Australia. The fairy tales themselves are a clue and tell the stories of lost princesses, scary old witches, homely but kind hearted crones... It gives me chills just thinking of how artfully these stories are crafted into this book.
After finishing that book cuddled in my bed on Saturday morning, I opened up The Shadow of the Wind, yet another book that tells the story of a mysterious book. This story talks about a magical, if not sad, place that I wish really existed - the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I want a job someday guarding those books so they are not forgotten. Seriously. Anywho, the eerie tale that follows about a boy who "adopts" one of these forgotten books and subsequently goes on a quest to discover why it has all but disappeared is one that will suck you in on a rainy Saturday night and not let you out of its grasp until you reach the end and learn all of the gritty details sometime in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday. I loved this book. Very rarely do I read a book and think that I need to own it so that I can pass it along to everyone who is willing to read it, but this is one of those books.
Alright, that was sort of brief but it's 5:30 and I don't want to sit at my desk any longer. Just wanted to mention a couple of wonderful reads for those of you who are going to be settling for the holidays and want something to read.
Oh yeah! And I couple of movie recommendations too...
- 27 Dresses - So cute that I went out and bought a copy...
- Avatar - I've been putting off seeing this because my tv isn't worthy. Well I watched it last weekend anyway and hello, AMAZING. I don't care who you are, watch it. My mom even loved it and my mom is not a movie person. That was the fastest 2.5 hours I've spent watching a movie in a long time. Beautiful, political, and heartwarming all rolled into one.
- My Sisters Keeper - Yeah, no. Not a bad movie if you haven't read the book but I am not surprised that Jodi Picoult hated it so much. Terrible adaptation of a great story. Skip the movie and read the book.
- The Queen - How did it take so long for me to see this movie?! It was so royal, and British, and somehow comforting and uncomfortable all at once. And I love Helen Mirren. Wonderful.
Happy Thanksgiving friends!
100 Books...
This thing is going around Facebook, and while I don't usually do things like this, I had to laugh at how many of these books I've read. I already added the rest of them to my reading list. Anything bolded below are books that I’ve read… The italicized are those that I started but didn’t finish. Wow.
The BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of these 100 books. I read 68 of them. That either means I'm really well read or have no life. Either way, for your viewing pleasure, here's my 100 books list.
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 (I read the whole thing in middle school and high school.)
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 (Close, but not the whole thing… I own it though so maybe that’s a good project for Thanksgiving break. Ha ha)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
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 - A.A. Milne (Yes Dad, I read them without you!)
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 (Just finished it! Review coming soon!)
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 Inferno - Dante
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 - E.B. 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
The BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of these 100 books. I read 68 of them. That either means I'm really well read or have no life. Either way, for your viewing pleasure, here's my 100 books list.
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 (I read the whole thing in middle school and high school.)
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 (Close, but not the whole thing… I own it though so maybe that’s a good project for Thanksgiving break. Ha ha)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
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 - A.A. Milne (Yes Dad, I read them without you!)
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 (Just finished it! Review coming soon!)
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 Inferno - Dante
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 - E.B. 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
Friday, November 12, 2010
Tales Untold
As you know, everyone has a story. Whether it's interesting or not is another thing. But bottom line, everyone has a story.
Some stories are sad. Some are joyful. Some make you pause. Some make you appreciate the life you've had or wish you'd made some different choices or been born into a different time, place, or family. Some stories do all of those things.
I think that's part of why I love books so much. I love people's stories too, but people are much less likely to just lay it all out there in black and white and tell you their story. There are always parts omitted because they don't think that bit is important or because they're embarrassed or they simply forgot. With books, it is the author's job to make sure every little important detail is included (if the details are omitted, it's probably not a very good book. And authors can't allow their characters to be embarrassed by their stories - if the character is not willing to share, it's simply not a part of the story. And of course, authors can't forget details! They've never get published if they skipped whole parts of the story.
This month is National Novel Writing Month and everywhere I look, someone is trying to write some sort of story. Those of you who get through it will probably have a product that might some day be worth reading with a lot of editing. Not that that's a bad thing! I used to write and I've pretty much given it up. Apparently my characters are too embarrassed to tell their tales. But unless you can get it just write, you're going to have a hard time satisfying both yourself and your readers.
Of course there are hundreds of books published every year by authors that simply just missed the point, so really this rambling is going no where.
Anywho...
I just finished a book that was a fabulous story. The Thirteenth Tale is about an elderly reclusive author who decides to finally tell her story to a little known biographer. The biographer is no professional but, due to some interesting circumstances, is able to treat the story with such tenderness that the sheer ridiculousness of it doesn't phase her at all. The author of The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield, did a wonderful job of capturing the essence of each of her characters and the story within a story within a book is so richly woven that I found myself complete engrossed. Miss Winter, the elderly author, has a story that simply doesn't seem plausible - wealth, incest, twins, mysterious deaths, and on and on and on - but somehow in the end it comes together and you're left puzzling over how you didn't see it before. And the narrator, the biographer, has a nasty mess of a life herself that you are easily drawn into.
Clearly, I found this a wonderful read... Highly recommended. And it's a great book club book for all my lady friends out there. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for a day on the beach but for snuggled up next to the fireplace with a mug of hot cocoa, it couldn't be more perfect.
Some stories are sad. Some are joyful. Some make you pause. Some make you appreciate the life you've had or wish you'd made some different choices or been born into a different time, place, or family. Some stories do all of those things.
I think that's part of why I love books so much. I love people's stories too, but people are much less likely to just lay it all out there in black and white and tell you their story. There are always parts omitted because they don't think that bit is important or because they're embarrassed or they simply forgot. With books, it is the author's job to make sure every little important detail is included (if the details are omitted, it's probably not a very good book. And authors can't allow their characters to be embarrassed by their stories - if the character is not willing to share, it's simply not a part of the story. And of course, authors can't forget details! They've never get published if they skipped whole parts of the story.
This month is National Novel Writing Month and everywhere I look, someone is trying to write some sort of story. Those of you who get through it will probably have a product that might some day be worth reading with a lot of editing. Not that that's a bad thing! I used to write and I've pretty much given it up. Apparently my characters are too embarrassed to tell their tales. But unless you can get it just write, you're going to have a hard time satisfying both yourself and your readers.
Of course there are hundreds of books published every year by authors that simply just missed the point, so really this rambling is going no where.
Anywho...
I just finished a book that was a fabulous story. The Thirteenth Tale is about an elderly reclusive author who decides to finally tell her story to a little known biographer. The biographer is no professional but, due to some interesting circumstances, is able to treat the story with such tenderness that the sheer ridiculousness of it doesn't phase her at all. The author of The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield, did a wonderful job of capturing the essence of each of her characters and the story within a story within a book is so richly woven that I found myself complete engrossed. Miss Winter, the elderly author, has a story that simply doesn't seem plausible - wealth, incest, twins, mysterious deaths, and on and on and on - but somehow in the end it comes together and you're left puzzling over how you didn't see it before. And the narrator, the biographer, has a nasty mess of a life herself that you are easily drawn into.
Clearly, I found this a wonderful read... Highly recommended. And it's a great book club book for all my lady friends out there. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for a day on the beach but for snuggled up next to the fireplace with a mug of hot cocoa, it couldn't be more perfect.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
An addendum to the last post...
So I finally finished the Edgar Sawtelle book I mentioned in my last post. Wow, I shouldn't have spoken so soon. That book was wonderful until the last 30 pages and it fell flat on it's face. I can't help but take back my recommendation. The ending of that book was awful. Truly awful.
Sad. I hate when my books disappoint me.
Sad. I hate when my books disappoint me.
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