RIP, Tim Russert

When I heard you died, I was shocked. Not shocked in a distant way, but shocked because you were so young and you loved your life so much. I didn't watch you faithfully on TV (there's only so much politics even I can take) but when I did see you, you were an unfailing class act. Even when you knew someone was lying, you didn't start screaming or calling names. You let their own words hang them.

And you asked the questions that made me think and take notice. This is our country, you seemed to say, and you challenged those who watched you to be citizens, to watch and take notice instead of mindlessly following the Political Leader De Jour.

So, I'll leave the rest of the tributes to those who truly knew you. I just wanted to say thanks.

RIP.

Father's Day and Pompeii

Yesterday, my mom and dad met Rob and I at our local park to go see a museum exhibit on the last days of Pompeii. It was fantastic---a beautiful day in the park and a well-done, thoughtful exhibit inside the museum.

I think the part that stuck with me was how alike we are; even across the centuries, there really isn't that much that changes. People conduct business, parents raise children, the gods are worshipped (from Greece, Rome and elsewhere; the Romans were nothing if not largely accepting of other people's religions) and daily life goes on without really understanding how everything can change so quickly. And for them, it did; in the space of 24 hours, nearly all of the inhabitants of Pompeii were killed by a volcano which had been smoldering under their feet for centuries.

Which brings me to Father's Day. My dad is a very recent cancer survivor, and I know perfectly well that we're lucky he's alive here at all. And he is---pretty healthy too and getting on with his life. And I watched him play with his granddaughter and I thought that if everything changed tomorrow, at least he---and us---would have been able to have this.

How I Plan to Spend My Summer (Blog Roll post)

The most recent blog roll post asks what we are planning to do (or have done) this summer.

Here's my list:

1) See A Day in the Life of Pompeii exhibit at the Natural History Museum (done, as of yesterday. It was fantastic---I'll cover that in another blog post.)

2) Go to the county fair (hopefully, either next weekend or the weekend following)

and

3) Have surgery to remove several large and pointy kidney stones from my left kidney.

Yeah. I know. I'm a party animal. ;) But I have my surgery date (July 30) and it looks like the recovery from that will take up the remainder of my summer. So I'm glad we got to have at least some fun this summer.

Banned Book Meme

Okay, here's how it goes. This is a list of commonly banned books---that is, books that libraries have been requested to ban. (How Little House on the Prairie ended up there, I"ll never know....) The books I've read are bolded; the ones I've read part of are italicized. Everything else is what I have left to read.

Here's my list:

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

To All The Books I've Loved Before (Blog Roll post)

The latest prompt was deceptively simple: name the book that changed your life.

My first response was an outraged mental squeal: "ONE? Just ONE? Are you kidding?" :O)

As you might be able to tell, I'm a follower of Erasmus, who said something to the effect that when he had a little money, he bought books, then food. So in consequence, we have a LOT of books (and that's not counting the ones for my husband's business...)

In the interests of keeping the list (sort of) short, here are my three choices:

1) The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane. This is a Classic Star Trek novel, but aside from a fantastic plot and writing that makes science understandable to the novice, it has a special place in my heart for one other reason. In the library in the small town where I lived years ago, there was the Adult Section and there was the Kids Section. To my eyes at seven or nine or twelve, the adult section had all the cool books, the thick books with hard covers and lots of pages. The librarians were careful to keep the kids out of the adult section---and that included the ones who should have been reading more advanced books (like me.) (Looking back, I understand why---there were a lot of, ahem, more romantic titles in the adult section and I'm sure they didn't want to hear from Jane's daddy where his daughter had learned those terms. ;-))

Anyway, I snuck in there one day and found The Wounded Sky. And I fell head over heels in love with it---not because I understood all of the astronomy that makes up most of the science in the plot (in fact, I still don't, though years later, I was amused to find out that the author had wanted to be an astrophysicist, but discovered she didn't have a grasp on the math either) but because it didn't talk down to me.

And in the days before kiddie lit made money (thank you, JK Rowling :)) a lot of children's books assumed that kids were, well, stupid. This book didn't and I loved it. And it opened doors for me---I started reading other Star Trek books, then other sci-fi novels and then other works of fiction. And I'm still doing it. So, thanks, Diane Duane.

2) Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. This book sticks out in my memory because it's the one book I've ever read in which there is intentionally not a single likable character...which, if you think about it, is a pretty ballsy thing for a writer to do. I won't say I enjoyed reading it, but it definitely made me think about how hard it must have been to write book like that.

And finally...(so many books, so little time...)

3) Cry, the Beloved Country (sorry, I can't remember right now who wrote this.) I loved it because it was poem masquerading as a story about guilt and honor and redemption and the terrible choices people make in harsh times, even when that means facing dishonor inside one's own family. Long after I finished reading it for my high school AP class, this single line stuck with me: "Cry, the beloved country, for the beloved child who is the inheritor of our fears."

And that about says it all; we pass both good and bad down to our children, our fears and our hopes. The line made me cry a little at 18 for the sheer hopelessness of the line and the situation in which the characters lived, but it rings true even now at 34.

So that's my list. Check the books out if you like; all of them are still in print (except, possibly, for The Wounded Sky, but I'm sure you can find it on Amazon if that's to your liking.) Enjoy. :)