Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Full of pride

Do you ever have moments when your child does something so kind that it causes your heart to swell with pride? Yesterday I had one of those moments with my oldest, Devin.

After spending the morning with some friends, we stopped off at my husband’s grandparent’s house for a quick visit. Ken’s grandma is currently suffering from skin cancer and her entire face is covered in awful bloody scabs and rashes. It’s difficult to look at because it looks so painful. For a child it probably looks very scary.

Well, when we arrived, Devin ran up to great-grandma and gave her a big hug, completely ignoring her face. She then played and chatted with her great-grandparents without sparing a second glace at great-grandma’s face.

As I averted my eyes from Devin’s great-grandma’s bloody scabby face, I marveled at how wonderful and loving Devin is and thanked God for her amazing heart.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I was visiting my friend Andrea's blog and read an interesting post. She took a list of 106 books most off as unreadable on some library list and highlighted the ones she had read or wanted to read. Well, after reading through the list, I was pretty amazed that I had barely read any of those books! My reading taste is mostly fluff, I admit it. After all, it is kind-of difficult to crack open an epic novel while the kids are running around screaming.

But it did get me thinking about all the great books out there that I'm missing out on. S0 I visited Time's website and discovered their All Time 100 Best Novels. I've posted the list below and put in bold the ones I've actually read. It looks like I have some catching up to do!

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume


The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis


Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell


On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Back Again

It's been a while since I've posted and I'm not as exhausted anymore. And although I am feeling better, it took almost a full week of terrible withdrawal symptoms to get this way.

When I was at the library the other week I picked up a book called SUGAR SHOCK! by Connie Bennett and a lightbulb went off in my head. I suddenly realized why I was feeling so terrible. It's was because of the sugar!

Up until May I had been on a no-sugar diet and was seeing a naturopathic doctor. Shortly after I was given a clean bill of health I fell off the wagon. Before too long I was wondering where my clean bill of health went. When I read SUGAR SHOCK! I realized that sugar took it away from me.

I know it sounds a little radical, but sugar really does make me feel terrible. It steals my energy, causes extreme moodiness and so much more. After reading the book I realized why I felt so good on my sugar-free diet and why everything had changed.

If you're feeling tired (or downright exhausted), moody, irritable or anxious, I strongly urge you to check out SUGAR SHOCK!