mialoubug

Do audiobooks count?

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:27:21 GMT

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King (Time for a reread on this one. It's been so long!)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (I just could NOT finish this)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (NOT a Toni Morrison fan)
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I MUST read this for the title alone)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Not too bad. I think I actually only own about 10 of these.

Puppy!!!

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 04:42:08 GMT

Her name is Lyra and she is a cheagle, or a beagle/chiuhuau mix. She is 11 weeks old and pretty tiny. She is supposed to grow to 15 to 20 pounds. Somehow I doubt it! But here she is.

Rest in eternal peace, John Albert Marcella

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:52:16 GMT

We buried my dad today. The funeral mass was beautiful. The priest, who has been a family friend for years, did a really wonderful job at capturing my father's life and spirit. It's been a difficult and extraordinarily enlightening week. I met so many people who knew my dad from various times in his life, all who told us how kind and wonderful and lovely of a man he was.

I'm really going to miss him. I was so fortunate to have him for as many years I did. He lived all of his 71 years to the best of his ability. Although we didn't have much money, he somehow made sure all of us went to private Catholic schools and that our Christmas and other holidays were plentiful with presents and food. I remember one time when he was out of work for three years. I was 11 at the time and he was a laborer. He hurt his back and he only got $100 a month on which to raise our family of 8. Looking back today I don't know how he did it -- my mother didn't work at the time -- or how he didn't lose it. But we got through it and at the end he was able to take my grandfather's ticket at the local longshore union where he finally got a decent wage. But he never complained, always worked hard and never took the easy way out.

It was three years ago in October that he was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. I had the privilege of taking him to every one of his doctor's appointments at the hospital where I work. We could not have asked for a better team of caregivers, all of whom adored him because he was so irreverent and open. Plus they liked him since he always had a kind word for everyone.

All of us were with him when he died last Saturday. We knew the time was coming, but the hospice nurse had given us a prescription for morphine to administer along with adavan for the anxiety. Thursday and Friday were awful -- he was screaming in his sleep, calling out for long-dead relatives, singing, telling my mother how pretty she was -- all generally strange utterings. In the end, all of us, my mother, me and all six of my siblings, formed a prayer circle around him. My cousins were there as well. Just as our priest completed the Sacrament of the Sick, my father died. It was peaceful and gentle and a very quiet and lovely death. We witnessed something was so amazing that I still can't wrap my head around it.

So now we go on with life without him. I miss him terribly. And Thanksgiving will be awful since next to his family, fishing and hunting, my father's absolute favorite pasttime was eating and cooking. Especially eating.

I love you dad. Goodnight and rest in the peace you so very much deserve.