Nephew and books

[ariadne3]

Well, Cathy and I went up to SeaTac (a horrible collision of names,) and retrieved the nephew, whom we will have on loan for about a month before having to return him to his rightful parent. He glommed onto me as soon as he got off of the walkway, and I carried him for a ways through the airport. His mom is right, he hasn't really grown that much since last year. Hopefully the combination of him no longer having to be on the EVIL mood and appetite suppressing meds and us having the kind of food he likes to eat will result in a growth spurt and some weight gain before we send him on home. Poor guy is picky; there are a few foods he really doesn't like at all, like tomatoes (I don't get that one, apparently it's a texture thing,) and the rest of it, he doesn't like poor quality food. At home, he won't eat the eggs; they're the insipid, flat kind that come from the store. Here, he practically won't eat anything without eggs, in fact I fed him tamago rolls for supper and he was ecstatic. I quote, "at Missouri they don't know how to do these right, they put bread on the outside!!!" Bread on tamago? That's weird. I've seen it as described in the link above, and the way I make it, which is to roll it around a sheet of nori so that it makes a spiral when cut.He felt so strongly about it that he was practically in tears about the wrongness of it all. I think that was also due to relief that I was doing it right, and that he was at that point working on minimal sleep and jetlag.

You see, he was super excited to be coming, apparently he woke his mom at 6:00 am (Central time) by bouncing on her bed and crowing "I get to go to Uncle Bill's todayyyyyyy!!!" His plane arrived at 9:00 pm Pacific time and he was still super amped. He crashed out pretty hard in the car on the way home (gladly, we did not crash, despite the best efforts of drivers who suddenly braked to a halt in front of us, and the one who almost side-swiped the car in front of us, as well...)but when I woke him up to come inside he regained the level of energy that only an exhausted, excited kid can attain. Once fed the aforementioned tamago and a couple of slices of melon, he chilled out with the cat for a while and finally consented to be tucked in. I expect that he'll sleep in, but not as much as I want him to!

I'm pretty excited that he's here, too. I love children, and a chance to have one, especially one like Andrew, around the house for extended periods of time makes me really happy.

Damnity damn. Just spilled the last sip of marionberry ale on my shirt. That usually only happens with water or tea, I must be pretty tired, too.

Anyhow, this looked like fun, so I did the book list.

(Lifted from young_raven )

Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.
Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

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 (most of them.  I stopped after a while.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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 (Yeah, most of ‘em…not so much the Richards.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller'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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
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 - C.S. Lewis (I liked this all right, but the allegory was kind of too much.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (I know Vesta will be horrified, but I really don’t like Jane Austen)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (see above)
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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (SO. FRICKIN. DENSE.)
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 Marte  (I think I need to find this just for the title.)
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
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' 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 (I might read this one, I've enjoyed some of his others.)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A S 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 - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I feel like I should…I keep trying.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (What a depressing little tale.)
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