You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2010.
This list is appearing on Facebook. As I prefer to do these kinds of things on my blog, here it is. Bolded are the books I’ve read. Italicized are the books I’ve started but haven’t finished. Plain text are the books I’ve not even started. This year’s book list, perhaps?
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 – However, it was in grade school. Should read it again.
6. The Bible – I try and I try, but I always get stuck somewhere in Exodus or Leviticus (ie, right near the beginning… *hangs head in shame* 
). 2011, perhaps?
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 – Really, now! That’s a lot of books for one listing!
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – So good! If you’re in a long-distance relationship, definitely don’t read this book unless your sweetheart is in the room with you.
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
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 – Wonderful book! (My review here.)
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis – I think this should be part of the Chronicles of Narnia? Oh well. The Shakespeare listing cheated me out of a lot of bolding! This can make up for it.
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
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell – I would like to read this and 1984 again.
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – What a beautiful book. I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend it, but the language that he uses is so beautiful.
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
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Someone advised me not to read this. I wonder if she is still of this opinion?
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Couldn’t finish it. I enjoyed 100 Years a lot more, interestingly enough.
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 – Interesting that this is on here. Hmm.
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 – Oh, I definitely want to read this.
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce – I think I started it, at least. It would have been in an English Lit class, and other material would have prevented me from finishing. Also, I don’t think I’m a huge fan of 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 – Just finished it two days ago! Delightful book.
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 – I would like to read it again, though.
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 – Love it!
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – Love it. I love the way Dumas writes.
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – I think I finished it… But I’m not sure…
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
What of these have you read? If you do this list on your own blog, feel free to leave a link in the comments! I’d love to see it. 
I wrote this riddle for M awhile ago. What do you think the answer is?
I am contemplating an assortment of containers. I really couldn’t tell you how big they are, but they are all of relatively the same size. Their contents vary tremendously depending on what they are called on to hold. They have no edges, but they do have endings. You can’t see where they start, but no one would argue that they do. And I’m actually using them as a measure right now, despite the fact that I could never lay a ruler against them. What are they?
There has been so much in the news lately about bullying and for good reason. It seems to have reached the pinnacle of horrifying, with children feeling the need to take drastic action in self-harm and -destruction, children not wanting to go to school, wanting to change who they are, becoming bullies themselves, even wanting to take a pink water bottle because people were making fun of her Star Wars water bottle (here).
And the general response for everyone writing these articles is to say, “Parents, talk with your kids about how to deal with bullying”.
But this advice is strangely limiting. If every parent is talking to their kids assuming their kids are being bullied, which parents are talking to the kids who are bullies?
The general assumption in the advice given is that, Oh no, my child simply couldn’t be a bully. I know him/her and he/she is a darling. He/she would never do that.
But there are a couple of flaws in that logic.
First, there is always at least one bully in any elementary school social group.
Second, there is a non-zero chance that bully could be your child.
Third, all children are bullies some of the time.
Yes, even your darling angel. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are real bullies (physically abusive, patently cruel). I would simply suggest that every child has the capacity to be mean to any other child, and every child has probably done something mean, even if they regretted it or didn’t mean it. So even if your child is a darling angel, the likelihood that they have, at some point in their life, done something mean to another child is fairly high.
So what is the cause? I was bullied as a child. In fact, I was the target of a grade-wide shunning when I was in grade six. And the reason? I was different. I was very mature for my age, I read and wrote at a level above many of my peers, I thought about the world around me, I was unswervingly Christian, I had an unshakeable idea of what was fair and unfair, and I was very independent. Individually, none of these things would have been an issue, and even together they wouldn’t have been until I was the most different person in our grade. There were other children more different than me, but as they were teased, they eventually either moved away or changed themselves. I didn’t change. I became the most different, making me the most teased.
And that, difference, is the crux of why bullying happens. After being in our families and establishing, based on them, what “normal” is, we are suddenly thrust into a group of diverse individuals. Part of our social nature is the desire to have friends. As a child, you quickly learn that people are friends with you over the things that you have in common. If the differences between you are too great, you aren’t friends. Part of our social nature is also the desire to be generally liked. Children very quickly learn that they have to be the same as everyone else in order to be generally liked. And the more children become the same as each other, the more noticeable a difference is. Children don’t naturally know what to do with someone who is different. They don’t know how to understand it. They can’t come to terms with it. It is unsettling to know that there is someone who is able to function in a way completely different from oneself. And because children don’t naturally have the skills to deal with this, rather than living with being unsettled, they do what they can to further separate themselves from one who is different. Thus why children bully each other. And the children who are being bullied do try to change, because being purposefully excluded from a social group is a very painful thing. But if they can’t, or even if they can but find they are still excluded, despair can set in.
But kids don’t have to be stuck in this pattern of excluding those who are different and being in despair if they themselves are that different person. Children are rapacious learners. They gobble up whatever they are given and their brains quickly and easily disseminate teaching.
Children do need to know how to deal with bullies, but it isn’t enough. They also desperately need to be taught how to deal with those who are different and how to not be bullies themselves.
The kids who made fun of the girl in the Star Wars water bottle case weren’t bullies. They were a group of little boys who decided that this girl was different from other girls and made fun of her for it. They played nicely with this girl at other times, so they weren’t hardened villains. They weren’t bullies, but they were acting like bullies in those moments where they teased her. These little boys are probably very sweet and friendly and play nicely with other kids, but they don’t know how to deal with someone who is different. So that is an important part of teaching your children about bullies. What do you do when you are bullied, but also:
What should you do when another child is different from you?
What should you do if your friends make fun of someone?
What should you say if you think that what someone does is silly or stupid?
What should you do if you don’t want to play with someone?
Do coach children on what to do when they’re being bullied (ignore the bullies, leave, talk to a teacher, etc), and do make sure that your children know that they are valued and loved for exactly who they are. But even if every child is taught this, bullying will continue. The only way to end bullying is to teach every child how to treat every other child the way they want to be treated.
M and I watched this movie the other night and here is a big
!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!
I was surprised at how creepy it was. M linked me to a handful of online discussions about it this morning, and one of the bloggers made brief mention of the villain as the main source of creepiness. This was my response:
I think in other Disney films, the villains are either unseen or seem to be motivated by something understandable, like greed (for money or power). Even if you don’t agree with the motivation, even as a child you can at least comprehend it. But in this movie, the villain’s motivation seems to be simply abject cruelty, which is difficult to cope with, even for adults.
With other Disney villains, while they had their lairs, their interactions with the good guys usually happened in neutral territory, unless the good guys were kidnapped and taken back to the lair. In this movie, there are shadow demons and voodoo heads that can appear whenever they want to and can, in a sense, create the bad guy’s lair wherever they want. Rather than having scenes where the villain is present and then having scenes where you’re free of the villain, the villain and his “friends” can and do invade at any time, giving (at least the perception of) a lot more screen time to the villains than other Disney flicks do.
In the other Disney movies, the villains can be escaped from, hidden from and outsmarted. In this movie, there is no escape from the shadow demons– you can’t hide from them, you can’t outsmart them, and if they capture you, you can’t even fight them. Others can fight them for you (shining light on them temporarily immobilizes them), but if no one is around, you’re powerless.
I think with the other Disney villains, too, children see the hero of the story managing to eventually overcome the villain, and can then imagine themselves overcoming their own fears. In this story, the good guys sort of overcome the bad guy, but it’s ultimately the creepy voodoo heads that bring his downfall. And the creepy voodoo heads, which are actually the biggest villains in the story, never get defeated.
As a contrast, in The Lion King, though Scar is creepy and powerful, Simba clearly overcomes the emotional hold Scar has on him, and the physical hold Scar has on his kingdom. And though the hyenas end up actually defeating Scar (by destroying him), it’s already been established that the hyenas are easily defeated by one or a group of powerful lions, and they therefore aren’t more powerful than what the good guys can overcome, while the voodoo heads are.
I liked this movie. I thought it was really cute with a good plot, interesting characters, and the celebration of good values (hard work, family, love). But I wish it was less creepy. I’m sure we’ll watch it again at some point, even if only to see how and if our perceptions have changed. But if I recommended it, I would indicate that the rating, rather than being the G it proudly sports, should actually be PG for frightening themes and images.
Edit: The “voodoo heads” are actually demonic, talking tribal masks.
While I read the ingredient list, I don’t read the rest of the recipe all the way through before I start cooking it. Rather than determining actual cooking and prep times, I estimate them based on similar recipes that I’ve made in the past. Invariably, the new recipe will end up using an entirely different method and will actually take two or three times as long to make.
So I will start cooking around 5, assuming it will take me an hour, only to realize that there’s a “cool for one hour” instruction that I was not counting on. *le sigh*
What’s yours?
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