On Fran's Bookshelf

Having coffee with Leslie yesterday and talking about writing and books made me want to do a post about the books I’ve read. In Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O!, she has a column called, “Books That Made a Difference To . . .” She chooses someone to reveal five of their favorite books and the reasons those books made their list. Hugh Laurie, who plays Dr. Gregory House, talked about how he’d read certain books and later couldn’t remember much about them when he picked them up again. But he also wrote, “Then there are the books that shine in my memory, milestones along the horizontal course of my life. I remember not just the books themselves but the chair I sat in, the shoes I wore, the woman I loved, what song was on the charts at the time. None of which makes them good books, exactly, although all of them are—it just means that they are mine. They really happened.”

The books that are really mine are:

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward
Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Love Story by Erich Segal
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Having It All by Helen Gurley Brown
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

And because I know you’re curious, here are the ones listed on Hugh Laurie’s Bookshelf (as they appeared in O! magazine in Feb. 2006):

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carre
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Reading and writing. I love it!

"Another one rides the bus"

Saw that on the back of a huge tow truck today. Laughed out loud. People and businesses take their parking pretty seriously here in Orlando.

Getting back in the groove after Christmas vacation isn't an event, it's a process. Finally last night I got the last of the ornaments put away. Funny how you admire the tree so much when it's first put up, basking in its beauty. Then after New Year's, you kinda curl your lip up in disdain at it--the green elephant in the room. But I guess when you've been looking at Christmas decorations since they were put out with the Halloween candy, you're over it by January 4. My ambitious sister said she took her tree down on Christmas night because "Christmas is over in this house." I hear ya.

We were almost 10 minutes late for school, and work was busy. Thank goodness Caroline had already done her homework at school, because John Sam's homework took some real maneuvering to get done. We had salad and spaghetti or ravioli, a rare dinnertime choice. I wanted to give myself a manicure, but it's so late and I need to get all the family's important dates onto the new Victorian calendar I treated myself to so I can get it hung up.

Over the weekend I got my rocking chair out of the garage, and it's going to go where the Christmas tree was with my new floor lamp I got from Target. Add in my footstool from long ago, and the whole thing's going to be my little reading area in the living room. I've got a nice stack of books ready to go--some of them I've already started on, some are brand new.