books books and more books

I stole this from Freakazojd and since it looks like she's currently visiting Europe, I don't think she is going to mind.

My litterature snob parts instantly came out when I saw this list.

THE ORIGINAL RULES:
BOLD: What you’ve read
Italics: What you’d like to read
*Asterisks: If you’ve read other works by this writer, but not this particular one
*??Question marks: If you’ve never heard of the writer??

That's too much work, so I am just going to bold what I've read and *asterisk what I would like to read. (Yes, this is a cheap cry for new books. Maybe if you have it you will let me borrow it. :)

Allcott, Louisa May: "Little Women"
Allende, Isabel: "The House of Spirits"
Angelou, Maya: "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
Atwood, Margaret: "Cat's Eye"
Austen, Jane: "Emma"??
Bambara, Toni Cade: "Salt Eaters"
Barnes, Djuna: "Nightwoodde"
Beauvoir, Simone: "The Second Sex"
Blume, Judy: "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret"
Burnett, Frances: "The Secret Garden"
Bronte, Charlotte: "Jane Eyre"
Bronte, Emily: "Wuthering Heights"
Buck, Pearl S.: "The Good Earth"
Byatt, A.S.: "Possession"
Cather, Willa: "My Antonia"
Chopin, Kate: "The Awakening"
Christie, Agatha: "Murder on the Orient Express"
Cisneros, Sandra: "The House on Mango Street"
Clinton, Hillary Rodham: "Living History"
Cooper, Anna Julia: "A Voice From the South"
Danticat, Edwidge: "Breath, Eyes, Memory"
Davis, Angela: "Women, Culture, and Politics"
Desai, Anita: "Clear Light of Day"
Dickinson, Emily: "Collected Poems"
Duncan, Lois: "I Know What You Did Last Summer"
DuMaurier, Daphne: "Rebecca"
Eliot, George: "Middlemarch
Emecheta, Buchi: "Second Class Citizen"
Erdrich, Louise: "Tracks"
Esquivel, Laura: "Like Water for Chocolate"
Flagg, Fannie: "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café"
Friedan, Betty: "The Feminine Mystique"
Frank, Anne: "Diary of a Young Girl"
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Gordimer, Nadine: "July's People"
Grafton, Sue: "S is for Silence"
Hamilton, Edith: "Mythology"
Highsmith, Patricia: "The Talented Mr. Ripley"
Hooks, Bella: "Bone Black"
Hurston, Zora Neale: "Dust Tracks on the Road"
Jacobs, Harriet: "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"
Jackson, Helen Hunt: "Ramona"
Jackson, Shirley: "The Haunting of Hill House"
Jong, Erica: "Fear of Flying"
Keene, Carolyn: "The Nancy Drew Mysteries"
Kidd, Sue Monk: "The Secret Life of Bees"
Kincaid, Jamaica: "Lucy"
Kingsolver, Barbara: "The Poisonwood Bible"
Kingston, Maxine Hong: "The Woman Warrior"
Larsen, Nella: "Passing"
L'Engle, Madeleine: "A Wrinkle in Time"
Le Guin, Ursula K.: "The Left Hand of Darkness"
Lee, Harper: "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Lessing, Doris: "The Golden Notebook"
Lively, Penelope: "Moon Tiger"
Lorde, Audre: "The Cancer Journals"
Martin, Ann M.: "The Babysitters Club Series"
McCullers, Carson: "The Member of the Wedding"
McMillan, Terry: "Disappearing Acts
Markandaya, Kamala: "Nectar in a Sieve"
Marshall, Paule: "Brown Girl, Brownstones"
Mitchell, Margaret: "Gone with the Wind"
Montgomery, Lucy Maud: "Anne of Green Gables"
Morgan, Joan: "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost"
*Morrison, Toni: "Song of Solomon"
Murasaki, Lady Shikibu: "The Tale of Genji"
Munro, Alice: "Lives of Girls and Women"
Murdoch, Iris: "Severed Head"
Naylor, Gloria: "Mama Day"
Niffenegger, Audrey: "The Time Traveller's Wife"
Oates, Joyce Carol: "We Were the Mulvaneys"
O'Connor, Flannery: "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Piercy, Marge: "Woman on the Edge of Time"
Picoult, Jodi: "My Sister's Keeper
Plath, Sylvia: "The Bell Jar"
Porter, Katharine Anne: "Ship of Fools"
Proulx, E. Annie: "The Shipping News"
Rand, Ayn: "The Fountainhead"
Ray, Rachel: "365: No Repeats
Rhys, Jean: "Wide Sargasso Sea"
Robinson, Marilynne: "Housekeeping"
Rocha, Sharon: "For Laci"
Sebold, Alice: "The Lovely Bones"
Shelley, Mary: "Frankenstein"
*Smith, Betty: "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"
Smith, Zadie: "White Teeth"
Spark, Muriel: "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"
Spyri, Johanna: "Heidi"
Strout, Elizabeth: "Amy and Isabelle"
Steel, Danielle: "The House"
*Tan, Amy: "The Joy Luck Club"
Tannen, Deborah: "You're Wearing That"
Ulrich, Laurel: "A Midwife's Tale"
Urquhart, Jane: "Away"
Walker, Alice: "The Temple of My Familiar"
Welty, Eudora: "One Writer's Beginnings
Wharton, Edith: "Age of Innocence"
Wilder, Laura Ingalls: "Little House in the Big Woods"
Wollstonecraft, Mary: "A Vindication of the Rights of Women"
Woolf, Virginia: "A Room of One's Own"

I didn't check to see where this list came from, but it looks like someone just took a womens' studies class.

Title suggestions??

I finally came up with something to end my project for my class. I know, I know, you're holding your breath and peeing your pants in anticipation. It's not ready to show yet, but to hold you over, I'm posting a revision of another piece from the project.



-----------------------------------------------------

“Sleep here,” she slurred.
Patting her half-removed
duvet cover crumpled in
itself, falling off the bed’s edge.

Between the sheets
her hesitation evaporated
in sucked breathes and hard
exhales. His arm laid
across her shuddering stomach coming
to rest beneath her breasts.

(Number nineteen or the big two-O?)
The double digit did not diminish
the significance of each man as he left
his footprint in her
memory.

His trail became more marked
and striking each time he came.

Her arrival was later. Harder
moans flew from her mouth in surprise
she shivered, coming again
and again. Her eyes rolled back
stretched stark.

She occupied this thing
that filled dripping in
exhaustion. Recoiling

she recalled how long
she had held it in. Her past
sticking in the glue of regret, shook
free.

I need to take some new pictures

Chin was correct -- although the enlarged pixels ended up making me look veiny. And someone guessed my heel.

I'm just happy for the attention.

And because it looks gross ...

Guess ...

Guess the body part and I'll post a new one ...

Find out why you should post your own body part here

Lifelong Scavenger Hunt

PhilO and I exchanged secrets last night in our bi-weekly phone call. Yes, I am aware that I should concentrate on my friends that live in my actual state, but I love the old ones the best.

In the course of our very dirty, unreapeatable conversation we discussed poop, regrettable sex and Catholic confession. But the best part was the discussion of a Lifelong Scavenger Hunt. And since I gave it a google and got nothing, I am giving Phil credit for creating the game.

It came up in the context of having sex with a pregnant woman (which will not be on our list, since I am scared of both catching pregnancy and weirdo pregnant bodies, also because I don't really understand at what point foreplay between two women turned into actual "sex")

He brought it up as in, "That's something that most people can't mark off their Lifelong Scavenger Hunt list."

PhilO has told me that he would like to skip straight past marriage and straight into fatherhood, with a surrogate mother or something - I'm not sure he has fully worked out the logistics of this plan. It works for me because it's less time I have to share him with another woman. Unless she has a daughter. And than I'm just fucked.

So sex with a pregnant woman - off the list, but we're going to come up with a list that is challenging, rewarding and probably secret when we mark off our "accomplishments."

I suggested we both earn our first points by visiting a priest when I go visit and confessing our sins.

He said he would bring a book to read to keep him busy while I finished (low blow). He also said he would not blow the priest to save me from eternal damnation, if it came down to that.

A real friend would to blow a priest to save his good buddy from hell. I can't wait until he needs a favor bj.

Poem Monday

I should blog about the awesome Bob Dylan concert I went to last week, not realizing the zoo was inside the park and asking directions two blocks from the actual location. I should tell you about how parking was free and the bottle of white zin I drank before the show, th cop that pulled me over after the show, and taking an exist at 1 a.m. that was actually pointed south and added 20 minutes onto my driving tim (which is A LOT when you have to wake up for work the next day)

I want to complain about how people never change and that once I see certain sides of someone that I know I should write them off but too often I give them more chances, reminding myself of all the mistakes I've made.

But instead, a new creepy poem:

Suicide Trivia

I know you're tired
of finding out facts

Broken Bic razors slice flesh
better than most box cutters

I noticed you only use forks
and knives when you come to dinner
after you found the kitchen spoon
lying across my bathroom floor

I stood still and watched
as you covered your ears
(among other parts)
and dropped your eyes down
when I told you that a single person
can make it through sex
with over 30 men
and live to make you cringe

I don't expect you to believe me
when I smoke pot, exhaling
that it's easier
than finding a doctor
to refill a few Adivan

Because there's no need to worry
about the bottle of sleeping pills
I keep in my bedside drawer

Even all 30 of them
have the power to do nothing
but make me sick