I admit that I'm one who periodically spirals into panic, overwhelmed with the stupid trivial details of life, like...how can I pick up the dry cleaning, complete something big and hairy for work, get to a soccer game, see a friend, exercise, walk the dog, run to the grocery store, shoot off some critical emails, catch up with my kids and husband, and not collapse before dinner. The anxiety of course rears its head over big Mother problems too -- the things over which I absolutely cannot control. What can set me off? The shitty economy, crappy political issues, the state of our schools, cancer messing with my friend or more personal traumas like trying to protect my children from harm or heartache, as if I can make a difference in say, Bobby's law school applications or Audrey's success in her SAT's.
I escape from these periods of dread and worry by sipping wine, lots of it at times, soaking in a hot bath, and then burying myself under the covers, to sleep away the uglies. I sigh beneath that comforter, just as I am about to "go under", content that I've successfully exorcised the worry demons. It's a short-lived victory as more often than not, I end up bolting up wide awake in the middle of the night, after just a few hours of sleep. This can never be good for many reasons the least of which is that it is in the wee hours of the night when I invariably conjure up even more problems over which I then obsess. From one challenge comes many, and then more and more and more until I feel BURIED. Sound familiar? Anyone?
I've learned to talk myself through the panic and force myself to focus on just one problem at a time. Running helps me accomplish this. Step by step, mile after mile I work to come up with a game plan to tackle my woes and by the time I hit the shower, my sense of nervous nausea is at bay. Success! That is, until a bump or two experienced in the course of the day drives me to end it, just like the previous one, sipping wine, in a bath, huddled up in bed before 9 pm.....and the scary cycle continues.
This is why Anne Lamott's advice in her Bird by Bird was so compelling to me. A colleague/friend gave it to me for my birthday and I devoured it in one sitting. Won't go into all the attributes of the book, but will share what's on its cover -- as the advice spoke to me and has been very helpful in taming my anxiety beasts!
"Thirty years ago, my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he had three months to write. It was due the next day. He was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."
I'm embracing the Bird by Bird philosophy. While it was presented to help writers gain confidence in the task of crafting a moving tale, building believable characters, and finessing complex story lines, it has helped this non-writer tackle the complexities and mundane elements of life. I've applied her thinking this holiday season, year-end frenzy and tackling some crazy, crazy work to-do's going into January and I'm of all things....SLEEPING! To me, that's all the proof I need.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
BBC's Top 100 Book List: Numbers. Pages. Film.
The BBC's top 100 Book List which was compiled in 2003 is enjoying a surge of visibility thanks to Facebook and the blogosphere. In the last few weeks, a number of friends have posted the list, prefaced with the annotation that the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books, and so for me, the roster served as a blatant challenge to assert my reading chops.
I powered through the list and madly clicked off the titles I read. Kudos to my high school and college comparative literature teachers. Without their syllabi, my grand total would have been cut in half, but sadly, of the many I read, there are several I simply blew through on assignment. So, I need to re-read numerous classics not because I have a paper to write or a grade to nab, but to savor the talents of some incredible writers. Thank you BBC for creating the list, and Facebook for making it so easy to share. The timely viral push has inspired some great additions to my Cinquenta Tales List.
While going through the BBC list I confess the enormous impact Hollywood has had on my interpretation of literature. Truth be told, for many of the reads below, several of the characters or story lines are immortalized in my mind through the film's interpretation of the novels instead of the novels themselves. "To Kill a Mockingbird" will always be one of my all-time favorite books and yet whenever I read the book, Gregory Peck is and always will be the only suitable personification of Atticus. To be clear, the man is Atticus! Can I ever read a Jane Austin or Emily Bronte book again and not imagine Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, or Colin Firth as one of their main characters? I've never read "Gone with the Wind", though now thanks to the BBC, it's on my Cinquenta Tales list. How will I be able to force the theme song from the film out of my head when I open the book or imagine anyone other than Clark Gable and Vivienne Leigh as Rhett and Scarlet when I turn each page?
While I love, love, love to read, I also love, love, love the power of film. Stunning cinematography, powerful music, and moving performances are just as lasting as beautifully constructed words in a book. For example, I read "Precious" before I saw the film and loved the book, but Monique's "who is going to love me?" scene with Mariah Carey will haunt me forever. Of course, there are far more instances when Hollywood blows it in a huge way and absolutely destroys a good read (Rebecca, Time Traveler's Wife, Lovely Bones, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corelli's Mandolin, Memoirs of a Geisha, DaVinci Code to name a few!), but you have to admit when a director gets it right, there's nothing like watching one of your favorite stories come to life in full glory, on the big screen....
So check out the list. Don't do what I did and focus on a number. Focus on the content you've devoured....And let me know what you think was better for each title, Book or Film?
100 Books
I powered through the list and madly clicked off the titles I read. Kudos to my high school and college comparative literature teachers. Without their syllabi, my grand total would have been cut in half, but sadly, of the many I read, there are several I simply blew through on assignment. So, I need to re-read numerous classics not because I have a paper to write or a grade to nab, but to savor the talents of some incredible writers. Thank you BBC for creating the list, and Facebook for making it so easy to share. The timely viral push has inspired some great additions to my Cinquenta Tales List.
While going through the BBC list I confess the enormous impact Hollywood has had on my interpretation of literature. Truth be told, for many of the reads below, several of the characters or story lines are immortalized in my mind through the film's interpretation of the novels instead of the novels themselves. "To Kill a Mockingbird" will always be one of my all-time favorite books and yet whenever I read the book, Gregory Peck is and always will be the only suitable personification of Atticus. To be clear, the man is Atticus! Can I ever read a Jane Austin or Emily Bronte book again and not imagine Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, or Colin Firth as one of their main characters? I've never read "Gone with the Wind", though now thanks to the BBC, it's on my Cinquenta Tales list. How will I be able to force the theme song from the film out of my head when I open the book or imagine anyone other than Clark Gable and Vivienne Leigh as Rhett and Scarlet when I turn each page?
While I love, love, love to read, I also love, love, love the power of film. Stunning cinematography, powerful music, and moving performances are just as lasting as beautifully constructed words in a book. For example, I read "Precious" before I saw the film and loved the book, but Monique's "who is going to love me?" scene with Mariah Carey will haunt me forever. Of course, there are far more instances when Hollywood blows it in a huge way and absolutely destroys a good read (Rebecca, Time Traveler's Wife, Lovely Bones, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corelli's Mandolin, Memoirs of a Geisha, DaVinci Code to name a few!), but you have to admit when a director gets it right, there's nothing like watching one of your favorite stories come to life in full glory, on the big screen....
So check out the list. Don't do what I did and focus on a number. Focus on the content you've devoured....And let me know what you think was better for each title, Book or Film?
100 Books
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. (Tag other book nerds....
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
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
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
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
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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’s 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
75 Ulysses - 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
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
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
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
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