Author: KRidwyn

top 100 books…

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 16, 2012

I was thinking of copying @flexnib’s idea when I read her post, counting how many she’d read… and since reading @jobeaz’s post, I’m now even more interested to see how many I’ve read. So here goes… (and keeping with ‘tradition’, I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read…)

1984 by George Orwell, England, (1903-1950)
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)
A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910)
The Aeneid by Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Beloved by Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931)
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957)
Blindness by Jose Saramago, Portugal, (1922-2010)
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935)
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400)
The Castle by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911)
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986)
Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837)
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849)
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616)

Essays by Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592)

Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832)
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553)
Gilgamesh Mesopotamia, (c 1800 BC)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745)
Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
History by Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985)
Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952) (I have read Hunger Games, does that count?)
The Idiot by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
The Iliad by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Independent People by Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784)
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961)
King Lear by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC)
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942)
The Mathnawi by Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273)
Medea by Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987)
Metamorphoses by Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC)
Middlemarch by George Eliot, England, (1819-1880)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300)
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924)
The Odyssey by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Oedipus the King Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC)
Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292)
Othello by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986)
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002)
Poems by Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970)
The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817)
The Ramayana by Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC)
The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa, India, (c. 400)
The Red and the Black by Stendhal, France, (1783-1842)
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922)
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929)
Selected Stories by Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904)
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930)
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972)
The Stranger by Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960)
The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (c 1000)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930)
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500)
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
The Trial by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989)
Ulysses by James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, England, (1818-1848)
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957)

11 out of 100. But to confess further, I’ve also italicised the ones that I attempted – some, better than others. There were 5 of those. ‘Don Quixote’ I only really glanced at, and decided that I didn’t have the time… but War and Peace I started twice, giving up at around the same place both times, and the same with ‘Crime and Punishment’. I persevered very hard with both Chaucer and Dante, but eventually decided that they were just ‘too hard going’. And I almost finished Chaucer, too! But got busy towards the end of it.

I’m a little surprised though. I would have thought that Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas would have made the list, or even Oscar Wilde or H.G. Wells?

So anyway, that’s *my* take. How about you?

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The top 100 books of all time

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 16, 2012

#blogjune

Lazy Saturday

It was a rough night last night. Mr 3 decided to enjoy screaming, lots of times, very loudly, and for really no apparent reason. We woke this morning to discover that our bread was too old to be edible; difficult when all three of your cherubs like toast for breakfast.
So Hubby elected to stay home and fix the fence, to try and keep our dogs from escaping, and I took our three to Currimundi McDonalds for HotCakes and strawberry thick shakes. And I managed to catch up on yesterday’s #blogjune entry while they explored the playground. Then it was time for a quick shop before Mr 3’s appointment at Deanie’s Kids Cuts.

They have a great place there – designed specifically to keep kids entertained while their hair gets cut. Essential when the child getting his hair cut is my Mr 3. He’s getting better, I must admit. And let’s face it – for any little kid, a stranger approaching their head with scissors, is probably a little on the nightmare-inducing side of things! Anyway, hair cut over, we came home. It was a beautiful day, with very little wind, so the kids and I spent time outside. Miss 7 built a sandpit tunnel for the very first time (quite an accomplishment when your younger brother likes filling in holes in the sandpit!) and Miss 4 did *not* fall off the trampoline, and Mr 3 – of course – terrorised the fish in our fish pond.

Back inside when the wind picked up, I was soundly thrashed by Miss 4 at Uno (she’s actually getting very good at it!) and so the afternoon progressed.

I don’t know about you, but I love ‘lazy’ Saturdays! Days when I don’t turn on the computer until after the kids are in bed – just so darn precious!

And now, having caught up on my #blogjune entries, its back into it. Work beckons. See you tomorrow, dear readers!

Tags autism, Child, Children, Family

#blogjune

Fishing in a pool

My husband is an excellent fisherman. He’s been fishing since he was knee- high to a grasshopper, and he’s very very good at it. Spending the majority of his teenage years as a local on North Stradbroke Island didn’t hurt either; there’s not much else to do over there than surf and fish. So, that being said, he is an excellent fisherman.
Enter Miss 7 into the story. She got her first fishing rod for Christmas when she was 2. Yes, 2. Years old. Okay… Six months later, she had caught her first fish. She also caught the ‘fishing bug’. She will, also, be an excellent fisher woman, I think.
Enter Miss 4. Yes, you probably guessed it; she also received a fishing rod for Christmas when she was 2. And again, had caught her first fish by 2 and a half. So the tradition was set.
Then Mr 3 was born, and Hubby got a new job. One that left me, virtually, a single mum. That was how little we saw him. Which was sad. And so Mr 3 got his fishing rod only a few months ago, for his third birthday. He’s been out with Hubby once, and he screamed so much when the boat was moving that he apparently put himself to sleep. Coping mechanism, apparently. I was horrified when I heard what had happened on their return. To think that he was *that* distressed, that to cope he had to put himself to sleep?!! Crazy! Insane!
Needless to say, they haven’t been out together again since. Sad, really. So Mr 3 is yet to catch his first fish. 🙁
On the upside though, he loves the idea of fishing, so he’ll probably get there eventually. He loves watching the fish swimming around in mine and Miss 7’s fish tanks, catching computer fish on the PS2, and if allowed to, will spend hours and hours playing with the water, the rocks, and the poor terrorized fish in the fishpond out the front of our main bedroom.
So yesterday, when I took an hour or so out of ‘work’ and visited my next-door neighbour, we sat and chatted while Miss 4 and Mr 3 played near her pool. Mr 3, with fishing rod in hand.
Very cute, in my opinion!

Tags autism, Child

#blogjune Bloxham Marketing Life Random thoughts Work

Parenting

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 14, 2012
2 Comments on Parenting

Do all parents second-guess themselves? Or is it just me?

I started this #blogjune challenge intending to explore the journey I’m on as a mum of a newly diagnosed autistic son. But today, I spent close to an hour in the emergency waiting room of Caboolture Hospital with Miss 4. She’d been at family day care with Mr 3, playing on one of their scooters, had fallen off and sliced open a deep gash just below her mouth. So she and I spent time at the hospital, while Mr 3 played back at Day Care, and my work continued to pile up back at St Paul’s, where I had decided to have a rare, kid-free day, to catch up on the mountain of work not yet completed.
And that’s when I started thinking about the whole ‘mother guilt’ thing again.

Miss 4 is with me 7 days a week, with the exception of ‘grandma playgroup’ when she’s not allowed to come to Mr 3’s ECDP. It’s very very very rare for me to organize a day of childcare for her (and Mr 3) because not only is it rather expensive, but also because Mr 3, being autistic, doesn’t like changes to his routine.
So when I do, and she gets hurt, I wonder ‘would that have happened if she had been with me?’ (No, because I don’t like scooters because they’re dangerous, so we don’t have any here at home… but that’s not to say that she could have hurt herself some other way…) I wonder ‘should I have put her in care today, or just kept her with me… seeing as I didn’t get the work done that I wanted to, anyway’. I wonder ‘what sort of mother puts her child in care when, really, she doesn’t absolutely *have* to?’ I wonder ‘this is the second time in the space of a few months that Miss 4 has ended up in Emergency… is this coincidence, or an indicator of something deeper, that I should be aware of but am not due to my busyness?’ I wonder how I’m going to catch up on the work I’m missing out on doing. I wonder if by some strange turn of events, @fionawb might just so happen to wander down to Emergency, and we might meet IRL. I wonder why the Caboolture Emergency is so drastically different to Nambour Emergency; where we were late last year… or Caloundra Emergency; where I’ve been with Miss 7… and Mr 3. I wonder if other mums visit Emergencies as much as I seem to; or if my kids are just clumsier than average; or if I’m one of those hypochondriac mothers who’s always imagining medical conditions on her kids.
And (as an aside) I wonder where the St Paul’s ad is, that we’ve been paying for for over a year now, that is meant to be playing in the Caboolture Hospital Emergency waiting room…)

Anyway… that was my afternoon. I want to thank my online friends for their messages and tweets wishing Miss 4 well. Your support means so much to me!!! It’s unexpected, and therefore all the more treasured. Thanks for being there for me! You guys rock!!!
So now, it’s late, and my inbox is still beckoning. I love my work… but can see that the day is coming where I’m going to need some staff…

#blogjune

Red riding hood

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 13, 2012

I blogged last week about how Mr 3 was more than happy to play two player against himself on the PS2. Today, he took that idea to the next level.
Maybe it was buying ‘Shrek Super Slam’ last week, maybe it was watching ‘Hoodwinked’ as a family on the weekend; I’m not entirely sure. But this morning, while I’m getting us ready for Miss 7’s excursion, Miss 4 to ‘Grandma playgroup’ and Mr 3 to his ECDP and Speech Therapy, he sets up the Playstation, turns on the tv, and plays a 4-player game, by himself, on aforementioned Shrek SuperSlam. So I have visions of ‘The Amazing Race’ (it’s the same music) while I’m hearing “Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood! Versus… Red riding hood!”
Okay…

Tags autism, Child, Playstation

#blogjune family anecdotes

Boundaries

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 12, 2012

Mr 3 has always been a climber. And a runner. He just doesn’t recognize boundaries the way that other kids do.
In the past couple of days (of course, only since I’ve been sick and haven’t had the energy to stop him / teach him that it’s wrong / it’s dangerous) he’s taken to pulling all of the clothes out of his wardrobe, then using the shelves to climb up as high as he can before he’s discovered. And the shelves are deep, so he crawls right inside and can’t be seen unless you’re looking. Luckily the evidence, spilled all over the floor, gives it away…

This is the shelf he climbed to today. It’s easily one and a half meters off the ground.

Now how am I meant to stop this??! Ideas, anyone?

Tags autism, Child

Uncategorized

Illness

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 11, 2012
4 Comments on Illness

I’m sick. And I don’t like being sick. But it was inevitable – a week of little people kindly sharing their germs with me has led to my finally succumbing. Okay – late nights with work, with study and assignments etc haven’t helped, but be that as it may, I am sick. I feel awful. And I’m not really up to sharing about my boy today. So I’ll just post this – me reading to my younger cherubs during our last holiday to Hervey Bay. Photo taken by Miss 7.

See you tomorrow, dear readers.

#blogjune

Tech-savvy kids

Post author By KRidwyn
Post date June 10, 2012

I love the fact that my children are digital natives. The screen of my MacBook Pro is covered with little fingerprints from when they’ve been using my iPad / iPodTouch, and have forgotten that they’re not on them anymore. When it comes to technology, their brains don’t ask “can I?”, but instead “how do I?” – they automatically assume that anything is possible. Whereas I, and others of my (and surrounding!) generations ask “IS that possible?”
Mr 3, in particular, amazes me with what he works out. (And I find it funny when Miss 7 and Miss 4 also ask, “How did you do that?’!) Case in point: the app Vid Rhythm. It’s a cute little app, making cute little video clips from various sounds that you copy. Mr 3 figured it out by himself – and then kindly saved me a copy of his creation. I had no idea that he was even playing with this! He was on the iPod Touch in the lounge room, while I was making dinner one night. I only discovered it after he was in bed that night:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldTKj6r-XYw&feature=channel&list=UL]