Today In History - January 5th

5th January, 1950: Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” hits #1 on the Billboard Pop Charts. It sold over 8 million copies and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1985.

You can find more Today In History here.

All-Time 100 Novels - Time Magazine

Two Time critics picked the 100 best English language books, their time frame goes from 1923 to the present.

**The titles in green, I've read. The ones I've reviewed will be linked. The ones that I will love to read will be in red.

The Adventures of Augie Marsh (1953) by Saul Bellow
All The King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm (1946) by George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume
The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds (1938) by Flann O'Brien
Atonement (2002) by Ian McEwan
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories (1946) by Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian (1986) by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited (1946) by Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep (1935) by Henry Roth
Catch -22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange (1963) by Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) by William Styron
The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time (1951) by Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
A Death in the Family (1958) by James Agee
The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey
Dog Soldiers (1974) by Robert Stone
Falconer (1977) by John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles
The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
Gone With The Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
Housekeeping (1981) by Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas (1962) by V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies (1955) by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving (1945) by Henry Green
Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children (1940) by Christina Stead
Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
Money (1984) by Martin Amis
The Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs
Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson
Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 (1948) by George Orwell
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory (1939) by Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike
Ragtime (1975) by E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
Red Harvest (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth
The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964) by John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart (1959) by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick
Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen (1986) by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys

Today In History - January 4th

4th January, 1998 : North American ice storm of 1998 begins in Canada with steady freezing rain falling over an area of several thousand square miles of Eastern Ontario, including Ottawa and southern Quebec, northern New York, and northern New England (including parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine).

You can find more Today In History by visiting here.

Finished an Old Favourite

December wasn't a very good month for our family. Our cat Bobo who had been suffering for the past few months with kidney and colon problems, was getting worse, so J and I decided to put him down. It was a very hard decision, but one that was the best for him. That same day I got a phone call from my sister letting me know that our father was in the hospital with heart problems and there could be a possibility of a heart attack. And thanks to God, that did not happen. He later had a quadruple bypass, and he is now resting and recuperating at home, and we're hoping that on his next visit to the cardiologist, he'll be given the okay to travel. Not too mention the craziness of the holiday season, and having both the munshkins come down with the flu, I needed I picker me upper.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I'm a huge Jan Karon fan. I try to (re)read her Mitford series any chance I get. And a visit with Father Tim was what I needed. I spent the past few days (re)reading At Home in Mitford. You can find my review here. Because I started this book just before the New Year, I'm not counting it.

Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008

As you can see I love checking out the best and worst lists. Here's another one...

Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008, according to Time Magazine.

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2. Lush Life by Richard Price
3. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
5. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. Personal Days by Ed Park
7. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
8. When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
9. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
10. The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

There's help out there!

I came across this at Marg's blog, and I thought it would be a wonderful idea. It just may help me. Because, let's just say I'm a challenge-a-holic and I need all the help I can get with the amount of challenges that I signed up to participate.

Chris of Book-a-rama is hosting The "I Suck at Challenges" Challenge. There are two type of levels you can join: the slackers or the 12 steppers. I'm definitely a 12 stepper.



To get more info or to sign up for the The "I Suck at Challenges" Challenge click here.

It's that time of year

It's that time of year when J and I start thinking about our family vacation. The past two years we've spent a week up at Sauble Beach. The kids love being so close to the beach, and we're driving distance to many different places. Last year we went to a pioneer village, we went to Tobermory where we took a boat tour, we took them to the drive-in, and many trips to the beach, and their favourite roasting marshmallows over a camp fire.

But this year we want to experience something different, so I've been looking around. I came across this list this morning, I found it at Aol Canada Travel, Top Budget-Friendly '09 Destinations.

Here they are:

1. Washington, D.C., U.S.A. - Major attractions: many monuments and museums, Smithsonian and National Monuments, and they are free! Which is a bonus. But I don't think the kids would be too interested in visiting museums.

2. Waiheke Island, New Zealand - I've seen pictures and it's gorgeous.

3. Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, U.S.A - The National Park is filled with hot springs, heat vents, sulfur ponds and dormant volcanoes, yeah fun! There are eight campsites and there's also one lodge from what I understand. And there's also B&B's and motel's surrounding the park.

4. Istanbul, Turkey - I would love to visit Istanbul! But not with the kids.

5. Civil Rights Trail, U.S.A. (Selma to Montgomery, Alabama) - This sounds interesting, but once again how much fun would it be for children under ten years old.

6. Cartagena, Colombia - Another fun location to visit without the kids.

7. Cape Town, South Africa - Yet another place to visit without the kids.

8. Berlin, Germany - Same comment as 6 & 7. Am I a terrible parent?

9. Belfast, Northern Ireland - Visiting Northern Ireland & Ireland has always been on my "To Visit List". But J has no desire to go there. Something to do with the rainy weather, go figure.

10. Angkor Wat, Cambodia - Looks gorgeous, but I'm starting to sound like a broken record, not with the kiddies.

11. Waterton National Park, Alberta, Canada - Now this one may be doable. Our kids are the outdoorsy type. They get it from their father, but I get to tag along and have fun too. I'm just not a huge fan or sleeping on the ground. Just imagine: icy blue lakes, an ancient gully surrounded by mountains and glaciers. But is it in the budget.

Oh well, I'll keep on looking.

Today In History - January 3rd

3rd January, 1924 : A precious treasure was found located near Luxor, Egypt, where King Tut’s tomb was discovered two years prior. This special object was a stone sarcophagus, which contained a mummy inside of Pharaoh Tutankhamen of Egypt.

You can find more Today In History here.

EW Best & Worst Books of 2008

According to Entertainment Weekly these are the best books of 2008:

1. SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, Uwem Akpan
2. THE BOOK OF DAHLIA, Elisa Albert
3. OLIVE KITTERIDGE, Elizabeth Strout
4. LUSH LIFE, Richard Price
5. BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON, Dash Shaw
6. THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET, Margot Livesey
7. DISQUIET, Julia Leigh
8. THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE, David Wroblewski
9. AMERICAN WIFE, Curtis Sittenfeld
10. WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K., Irina Reyn

And here are the worst:

1. CHASING HARRY WINSTON, Lauren Weisberger
2. THE LACE READER, 
Brunonia Barry
3. THE GARGOYLE, 
Andrew Davidson
4. BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, James Frey
5. A WOLF AT THE TABLE, Augusten Burroughs

Today In History - January 2nd

2nd January, 1929 : The United States and Canada signed an agreement to protect Niagara Falls.

You can find more Today In History entries here.

Slow Cooking Thrusday

It's the first Thursday of the year! And it's time for Slow Cooking Thursday, hosted by Sandra of Diary of a Stay at Home Mom.

Wine-Braised Veal(osso bucco) Shanks

3 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp each salt and pepper
8 pieces veal hind shank (1 1/2 inches/4cm thick) about 4 1/2 lbs (2 kg)
4 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp crumbled dried rosemary
3/4 cup white wine or low-sodium chicken stock
3/4 cup low-sodium chicken stock
1 tsp grated lemon rind
1/2 cup halved pitted green olives
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp capers, rinsed
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

In shallow dish, stir together flour and half each of the salt and pepper. Tie kitchen string around each veal shank; press into flour mixture to coat. Reserve remaining flour. In skillet, heat 1 tbwp of the oil over medium-high heat; brown veal, in batches. Transfer to slow-cooker.

Drain fat from skillet; add remaining oil. Fry onion, garlic, rosemary and remaining salt and pepper over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 5 minutes. Scrape into slow-cooker.

Add wine, stock and lemon rind to slow-cooker. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours or until shanks are tender.

Add olives, lemon juice and capers. Whisk together remaining flour with 3 tbsp water; stir into slow-cooker. Cover and cook for 15 minutes or until thickened. Sprinkle with parsley.

Today In History - January 1st

1st January, 1966 : Canada Introduces it's earnings-related social insurance program the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) . At age 65 The CPP provides regular pension payments calculated as 25% of the average contributory maximum over the last 5 years.

For more Today In History click here.