Memoirs

When I lived on the OTHER side of Wright St. and was childless, I loved to take late night walks in neighborhoods near downtown.  I was fascinated by the glimpses I would catch of other people's lives through their apartment windows.  Did they have photographs or paintings (or batik cloth) on the walls?  Were their shelves full of stacks of books or rows of DVDs?  I loved to see the myriad way people utilized their balconies.  Did they have one covered with window boxes?  Did they have a great chair to sit and read on?  Was it a collection of bikes and other athletic gear?   I was fascinated by what these glimpses told me about the inhabitants of these dwellings.  In the same way, memoirs can be fascinating because of that glimpse they give you into the way other people live.  These are the titles from the memoir section of 501 Must-Read Books.


  1.  Paula, Isabel Allende
  2.  Journal Intime, Genri-Frederic Amiel
  3.  Aubrey's Brief Lives, John Aubrey
  4.  Confessions, Augustine
  5.  Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir
  6.  My Left Foot, Christy Brown
  7.  The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Benvenuto Cellini
  8.  The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, Cyril Connolly
  9.  Boys: Tales of Childhood, Roald Dahl
10.  My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
11.  An Angel at My Table, Janet Frame
12.  The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
13.  Journals 1889-1949, Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
14.  Poetry and Truth: From My Own Life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
15.  Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, Edmund Gosse
16.  Ways of Escape, Graham Greene
17.  Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin
18.  84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
19.  Pentimento, Lillian Hellman
20.  Childhood, Youth, and Exile, Alexander Herzen
21.  The Diary of Alice James, Alice James
22.  Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Gustav Jung
23.  Diaries 1919-23, Franz Kafka
24.  The Story of My Life, Helen Keller
25.  The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe
26.  I Will Bear Witness, Bictor Klemperer
27.  In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming
28.  A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis
29.  The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay
30.  The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield
31.  The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
32.  The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
33.  Borrowed Time, Paul Monette
35.  My Place, Sally Morgan
35.  Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vladimir Nabokov
36.  Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi
37.  Memoirs, Pablo Neruda
38.  Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson
39.  Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje
40.  Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
41.  Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda
42.  Diary, Samuel Pepys
43.  Letters, Pliny the Younger
44.  Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
45.  Words, Jean-Paul Sartre
46.  Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
47.  Walden, Henry David Thoreau
48.  De Profundis, Oscar Wilde
49.  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
50.  Autobiographies, William Butler Yeats

I could think of no better book for a Busy Bibliophile than to read Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books.  I am currently reading it, and I must say, not only am I enjoying it as a memoir, it is also piquing my curiosity regarding other "Must Read" books on my list.   Do you have a favorite memoir?  Have your read any of these?  Let me know what you're thinking.

Novel T-shirts (Ha! Ha!)

I was flipping through my Real Simple magazine, when I found the most adorable T-shirts.  If you are a bibliophile and a clothing horse (like myself), you have to check out http://www.outofprintclothing.com/ .  This site sells men's and women's T-shirts with the cover art from well-known literary works on them.  Better yet, for every shirt you purchase, the company donates a book to a community in Africa.  Cute clothes, books, and doing good?  I LIKE it!!  Now...the only question is who can I sucker into buying one of these beauties for me?  (Man, I wish I knew about this site BEFORE Mother's Day).  And which one do I want-- 1984, The Catcher in the Rye, Atlas Shrugged?  Seriously..I love these shirts.

The Scarlet Letter- I SWEAR...the dog did eat my homework.

I'm only kidding, it is not the dogs' fault that I have not written in so long.  (Although I do like to blame most of the household problems on the dogs).  And I really did finish reading The Scarlet Letter ages ago.  It's just that, in true Busy Bibliophile style, I just haven't made the time to sit down and write about it.  This is a long-standing problem with me.  As a kid, I always loved to participate in our town's summer reading program.  Every summer I would sign up and be SO excited to start reading.  As a matter of fact, most summers I actually won those reading programs.  But here's the thing, I won them based on the number of books I would read in May...and maybe part of June.  Part of the program was not only reading the books, but writing a little summary of them to turn in as proof you'd read them.  I generally tired of this quickly, because the writing slowed down my reading.  Usually I picked reading another book to writing about the one I had just read.  So you can see that not much has changed with me since childhood.

Right now is garden time as well.  I have a 25 by 32ish plot at my mother's house.  Our agreement is I plant it and buy most of the seeds and plants.  She helps every now and then (watering mostly) and gets to share in the harvest.  It's a pretty good arrangement, since I live in a rental with a rather shady backyard.  This means that if the weather's nice and I'm not working, I am at my mother's house playing in the dirt.  So far I've planted lettuce, spinach, potatoes, broccoli, brussel sprouts, beets, bunching onions, and strawberries.  Onion sets, tomatoes, green beans, lima beans, sweet corn, and pumpkins are still to come.  Last year was our first year growing pumpkins, and we got a 70 lb. pumpkin!  I know my husband is itching to top that.  So between my naturally tendency to try and skip the writing to get to the reading and a rather sizeable garden, you might be able to understand how I've put off writing a blog entry for so long.  And if you don't believe that...my chihuahua ate my blog entry.