To My Mom Part IX: The Purge

So if you are "friends" with me on Facebook, you've noticed that I've been going through my moms stash of greeting cards and mailing out all the silly inappropriate ones to those who have requested one, and even some to those who haven't. So why have I been doing this? Well, after two and a half years, Dad and I are finally cleaning out her office, to convert it into the spare/guest bedroom/my office. This means everything needs to be taken out and gone through. Big task. I've gone through her CD collection and digitized the ones I want to keep and boxed them all up. Dad has gone through her desk and organized all her stationary (there's a lot - she loved shopping at Staples). We have sticky notes and pencils to last two lifetimes. We've been finding interesting things. Something dad found was three note pages with her list of books to read, movies to watch, and a list of 10 books from me. She had copied the list from one of those Facebook things that people fill out. It was one that asked for the 10 books that have influenced or stuck with you the most. So it isn't a list of my favorites, but influential. She kept it. This list is probably 10 years old. Why? She must have thought it important to know about me. She was a voracious reader. And perhaps thought that reading the books that have stuck with me, would bring her insight into me or closer to me. I'll never know, because I didn't know she kept the list in the first place.

Here's the list: She named it Kelly's List
1. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. Christy by Catherine Marshall
7. A Town Called Alice by Nevil Shute
8. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
9. Canery Row by John Steinbeck
10. The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind

The list is still pretty accurate. However, I would change that last one now. Once I got to book 5 in the series, I got tired of the preachiness of the main character and the fact that none of them learned or evolved and seemed very two-dimensional. I got bored. There's a new series (book one: Outlander was published in 1991) I would replace it with. The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon. For one, I finished the series (she's writing book 9 now), second, and more importantly, it's the series I was reading when she died. That may sound very creepy, but, I had started reading them maybe three months before she passed, and I finished them a few months after she passed. They got me through a very difficult time. I would read them at night into the wee hours of the morning during the last month when she was really sick and in the hospital. And I would read them till my eyes couldn't focus anymore and fatigue would put me to sleep in under 5 minutes after she died. It was the only way to get sleep and not have my mind constantly thinking and turning. So I guess they have a special place in my heart now for getting me through that time.

It will be interesting to see what else we discover in moms old office.

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