Leo

When I uncovered the birds this morning, Leo the cockatiel was on the bottom of his cage. It took monumental effort on his part to pull himself onto the lower perch, where he had to spread his wings to balance, unsteadily at that.

I called the emergency vets' office up in Huntersville, assured them he'd been perfectly normal until this morning, and found out that the avian vet would be in at 8, which gave me just enough time to get there same time as she did.

I'd decided on the way that it had to be his kidneys; all the evidence--Ezra's chronic kidney disease, Claudius's passing of crystals last month (turned out he didn't have a uti after all), even my son's suspected passing of stones/crystals back in March--everything pointed in that direction.

Blood work showed I was right--Leo's uric acid levels were in the 50s. Because Leo flew into my in-laws' garage several years back, we'd never known how old he was, but the vet thought he was already in his 20s, "a little old man with gnarly, gouty feet." Because of his age, because he'd been too old to tame by the time we got him, because the vet said she'd never had the luck treating cockatiels with kidney disease that she's had with conures, we agreed it would be best not to put him through the effort.

So I brought the cage back empty, with Leo inside a green cardboard box.

We will miss Leo's dancing--an activity his gnarly feet never curtailed. We will notice how much quieter the house is without him.

2008 Edition of 1001 Books: New Additons

The 2008 edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is out, and Ashleigh has posted the updated list in its entirety. The revised list is more international this time around; I've not heard of most of the books or authors in the updates, so the additions listed below should keep me from ever experiencing a sense of being well-read.

I hate that Rebecca West's The Birds Fall Down was cut from the revised list, am happy that Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children and Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays made the grade, and cannot understand the inclusion of Robert Merle's The Day of the Dolphin at all. And psst, Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness is a memoir.

Edited to add: And they took out The Brothers Karamazov! The horror!

The additions to the list (the few I've read in bold):

: Pre 1800 :

0002 : The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter . Anonymous *
0003 : The Tale of Genji . Murasaki Shikibu *
0004 : Romance of the Three Kingdoms . Luó Guànzhong *
0005 : The Water Margin . Shi Nai'an & Luó Guànzhong *
0007 : Tirant lo Blanc . Joanot Martorell *
0008 : La Celestina . Fernando de Rojas *
0009 : Amadis of Gaul . Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo *
0010 : The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes . Anonymous *
0012 : The Lusiad . Luís Vaz de Camões *
0013 : Monkey: A Journey to the West . Wú Chéng'en *
0015 : Thomas of Reading . Thomas Deloney *
0017 : The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra *
0018 : The Conquest of New Spain . Bernal Díaz del Castillo *
0019 : The Adventurous Simplicissimus . Hans von Grimmelshausen *
0051 : Anton Reiser . Karl Philipp Moritz *
0054 : A Dream of Red Mansions . Cao Xueqin *

: 1800s :
0065 : Henry of Ofterdingen . Novalis *
0066 : Rameau's Nephew . Denis Diderot *
0068 : Michael Kohlhaas . Heinrich von Kleist *
0077 : The Life and the Opinions of the Tombcat Murr . E.T.A. Hoffmann *
0084 : Eugene Onegin . Alexander Pushkin *
0089 : The Lion of Flanders . Hendrick Conscience *
0092 : Camera Obscura . Hildebrand *
0093 : A Hero of Our Times . Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov *
0098 : Facundo . Domingo Faustino Sarmiento *
0099 : The Devil's Pool . George Sand *
0113 : Green Henry . Gottfried Keller *
0116 : Indian Summer . Adalbert Stifter *
0151 : Pepita Jimenéz . Juan Valera *
0152 : The Crime of Father Amado . José Maria Eça de Queirós *
0155 : Martín Fierro . José Hernández *
0167 : The Regent's Wife . Clarín Leopoldo Alas *
0173 : The Quest . Frederik van Eeden *
0175 : The Manors of Ulloa . Emilia Pardo Bazán *
0178 : Under the Yoke . Ivan Vazov *
0179 : The Child of Pleasure . Gabriele D'Annunzio *
0180 : Eline Vere . Louis Couperus *
0184 : Thaïs . Anatole France *
0187 : Down There . Joris-Karl Huysmans *
0194 : The Viceroys . Federico De Roberto *
0202 : Compassion . Benito Pérez Galdós *
0203 : Pharaoh . Boleslaw Prus *
0206 : As a Man Grows Older . Italo Svevo *
0207 : Dom Casmurro . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis *
0210 : Eclipse of the Crescent Moon . Géza Gárdonyi *

: 1900s :
0212 : Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem . Emilio Salgari *
0214 : None but the Brave . Arthur Schnitzler *
0223 : The Call of the Wild . Jack London *
0224 : Memoirs of my Nervous Illness . Daniel P. Schreber *
0225 : The Way of All Flesh . Samuel Butler *
0230 : Solitude . Víctor Català *
0241 : The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Rainer Maria Rilke *
0250 : Platero and I . Juan Ramón Jiménez *
0261 : The Underdogs . Mariano Azuela *
0262 : Pallieter . Felix Timmermans *
0263 : Home and the World . Rabindranath Tagore *
0267 : The Storm of Steel . Ernst Jünger *
0272 : Life of Christ . Giovanni Papini *
0275 : Claudine's House . Colette *
0277 : The Forest of the Hanged . Liviu Rebreanu *
0288 : The New World . Heruy Wäldä-Sellassé *
0295 : Chaka the Zulu . Thomas Mofolo *
0299 : Under Satan's Sun . Geroges Bernanos *
0301 : Alberta and Jacob . Cora Sandel *
0306 : The Case of Sergeant Grischa . Arnold Zweig *
0326 : I Thought of Daisy . Edmund Wilson *
0333 : Monica . Saunders Lewis *
0334 : Insatiability . Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz *
0339 : The Return of Philip Latinowicz . Miroslav Krleza *
0341 : The Forbidden Realm . J.J. Slauerhoff *
0344 : Vipers' Tangle . François Mauriac *
0346 : Cheese . Willem Elsschot *
0347 : Man's Fate . André Malraux *
0359 : On the Heights of Despair . Emil Cioran *
0360 : The Bells of Basel . Louis Aragon *
0370 : War with the Newts . Karel Capek *
0376 : Rickshaw Boy . Lao She *
0379 : Ferdydurke . Witold Gombrowicz *
0380 : The Blind Owl . Sadegh Hedayat *
0388 : Alamut . Vladimir Bartol *
0392 : On the Edge of Reason . Miroslav Krleza *
0403 : The Man Who Loved Children . Christina Stead *
0404 : Broad and Alien is the World . Ciro Alegría *
0406 : The Harvesters . Cesare Pavese *
0410 : Chess Story . Stefan Zweig *
0412 : Joseph and His Brothers . Thomas Mann *
0417 : Pippi Longstocking . Astrid Lindgren *
0424 : Bosnian Chronicle . Ivo Andric *
0425 : The Tin Flute . Gabrielle Roy *
0426 : Andrea . Carmen Laforet *
0427 : The Death of Virgil . Hermann Broch *
0429 : Zorba the Greek . Nikos Kazantzakis *
0431 : House in the Uplands . Erskine Caldwell *
0438 : Midaq Alley . Naguib Mahfouz *
0439 : Froth on the Daydream . Boris Vian *
0440 : Journey to the Alcarria . Camilo José Cela *
0441 : Ashes and Diamonds . Jerzy Andrzejewski *
0445 : In the Heart of the Seas . Shmuel Yosef Agnon *
0446 : This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman . Tadeusz Borowski *
0463 : The Guiltless . Hermann Broch *
0464 : Barabbas . Pär Lagerkvist *
0474 : The Hive . Camilo José Cela *
0479 : Excellent Women . Barbara Pym *
0480 : A Thousand Cranes . Yasunari Kawabata *
0485 : The Lost Steps . Alejo Carpentier *
0486 : The Hothouse . Wolfgang Koeppen *
0489 : The Dark Child . Camara Laye *
0490 : A Day in Spring . Ciril Kosmac *
0495 : The Mandarins . Simone de Beauvoir *
0497 : Death in Rome . Wolfgang Koeppen *
0498 : The Sound of Waves . Yukio Mishima *
0499 : The Unknown Soldier . Väinö Linna *
0503 : The Burning Plain . Juan Rulfo *
0506 : The Tree of Man . Patrick White *
0508 : The Devil to Pay in the Backlands . João Guimarães Rosa *
0517 : The Glass Bees . Ernst Jünger *
0521 : The Manila Rope . Veijo Meri *
0522 : The Deadbeats . Ward Ruyslinck *
0528 : The Birds . Tarjei Vesaas *
0532 : Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon . Jorge Amado *
0536 : The Guide . R.K. Narayan *
0538 : Deep Rivers . José María Arguedas *
0542 : Down Second Avenue . Ezekiel Mphahlele *
0551 : The Magician of Lublin . Isaac Bashevis Singer *
0552 : Halftime . Martin Walser *
0554 : Bebo's Girl . Carlo Cassola *
0555 : God's Bit of Wood . Ousmane Sembène *
0556 : The Shipyard . Juan Carlos Onetti *
0563 : No One Writes to the Colonel . Gabriel García Márquez *
0565 : Memoirs of a Peasant Boy . Xosé Neira Vilas *
0569 : Time of Silence . Luis Martín-Santos *
0574 : The Death of Artemio Cruz . Carlos Fuentes *
0575 : The Time of the Hero . Mario Vargas Llosa *
0578 : The Third Wedding . Costas Taktsis *
0579 : Dog Years . Günter Grass *
0591 : Three Trapped Tigers . Guillermo Cabrera Infante *
0594 : Back to Oegstgeest . Jan Wolkers *
0595 : Closely Watched Trains . Bohumil Hrabal *
0597 : Garden, Ashes . Danilo Kis *
0601 : Death and the Dervish . Mesa Selimovic *
0602 : Silence . Shusaku Endo *
0603 : To Each His Own . Leonardo Sciascia *
0606 : Marks of Identity . Juan Goytisolo *
0612 : Miramar . Naguib Mahfouz *
0613 : Z . Vassilis Vassilikos *
0615 : The Manor . Isaac Bashevis Singer *
0618 : Day of the Dolphin . Robert Merle *
0621 : The Cathedral . Oles Honchar *
0637 : Jacob the Liar . Jurek Becker *
0643 : The Case Worker . György Konrád *
0644 : Moscow Stations . Venedikt Yerofeev *
0645 : Heartbreak Tango . Manuel Puig *
0646 : Seasons of Migrations to the North . Tayeb Salih *
0647 : Here's to You, Jesusa! . Elena Poniatowska *
0648 : Fifth Business . Robertson Davies *
0649 : Play It As It Lays . Joan Didion *
0651 : A World for Julius . Alfredo Bryce Echenique *
0656 : Cataract . Mykhaylo Osadchyl *
0660 : Lives of Girls & Women . Alice Munro *
0666 : The Twilight Years . Sawako Ariyoshi *
0667 : The Optimist's Daughter . Eudora Welty *
0676 : The Dispossessed . Ursula K. Le Guin *
0677 : The Diviners . Margaret Laurence *
0681 : The Port . Antun Soljan *
0683 : The Commandant . Jessica Anderson *
0684 : The Year of the Hare . Arto Paasilinna *
0686 : Woman at Point Zero . Nawal El Saadawi *
0695 : Blaming . Elizabeth Taylor *
0699 : Kiss of the Spider Woman . Manuel Puig *
0700 : Almost Transparent Blue . Ryu Murakami *
0702 : The Engineer of the Human Soul . Josef Skvorecky *
0703 : Quartet in Autumn . Barbara Pym *
0706 : The Wars . Timothy Findley *
0710 : The Beggar Maid . Alice Munro *
0711 : Requiem for a Dream . Hubert Selby Jr. *
0715 : The Back Room . Carmen Martín Gaite *
0720 : So Long a Letter . Mariama Bâ *
0723 : A Dry White Season . André Brink *
0725 : Fool's Gold . Maro Douka *
0727 : Southern Seas . Manuel Vásquez Montalbán *
0729 : Clear Light of Day . Anita Desai *
0732 : Smell of Sadness . Alfred Kossmann *
0737 : The House with the Blind Glass Windows . Herbjørg Wassmo *
0738 : Leaden Wings . Zhang Jie *
0739 : The War at the End of the World . Mario Vargas Llosa *
0742 : Couples, Passerby . Botho Strauss *
0752 : The Book of Disquiet . Fernando Pessoa *
0753 : Baltasar and Blimunda . José Saramago *
0759 : The Christmas Oratorio . Göran Tunström *
0760 : Fado Alexandrino . António Lobo Antunes *
0761 : The Witness . Juan José Saer *
0765 : Professor Martens' Departure . Jaan Kross *
0767 : Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel . Julián Ríos *
0771 : Democracy . Joan Didion *
0779 : The Young Man . Botho Strauss *
0780 : Love Medicine . Louise Erdrich *
0782 : Half of Man is Woman . Zhang Xianliang *
0787 : Blood Meridian . Cormac McCarthy *
0789 : Simon and the Oaks . Marianne Fredriksson *
0791 : Annie John . Jamaica Kincaid *
0794 : Ancestral Voices . Etienne van Heerden *
0795 : The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman . Andrzej Szczypiorski *
0800 : Memory of Fire . Eduardo Galeano *
0806 : Ballad for Georg Henig . Viktor Pasokov *
0810 : Of Love and Shadows . Isabel Allende *
0812 : All Souls . Javier Marías *
0814 : Black Box . Amos Oz *
0819 : Kitchen . Banana Yoshimoto *
0823 : The First Garden . Anne Hébert *
0824 : The Last World . Christoph Ransmayr *
0829 : Paradise of the Blind . Duong Thu Huong *
0831 : Gimmick! . Joost Zwagerman *
0832 : Obabakoak . Bernardo Atzaga *
0833 : Inland . Gerald Murnane *
0838 : The Great Indian Novel . Shashi Tharoor *
0846 : The Shadow Lines . Amitav Ghosh *
0853 : The Daughter . Pavlos Matesis *
0856 : The Laws . Connie Palman *
0857 : Faceless Killers . Henning Mankell *
0858 : Astradeni . Eugenia Fakinou *
0865 : Memoirs of Rain . Sunetra Gupta *
0869 : The Dumas Club . Arturo Pérez-Reverte *
0875 : All the Pretty Horses . Cormac McCarthy *
0876 : The Triple Mirror of the Self . Zulfikar Ghose *
0877 : Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture . Apostolos Doxiadis *
0880 : Before Night Falls . Reinaldo Arenas *
0882 : The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll . Álvaro Mutis *
0883 : Remembering Babylon . David Malouf *
0884 : The Holder of the World . Bharati Mukherjee *
0890 : The Twins . Tessa de Loo *
0894 : Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light . Ivan Klima *
0897 : Deep River . Shusaku Endo *
0904 : Our Lady of the Assassins . Fernando Vallejo *
0907 : Troubling Love . Elena Ferrante *
0908 : The Late-Night News . Petros Markaris *
0913 : Santa Evita . Tomás Martínez *
0923 : A Light Comedy . Eduardo Mendoza *
0924 : Fall on Your Knees . Ann-Marie MacDonald *
0927 : Margot and the Angels . Kristien Hemmerechts *
0929 : Money to Burn . Ricardo Piglia *
0938 : The Heretic . Miguel Deliber *
0941 : Dirty Havana Trilogy . Pedro Juan Gutiérrez *
0942 : Savage Detectives . Roberto Bolaño *
0945 : Pavel's Letters . Monika Moron *
0946 : In Search of Klingsor . Jorge Volpi *
0947 : The Museum of Unconditional Surrender . Dubravka Ugresic *
0948 : Fear and Trembling . Amélie Nothomb

: 2000s :
0949 : Bartleby and Co. . Enrique Vila-Matas *
0958 : The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay . Michael Chabon *
0960 : I'm Not Scared . Niccolò Ammaniti *
0961 : Soldiers of Salamis . Javier Cercas *
0967 : Snow . Orhan Pamuk *
0972 : The Namesake . Jhumpa Lahiri *
0973 : Vernon God Little . DBC Pierre *
0974 : The Successor . Ismail Kadare *
0975 : Lady Number Thirteen . José Carlos Somoza *
0978 : A Tale of Love and Darkness . Amos Oz *
0979 : Your Face Tomorrow . Javier Marías *
0981 : The Swarm . Frank Schätzing *
0982 : Suite Française . Irène Némirovsky *
0985 : The Book about Blanche and Marie . Per Olov Enquist *
0986 : Small Island . Andrea Levy *
0987 : 2666 . Roberto Bolaño *
0988 : The Line of Beauty . Alan Hollinghurst *
0989 : The Accidental . Ali Smith *
0991 : A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian . Marina Lewycka *
0992 : Measuring the World . Daniel Kehlmann *
0993 : Mother's Milk . Edward S. Aubyn *
0994 : Carry Me Down . M.J. Hyland *
0995 : Against the Day . Thomas Pynchon *
0996 : The Inheritance of Loss . Kiran Desai *
0997 : The Kindly Ones . Jonathan Littell *
0998 : Half of a Yellow Sun . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie *
0999 : The Reluctant Fundamentalist . Mohsin Hamid *
1000 : Falling Man . Don DeLillo *
1001 : Animal's People . Indra Sinha *

Also new:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Retreat Without Song by Shahan Shahnoor
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
Crossfire by Miyabe Miyuki

Final Read-a-thon Update

I've had a blast as I hope everyone else did. I read exactly 900 pages.

Wow, I could've finished Les Mis.


Completed during 22 hours that I read:

Was This Man a Genius? Julie Hecht

Requiem, Mass. John Dufresne

Partially read during the readathon:

When You are Engulfed in Flames. David Sedaris

My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles. Jane Bowles

The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories. Anton Chekhov

Everything That Rises Must Converge. Flannery O'Connor

Interpreter of Maladies. Jhumpa Lahiri

The Calling. Inger Ash Wolfe

Read-a-thon Update the Seventh

There's no way I'll finish it before the read-a-thon ends, but I'm now reading Inger Ash Wolfe's The Calling, a book about a serial killer that I'd have started last night if I hadn't been sidetracked by the new Dufresne.

Inger Ash Wolfe is a pseud for a "North American literary novelist," presumably a Canadian one. Figuring out The Calling's author has become a recent parlor game at Readerville. Last week someone linked to an Alice Munro interview which didn't rule out her switching to another genre of writing. The main character's name is Micallef--an anagram of Alice M F, possibly? Munro kept her first husband's name to write under, but her second husband's name starts with an F. Of course, she's known more for short stories than novels anyway.

Seventh reading update:

Inger Ash Wolfe's The Calling. 62 pages

Read-a-thon Update the Sixth

A shower. Breakfast. I started the new David Sedaris, which I'd rather not read all in one fell swoop, so I then turned to a deliciously weird story by Jane Bowles.

Sixth reading update

From David Sedaris's When You are Engulfed in Flames:
"It's Catching"
"Keeping Up"
"The Understudy"
"This Old House"
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?" 62 pages

From My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles:
"Camp Cataract" 42 pages

Read-a-thon Update the Fifth

Was within 50 pages of finishing my current book last night when my brain up and departed. Went to bed at 10 (I am soooo pathetic, I know), but set the alarm for 3. Took about 15 minutes for the brain to return to body and I've now finished a wonderful book I'll wait to review once the read-a-thon's over.

Fifth reading update

John Dufresne's Requiem, Mass. 316 pages

Total pages read to this point: 632 pages

Read-a-thon Update the Fourth

Any meaning is better than none. Ask any Catholic or Methodist or Hutterite or Hmong. You believe in a God who, in his exquisite loneliness, created the universe and little you. Or you believe that we, in our terrifying loneliness, created God. Doesn't matter which. Ask any Vietnamese child kneeling in the mud, praying, choking on her tears, feeling the hot muzzle of an M16 at the nape of her neck, hearing the screams of her grandparents, inhaling the sting of smoke and cordite, knowing that this soldier here behind you, dear, is about to make his own meaning by firing a burst of bullets through your head. At that moment there is no arrow of time for you, there is no there, no then. There is only this singularity, this Planck instant, the big bang. At that moment you are borrowing energy against time and shaping your brief life into a quantum of meaning.

--John Dufresne, Requiem, Mass. 168 pages