From Ramona

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.

3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7 . Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 . The Complete works of Shakespeare (Like Purplesque and Ramona I've tried, and failed. Evidently I'm uncouth)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit --J.R.R. Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveler's Wife

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 . The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - hated LWW, why would I toture myself with the sequels?

34 . Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune- Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White How could you not love this book?

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town like Alice- Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet- William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Happy 10th Anniversary

I love you sweetie. You have been my friend, partner, and true love. You are a great husband and a loving father. You make me want to be better than what I am now. 19 years ago, we exchanged class rings and now look at us. I am truly a lucky person to have you in my life.

Thank you

Great delivery day

3 deliveries today. Total time spent pushing with the patients (I push with my patients, I don't have the nurses start pushing them, so this is a true total time pushing): 12 minutes.

YES!

Have I mentioned that I love multips?

Done!

Take THAT ABOG! I am done, done, DONE!!!!

Neener!

I HATE ABOG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



My head is spinning from entering 210 deliveries and about 140 surgeries from last year.

I'm beginning to think board certification isn't worth it. And now there is continual recertification, which, amazingly enough, the established docs are grandfathered out of needing to do.

Garump!

Did I mention how much I loathe ABOG?

Tattoo, Tattoo!!!

Watched a documentary last night on tatts. Interesting.

As a doctor, you see lots of tatts on people. Some are truly works of art and some...well...should be regretted. I STILL remember a tramp stamp (a tatt on the small of your back) on a patient when I was a med student. "Exit only" with an arrow pointing down. Sigh. Just recently I saw a beautiful tatt - footprints with her kids' names on her foot.

Just remember ladies, that young, flat abdomen you have now will not be that way later. Most women get stretch marks and those make tatts look ugly. And please don't put one right down by the pubic hairline - it's a bitch to sew skin when there is a tatt to match up.

And also, if you have lots of tatts, no fair whining about needles and injections. You will have ZERO credibility. Trust me.

The most amazing thing

Even though I have literally seen thousands of births, it still amazes me.

The woman is pushing and at first, just a smidgen of head is visible if I'm separating the labia. Then after some more pushing, the head is seen without my assistance (at this point, I'm frequently styling the hair into a ponytail/mohawk). Then a few more pushes, and she's crowning.

And then it's done. Once the baby crowns, it's pretty quick. But it's so cool to see the head come out, turn, and then the rest of the body follows.

Just beautiful.