Interesting Exercise

Stolen from a blog where it was borrowed from another blog...
Humbling to realize I haven't read nearly as much as I like to think I have.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place."



The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
American Gods*
Anansi Boys*
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir*
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things*
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex*
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose*
Neverwhere
1984*
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel*
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver*
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

More Millar

Millar is great fun, and the blurbs he gets on his books are incredible. How can you NOT want to read his stuff?!

Dave Mallett in 1967

Who doesn't love YouTube?!

The Taint of Corporate Caffeine

Please please please don't ignore Garth Stein's new book just because it will be staring at you from every Target, Wal-Mart, and liquor store in the wake of the news that Starbucks has picked it to be their next big 'sell.' The book is wonderful. Really. Read it.

Mo Willems Rocks

I bought a copy of Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late for Griffin whilst last in Powell's. The G-man loves it, along with all of Mo's books. For parents who have to read the same book three times a day for weeks on end, you can do no wrong with the Pigeon and the Knuffle.

More Audio

Listening to The Shining (remember, limited selection... though really, I think I last read the book in 1987, so it's damn near new to me), and I gotta give high marks to Campbell Scott for the narration. He also read Into the Wild, and his gravitas almost killed the whole story, but he is perfect for Mr. The King.

Photo by S. Alexie

A picture taken in front of the lending library at the Heathman Hotel. From left, Jay, Steve and I served as consultants to Chris, on the end, in setting up this one-of-a-kind hotel collection. The books are signed copies left by the authors that have stayed in the hotel over the last two decades. The collection is now available to browse on-line, thanks to Jay's tech savvy.

The best part about this photo though, is that it was taken by Sherman Alexie...

Judging Books By... Well, Their Covers

As tedious as it can be to see publishers pump out stab after stab at replicating the latest bestseller, it can be equally fun to watch them try to be 'subtle.' Check out these covers, and tell me the similarity is mere coincidence. Yeah, uh-huh. Ironically, Publishers Weekly hated the original...

A Good Character

The FRL has a small but growing collection of CD audio books, so I am a bit limited in what I can throw on during my commute. These items, however, HAVE reacquainted me with a writer I previously gave up on. Daniel Silva wrote a great debut spy thriller about a decade ago called The Unlikely Spy -- a crusty but crafty old British academic, the Enigma machine, Natzi's... a good ride. His next book, though, didn't last three chapters in my stack.

And yet, I listened to his newest, The Secret Servant, and enjoyed it enough to backtrack and begin to trail the franchise character, Gabriel Allon through Silva's fiction. Allon, an Israeli spy trained as a world-class art restorer, has a history that goes back to the hunt for the members of Black September. Having recently watched Spielberg's haunting Munich, I felt like I was jumping right back in with the story.

In the words of Pvt. Hudson, 'We're all gonna die, man!'

My dad sent this link out recently, and it is about as depressing as you can get. Certainly there appears to be a bit of a pessimism involved, but the fact that these are the words of a guy whose predictions have been largely correct, despite being branded as a bit of a loon, is more than a little frightening (especially for those of us with kids...)



On that happy note, I think I'm going to read Kunstler's new novel, World Made By Hand, because even his predictions about the end of oil and the environment as we know it suddenly seem optimistic!