Ah, via Kottke, comes the kind of list I love: 1001 Books (fiction) That You Must Read Before Your Die. Kottke’s read 30 of them, here’s the one’s from the list I’ve read:
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
I’ve read 27. Kinda pathetic, actually, but I’ve got the same excuse as Kottke in that I most read non-fiction. I should mix in more fiction now that I think about it, maybe start a 2 for 1 system.
Imagine a powerful, moving memoir in which the writer is a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. Is that something you’d like to read? I would. Now imagine a story about someone who is “all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, with her biological family” and never ran drugs for anyone. Which story would you rather read? The first one, obviously, which is what Margaret Seltzer, also know as Margaret B. Jones, also realized and which is why Ms. Seltzer pretended to be the first instead of writing about the second. Now her “memoir”, “Love and Consequences” is being recalled. Paging James Frey?
Via Jason, the NY Times gets into the end of the year spirit by putting out their list of the “100 Notable Books of 2007″. Despite the fact that I consider myself an avid reader, I have embaressingly only read 2 books on the list:
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J.?K. Rowling
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. By Michael Chabon
In my defense, some of the books that the NY Times considers “notable” are crap but even still, I’d have thought I would have read more then just that. I bet my Dad’s got 50 or so crossed off, I’ll have to ask him. Also, unlike Jason, I can’t claim having a child as an excuse either. Oh well, I’ll do better next year.
Seth Mnookin, author of the good Hard News and the even better Feeding the Monster, got married. Congrats to him and his bride. (via The Big Lead)
Via Gabe Roth I learn that one of my favorite books, and one of the better books I’ve read on the Iraq War, Generation Kill is being turned into a 7 hour miniseries for HBO. Even better, its being co-written by David Simon and Ed Burns of “The Wire” fame. I don’t want to get my expectations up too high but I hope they do justice to the book. It’s really good.
As some may know I am leaving for Africa on Saturday. Its a two week trip, though chances are high I could die at any moment. Anyway I’ve decided to do something of a chronicle of the whole thing as really, how many chances do you get to go to Africa? This series will be known as “So this is Africa” for two reasons: 1) I think it sounds funny and appropriately awkward and 2) I did an IMDB search for “Africa” for inspiration and this was the best I could come up with.
Currently I am in the almost ready to think about packing stage of packing. I’ve gotten my shots (though haven’t gotten my malaria pills. oops) and thats about it. In considering my packing my biggest thought/desire is that I do not want to bring a lot of stuff over. I always, always over pack but not this trip, no sir. I’m bringing one backpack and one medium-sized bag and thats it.
The biggest problem with this dedication to packing light is not clothes selection but reading material. I like to read books. On a trip like this I imagine, in between avoiding death by hippo, there is going to be plenty of reading time. On the soul-numbing 15 hour flight over there in particular I’m going to want things to read. But books take up a lot of space and are heavy and once you are done with them they are just dead weight to be carried around. Thats no good, I cant bring 20 books with me over there and then drag them all over the place.
Inspired by my friend The Mexcian I think I’ve come up with a decent solution: printing out articles. I’ve long bookmarked various articles and things that I’ve been meaning to read but for one reason or another just haven’t, this trip could be the perfect way to clear out some of that backlog. Here are some pro’s and con’s of this strategy:
Pro:
- When I finish reading I can discard the printouts, saving me from having to carry them all over the place.
- I can catch up on my way too large articles backlog
- Articles can be nice to read because they are like little short stories, you dont need to put in a huge time commitment.
- If I am in dire need of kindling in the wilderness I will have lots of things that are easy to burn.
Con:
- At the beginning of the trip I’ll be carrying quite a lot of paper
- This is obviously very bad for Earth. I’m going to be printing out a lot of paper and then just throwing it away. I’ll recycle when I can but even still. Bad karma, at the least.
- I’m not sure what the printing limits are here at work but I imagine I’m fairly close to them.
I have two and 1/2 office days before departure and I’m printing off an average of 4 articles a day. Throw in a couple choice books and I could be good to go. Stay tuned for the next “So this is Africa”.
I walk to and from work every day. Its good exercise and enjoyable, though less so when raining or really hot. For a while my routine involved listening to jams on my iPod and zoning out, more recently I’ve been reading while I walk which has been a much more satisfying experience. I’ve wanted to increase my reading and the 20 minutes it takes me to get to work or home was essentially just dead time so its perfect.
I relate this to provide my own personal context as I pass on the news of Robert Bernocco, an Italian IT guy. I think reading is a productive thing to do on my commute, Mr. Bernocco blows me out of the water. On his commute he wrote a book. On his cell phone. True fact:
An Italian writer decided to put his mobile phone to good use during his daily commute to and from work — by writing a book.
Robert Bernocco, an IT professional took advantage of his travel time by writing a 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers), on his Nokia using the phone’s T9 typing system.
“It really was a time management issue. He had a book in him and really wanted to write it but found he just didn’t have the time to sit and do it on a computer,” said Gail Jordan, PR director at the book’s publishers, Lulu.com.
Writing in standard Italian rather than text-message shorthand, Bernocco divided his manuscript into short paragraphs, saved them on his phone and then downloaded them onto his home computer for proofreading and editing.
“Only a few years ago I would have struggled to find both the time and the publisher to enable me to create this book,” Bernocco said in a statement. “Thanks to my Nokia and Lulu, I am now proud to be a published author.”
Now I feel inadequate.
(via Lifehacker)
I just started reading the new Harry Potter book last night (a gift from my favorite person from New Jersey). Everything else has been put to the wayside while I finish it. If you tell me what happens at the end I’ll kill you. That is all.
The Guardian did a poll the other day asking the public to chose what the definitive book of the 20th Century was. George Orwell’s 1984 came out on top with 22% of the vote. Ok, solid choice. In order of publication date here are the Top 10 books Guardian readers felt defined the 20th century:
*Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
*The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
*The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
*Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
*The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
*Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
*The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
*The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
*Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
*Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Hmmmm. Which book sticks out there? Perhaps Bridget Jone’s Diary? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, but really, does it belong on this list? Me thinks not. Despite being an avid reader from this list I’ve only read, embarrassingly, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22…..and Bridget Jones’s Diary. So I guess who am I to talk?
(via Kottke)
The Associated Press asked the Presidential candidates what was the last fiction book they had read and while there were the usual answers (John Grisham) some are quite interesting. To wit:
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: ”The administration’s energy plan.”
California Rep. Duncan Hunter: ”The Democrats’ proposal to balance the budget.”
Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: ”An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore.
Well played sirs. The oddest though was Senator Clinton’s choice, ”Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Unless I am mistaken (and I’m not) “Team of Rivals” is a work of non-fiction, not fiction like the question asks. Maybe this is a very sly swipe at the plagerism allegations against Doris Kearns Goodwin (but somehow I doubt it).
(via The Plank)