What I Read Today

I opened up Google Docs today and found a bunch of documents called “What I Read Today,” all dated late last year. This is one of those things I do and then completely forget about. Anyway, I thought it was a neat idea (I think all my ideas are neat, which is a character flaw that I find adorable). So, this is what I read today:

• A short story by Stephen King entitled “A Very Tight Place.” It concerned two wealthy men who are business enemies and then one of them goes a little nuts and traps the other one in a port-a-potty, which he then tips over. It’s been modified so the man will die in there. I would call the story “good” and the description of the poop smell “gag-inducing.”
• A short article about the bailout and McCain’s reaction to it, from the New Yorker. Conclusion: his was not the reaction of a good President; if he wins we should all put our money under our mattresses.
• Five emails from Jen.
• 112 work emails.
• One jillion articles about Sarah Palin.
• A short article about Liz Smith, who I do not understand. She’s Perez Hilton for old people? Is that the deal? I’m surprised by her continued ubiquity. Everyone seems to know who she is, but why? Also, isn’t her gossip always wrong and/or akin to celebrity press releases? Why do I have so many preconceived notions about Liz Smith?

That is all. Wait, I can’t end that way, because that is how John Hodgman ends his posts.

Book Meme

(Stolen from the blog of a friend.)

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

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE. [Ed. - Ok, my underline button went away, the shortcut for it is not working, and I don't feel like editing the HTML to get it there so I am not doing this one.]

The List:

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
   
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible [Ed. - ALL of it? No. Much of it? Yes.]
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip 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. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
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
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 Meany – 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
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
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 – Arthur Ransome
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
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-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

I got 60. Granted, I read some of these so long ago I could not tell you a single thing about them, and thus they should probably not really count.

See Ro Read Three Books

I am imbued with childlike wonder, I hate writers, and the future is naked. Read all about it here.

Book log is up

Also, I put up my booklog: See Ro Read

You really have to read The Remains of the Day, it’s spectacular.