big, big reads

It's been a busy week, what with trips to Vegas, looming deadlines, a global warming kerfuffle, and such. It's still busy, which is why I probably won't be posting again to the cocktail party until Friday or Saturday. In the meantime, on the off-chance you missed them (or think I'm a slacker), here's what I've been blogging about over at Twisted Physics:

-- Loop the Loop (closed timelike curves and an X Files episode)
-- Weird Science (an ode to crackpottery)
-- GLAST-nost (classical composer pens prelude inspired by
-- A Bug's Life (extremophiles will inherit the earth)
-- A Legacy Lives On (Jodrell Bank is saved! Huzzah!)
-- X Marks the Spot (astronomers have had x-ray vision for years)
-- Splitting Image (Hugh Everett's Many Worlds doctrine is the topic of shiny new film)

Of course, if you're feeling particularly ambitious, there's always that quaint tradition of reading books instead of blogs. The National Endowment for the Arts sponsors The Big Read, and via Tom at Swans on Tea, I came across this book meme of the NEA's top 100 books. (A couple of the NEA's choices are a bit, um, questionable, but hey -- reading is fundamental!) The rules are simple:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
3) Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [I am the child of fundamentalists. Of course I've read the entire Bible. Twice.]
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 May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [English major; 'nuff said.]
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 0 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 [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
*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 [oh, the wasted hours of my life I'll never get back]
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 [saw the film]
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 [not a fan. sorry.]
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [absolutely brilliant]
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 [what the hell is this doing on here?!?]
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 [again, why the duplication?]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The upshot? I read too damn much. Seriously, many of the books on the list I read while still in college,  majoring in English lit, when it was my "job" to be well-read and -- let's face it -- I had a lot more leisure time on my hands. But I'm still a voracious reader. So is the Spousal Unit. Which explains why our loft is constantly in danger of collapsing under the weight of the all the books. Then again, I've only read two books on Gwyneth Jones' recent Top 10 list of science fiction by women writers: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, and Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary.

I have far less time on my hands these days, this week in particular. But I did find time to play with Wordle, like all the other cool science bloggers. Here's the Wordle for my new book:

I am such a slacker.

Comments

[Waterdog]

I recommend Watership Down. I see you have no intention of reading it and I think you should. But other than that, kudos on doing so well on this list. I don't think I would even make half of it and you've nearly completed it.

[Jack Hamilton]

The book "Cold Comfort Farm" is much, much better than the movie. It's one of the funniest books I have ever read.

Speaking of funny, why no Wodehouse, regarded by some as the finest writer of the 20th century?

[Ms. Krieger]

I admire your literary experience...and sympathize with the book weight problem (how DID you move them all to LA? That must've been insane and hugely expensive. Oy.)

I'd like to recommend another to feed your addiction: The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks. Again, you don't seem to have read it, or intend to. But you should. I'm not one for horror novels - this may be the only one I have ever read. But it is so artfully done - even my mother liked it. Iain Banks is a master of the psychological conflict. Highly recommend it.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

I'm amused that everyone seems distressed that I haven;t read THEIR favorite book, nor have any intention of doing so. C'mon, people, I've read three-fourths of the books on the list (a mere fraction of the number of books read thus far in my lifetime)! And there are more new books being published every time also demanding my attention. Something's gotta give!

I _do_ have one way out of the dilemma: outsourcing. The Spousal Unit has actually read most of the books on the list that I haven't read. See, this is why we complement each other! (He also highly recommends THE WASP FACTORY, incidentally.) Between the two of us, we've got that infernal Top 100 list covered.

That said, I think I will actually add COLD COMFORT FARM to my "to read" list, since Jack recommends it as funny, and is also a Wodehouse fan, so he must know from funny. :)

[prospero]

It's impossible to read too much.

Cold Comfort Farm? Great movie. Watership Down? Plague Dogs is better.

Wodehouse? If you want tragically funny Brits, there's Evelyn Waugh and William Boyd and Kingsley (f**king) Amis, noticeably absent. No Hemingway would be a blessing, but no Cormac is ridiculous.

The Little Prince is drivel, but Night Flight by the same guy (pronounced gee en franche) is terrific.

Jane Eyre? Skip down to Wuthering Heights. Owen Meany and not Garp?

Making a a list of this sort without Huckleberry Finn is pretty much like wearing a hospital gown without rear closure. Oh, there's Don DeLillo, Gunter Grass, Lampedusa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mark Helprin, TC Boyle, Nabokov, Stendahl (who beats Flaubert all to hell), Homer, Peter Matthiesson, Walter Mosely, Chaucer (whom we have to thank for the blessing of Procol Harum), Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Raymond Chandler, the woman that wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell whose name I can never remember, Margaret Atwood, John Gardner, Mikhail Bulgakov (who didn't write the Great American Novel but did write the Great Russian Novel), Thomas Wolfe (who, in fact, wrote the Great American Novel), Homer, Joseph Conrad, Henry David Thoreau, and bada beda.

What's truly hilarious about the list is that it includes William Kennedy Toole and not Walker Percy. If Confederacy of Dunces is remotely in a class with The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, my education was a shard of ill-spent youth.

Hamlet's good, but you can just read the second soliloquy. The greatest Shakespeare are Richard II, Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

Reading lists, like comparisons, are odious. I say, read everything, but skip the non-fiction. Perversely, truth is best found in fiction.

But, you know, I'll bet the First Librarian has this list tacked on the wall in Crawford, next to the Clearing Brush list.

[Susan Coleman]

Great blog. Of course, by now you have probably discovered that this is not the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read but rather one from the U.K. and compiled by the BBC. In its Big Read, the NEA (neabigread.org) provides grants to communities for “one book, one community” programs. The communities then choose among a few dozen (not 100) books and distributes free resources for book group and classroom discussions. Just thought NEA and the Big Read communities should get their just due!

[Alexziller]

Hello, I am going to do the very obvious thing, i.e. wondering why my favorite one isn't on the list and warmly recommending it ;-)

Umberto Eco - The name of the rose

Pax Vobiscum!

[Jim Lehane]

I have been doing a similar thing except I have compiled 4 different lists of 100 greatest books (and 1 of top 10) totaling 306 books. Good job reading so many on the list before even looking at it though. Many of the books I read (and loved) were only a result of my list. I have compiled them here if you are interested:

http://www.dinojim.com/literature.htm