(Mostly) Annotated Books of Pretension

Well, that whole thing clearly didn't work out, did it? The first of the year hit, and with it came mega-lots of overtime. I have been storing up all of my brilliance so as to share it with the Internets some day, but until that day arrives, I felt compelled to partake in a meme I picked up from Evil Bender. I would link to the original, but you can click through if you really want to, and I am too lazy. Speaking of having one's English degree(s) revoked, failure to properly cite might be due cause... :-)

Italics: I have read
Strikethrough: Started, never finished
Normal: Never even tried

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina (seemed like a good idea at the time)
* Crime and Punishment (a labor of sheer stubbornness)
* Catch-22 (I was reading a friend's copy over at his house, set it down, and then never saw him again. Not by design or anything; it just kind of... happened.)
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion (It's no There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Holiday for readability...)
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote (In Spanish - beat that!!)
* Moby Dick (too... much... whale)
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary (I always associate this title with hidden lady-parts)
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre (I know I read both this and Wuthering Heights when I was younger, but now I can't for the life of me keep them straight. I think Wuthering is the one with the crazy wife, right?)
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov (see note on Anna Karenina)
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (never heard of it, but it sounds awesome...)
* War and Peace (see note on all Russian novels I have ever read)
* Vanity Fair (Anyone else just adore Thackeray?)
* The Time Traveler’s Wife (Is that anything like The Time Machine? Mmm... delicious, plump, lazy Eloi...)
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations (Best... Dickens... Evar)
* American Gods (did I mention I love Gaiman? srsly.)
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (pretty funny when it's not being all self-indulgent... which is heartbreakingly often)
* Atlas Shrugged (still can't think of my attempt to read this monstrosity without getting visuals of that terrible, terrible scene written by the Ayn Rand fanboy... you know the one. Ew.)
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (Only if reading through the first chapter in Barnes and Noble counts as an attempt to read the book...)
* The Canterbury tales (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to to roote...)
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (How can anyone NOT read this?)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (see note on Catch-22)
* Brave New world (Ford is in his flivver and all's right with the world!)
* The Fountainhead (ugh, TWO by her? I SO wish I could rinse my brain out.)
* Foucault’s Pendulum (want to read)
* Middlemarch (Did you know that George was really a woman?!)
* Frankenstein (the monster is so much more articulate in the book than he has been in any movie... why is that? Maybe because 10-page monologues don't translate well to the silver screen, I guess, but it's still a shame. Hulk smash.)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (want to read)
* Dracula (I kept hoping for the good part, and then it was over. Ripoff.)
* A Clockwork Orange (I read the British version with the very moral final chapter still intact. What up now?)
* Anansi Boys (want to steal from EB's shelf read)
* The Once and Future King (should have, didn't. ah, well)
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons (sweet Moses, no. why? Seriously, why?)
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses (I would probably put out a death sentence on him too... because I WISH I WROTE THIS WELL!! little religious/geopolitical humor there for you)
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray (Spoiler: the picture is HIM!! but only sort of)
* Mansfield Park (sadly, no)
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse (I am ashamed.)
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist (typical, depressing, quirky Dickens. Gotta love him)
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables (I don't seem to do well with Hugo... unless, of course, it's Hugo Gernsback)
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune (I want to kiss and marry this book. seriously.)
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury (this reads like a tale told by an idiot)
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (want to)
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present (yes, I know I am a freakin' pinko commie leftist hippie. And yes, I'm ok with that.)
* Cryptonomicon (I thought this only existed in scifi movies?)
* Neverwhere (want to)
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five (See note on Catch-22)
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Yes, it's pop linguistics. Yes, it's prescriptionistic to the extreme. But it's also sort of funny.)
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey (nope - on the list, eventually)
* The Catcher in the Rye (insert angst here)
* On the Road (didn't understand or appreciate it much, unfortunately... I was too young)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (more Hugo... I really do mean to read this stuff)
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (sounds fun but also too self-aware for my taste)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (want to)
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down (bunnies!)
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit (now THAT is high-quality fantasy that doesn't put me to sleep.)
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island (of course - I was homeschooled, duh)
* David Copperfield (second-best Dickens evar)
* The Three Musketeers (Surprise, a Hugo I finished!!)

Thing Four

Thing four is instant messaging. How did we ever live without such an indispensable tool before the tidal wave of IM programs swept over us in the 1990s? I remember with great fondness how I used to chat with my friends, including EB and Marshwiggle, on ICQ back when it first came out. Then, AIM and MSN Messenger, of course, and eventually the Google Chat client. There was something empowering and delightful about being able to communicate instantaneously in a written format. It also made roleplaying online much easier, but that is a whole different thing to be thankful for. :-)

I am currently on my third job that involves extensive use of instant message clients. My first job that required IM was at the student newspaper where I served as online editor for a single, lonely, enraging academic year when I was a junior. It came in very handy when I had system-related questions for the techies and the former editor... and also when I was just lonely and bored and wanted to chat with a pretty girl while the incredibly buggy scripts ran on my Mac G4.

I dated the woman who would become my wife over IM for almost a year while I was teaching at a mission school near Four Corners between my undergraduate and graduate programs. The mission's phone line was expensive and unreliable, but the Internet uplink was essentially free and hardly every went down. It was a very, very good way to stay close to the woman I loved.

At my most recent two jobs, chat clients have been simply indispensible. I literally could not have done my job without them. When I worked for a news-gathering service based out of Washington D.C., it was four months before I met any of my colleagues in person, although I worked with 5-10 different people every day to get our products put together. Everything we did was via IM. In my current job at the call center, I am able to provide excellent, value-added customer service in real time because of the intraoffice IM client there.

And last but not least, instant messaging is also an excellent medium for bugging people about things that they should be doing without being too confrontational. For instance, Marshwiggle popped me up via intraoffice IM the other day (yes, he works in the same company I do, more or less) and said, "Hello, sirs. I would like one of your two day weeks, please." This was his way of letting me know he had noticed my absence of "things I like" posts during the week after my power went off. If he would have e-mailed me about it, I might not have responded as well as I did to his subtle hints. :-)

There is much more that I could say about IM clients and the communicative genre of instant messages, but I should probably just close this particular topic with a simple reiteration of my original point: IM is a wonderful thing.

Thing Three

I began to write this -- ironically enough -- over at my mother-in-law's house because we were out of power. But then, our power came back on and I had to go home and cleanse the freezer of its odiferous chicken juices, and then I was behind on sleep and WAY behind at work, and one thing led to another, and here it is nearly two weeks later, and I'm only now getting around to posting this. So, in summary: here is Thing Number Three.

Power.

As Evil Bender and the Lizard Queen, among thousands -- maybe millions -- of other people across the midwest and southwest could tell you today, power is an amazing thing. Yes, we gripe about the rates, and yes we gripe about the outages, but deep down, we are very pleased with this tool that enables our daily activities to be so pleasant.

I think I forget just how grateful I am for electric current in my house until I suddenly lose it. Then, I realize how nice it is to be able to store perishable food in my kitchen, to take a hot shower, to read by the light of an incandescent bulb at low, medium, or high strength... to say nothing of posting on the Internets.

Electricity, like many of the trappings of our modern existence, is something that requires more organization and planning than most of us realize. And it is much more fragile than we realize, too. A few blown transformers are all it takes to drastically disrupt a city's daily routine. So, I suppose that in some ways, I am equally thankful when my electricity goes out, because it reminds me of what a wonderfully designed house of cards our modern, technologically advanced society is.

Thing Number Two

Hot tea.

It's an amazing thing, fresh steeped in the morning, and much less abrasive than the flavor of most coffee.

If you're not familiar with the story of tea and its meanings in both Eastern and Western culture, you might be interested in reading The Book of Tea, which discusses these things as an aside to a fascinating account of tea's significance in Shintoism. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Strangely enough humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme.

Without question, I enjoy my morning tea. But as I drink it, I sometimes also imagine I taste in it the agonized labor of generations of Asians slaving to produce a product to be sold, enjoyed, and profited from by a despotic people on the far side of the world. So I guess tea sometimes leaves a bitter aftertaste in more ways than one.

A Week of Things I Like

I've decided to post a different one of my favorite things every day this week. Too often, I focus on the negative and unpleasant things in life. This is my attempt to focus on some of the wonderful things I enjoy each day.

Thing 1: The scene in Casablanca where Victor Laszlo leads the whole bar in drowning out "Die Wacht am Rhein" with "La Marseillaise." One of the greatest moments in cinema, and one that never fails to give me goosebumps. I think the reason I like it so much is because it highlights the power of people united against evil.

It's funny -- Most of the time, displays of nationalism seem undesirable to me, since they tend to polarize people and create an "us/them" mentality. Sometimes, this mentality even arises within the nation itself, between ultra-loyalists and more moderate patriots. That's what I call "a house divided against itself."

So why is this time different? Why do I love, love LOVE this scene so much? I think it is because there is a small group of bullies who get overcome by the people they are attempting to bully. The Germans in this film are very aware of their political power, and I find it inspiring that the crowd at Rick's is willing to stand up against that power. They are immediately punished for it, of course, when the bar is summarily closed (because the commandant is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that there is gambling going on there... right before an employee comes up and hands him his winnings for the evening).

But that willingness to fight against evil is something that no amount of closing bars can destroy.

Great flick. :-)