Zwhoosh!
(”Zwhoosh” being the sound of time zooming by at a mad pace, of course.)
Apparently the Martians have been messing with my time sense again, because somehow it’s gotten to be bang in the middle of May, and I haven’t updated le blog for, what, six weeks now? I have no idea what happened to April; did we even have one this year?
I shall try to do better. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I really mean it, for sure.
Erm, just as soon as I get back from my upcoming trip to Vancouver, that is (yay! Canada! Northwest Coastal Region!), and recover from the chaos and uproar that are sure to ensue when a gaggle of feral science editors get together and talk shop and show grammatically precise and correctly punctuated PowerPoints to each other about online manuscript submission, open access, and streamlining peer review. Good fun.
To fill in the time until I get back, assuming not everyone has abandoned even pretending to read this thing on the reasonable assumption that I’ve flaked out completely, as opposed to just partially, I submit a meme. I wasn’t tagged, so I hope I’m not committing some breach of meme protocol by hijacking it, but I’m sure someone will let me know if I am. I personally encountered it first at Carena’s Craftblog (she who is now responsible for my mad craving for a Pebeo Porcelaine 105 pen, and is the main source of all my non-knitting-related craftiness urges. Well, except for the shrinky-dink craving. Please, please, do not let me loose in a craft store unchaperoned right now, or I shall soon be penniless).
I don’t generally do memes, but this one involves books, which cannot be entirely of the bad:
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.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
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
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things (ETA: Does Small Gods count as close enough?)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
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
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
It’s possible that some of the things I read yonks ago actually were for school and I just don’t remember that. It’s also possible that I left off a couple that didn’t make a huge impression on me; f’rinstance, I’m pretty sure I at least started something by Jane Austen, but after this many years I cannot remember which particular Empire-waist-dress-wearing, be-bonneted heroines were involved. They all blend together for me, much like the bits and bobs of Hemingway I’ve tried. I stand amazed, though, at the presence of several Atwood and Gaiman books on the list — how on earth can people refrain from tearing into those books as soon as they get their hands on them? Particularly Oryx and Crake, which is one of my absolute, forever favorites. . . .
(Someone out there would probably despises either or both of those authors, but feels equally appalled at the number of Dickens books I started but wound up burying under piles of other books and dog hair so I wouldn’t have to look at them any more. Sorry. Dickens just makes my teeth itch.)
Anyway, there’s yer meme. I’m too much of a weenie to tag someone else, but if you do happen to pick up the thread from here, it would brighten my day and/or night if you’d let me know with a link or an e-mail. Alternatively, if you felt compelled, you could gently mock my reading choices or recommend books on the list I really should read (or avoid) through the comments.
I’ve got a list of about a dozen errands and things I have to accomplish before I leave on Saturday, but I’ll try to stop in again if I can. I haven’t yet decided whether to bring Errol the Mac with me, because the hotel is one of the snooty convention ones and charges for Internet access, and I don’t know yet how prevalent free hotspots are in Vancouver. (At least I’ve got my HappyCow list of veg-friendly restaurants, my passport [complete with absolutely preposterous photo, because they made me take off my glasses, with the result that I look like a concussed gerbil with a toothache], and both Travelocity and hotel confirmations printed out, so at least I’ve got the really vital things sorted out and pre-researched.)
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*Not sure how old this meme is. You can see the current rankings here. Brave New World, for instance, has dropped as of this writing to number 187.
