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- Maybe I need to read some of Nobel Prize laureate Doris Lessing‘s work as she sounds like my kind of person. Her response to winning the literature prize? “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less!”
- Earlier this week I finally got around to watching the 60 Minutes piece on Bruce Springsteen. You need to see it in its entirety if you can but this excerpt reinforces exactly what I said in my last post about him. I’m starting to think we need a Jon Stewart-Bruce Springsteen ticket in 2008.
- Kurt Andersen nails it: “When it comes to free speech, we need to let a hundred flowers bloom. We need to chill. We need to stop being pussies.” (Via.)
- The WaPo has started a book blog where each week a staff member recommends a list of five favorite books on a particular subject . (Via.)
- You’d think when someone leaves 9,000 books to a state university library and up to half of them are expected to be used by the library it would draw the attention of more than just the student newspaper.
- A survey shows that nearly “a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part … predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057.” I guess I’m not personally concerned since I doubt I’ll be around to notice. (Via.)
- Given the fact I rarely complete television series DVDs, I’m glad to see that season 1 of The Wire is now on HBO On Demand. It’s a series that has come highly recommended but I haven’t wanted to jump into four years in.
- My television time has increased dramatically with a subscription to NHL Center Ice. It’s fascinating to watch Canadian broadcasts. For example, during a game early this week the Canadian play-by-play announcer said he was repeating who got the assists on a goal because he knew there were people at home keeping track of that info for their fantasy pools. Plainly, he wasn’t talking about Americans.
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing, Martha Quest
The news this week serves as further confirmatino of my illiterati status despite how much I read.
Case in point 1: Doris Lessing wins the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Nope, never read a thing by her.
Case in point 2: The finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards have been announced. I’ve read none of the fiction nominees and only one of the nonfiction nominees. I am suprised the one finalist I read even made the list — it’s Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I can hear the howls of outrage already.
I’m not howling about these confirmations. We illiterati read what we do simply because we love to read.
The more I know, the less I understand
“The Heart of the Matter,” Don Henley, The End of the Innocence
I know I’ve posted on this before, but over the last couple days I once again began to wonder just how bizarre my reading habits might be. What brought this on is the last several books I’ve read.
In the last five books, I’ve gone from a Hugo-nominated SF novel (Eifelheim) to The End of America, which warns about a “fascist shift” in America, to a biography/study of John Coltrane to a book about convent life in renaissance Venice to Goon, the story of a guy who plays some minor league hockey solely as an “enforcer.”
It’s really the latter two that kind of got to me. Who jumps from reading about convents (which completed my Armchair Traveler challenge) to reading about hockey goons? As I look, though, I think the order may tend to reveal my range of interests — SF, current events, music, history and hockey. So, I ask once again, does my reading history make me “well-rounded” or weird?
I guess it doesn’t matter since it probably won’t change much. I had to pick up the new Eric Clapton autobiography since it just came out and I think a book on life in Stalinist Russia will follow.
Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.
Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich
It’s sometimes good to see you aren’t alone in the number of books in your house that you just haven’t gotten around to yet. This meme started this week as is based on the top 100 (105 counting ties) books carrying an “unread” tag by LibraryThing users who use such a tag. The list is as of October 8.
I’m not surprised by the number of so-called “classics” on the list. In fact, I would have anticipated more given the number of people who buy books just because they’re considered classics. I am also somewhat surprised that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time isn’t on the list.
Everybody does it different but in my iteration I’ve put in bold the books I’ve read, italicized those falling in the “one of these days” category and underlined those books I started and didn’t finish for whatever reason. I’ve also placed an asterisk by a couple works by Dickens because I know I read one or more in high school but just don’t recall which.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Hobbit
- Life of Pi
- 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
- 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 Novel
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Atlas Shrugged
- Reading Lolita in Tehran
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Middlesex
- Quicksilver
- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
- The Canterbury Tales
- The Historian
- 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
- 1984
- Angels & Demons
- The Inferno
- 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 Misérables
- 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
- The God of Small Things
- A People’s History of the United States
- 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
- 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
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- The Aeneid
- Watership Down
- Gravity’s Rainbow
- In Cold Blood
- White Teeth
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield*
- The Three Musketeers
Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity.
A. Edward Newton
- JR brought my attention to a NYT article on the uproar over the difficulty fans have getting tickets to concerts and other events. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help if Ticketmaster is correct in alleging one software company developed a program that means ticket brokers are “bombarding Ticketmaster’s Web site with millions of automated ticket requests that can constitute up to 80 percent of all ticket requests.”
- The Springsteen tour is one of the things that’s drawing fan ire. But word is Springsteen and the E Street Band have enough in the vault from their recent recording sessions for another album. (BTW, Rolling Stone is among those praising Magic. In giving it five stars, it’s highest rating, the review make some observations similar to my recent post.)
- Barnes & Noble has launched its own online review site. While it looks fairly good, I think the lack of an RSS feed will seriously undercut the effort.
- The Nobel Prize Foundation will announce the winner of the 2007 literature award on October 11. (Via.)
- At the other extreme, the winners of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced this past Thursday. The literature winner? Australian Glenda Browne “for her study of the word ‘the’ — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.”
- How about this for a concept for the presidential race: “each serious candidate for the presidency should be required to give a speech on his/her views of the constitutional powers of the presidency.” Nah, that’s got far too much to do with how we’re governed to attract the media.
- As NHL Center Ice has consumed most of my evenings this week — except for Saturday night when I went to the Stampede’s season opener — I may as well note The Hockey News has a piece on former Stampede player and Gopher Thomas Vanek coping with the expectations he faces in light of his $10 million salary this year playing for the Buffalo Sabres.
Some folks trust to reason
Others trust to might
I don’t trust to nothing
But I know it come out right
“Playing in the Band,” Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses)
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