Archives, eh
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# Links for 2008-05-06
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# Links for 2008-02-19
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan ✴
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# A Reading List
Via col, the top 106 books marked as unread on LibraryThing, as of time of his writing.
I don’t like memes generally but I don’t read widely enough, so succumbing to this one is an exercise in self-improvement, I suppose.
Bold means I’ve read it. An asterisk means multiple reads. Italics means I started but didn’t finish. Strike through means I hated it and refused to finish.
An underline was supposed to mark a book on my reading list. It should be taken as implied by the second paragraph that the lone book I despised aside, everything uncompleted is on my redaing list.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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 : A Memoir
- The God of Small Things
- 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 ∗
- White Teeth
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield
- The Three Musketeers
At least one of these I am going to read solely because it will wind D up; she loathes Pride & Prejudice.
On the other hand, I’m not going to read Angels & Demons because it will wind me up. It should be obvious why it is largely unread. So many people managed to get through the Da Vinci Code – myself included – solely because the titillation at reading such semi-taboo material disguised the awfulness of the writing. Then they went to try out previous books and there was nothing left to occlude the clunkiness of the prose, the plot, the people.
I know I have read the Odyssey and Iliad. I can distinctly remember struggling through them. I very much doubt though that I took much in to start with; I certainly only remember those bits and pieces that have entered popular consciousness: the Horse; Circe; Hector’s desecration. That kind of thing. So re-reading them will likely indistinguishable from reading them for the first time.
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# Links for 2007-08-31
- sp!ked review of books | Towards an age of abundance ✴
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# Links for 2007-08-30
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# Links for 2007-05-15
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# Links for 2006-12-11
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# Links for 2006-11-05
- REST Web Services ✴
