I've even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

August 27, list of the top 100 unread books on Librarything. Bold books you've finished, *asterisk if you've read it more than once, italic if you started but haven't read it, underline if you mean to get to it, and cross out if you hated it.

(In summary I've read 43, and only started and didn't finish 7. One of which is THE COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE. I mean, come on!)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment *
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Catch-22 *
Wuthering Heights
The Brothers Karamazov
The Silmarillion
War and Peace
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Don Quixote
( Read more... )

The fog this morning made me want to stand still and let the droplets infuse my clothing. Although that sounds and feels rather unpleasant, because the external cold penetrates your clothing more readily that way, it's so beautiful I welcome it. The diffuse lighting gentle against the autumnal foliage, from Seattle to Issaquah, so very lovely. The soundtrack randomly plays Amp and the Helio Sequence, just in case I didn't get the message. Melancholy bliss. Sublime. Everything is starting to die in the most aesthetically pleasing way.

I am actually on the last tenth of Infinite Jest and honestly I'm a little sad that it's ending. I hate to say that I haven't been so empathetic with characters since beginning The Wheel of Time but that's the only thing I can think of. I am often sympathetic with characters in books - this is why I read books instead of having friends when I was young - but this empathizing thing is fairly fresh. Part of it is probably because my own writings feature young men seemingly dead to the world. So I get where DFW is coming from by making the main character one of these. It's partly a great book and partly a letter from the author. It's a punch in the gut to have my innermost secrets pulled out that way, like having a conversation with a new best friend till 4am. I feel a little troubled that I waited to read this after Mr. Wallace's heartbreaking suicide, but on the other hand would I really feel so close to him if I didn't know how crushingly depressed he was? Or would I have been able to guess it?

* Greek Paganism: I'm in the middle of Courtesans and Fishcakes, which is a little too esoteric to get interested in, but it got me to start The Homeric Gods, which is a lot more accessible. Although a bit difficult to grasp, the author basically is successful in explaining the way that the Greeks saw religion, not as some weird otherworldly spiritual experience, but as the spirit of nature. Thus, well, the paganism we're all sort of familiar with is based on the Greeks.

The explanation starts with the Illiad, in which heros perform mighty feats, but NOT impossible ones, with the help of gods and goddesses. That is to say, there are no "miracles" in the judeo-christian sense, just people whose natural abilities are somewhat enhanced by their deities. The Greek religion therefore was utterly rational in that sense. I mean, it's silly to us today to think that figuring out a problem was due to Athena or whatever, but it still works beautifully as a metaphor.

* Common Knowledge: Mr. XKCD posted the blue eye logic puzzle yesterday, and while he also provides the solution*, he doesn't really explain the reasoning that well. Which is fine, you know, but I kept tripping over the logic in my head. I even got candid to try to explain it to me, and he pointed me to the Wikipedia article on Common Knowledge (as a game theory term). I'll refrain from any other discussion till I get to the comments, but I think I got it now. I even emailed it to my ex Nick to see what he could make of it, since before Joel he was probably the smartest person I knew.

* Wall of Sound: There's a festival in Virginia with a bunch of loud bands of that genre. (Although it says only "indie/shoegaze/New wave".) I am wondering if there is a market for that kind of thing here. I mean we have Kinski, right? I'd love to have something like that locally, and reading about dB fest's origins makes me really wonder.

edit: oh the solution is here.

FREE LATTE FOR READING BOOKS!

edit: just throwing in another link. Is it finally time to ditch Photoshop and go open source? Almost.

Readers who bought A Million Little Pieces from Random House get refunded.

NPR's Frey Fraud story

Smoking Gun's investigation: none of the crimes referred to in the book actually happened.

And he plagiarised a bunch of it.

From that last link:

...I suspect you are [allergic to the truth]. That's why you love this fake, Frey: because Frey's version of the drug world is false in every way. But it's a nice rightwing lie, so you're happy. He assures you that indeed, drugs equals addiction equals rehab or death. Which is utter, absolute nonsense.

Here's a stat to prove it: last year Italian pollution officials checked levels of chemical in the Po River, which drains most of Northern Italy. They discovered there was so much cocaine residue in the water that the residents of the area had to be using coke at more than ten times the rate cops had estimated. It meant that every young adult in the place was coked, every weekend. Two relevant facts: Northern Italy is virtually crime-free. The only crimes around are imports (Albanians, mostly), and they're not the coked-up partygoers whose piss was getting the river so high. (Lots of talkative, gung-ho fishies in the Po, I bet.)

Second key fact: coke is actually one of the more dangerous drugs, almost as bad as alcohol.

Combine these facts and stats and you see that (A) There are far more drug users than we admit out there; (B) They're doing fine, holding jobs, raising kids, snorting on the weekends and trooping back to work like the rest of us. They just have a better time on the weekends than you booze-suckers.

every (new) book I've read, total 67 ( Read more... )

with the ones I've read in bold:

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

edited when I read Microserfs

Glancing at the Banned Books list, Reg and I have become confused.

velvet: I mean, i can understand The New Joy of Gay Sex
velvet: but To Kill a Mockingbird?
herbaliser: this is my question:
herbaliser: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
velvet: yeah.
herbaliser: THE HELL?
herbaliser: or
herbaliser: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
velvet: heh, american psycho.,
herbaliser: James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
velvet: why the fuck is judy blume all over the place?
velvet: do people just not want their children reading?
herbaliser: b/c she talks about sex and masturbation and periods
velvet: UNNATURAL
herbaliser: now this
herbaliser: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
herbaliser: they don't even say it in that book more than twice
herbaliser: Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
herbaliser: Wtf.
velvet: HAHAHAHAHA
herbaliser: How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
herbaliser: it was written in the FIFTIES
herbaliser: you may as well ban The Mouse and the Motorcycle
velvet: little black sambo? WTF?@!?!?!
velvet: btw, the mouse and the motorcycle rulz.