No mention of those dogs I read about… wait, that was made up?
Cool. ‘Turnable’ pages of Robert Hooke’s notebooks are online. I haven’t read the whole thing (although I’ve looked at all the pages), but what I’ve seen so far is pretty thrilling. Mainly because I’ve read the entire Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson and remember a lot of the real-life characters.
I wish Enoch Root was real…
Via New Scientist.
Does this make me culturally uninformed?
LibraryThing’s 106 most unread books. Bold what you have read, italicise what you attempted, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. If you haven’t heard of them, just leave ‘em alone.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
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: 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
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
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes*
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 5*
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: 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
(I’ve heard of the rest, and some I’ve read — the abridged versions — as a child.)
Will the magic still be there at 50
I’m hoping that those of my generation (and earlier) are feeling just as excited and anxious about this — the Famous Five are coming back! Not as children off on adventures and solving crimes, but middle-aged adults who are brought together by another crime.
No one should be surprised that I identified with George the most when I was a child — I was a total tomboy (it definitely wasn’t any sort of gender confusion, I just thought boys had the better games, sports, toys) and the Famous Five just fed my completely unrealistic desire for adventure. Growing up in a middle-class suburb in Singapore doesn’t really offer much opportunity for exploring and intrigue. The best we had was the dark house at number 13 (or 11a, as it was re-numbered).
The only thing I’m worried about is seeing the Five at 50 might spoil the fun for me — but I doubt it. Bring it on!
Small glimpses of an ordinary life
It’s been pretty eerily quiet round these parts, considering how prolific I normally tend to be.
I got my first author autograph at the company party last weekend. Quite a thrill!
I’ve joined Second Life.
Basically, I’m spending a lot of time reading. I’m reading a manuscript right now that is blowing my mind.
It’s amazing how worn out one can get from commuting to and from Edinburgh every day.
And there’s something suddenly quite funky (not cool — smelly) going on with the home Internet connection; goblins and elves must be making mischief, as I never seem to be able to maintain a consistent connection, but Neil has no problems when he plugs the cable into his laptop. WTF is going on there, I don’t know.
It makes my obsessive re-designitis quite difficult to satisfy.
We’ve spent the last three to four weekends helping Neil’s sister paper and paint her room. She estimates that she should be able to move into it in a week’s time. Which means we should (in theory) be able to move into the address I’ve been using as my mailing address — although not into the room we’re meant to use — soon after that.
I have discovered that I’m pretty good with a paintbrush and good old emulsion. Let’s just say second coats may not be needed when I’m around. And I’m getting irrationally excited at the prospect of our next trip to Ikea.
We swapped our car insurance yesterday, and we are now driving the new (old) car. It’s pretty much the same as our last (old) car, just slightly less old and with more doors.
I’ve just got a couple of tips for you: read The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. It’s amazing. When it’s published, you have to read The Poison that Fascinates by Jennifer Clement.
Review — The Raw Shark Texts
I must admit, I was kind of sceptical when this book was pressed into my hands with the instruction to read it. It’s kind of a cult hit, there are rabid fans, and rabid fans of novels tend to remind me of Neuromancer, which I so did not get into.
However, I was pleasantly surprised. I must say it did take me a while to get into it, but when I was on the bus this morning, racing to the end of the novel, I was definitely in the mood known as ‘completely absorbed’, the kind where I could walk into a wall, cut my arm, and not notice it (yes, I was 11 at the time when this first happened). The plotline’s been described loads of times. Eric Sanderson wakes up with almost complete amnesia. He finds a note to himself and this starts a chain of events that involve a dead lover, a new hot chick named Scout, Dr. Trey Fidorous, conceptual fish (these are the baddies), and a very cool cat named Ian.
This book works on so many levels. But…
Jane Austen, not very successful author
If Jane Austen was alive today, she might not be able to find a publisher. Well, that inspires a lot of hope amongst writers, I’m sure.
Heh.
Review — Beautiful Bodies, Laura Shaine Cunningham
I’m not a chick lit reader at the best of times (but at the worst of times, when I’m very bored, I’ll read anything), but when there was a £1 clearance sale at Amazon UK and I felt the obligation to buy books that I could share with those situated close to me (read: Neil’s mother and sister, who are both chick lit readers), I took the plunge and risked it.
It starts off promisingly enough. I was quite interested in the telling of each woman’s tale, how each of them is so different from the rest, but they were all best friends due to circumstances two decades ago. It made me think of what the expatriate situation was like in Xiamen (before so many expats arrived in 2005-6), everyone had to be friends because we were all strangers in a (comparatively) strange land.
The synopsis is this: six women, all long-time friends, are meeting on what will be the coldest night of the year, to celebrate the impending arrival of a baby.
Kurt Vonnegut (Jr)
Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favourite authors in the world. His irreverence and quirky conversational style has always inspired me.
May he rest in peace.