Daily Archives: 29 Dec 07

A book-related meme

Posted on by

Adapted from David Brake. These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Now, be honest. Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn’t finish, strikethrough for books you have no desire to read, a question mark in front for books you never heard of and X in front of what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. Choose up to five favorites from among those you have read on the list and preface them with an exclamation point.

  • 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
  • The Aeneid
  • Watership Down
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Hobbit
  • White Teeth
  • Treasure Island
  • David Copperfield

Please place a comment below if you are spreading the meme onward by posting your list on your site.

The Credit Card Prank

Posted on by
“How crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice? In my lifetime, I have made nearly 15,000 credit card transactions. I purchase almost everything on plastic. What bugs me about credit card transactions is the signing. Who checks the signature? Nobody checks the signature. Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?”

Edge Holiday Reading

Posted on by
Edge: “Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker‘s list of Books From Our Pages?

Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art—the official culture has kicked them out…

We are pleased to present a list of books published in 2007 by Edge contributors (and others in the science-minded community) for your holiday pleasures and challenges.” — John Brockman (Edge)

15 minutes of fame, unfortunately

Posted on by

Scroll down this 12/14/07 Lewiston Tribune front page to the photo of Michael Millhouse trimming some shop windows with Christmas cheer. Think he’s pleased to make the front page? Think again, since the Tribune also reproduced on that same front page (scroll down abit further) a surveillance photo of a man lifting a woman’s wallet from the counter of a convenience store earlier in the week. Too bad he was wearing the same coat, and that police noticed the similarity. Millhouse was nabbed for the crime… [.pdf via VSL]

UNICEF Photo of the Year

Posted on by
11-year-old child bride sits next to her 40-year-old fiance: “There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual — without disgust, nausea and rage. We are beholding the fiercest barbarism imaginable. But a carefree cultural relativism — which this age has donned as its outward manifestation of decadent indifference — allows many to simply look away. They turn away from the sight of an 11-year-old girl, who is about to be raped by the man sitting next to her.” (Der Spiegel thanks to walker)