Green Tee Readings

Thanks to this Making Light post using the Titanic as a basis for pondering keeping current with the abilities of technology, I really want to read Connie Willis’ Uncertain Principles who got it via Tom who seems to have gotten it via Abbi a list of books to compare yourself against. Check Abbi’s page for actual information regarding source material.

The game here, if there is indeed a game, is to mark books you’ve read in bold and books you’ve started in italics. You can, if you wish, put an asterisk in front of books you intend to read, but that’s no fun for me. Instead, I’ll indicate with an exclamation point books I’ve read for school to further display that Americans have probably read more than six of these hundred

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen !
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte !
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte !
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ! (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, parts of Julius Caeser)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger !
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald !
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams !
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck !
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ! (although, really, why is this separate from the whole series?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell !
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving !
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding !
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens !
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville !
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker !
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad !
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare !
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’m with Chad in wondering what The Wasp Factory is doing on this list. Seriously, one of the hundred best? Really?

And there are 14 books that I’ve both finished and been assigned (and not counting books whose entirety wasn’t assigned), which is well over the supposed average of six for Americans. So one and a third other people? I have you covered.

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Taken from Adventures In Adventures in Ethics and Science the Cult Book Meme (boldface indicates a read book, italics indicates a started but never finished book.)

* Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
* The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
* A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
* Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
* The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
* The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
* Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
* The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
* The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
* The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
* Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968 )
* A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
* Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782) –read other works by Rousseau, largely because I had to teach ‘em
* The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
* Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
* The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
* Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
* The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968 )
* Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
* The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
* The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
* Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
* Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
* The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
* I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948 )
* If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
* Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990) — I totally want those two hours of my life back
* Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
* The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
* Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
* The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958 )
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
* No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
* On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
* The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
* The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
* The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
* The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
* The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
* Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
* The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
* Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
* The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
* The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968 )
* Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85) — read other Nietzsche, especially The Gay Science, in order to be able to teach Nietzsche
* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

Clearly, I’m not as well read as someone thinks I should be. I’m definitely not as well read as I think I should be, I mean, really, I haven’t even started To Kill a Mockingbird?

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During a conversation at work last night, I admitted something that’s been in the recesses of my mind lately, something that’s probably led me to be a bit more on edge and reluctant to talk than usual*. I no longer want to be an English teacher. It’s a bit of mental whiplash, that; nearly all my life I’ve identified myself as an English teacher in training. My very best and favorite instructors taught English, and since books were (are) my favorite place to be, it seemed natural to follow their lead. Maybe it was sympathetic vibrations.

I love story and well placed words as much as I ever, but the processes of Studying English have no appeal anymore. The tools, thinking about writing, about word choice, about what’s being said, what’s being elided and thinking critically about all these, are valuable, but they’re not solely the provenance of English, they’re part of logic, history, science and communication. They’re part of being human.

I know you might be thinking “English is under the umbrella of Humanities! You’re saved!” But I’m not. I used to think that English was the most important thing I could be doing, and that the only way to do English was to do it professionally. Even more specifically on the professional angle, that the only way to talk about books was to do it academically. That’s manifestly not the case.

I’m also not saved by the Humanities Umbrella (I think it’d be purple), because I can’t stand the implicit arrogance in calling a group of studies the Humanities, like they’re all it means to be human, that they’re the greatest part of the human endeavor, the grand pinnacle of achievement. That buffalo’s empty**.

So I’m left wondering if I’ve wasted time (short answer: parts, yes, by virtue of not doing anything during those times but tread water), disliking where I’m at (in multiple senses), and not where I want to be, instead. That’s a lot of “well, shit” moments there.

__
* I know, hard to believe.
** “When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty”

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John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream is officially released in a convenient to purchase price and a size suitable for carrying everywhere you might want to take it (refunds for getting it water or fire damage for taking it with you when fighting fires, however, are probably not available). If you ever thought that William Gibson or Neal Stephenson should just shut up already and let you shovel popcorn down your throat, this is certainly the novel for you.

Excuse me, I need to find something to get butter off of the cover of my copy.

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I just finished John Scalzi’s most recent book in the Old Man’s War universe, The Last Colony. Okay, that’s a bit of a lie, I did just make some tea and a peanut butter sandwich in-between finishing the book and now, but that’s just preparation for the research that I should have been doing the last few hours. Onward with a totally spoiler-free quickie review:

The book contains nearly pure deliciousness, a common feature of his novels, and serves well as the dessert course in the John Perry Journey. Stylistically, there aren’t any surprises for someone who has read the other two Old Man’s books, with mentions of certain pork products, adhesive substances and members of Family Felidae, as well as some very standard Scalzi word emphasis, some of which will probably have people still assuming that John Perry is a Mary Sue.

Personally I think that would be fine. Then at least there’d be a military presence here if we’re attacked. The only other option would be that they hang us out to dry, and you know what? That’s what’s happening already.

That certainly feels a bit like what I’d read over at Whatever.

Further thoughts, including how much pleasure was gleaned from having the politics become more central without scraping all the frosted fun away will have to wait until I’ve caught up to all the work that I’ve been avoiding lately, but the short review is that this is a good book, following in many of the principles of Carrot Cake Soup, and entirely worthy of your time. I’ll regret neither time nor money spent. Unless I fail my paper, at which point the sorrow-reducing powers of carrot cake soup will come in handy.

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