Last night I dreamed about a flat tire on my car and cat vomit on my carpet. Which one do you suppose I actually encountered in the course of my morning?
*No prize for the winning guesses, just the satisfaction of getting a peek into how glamorous my life really is. Which, really, is a pretty cool prize, if you think about it. Okay, you'd have to think pretty hard to see how cool it is, so don't blame yourself if you're not capable of it. 'Cause, see, if you were as cool and as glamorous as I am, you wouldn't have to think so hard at all.
The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
If you'd like, copy this list. List the books you have read in bold, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (I have never even heard of this. For the record. Is it an actual book?)
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 (in Spanish!)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (the first time was when I was 10!)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
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
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
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
1984
Angels & Demons
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
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
Cloud Atlas
There is 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
Blame this meme entirely on Earnest English.
There are a remarkable number of books that I have started but never finished. Several of them I've started many, many times. Looking back, I can't think of a book I've finished if I stopped reading it more than twice (not including putting it down for, say, a week or two). I think I'm finally going to accept the fact that I will never finish "Love in the Time of Cholera" or "Atlas Shrugged."
I know it isn't only older folks who do this, but it sure does seem to be common among those of my relation and acquaintance: Why do senior citizens seem to think it is okay to comment on the racial make-up of the crowd at a meeting or restaurant or other gathering, particularly when the predominant race or ethnic group represented in the group is different from that of the commenter?* And why won't they take silence as a proper response when they make such a remark, particularly when the commenter is not related to the person to whom the comment was made?
Here's what I typically do:
If the commenter is a friend or relative of mine, I will let that person know that I am not interested in hearing such "observations" and I will tell them nicely - but specifically - why I find such remarks troublesome or offensive. If, however, the commenter is either a random person nearby (and you'd be surprised how often this seems to happen) or someone of only tangential acquaintance, I will look at the commenter for a long moment, partly to make sure I have correctly understood the intent of the remark and partly to make it clear to the person that I heard what was said, and then I will turn my eyes and attention elsewhere. I will simply be silent; I avoid even an "mm hmm" or "uh-huh" for fear that either could be perceived as tacit agreement or complicity in the views of the commenter. I do not actively change the subject. I'd rather there be silence in an effort to indicate that I am pointedly not responding versus simply glossing over a potentially awkward moment by moving the conversation (and, thus, the person's attention) elsewhere.
First off, does this sort of thing happen to you, too?
Do you notice certain categories of people (by age, urban/suburban, socio-economic background, religious background, college-educated vs. not, geographic history, etc.) doing this more often than others?
If it does happen to you, what do you do?
* after the jump.
* Here I want to distinguish the scenario I am describing above as entirely separate from the following: Suppose I am at an Asian restaurant and someone nearby notes that the crowd is predominantly Asian, stating, "This must be a good/authentic/whatever restaurant, since it is attracting so many people who probably know a lot about this kind of food." In this example, I personally think the observation might be an interesting and/or relevant one. Unlike, say, the person in the waiting area of an Asian restaurant who comments, "Looks like we're the only white people here," while looking pointedly and uncomfortably at the non-white, non-Asian crowd in the lobby.
Do you agree with this distinction?
How long do you think one of those little single-size packets of Crystal Light can roll around in one's purse before its contents no longer taste right when mixed with water? Alternately, what is the half-life of Splenda? I'm gonna guess the answer to both questions is about 18 months.