Frequent Citations

More Literature

I was just telling someone the other day (hi Deb!) that I needed a list of books to read in August, when I plan to do nothing but vegetate. Lo and behold, a list from Divine Angst with instructions: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. So I’m (mostly) skipping the “underline the ones you read for school” because I really cannot remember. One or two of the Russian literature books surely were assigned, and of course I studied the Greek epics in college. Oh, and Madame Bovary was assigned and remains my least favorite book ever.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (on order!)
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude (What can I say? I’ll try again some day.)
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion (I think I must have, but don’t recall. Mother?)
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary (still hate it)
A Tale of Two Cities (If you liked this book, order The Scarlet Pimpernel immediately!)
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad (It is the most perfect piece of literature ever written.)
Vanity Fair (I’m almost sure I read this, but maybe only started it.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin (On order! I’ve read other Margaret Atwood works, and she’s wonderful.)
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel (On order!)
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi (Boy loved it.)
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury (Thinking about ordering it, but not a big fan of Faulkner.)
Memoirs of a Geisha (It’s on my shelf. Maybe someday I’ll read it.)
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver’s Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I remember now that it was assigned, but I enjoyed it.)
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything (now on order!)
Cryptonomicon (um, yes, and the others too)
Dubliners (How much Joyce need I read? Well, I might order it.)
Oryx and Crake (I’m passing on this Atwood.)
Angela’s Ashes (And you can’t make me read it, either.)
Beloved (still regretting it, but a highly talented author)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass (GirlChild has read it, and approved.)
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Watership Down
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones (Scandalous!)
The Road (Ick.)
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

There is an interesting commonality of themes in these books. Adventure, travel, daring, doom—all brought about by the inevitable forced of our own natures.

Such as the doom I'm bringing upon myself by not writing that habeas paper, which I'm now going to, uh, start.

Moneyball 1, Papers 0

I willfully ignored my papers and read Moneyball instead. One of my interviewers this fall recommended it.

So do I, if you've never read it. Even if you're not a baseball fan it's a fascinating story. But it leaves unanswered the big question: what does it really take to win it all? Because making it to the playoffs is only the first step.

(Sort of the way reading cases is only the first step toward writing my papers.)

I also read a couple of the books mentioned by True, which were tons of fun. This whole reading for pleasure idea is good stuff. I'd nearly forgotten. But since I woke up this morning with plans for one of my papers running around in my head, I think it's time to listen to my subconscious.

Dark Stacks & Dusty Books

It seems as though life is all on-line these days. All the research I need to do, my communications, my (non-existent) entertainment -- it's all scrolling and clicking. I have nearly forgotten the pleasures of strolling and picking instead.

Yesterday I had to get some actual books out of the library for a research project I'm doing. After narrowing my search down to the general area on the proper floor, I had to simply wander up and down the aisles until I found the right section of the stacks. Had I but known that it is conveniently near the professor's office!

I found my books quickly enough. Then, from force of an old, old habit, my eyes started scanning the shelf. Book after book called out to me, luring me with their dusty pages and intriguing titles. It is probably fortuitous that the next row over lacked more than the dimmest light from a flickering fluorescent or I would still be there, sitting on the floor and piling books around myself. Next time I'll bring a flashlight.

I Beg To Differ

I've been reading Republic.com by Cass Sunstein. He makes a point that I've thought about for a long time.

For democracy to work, people need to be exposed to opinions different from their own.

I have often noticed that people who lean strongly one way or another tend to be reluctant to listen to the arguments from the other side. They listen to the news outlet that carries stories they want to hear, they avoid commentators they disagree with, they talk to like-minded people. I know some people who only listen to Fox News because it's the only news organization that they feel gives Bush a fair shake, and they refuse to listen to NPR because they think it's a bunch of commie liberals. I know others who feel exactly the opposite: Fox is a propaganda outlet for the Bush administration and NPR is completely fair and balanced.

We alter and form our view of the world by the choices we make, and today we have so many choices: where we get our news, what news we get, what we do with our discretionary income, who we support with donations. Every time we eliminate opposition or discomfort, we narrow our view. Where there is only agreement, there is no discussion. Where there is no discussion, there is little thought. Thoughtless government is bad government.

In the spirit of encouraging democracy, I have put a new blogroll in my sidebar: Divergent Views. It has Left, Right, and Left and Right. Go ahead, be daring, and see what the other side has to say.

Potter Pottiness

I finished the latest Harry Potter Sunday morning. The only reason it took me so long was because GirlChild and I saw Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Saturday night. (I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would, by the way, and not only because Johnny Depp is the most gorgeous creature ever.)

Yes, I love the Harry Potter books -- they're fun stories set in a fairly well-crafted alternative world. Rowling was a classics major, by the way, and that shows up in her work. Lovely to see a classicist minting money.

At any rate, I noticed a huge number of comments to Heidi's post on the book. The quantity and variety of cracked theories amazes me. I'm not going to tell you a thing about the book or any of my own (completely reasonable) theories. Go read it your own self.

Still Clueless

I read Freakonomics last night.

While I still haven't a clue what the gross domestic product is, I'm all up on trends in California baby names.

It was an enjoyable read, enlightening and thought provoking in certain ways. Mostly it made me wish I'd taken a serious stats class instead of that formal logic class that almost killed me. The explanations rely pretty heavily on regression analysis and I'd like to understand the technique better -- as in, manipulate a bunch of data with it myself to see what kind of true and/or crazy answers I get.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Don't you love them?

Back to Border's

I'm bad. Make that Bad, with a capital B.

I went to Border's last night and bought Janet Evanovich's latest, the day it was released.

It was pretty much like all the others in the series. Kind of fun, not too (at all) believable; all in all, a decent way to pass a few hours. Evanovich may be running out of ideas for ways to destroy a car.

I did also get Freakonomics, since I feel that I really should become familiar with this term, "economics," before school starts.

I have an uncle who teaches economics at a university. You'd think I'd at least know what a, um, gross domestic product is.

Don't ask me; I'm in a random mood this morning.

Cape May Court House

I finished reading this book last week. It was interesting, given the odd circumstances of the accident.

I love it that Cape May Court House is actually the name of a town, not a building. Don't suppose that's why the author bought the rights to the story, do you?

For those of you who wouldn't read the book under any circumstances, it's the true story of a man whose wife died. He sued Ford, claiming that the airbag in their car killed her; Ford's defense was that he killed his wife.

His wife was pregnant. He was having an affair. They had just increased the amount of her life insurance, which paid out double because she died in an accident. And he lied, lied, lied throughout discovery -- to everybody, including his own lawyers. So the guy is not the most credible person in the world.

Ford, on the other hand, employed the classic delay tactics. It hired more experts, insisted on more depositions, turned over massive quantities of unindexed material and refused to turn over other items requested. So whether or not the woman died because of the airbag, Ford was not likely to be paying anything out any time soon.

To me the most interesting part of the book was the maneuvering on either side, including the low-down underhanded tricks. It was a little surprising how much the judge let them get away with, although I don't know how much choice he really had. There was a lot of mean and personal bickering, so it was a fun read.