LibraryThing 106 Unread Books Meme

Yeah, another book meme. I figure it’s better than not posting, and you do get to at least learn something about me in the process. I have a couple of half-finished posts that I keep meaning to work on.

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones read solely as a curriculum requirement, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.

Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.

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
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The 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
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 : a novel
*1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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 : 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

Of the books I’ve read on this list, I’d say “1984″ is my favorite. “Dune” is second. One of the things I noticed on the second reading of “Dune” is that Frank Herbert has trouble writing inter-personal relationships. It really shows in the scene where Jessica befriends Stilgar.

You Know You’re a Geek When…

You know you’re a geek when the first thing you do after moving offices at work is go to Home Depot to buy plastic cable wraps to take care of the cabling for all your computers (three to be exact: one development box, and two test servers).

What I Learned This Week

This week I learned:

1. That the sight of blood and other icky stuff doesn’t gross me out nearly as much as it did in the past.
2. That a cat who is smart enough to almost instantly learn a new place she isn’t supposed to sit at in order to get attention is dumb enough to chew on a leaf dangerous to cats. Fortunately, the only harm done was losing her dinner.
3. That once again, you don’t pick your house projects, they pick you. This time it was installing a railing for the steps in the garage. Yeah, something the builder should have done.
4. That when my father-in-law says, “we’ll work on this tomorrow”, he really means, “in an hour I’m going to decide to work on it anyway”.
5. That the best way to fix a gas trimmer which won’t start is to show somebody what’s wrong with it.

With any luck, in a few days I’ll get back to my semi-regularly scheduled deep thoughts.

RL Calls

Been busy the past week, and I won’t be in-world the upcoming week because of RL. I may blog if the mood strikes me.

Book Meme

Since I was implicitly tagged by Josie to do the book meme, and I’m sitting right next to a bookcase, I’ll pick one from my “to read” pile.

“Pandora’s Star” by Peter F. Hamilton. British SF author for those who don’t know. Turning to page 123 and counting to the fifth sentence. Here are the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences:

There was definitely vodka in it, she could feel the distinctive chill burning along her throat. The recovery vehicles sent out from the main convoy had picked her up twenty hours ago. Which had come as a profound relief; two and a half days alone in the temperate forest was slightly more wilderness adventure than she wanted.

And, in the spirit of “recycled memes”, I’ll let people tag themselves. Everyone go forth and post about your books if you haven’t already done so.

Secrets and Lies

So I was going through my Google documents a few days ago when I stumbled upon what looked like a draft to a response to a Second Life Insider article written by Akela Talamasca back in September, 2006 (made obvious by the fact that I mentioned his name). A little investigative digging, based on the date of the document, turned up this article.

The article talked about how easy it was to hide your identity and other aspects of yourself in SL. In addition, Akela mentioned:

“And yet, it’s ridiculously easy to feel that you have trustworthy friends and loved ones in SL. [various explanations excluded] Whatever it is, it’s frequently the case that people fall into each other’s lives much more readily in SL than they do in RL, but with much less forethought about possible harm.”

My response, which appears in the comments section, was:

“On the topic of misplaced trust, I think the reason it’s ridiculously easy to feel that you have trustworthy friends and loved ones in SL is because of what Akela said: the lack of subliminals such as tone of voice, body language, and word choice. Perhaps an avatar’s detailed appearance, somatic tics, and preset idle animations help convey a positive non-verbal impression which leads to a false sense of security where one would normally be cautious. It’s much harder to mask or have deceitful body language than it is to lie in a conversation.

Personally, sometimes I feel uncomfortable having conversations in SL with people of any shape, form, or gender because of the lack of non-verbal feedback. In those cases, it feels like I’m talking with ear plugs on (hope that analogy makes sense).”

Most of the time, I look back at stuff that I wrote which is more than a year old and cringe. But this seems to have held up pretty well in the year and a half since I wrote it. In addition, it was written after being in SL for only a month.

At the time the article was written, I had considered the lack of non-verbal communication to be an almost insurmountable barrier. It was one of the reasons I almost left SL back then. In RL, I’m very conscious of and rely heavily on non-verbal communication. I’ll deliberately make use of it in conversation in order to achieve some desired effect.

Fast forward to today, and obviously I have not left SL. I’ve compensated for the lack of non-verbal feedback by waiting, sometimes very long, to make discernments about other people. In some cases I’ve known people for almost a year in SL before becoming friends. That tends to be the opposite of what I do in RL, where I decide far more quickly.

A year and a half later, I can’t think of much to add to what I said, which tends to be unusual. Perhaps I’ll check back in another year or year and a half and see how it holds up.