1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put an asterisk next to the books you’d rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger* (see my analysis of why it sucks).
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot* (I hate George Eliot. I really hate her.)
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
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 …meh.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert* Ick ick ick.
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
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 (I’ve read one or two maybe?)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
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 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Now that everyone has given their little hagiographies on George Carlin, it’s time for me to jump in. I once had the great honor of having George Carlin make fun of me live on stage.
Years ago, my mother and I went to see him at one of the Trump casinos in Atlantic City (the Trump Wretched Excess, or something like that), and he did two hours of new material that has never seen the light of day on an album or in a special. One part of the routine was on cats, and he was talking about a male cat of his who contracted a urinary tract infection and had to have his penis amputated.
This set my mother and I off. We both thought of our old cat, Lewis, who had been in a similar situation years before. We had even nicknamed him “plastic ass” because of the PVC tubing the doctors routed through to his backside to act as a substitute urethra. We were in the front row, and laughed so hard we nearly fell off our chairs. I think one of us must have started clapping, because Carlin stopped and looked right at us. Abandoning his planned punchline, he just stared at us.
“REALLY! It seems an odd thing to be in favor of!”
He then went back to the act. About fifteen minutes later, he did a proper dick joke. After he gave the punchline (and not too many people laughed), he doubled back and came over towards us.
“I want to see what the penis people over here thought of that joke.”
That’s the extent of my proper reminiscence of the man. Only saw him that one time, but I won’t forget it.
As for Carlin the man, about ten years ago, in my opinion, he stopped being a comedian and became a full-blown philosopher. He spoke very bluntly about the human condition, and while he had made a name for himself before for rapid fire delivery, when he started philosophizing, he could go five or ten minutes without a punchline and still hold everyone’s attention.
The best example of this was his penultimate HBO special, Life Is Worth Losing. If you don’t have it, pick it up. The last part of the routine is a spiel just under 7 minutes long called “Coast To Coast Emergency.” Barely stopping for a breath, he describes a bizarre chain of events which could lead from a water main breaking in Los Angeles to the complete fragmentation of the space-time continuum and a new big bang that brings about a utopian universe. It’s an amazing piece of work, and makes you think about life and what it really means.
That’s what philosophy is for. George should go down in history as one of the great philosophers of the 20th Century.
Just in case some people want to shoot their mouth off about Frank Lautenberg, here are the facts:
6/10/08: Lautenberg votes to CONFIRM Bush appointee Mark S. Davis of Virginia to be US District Judge. 5/20/08: Lautenberg votes to CONFIRM Bush appointee G. Steven Agee of Virginia to be US District Judge. 4/10/08: Lautenberg votes to CONFIRM Bush appointee Brian Stacy Miller of Arkansas to be US District Judge. 3/14/08: Lautenberg votes AGAINST legislation to allow reimportation of prescription drugs. 12/14/07: Lautenberg votes AGAINST the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007. 6/20/07: Lautenberg votes AGAINST a biodiesel tax credit. 5/24/07: Lautenberg votes YES for $120 Billion in Iraq war funding. 4/26/07: Lautenberg votes YES for $124 billion in Iraq war funding. 3/29/07: Lautenberg votes YES for $122 billion in Iraq war funding. 9/29/06: Lautenberg votes YES for Military Commissions Act, gutting habeas corpus. 3/2/06: Lautenberg votes to EXTEND the USA PATRIOT Act. 7/29/05: Lautenberg votes NO on alternative energy tax breaks.
I made up my mind. I can’t vote for Frank Lautenberg, even if he is the Democratic nominee for Senate this year.
Lautenberg is pro-war.
He refused to filibuster John Roberts and Sammy The Fish Alito’s nominations to the Supreme Court. (See picture above.)
He doesn’t give a shit about anyone in South Jersey; as far as he’s concerned, the State ends at a line from Trenton to Tom’s River.
I’m sorry, but if we’re going to have someone who votes Republican in the Senate, I’d rather see a real Republican in the seat so we can go after him. I’m going to vote for the Green candidate, unless a “South Jersey Democrat” gets his name on the ballot in time. We can’t afford another six years of Frank Lautenberg.
You’ve read, I’m sure, on different blogs about how Reagan called for the murder of an anti-war activist last week. At the time, I thought it was just because Michael Reagan fell into the usual right wing mindset, and hated anti-war people because either:
Most of his friends and family were war profiteers,
He believed in Manifest Destiny, or
He was a sick evil fuck.
Now comes evidence that the real reason Michael Reagan loves this war is this: he hates brown people.
He hates them so much that he feels that, if he doesn’t approve of the name given to the child, they should be killed on their first birthday.
And that they should be killed by having grenades inserted in their rectum and detonated.
I’m not exaggerating, either.
Come back and read the rest of this entry after your stomach settles down.
Now back to the rant.
The irony here is that Michael, for those who don’t know, is not the natural born son of Ronald Reagan; he’s Ron-ma’s adopted son. This means that we can’t put the blame for any of this shit on Reagan’s genes. This is because he was raised this way. “And if that’s how they’re going to be raised…” (to believe that brown people are only worth death by rectal grenade at age one) then they’re better off dying in their infancy. Too bad we didn’t have that option with Michael Reagan.
You see, Michael Reagan was born before Roe v. Wade became law, and that meant that he couldn’t be aborted, and had to be put up for adoption. As a result, he wound up in the Reagan household, where he was obviously taught to hate all inferior races and undesirable types. He wound up being raised by the man who created the myth of the welfare queen and laughed as AIDS destroyed almost an entire generation of homosexuals. He was raised to hate people who were not like him, and think them worth nothing but painful death.
Now, if Michael Reagan had been aborted, his soul might have cycled through, and been born into a child who had more of a chance of being raised in a loving and caring family, where he could be taught the beauty in everyone, instead of just being a handy prop for your dad’s incipient political career (see also: John McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter). As a result, he might have been spared the trauma that leads him to statements like this. After all, if that’s how he’s going to be raised, he’s better off being ripped out of his mother’s wound with a coat hanger. Bye bye, baby.
What? You think that statement’s too extreme? Too hateful? You’re right. It is. Think about it, Michael.
We arrived at the courthouse yesterday at 8:15, and were allowed in at 8:30. That gave us a half hour to strategize.
The lawyer had prepared a memorandum, detailing the damages done to us and estimating their value anywhere from 1.2 Million to 6 Million. The judge had asked him (before deciding to order the settlement conference) what our drop dead minimum point was, and he told her if we were forced to settle immediately, we could do so for $950K. She then said that she was optimistic a settlement could be reached and scheduled yesterday’s session.
Things seemed to be going swimmingly until a bomb threat forced the evacuation of the courthouse around 11. The judge and Wachovia (who she was talking with at the time) adjourned to the prosecutor’s office a block away. We adjourned to the A&W a mile away. (Safer.) The lawyer told us that the judge was very favorable towards us, and he was optimistic that she was applying the screws.
Across the street from the courthouse, waiting for them to reopen at 1:30 as had been announced, our lawyer ran into their lawyer and they had an impromptu conference. Their lawyer offered us $75K, saying he had convinced Wachovia to go for that much. We refused, and the lawyer told him that when we went back inside, he would ask the judge to set the trial date since there was no way we could reconcile the two positions, which weren’t even in the same state.
After hearing all that, we were pretty wound up. I started having chest pains and trouble breathing. It wasn’t long before I was being laid out on the sidewalk. Fortunately, it turned out to just be a panic attack and there was no need to go to the hospital. By the time I was taken care of and we were back in, the judge was back in chambers with Wachovia.
Around 3:00, the judge’s clerk pulled us into a jury room to confer with our attorney and his partner Jose who had arrived along the way. The bank had raised their offer to $100K. The clerk said he couldn’t advise us one way or the other, needing to be neutral, but that the judge really didn’t want this to go to trial, and that we should consider their offer or come back with an appropriate counter. We knocked heads, smashed numbers, and identified two main parts of our complaint that were beyond slam dunk, and the minimum value of each. We lowered our offer to $550K.
3:45, lawyer comes back out. They aren’t budging from $100K. Judge wants to know if we will accept or counter. We counter with $423,959.53, the absolute minimum of the one big slam dunk part of the complaint. He goes back in.
4:30, lawyer comes back out. They’ve gone up to $150K. We counter that we need them to admit, essentially, that they’ve done something wrong and not to be able to just write this all off as if it was just an accounting error. We finally agree to counter with $350K, the amount that they’ve collected in fiduciary fees since they announced their intention to resign as trustee on July 1st, 2002. Lawyer goes back.
Few seconds later, he comes out to get his day planner. Wachovia hasn’t even decided to wait to see if we would accept. Their lawyer and the judge were talking trial dates. Around 5:15, he comes out and tells us trial is set for July 28th. Judge estimates that the trial should run five months.
On way out of courtroom, clerk pulls lawyer back in while we go out to the hallway. My mother is looking pale. She is very angry that I had to drive 415 miles each way to collect her for this bullshit session. Lawyer comes back out, and says the judge is prepared to call Wachovia’s lawyer and tell them they are royally fucked (her words) if they don’t come up to $200K. We are supposed to go home and sleep on this. Meanwhile, their lawyer has informed our lawyer that because we supposedly refused to settle (even though we were the only ones who did any real compromising) the bank was going to cut off our income. We leave.
On the way back to her mother-in-law’s (where she is staying), my mother’s breathing gets worse. The chest pains follow and shoot up to her neck. Bryan (driving the car) turns down a side street up to the highway that leads to the hospital. I half carry her into the emergency room and they take her right back into triage. EKG, chest X-ray, and blood work follow.
Her cardiac enzymes are way off, and the decision is made to admit her. All those years of intravenous drug use come back to haunt her as not one good vein can be found anywhere in her arms. They decide to run the IV though her neck. Meanwhile, the chest x-rays come back. There is a nasty looking spot on her lung. They admit her and I get home at 12:47 AM this morning.
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