Sitting apart
What I want most
is to spring out of this personality
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.
Rumi
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Youth wising up?
I was ahead of my time.
“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Books
According to the BBC (according to a circulating blogger meme), most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed below. It seems to me, however, that that represents a rather literate sample.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible *
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks x
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell *
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens*
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy x+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x+
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving x
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
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 x
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x+
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray x
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x+
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole x+
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I've read 59 out of 100 of these books, and intend to read 21 more. That leaves 20 I don't know anything about (I will be investigating some on Amazon) or don't care to read. I've also read books by a few of the authors other than their books listed here (e.g. Du Maurier, Rushdie, Banks, Dahl). There are also a couple on the list that I may have read, but it was so long ago I'm no longer sure, so I didn't include them.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Incorrigibly plural
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Louis MacNeice, from "Snow"
Monday, June 08, 2009
Learning
It is difficult, in an era in which most Americans acquire their information from packaged sound bites that require almost no effort from audiences, to convey the excitement of a time when people were willing to expend a good deal of energy looking at evidence, and listening to opinions, that challenged the received wisdom of previous ages. Autodidacts considered it fun to sit or stand for hours and hear lecturers discuss Shakespeare's sonnets, the poetry of Byron, the philosophy of Voltaire, the new biblical criticism based on the premise that the Scriptures were written by humans, evolution, electrification, the germ theory of disease, or woman suffrage.
Susan Jacoby, from Freethinkers
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Joy
Joy always,
Joy everywhere—
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.
Carl Sandburg, from "Joy"
Of wet and wildness
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, from "Inversnaid"
Monday, May 18, 2009
Breaking loose
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."
The people is a tragic and comic two-face:
hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twist-
ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: "They
buy me and sell me...it's a game...
sometime I'll break loose..."
Carl Sandburg, from "The People, Yes"
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Your story
Never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are—they're yours to uncover and stand behind—so long as, at the very least, there is courage.
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics In Calamity Physics
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
