On Books, and Not Reading Them

Invite me to do a meme, challenge me, and I'll fail to get around to it. But just happen to post a bookish meme (a list!) and I am all over it. Good to see you blogging, Kristjan, I miss your font around the 'Ville.

The books listed below are "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." What I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:

* 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
* 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 o f 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 [finished, but I hated it]
* 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

I don't often finish a book I'm not really enjoying. Every once in a while I'll plow through something I dislike, just to be able to say in excruciating detail why I dislike it. Atwood's a fine writer, but she didn't know what she was talking about it Oryx & Crake, and it showed.

The Russians are clearly not a big hit with me.

By the bye, I'm reading Stumbling on Happiness, which I've been looking forward to forever it seems. It's amazingly good. Gilbert has a polished lecture style (I'm guessing), with jokes and light asides, even as he loads the reader up with all the research. It's not meant to be any sort of self-help book, but it is helpful, I think, to understand why in times of great stress, my daydreams would all be about decorating my dream home (a very human desire for control, particularly when I feel out of control of life events).

More on The Pressure Boys Reunion

Raleigh's News & Observer ran a long article on Sunday.Pressure Men:

"Kick-starting the Pressure Boys back to life has not been simple. Frontman Plymale, guitarist Settle and saxophonist Stafford live in the Triangle, but the other three in the reunion are scattered across the country. Trumpet player Je Widenhouse lives in Asheville, and drummer Rob Ladd and bassist Jack Campbell both reside in California. So they're having to rehearse when they can (including this week)."

Be sure and check out the audio slide show. Kudos to the Spouse, for making it all sound awesome.

More on The Pressure Boys, the fabulous collection Songs for Sixty Five Roses, and the two bands The Pressure Boys and Sneakers

I can hardly wait for Friday night's show. Here's my life: I'm worried about being too tired for the concert, because I'll be at my daughter's dance recital dress rehearsal all evening. The Offspring are too young to attend the show, sadly.

Speaking of Readerville

And aren't I always? Come see my list of recommended steampunk reads.

I don't know if it's acceptable to trackback to one's self, but I'm doing it anyway, as practice.

Update 4/22: So much for that practice. How 'bout this: Steampunk at Readerville