11 posts tagged “books”

since I read a book that scared me so badly I couldn't sleep.

I stated Stephen King's Duma Key last night around 9 p.m.; about midway through I realized I had to try to sleep soon and started scanning through the second half of the book because I knew I wasn't going to sleep until the ghost had been laid to rest, so to speak.

Hmph.

I should know there's no skimming with books like that. By 3:30 I was almost finished, but at the most tense part, when ... flicker, flicker, off - the power went out.

Two problems. One, I was already scared almost out of my mind. Two, I had to finish that damn book. Stumbled around until I found a flashlight to read the last 10 or so pages, which, of course, involve a flashlight in a remarkably creepy way. Good, now that's done.

But I have no alarm clock and the juice on my cell phone is too far gone for me to rely on using it as an alarm in the morning. Opened the blinds thinking the morning sun would surely wake me up on time and tried to sleep, but no dice.

Finally the power came back on around 4:15. I had to reset my alarm but apparently did it wrong, because it failed to go off this morning and I was late for work.

Nice one, Stephen! Nice one! I don't think you've creeped me out like this since, oh, Pet Semetary? And how you managed to get the power to go out right at that moment ...

In 1968, shortly after assembling the track "Revolution 9" by layering tape loops (including a found test tape of an engineer repeating "number nine") over the fadeout of the album version of "Revolution," Lennon told long-time friend Pete Shotton:

This is the music of the future. You can forget all the rest of the shit we've done - this is it! Everybody will be making this stuff one day - you don't even have to know how to play a musical instrument to do it!

Of course, later that night Lennon also told Shotton that he (Lennon) was Jesus. When he told the rest of the Beatles the next morning, "they agreed they needed time to consider this proclamation." Yes, I imagine they did.

From Beatlesongs, by William J. Dowlding

p. 44
"... Wikipedia, with its millions or amateur editors and unreliable content, is the seventeenth most-trafficked site on the Internet; Britannica.com, with its 100 Nobel Prize winners and 4,000 expert contributors, is ranked 5,128."
Well, there's a simple reason for that. Really simple. Wikipedia, free. Britannica, not free. I use Wikipedia all the time; I know to take what I read there with a grain of salt, but often it's actually people's opinions I'm looking for, not just dry academic prose. And the other thing - winning a Nobel Prize doesn't mean all that much, if you listen to Al Gore's critics.

p. 46
" ... democratized media will eventually force all of us to become amateur critics and editors ourselves. With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye."
Excuse me, but you didn't already read everything with a skeptical eye? If not, how many times did you buy ocean-front property in Oklahoma back in the 80s?

pp. 53-54
"When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighed by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy ... Unlike professionally edited newspapers or magazines where the political slant of the paper is restricted to the op-ed page, the majority of blogs make radical, sweeping statements without evidence or substantiation."
Oh, where to start? We know nothing of the sort; we may assume it, but we do not know it. The U.S. news media has either been mislead or too cowardly to report many relevant things about the war in Iraq; I, for one, do not trust them. A quick look at BBC News offers another point of view, and by reading both I think I might be getting something approaching the complete story. Political slant limited to the op-ed pieces? Bull. All I can think about is Fox News, so obviously in the pocket of the reigning Republican administration. How many news magazines, over the years, have been accused of being ridiculously liberal?

p. 68
"When we, the citizens, don't know whom to believe or whom to trust, we may end up making the wrong decision, or, worse yet, just switch off -- from the candidates, from politics, from voting at all." (He's just written about "amateurs" who create political ads that are then placed on YouTube and other non-regulated places.)
News flash: You don't know who is telling the truth in politics. End of story. Full stop. If you need an example, think about the Swift Boat "problems" for John Kerry. It's all about who has the best propaganda machine. Why does it surprise you that those same propaganda machines operate online, just as they do in other media?

Well, the ability to add a post to Vox from the bookmarks bar is nice, but not if it doesn't include any pictures of the site I'm linking to. How dull is that?

Anyway, here's a link to some beautiful illuminated manuscripts and other literary wonders at the European Digital Library. Enjoy!

Yet another book that needs more pictures. In this case, it's Paris: The Secret History.

This time there are some pictures, just not enough. So, I'll do my usual and gather up some more.

(I wish I could find an easy way to put them all in one post, but I'm searching for them in Flickr and using the post to blog option there. For some reason, I can't find the pictures when I search using the same key words on the Flickr tab of Vox's "photos" option.)

Roman Baths of Paris (non-functional)

Originally uploaded by lynnsterj.

I decided earlier this year to do that internet meme thing and read and record 50 books this year. I intended it as something I'm going to do with my Vox blog, but in effect ... I'm already almost half the way to completing a New Year's Resolution! (Which might mean I need to amend that resolution to 100 books. We've still got a month to go in the first quarter, people!)

Book: Show us one of your favorite works of fiction.

What might have happened if Jane Austen wrote Harry Potter, for adults. One of the most satisfying books I've ever read.

I'm stealing this from thereshegoes ... who says"I took this meme from typewriter who got it from Lightchaser etc."

Instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you have read a bit from but never finished, italicize the ones you might/want to read in the future, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10-foot pole, and do not do anything to the ones you’ve never heard of. And I'm adding my own twist -- bold and italics for things you want to read again or have already read more than once. And bold with strike through for things you've read but kinda wish you hadn't. And lighter gray for ones you've heard of but don't really have any specific plans to read, although if it was there you might -- sorta noncommittal, really.

Warning: If you copy and paste this list, you won't be able to change the formatting much. You can add new formatting but you can't take away the old; if something is italics, it's going to stay that way unless you retype it. At least that's what is happening for me ...

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride And Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
   
4. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkein)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkein)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
    
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (C Brontë)
    
21. The Hobbitt (Tolkein)
    
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Alcott)
    
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (E Brontë)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis)
    
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
    
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
    
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
    
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38.  I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
    
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)
    
45. Gift & Award Bible NIV (Various)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
    
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
    
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
    
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (McCullough)
    
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
    
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
    
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brahares)
67. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
    
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Burnett)
    
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (Irving)
    
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen) 
86. Watership Down (Adams)
    
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
    
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Ludlum)
    
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Bearing in mind I have an MA in English Lit, is anyone surprised?

I just finished reading Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, and now I have a new Top Ten favorite! With the exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr  Norrell, it's the best book I've read in many years. It's meaty somehow - a book to really sink your teeth into. Like something the Brontës would have written, except faster paced. And there's all sorts of unreliable narrators, so even when you're finished you're not sure what happened. I want, no I need, more books like this!

There is also an exquisite accompanying website.

I've also just finished John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels, a non-fiction work about the fiery destruction of Venice's historic La Fenice Opera House and its eventual reconstruction. The book started out strong, and the individual vignettes were often incredibly interesting, but the last chapter dragged on and on. I did, however, wind up spending most of the morning searching Flickr for photos of Venice and LaFenice (pronounced feh-NEE-cheh). Beautiful place, although I didn't really find photos of the theater before the fire, which was what I really hoped for.

What I'm currently reading (not arranged well on the page - sorry, can't figure out how to fix 'em)