All the cool kids are doing it and I wanna be like the cool kids.

These are the 106 books that are most often marked as ‘owned but not read’ at LibraryThing.

I have read the ones in bold . According to the rules, I am supposed to italicize the ones I have partially read, but I am going to italicize the ones that I am pretty sure I have read but remember nothing about.

Here goes:

• 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 (it is third in my bookpile though)
• 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 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

Dear DIRECTV Customer: 

Your new bill for DIRECTV account 037048676 is now available online. Your total amount due is No Payment Due. 

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No doubt Comcast will be much better at this kind of stuff.

I just went through Gamer Pro’s entire list of the 52 most important games of all time and could not see Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Gauntlet, Pole Position or Manic Miner anywhere.

The list was probably compiled by youngsters.

The 7 or 8 Guys that I have made in the past have all been spur-of-the-moment affairs with whatever-old-clothes-I-Found-in-the-wardrobe.

This year I vow to give him more respect. My Guy Fawkes will be recognisable as an early seventeenth century terrorist - probably free-standing and possibly equipped with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

I challenge anyone who is attending any Guy Fawkes or Plot Night festivities, quizzes or camping trips to do better!

My vacation started just over half an hour ago and already it is quite excellent. From my chair, at the top of my drive, as I sip my second beer, I can see no less than 12 wireless networks.

I am enjoying my book (despite its not being very good) and came across this quote, which I thought I’d share:

It is an excellent rule to be observed in all disputes, that men should give soft words and hard arguments; that they would not so much strive to vex, as to convince an enemy.

John Wilkins, 1643-ish

The book is Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer. It tells the story of man’s beliefs about the soul and is a kind of potted history of neuroscience through superstition, alchemy and - I presume because I haven’t yet got that far - science.

The major thurst of the book is OK but he keeps meandering off into these irrelevant side-stories and, in the latest one, his version of the English Civil War has the Puritan freedom-fighters erecting a beacon of tolerance and freethinking to illuminate the land after the dark ages of the tyrant Stuart kings.

Since I dropped history at the first opportunity (there is only so much you can take of Mrs Timm), I don’t really know the official establishment view of the Civil War. Most of my knowledge is coloured by Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples in which the Churchill Family were the underground resistance during a brutal military dictatorship in which humourless Roundheads abolished song and colour and beauty and imposed meat and two veg on generations of Englishmen.

In my version, Cromwell has a lot in common with Mullah Omar. Not that I am a Royalist, you understand (quite the contrary), but I note that many of the great advances that came out of England came after the Restoration.

I wonder what the official view is. I wonder what other Englishmen think about the Civil War - to the extent that they think about it at all. Comwell. Good guy or bad guy?

I shall ask the very next Englishman I meet.

Speaking of which, one of my favourite Englishmen has invited me to a Britain-oriented quiz on Plot Night. No-one from my part of the country calls it Plot Night. To us, it is Guy Fawkes’. No doubt that’s another symptom of the North-South divide.

Speaking of Plot Night, Aaron asked me if he could come to our Guy Fawkes-themed camping trip dressed as Guy. Only if your costume is flammable, I replied - quite reasonably I thought.

Thanks to V is for Vendetta, Aaron has it in his head that Guy Fawkes was some kind of revolutionary hero - to Americans like Aaron, all revolutionaries are heroes - but I carefully explained that Guy Fawkes was closer to one of Osama bin Laden’s suicide bombers than to Thomas Paine - who, by the way, got his start in the village pub in Lewes where my mum lives. I also explained that the American Revolution was quite a-typical as most affairs of that nature are followed by Reigns of Terror or Interregna in which Humourless Roundheads/Khmer Rougians/Enragés put people in re-education camps, chop off their heads, persecute the Irish, and, worst of all, blandify English menus.

So, anyway, which is it?

Cromwell. Good guy or bad guy?

I am always surprised by how long mammals have been around.

Let’s compress all of earth’s 4.5 billion years of history into a single year, such that the earth would have first formed on January 1 of this year, and the present — the here and now — would be represented by the stroke of midnight on the last day of this year, December 31. On this scale of time the first primitive microbial life forms appeared on earth in late March, followed by more complex photosynthetic microorganisms in mid- to late-May. Land plants and animals emerged from the sea in mid-November, and the first mammal drew its breath on Thanksgiving Day. Dinosaurs appeared on earth on the morning of December 13, but then disappeared forever on December 25, at 7:30 p.m. Coincidentally, or not, just a moment before, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit the earth near the Yucatan peninsula and plunged the earth into what some scientists have described as a thousand years of winter’s hell.

     Human-like creatures appeared in Africa sometime during the evening of December 31, around dinner time, maybe 6:30 p.m. or so. Homo sapiens appeared on earth at about five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the midst of the last great ice age. Rome ruled the Western world for five seconds — from 15 seconds to 10 seconds before midnight on the 31st. And as the ball begins to drop — Columbus landed in the New World three seconds to midnight, the United States was founded one and a half seconds before midnight, and 13 men with 13 prayers and 13 dollars met in the frontier settlement of Hamilton, New York to found Colgate University just slightly more than one second before midnight, at the end of this eventful year.

http://www4.colgate.edu/scene/nov2000/april.html