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Thanks all. I appreciate the exposure.

Off-Topic: TBR

Well, I'm almost finished with my 100 Wild Little Weird Tales book (finally!) and the pile of books on my nightstand isn't getting any smaller, so I thought now might be a good time to make up a "to be read" list. I have a slight problem with getting to books that I've owned for a long time and thought I might get to them more quickly if I put them down on a list. Also, perhaps having this up on net will help me refrain from getting books from the library for a while and help me concentrate on reading books I OWN.

Anyway, here it is, with the books listed in roughly the order I plan on reading them:

H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales - Douglas A. Anderson (ed.)
Island - Aldous Huxley
The War Of The Worlds - H.G. Wells
The Time Machine - Wells
The Island Of Dr. Moreau - Wells
The Invisible Man - Wells
The First Men In The Moon - Wells
The Food Of The Gods - Wells
In The Days Of The Comet - Wells
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - Alan Dean Foster
Cthulhu's Heirs - Thomas M.K. Stratman (ed.)
The Histories - Herodotus
Utopia - Sir Thomas More
Complete Tales & Poems - Edgar Allan Poe
The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian - Robert E. Howard
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
A Wrinkle In Time - Madeleine L'Engle

I might change it up a bit and tackle Splinter Of The Mind's Eye (there's a real obscuro one for all you Star Wars geeks out there) after, say, The Invisible Man if I'm getting sick of Wells by that point (which I probably will be), but otherwise I think I'm pretty much gonna go in that order.

I'd also like to get my hands on the following titles, eventually (after I read all the stuff on the list above, of course):

Dreams From My Father - Barack Obama
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
Behold The Man - Michael Moorcock
Crash - J.G. Ballard
A Harlan Ellison collection (I'd love to tackle the monstrous (1,200 pages!) Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective, but I'm thinking that something like Deathbird Stories might be a little more realistic - I love Ellison, but I don't wanna read just him for a year.)
The Haunting Of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin
Perhaps Lovecraft's Horror In The Museum or some other volume of classic weird fiction I haven't checked out yet.

What's on your list(s)?

Off-Topic: ALA Banned Books

I saw this link posted at John Coulthart's excellent online journal {feuilleton} and thought I'd post it here as well:

ALA Banned Books

Here's an article on the same topic in the American press, if you'd like to compare.

Authors, banned books part of 1st Amendment salute


Before anyone accuses me of "getting all political", I need to state that I feel that freedom of speech is protected by the U.S. Constitution and should therefore be considered a non-partisan issue, at least here in the States. It occasionally seems to me that my friends on the Right forget that their speech is protected by the First Amendment, too.

Off-Topic: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

As you may be noticing, I'm slightly obsessed with lists, especially those involving the arts. I recently came across the list of books in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and checked to see how many I've read; I performed pitifully, having only read sixty-one of the books on the list, or only about 6% of the titles on the list.

Anyway, here's the ones I have read:

Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons (suprise!)
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The World According to Garp – John Irving
The Shining – Stephen King
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Emma – Jane Austen
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe

Here's a link to the entire list, if you want to check it out.

Off-Topic: Annoyance; Newsweek List

This is extremely irritating.

I saved a blog entry I had started back on 8/19, and completed it just now, and instead of posting at the top of the front page of my blog, it posted back by my 8/19 post.

Here's the post, if anyone wants to read it - it's about Newsweek's Top 100 Books list.

Does anyone know how I can prevent this from happening again in the future?

Off-Topic: Newsweek's Top 100 Books

Can't believe I missed this one when it came out:

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: the Meta-List

This is actually kind of an interesting spin on the whole "Top 100 Books" idea: rather than create an entirely new list, Newsweek combined a bunch of pre-existing list to make a "list of lists" - sort of like acclaimedmusic.net, but with books instead of albums and songs. I did okay, I think - I've read 25 of the 100:

1984 by Orwell
The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner
The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Catch-22 by Heller
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
Brave New World by Huxley
Native Son by Wright
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Lewis
On the Road by Kerouac
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee
The Holy Bible
A Clockwork Orange by Burgess
Hamlet by Shakespeare
King Lear by Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Shelley
Song of Solomon by Morrison
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut
Animal Farm by Orwell
Lord of the Flies by Golding
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
Heart of Darkness by Conrad
The Maltese Falcon by Hammett

How 'bout you?