Pretty Good on Paper

I spent much of my free time the last two days reading Nothing to Lose, the latest Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child. In fact, I took half the day off yesterday, partly because the weather was so warm, for a change, but partly because I just wanted to read it.

It has been nearly a year since I started reading Child’s addictive series, of which this is the eleventh. All of the previous ten I have read more than once. So when I found out that the book was available already at the U.K. version of Amazon.com, I ordered it and sent my pounds thither posthaste.

I don’t quite get why it was released on March 24th in that backward land across the sea, but it won’t be released in the United States until June 3. There are some editing changes to be made, I know. But how long does it take to replace all the instances of “tyre” with “tire?” “Kerb” with “curb?” “Oestrogen” with “estrogen?” I suppose that they will have to sort out all of the instances where, for example “organisation” must be changed to “organization,” and sort out the other s-z issues.

And there are some words that seem to have made the jump across the pond already. The Smiths brought the word “spanner” with them packed in one of my favorite rhymes of all time:

I broke into the palace
with a sponge and a rusty spanner,
She said “I know you and you cannot sing.”
I said “that’s nothing, you should hear me play piano.”

So now we all know that a spanner is a pipe wrench.

Oh, and the covers had to be different, too, because the UK version had to show a picture of what a town in Colorado might look like (above), whereas in America these have been carefully branded over the years as a target with a bullet hole in it (below).

I guess all of the punctuation marks should be put on the other sides of quotation marks, too, so there’s one more thing to do before releasing the book here. Probably the publishers want to spare themselves having to answer irate letters from American readers complaining about [nonexistent] typographical errors.

At any rate, now that it will be another year before I get to read another Jack Reacher novel. Does anyone out there know of any books as entertaining as these with a similar hero?

I was ironing a shirt this morning and had the Today Show on (yeah, I know) and they were talking about this Web 2.0 site called Juicycampus.com. If you haven’t heard already, the site encourages people at any of 50 (so far) college campuses to post juicy rumors about others, completely anonymously. Open to abuse? No, more like open for the sole purpose of abuse. The campus at which I work is not one of the favored few (yet, of course), which is sad; I hate to be left out of new trends, especially when self-destruction is so glaringly immanent.

At any rate, it made me think of this delightful passage of a delightful book called Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland. [One of my favorites, honestly. It is The Soul of a New Machine for Generation X.] The book concerns a group of playful geeks who quit their jobs at Microsoft to build a video game. One of them, at some point in the book, writes a bit of code that allows any of the seven or so people coding the game to post rumors anonymously. Things quickly get out of hand, of course. He pulls the plug, to much relief on everyone’s part, after about 24 hours.

What’s different about juicycampus.com, of course, is that the company’s founder, Matt Ivester, already graduated from Duke, in 2005. So he is not subject to the stream of junk that afflicts all of the people at these colleges. Perhaps Matt would feel differently if someone, perhaps someone who knew Matt at Duke (or perhaps knew him at Clemson, before he was kicked out because of that Harry Potter Fan Club fiasco), maybe one of his frat buddies, posted some gossip about Matt.

Or not.

This fall I find myself re-reading some of Stephen King’s books, many of which I first read when they were first issued in paperback. I’m doing this partly because I like the genre, partly because I see Mr. King as a really good writer, from whom I have a lot to learn, and partly because I have one of those unique minds that can forget all but a few basic plot elements from a novel I read only a couple of years back. This special skill allows me to enjoy a book just as much upon second, third, or fourth readings. It can save money during those times when you are mainly reading for entertainment or escape.

I’ve long since lost or loaned or sold the novels that I am re-reading, of course, assuming I ever owned them, so I turn to Bookmooch or Paperbackswap for a fresh copy. I usually opt for hardbound books, when I can get them, knowing that I am likely to keep them, and that since I live now in a house with dry and ample basement space, and am likely to be here some time, there is a place to store them. Plus, I just like them.

This week I am reading The Dead Zone, which I was surprised to discover I had never before read. I saw the movie, of course. Anything with Christopher Walken in it is a must-see. But all of my memories are from the movie–I’m almost certain. Most shocking of all, though, was this picture of the author on the inside of the jacket.

Would they have sold more copies if his picture was on the front cover? Or would they have scared off potential readers? You decide.

One of the most generally prescient science fiction authors, and one of my favorites, has always been Robert A. Heinlein.  That first sentence requires a lot of qualification, which I won’t do in this post–perhaps later when I have more time.  I’m posting this today for two reasons. 

1) My wife reminded me this morning that it only takes five minutes or so.

2) My nine-year-old son was doing research for his Spanish class last night using Youtube (looking at and listening to Flamenco music and some other things.)

So that research reminded me of a passage in a book called Friday, by the aforementioned Heinlein, written, if I am not mistaken, (no, I won’t take the two minutes it might take to look it up) in 1990.  The protagonist, a young, genetically engineered combat courier named Friday, is doing some research at a facility in Pajaro Sands, California.  She gets off on a tangent, as researchers often do, following links on a world-wide web that did not yet exist, and sees a video of Professor Irwin Corey, the World’s Foremost Authority. So I’m linking to one here:

He’s pretty funny.  The crowd is perhaps funnier, in an entirely different way–they know all the gags and repeat the lines, ad tedium.  I chose this particular one because it popped up first on the list.

Kinda makes you think.

I got this from Writing Grandmother’s Book, who got it from Superfastreader.  It’s another book meme which lists books tagged as unread in Librarything.  Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, and put asterisks next to those you read more than once.

Jonathan Strange & M. 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
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
* Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
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
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
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

There are a lot of books here in common with the 100 Books Meme.  But they are nowhere near the bottom of the curve among the people who filled out that meme (see frequency table here).  For example, more than half the people who did that meme had read The Hobbit (67%), Catcher in the Rye (64%), etc.

 I’ll tag raincoaster, Stiletto, strugglingwriter, and K. F. Gallagher.

Back at the beginning of the summer I pre-ordered Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book.  And Amazon sent me an email earlier in the week telling me that it was on its way.  It could even be here today.  If so, I’m going to set aside the two other books I’m reading and start right in on it. 

I’m particularly excited about this one for two reasons.  First, I loved Going Postal, which featured the same protagonist as the new one.  Second, I majored in economics in college, and I’m really looking forward to seeing Pratchett’s Discworld analogues to Earth’s monetary systems.  What does Gresham’s Law look like on the Disc?  Will Ankh-Morpork have some sort of Bretton Woods? 

I

I’ll let you know.

While I was putting up my own LibraryThing Tag Mirror yesterday I was also puzzling about the list of books comprising the 100 Books Meme.   Then, suddenly, and somewhat painfully, ineinsbildung!  [When backed into a corner, exclaim something in German.  Even fewer people (one of whom is this blogger) know German than know Latin.]  

It occurred to me that I should give the same treatment to the idiosyncratic list that is the 100 Books Meme.  So I created a LibraryThing account comprised just of those books read by half or more of the bloggers who did the meme.

What sort of tags do those books have?  Well, these (click to enlarge):

And here is the tag mirror for the entire list of 100: (click to enlarge):

What does this tag cloud say about the composer of the list? I’ve got to get to work, so I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the student, posting about it later only if I can make some sense of it.

Click here to examine the 100 Books LibraryThing tags individually or perhaps here would be even better.

I got this from Cavan.  I have been very lazy about updatain my LT account.  Originally, I had what I thought was an interesting way of tagging my books, but beyond a hundred or so I stopped tagging them altogether.  Librarything recently unveiled a new feature for showing your library via tags put in but people who are less lazy–the tag mirror. 

The tag mirror shows my library, as if it was tagged by the more-responsible librarians there.  There are several different options for the number of tags.  Here’s 150 tags, the lowest setting (click to enlarge):

And here’s my library with 300 tags (click to enlarge):

I think there’s an option for 1000, too. but I couldn’t figure out how to actually display it.  If you click here, you can see it.

The 100Books meme has made the rounds of the blogosphere for some time now, and I have examined the responses of 200 blogs, but haven’t yet decided what it all means.  Partially, this has to do with the eccentricity of the list itself.  Respondents are predominently within a demographic that I can only describe as “literate knitters.”  Hard to generalize from it, is what I mean to say.  I’ve got a plan to remedy that, which I’ll get to later.  First, here are the boring summary statistics as a pdf. 

The blogger in the sample who read the fewest read only four of these books.  One blogger claimed to have read 90 of them. And the average blogger claimed to have read 39 of them.  [I would have read 39 of them, too, if I had read all of the books I was supposed to read in school.  But I charted my own course, which explains my disappointing grades.]

I haven’t had much chance to look at the cross-tabulations yet, but I did notice a couple of oddities:

1. Eleven people read Tolkien’s Return of the King without having read The Fellowship of the Ring.  What, if any, is the deal with that?
2. Ten people read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but did not read Harry Potter and the Sourceror’s Stone (AKA HP and the Philosopher’s Stone).  Similarly, WTF?

More to come.

This is a book meme that bounced around the blogosphere for a while.  I compiled statistics from a sample of 200 bloggers who have done it.  I’ll be posting some of the results later this week, but I thought I’d do the meme myself first.  It’s only fair.  It’s easy.  Just copy the list, bold the ones you have read, and post the results.  Don’t feel bad if you didn’t read a lot of them.  It is an odd list.

My results are kinda pathetic, in some spots, and I only read 35 percent of them (assuming I counted correctly.)  Found myself thinking that I am not reall all that well-read after all.  Some of the stuff in the list I don’t even recognize.  Some of it is trash, of course.  But there are a few that I really meant to get to.  Some of the ones I meant to read are also trash, I suspect.  Anyway, here’s my list.

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 (Tolkien)
6.   The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7.   The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
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
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 (Charlotte Bronte)
21.  The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22.  The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23.  Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24.  The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25.  Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27.  Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. 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.  The Bible
46.  Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47.  The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48.  Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49.  The Grapes of Wrath (John 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 (Colleen McCullough)
59.  The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60.  The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61.  Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62.  The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63.  War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64.  Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65.  Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66.  One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67.  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
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 (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76.  The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78.  The World According to Garp (John 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(Richard 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 (Robert 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)

Let me know if you want to participate in the study, and I’ll be sure to get your list in.