Lite Ray? Sure

Found this at tobey’s.

——

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

Them Silly List of Books

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I’m guessing I’ve read this thrice. The appendices probably more.)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (And this is here because?)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (The problem with having seen the film first is that Atticus has to look like GregoryPeck in your head.)
6. The Bible (Not all of it you understand. Favorite bit - Ecclesiastes)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (And this was a decade before that year actually hit.)
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (In progress)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I loved it at the time. But then I was 16 so I doubt I’d underline this now.)
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (I already knew that the very rich could be horrible people but it was a good reminder)
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Especially the Vogon Poetry)
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Isn’t this covered in 33?)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (Why is this here?)
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (The movie wasn’t as funny as the book. What do you mean it’s not supposed to be a comedy? Why is this here?)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (High school assignment)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (You see it’s really a book about writing as process of redemption.)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (Have you ever noticed that all the greatest sci-fi novels are really about religion?)
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Pomo gothic-horror about a writer in Barcelona.)
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (Seen both film and mini-series though.)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (And apart from all the Shakesperean references – starting with the title – have you ever noticed that all the great sci-fi stories are really about religion?)
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (small man tries to teach big man to stop killing his pet mice.)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (How to get even. Really even. Keep notes since you will lose track of who did what to him to deserve what he does to them.)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (There’s too much chick-lit here already.)
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdied 
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (there are really only two novels, MD and Don Quixote. Everything else is just gravy.)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (I’m still wondering why I haven’t)
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I’m still wondering why I haven’t)
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (It has it’s moments. But you have to try to stop laughing at others.)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry (Maybe 10 times. Well it’s short.)
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams 
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (The humor here is intentional.)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (But there’s a “Complete Works” up there!)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 

 

——–

And just to let everyone understand that it’s a dumb list, here are some missing in action (that I’ve read):

Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man & The Sea – Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (Ok, I had my EH period)
 The World According to Garp – John Irving
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (Okay, add this to DQ and MB)
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe 
Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll 
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig (Look for this in Fully Booked in the Philosophy Section.)
The Once and Future King – T. H. White
Morte d’ Arthur – Thomas Mallory (Now what made me think of that?)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach (I just thought I’d throw that in since everyone wanted to choose this for a book report in high school for very understandable reasons, until the teacher got wise and banned book reports of it. I was intending to do “Old Man & The Sea” anyway. It’s also short. Having said that, I did really enjoy the story of the little seagull that went splat! and became a Christ-like ghost symbol to the other seagulls.)
Stranger In a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein (I grok it)
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
 

 Okay I’m tired. Enough trying to remember every book I’ve ever  liked.

Filed under: Objects I Like, books

Conversation with Vesta

The Tambourine Player by Charles-Émile-Hippolyte Lecomte-Vernet | Joseph Friedman Ltd.

And they once told you it was too late—
You watch the fire talking, telling you
“Dance! Bang drums, Climb walls! Don’t stop!”
You must respect remarks from virgin goddesses
Who stare at you past leftover bacchanalia
That you had thought you could control
But know the helplessness of truth.

It was in another’s dream: the Hunters
And dogs had chased the stag into water,
Then looked up at where the other gods
Staring down at them from the tree tops
Pointed with their lips towards a cave
(They’re funny in that way, these dream gods)
And going in they saw the goddess, crudely carved
Asking where everybody went. She blamed
The new Virgin, and the kid with the curly locks
In the stone building on top of the hill.

The Hunters were of a different past from hers
And couldn’t understand her words — they shrugged
And caught the deer and neglected the future.

Filed under: Artes, Objects I Like, Poetry

Poulet de Champagne 1 & 2

Filed under: Artes

Offiziolo – L’eterno e gli eremiti

File:Offiziolo – L’eterno e gli eremiti.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Filed under: Artes, books

Wordle – La Bella Luna

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
Tell me why you stop me, now halfway
Along this road to where we all end up
Without a firm reply to–who was that?

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
When it’s been dragged from me and dragged too often
Without a note, not even one that said
With pride–hey look at him and what he did!

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
I thought to fool them, all the multitudes,
And had a mind enough to think me grand
But not enough to know they thought me stupid.

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
Remember now that dream I told you of
When I was naked in the streets and stared-at
By those multitudes–and then I hid.

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
I hid from them with shame in case they knew
Of all those lies that somehow made it past
The scrutiny I held myself towards.

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
All those cruel Aprils past I’d known
How just before each crucifixion, I knew
Each nail and how it would be struck.

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
So there! I’ve told you now, my Artemis,
While you baleful me with silver light,
Of all that guilt I knew but now I don’t.

Ay! La Bella Luna, Bella Luna!
I’d sooner know you as Athena naked
To think, and just as well your breasts are full
From succoring that child we soon will have.

Ay! Ay! Ay! Bella Luna!
You care for me I know, and how I know?
You see me more than any mother could
For you’d not leave without at least a kiss

(reprise)

Filed under: Objects I Like

Book Fungus Can Get You High

You can grow fungi without a book

…if you want to find mold, the only place that may rival a refrigerator is a library. Just last week the Las Cruces, N.M., Public Library was closed indefinitely, prompted by health concerns after a fungus outbreak in the reference section. Library director Carol Brey said the fungus promptly spread to old history books and onward to the literature section. The town’s Mold Eradication Team, she said, shuttered the library as a precaution. “We didn’t want to take any chances,” she said.

via Book Fungus Can Get You High.

Thank you to Diesdre for explaining why some of us display an inordinate fondness for libraries.

Filed under: books

Rhinoceros

382d7b5b4a33db434187cd641a5ffef00632005f_m.jpg (JPEG Image, 400×308 pixels).

Filed under: Objects I Like , photography, allusion

The Perfect Image

Cat Frog Umbrella Man Celestial Fairy

Filed under: Artes, Celestial

Bakufu Ohno Woodblock Print Collection – Ohmi Gallery

Bakufu Ohno Woodblock Print Collection – Ohmi Gallery.

Filed under: Celestial , japanese prints

You Call That Poetry?!: Poetry Foundation [article]

lighght

via You Call That Poetry?!: Poetry Foundation [article].

Filed under: Literary Criticism, Objects I Like, Poetics , anti-poetry