Category: reading

Books I’ve Read in 2010

In 2009, I finally completed my 52 book challenge.  Not only that, I read twice as many books as in 2008.  For 2010, at the moment at least, I don’t have a specific goal.  I will continue to keep track of my books read as I finish them.

Total pages read: 24,002
Shortest book: 117 pages
Longest book: 838 pages
Fiction: 41
Non-fiction: 28
Cookbook: 10
Poetry: 1

Last book read:

80.  Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge by William
Powers.  A memoir of his time in Liberia directing aid during the reign
of Charles Taylor in Liberia.  292 pages.  (Finished 31 Dec 10).
 
Full list below the cut:

Past Lists:
2009 List
2008 List
2007 List

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/12/books-ive-read-in-2010/

2009 Project

My book list for 2009:

Total pages read: 20,396
Shortest book: 77 pages
Longest book: 1014 pages
Non-Fiction: 19
Fiction: 34
Cookbook: 6
Poetry: 3

Last book read:
62.  Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison. 
The older brother of Augustin Burroughs tells his story of growing up
with Asperger’s (though undiagnosed until he was middle aged).  288
pages.  (Finished 31 Dec 09).

Full list below the cut:

Past Lists:
2008 List
2007 List

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2009/12/2009-project/

Reader Stereotypes

Shamelessly stolen from here: http://laurenleto.wordpress.com/readers-by-author/

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

by Lauren Leto

(by the way – I respect every author on here, kind of)

J.D. Salinger

Kids who don’t fit in (duh).

Stephanie Meyer

People who type like this: OMG. Mah fAvvv <3 <3.

J.K. Rowling

Smart geeks.

Jack Kerouac

Umphrey’s McGee fans.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Girls who didn’t get enough drama when they were younger.

Lauren Weisberger

Girls who can’t read. Or think.

Jonathan Safran Foer

30somethings who were cool when they were 20something.

Jodi Picoult

Your mom when she’s at her time of the month.

Chuck Klosterman

Boys who don’t read.

Chuck Palahniuk

Boys who can’t read.

Christopher Hitchens

People I would love to hang out with.

Leo Tolstoy

Guys I want to date.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Guys I want to sleep with. (The difference between the two Russian
authors lies in the fact that I think the Underground Man is sexier
than Pierre Buzukhov).

Christopher Buckley (or William F. Buckley)

People who love excess verbiage.

Ayn Rand

Workaholics seeking validation.

David Foster Wallace

Confirmed 90’s literati.

Jane Austen (or Bronte Sisters)

Girls who made out with other girls in college when they were going through a “phase”.

Haruki Murakami

People who like good music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who can start a fire.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

People who used to sleep so heavy that they would pee their pants.

Charles Dickens

Ninth graders who think they’re going to be authors someday but end up in marketing.

William Shakespeare

People who like bondage.

Mark Twain

Liars.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

People who drink scotch.

Joseph Conrad

People who drink old fashioneds.

Dominick Dunne

People who get their class from Vanity Fair.

Anne Rice

People who don’t use conditioner in their hair.

Edgar Allan Poe

Men who live in their mother’s basements. Or goth seventh graders.

Michael Crichton

Doctors that went to third-tier medical schools.

John Grisham

Doctors that went to medical schools in the Dominican Republic.

Dan Brown

People who used to get lost in supermarkets when they were kids.

Dave Eggers

Guys who are in the third coolest frat of a private college.

Emily Griffin

Women who give their boyfriend marriage ultimatums.

Richard Russo

People whose favorite day in elementary school was “Grandparent’s Day”.

Anais Nin

Librarians.

Margaret Atwood

Women whose favorite color is hunter green.

William Faulkner

People who are good at crosswords.

Jackie Collins

Your drunk stepmother.

Nicholas Sparks

Women who are usually constipated.

James Patterson

Men that score a 153 on their LSAT exam.

Sylvia Plath

Girls who keep journals (too easy).

George Orwell

Conspiracy theorists (too easy).

Aldous Huxley

People who are bigger conspiracy theorists than Orwell fans.

Harper Lee

People that have read only one book in their life and it was To Kill
A Mockingbird (and it was their assigned reading in the ninth grade).

Nick Hornby

Guys who wear skinny jeans and the girls that love them.

Ernest Hemingway

Men who own cottages.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

People who get ARM mortgages.

Vladimir Nabokov

Men who use words like ‘dubious’ and ‘tenacity’.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sommelieres.

Bret Easton Ellis

Foo Fighters’ fans.

Hunter S Thompson

That kid in your philosophy class with the stupid tattoo.

Cormac McCarthy

Men that don’t eat cream cheese.

Thomas Aquinas

Premature ejaculators.

Pearl S. Buck

Women whose favorite president was Harry S. Truman.

Toni Morrison

Female high-school English professors that only have an undergraduate degree.

Thomas Pynchon

People that used to be fans of J.D. Salinger.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Women that liked the movie “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” but didn’t read the book.

Rebecca Wells

Women on the East coast that wish they were from the South.

Tama Janowitz

Cougars that went to an urban college in the 80s.

Alice Sebold

People that liked Gilmore Girls – even in the first season.

Michael Swanwick

Men that argue that Neil Gaiman is overrated.

Terry Goodkind

People who have never been dungeons master but still play D&D.

Stephen King

11th graders who peed their pants while watching the movie It.

H.P. Lovecraft

People who can quote the Comic Book Guy from Simpsons.

Brothers Grimm

Only children with Oedipal complexes.

Lewis Carroll

People that move to Thailand after high school for the drug scene.

C.S. Lewis

Youth group leaders that picked their nose in the 4th grade.

Elmore Leonard

People that know how to perform a “Michigan left”.

Shel Silverstein

Girls that can’t spell “leheim”.

Douglas Adams

People who bought the first generation Amazon Kindle.

Tucker Max

Guys that haven’t convinced their girlfriends to try anal yet.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Political theory and constitutional democracy majors.

Tom Clancy

People that skipped school by hiding out in the gym.

Herman Hesse

People that own one straw chair in their house.

Phillippa Gregory

Women who have repressed their desire to go to Renaissance Festivals

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Men that can’t lie but will instead be silent if they know you don’t want to hear the truth.

Susan Wiggs

Older women who are surprisingly loud during sex.

Nicole Krauss

Girls that intern at Nylon but end up moving back to the Midwest for their real job.

Mitch Albom

People that didn’t go to college but do well on crossword puzzles.

Stieg Larsson

Girls that are too frightened to go skydiving.

Sue Grafton

Women that have an @aol.com email address.

Seth Grahame-Smith

People that own a smart phone which requires a stylus to use it.

David Baldacci

No one. Even the police say Clancy before they’ll say Baldacci.

Michael Pollan

The girl that just turned vegan to cover up her eating disorder.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

People who refer to themselves as “playing devil’s advocate”.

O. Henry

Men that have names like Earl or Cliff and were really close with their paternal grandfather.

Virginia Woolf

Female high-school French teachers that have their master’s degree.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2009/12/reader-stereotypes/

On Beauty

On Beauty

No, we could not itemize the list
of sins they can’t forgive us.
The beautiful don’t lack the wound.
It is always beginning to snow.

Of sins they can’t forgive us
speech is beautifully useless.
It is always beginning to snow.
The beautiful know this.

Speech is beautifully useless.
They are the damned.
The beautiful know this.
They stand around unnatural as statuary.

They are the damned
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face

and so their sadness is perfect.
The beautiful don’t lack the wound.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.
No, we could not itemize the list.

Cape Cod, May 1974

— Nick Laird (via On Beauty by Zadie Smith)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2009/06/on-beauty/

2008 Project List

Here is the list of books I’ve read in 2008.  My goal is to finish 52 books (the equivalent of a book a week).

Total Pages Read: 10,774
Shortest book: 96 pages
Longest book: 928 pages
Fiction: 17
Non-Fiction: 13
Poetry: 1

Last book read:

31.  Drown by Junot Díaz.  Short Stories about a Dominican immigrant family.  224 pages. (Finished 30 Dec 08)

Full list below the cut:

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2008/12/2008-project-list/

the truth below the truth

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow.  A woman’s body was like that.  If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth.

from The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2008/09/the-truth-below-the-truth/

Read a Book

I just saw this for the first time this past week.  This was originally aired on BET show The 5ive, and I believe (from the CNN spots below) has been aired on the show 106 & Park, a daily top-10 rap video countdown.  The song, by poet Bomani Armah, aka D’Mite or notarapper, is a parody/satire of the state of the “urban” black culture.  Not surprisingly, people didn’t get it:

Part 1 (From CNN)

Part 2 (From CNN)

I love in the second part of the interview, that the guy doesn’t see how silly his complaints about this animated short are.  He keeps trying to make the video out as a PSA, removing it from the context where it was shown. Completely ignoring the fact that it was shown on a show (and channel) that regularly feature music videos that glorify violence and drugs, while at the same time objectifing women. 

When accused by the CNN host of being a provocateur, Bomani responds wonderfully:
“I didn’t think the idea of reading and hygiene and all these things was controversial”

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2008/06/read-a-book/

The 2008 Project

Last year, my friend Elizabeth and I set out to read a book a week (or the equivalent by the end of the year).  The first half of the year, I was doing pretty good, however, with the move to L.A. things slowed down significantly during the second half of the year.  My final total for 2007 was 30 books. (The list is here).  Elizabeth ended up making it to 52 (Her list is here).

Since I didn’t make it to last years goal, I’m starting anew with my 2008 project.  My goal is to at least improve on last years total, while still striving to attain the book a week goal.

To start of this year’s project the following books are on the nightstand queue:
The Audacity of Hope by Barak Obama
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
Getting Things Done by David Allen (re-read)
What’s Your Poo Telling You? by Josh Richman & Anish Sheth, M.D. (a gift from Elizabeth)
The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A Postsecret Book compiled by Frank Warren

That should get me the first few month’s at least.

I’ve also got a few books in mind that I plan to read this year:
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Chronicles of Narnia Series by C.S. Lewis (Yes I know its a crime that I’ve not read these yet)
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2008/01/the-2008-project/

Books I’ve Read in 2007

Inspired by this list, I’ve decided to keep a list of books I’ve read in 2007.  I’ll more than likely be doing less individual reviews and just updating this list as I finish books.  Anyway…enough of the rambling explanations, on to the list.

Last book finished:

30.  Atonement by Ian McEwan. (Finished 12 Dec 07)

 

See the Complete List below the cut (its starting to get long):

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2007/12/books-ive-read-in-2007/

NYT’s “Best American Fiction of the past 25 years”

The ones I’ve read are in Bold:

Beloved-Toni Morrison
Underworld-Don DeLillo
Blood Meridian-Cormac McCarthy
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels-John Updike
– Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
American Pastoral-Philip Roth
A Confederacy of Dunces-John Kennedy Toole
Housekeeping-Marilynne Robinson
Winter’s Tale-Mark Helprin
White Noise-Don DeLillo
The Counterlife-Philip Roth
Libra-Don DeLillo
Where I’m Calling From-Raymond Carver
The Things They Carried-Tim O’Brien
Mating-Norman Rush
Jesus’ Son-Denis Johnson
Operation Shylock-Philip Roth
Independence Day-Richard Ford
Sabbath’s Theater-Philip Roth
Border Trilogy-Cormac McCarthy
— All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain
The Human Stain-Philip Roth
The Known World-Edward P. Jones
The Plot Against America-Philip Roth

It seems I have some work to do on this list.  Though at least I did get the top 3. 

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2007/03/nyts-best-american-fiction-of-the-past-25-years/