Man I hope this post goes through because it wasn't easy figuring out how to transliterate the post title!
Recently in Fun/Recreation Category
I stole this one from my evil twin.
“What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read ‘em for school in the first place.”
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (excerpts)
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 (excerpts)
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 : 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 (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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 (abridged version only)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (abridged children's edition)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*
I think I have gotten more reading done this year already than I did in the entirety of 2007. I finally finished the Arab history I started in 2006 (or was it 2005); I just finished A Short History of Asia today, and now I'm halfway through All the Shah's Men, a history of the CIA-led coup in Iran that deposed their democratically-elected secular-leaning government and installed a monarchy which was eventually replaced by Islamic extremists in 1979. The judgment of hindsight makes it easy to question the wisdom of initiating the coup; the most disappointing outcome of America's involvement in the coup was that we became hated in Iran as much as the British imperialists who had ruled Iran in the preceding centuries, whereas before the coup we were generally admired for our commitment to freedom and opposition to imperialism.
Of course, one of the many things I realized in reading the Asian history is how much the Chinese are disliked throughout Asia for their own imperialist past (ditto for Japan). The West doesn't have a monopoly on imperialism by any measure.
Another book I read recently was The Island at the Center of the World: A History of the Dutch Colony of Manhattan, which followed on the heels of another history of New York City, Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. Next up in my queue is Kurlansky's A Basque History of the World. Then I'm looking for a Persian history. Somewhere in there I plan on re-reading Les Miserables (the unabridged version) and digging into more of Jane Austen's novels (I recently read Pride and Prejudice for the second time, and am looking forward to reading more of her novels).
Finally, with my two oldest children I have been reading Anne of Green Gables, a first for all of us, and very much enjoying it. We will continue reading the series out loud in the evenings until we finish it.
In other reading news, I finally convinced my wife to ignore her prejudices against fantasy fiction and give The Eye of the World a chance. She breezed through it, is thoroughly hooked, and is well into The Great Hunt at this point. I'm not sure when the 12th and final book is scheduled for release, but I'm hoping when it does come out she won't be ready to read it yet otherwise I'm going to have to fight over it with her. :)
I have many weaknesses. One of them is a fondness for functional technology and a tendency to purchase such items, within the limits of our budget (mostly). 3 years ago we got our first LCD monitor -- a 19" Samsung Syncmaster to replace the 19" Viewsonic CRT we used for our main computer.
For Christmas this year we bought a Viewsonic 22" LCD monitor for my Media Center PC (which was using the 19" CRT). We liked it so much, we started moving it back and forth between the desktop and the laptop in our room we use to watch movies in bed. It's the kind of situation in which we were just asking for an accident to happen.
So, this past week I went overboard and got another 22" LCD, this time an HP w2207 that TigerDirect had on sale.
I have been completely satisfied with all 3 LCD monitors we've purchased. Of the three, the HP has the nicest appearance but the Viewsonic (with a 2ms response time) has the best performance. The Viewsonic will be coming to Gamefest this year -- WarIII looks gorgeous on it and I expect whatever else we play will look nice as well. The HP (at 5ms) looks good, but when it is plugged in to the onboard graphics card on the laptop movies ghost a bit (it is also a D-sub connection). I'll have to give it a try on the DVI graphics card on the Media Center PC to give it a real test.
So while I don't have any TV's in my house I do have three LCD monitors (and I still haven't gotten rid of the 19" CRT yet), which seems excessive when I write it out. But as we discussed in our small group last night, what we have for material possessions is much less important than how attached we are to them.
Nothing is free, but if you like testing your vocabulary you can donate your time at Freerice.com and in return the site will donate rice to hungry people (allegedly) for every correct answer you give. The highest level I have achieved is 49 (out of 55). Usually I am in the mid- to upper 40's. Last night Jamie and I (tag-teaming) got up to 5000 grains of rice donated (your donation increases in 20-grain increments), so that would be 250 correct answers in a single session.
If it was my site, I would increase the donation as the words got harder; but of course this simply betrays my elitist side. The rice is actually paid for by the advertising on the site, which is a nonprofit organization. So go on -- use your competitive nature for some good for once! Let me know if you can top me. . .as I once infamously proclaimed, "It's not a competition as long as I'm in the lead!"
I recently finished reading Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab World. I thought the writing was somewhat lacking in vim and vigor, and it ended rather abruptly. I'm not sure if the author was just trying to be objective or if he couldn't quite figure out what his own perspective was, but as a book it was rather disjointed and I never quite figured out what his angle was. At any rate, it served the purpose I had hoped, insofar as it gave me a greater knowledge of the roots of the Middle East conflicts.
Probably the most important insight I gained from the book is the ethnic roots of the Sunni-Shi'a divide. Yes, it is partly religious/theological; however, it seems more significant that the conflict between the Arabs (mostly Sunni) and the Persians (mostly Shi'a, with ancient Persia being roughly equatable with modern Iran) predates the introduction of Islam.
Another important insight is how dumb we Americans are. How many of Europe's messes are we going to try and clean up? It is France and Britain's (among others) colonial meddling that created many of the political problems in the Middle East (not to mention Southeast Asia) in the first place; but from Korea to Vietnam to Palestine to Iraq, much of the conflict that we are trying to resolve by force was only made worse by Europe's own ill-conceived interference back in the day. At least Britain, unlike France, tries to help out, albeit without really acknowledging its own historical contribution to the problem.
Anywho, now I'm on to another history: Asia. I'm starting with a short primer entitled (appropriately) A Short History of Asia by Colin Mason. And that's what's on my reading plate lately.
I also recently finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia series out loud to the two oldest children. We are now adding to their literary experience and filling a gap in mine by reading a series of books about a girl named Anne Shirley, the first book of which is called Anne of Green Gables. So far I am much enjoying it, as are the children.
Americans, before the age of television, were probably the most prolific readers in the world. We may still be, though much reading time has been replaced by boob tube time. Television never has been able to displace reading completely, though it has both influenced and diminished print in many ways. The Internet is still primarily text-based, and hopefully will remain so for quite some time. But now I am digressing.
I grew up reading periodicals as well as books. If I remember correctly, our family subscribed to Highlights for quite some time; later, I was an avid reader of Guideposts and Newsweek. I didn't read many periodicals during college, though. When Jamie and I married, one of our friends gave us a trial subscription to World and we appreciated it enough to take up the subscription ourselves.
Later on, we started subscribing to Christianity Today. At one point we canceled our subscriptions to both CT and World, because we just didn't have time to read them. However, for some odd reason, CT just kept coming to our home -- even after we moved. We got several notices that our subscription was running out, but the magazine showed up in the mail each month nonetheless. This past year, out of guilt as much as anything, I started paying for the subscription again. We also recently renewed our subscription to World.
We also currently receive two other paid-subscription periodicals: The Economist and Tabletalk. I first read The Economist for a class I took in college, and later a friend bought me a year's subscription (a generous gift!) to it, which I let lapse. But recent improvements in our budgetary situation have allowed me to re-subscribe. It provides in-depth news coverage and analysis of events, politics, and (naturally) economic conditions from all over the world, from a liberal (in the old-fashioned, free-market sense of the word) point of view.
Tabletalk is a monthly devotional-type periodical published by Ligonier Ministries, part of R.C. Sproul's organization. A friend had been handing it down to me each month for the past 18 months; this past November I decided to get it myself instead.
I try to read all these magazines from cover to cover; the most difficult feat to accomplish is doing so with The Economist, as it is a weekly publication that generally runs over 100 pages. But I appreciate the way in which all of these contribute to and influence my worldview.
What do you think? What magazines do you read, and why?
