the pomegranate tiger

I came upon this Youtube video from a forum I frequent: Love it when Lenore says their hours are "Every Saturday nine to five; anytime by chance; anytime by appointment."

Okay, after posting this --> Is this cheating? , I felt the tiniest bit guilty. I realized I wasn't really giving the system a chance. I'm going to give it another try and this time I'm going to choose at least one of my current reads with this method. Last week I came up with The Barclay Family Theatre on the random number generator and finished it over the weekend. The next number up is 15, Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte. And when I finish it, I'll remove it from the queue. So now I've done it; put it down in writing, right here on my blog for all to see. Let's see how long I can keep it up.

As some of you may have noticed, I started a Reading Queue on my sidebar as a follow-up to this post based on C Max Magee's article on The Millions . The unread books on my shelves were getting out of hand and I needed a better method of choosing the next book to read. I stumbled onto Magee's method and decided to give it a go. I've had mixed results. I listed all the unread books on my shelves; I alphabetized them by title; I put them all on a spreadsheet and numbered them; I fed the data into the Random Number Generator (actually, it's called the Integer Generator, but who except mathematicians would call it that); et voila, out spits the number of the next book I'll read. One little problem. There's a try "Again!" button. When I'm not in the mood for the book that comes up, I tend to hit "Again", again and again. Is that cheating? Methinks it is.

Here's a book meme that I've run into a few times, but never bothered to do until I saw it on Wenda's Daring to Write . A list of 100 books: You're supposed to bold the ones you've read; italicize those you'd like to read; cross out those you don't want to read (I've put an X next to them); and asterisk ** those you've never heard of. Wenda added 10 more of her own which I've also included. And true to my obsessive-compulsive nature, I've included a key and tallied up my individual totals at the end. I'm not sure what this all achieves, but it was fun to do and reminded me of a few titles I'd forgotten. Key: Bold = read Italics = would like to read X = don't care to read ** = never heard of 1. The Da Vinci 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: ...

One of the blogs I've discovered over the last couple of years is The Millions (A Blog About Books) . It's well-written, interesting and about, well, books. I hadn't visited in awhile, so when I went back, I decided to read some earlier Notable Posts (yes, there's an actual section called "Notable Posts"). The title, The Reading Queue Revisited , caught my eye. Like most avid readers, the owner of the blog (C. Max Magee), has a large stash of books on his shelves that he hasn't read and needed a way to get through, hopefully, in his lifetime. I can relate. Just look at the four books I purchased a couple of blogs ago. They've now arrived and join the dozens of unread books already on my shelves and nightstand. This compulsion to accumulate books is somewhat akin to my aunt's post-Depression Era habit of picking up and saving every bit of string, paper and bag – just in case. Heaven forbid I'd be without reading material if some catas...

It's always a bit of a crapshoot when you read a book recommended by someone else. I touched on this before in this post (Jan23-06) where a friend was reading a book by an author I recommended. I anxiously awaited his opinion – but – it never came. I was upset and annoyed. I've come to terms with it, but now I find myself in a similar situation. For those who don't know me, I love reading. In the past, I'd read anything I could get my hands on; newspapers, magazines; fiction, non-fiction; even the backs of cereal boxes, in a pinch. I read everything from entertaining fluff to philosophy. There were very few books that I could say I absolutely hated. The optimistic side of me could always find something positive in what I read, even if it were a "been there, done that" and don't need to read him again. As it turns out, I've become a little more selective in my old age. I've developed more interests and seem to have less time; and I get the horrib...