A booklover's dream - 1 million books

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."

Reading Queue - redux

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.

Is this cheating?

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.

The 100 Book meme

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: 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 (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban (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) X
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) X
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) X
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay ) X
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb) X
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) X
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella) X
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. 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) X
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) X
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) X
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) X
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares) X
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding) X
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) X
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) X
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) X
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch) X
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford) X
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

My totals:
Bold = read (61)
Italics = would like to read; (19)
X = don't want to read; (18)
** = never heard of (2)

and here are Wenda's extras:

101. Pilgrim (Timothy Findley)
102. The Englishman's Boy (Guy Vanderhaeghe)
103. Clara Callan (Richard B. Wright)
104. Cereus Blooms at Night (Shana Mootoo) **
105. Larry's Party (Carol Shields)
106. Suite Française (Irène Némirovsky)**
107. Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje)
108. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
109. Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood)
110. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Roddy Doyle)**

Random Numbers

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 catastrophe struck and the computer and TV were unavailable. Never mind that maybe – just maybe – there'd be other things to worry about. It's kind of like a security blanket, I guess.

Aside from having a lot of books gathering dust, the other major problem with having so many unread books is deciding which book to read next. Each and every book on my shelves was either given to me or hand-picked by me for a reason -- the reasons for some being rather obscure now. So how to choose the next read from my growing To-Be-Read shelf? My usual method is to choose a few books at a time and start reading them concurrently. At some point, a favourite emerges and gets finished before the others. The by-product of this method is that I end up with books that are only partially finished and have lost their allure. They go back on the TBR shelf or languish in a pile on the nightstand or on the floor by my bed.

Anyways, back to C. Max Magee and his Reading Queue. He sorted his unread books and came up with a list of books that he'd like to eventually read. From this list, he vowed to randomly select each new and subsequent book to be read. Well, I could see, and he soon discovered, a problem with this "random" system. The problem being that the randomness factor tends to fall by the wayside when new, interesting titles come along and nudge out the old dust-gathering ones.

He's come up with an ingenious solution. He lists his books alphabetically and numbers them; then he uses a random number generator to choose his next book. I guess it's working because he's been using it since June 2005. Although it might be worthy to note that his original queue had thirty-one books before the random numbers system; and his current queue has fifty-one books.

Still, it might be worth a try.


Take a look at The Reading Queue Revisited to read the full article.

Book recommendations

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 horrible feeling that I'll never have enough time to read all the great books and authors I want to read; thus necessitating a more directed approach to choosing my reading material. I search out booklists and people's favourites – something I've always done – but now with an added determination. I'm also challenging myself with some authors and tomes that, heretofore, I've been reluctant to tackle.

One such challenge is Thomas Pynchon's, "Gravity's Rainbow". It was highly recommended by people I respect and after some warm-up runs with a few of his earlier works, I plunged in. I miscalculated the concentration needed and floundered, but I persevered. It took me three tries before I could get into it, but I now find myself almost half-way through and quite grateful for my never-give-up stubborn streak. It's been a wild ride through Pynchonland and will comment more when I finish it. But for now at least, I can honestly tell those who recommended this book to me that I'm reading it and like it.