I need to remember to throw in more non-fiction every now and again.

I started two new fantasy series at the same time.

George RR Martin’s – A Game of Thrones (A Song of Fire and Ice)

and

Patrick Rothfuss – Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles)

I like them both. I like almost all books though.

I also just recently polished off 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne is a grand chronicler / cataloger. That means there  are whole pages you can just skip. Oh, he’s still listing types of fish in the Indian Ocean three pages later? Next, Next, Next, oh the story starts again. Overall though – great book worth reading.  You can see the influence his work in the late 1800s has on modern science fiction. To me that’s fascinating.

Read 20,000 leagues under the sea and then pick up a copy of Michael Chrichton’s Sphere. Makes me want to re-read sphere. I’ve been through that book something like 4 times by now. Great read.

Holy.

Shit.

I read the comic years back and loved it. The dark and gritty story. The everyman super hero. I loved everything about it. It was such a change of pace from your normal black and white super hero story.

The movie added even more to that. The directors cut didn’t shy away from any of the nasty bits either. That’s what I loved. It showed the absolutely most vile aspects of the story for exactly what they were, and said “This is your reality. It’s ugly. Deal with it.”

At 3:06 from Opening to End of Credits it was a long ass movie. It was absolutely worth it.

If you like action, can stomach some very graphic sex, violence, and EXTREMELY morally questionable behavior, then I recommend this for you.

If the thought of watching someone get their arms cut off, or a dog eating a little girl makes you squeamish, then maybe this isn’t the one for you.

If you have the stomach to see it through you’ll be rewarded with an excellent and thought provoking story, beautiful cinemtography, and HOT latex suit action courtesy of Malin Akerman playing Silk Spectre. Do yourself a favor and google search it.

Also. Boobs!

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the movie:

None of you seem to understand.
I’m not locked in here with you…
YOU’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!!
-Rorschach

I have a kindle and I was looking for something to read. I downloaded the Sword of Shannarra series. I am extremely disappointed. Not that it is a bad series, but it just doesn’t live up to Sword of Truth or Dune at all in terms of quality and interest. It doesn’t grab the reader by the balls and say “READ ME TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT”.

It seems predictable. Maybe others have copied from him, maybe he’s copied from others, but I just get the feeling that I’ve read it before.

It’s three books and I’m on the first one now. Since I paid for it I’ll read it and add it to my collection, hoping it gets better towards the end.

Any recommendations for a good (completed) fiction series? Like I told Kurt and Brendan, I like my authors dead. This way I don’t have to wait for the rest of the series to be written. They can be alive too, that’s ok. As long as the series is done.

The weather was gray and dreary. The temperature was cold.

I had just finished the Harry Potter series.

I picked up my Kindle in bed and was browsing through Amazon recommendations and some books that Jon Stewart mentioned on “The Daily Show.”

I decided I liked Ron Paul – “he has interesting ideas” I thought to myself. I went ahead and purchased Ron Paul’s – The Revolution. I’ve been reading it non stop since I bought it. It has been 200 pages of fascinating ideas and I just finished it.

I realized I really do like the appeal of a government system limited to just the constitution. It has great appeal from a sense of personal responsibility.

I can take care of my own damn self. Government should not take care of me one bit beyond the powers assigned to it in the constitution. It was refreshing to hear someone who had these same ideas.

As part of the recommended reading I also took a look at the Mises.org site. Here is a great article called:

What Has Government Done to Our Money?

I voted for Obama, but I really liked the ideas Ron Paul had. I only wish our country would on a mass level gain some sanity and take some interest in politics.

I recommend everyone read Ron Paul’s book just to get a fresh take on things. These are by no means new ideas, but old ideas that we’ve strayed so far from we’ve forgotten them completely.

BBC believes most people will only have read SIX of these 100 books. I find that hard to believe, and can’t find a news article to back up the figure… so… anyway… how many have YOU read? Be honest!

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen ()
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (x+)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte ()
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x – reading now)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible ()
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x+)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (*)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens ()
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (x+)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all of the plays in their entirety…(same))
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier ()
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x+)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ()
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (*)
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 (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy ()
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (x+)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh ()
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky ()
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
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 (*)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ()
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden ()
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne ()
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell ()
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
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 (x+)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan ()
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel ()
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (x++ loved this series)
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 ()
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens ()
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (x)
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 (x)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (*)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold ()
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas ()
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens ()
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x+)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ()
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (x)
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 (x)
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 (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom ()
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ()
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (x – over analyzed in high school! (was in your class for this))
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery ()
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 ()
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo ()

I believe I’ve got 26 in there.

It makes me think of a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a while now:

Saying the wrong thing.

Have you ever had a moment in a conversation where you knew exactly what the wrong thing to say was? The thing that would bring complete silence to the conversation, cause someone to cry, stop being friends with you, or even break up with you?

It’s like walking by the fire alarm in a hallway. You know exactly what would happen if you pulled it, but you keep walking anyway – with the alarm unpulled.

Not sure if other people have these same moments during the day. I have them constantly.

Updike’s character Rabbit makes me thing of my impulses surrounding this.

Whenever he’s in any sort of situation with girls he’ll ALWAYS say exactly the wrong thing. I’m interested to see how it turns out for him. I’m about 100 pages in now. Wish me luck.

EDIT:
That didn’t work out AT ALL for the guy. Looks like I learned an important lesson?

I get some requests though that are from people I can’t remember ever even meeting.

This makes me wonder, do they remember me? Did I make some impression on their memory that they failed to make on mine?

What’s more likely is that they’re just adding everyone from their graduating class. Nevertheless, it makes me wonder.

I got started on thinking about time a lot. Time is a very funny thing. You don’t realize it has passed until a large chunk has gone by. It’s like watching the sun rise in the sky. Once the sun breaks free of the horizon you lose your reference point and the sun seems to stand still. You can look back at noon, then again closer to sunset and see that the time has passed, but there is no particular point when you recall it happening.

Growing up has been like that. You just wake up one morning and realize you’ve done it. There was no point when someone rang a bell or handed you a degree that marked your “growing up,” but slowly it happened. After so much time passes you realize that school is a distant memory. Something that happened to another person in another life.

The person it happened to isn’t even you anymore.

Certainly you have shared experiences with that person, but because of those experiences you’re different. You can never go back to what was, and what you were. There was a fork in the road and you diverged. But there was no fork, no immediately recollected divergence. Just a slow drift as that person in the past fades away.

What’s even more interesting is the people you knew back in that past…. they remember the person you were. Your past self has a life of its own in the memories of those who knew you then.

This must be what makes it so interesting to see people at a highschool reunion. There is so much reconciliation to be done between the memories of people, and the actual person.

Just by walking into the room you are causing massive energy expenditure in the brains of everyone who is quickly trying to integrate this new you with the old you.

I know I’ve had to do that before. When people change it just blows my mind.

I will never forget a kid from my kindergarten class. He was scrawny, allergic to everything, and had thick glasses. I remember him in that way from kindergarten until maybe 5th grade. I went back to visit that town in college. It nearly destroyed my brain to meet the guy he turned into. Beer drinking, big dude. Seemed like a pretty rough guy. There was absolutely no way I could have connected these two people together. No series of events plays out in my mind to connect my past image of him with his current image. I cannot see how it would have happened.

I wonder how many minds I inhabit right now. I wonder if I could find a way to tease out each one of those snapshot and then compare them somehow. It would be fascinating.

I also started thinking about home as an abstract concept. That old quote “You can never go home again” is so true. I could go back to New York, but it wouldn’t be home. It hasn’t been home for a long time.

It makes me wonder what the time limit is on that. How long can you be in a new place with new people before you lose your old home and assume the new one? Do people assimilate homes at a different rate? I’m sure it’s a slow process. It’s just like growing up. You wake up one day and realize you’ve done it. But you did it long ago. It just took the time to realize.

What will my future self think of this present self? What things could I do to make those two people drastically diverge for the better? For the worse?

I guess I got started on all of this by reading about quantum physics in “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson. Thinking about his quantum brain theory was really interesting.

But – that’s enough for me tonight. My future self is likely to be tired in the morning.

There’s this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what’s immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what’s right around them is unimportant.

And that’s why they’re lonely.

You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you’re just kind of an object. You don’t count. You’re not what they’re looking for. You’re not on TV.

He goes on to talk about a secondary America you see on the back roads off the main highways. He talks about how you see the real country driving through the back roads.

I had a bit of experience with this driving up to New York taking some crazy back roads thanks to my GPS. It really is a completely different experience.

This touches on two things that I believe are important

1. I hate the negative impact TV has.

Reading this as well as “Bowling Alone” paints a pretty dark picture about what TV can do.

It’s not limited to TV either. It’s any medium that has the ability to destroy social bonds and turn people into solitary creatures. It kills ambition to go socialize. My ambition to do so is low to start with so it would be particularly devastating for me. In a way I think my addiction to Internet entertainment may be somewhat similar to TV that Putnam mentions in Bowling alone. Different technology, same effects. Here I sit alone.

Maybe the nature of this is slightly different though. At the moment I am less of a passive consumer than TV would have me be. Most times on the Internet though are spent in read only mode for me.

2. I like the idea of traveling around and seeing lots of different things.

Who knows if I’d like it in practice. Maybe I’ll find out.

I enjoyed my trip to San Francisco a while back. I liked seeing NYC and Boston. Going through the back country in PA was beautiful. Driving through DC on an early Sunday morning was interesting.

Just some randomness for you. Trying to figure out what this is all about.

I love reading, and need to meet more people / become comfortable talking to strangers.

Joining a book club seemed like a great way to accomplish these things.

Brendan and I joined this club that meets in and around Durham. We had our first meeting tonight reading God’s Middle Finger which was really entertaining. Talking about it was just as fun.

Next month we’re reading Maus, a graphic novel about the holocaust (sounds crazy but won a pulitzer back in the 90s). I’m really excited to expand my literary horizons. Normally I read the same stuff over and over.

On top of meeting new people I hope to meet new types of books. So far it’s going well.

Updates monthly on this.

Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable, let’s prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

-Douglas Adams