Of books and lists and other intellectual snobbery

 

If you want to kill an hour AND hone your lit snobbery, check out 3M’s list of the 1001 works of fiction you must read.

 

Naturally my “want to read” list outpaces my “have read” list (at least in intellectual value), and I did give up once I reached the 1700s (because really, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion does not sound like bedside reading), but here are my results:

 

Have Read (thanks due largely to Murphy’s 20th century fiction course):

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

Atonement – Ian McEwan

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Pastoralia – George Saunders

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

Whatever – Michel Houellebecq

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

White Noise – Don DeLillo

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor  

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford (ugh!) 

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

A Room With a View – E.M. Forster

 

Want to read (thanks largely to name recognition, bookshelf envy and the Brookline Booksmith’s Bmail):

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

Youth – J.M. Coetzee

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow

Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Trial – Franz Kafka (fro?)

V. – Thomas Pynchon

Rabbit, Run – John Updike

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (bought, not yet read)

The End of the Affair – Graham Greene (bought, not yet read)

 

[image of the best wire ever (sent at 6 a.m.!) from Brookline Booksmith's used book cellar find-of-the-week archive]

Web, approximately: Google set to rival Wikipedia?

In an effort to make the web more “discoverable,” Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber announced on Thursday the Google rival to Wikipedia – called “knol.” A knol – or unit of knowledge in Googlespeak – will be written by users with “authorative knowledge” on the subject.

The key idea is to highlight authors who otherwise wouldn’t get props. As Manber puts it, “Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.”

We have to wonder what this will mean for Google’s elusive algorithms, considering Manber was shameless in saying, “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” (read: anything that gets posted by us will be at the top of the results, so deal with it Wikipedia.)

A full screen shot and more on knols (which my blog writer won’t stop changing to ‘knolls,’ Damn you and your alternative spellings!) is available at Google’s prod dev blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Smart, approximately: better yourself through exercise, healthy diet, and This American Life

Probably the easiest way you can better yourself intellectually is to listen to This American Life’s podcasts on the way to work. The show is often hilarious, high-brow by nature, and almost always insightful - and will only add to that jumble of Trivial Pursuit knowledge that your $120,000 liberal arts education got you.

Edit: I should probably disclose that my brother and I relentlessly made fun of a) my dad for liking this show when we were growing up and b) Ira Glass’s stammering. And here, out on this series of tubes, I am admitting I was totally wrong.

This American Life host Ira Glass (image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most quality pieces on the show was last week’s story by contributing writer Jack Hitt on the island of Nauru, a tiny island most of us have never heard of, but one that has meant everything to the world economy in the past 10 years.

Read more here. Subscribe to the Podcasts on iTunes by clicking here.

Planes

This is called Planes. I wrote it for my creative fiction class in college. Don’t steal it! (I say that as though it’s worth stealing. But if you are a jaded college junior taking a creative writing course, it might just fit the bill.)

They were lying in the grass, Margaret and Tom, eating turkey sandwiches in the hot afternoon sun. Tom was reading the newspaper while Margaret watched the planes that flew overhead every once and a while. She liked how they left large trails of exhaust – a brilliant memory of themselves against the blue of the sky.