Thursday, May 29, 2008

M&Ms

I may be the only person on the planet who considers M&Ms a friendly food for those suffering from orthodontic work. The day after my wisdom teeth were removed, I went to a barbecue birthday party and ate ice cream, then sucked on M&Ms for the rest of my meal. Today, I gave up and started doing the same. It kind of works, because part of the trouble of these damn braces is that the pain is just distractingly bad, and eating mitigates it somehow, therefore making me feel less like a chipmunky loser and leaving me more able to concentrate. So a continual M&M in the mouth helps with this problem. Plus, the braces completely prevent me from rushing through the (miniature) bag, and that's probably better for all involved.

After my teeth stop hating me, I'm going to absolutely devour a salad and some apple slices. And a piece of bread. And a Giordano Brother's sandwich (last night we were going to go there before the Jamie Lidell show, but went to Kennedy's instead, thank God, because I can actually eat paneer and rice).

Done dreaming of food now. You guys must think I've entirely lost it.

Parisian Flashback

This morning Dan drew my attention to a post from the Frugal Traveler about a week living in an apartment in Paris, and compared it to our Thanksgiving weekend there in 2003. It's fitting that today I would indulge in such nostalgia because Pablo, our long-lost-to-kilts-and-PhDdom friend, is descending upon our household this evening for another brief weekend. So without further ado, I present a few shots from Paris, back in the day. (Confession: The night these photos were taken, the four of us -- Dan's now ex girlfriend was there too -- bought four bottles of wine. Devon decided she didn't want any. So we took it upon ourselves to finish the rest. I think I could probably hack a bottle-plus these days, but back then I most definitely could not, and the night did not exactly end well for me. However, I have survived to post the photos on the Internet.)

The three of us. Check out my sweet PJ pants.

Possibly one of the most ridiculous photos of these two ever taken.

Shadowy me and Dan.

All IKEA, all the time!

The Road

I'm actually really excited for the film of "The Road," even though I loved the book and have no idea how it will work in movie form. The Times did a really interesting bit about the filming here.

(via)

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Condi



I saw Condoleezza Rice and David Miliband speak at Google last week. It wasn't nearly as rage-inducing as I expected, even though I'm still baffled by Rice's obvious intelligence yet complicity etc. with the Bush administration. She is terrible at delivering the party line, but sticks to it stubbornly, as you'd expect.

I found David Miliband kind of attractive. Is that wrong? He was in any case much more interesting than she was.

Also, you can see the back of my head in the video. I'm sort of in the second row in the shots where you can see 3-ish rows, towards the right, in a white shirt with shortish brown-red hair.

Beards

I've totally written about this before but I continue to love men with beards. Saw this dude at the A's/Red Sox game on Sunday (he was also wearing a kind of funny hat) and really, I cannot explain my extreme attraction. Anyway, so in a related note I really appreciate this dude who is trying to grow "all types of beards." I feel like he is not playing entirely by the rules because sometimes he grows a full one and then shaves off bits to make a moustache, instead of growing just the moustache. But that is because I am a weird advocate for facial hair (best realization of the weekend, of which there were many: Friday night, while at dinner with my friend and his parents, I saw fit to text my friend Justin and tell him "BTW, I love your moustache." I have no idea why, and I was not drunk either, so there's no excuse for my lack of remembering the reason for this). Anyway this is pretty amusing, mostly because you can see how facial hair totally changes the look of someone's face! Like, look at the soul patch (how nerdy, ew) compared to the Van Dyke (like, hello, ew, looks like a criminal) compared to the Zappa (charmingly nerdy in a way I can't explain) compared to the everything. It's worth a look.

Your latest braces update

Someone just pep-talked me into eating a grape. And cottage cheese may be my new favorite food. It's like cheese curds! Only non-fat and sort of foamy, which is, let's be frank, the creepiest part.

This is what we are up against.

(via)

Graffiti + Jesse's Girl = Amazing

Yes.

Postcard from the Baby Daddy?

This particular Postcardfromyomomma is pretty fascinating. You have to read the comments. Aren't you on the edge of your seat?

Things I have eaten today

-Oatmeal
-Smoothie
-Cottage cheese with honey in it
-Two pieces of sushi. This part was very difficult, but it was those ones with the soft wrappy thing around plain rice, so I could just kinda choke it down. I was desperate for something solid.

When you are spending a day experimenting with soft foods, you end up Googling things like "cottage cheese" just to come up with a way to make it less disgusting. My friend Laurel eats it with yellow mustard and let me tell you, I would have killed for yellow mustard around 11:30am. Then I read the entirety of this post and got hungry for more cottage cheese with all these fixings. It's amazing what you want to eat at times like these.

Currently I am just dreaming of a milkshake. There really is nothing else I can imagine not hurting right now.

Oh, and by the way, this is all much, much, much worse than the time I got my wisdom teeth out.

Adventures in Bracey Eating

(That was a poor attempt at making an "Adventures in Baby-Sitting"-like title.)

Last night my friend Kevin and I went out to dinner. At first we were going to go to Lolo, this newish place that is supposed to be pretty cool. Then I found the menu online, and everything was encrusted in nuts or panko or something ridiculously not good for my mouth at the moment. So instead we went for Weird Fish, because I figured fish is kind of easy to eat. What was awesome about it was that Kevin was all for the constraint of eating only newly-braced-person-friendly food. So we ordered clam chowder, tortilla soup, blackened catfish with sauteed spinach and pureed yams, and fish cakes. It was pretty hilarious. Kevin ate the tortillas from the soup and we mashed the oyster crackers deep into the chowder to make them soggy. The coleslaw, unfortunately, was all him. But the peanut butter cream pie...

Today, of course, I'm in major pain as these stupid things have rubbed my mouth raw. And it's harder to chew. I am on to smoothies and oatmeal for breakfast. Sigh.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A little late for the holiday weekend, but...

Brace Face

I am now officially starting my orthodontic journey. this morning I got braces put on my (bottom) teeth. Before you ask what color I got, I will explain that they are apparently a new kind of braces... they are called self-ligating brackets, and they are like little snappy things that are glued to your teeth and then clip down over the wire, instead of having bright bandy things on each tooth. They look absolutely terrible and I totally am glad that I never mocked anyone in my youth for being a metal mouth, because if I had not I would be really, really afraid of karma's bitchiness. At any rate, I am now making strange faces all day because these things feel so damn weird, and I can't believe that at the age of 24 my fate for the next year and a half (plus or minus 6 months) is to floss my teeth with one of those weird fisheye threaders and refrain from eating popcorn and uncut apples. Really, I knew that I was a late bloomer in many ways, but do I have to get the adolescent dental experience as well?

So it doesn't hurt right now, I just look and feel like some kind of freak. But that is the report. And don't ask for pictures. I'm not ready for that yet.

Read the full description.

WTF?

Saturday, May 24, 2008

no subject

Bacon IN a mimosa. it just happened.

Friday, May 23, 2008

A life of leisure

Last night I had a date. I even slept over.

Don't get excited. It was a "date" with my friend Zoe, and it consisted of the two of us sitting on her floor drinking kir and eating brie, and concluded with me getting so tired (not, I should clarify, drunk) that I ended up deciding that the four blocks' walk back to my house was far too far, so I stayed there. I miss sleepovers of the girl sort. I woke up this morning and, since my boss had essentially given me carte blanche to work from home today anyway, sent a quick e-mail and then hopped off to Happy Donuts for breakfast with Zoe and her two visiting friends from Carleton (who arrived fresh off the super shuttle last night around midnight). After a decadent breakfast of crullers and white-frosted cakes, not to mention coffee (I'm back on that bandwagon, too) and milk, I walked home in the sun from Noe Valley.

Let me tell you, there is nothing so nice as a leisurely weekday morning in San Francisco in the spring. I never really get to enjoy days like this -- even now, I'm working in my house, which has the strange kind of blue-tinted lighting that masks the orangey-ness of the daylight -- but the glimpses I get always surprise me. There are so many people out and about! There was a line at Ritual out the door, and crowds clustering to eat breakfast at Boogaloo's -- on a Friday! It's so social and inspiring and all I could think about was how much I want to work here in the city, preferably in some absurdly flexible job that allows me to wander around city streets during the daytime. Also, I want to go thrift shopping. I have certain wants.

I also thought of what I personally think is a great idea for a blog. I'm going to think about it a bit more and let you know if and when I start it. It's not a money maker, just an intellectual exercise, and something I think would be really good for me to focus on. (And, ok, dream of working in coffee shops in the sunshine.)

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Take me out to the ball game

Ok, so it is probably no secret that I am obsessed with me and my little sister as children. It's sort of weird, but I love pictures of us. I don't know if it's some strange existential angst or nostalgia or what, but whatever, I've come to terms with my strange self-love, and so should you. Anyway, so my dad has been on this binge of scanning all our family photos to digital copies, and he's also been turning our old family videos to DVDs. He sent me this digital file today. Please watch and enjoy the adorableness.

Things that make me want to tear my hair out (a list of one)

This article:

...another Obama supporter, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, calling Obama the first black politician to "come to the American people not as a victim but rather as a leader." You hear this kind of talk all the time. Never mind the dignified glories of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Colin Powell, Kurt Schmoke, and others. We have arrived at the crux of the matter. So much of the educated white people's love for Barack depends on educated white people's complete ignorance of and distance from the rest of us. [...]

Which brings me to South Carolina, where I was born and raised. I was there before and during the primary. Recall the moment. Obama was gaining on Clinton--but had also just lost New Hampshire and Nevada. A loss in South Carolina, and he would have been done for.

It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.

(via)

Just because I can

I am inexplicably stressed out. By which I mean, I am half-explicably stressed, and the rest is just some kind of pent up stress that is probably some combination of hormones and medications and my own peculiar anxious brain and chemicals. So as a result, all day I have just sat at my desk and tried to think of blog posts to write, because at some point this morning I had a truly brilliant insight I wanted to share here and then I totally forgot and oh, I actually think that is part of my stress. I believe that this is the kind of occasion that could potentially call for one of those apparently-so-addictive-doctors-don't-prescribe-them-anymore Xanaxes. In other words, come on chemicals.

I think part of my angst stems from reading a lot of blogs this week, which gives me a really strange, antsy feeling, because I want to live my life and chronicle it at the same time, and yet I am stuck at my desk, which is none of the above. This is also why I overeat.

I had another pseudo-realization last night -- which is, why the hell are people freaking out about the oversharing on the Internet? Why does the fact that people blog about their lives throw people into some kind of major tailspin over the "Millennial" generation? Because last I checked the entire purpose of blogs was to overshare. Is this some kind of genius simplification of an overwrought New York Times trend piece type situation, or am I just stating the obvious?

Stating the obvious should be the name of my blog.

I love my friends.

Sarah: ok, i sent the "we're total fucking bad asses" someecard to our flip cup team
and he just responded...he woke up still drunk this morning
finally, i was less drunk than someone!!
9:46 AM me: woo hoo!
Sarah: i puked and rallied at the bar, so maybe that's why

And it continues...

Earth to the Clinton campaign:

In other words, the Florida/Michigan brouhaha is much ado about nothing. Even if Clinton gets her way with the two states, she'd still need about 80 percent of superdelegate commitments to secure the nomination. Clinton's arguments about electability and the popular vote might persuade a dozen delegates, or a couple dozen, or perhaps even the majority. It won't persuade 80 percent. (Or more realistically, the 90 percent she'd need if there is some sort of compromise on Florida and Michigan).

From here. This is all driving me absolutely crazy. I really, really, really can't handle the kinds of arguments that are coming from the Clinton campaign about FL and MI. It actually feels unhinged to me.

(Of course, the above argument assumes that the MI delegates that were not for Clinton get counted for Obama. Which the Clinton campaign does not want to happen.)

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Doodle4Google

These are pretty awesome, although there is an excess of "What if we saved the environment/achieved world peace" doodles. Not to mention -- two doodles made from hands (see grades 4-6, region 2, and grades 10-12, region 7)???

The ones I like best are the ones that, like real Google Doodles, replace the letters with other objects (check out grades 10-12, region 2 and 3, and grades 7-9, region 1, 5, and 6). I also quite like the one from grades 4-6, region 10.

I think the winner of this competition is going to have their doodle up on Google tomorrow. Not a bad deal.

On Tina Fey being "curvy" (or not)

Since I had lost my April 28 New Yorker, it took me a while to actually read the Anthony Lane review that had people pissed off back in, well, April. Here's the part in question:

Angie is skinny to Kate's curves, loose-tongued to her zipped-up sense of fun, fertile to her barren jealousy. Angie wears pedal pushers and tank tops, whereas Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It's possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, thought in complete command of her deliver -- dry, spiky, but unthreatening -- she hasn't yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn't big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she's no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball -- a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Alright, so obviously* this is annoying, but besides being sexist, it's also inaccurate. Tina Fey isn't big at all, nor is she curvy to Amy Poehler's skinny. Hello? Look at them here. I always thought -- and think -- that Tina Fey is kinda bony -- her body and her attitude/delivery are sort of the same -- "spiky," wry, laidback. She's not ripe at all, and in this movie she's the opposite of ripe because she is, oh that's right, unable to have children of her own. If anything it's Amy Poehler who is ripe -- and she shows off what "curves" (I fucking hate that word**) she has way more than Tina does because she dresses kind of skanky. Tina's skirts that "Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off" actually professional on her, which, hello, dumbass, is part of her character. (She is just a little tightly wound.) Plus, they actually look pretty good most of the time.

So in other words, not only are you apparently kinda sexist, Anthony Lane, but you kind of sucked at reviewing this movie. (Which, for interested parties, was actually pretty good.)

*Emily Gould comments that Tina Fey is "normal-sized," but I have to say that the women of the Gawker blogosphere (by which I mean the Jezebel girls and then Emily Gould), for all their more-mainstream-than-Feministing championship of women and all that, still totally suck at perceiving "normal" women's bodies. For them "normal" seems to be "unfamous," but still thin as shit. Perhaps that is because they are all some kind of pseudocelebrity themselves (case in point), and therefore have skewed perceptions. At any rate, I think Tina Fey is pretty hot.

**Every single magazine that has a "size" issue or a "body" issue or who wants to show you jeans or swimsuits or what-have-you "for your body type" always labels one type "curvy." That is their PC word for "fat," and they never actually have clothes for real people who are overweight and not like big boned or whatever. I want clothes for people who are supposed to be kinda skinny with not a lot of waist, but who have managed to add on 20 pounds at some point and therefore are "curvy." Not to go off on a rant but one good thing about Self magazine (besides everything) is that when they do a body breakdown, they actually do it by shapes, like "bigger in the middle" or "bigger on top" and shit like that. Anyway, just a thought.

On a related note...

I finally cleaned my room yesterday in preparation for the house cleaner's visit. I'm not one of those people who cleans for the cleaners, I'm one of those people who is so dirty that in order for the cleaner to enter the domicile, I have to clean. Not kidding. The past two or three weeks my room literally exploded and I had approximately five separate piles of clothes (laundry, coats, recent clean laundry, clean laundry pulled from drawers, and clean laundry that had been air dried) and like 14 days worth of mail in the entry to my room. It was truly sickening and probably hazardous to my health. (I think there were also like 8 glasses of water half drunk and also a mostly-drunk PBR can on top of a stack of New Yorkers. Not kidding again.)

Anyway, so the point of all this is that in an amazing, unheard of twist (I am full of these non-revelation revelations today), I feel much more relaxed and clear-headed today. It appears that a clean room does indeed equal a clean mind. After the room was mostly clean, I found myself discovering new things I could do to make it feel more clean. I put the subwoofer I'm no longer using in the closet. I got rid of my desk which I'd replaced with a piano two months ago. I managed to find real clothes for work today instead of a tshirt with jeans and a sweatshirt. I even remembered to floss last night before bed. I feel like I can face the world. This, my friends, seems to be a true accomplishment. Now if only I can sustain it through this weekend. Hurrah!

I am writing the title to this post after the rest of it and I feel an extreme amount of self-distaste right now.

This is probably going to be a really lame post but whatever, I believe in honesty and over-sharing on the Internet.
It's funny that Ellen posted about this book "Frugal Indulgents: How to Cultivate Decadence when your Age and Salary are under 30" on her blog this morning, because last night Justin and Elizabeth were talking about living decadently/extravagantly. I remarked that I was certainly living decadently because our house cleaner was coming this morning and I was planning to take my laundry to the wash and fold (which I totally did). This morning, while I waited at the counter for the wash and fold woman (who was late) to be dropped off by her husband for work, I felt totally sick of myself for being such a goddamn yuppie. I swore to myself that the only reason I pay for others to clean my laundry and house (the latter rarely, the former increasingly more frequently) is because it's better for my mental health and also because sometimes it's just like paying for time rather than service (like, for my own time). I also swore that my next apartment would have a washer/dryer so I could avoid this kind of self-hate before 8am. Then I heard my dad's voice in my head, telling me that everyone has 24 hours in every day (this might be blended with Liv Tyler's dad's voice in Empire Records, except I am not on speed), and saying that you don't have time is not really an excuse because you have a lot of time. Only not really, I tell myself, so I paid my $22.50 for my laundry and marched back home.

Anyway, all this is sort of part of this recent realization I had which is that (surprise) I don't have it that bad. Please bear with me during this awful, terrible, white upper-middle class professional city-dweller moment while I realize that while I want things I can't afford, I can actually afford most things I want. Plus, I can afford to pay for my laundry, buy the occasional episode of "Gossip Girl" on iTunes, purchase organic vegetables in the middle of a global food crisis, not to mention get $65 haircuts and $12 manicures. This is all very terrible of me but I feel like I've been living under the impression that I wasn't well off, and suddenly I realized that I actually kind of am, comparatively speaking. It is sort of a strange experience to come to terms with the fact that maybe you are one of those privileged people you've spent a majority of your life judging.

I can't believe I just wrote this entry. It's so much worse in print. Ack.

Oh yeah, and also, we got HDTV last week.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

A poem

I finally got to the April 28th New Yorker after losing it twice (I ended up borrowing a copy). I am glad I got it for a lot of reasons, but I especially liked this poem.

Here Name Your

My friend spends all summer
mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag
the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten
and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks
up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no
grownups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join
hands so that someone can run them open.

Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter
and regather together

as if any arms might ever really hold.
I'm trying to finger the source -- pleasure of or need

for -- these enactments of resistance, if Resistance
is indeed their name. I'm trying to walk the parallels to terminus --

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge,
tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit --

trying to admit to seeing double,
innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself
on all sides, my heart forced by itself

for itself, to learn not only mine
but all the lines --

crow's flight, crow's-feet, enemy, party, picket,
throwaway, high tide, and horizon -- to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night
and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some
part for the snow's steep slope.

--Dora Malech

It's one of those poems where I feel like the tricks are obvious ("nought, knot" for example, or "lickety-split over rickety bridge") and yet I don't think I ever would have thought to do it myself. Well, most poems are like that, but this one's charms are sort of obvious and sort of obscured by the obvious ones, if that makes any sense.

Forgive me for this twee-ness

The last few days I've been semi-methodically clearing out feeds in my Google Reader in an effort to waste less time on the Internet. That sounds paradoxical and it totally is. But I have so much backlog from various blogs that I needed to clear out all the unread items so I could start over without feeling burdened. So that led, today, to me going on an Etsy binge. I haven't bought anything... yet... but that is not the point. Check out these tailor-made-for-Emily finds...

Bunny ring
They have owls too.

Sad owl print:
HER NAME IS MINERVA, FOR CHRISSAKE.

And this whole set of little drawings that I love! They are sort of Frog-and-Toad/Beatrix Potter esque. I think I like the raccoon and squirrels the best.

I wonder if my animal obsession is some bizarre nesting instinct. Sarah and I were just talking about nesting instincts (mine is nourished weekly by Bethany's three blogs chronicling her motherhood), and I think this is just further damning evidence.

Monday, May 19, 2008

It's like some kind of periscope into my head

I have the craziest dreams lately. Last Thursday night, I had a dream that Jim actually had proposed to Pam, after the Andy business, by teasing her about something being in his coat pocket, so she had to get it out and then there it was, a ring. Friday night, I dreamt that a ton of us woke up late (like 9:15) for Bay to Breakers and had to relocate from the start to around Alamo Square. And then last night I had a dream that the Oregon and Kentucky primaries took place, and Barack Obama's expected 16+ elected delegates from Oregon somehow had been discounted (not that they'd gone to Clinton, they just somehow did not exist) and he still didn't have the pledged majority and the race was still, still, still going on.

All this gives you a somewhat disturbing image of what my brain spends its time on. (The sad part is that the third dream is probably going to come half true - even if Obama wins as expected, Clinton shows all signs of going on with the race, including claiming that 2025 delegates is not the required majority, and Obama's camp is not planning to claim the nomination even if he hits 2025 tomorrow.)

B2B2KGreat


Wow. Wow. Wow.

Those were the words Obama said facing a crowd of 75,000 in Portland and those are the words I say when I think about Bay to Breakers yesterday.

B2B really is San Francisco's finest moment. Saturday night, Peattie said, "I wish Bay to Breakers wasn't tomorrow." I thought he meant because we maybe weren't prepared, because he was tired, because he wanted to do something fun Saturday night and knew he shouldn't in order to rest up for the next morning, but no. He clarified: "Because it's going to be another whole year before it happens again." Somewhere around the starting line yesterday morning, I realized I completely agreed with him. Seriously, it's such a great day. I can't really picture it for you if you weren't there, but I came away from the day with a million little snapshots in my head, and I almost want to write them all down here to ensure I remember them forever. However, I think I'll spare you. All you need to know is that we started at the beginning. We lost people immediately and found them again, as you are wont to do. We lost people at what I call the Bermuda Triangle, the block between Hayes and Fell on Divisadero. Those people we didn't find again. We picked up a keg at a friend's house on Fulton, and I don't remember what happened to it. We saw the buffalo. And hours and hours later, we made it to the beach. I dipped my toes in the ocean. And then we took an epic N-Judah ride back to Duboce Park, where after a stop at JJ's house, we went to Naan and Chutney on Haight and wolfed down our only food since (in my case) a bowl of cereal at 6:30am. Satisfaction of a race well staggered.

God, I love Bay to Breakers.

Some pictures. The top one is the entire alphabet, plus symbols, minus H, Q and U, who were running very late. So we met them at 7th and Howard, except by that point we'd lost, like, everyone else.

This is the first word we spelled.

They were really excited about this. The colors... so amazing.

Not spelling anything, just felt like posting this one. Me, Laurel (R), and Zoe (Z). W (Sarah) is on the left you just can't see her face.
All Laurel and I wanted to do was spell "drunk." U was late, so we spelled "DRINK" instead. Ace (D), Laurel (R), Eli (I), Nick (N) and me.

Then we spelled "DRANK." JJ is "A."


Then they realized they could spell "RAW" and I just wanted to be in the letter so after they did that I threw myself on the end for "RAWK." (Laurel, JJ , Sarah, and me.)


Hours later we finally found U, and then we had lost N. This is me, scanning the crowd, looking for someone who could fake being an N. (Ace, Laurel, this guy Rick I met yesterday while I was yelling at him for not showing up earlier, and me.)

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Brought to you by the letter K.

I've sort of been hesitating to post about this because I'm worried about blowing the total awesomeness of it all, but... screw it.

Bay to Breakers, a.k.a. Best Day Ever, is this Sunday, and my friends and I have collected together (with a lot of people I don't know, but who are friends of friends and visitors from out of town) to be the ALPHABET. We are all going to be wearing bright t-shirts with letters (some of us are symbols). We can spell things all day. It will be really awesome. My friend Peattie had the idea and we're all sort of shocked and awed that it's actually happening, but it really, really is. Obviously it hasn't happened yet, but there's been enough entertaining buildup to get me jazzed about it. Such as: calling each other by our letter names all week (I feel like I am in Gossip Girl, especially every time I address Justin as J) and sending out lots of videos of Sesame Street. Like this one, which Laurel sent today, and which I am pretty sure I've drunkenly sang before (Sesame Street is so deeply embedded in my brain) and which we are planning to drunkenly sing again, this Sunday, while winding our way through the maddening crowds of San Francisco on the Best Day Ever.



I'm not the letter E as you might expect -- Elizabeth got that one -- instead I've gone with K for Kettering, which is swiftly becoming a nickname that I actually respond to.

When Obama wins....

You know how they talk about how TV totally changed politics? And then how the Internet changed politics because of blogs and stuff? I feel like this election has really reached a new Internet, media peak. The sheer numbers of weird memes and things... as evidenced by the fact that I've posted about most of them. Anyway, here is the latest (a little late)... When Obama Wins.

A John Hagee Is Crazy Alert

Here.

When Sen. John McCain was forced to distance himself from Pastor John Hagee earlier this year, he denounced the pastor’s attacks on Catholicism. But asked why he wouldn’t “repudiate” Hagee’s endorsement of him, McCain found something to praise.

“I'm grateful for his commitment to the support of the state of Israel, and I'm very grateful for many of his commitments around the world, including to the independence and freedom of the state of Israel,” he told CNN’s Campbell Brown on April 29.

Hagee’s commitment to Israel, however, is itself controversial: It’s rooted in the belief that the Jewish state will — soon — be the site of Armageddon.

It's not even so much a critique on McCain for seeking out and enjoying his endorsement. It's mostly just a comment on how some people out there are batshit insane.

Things that are Younger than John McCain

First let me make a small disclaimer: sometimes I like things for purely humorous reasons and not because I think they matter (much) politically.

So, John McCain, as we know, is pretty old. For a Presidential candidate. I've seen him speak twice in person and he looks/seems even older in person. But whatever, he seems to be generally mentally on top of things so I won't judge. That said, this site "Things that are Younger than John McCain" is really funny. It's good especially because of the comments, like those on this post (check out #8 and #9). Plus, it is sort of educational! Chocolate chip cookies, born in the 30s. Good to know!

(via Serious Eats)

More on R. Kelly (I just can't resist)

I showed Dan, my roommate and resident R. Kelly (and in fact all trashy hip-hop) expert, the R. Kelly trial blog I linked to earlier, and he countered with this.

Seriously, I will never be able to decide if R. Kelly is insane or some kind of secret genius. It's kind of like how I can't decide if people on the Hills are really really stupid, or just really cleverly manipulating the fame machine. In their case I think I think the former, but with R. Kelly it's like I just can't decide. I mean he wrote a hip-hopera! And this is a song about his hair dresser filled with tons of absurd sexual innuendo! And! And! He wrote a song called "Sex Planet" which is also filled with tons of absurd sexual innuendo! Seriously, I just can't express my bafflement and awe at the man who is R. Kelly. Sex trials or not.

Rambles.

Several thoughts are running through my head today. First, I love it when San Francisco is hot. The predicted high for today is 92 in the city, which is absolutely insane, and it completely changes the feeling of things. I happen to be working in the SF office today, and my trip to work got me sweating, plus it made me feel like I was going to work somewhere like Chicago, not my chilly city by the bay. It's not just hot this week, it's sort of hot and humid and hazy, the kind of hot that is also cloudy, and the cloud pins all the heat and (dare I say it?) smog in around you. Luckily I have no problem with heat, although it does make me want to wear shorts to work which is sort of a no-no, even at my company. Instead, I've had to resort to skirts and dresses, which has made me once again question my wardrobe and made me seriously consider a revamp. I half-promised myself recently I wasn't going to buy new clothes until I got rid of old ones, but I keep having to dip into the old ones when my newer ones don't turn out to work in my favor, and in general I'm having major wardrobe malfunctions and stressful moments (when I was dressing for my friend's confirmation on Sunday, in other words, when I was dressing for CHURCH, I actually threw a crying fit, and maybe I also said "Fuck God"). Anyway, this is all not the point. The point is that San Francisco in the heat is a totally different city. On my walk home last night there were scores of people out on patios outside of cafes that are normally dead quiet. Half of it feels bohemian and the other half is the sort of underside of the city that you don't always see - but either way it is good.

The other thing that's going on this week is my second killer sinus infection of the season. I know you're all really excited about a paragraph that starts like that, but I'm not planning on going into the details except to say that my allergies are the worst and if I lived in the 19th century I would most definitely be branded as sickly and confined indoors to knit and stuff like Colin Craven or Mercy in "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" or maybe Mary Ingalls prior to going to the school for the blind. Thanks to, you know, modern medicine and stuff, I am still rallying for work every day, although each night I've gone straight home, watched mindless television, and gone to bed, on average, at 10pm. Anyway, so today I implemented a new strategy... the case of medicines. I busted out an old make up case and filled it with my various accoutrements of illness. I am awesome.

This morning I took the bus to work instead of the BART. I always take the BART, and that means that I always walk by the same crack dealers near the corner of Mission and 16th. Seriously, they are always there in front of the same store, and that entire block from 17th to 16th is like a little obstacle course of high people missing teeth. While that does tend to wake you up a little, I kind of didn't feel like it today, so I took the Mission 14 bus instead. Which is ironic, or something, because the Mission 14 bus is filled with crazy people all the time. I don't think I've ever been on it without crazy people. This morning the crazy person was sitting in the front area singing this almost tuneful, nevertheless wordless song for the entire ride until he got off somewhere around 3rd street. It was loud enough to fill the entire bus, and very bizarre. There is nothing like a little San Francisco crazy person culture to start off your day.

Anyway. Back to it. Whatever it is.

This is why blogs are awesome.

BEST!!

(via)

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Obama in an unmoderated debate

I have to agree with Hendrik Hertzberg here. When Obama spoke at Google last year, his speech was good, but his Q&A was better. I think a town hall format, or a non-moderated debate format, would highlight some of his assets very well. He's quick on his feet.

(tip to Justin for the link)

P.S. Yay for Edwards and NARAL endorsements!

Why Kissing Jessica Stein is amazing.

I love Rachel for posting this:

Yoga guy: In what ways do you feel we don’t click?

Jessica:In what ways? We don’t click in any ways. We don’t have chemistry, or banter, or common interests. You’re a yoga instructor, you get colonics, you don’t understand the chaos or absurdity of life, on this planet and in this city. You don’t understand irony, or ethnicity, or eccentricity, or poetry, or the simple joy of being a regular at the diner on your block—I love that. You don’t drink coffee, or alcohol, you don’t overeat, you don’t cry when you’re alone, you don’t understand sarcasm. You plod through life in a neat, colorless, caffeine-free, dairy-free, conflict-free, banal self-possessed way—I’m bold, and angry, and tortured, and tremendous and I notice when someone has changed their hair part, or when someone is wearing two very distinctly different shades of black, or when someone changes the natural timbre of their voice on the phone. I don’t give out empty praise. I’m not complacent, or well-adjusted, I can’t spend 50 minutes breathing and stretching and getting in touch with myself, I can’t even spend 3 minutes finishing an article. I check my phone machine 9 times every day, and I can’t sleep at night, because I feel that there is so much to do and fix and change in the world, and I wonder every day if I am making a difference, and if I will ever express the greatness within me or if I will remain forever paralyzed by the muddled madness inside my head. I’ve wept on every birthday I’ve ever had, because life is huge, and fleeting. And I hate certain people and certain shoes. And I feel that life is terribly unfair and sometimes beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary, but also numbing and horrifying and insurmountable. And I hate myself a lot of the time, but a lot of the rest of the time, I adore myself and I adore my life in this city, in this world we live in, this huge and wondrous, bewildering, brilliant, horrible world.

(sigh) And in these ways, I feel that we do not click.

Yoga guy: So you don’t think it’s gonna work out right now?

—Original scene from Kissing Jessica Stein that didn’t make it into the movie

Kissing Jessica Stein is underrated or underrepresented, probably because of the whole lesbian thing, but the reality is that I relate much, much more to Jessica than I ever could to Carrie Bradshaw or any of the other SATC girls, who are supposed to be our New York archetypal women of our generation (or the one a bit ahead of us). She's such a disaster, but in the ways I am a disaster, and now I feel the urge to go watch this movie as soon as possible.

Standing in Love

I thought this little bit was lovely... it's about the difference between "falling in love" and "standing in love." In some ways it's what we always have known, that the giddy feeling of falling in love must at some point give way to a different kind of love, blah blah blah. But what I liked best about it (besides that idea of "standing in love" with someone) was this:

When you fall in love, you want your partner to be faithful to you because if they are not it threatens your loneliness again. They might leave you, and leave you alone. This is possessiveness. So it is quite possible to find two people who are apparently in love with each other and who actually feel no love for anybody else. These are the kind of lovers who are completely annoying to be with. They are so involved with each other that they do not notice the rest of the world. They make you feel alone when you are with them. They think of love as luck and that their luck is in – and conversely, that everyone else’s luck is not.

There [sic] luck is not in, though, because their love is, in fact, what Fromm calls ‘an egoism together’; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. It is in fact narcissism – they love themselves in each other; they see each other as Narcissus starred into the lake. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, they are separated from the rest of humankind – which is why you feel lonely or annoyed in their presence. In fact, they too remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves, though they daren’t admit it and so become even more absorbed in each other. Their experience of union is an illusion.

When you stand in love, though, you want your partner to be faithful to you but not because you cannot be alone but because it represents to you the faithfulness that must exist between all human beings who are to relate well to each other. In other words, it is not an exclusive possessiveness but an expression of an inclusive love for all humankind, potentially at least. Thus, the nicest people to know who are in love with each other are those who make you feel part of their love, whose love generates a welcoming home, brings out the best in you and so on. They have learnt the art of love with each other and it results in generating love that they have for others.

I have always tried to make the argument that best couples are those who are additive -- who you can spend time with in a group and who don't suck the energy out, but instead add to the room, add their own energy, which is from two people but not only for two people. This puts it a bit better than I've been able to -- additive is such an non-lovey word: turns out the kinds of couples I like, and the kind of couple I want to be a part of, are those who are "standing in love." This really comes back to the essential issue of balance in relationships that I've been struggling with for the past year -- the lameness of codependence and the sweet spot of independence yet coupleness that as far as I can tell is incredibly, incredibly hard to find. Worth looking for, though.

(via)

Clinton 2012?

Pretty fascinating take on whether or not Clinton could conceivably run in 2012, assuming she loses the nomination this time.

(via)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Maybe if I didn't spend so much time on lists of books, I'd read more

I find myself physically incapable of not filling out any kind of online survey about reading. Case in point, and forgive me for the incredibly long list on my homepage: this list of 1001 books you should read (before you die? I think it's based on a book of that title). Bold means I've read them. I put asterisks next to those I have copies of in my room right now.

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro*
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan*
3. On Beauty - Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
6. The Sea - John Banville*
7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
9. The Master - Colm Toibin
10. Vanishing Point – David Markson
11. The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd
12. Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
13. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
14. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
15. The Colour – Rose Tremain
16. Thursbitch – Alan Garner
17. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
18. What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
20. Islands – Dan Sleigh
21. Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
22. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
23. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
24. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
25. The Double – José Saramago
26. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
27. Unless – Carol Shields
28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
29. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
30. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
31. In the Forest – Edna O'Brien
32. Shroud – John Banville
33. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Youth – J.M. Coetzee
35. Dead Air – Iain Banks
36. Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster*
38. Gabriel's Gift – Hanif Kureishi
39. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
40. Platform – Michael Houellebecq
41. Schooling – Heather McGowan
42. Atonement – Ian McEwan
43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
44. Don't Move – Margaret Mazzantini
45. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
46. Fury – Salman Rushdie
47. At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O'Neill
48. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
50. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
51. An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
52. The Devil and Miss Prym - Paulo Coelho
53. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
55. The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
56. Under the Skin – Michel Faber
57. Ignorance – Milan Kundera
58. Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
59. Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
60. City of God – E.L. Doctorow
61. How the Dead Live – Will Self
62. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
64. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
65. Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
66. Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
67. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
69. Pastoralia – George Saunder
70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
73. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
74. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie*
77. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
79. Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
80. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
81. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
82. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
83. All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
84. The Talk of the Town – Ardal O'Hanlon
85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
86. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
88. Another World – Pat Barker
89. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
91. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
92. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
93. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
94. Great Apes – Will Self
95. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
96. Underworld – Don DeLillo
97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
98. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth*
100. The Untouchable – John Banville
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
102. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
103. Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
105. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
106. Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
107. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace*
108. The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
109. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
110. The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
111. Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
112. The Information – Martin Amis
113. The Moor's Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
114. Sabbath's Theater – Philip Roth
115. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
117. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
118. Love's Work – Gillian Rose
119. The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
120. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
121. The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
123. Land – Park Kyong-ni
124. The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
125. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
126. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
127. City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
128. How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
129. Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
130. Felicia's Journey – William Trevor
131. Disappearance – David Dabydeen
132. The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
133. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
134. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
135. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
136. Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
137. Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
138. Complicity – Iain Banks
139. On Love – Alain de Botton
140. What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
141. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
142. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
143. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
144. The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
145. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
146. The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
147. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
148. Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
149. The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
150. A Heart So White – Javier Marias
151. Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
152. Indigo – Marina Warner
153. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
154. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
155. Jazz – Toni Morrison
156. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje*
157. Smilla's Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
158. The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
160. The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
161. Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
162. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan* (at my parents' house)
163. Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
164. Arcadia – Jim Crace
165. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
166. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
167. Time's Arrow – Martin Amis
168. Mao II – Don DeLillo
169. Typical – Padgett Powell
170. Regeneration – Pat Barker
171. Downriver – Iain Sinclair
172. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
173. Wise Children – Angela Carter
174. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
175. Amongst Women – John McGahern
176. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
177. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
178. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
179. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
180. The Things They Carried – Tim O'Brien
181. A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
182. Like Life – Lorrie Moore
183. Possession – A.S. Byatt
184. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
185. The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
186. A Disaffection – James Kelman
187. Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
188. Moon Palace – Paul Auster
189. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
190. Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
191. The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
192. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
193. The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
194. The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
197. London Fields – Martin Amis
198. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
199. Cat's Eye – Margaret Atwood
200. Foucault's Pendulum – Umberto Eco
201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
202. Wittgenstein's Mistress – David Markson
203. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
204. The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
205. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
206. Libra – Don DeLillo
207. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
208. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
211. The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
212. The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
213. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
214. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
215. The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
216. The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
217. Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
218. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
219. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
220. World's End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
221. Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
222. The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
223. Beloved – Toni Morrison
224. Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
225. Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
226. Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
228. The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
229. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
230. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
231. Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
232. Foe – J.M. Coetzee
233. The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
234. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
235. The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
236. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
239. A Maggot – John Fowles
240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
241. Contact – Carl Sagan
242. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
243. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
244. Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
245. White Noise – Don DeLillo*
246. Queer – William Burroughs
247. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
248. Legend – David Gemmell
249. Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi
250. The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
251. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
252. The Lover – Marguerite Duras
253. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
255. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
257. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
259. Flaubert's Parrot – Julian Barnes
260. Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
261. Shame – Salman Rushdie
262. Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
263. Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
264. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
265. Waterland – Graham Swift
266. The Life and Times of Michael K - J.M. Coetzee
267. The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
268. The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
269. The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
270. If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
271. A Boy's Own Story – Edmund White
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
273. Wittgenstein's Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
274. A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
275. Schindler's Ark – Thomas Keneally
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
277. The Newton Letter – John Banville
278. On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
279. Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
280. The Names – Don DeLillo
281. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
282. Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
283. The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
284. July's People – Nadine Gordimer
285. Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
286. Broken April – Ismail Kadare
287. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
288. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
289. Rites of Passage – William Golding
290. Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
291. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
292. City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
294. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
295. Smiley's People – John Le Carré
296. Shikasta – Doris Lessing
297. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
298. Burger's Daughter - Nadine Gordimer

299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
300. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

302. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
304. Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
305. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
306. The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
307. Yes – Thomas Bernhard
308. The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
309. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
312. The Shining – Stephen King
313. Dispatches – Michael Herr
314. Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
317. The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
318. Ratner's Star – Don DeLillo
319. The Public Burning – Robert Coover
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
321. Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
322. Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
323. Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
324. Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
325. W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
326. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
327. Grimus – Salman Rushdie
328. The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
329. Fateless – Imre Kertész
330. Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
331. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
332. Humboldt's Gift – Saul Bellow
333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis
334. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
336. The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
337. Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
339. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
341. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
342. A Question of Power – Bessie Head
343. The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
344. The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
345. Crash – J.G. Ballard
346. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
347. Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon* (at my parents' house)
348. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
349. Sula – Toni Morrison
350. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
351. The Breast – Philip Roth
352. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
353. G – John Berger
354. Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
355. House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
356. In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
357. The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson

359. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
360. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
361. Rabbit Redux – John Updike
362. The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
363. The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier
365. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
366. Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
368. Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
369. Troubles – J.G. Farrell
370. Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
371. The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
372. Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
373. Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
374. Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
376. The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles

377. The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
378. Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
379. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
380. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
381. Them – Joyce Carol Oates
382. A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
383. Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
384. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
385. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
386. Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
387. Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
388. The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
391. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
392. The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
393. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
394. A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
395. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
396. Chocky – John Wyndham
397. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
398. The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
400. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
401. Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
402. The Joke – Milan Kundera
403. No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
404. The Third Policeman – Flann O'Brien
405. A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
406. The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
407. Trawl – B.S. Johnson
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
409. The Magus – John Fowles
410. The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
411. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
412. Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
414. Things – Georges Perec
415. The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong'o
416. August is a Wicked Month – Edna O'Brien
417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O'Connor
419. The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
420. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
421. Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
422. Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
423. Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
424. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
425. Herzog – Saul Bellow
426. V. – Thomas Pynchon
427. Cat's Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
428. The Graduate – Charles Webb
429. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
430. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
431. The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
432. Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
435. The Collector – John Fowles
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – Ken Kesey*
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
438. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
440. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
441. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
442. Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O'Brien
443. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
446. A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
447. Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
448. Solaris - Stanislow Lem
449. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O'Connor
453. How It Is – Samuel Beckett
454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
455. The Country Girls – Edna O'Brien
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
457. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
458. Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
459. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
460. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
461. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
462. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
463. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
466. Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
467. Breakfast at Tiffany's – Truman Capote
468. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
470. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
471. The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
472. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
474. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
475. Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
476. The End of the Road – John Barth
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
479. Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
480. Voss – Patrick White
481. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
482. Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
483. Homo Faber – Max Frisch
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
485. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
486. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
487. The Wonderful "O" – James Thurber
488. Justine – Lawrence Durrell
489. Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
490. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
491. The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
492. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
493. The Floating Opera – John Barth
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
496. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
498. The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
499. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
500. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
501. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
502. The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
503. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
504. I'm Not Stiller – Max Frisch
505. Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
506. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
507. A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
509. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
510. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
511. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler* (at my parents' house)
512. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
513. Watt – Samuel Beckett
514. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
515. Junkie – William Burroughs
516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
517. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
518. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
519. The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O'Connor
523. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
524. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
525. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
526. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
528. The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
530. The Rebel – Albert Camus
531. Molloy – Samuel Beckett
532. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
533. The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
534. The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
535. The Third Man – Graham Greene
536. The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
537. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
538. The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
539. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
540. The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
541. The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
542. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
543. The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
544. The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
545. Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
546. The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
548. All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
549. Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
550. Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
551. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
552. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
553. Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
554. The Victim – Saul Bellow
555. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
556. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
557. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
558. The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
559. The Plague – Albert Camus
560. Back – Henry Green
561. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
562. The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

566. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
567. Loving – Henry Green
568. Arcanum 17 – André Breton
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
570. The Razor's Edge – William Somerset Maugham
571. Transit – Anna Seghers
572. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
573. Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
575. Caught – Henry Green
576. The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
577. Embers - Sandor Marai
578. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
580. In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
581. The Poor Mouth – Flann O'Brien
582. The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
583. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
584. Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
585. The Hamlet – William Faulkner
586. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
589. The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
590. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
591. Party Going – Henry Green
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
593. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
594. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O'Brien
595. Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
596. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
597. Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
598. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
600. After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
601. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
602. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
604. Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
605. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
606. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
607. Murphy – Samuel Beckett
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

611. The Years – Virginia Woolf
612. In Parenthesis – David Jones
613. The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
614. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
615. To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
616. Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
617. Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
618. The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
620. Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
621. Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
622. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner* (at my parents' house)
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
624. Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
625. Independent People - Halldor Laxness
626. Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
627. The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
628. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? – Horace McCoy
629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
630. England Made Me – Graham Greene
631. Burmese Days – George Orwell
632. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
633. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
634. Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
635. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller*
637. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
639. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
640. Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West*
642. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein*
644. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
645. A Day Off – Storm Jameson
646. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
647. A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
648. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
651. To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
653. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
654. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
655. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
656. Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
657. The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
658. Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
659. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
661. Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
662. Passing – Nella Larsen
663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
664. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
665. Living – Henry Green
666. The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
668. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
669. The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
670. Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner* (at my parents' house)
672. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
673. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
674. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
676. Lady Chatterley's Lover – D.H. Lawrence
677. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
678. The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
679. Quartet – Jean Rhys
680. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
681. Quicksand – Nella Larsen
682. Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford
683. Nadja – André Breton
684. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
685. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
687. Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
688. Amerika – Franz Kafka
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
690. Blindness – Henry Green
691. The Castle – Franz Kafka
692. The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
693. The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
694. One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
695. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
696. The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
697. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
698. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
700. The Counterfeiters – André Gide
701. The Trial – Franz Kafka
702. The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
703. The Professor's House – Willa Cather
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
705. The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
706. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
707. We -Yevgeny Zamyatin
708. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
709. The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
710. Zeno's Conscience – Italo Svevo
711. Cane – Jean Toomer
712. Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
713. Amok – Stefan Zweig
714. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
715. The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
716. Jacob's Room – Virginia Woolf
717. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
718. The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
719. Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
720. The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
721. Aaron's Rod – D.H. Lawrence
722. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
723. Ulysses – James Joyce* (at my parents' house)
724. The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
725. Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
726. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
727. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
728. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence* (at my parents' house)
729. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
730. Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
731. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
732. The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
733. Summer – Edith Wharton
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
735. Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
737. Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
738. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
739. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
740. The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
741. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
742. The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
744. Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
745. Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
746. Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
748. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
749. Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
750. Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
751. The Charwoman's Daughter – James Stephens
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
753. Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
754. Howards End – E.M. Forster
755. Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
756. Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
757. Martin Eden – Jack London
758. Strait is the Gate – André Gide
759. Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
760. The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
761. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
762. The Iron Heel – Jack London
763. The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
764. The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
765. Mother – Maxim Gorky
766. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
767. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
768. Young Törless – Robert Musil
769. The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
770. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
771. Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
772. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
773. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
774. Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
775. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
776. The Ambassadors – Henry James
777. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
778. The Immoralist – André Gide
779. The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
781. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
782. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
783. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
785. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
786. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
787. The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James*
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
791. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
792. What Maisie Knew – Henry James
793. Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
795. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
796. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
798. Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
799. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
800. The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
801. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
802. Born in Exile – George Gissing
803. Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
805. News from Nowhere – William Morris
806. New Grub Street – George Gissing
807. Gösta Berling's Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
808. Tess of the D-Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
810. The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
811. La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
812. By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
813. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
814. The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
815. Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
816. Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
817. The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
818. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
819. She – H. Rider Haggard
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
822. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
823. King Solomon's Mines – H. Rider Haggard
824. Germinal – Émile Zola
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
826. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
827. Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
828. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
830. A Woman's Life – Guy de Maupassant
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
832. The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
833. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
834. Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
835. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
836. Nana – Émile Zola
837. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
838. The Red Room – August Strindberg
839. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
841. Drunkard – Émile Zola
842. Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
843. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
844. The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
845. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
846. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
847. The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
849. In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
850. The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
851. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
852. Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
853. Middlemarch - George Eliot
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
855. King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
856. He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
857. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
858. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
859. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
860. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
862. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
864. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
865. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
868. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

869. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
870. Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
871. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
872. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo*
874. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
875. Silas Marner – George Eliot
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (abridged)
877. On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
878. Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
881. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
882. Max Havelaar – Multatuli
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
884. Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
885. Adam Bede - George Eliot
886. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
887. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
888. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
890. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
891. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
892. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
893. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
895. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
899. Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
900. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
901. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
903. Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
907. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
910. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
912. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
914. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
915. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
917. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
919. The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
920. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
921. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
923. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
924. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
925. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
926. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
927. The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
928. Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
929. The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
930. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen

934. Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
935. Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

939. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
941. Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
942. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
943. Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
944. The Nun – Denis Diderot
945. Camilla – Fanny Burney
946. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
947. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
948. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
949. The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
950. The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
951. Justine – Marquis de Sade
952. Vathek – William Beckford
953. The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
954. Cecilia – Fanny Burney
955. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
957. Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
958. Evelina – Fanny Burney
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
960. Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
961. The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
962. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
963. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
964. The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
965. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
966. Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
967. Rameau's Nephew – Denis Diderot
968. Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
969. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
970. Candide – Voltaire
971. The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
972. Amelia – Henry Fielding
973. Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
974. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
975. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
976. Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
977. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
978. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
979. Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
980. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
981. Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
982. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
983. Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift

984. Roxana – Daniel Defoe
985. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
986. Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
988. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
989. Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
990. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
991. The Pilgrim's Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
993. The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe 994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
995. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
997. The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
998. Aithiopika – Heliodorus
999. Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
1000. Metamorphoses – Ovid
1001. Aesop's Fables – Aesopus

Total: 94. I am therefore inspired to pick up all the copies of books on this list that I already have and finish off a list of 100. I could also theoretically sign up for this.

The best part is that a good number of the books on this list I own but have not read yet were purchased in one fell swoop of a buying binge, at Logos bookstore in Santa Cruz, just a few weekends ago. Am I psychic somehow, or just a huge bibliophile?

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