1,001 books; or, for a while there, I thought I was illiterate

Well, people, I'm doing a meme. Again. Because I really am that desperate for something to say.

I mean, sure, I could write a blog post on how I find Sarah Palin eerily unlike myself, even though we're both brunettes who wear sexy librarian glasses and live in a cold climate. But you wouldn't want to read that.

You see, Palin has fans who are planning on voting for her because she's just like them.

And that's one reason I'm not voting for her. It's because--no. I can't say it. It would come across as egotistical, and I don't do egotistical. What I really do best is a kind of sprightly self-denigration.

But I can't talk about Sarah Palin without coming up with adjectives like provincial, tacky, uneducated, inarticulate, and bumptious. And this leads me to the inescapable conclusion that I think of myself as sophisticated, classy, educated, articulate, and socially aware.

And I simply can't go there.

So I'm going to talk about books.

***

OK, here is this 1,001 Books meme thing I grabbed from Jasmine. Except I did it my way. Instead of copying and pasting the entire list and then bolding and italic-ing and whatever, I just deleted all the books I hadn't read. So these are all books I've read, I just couldn't get rid of the bolding and italics and indenting and auto-numbering and such. (You simply would not believe what the html looks like beneath this smooth, dare I say it? Sophisticated facade.)

2000s

I have read exactly no books on the list of 69 titles from the 2000s.

1990s

I have read exactly no books from the 114 titles from the 1990s.

(Wait a minute. Maybe I'm less sophisticated than I thought.)

1900 - 1980s

1. Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
2. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
3. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
4. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
   
5. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
6. The World According to Garp – John Irving
7. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
8. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
9. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
10. Rabbit Redux – John Updike
    
11. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
12. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
13. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
14. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
15. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
16. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
17. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
18. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
19. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
20. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
    
21. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
22. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
23. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
24. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
25. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
26. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
27. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
28. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene 1940s
    
29. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
30. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
31. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
32. The Plague – Albert Camus
33. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
34. Animal Farm – George Orwell
35. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
36. Native Son – Richard Wright
37. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys 1930s
    
38. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
39. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
40. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
41. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
42. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
43. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
44. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
45. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
46. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
47. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
48. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
49. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
50. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
    
51. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
52. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
53. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
54. Quartet – Jean Rhys
55. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
56. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
57. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
58. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
59. Ulysses – James Joyce
60. The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
61. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
62. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce 1910s
    
63. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
64. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
65. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
66. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
67. Howards End – E.M. Forster 1900s
    
68. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
69. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
70. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
71. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
72. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
73. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann

1800s

1. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
2. Dracula – Bram Stoker
3. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
4. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
6. New Grub Street – George Gissing
7. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
9. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
10. She – H. Rider Haggard
11. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
12. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
13. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
14. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
15. Nana – Émile Zola
16. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
17. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
18. Drunkard – Émile Zola
19. Middlemarch – George Eliot
20. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
21. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
22. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
23. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
24. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
25. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
27. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
29. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
30. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
31. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
32. Adam Bede – George Eliot
33. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
34. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
35. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
36. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
37. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
38. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
39. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
40. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
41. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
42. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
43. Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
44. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
45. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
46. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
47. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
48. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
49. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
50. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
51. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
52. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
53. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
54. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
55. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
56. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
57. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
58. Persuasion – Jane Austen
59. Emma – Jane Austen
60. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
61. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
62. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

1700s

1. Evelina – Fanny Burney
2. Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
3. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
4. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
5. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
6. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
7. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
8. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
9. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
10. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
11. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
12. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700

1. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
2. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous;
   
3. Metamorphoses – Ovid
4. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

***

Still with me?

Perhaps later, gentle reader, I'll let you know what I actually thought of these books. But not now.

No, I'll save those ruminations for those long, cold winter evenings by the fire. Because nothing beats the warm glow you get as book after book is being lobbed onto the flames by a former beauty queen from Alaska.

Hee!

Drunk blogging a Girl Scout camp-out

Thank God for rain.

We had scheduled a Girl Scout camp out, sort of a gateway camp out, actually, which was to take place at one of our leader's houses, in her yard. There were going to be tents, and a campfire, and a walk to the beach for flashlight tag, and doughnuts the next morning.

Well, it poured rain all day. Which meant that we'd be sleeping on the very wet ground. And then there's that thing where tents leak wherever you touch the canvas.

So we had a pizza party at her house, instead. Indoors. And the girls watched a DVD down in her home theater. And then sang Karaoke.

And I? Ate pizza and salad and drank lots of wine. And sang a karaoke "Material Girl" with one of the other moms. And then came home and caught up with my husband. Instead of sleeping in a tent with a bunch of 6th grade girls.

It may be the wine speaking, but can I have an A-MEN for the rainy weather?

A-MEN!

I'd rate this entry M for "Mature Audiences"

except it's so obviously the product of an extremely immature person.

OK, this is dumb.

But sometimes when I'm bored, or I'm looking for a blog post idea (because I'm a member of Blog365 who has blogged every damned day since January 4th, and sometimes I'm kind of hard up for something to say) I go to a search engine or Amazon or YouTube and type something in--not just to see what I'm supposedly searching for, but the things that are kinda sorta related to what I'm looking for.

It's a sort of six degrees of separation, based, I suppose, on an algorithm that tracks what other people have searched for. So for example, a search for "peace signs" might eventually bring me to a biography of Winston Churchill.


Anyway, tonight I went to YouTube. Where I often find the most amazing things.

My latest YouTube thing is how-to videos. I discovered a link to one on a shopping blog--I clicked on the link, and the next thing I knew, I was watching a video of a woman demonstrating how to get the effect of the latest MAC makeup collection by using what she already had.

I watched this with a sort of amused fascination. I love makeup, and my first on-line community was a bunch of makeup freaks, so I certainly know a lot of women who are even more obsessed with makeup than I am. But we are amateur accumulators rather than quasi-professional makeup collectors or makeup artist wannabes.

I mean, uploading a video of yourself putting on makeup? Who knew anyone did this? And this woman was positively plastering herself with eyeshadow--and seemed very pleased with the effect, even though she ended up looking like a Manga character.

So anyway. Enough with the rambling self-justifications.

Tonight I went to YouTube and typed in "how to walk in high heels."

Well. You wouldn't believe the number of hits. And not just from trannies and fetishists, which of course, you'd expect to see. (There were plenty of them.)

But there were a surprising number of perfectly serious videos that purported to actually teach women how to walk in heels. What's next, how to put on a bra? How to brush your teeth?

And there were videos by people trying to teach fitness classes for women wearing high-heeled shoes. Which I guess would be strippers who need to get back in shape after too many evenings spent swilling "champagne cocktails."

But there were also sub-genres of film-making that I never knew existed. A reasonably sophisticated person could predict the existence of stiletto-wearing women fetish films. And we've all heard of snuff films, right?

But did you know there were snuff films for cell phones that feature stiletto-wearing women?



They seem to be very popular in Germany.

Silly Germans! I hate my cell phone, too, but when I get mad at it, I just let the battery run down until it dies.

A tale of two lunches

This was a hard week for me. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a jeans-wearing housewife with a bad case of blogger's butt and a closet full of clothes that are too tight. And yet, I needed to head into the city five times this week to go to some kind of glamorous event.

The strain almost killed me.

On top of which, two of the events were luncheons. As in ladies-who-luncheon.

Frankly, if you want me to have a rotten time, invite me to lunch and then call it a luncheon. I'll hate it.

Now, one of these luncheons was a program of a non-profit whose board I currently adorn. If not for that, I would have blown it off, and not just because of my enormous wardrobe challenges. It was one of those deals where there was a talk, then the luncheon. And the talk was going to be about 18th century furniture.

Here is a laboriously-produced Excel chart depicting my interest in antique furniture:






I knew the lecture itself would be less than fascinating and more of an opportunity for me to get into a Zen state and mentally alphabetize my spice rack. And I'm not whining about that. Advance notice does a great deal to mitigate the pain of 30 or 40 minutes of feeling bored, so my real problem was afterwards at the luncheon.

I think after sitting up straight and doing my best Nancy Reagan imitation, where I look like I've been paying all kinds of attention (and unfortunately, actually HAVE been paying attention so that I'll be going to my grave knowing way more than any sane person would ever want to know about the variations in carving on the feet of 18th century tables and chairs) I deserve to have a nice meal.

But this was just not my kind of meal. There was this salad of frisee (that bitter curly lettuce that doesn't appear to want to go into your mouth, and instead, wants to stick itself up your nose) with wobbly poached egg on top followed by huge plateful of salmon (which I don't like) and two tiny new potatoes and pureed butternut squash (which I do, but there wasn't enough of it. So I found myself looking hungrily at other peoples' plates, wondering whether it would seem really tacky to ask them whether they were planning on eating their puree.) And then there was a slice of some kind of awful dark chocolate tart flavored with orange, ew. And NO WINE. And then finally, blessedly, some coffee.

OK, the other luncheon was sponsored by Tiffany & Co. I have no idea how I ended up on the invitation list for this event, but this was the single most incredible luncheon I have ever attended, and not only was it free, but we walked out with all kinds of loot.

The Tiffany luncheon was to announce to launch of wowowow.com. It's a web site produced by Liz Smith, Candace Bergen, Whoopie Goldberg, Julia Reed, Judith Martin (a/k/a Miss Manners) and a bunch of other amazing women.

So guess who was at the luncheon?

I should say here that that at least in Chicago, if there is a big name on the invitation, there's a 95 percent chance that said big name is hanging around his chalet in Gstaad or his beach house in Malibu, or basically, is anywhere except at the benefit. And yet, at this luncheon for about 50 women, sponsored and paid for by Tiffany & Co., were

Judith Martin (Miss Manners), Julia Reed, and Liz Smith

And the tables were decorated with Tiffany jewelry. Diamonds? Check. Great big South Seas pearls the size of golf balls? Check. Those enamel Jean Schlumberger bracelets that sell for $18,000 each? There were piles of them on the tables for people to play with.

And everyone had a sterling silver "Return to Tiffany" book mark at their setting, as a party favor.

And the food was really good. OK, there was Caesar Salad and chicken with rice and sugar snap peas, which isn't all that exciting, but there were also individually-prepared chocolate souffles with crme anglaise and fresh raspberries.

And the authors were signing free books for us.

And it turns out that Miss Manners is a fan of Donna Leon, whom I adore.

More important, Miss Manners sat at my table at lunch, and just so you know, she rested her arms on the table. Which, OK, it wasn't her elbows, but still.

Honestly, people, this was heaven. I wish my wedding had been even half as luxurious and lovely. I don't even care that wowowow.com is a very slick website with high quality content that will keep readers away in droves from the penny-ante likes of this blog. That's how good this lunch was.

So, gentle readers, what have we learned? I can be bought. And don't make me sit through a slideshow of antique furniture again. I'm begging you.

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm really enjoying FaceBook. A bunch of my friends have joined, and there's always something new happening. Except over in the sidebars, where I keep getting asked the same questions, over and over. So I thought I'd put together a FAQ for FaceBook. Here you go:

1. Brian Wilson Live?
Actually, this looks like someone wearing a Barack Obama Halloween mask.

2. Muggle Quidditch 2.0?2.0? Please don't tell me there was a Muggle Quidditch 1.0

3. Monetize your blog

Oh, go verbatize yourself.

4. Interested in Fashion?

Well, yes. Yes I am.

5. House, M.D. Fan?
Yes I said yes I will Yes.

More political insights from Poppy Buxom

Good evening. This is an extraordinary period for Poppy Buxom's kitchen.

Over the past few weeks, many members of the Buxom family have felt anxiety about her cooking and her so-called "cleaning up." She understands their worry and their frustration.

So she proposes that the federal government hire an indefinite number of cooks and maids so that Buxoms and other lovers of fine food and wine can avoid food poisoning and resume eating.

This rescue effort is not aimed at preserving any individual person or family. It is aimed at preserving the Buxoms' overall health, as well as the health of their friends, relatives, contractors, lawn guys, and the guy who comes around quarterly to make sure mice don't move in.

How did her kitchen reach this point? Well, most Home Economists agree that the problems we're witnessing today developed over a long period of time. For more than a decade, a massive amount of internet technology has flowed into Poppy Buxom's kitchen from wireless DSL modems, making her kitchen into an attractive and secure place to blog, email, Twitter, FaceBook, and generally fritter away a lot of time.

Now, Poppy Buxom believes housewives who spend hours in front of their lap tops--who, in short, make bad decisions--should be allowed to end up overweight, depressed, and divorced.

And under normal circumstances, she would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The household is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of cleanliness. Major sectors of the Buxoms' food-preparation system are at risk of shutting down.

The household's top home economic experts warn that, without immediate action by health inspectors, the Buxoms could slip into a culinary panic, and much projectile vomiting would occur.

The choice, therefore is clear. Spend the money on kitchen help now, or rack up a huge hospital bill. Poppy believes you should hire the kitchen help--regardless of what it costs you.

Together we will show the world once again what kind of family the Buxoms are: one that tackles problems head on, by going to the American taxpayer with their hands out. A family where Mr. and Mrs. Buxom come together to make huge messes for other people to clean up. And finally, a kitchen where bacteria of every background can work hard, develop their talents, and realize their dreams.

P. S. This is much funnier than anything I could write.

Political insights, courtesy of The Onion

McCain�s Economic Plan For Nation: "Everyone Marry A Beer Heiress"