Bibliotica

Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

While I don’t own cats, I have enough friends who do to know that being alone without a book is somewhat akin to feline friends being locked in a house without a scratching post or cat tree…not a pleasant situation.

Since I have my wallet, I’d probably hit the airport bookstore and see what was on the best-seller list, or indulge in a few girly magazines of the sort I generally only read at the salon, because it makes them special, and they seem to GO with the salon.

Failing that, I’d look around for a stray newspaper or cast-off book - airports are popular drop points for Book Crossing, after all.

(And yes, I know, yet again, I’m participating on Sunday. Guess I’m not much of a joiner these days, is all.)

Six years ago, I had Lasik surgery on my eyes, and went from not being able to see the big E at the top of the chart to 20:20 vision, though it wasn’t instant - it takes time for eyes to settle.

People always ask what having the surgery impacted the most, and they generally expect grand answers like, “I can scuba dive without a special mask,” but the reality is, it’s the little things that you really notice, things like being able to see to shave your legs in the shower, or put on make-up, being able to read the numbers on the alarm clock when you wake in the middle of the night, and being able to read in bed without fear of rolling over on your glasses, or forgetting to remove your contacts and harming your eyes. (Ditto falling asleep on planes)

It is with this in mind that I present the following meme, in honor of the first 48 hours after surgery, in which I was forbidden to read anything at all.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as unread by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I was tagged by my blog-buddy Green Tuna with this meme, and since the alternative to blogging tonight is to read about individual health insurance plans, and then write about them (which is important, yes, but kind of dry), I thought I might participate.

Ms. Tuna provides the following, rather familiar, instructions:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Like her, I have some issue with the closest book. Technically the closest book to me is the instruction manual for my Blackjack, which was stashed in the back of my night stand and may never leave. But that would be kind of dry.

Then there’s the pile next to the bed, running along the window sill. Is the top one on one section of the pile significantly closer than the top book on another? Not really.

I’ve chosen, therefore, to use a book that is on the stack, as yet unread, Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen:

Sydney watched Claire work for a while. “I wonder why I didn’t inherit it,” she said absently.
“Inherit what?”

As to tagging people, if you have a book in the room you’re in when you read this, consider yourself tagged.
Or not.

CJ over at My Year of Reading Seriously did this meme, which she snagged elsewhere, as one does. I liked it, so I’m snagging it as well. If YOU want to play along (and I encourage this), the questions are listed without answers interspersed below the fold.

Hardcover or paperback? Why?
Hardcovers last longer; paperbacks are easier to tuck in a purse, but my favorite size and shape is the trade paperback because they’re lighter than the first, and not as thick as a standard paperback - I have small hands, so this is an issue.

If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
You know, I’ve never named a book shop, only a coffee shop. Ex Libris would be one option though it might seem a little too toney. Maybe just Stacks.

My favorite quote from a book (name it) is…
Oh, this changes, often, but for the moment: I’d gotten better lately at simply refusing to let my imagination run away with me. Maybe it had something to do with being a sociopath; if so, let’s hear it for dementia. From Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton.

The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…
Madeleine L’Engle or Mark Twain.

If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
Oh, I want to pick something lofty like The Complete Shakespeare, but the reality is that I’d bring along The Eight by Katherine Neville, and not just because it’s 825 pages long, either.

I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that
…would allow me to read in the tub - actually READ, not listen to an audio book - without any chance of the book getting wet.

The smell of an old book reminds me of…
Poking around old bookshops in the Haight on a rainy day, and then curling up in front of a fireplace with espresso, quilt, and dog, to read.

If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
I wanted to be Harriet from Harriet the Spy when I was little, and then Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables when I was older. I like the Anita Blake series, but I wouldn’t want to BE Anita - it’s exhausting. The lead character from Madeleine L’Engle’s Certain Women appeals to me even though her name escapes me, or the researcher in the Pink Carnation series. It all changes depending on my mood and the weather and what I’ve read recently.

The most overestimated book of all time is…
The DaVinci Code. It was a nice couple hours of entertaining reading, but folks, it was just a novel, and similar stories have been told far more artfully (*cough*Foucault’s Pendulum*cough*).

I hate it when a book…
Ends prematurely. When you’ve been sucked into the story and you’re invested in the characters, and then it just sort of fizzles out. It’s so disappointing.

Click para continuar lendo »