Borrowed from my friend nitouche:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing‘s users. (Did you know that Google Books now has a ‘display and rate your own library’ feature? And it’s free? Here’s my list of books I have written or contributed to). Anyway, on with the list!

Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn’t finish, strikethrough asterisk for books you have no desire to read, a ? in front for books you never heard of and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

? Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights *
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses *
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
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
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth *
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Some musings of Alan Watts, an English populariser of Eastern philosophy, on the temptation to concentrate on the destinations in life – must… finish… PhD! – rather than on the journey – entertainingly accompanied by animation produced by the creators of South Park. Five other such animated musings are also available online.

Thanks to the rather handy Edwin C Bolles collection of historical and topographical London documents I just read this rather cheering quotation about my neighborhood (Highgate) from a 129 year old guide:

[John] Norden, whom we have quoted above, bears testimony to the healthiness of this locality. He writes: “Upon this hill is most pleasant dwelling, yet not so pleasant as healthful; for the expert inhabitants there report that divers who have long been visited by sickness not curable by ` physicke ‘ have in a short time repaired their health by that sweet salutary air.” Indeed, the place is still proverbially healthy, and therefore has been chosen from time immemorial as the site of hospitals and other charitable institutions. It is worthy of note that Defoe, in his “History of the Plague,” records not a single death from that fearful visitation having happened here, though it extended its ravages into and beyond the northern suburbs, and even as far as Watford and St. Albans; and his silence is corroborated by the fact that during the continuance of the plague only sixteen deaths are recorded in the register.

OK I admit my teaching may not have been at my best today. I’ve been suffering from the flu since Friday and am still hardly at my best. There was a moment in the tube on the way to my workshop that I thought I might throw up, but it passed. I may also have been a little distracted by guilt – you see in order to come today I had to leave my (exhausted) wife at home with our (still sick) baby child.

But there wouldn’t have been time to find someone to replace me and I know you are paying more than £10,000/$20,000 to learn at the LSE (plus a great deal more for living expenses in London) so I felt I had to do my best to attend – I can’t remember a lecture or seminar ever being cancelled because of ill-health when I was being taught (though I may have forgotten a time or two).

To be honest though this was an advanced workshop session on Internet methods – a subject I enjoy talking and thinking about, and I was being a little selfish – I actually really like teaching, and a workshop full of graduate students who are (on the basis of marks and financial commitment at least) some of the ‘best and the brightest’. So I was really looking forward to my workshop…

Until I noticed early on that your attention was elsewhere. To be more precise you were using the Internet access I (foolishly) arranged in case it would be needed for teaching in order to surf some kind of funny images site. Which was bad enough. But then you started to smirk and show them off to the woman beside you. Then would have been the time to call you out on it I suppose, but I didn’t really expect you to carry on in the same way for the entire one-hour session. But that doesn’t mean what you did was fine. Here are a couple of tips.

1) You don’t get marked for attendance at the LSE – you get marked for results. If you know in advance you don’t have any interest in the subject don’t turn up – I assure you you won’t be missed.
2) If you do want to surf recreationally, sitting under the speaker’s nose is the wrong place to do it.
3) Distracting another potential learner – even one you hope to impress – puts you pretty close to the bottom tier of my personal student hell.

If you do come across this weblog posting in your idle surfing consider this a warning – if you start anything like that again in next week’s workshop, I will waste a precious minute or two of teaching time giving you a piece of my mind. It may not cure my flu but it would certainly make me feel better about teaching for a little while…

Thanks to a house move I have been trapped on dialup at home – at least for the next week or so – and I have been reminded about just how painful using the Internet is when you have to do it at less than 10Kb/s. All Internet users are definitely not equal in their ability to get things done. It has taken me 20 minutes just to check my email and read a minimal number of pages very slowly. By contrast once my broadband is installed, £5/$10 a month will get me a scorching fast (up to) 8Mbps (because it is bundled with my satellite TV). I can hardly wait!

After spending much time with a friendly but unable-to-help Dell technician I seem to have figured out the problem with my wife’s laptop myself (or at least found a way around it). It seems that for some reason her wireless driver crashes the whole system when trying to handle WPA encryption but it can handle WEP encryption fine. So we’re using that now. Not too elegant, but if it works don’t mess with it as I said earlier!

Having bought a desktop PC (dubbed ‘playmate’) for (mostly) games and (partly) other applications like NVivo which don’t run on my iBook, I find that I have had to learn how to network between them inside the home. So now using VNC I can view my iBook’s screen in a window on my PC then when I have finished working on a file on my Mac I can use Windows Sharing to open my Mac’s filing system as if it were a drive on my PC and copy what I need across. I can even print to my printer in the study from my Mac in the living room. It’s like my Mac is somehow ‘inside’ my PC. Rather eerie – and I confess it makes me feel like I am finally catching up to the level of computer skill exhibited by some of my friends. Of course they have been doing this kind of thing for years…

At the conference centre outside Oslo…

P.S. I never even dared to ask the price of alcohol while I was there – I had heard it was the priciest thing about Norway – but just before I left I asked the price of .5 L of beer in the airport bar – £6!

I visited Oslo to attend the first meeting of the Mediatized Stories network (which was a very interesting gathering of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines with a common interest in youth and digital storytelling), and have stuck around afterwards for a few days to see the sights. The weather has been lovely (the summer solstice is coming up) and the city is startlingly clean and prosperous. Nowhere I have seen so far could be described as run down – it’s like a whole city made up of the nicer bits of North American cities like San Francisco or Seattle. The people are also really friendly – I lost my Oslo Pass (free entry to museums and public transport etc) and all the people I explained this to were happy to let me enter their museum/bus/whatever without any fuss. And of course everyone speaks fluent English. I forgot my USB cable so my own pictures will be on Flickr early next week when I return. Meanwhile you can satisfy yourselves with other people’s Flickr photos tagged with Oslo.

On the other hand… first there is the weather. Actually it doesn’t get all that cold on average (if you are a Canadian). But there are 148 days under 0C/32F every year on average – and those cold days would be dark as well. And the real kicker is the cost of living. I am staying at a private “B & B” which is little better than a moderately well-decorated hostel (only Special K available for breakfast cereal, you have to wash your hair and body with hand soap as that’s all there is, there are only showers not baths and all of them are shared – you can imagine). It costs £50 a night. Just a main course (no dessert, starter or coffee – I quickly stopped dreaming of them) cost £20-30 at every restaurant I found. (At cafes you could get meals slightly cheaper). A half litre of Pepsi cost £2 everywhere I looked. My two day museum and transport pass cost £30. I could go on…

One of the small ironic pleasures of being a Londoner is going abroad and finding everything less expensive but Oslo was the exception to the rule. It feels even more expensive than Tokyo (mind you I didn’t try buying melons while I was there!)

Nonetheless, I have always been of the opinion that when you go on holiday you shouldn’t
count the cost as it ruins the fun. And I am trying not to! I wouldn’t want to put you off coming either. It is a great, relaxing place to visit as long as you don’t look up the exchange rate before you go…

In the spirit of Jeff Jarvis’ famous gripe I would like to offer my own beef with Dell. I bought a machine from them before without too much trouble but this time I have been having extreme difficulty just getting them to take an order from me. More details below (more…)