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- Initiate 10-year campaign to finish the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.
- No more soda; substitute with more cowbell.
- Measure sleep in increments of 1/10 of the hour.
- Watch one listworthy movie a week.
- Feel bad about not flossing daily; use Listerine for the full 30 seconds.
- Exercise daily between 6:30am-7:00am.
- Grow gray hair.
- Take one daily picture of myself for a year and animate it.
- Wear sweaters.
- Remove "Two and a Half Men" and "King of Queens" from PVR.
5 comments:
Good luck with #1. That's a very noble intention, but seems impossibly daunting (especially for someone working 70 hour weeks at a firm). I'd save Ulysses for year 10 and start with something enjoyable, like Catch-22 or Henderson the Rain King.
Or you could take the easier route and do the Reader's List, which has a bunch of gimmes like Ender's Game and the Hitchhiker's Guide.
As for PVRs, it took me a month to convince Tivo that I don't ever want to watch Becker. I still feel insulted.
I have already earmarked Ulysses as a "year 10" book, along with Finnegan's Wake, which the smartest person I ever met said was completely incomprehensible.
I did just finish Darkness at Noon and I'll finish Brave New World this weekend. Both quite good.
I got through half of The Sound and the Fury before I needed to find some literary criticism to guide me through the narrative. I think I'm ready to attempt another read now that I let the stream of consciousness style sink in.
Catch 22 and Sister Carrie are next on my to do list. I'm looking forward to it.
And I agree that it is a "noble intention," because the chances are great that I won't be able to finish it, especially because I'm a very slow, methodical reader (blame it on law school and/or critical theory classes).
The reader's list doesn't really interest me as much. It's the same reason that I guffaw at the viewer's list on IMDB of the greatest movies of all time. They just seem to be so susceptible to whatever the fad of the day is -- which is why CGI-heavy films are well-represented on that list. I'm sure we will all have a hearty laugh in about nine or ten years when we see how ridiculous these effects actually are.
The other thing is that I'll probably take time to read books that aren't on that list, like The Brother's Karamazov as well as non-Western literature that isn't represented as part of the traditional literary canon.
So, in the end, I just need to kick myself to keep reading and stop watching so many episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond.
re: Becker -- I'm amazed that that show is still in syndication.
S&F is my favorite, and well worth a couple reads. Even though it is ostensibly an experiment in technique, I find the story the most compelling of all of Faulkner's books.
You may think this is cheating, and it would be hell to read the whole thing onscreen, but someone put a copy online with a coding sequence for what time period is referenced. It can at least clarify some of the weirder parts of Quentin's section. And once you get past Quentin's section (part two), the rest of the book is much simpler to read.
Good luck!
Oops, forgot the link:
http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/
thanks for the link -- very helpful reference. i've actually downloaded an unabridged version of the book from audible so hopefully listening to the words while I read will help me focus as well.
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