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Books

These are my 50 favorite books. These are books I wouldn't feel bad about recommending; books I already have, or will probably, read multiple times. I do not claim these are the best books ever written.

The order here is: off-the-top-of-my-head (or as I found them on my bookshelf). I didn't go back and do a real ranking, because I don't think I could. Because a book takes so long to read, as compared to listening to an album for example, it's hard to develop the kind of fine-grained familiarity and appreciation I think I need to be able to judge the 43th vs. the 44th. I might be able to rank the top five or ten - things I find truly outstanding. But I didn't do that here.

In other words: it's best if you just ignore the numbers. If it's on the list, I like it.

  1. Jeff VanderMeer - City Of Saints And Madmen
  2. Mark Helprin - Memoir From Antproof Case
  3. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station
  4. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
  5. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
  6. The Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
  7. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
  8. Jonathan Lethem - Gun With Occasional Music
  9. Edward Gorey - The Ghastlycrumb Tinies
  10. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter (series)
  11. John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
  12. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
  13. Neil Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
  14. Frank Herbert - Dune
  15. W. Shakespeare - Hamlet
  16. W. Shakespeare - Othello
  17. Hunter S. Thompson - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
  18. Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
  19. George Orwell - 1984
  20. Michael Chabon - The Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay
  21. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
  22. William Golding - Lord Of The Files
  23. Walter Van Tilburg Clark - The Oxbow Incident
  24. Larry Niven - Ringworld
  25. Anne Rice - Interview With The Vampire
  26. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
  27. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
  28. Joseph Heller - Catch 22
  29. Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game
  30. Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
  31. J.D. Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye
  32. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
  33. Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird
  34. Stephen Crane - The Red Badge Of Courage
  35. Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
  36. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
  37. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  38. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
  39. Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
  40. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
  41. John Updike - Rabbit, Run
  42. Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
  43. Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach
  44. Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel
  45. James Gleick - Chaos
  46. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History Of Time
  47. Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life
  48. Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
  49. Thomas Hardy - Tess Of the d'Urbervilles
  50. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

Any potentially embarrassing omissions ?

Two hundred billion boxes of Kashi U!

It's that good!

Instead of sarcastic and misleading comparisons to billions of Big Macs, how about we compare the stimulus package to other government spending?

For one example, the US military. While the $700B+ stimulus package Obama just signed is a hell of a lot of money, it would be roughly enough to fund the US military (including the Department of Defense and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) for twelve months (though, if you really add it up, even $700B wouldn't be enough).

One year. We'll spend that much on the military this year. We spent that much last year, too. And the year before, and before that, too. etc.. And even then, our spending on the military is currently low by historic standards.

But anyone who complains about that is a hysterical pacifist lefty, of course. Serious people know that military money is magic money: it comes from nowhere and costs nobody nothin.

Let's not talk about it any further.

(Unless you want to, then you should go read this)

A Boy And His Dog Bride

I was just going to quote this story's headline:

    Indian boy marries dog to ward off tigers

... cause that's great all by itself right? But then I read the first paragraph:

BHUBANESWAR, India - An infant boy was married off to his neighbors' dog in eastern India by villagers who said it will stop the groom from being killed by wild animals, officials and witnesses said Wednesday.

So I had to quote that, too!

And then I read the next one:

Around 150 tribespeople performed the ritual recently in a hamlet in the state of Orissa's Jajpur district after the boy, who is under two years old, grew a tooth on his upper gum.

Snaggletooth is a curse? Yay! And I was hooked.

So, here's some more of this story of an arranged, bestial, child marriage:

The Munda tribe see such a growth in young children as a bad omen and believe it makes them prone to attacks by tigers and another animals. The tribal god will bless the child and ward off evil spirits after the marriage.

"We performed the marriage because it will overcome any curse that might fall on the child as well on us," the boy's father, Sanarumala Munda, was quoted as saying by a local newspaper.
...
The villagers then ate a feast with rich food and alcohol to celebrate.

Of course they did. Wouldn't be much of a wedding without that.

The dog belongs to the groom's neighbors and was set free to roam around the area after the ceremony. No dowry was exchanged, the witness said, and the boy will still be able to marry a human bride in the future without filing for divorce.

Booo! Not only did they marry a non-consenting child to a dog, they don't even make it binding. Marriage is forever! Why don't they respect the institution?