Books, Books, Books

Squeaking in just under the wire for a post on the 4th, I'm going to mention books. And be a bit random.

I like books. I like to read. A lot.

I'm on Goodreads. Join me if you're a reader too. I also have that widget over in the sidebar, which if you read my blog from an rss feed, you've never seen. I like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, Robert Heinlein, and sensational history, like things that verge on historical fiction (A Treasury of Royal Scandals is amazing!) and things that are decidedly historical fiction (or plain old fiction with historical settings) but good (The Red Tent, Memoirs of a Geisha, any Arthurian legend like Mists of Avalon), and I am, if you didn't know already, a big user of lists.

I like crossing things off of lists. I used to carry a planner around with me with all kinds of lists in it. Things don't get done nearly as well as they used to because Franklin Covey stopped producing the kind of pages I like and it's expensive to get pages that would probably work shipped to Japan, so I haven't done so yet. I really should. It would help a lot with remembering to e-mail, mail, and do various little things that I just can't seem to remember on my own anymore.

Anyway, the point of mentioning the lists is that I've been going through the book lists on the sidebar and bolding any book that appears on more than one list. I've got the first three lists completely done, and am working my way through. This way, if I'm trying to decide between books, I can read the ones that appear on multiple lists to somewhat artificially up my score.

Right now, I'm reading Last of the Mohicans on my iPod (so it doesn't advance very far very often), Freakonomics (not on my lists) as a hard copy (which can't be read as easily while knitting, so again doesn't get touched often enough), Discworld #8 Guards! Guards! on my laptop (which is on the BBC Big Read list and what I read while knitting), and I'm starting something new on my work laptop. That one doesn't get touched often either, which is why it took me a year to get through the last 1/4 of the Count of Monte Cristo. It's only for if I am eating lunch at my desk or am waiting for a meeting after school or something - during the workday I work or work on Japanese, including attempting to read Harry Potter. That's not going too well just yet.

I'm trying to decide between Mrs. Dalloway (crossed off on my list but I have no recollection of reading it), Jane Eyre, and A Clockwork Orange. I think I'll go with Mrs. Dalloway followed by Jane Eyre since they're both available through free online sources. I love Project Gutenberg!

I am also annoyed at some of the lists I have for good books. Any of them that list the Lord of the Rings books list it as a single entry. It's a trilogy. Three books. Not one entry. Same with His Dark Materials, and on one of the two 1000 book lists, Discworld. Discworld is a huge series of nearly 30 books! You had 1000 books to choose, and you put a 30 book series, 3% of your total list size, as ONE entry? Come on now! At least the BBC Big Read people took the best of that series (and the Harry Potter series) and put those books on individually. Yes, that means that 7 of them are in the top 100 and there are eight more from 101 - 200, but they are just that good! Also, it takes quite some time to get to cross things off if it's listed as a series instead of by book. Especially when the series is Discworld and not yet finished.