The Goodreads 100 Books Meme

In the spirit of the 100 book meme, Goodreads has posted a fairly diverse group of novels for its members to rank, drawn from both the most popular and the most highly rated books from its readers' libraries. And in the true internet spirit of borrowing, I've typed up the list for the rest of us to pass around. Goodreads reports that its average user has read 27 out of the 100; I've read 57 (and Darwin has read 31), and I find that most of the ones I haven't are books I've seen around but haven't felt a great compulsion to take and read.

Here's the key:
Books I've read
Books I started but didn't find interesting enough to continue
Could be interested to read
If I were handed this, I'd look for the nearest cereal box as an alternative
Haven't read

To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye
Fellowship of the Ring
Pride and Prejudice
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Romeo and Juliet
Jane Eyre
1984
Hamlet
The Hobbit
Brave New World
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Great Gatsby
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Fahrenheit 451
Wuthering Heights
Alice in Wonderland
The Secret Garden
Green Eggs and Ham
Little Women
Of Mice and Men
The Handmaid's Tale
Lord of the Flies
The DaVinci Code
Frankenstein
Dune
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Gone With The Wind
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
A Wrinkle in Time
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Slaughterhouse Five
Anne of Green Gables
Twilight
Where the Sidewalk Ends
The Little Prince
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Princess Bride
The Picture of Dorian Grey
The Hunger Games
Sense and Sensibility
The Golden Compass
Dracula
The Color Purple
The Kite Runner
The Odyssey
Anna Karenina
And Then There Were None
Interview with the Vampire
The Book Thief
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Count of Monte Cristo
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Joy Luck Club
Little House on the Prairie
The Giver
Life of Pi
Rebecca
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ender's Game
A Tale of Two Cities
The Stranger
East of Eden
Les Miserables
The Bell Jar
Lolita
The Road
The Time Traveler's Wife
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Stand
Catch-22
The Sun Also Rises
The Pillars of the Earth
Crime and Punishment
The Good Earth
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Help
Watchmen
Lonesome Dove
Water for Elephants
Outlander
American Gods
The Poisonwood Bible
My Sister's Keeper
The Master and Margarita
The Notebook
Like Water for Chocolate
Beloved
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Invisible Man
A Game of Thrones
The Fountainhead
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ulysses
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The Brothers Karamazov
The House of the Spirits
Fight Club
Middlesex
Interpreter of Maladies

Meme: All about books (of course)

Via Melanie Bettinelli, our favorite kind of meme: one about books.

1. What author do you own the most books by? We inherited an entire shelf full of books by Tolkien when my grandfather passed away. Given that we'd already had quite a few, Tolkien is now far and away the leader.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
Like Melanie, I think it's the Bible (in several editions and languages) followed by Lord of the Rings.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? What are you asking for?

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Aw, sheesh, I don't know. Like Melanie (she's going to think I'm cribbing her answers) I do like Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? Probably Lord of the Rings.

6. Favorite book as a ten year old? I remember reading Anne of Green Gables and Caddie Woodlawn.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year? No contest: Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year? Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris (hi, Melanie!), though I found some of the biographical elements frustrating. But the real contender is the book I'm currently reading: Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel On Prayer by Fr. Thomas Dubay, which is so rich I can only read short bits at at time.

On a different front, Stephen Potter's The Theory And Practice Of Gamesmanship Or The Art Of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating is a hysterical classic. And When Sisterhood Was in Flower by Florence King is completely and inappropriately, laugh-'til-you-fall-off-the-couch funny.

And! Mariette in Ecstasy! A Time of Gifts! Exiles!

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? I would be curious to see the results if everyone I knew read Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker (which uses the concept of the Trinity to analyze an author's creative powers) and applied it to their tastes in fiction. That's a really snotty answer, and I'm sorry.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Declare, by Tim Powers.

11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? The Acting Person, by Karol Wojtyla.

12. What is your favorite book? Darwin says his favorite book is Brideshead Revisited. I really can't pick one. Name of the Rose The Great Gatsby Divine Comedy Jesus of Nazareth...

UPDATE: Thinking this over, I have to answer: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

13. Play? Twelfth Night. I ran lightboard my freshman year for our production and so memorized many of the lines after hearing them over and over again. The sound board tech and I had a countdown to our favorite line (based solely on the delivery of the actor): "O, that record is lively in my soul!"

14. Poem? The only one that springs to mind is The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that might be because I read Exiles a few months back. Or, if you prefer, Sonnet 91.

15. Essay? The Night the Bed Fell on my Father, from My Life and Hard Times (Perennial Classics) by James Thurber. I don't know if it counts as an essay or a short story, but it's unparalleled as a read-aloud.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? President Obama. Look, the guy writes well enough, but he's not all that.

17. What is your desert island book? The Bible. Cliche, but true.

18. And . . . what are you reading right now? Practical Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare by Peter Reynolds; Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay; The Aeneid (Fitzgerald translation); Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser; several books of children's theater games

Out loud to the girls: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths; The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois.

100 Philosophical Works Meme

Brandon of Siris provides a variant of the various 100 Books memes that have wandered the blogsphere recently.

The basic idea was this: a list of a hundred books, each providing a relatively accessible portal to philosophy, likely to have something of interest to a very wide range of people, in order to encourage a wider reading in philosophy, and perhaps an interest in philosophy among those who might be turned off by anything too academic. So that constrained the list to philosophical works available in English, not too difficult to find (at least with a good library), not too overwhelming (e.g., not too long or too jargonish), potentially enjoyable to all sorts of people; there was also the constraint, considerably more limiting, that only books I'd read in some version or translation or other could be included, since only if I had read the book at least once, at some point, could I be sure it was a reasonable candidate for the list. I also tried to limit relatively recent philosophical work in order to compensate for the bias of recency. Also, with a few very readable exceptions, I have bypassed standard college course fare. The result was as follows, in no particular order. (I have linked to those available online in some form. Needless to say, and although some of the editions are quite good, this does not always or even usually indicate that this is the best edition available. The rest should be accessible through a descent university library or good bookstore. Also, it should go without saying, but might not, that inclusion on the list, while it shows that I think the work interesting, does not show that I necessarily agree with it in any way.) I have a defense of each one's deserving a place on this list, if you have any questions about a particular entry. Did I miss any good ones? Which ones have you read? If you were going to make your own list, what would be on it?

You can see why I find this irresistable...

Here's the list. I've bolded the one's that I've read:

1. Voltaire, Candide
2. Dante, Divine Comedy
3. Plato, Apology
4. Xenophon, Apology
5. Berkeley, Alciphron
6. Aquinas, Collationes super Credo in Deum
7. Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II
8. Scotus, A Treatise on God as First Principle
9. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
10. Descartes, Discourse on Method
11. Hume, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences"
12. O. K. Bouwsma, "Descartes' Evil Genius"
13. Gilson, Forms and Substances in the Arts
14. Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum
15. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi; attr.), Zhuangzi
16. Fa-tsang, Treatise on the Golden Lion
17. Xuedoe/Yuanwu, The Blue Cliff Record
18. Sartre, No Exit
19. Chesterton, Manalive
20. Shaw, Saint Joan
21. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy"
22. Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
23. Darwin, The Descent of Man
24. Kingsley, Hypatia
25. James, "The Will to Believe"
26. Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"
27. Whewell, On the Principles of English University Education
28. Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle
29. Masham, Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Virtuous Christian Life
30. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
31. Lull, Book of the Gentile
32. Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
33. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
34. Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel
35. Epictetus, Enchiridion
36. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
37. Johnson, The History of Rasselas
38. More, Utopia
39. Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
40. Bacon, Essays [I've read some, anyway]
41. Justin Martyr, First Apology
42. Minucius Felix, Octavius
43. O'Brien, The Third Policeman
44. ***, IV Maccabees
45. Langland, Piers Plowman
46. Lewis, Abolition of Man
47. ***, Cleanness
48. Mill, Utilitarianism
49. Anselm, On Freedom of Choice (PDF)
50. Abelard, Historia Calamitatum
51. Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy
52. Kant, "Perpetual Peace"
53. Cicero, De Officiis
54. Pascal, Pensées [I've read some not all]
55. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
56. Clausewitz, On War
57. Shelley, "Queen Mab"
58. Pope, An Essay on Man
59. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
60. Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth
61. Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond
62. Casanova, History of My Life
63. Lucian, Hermotimus
64. Lorris/Meun, The Romance of the Rose
65. Sophocles, Antigone
66. Christine de Pisan, Book of the City of Ladies
67. Augustine, Confessions
68. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance (PDF)
69. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
70. Abbott, Flatland
71. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
72. Gilman, Herland
73. Saadia, Beliefs and Opinions
74. Lessing & Mendelssohn, "Pope a Metaphysician!"
75. Hume, "A Dialogue"
76. Menkin, The Love of the Righteous
77. Lessing, Nathan the Wise
78. Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity
79. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
80. Eliot, Romola
81. Maritain, Theonas
82. ***, The Great Learning
83. Stapledon, Sirius
84. Eco, The Name of the Rose
85. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen
86. Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time)
87. Fichte, The Vocation of Man
88. Edwards, Freedom of the Will
89. Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
90. Shaftesbury, "Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor" (PDF)
91. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
92. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought
93. Kant, "On the Question: What is Enlightnment?"
94. Austen, Mansfield Park
95. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
96. Duhem, German Science
97. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
98. Dryden, Religio Laici
99. Chaucer, The Parson's Tale
100. Teresa of Avila, Life of Teresa of Avila, by Herself

Given that I don't reckon myself much of a philosopher, 20% probably isn't too bad. Most of the items I'd have to suggest probably fell under the "standard college fare" exclusion. I would have perhaps suggested the following:

Plato: Euthyphro, Phaedo, Republic
Aristotle: Ethics, Metaphysics
Aquinas: Selections from Summa
Anselm: Discourse on the Existence of God

But those are, of course, very, very standard. (What can I say, I guess I'm a standard sort of guy... )

I was glad to see that Lucretius made the list, as he's long been a favorite of mine.

I scored an unexpected point by having read Romance of the Rose -- though it strikes me as more interesting as a medieval cultural curiosity than as philosophy.

And I'm rather ashamed to admit that a few of the ones highlighted above, which I know that I read, I can recal virtually nothing about.

Only Very Mildly Quirky

Kyle of Postmodern Papist has tagged us on the Six Quirks meme. There's nothing like trying to come up with six quirks to write about to make you feel terribly mundane and ordinary, but here is our best shot on a Sunday evening.

1. Link the person(s) who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 fellow bloggers by linking them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged

I'm not sure that we're quirky enough to muster illustrative songs as Kyle has, and one of my quirks which I shall not officially enumerate at this time is that I never tag people on memes, but that aside:

1) We do not currently have a TV. This does not mean we never watch anything, as we continue to slowly work through our NetFlix queue on the iMac, and there's an old 12 inch TV/VCR combo on which the girls are occasionally set loose with their children's videos, but when the TV died some months ago we took the opportunity to cancel the cable subscription and have since been cut off from the act of "watching TV".

2) While we have an affinity for large projects (reflooring the downstairs, this weekend spent refinishing a newly acquired old desk, etc.) there are many small upkeep things around the house that have been waiting for our time for months, and continue to wait: a curtain rod needing to be re-hung in our bathroom (thus we must shower in the dark at night), the seats on our kitchen chairs have not been screwed back down since they were refinished eight years ago, etc.

3) Darwin eats his cereal without milk and Mrs Darwin hates Oreos.

4) We are both of the as yet small group of home school graduates now homeschooling our children.

5) We have a very rapid family linguistic cycle, most especially for nicknames. One or more of our three girls have, over the last few years, borne the names: Noogs, Babs, Toogs, Cake, Bella, Belly, Shabs, Pigs, Snooglet, or any of the above with -belle or -let added as a suffix.

6) Mrs Darwin hates romance novels, and Darwin is completely bored by sports (except when the boys at work are following a cricket match between India and Pakistan).

Top 100 Films Meme, Part II

I'll bite on Darwin's Top 100 Films Meme.

1) Your favorite five movies that are on the list.

Vertigo
Amadeus
To Kill a Mockingbird
Patton
Bringing Up Baby

Honorable Mention: Ben-Hur (a sentimental favorite 'cause I watched it over and over again as a youngster)

2) Five movies on the list you didn't like at all.

E.T.
Annie Hall
Doctor Zhivago
2001
The Graduate

3) Five movies on the list you haven't seen but want to.

All About Eve
Birth of a Nation
Duck Soup
The Jazz Singer
Schindler's List -- maybe.

(I would remind Darwin that we have seen, and liked, Double Indemnity.)

4) Five movies on the list you haven't seen and have no interest in seeing.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Raging Bull
Clockwork Orange
Goodfellas
Platoon


5) Your favorite five movies that aren't on the list.

The Thin Man
Fellowship of the Ring
The Incredibles
Gladiator
This Is Spinal Tap

Another Book Meme

Jay Anderson tagged us for a book meme a while back as well, and since the same book that MrsDarwin gabbed is still the closest to the computer, I figured I'd do that one instead:

Three non-fiction books everyone should read:

1. Confessions by St. Augustine - (I thought of putting the Bible, but that seemed too smart-ass somehow.)
2. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff - A book calculated to bring mist (if not a tear) to the eyes of any book lover.
3. Euthyphro by Plato - There are deeper and longer dialogues, but that's the one that really made things "click" for me and was something of a watershed work.

Three books of fiction everyone should read
1. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - The best Catholic novel, and one of my favorite novels of any sort.
2. The Divine Comedy by Dante - Though I do feel a little odd putting it under "fiction".
3. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome - There is no funnier book.

Three authors everyone should read
1. Fyodor Dostoevsky (perhaps the world's most brilliant novelist)
2. Anthony Trollope (because what is life without charm -- that "great English blight")
3. J.R.R.Tolkien (who somehow answered the 20th century's questions by never writing about the 20th century)

Three books no one should read
I'm always hesitant to saying that no one should read something (I have a feeling it's good for my soul that The Index doesn't exist any more, as I'd be more inclined to read things because they were on it it.)
1.Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin - Having known some people who thought it was a wonderful book...
2. Anything by Danielle Steele (because if you want to kill brain cells there are better ways to do it)
3. Anything by L. Ron Hubbard (need one say more?)

And adding my own section because I didn't want to have to decide between them and prose authors:

Three Poets Everyone Should Read:
1. Homer
2. Milton
3. Shakespeare
(Okay, so my poetry reading is very conventional -- but at least it's good.)

The Nearest Book Meme

We've both been tagged by Literacy-Chic for this meme.

Grab the nearest book.

Open it to page 161.
Find the fifth full sentence.
Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
Don't search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you

"This is Miss Pym, Albert."

from Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey. I read her The Daughter of Time while at my family's house and was hooked.

Anyone who wants can put up their own answers in the comments box.