Roti and The End of Overeating

Here's a fresh roti (with chickpeas and roasted sweet potato)...

...and here's what happens to a roti when you take it out of the freezer and put it in the toaster. (The toaster worked so well for the plain and aloo parathas, but turned the roti into a cracker. I wonder if that has something to do with the roti's "no oil" content.)


This is a better picture of tonight's dinner, although it's harder to see the detail on the food. Of course, when your yogurt is bleeding into both the chickpeas and the steamed spinach, maybe it's better to avoid too much detail.

So today I read the latest crazy hit book, David Kessler's The End of Overeating. The title is a bit misleading; the book should be called something like Chain Restaurant Food Is Full Of Fat And Sugar and Chemicals and They Mix It Up In A Lab and an Underpaid Line Chef Defrosts It For You. That's essentially what the book is about, and for what it's worth, it's interesting--though it's nothing that anyone who has read Fast Food Nation or seen Super Size Me hasn't heard before. Kessler's particular take is that we overeat because the food itself is addictive, which again is not a new idea, but he peppers his book with delicious anecdotes like "the chicken in Chili's Southwestern Eggrolls is ground into a smooth puree so you don't have to chew it, which Chili's food scientists did deliberately because they knew that the faster you ate, the more you would eat."

Kessler's solution to overeating, which he claims is inevitable given the state of American food (high-fat, high-sugar which melts on the tongue and creates an instant craving for more), is nothing more than sheer willpower. He says you have to tell yourself every day, at every moment, that you choose not to eat the HFCS muffins at the office meeting or the 1,000 calorie burger at the fast food joint or the Cinnabon being pumped through the air vents at the mall. And eventually, he says, you'll stop wanting to.

It's a bit of a dismal idea but I understand where he's coming from. The more I step away from packaged food and the dreaded HFCS the more I understand how eating it changes my brain. After every dinner, for example, I eat one square of an 85% cocoa Lindt chocolate bar. (Sadly, the chocolate never makes it into any of my photographs.) Last night, my sister brought over some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. She took two and gave me two and put the rest of the bag on the sofa; the minute I had the first one in my mouth I was already thinking about how excited I was to eat the second one, and then the entire time we were watching The Golden Girls ('cause of Bea Arthur, natch) I was sitting there thinking "there are more peanut butter cups on the sofa..."

But before I sound too "my diet is more FTW than yours," here's the kicker. You all have seen what I eat. I have Kashi and homemade yogurt for breakfast, dal or soup and homemade bread for lunch, and a sensible dinner followed by a square of chocolate. I take apples for my morning and afternoon snacks. Maybe twice a week I have a cookie at work (because there are always cookies and I can't always resist them). And on the weekend I go to Tryst and have a chai or cappuccino with two inches of steamed milk on top.

On top of that I'm active; I walk four miles a day and I practice Ashtanga six days a week.

And I've put on ten pounds in the past ten months.

*sigh*

Explain that, Dr. Kessler.

Strange Loops and Samosas (Step-By-Step)

I've been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter and his twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer-Prize-winning treatise on recursive mathematical properties and their paradoxes. And it's thinking like that that makes my jumbled pile of person think that I should be working on my seminal work... whatever that may be.

But... I sat down and considered for a moment that it took me ten years of writing half-finished, short-sheeted novels before my consciousness generated the story that would, in fact, become a novel; ten years after that and I haven't been able to recreate the experience. (Lots of short sheets, though.)

So I sat for a while with my book this afternoon and puzzled how I could possibly ever get it revised and published, or if I even wanted to, or if I should use the power of the internet to push my characters off into the cloud for viral consumption. (It doesn't help that the only copy of said book is in paper; it was written on way-too-old technology and before it can go anywhere will need to be all-three-hundred-pages retyped.)

I even read the first chapter aloud, into my audio recording software, to hear how it sounded.

And then I got discouraged.

And then I made samosas. ^__^

1 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons ghee/oil. Mix with your fingers until it looks like "thick breadcrumbs."

Add one tablespoon of water at a time and slowly knead until the dough forms a ball. (You'll need between 4-6 tablespoons.) This is the hard part because you've got both hands in the dough and you've got to stop, turn on the sink, stick the tablespoon under the water, turn off the sink, dump the tablespoon of water into the dough, and try not to notice how covered with flour your kitchen is getting. ^__^

(Probably next time should fill up measuring cup with 1/4 cup water beforehand and pour it on the dough in increments.)

Here's the dough after it has sat, covered, for the requisite 1/2 hour. In honor of Douglas Hofstadter I added the recursive feedback loop in the background. ^__^

I am still not sure what happens to the dough in that mysterious half hour between kneading and rolling out. For all intents and purposes it appears exactly the same. Is it a science thing?

Here's the leftover aloo paratha stuffing from this weekend, to which I have added the necessary peas.

I guess I skipped the photo of the step where I cut the ball of dough into eight pieces and roll each piece out into a circle. At this point I've cut the slit in the circle of samosa dough and folded over on itself to make the "cone." That's not exactly a cone, as you can see. The dough is pretty limp, so I have to help it out.

I have no idea how this picture turned out so interesting. Didn't know my camera could do that. ^__^

As you can see, they are closed before I put them into the oven. I don't know why some of them choose not to stay that way.

Also, I think I need to work on my samosa-shaping. Proper samosas are shaped like tetrahedrons, equilateral on all sides, and they have that ridge down the one side. Like this:

(Wikipedia.)

Nine happy samosas, after baking. They really are delicious, even if they aren't perfectly tetrahedral.

This samosa is ready for its closeup. It is also ready for some constructive criticism. I know that using white flour and deep-frying would make a difference, but... is there a way to make better samosas even when baking them?

And here they are on the plate, along with yogurt, the chutney powder that I seem to be putting on everything these days, and the mattar black beans. What's that stuff on the beans, you ask? It's the cheddar cheese that melted in the frying pan yesterday. I let it sit on my cutting board until it chilled and then I cut it into smaller pieces and put it back in the refrigerator. IN THIS HOUSE WE DO NOT WASTE FOOD. ^__^ (Especially expensive Farmers' Market cheddar from happy cows.)

I Am A Twenty-Seven-Year-Old Strange Loop

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...
--They Might Be Giants

So I'm nearly finished with Douglas Hofstadter's newest book, I Am A Strange Loop. His middle book, Le Ton Beau De Marot, is one of my favorite books ever, and I have to admit that I've never made it all the way through GEB but am starting it over again and this time I will prevail!

A quick summary: Hofstadter wrote this huge tome called Godel, Escher, Bach about... um... recursive mathematical properties and their associated paradoxes (is that a good way to sum it up? it's a bit more complicated than that, especially with all the Bach canons thrown in). Then he wrote another huge tome called Le Ton Beau De Marot which is all about linguistics and translation (maybe if one says GEB is about the paradoxes of math, Marot could be about the paradoxes of language). Lately he wrote a much shorter book called I Am A Strange Loop which is about the paradox of thought itself (the part of us that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of).

The last book is by far the easiest to read, mainly because it deals with a lot of things that most people have probably pondered at some point in their lives (to wit: how does that mass of cells in my brain churn out thoughts?). In fact, as I read it, it seemed a little unfair that Hofstadter had taken the time to write out all of these ideas that I had, myself, already present in my own mass-of-cells brain. It was like he was stealing the inside of my mind and selling it.

And then, deep within the recesses of this book that seemed to contain my own ideas in Hofstadter's writing, he happened to casually mention that he wrote the 900-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning GEB when he was twenty-seven years old.

That's the age I am now.

There are huge chunks of GEB which explore Zeno's Paradox (Achilles can never catch the tortoise because even in the time it takes for Achilles to reach the tortoise's point X, the tortoise will have moved incrementally forward to point Y, and by the time Achilles reaches point Y, the tortoise will have inched forward to point Z, etc.). Sometimes I look at my generation and think that we're in our own version of Zeno's Paradox; every time we approach the bar of adulthood, it has inched a few years down the road; and when we hit that age, we find the bar is still further away.

Hofstadter was 27 in 1979; he had been an assistant professor for two years already. No one gets to do that anymore. Some people would say that today's twenty-somethings aren't prepared for the job (Hofstadter wrote GEB, but my own peers turn out things like this). That's, of course, a causality loop as much as it is anything else, combined with the unfortunate fact that few people now get the careful, one-on-one mentoring that Hofstadter got as a student.

(For all of education's current emphasis on group learning and group work, and for all of the internet's development of the hive mind, it is interesting to read biographies and notice that most people who are notable enough to have biographies trace their work back to a lengthy period of one-on-one mentoring. Just sayin' is all.)

But I suppose there's another side to all this Zeno Paradoxing: if thirty is the new twenty, as it were, then I have another ten years to create my seminal work. That tortoise is still just a bit ahead of me. I had better start running.

Ira Glass Is My Friend

"Hi," he said. "I'm Ira."

I didn't respond automatically as I should have, temporarily bowled over by two contradictory thoughts: first, the sheer duh-ness of his statement (of course you're Ira Glass, that's why we're here); secondly, the absolute genuineness with which he spoke. He was introducing himself. He wanted me to know who he was. In those three words he connected with me on a personal, almost intimate level, and I could understand how he got people to tell him their stories and secrets.

"Hi," I said, a few seconds late to the exchange. "I'm Blue."

I had waited over ninety minutes to get to the front of the line. At first, in the back, when we were too far away to see, people were joking "it's taking so long because everyone's pitching him ideas for This American Life;" as we got closer, we realized it was because Ira was talking to everyone in the line; asking them questions about who they were, what they did, where they lived, what brought them out that evening, etc.

I'd bought his book even though I don't really think it is useful or necessary for me to get famous people's signatures on things; the real reason I bought his book was because I hadn't known until the moment I walked into the Borders that Ira Glass had written a book (they had advertised it as an opportunity to get This American Life DVDs autographed, and the books were a surprise), and by chance or fate the woman behind the counter told me this particular book was the very last copy in the store. That, apparently, is what it takes to get me to impulse-buy something. (I have a vision of the woman pulling out another copy after I leave the counter, and telling the next person who walks in that this, too, is the very last copy.)

So after Ira talking about This American Life and the Q&A I got in line, with this book, and waited ninety minutes (and read the first 130 pages) and as soon as I got close enough started watching Mr. Glass interact with everyone in line. It was fascinating.

After Ira Glass introduced himself to me, he asked me a few questions about my job and then said, over his shoulder to the Borders assistant, "All these people in Washington have such interesting jobs!" He was keeping track, too, because then he talked to me about some of the other jobs he had heard about in the past ninety minutes, and then he signed my book "Your Friend, Ira Glass." Then I said "Thank you very much," and he said "No, thank you very much," as if it had been the most generous thing I could have done, to come out this evening and buy his book and then wait patiently for him to autograph it.

It was an interaction both intimate and bizarre, in the way that I felt that Ira Glass was one hundred percent serious about what he was doing, both in terms of his radio show and in terms of every interaction with every person in this line. I left wishing I could be more like that, though I can't imagine how much energy it would take, to invest oneself fully in every conversation and to remember and track them like threads in a story.

But Ira Glass is, after all, a storyteller. And, for five minutes yesterday evening, my friend.

To Quote Both Bronte And Skunks

Once there were two skunks named Out and In.
Whenever Out was Out, In was In
And whenever Out was In, In was Out...

Now that I am not at Tryst, I wish I were at Tryst. Actually, I don't, because Tryst is the sort of place where you have to wait 1/2 hour to get a glass of water, and by then you've already gotten up and gone to the counter yourself and just taken one.

But I wish I were somewhere.

Do you remember that sentence, from Jane Eyre? The one where she tires of her routine of eight years in a single afternoon? I feel a little like that. It's not that I'm tired of my job, because I love my job. It's not that I'm tired of doing Ashtanga every morning, because I love that too. But I'm starting to feel like I come home every evening and watch Hulu and eat dinner and check my Google Reader and go to bed. That's what I'm tired of.

(That whole thing about my "not having an evening routine" isn't true, btw. I come home. I shower, cook dinner, eat while watching Hulu, check the internets, maybe play some Super Famicom, and go to bed. That is teh lame.)

So I need somewhere to go.

Actually, finding somewhere to go is the easy part. Tomorrow Dalton Conley is giving a talk at Politics and Prose about his book Elsewhere, USA and I will go there. Today I went to Tryst and to the Farmers' Market and to the zoo. I also did two loads of laundry, one load of dishes, cooked meals for the entire week, packaged them in bento, and baked a loaf of bread. And wrote a short story and three blog posts. And hung out in Idle Time Books for a while.

Okay, let me rephrase this:

I need somewhere to go where I have to talk to other people. ^__^

Every time I go to Tryst or wherever I do kinda hope I will maybe talk to someone. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother putting on lip gloss or brushing my hair. But I don't know how to gracefully jump the chasm from "sitting next to six other people on a ratty coffeehouse sofa" to "starting a conversation that is enticing enough to draw their gaze away from their laptops, and to ensure that gaze is interested rather than murderous."

So--before you all jump with the suggestion--I spent some time this afternoon flipping through Meetup.com. Whenever I found a meetup group that looked interesting (like the cooking ones) I checked the stats on the previous meetups. There weren't a lot of repeat visitors. People would come to one meetup only and then quit the group. That didn't bode well for the success of the enterprise.

Still, I signed up to receive messages from a cooking group and a Scrabble group (Scrabble is fun, and more importantly, free), and tried to find a writing group but most of those seemed to be out of commission. (That was the other weird phenomena of Meetup.com. Groups would form, have three meetings, and die.) And then I thought about groups I would like to start, including:

• A cooking group which didn't require a $75 per-meeting fee; maybe one more like a potluck group where people brought dishes and talked about how they were made and then we talked about how they tasted and offered suggestions, or maybe a group where everyone learned how to cook by all trying to make the same recipe and comparing results

• A group for people who still play Super Famicom ^__^

• A group for people who want to listen to This American Life together on Saturday mornings and talk about it and maybe there would be food too

As you can see this is an impressive list.

Sigh. I still haven't put that "yoga happy hour" sign up on the wall of my Ashtanga studio. That might be an easy next step.

And I am going to hear Dalton Conley tomorrow. If all else, his book is about how we don't talk to one another anymore. ^__^

The Hundred Dresses Project

The Hundred Dresses, for those of you who don't remember your children's literature, is a short "chapter book" by Eleanor Estes about a small American town and the new student who swears she has a hundred dresses, even though she only wears the same faded dress to school. At the end of the book she moves away (Katherine Paterson would have killed her off), and the other students discover that she has 100 drawings of dresses, all hanging up in rows in her former bedroom.

I don't think that I will ever own one hundred dresses; not at the same time, anyway. Still, I can't help referring to my "work clothes accumulation" endeavor as the hundred dresses project.

Why dresses? A few reasons. I've always liked dresses, ever since I was two years old and told my mother that I was going to wear only dresses, every day, for the rest of my life. (I actually managed to wear dresses, nearly exclusively, for most of my toddler/early childhood years. My parents had to trick me into wearing pants by doing things like asking my kindergarten teacher to tell me I was required to wear jeans to school.)

"Wear-to-work" dresses are also far less expensive than putting together work outfits involving slacks/skirts and blouses. If a dress costs the same as a skirt, it's idiotic (in my still-budget-obsessed mind) to buy both the skirt and the blouse when one can get just the dress and have the entire outfit done with.

Oh, and I can never find dress pants that fit me properly. Always too big in the waist, too snug in the hips, and too long in the legs.

Thus, dresses. ^__^

I don't have a hundred. Not even close. Right now I have fourteen. Nearly all of them are from Ann Taylor Loft, which has become my favorite go-to clothing store. (It is a testament to my provincial and/or shopping-deprived former lifestyle that, when I first went into ATL and they wrapped the clothes up in tissue paper before putting them in a fancy bag, it just about blew my mind. They never did that at Target.)

Four of these pretty dresses were bought this afternoon, and now I will show you pictures, because everyone likes pictures!


My favorite of the lot. So cute!

This one actually looks much better on me than it does on the model. Sometimes it helps to have actual curves.

Ditto for this one. I would happily model for ATL for free, if they would ever ask. (Since their clothes are designed for petite women, it would be nice if they actually had a photograph of a petite model in their stores. I volunteer myself.)

And there's the blue one. I always look good in blue. ^__^

No, I don't think I will ever have a hundred dresses. But it might be fun to cap out at 25. What's a little surprising to think about is that I'm more than halfway there. Forget 100 -- I've never even had fourteen dresses in my closet at any one time.

I love dressing for work. ^__^ And I can hardly wait to have all my dresses hung in my closet, organized by color, in my almost-there apartment.

If The Last Words Aren't "For Better Or For Worse," Some People Stand To Lose A Lot Of Money

The comic strip For Better or For Worse is scheduled to end on August 30.

Well, not exactly "end." Stephen Pastis summed it up best:



However, Lynn Johnston has confirmed that the last new strip will run on Aug. 30, five days after the August 25 "Lizthony" wedding strip which for some bizarre reason is taking place on the fifth anniversary of Anthony's first comic-strip marriage (to the ill-fated Therese), and spoiler-types have confirmed that it will be a lengthy "here's what's going to happen to the rest of the characters for the rest of their lives."

There is already all kinds of snark going around about what wonderful things Johnston has planned for her characters (Michael winning a Pulitzer Prize, April marrying Gerald). Ever since it was leaked that Johnston's marriage had fallen apart, people began noticing that her strips started centering only on the "for better" part of life, as if she were insisting her characters have all the fantasy happiness she wished she were experiencing herself. (Seriously. Read the link. It explains why she decided to pull a 180 and pass Liz off to Anthony instead of Paul.) That's all well and good, but it turned her strip from a tongue-in-cheek look at the ups-and-downs of daily life into a parade of unrealistic Mary Sue adventures, which, in turn... prompted all the snark.

Anyway. The thought of a "here's what will happen for the rest of their lives" ending focused entirely on success and happiness made me think of how another author, with equally beloved characters, handled a similar situation.

From Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys:

It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic conclusion might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain, and forestall the usual question, 'How did they end?' by briefly stating that all the marriages turned out well. The boys prospered in their various callings; so did the girls, for Bess and Josie won honours in their artistic careers, and in the course of time found worthy mates. Nan remained a busy, cheerful, independent spinster, and dedicated her life to her suffering sisters and their children, in which true woman's work she found abiding happiness. Dan never married, but lived, bravely and usefully, among his chosen people till he was shot defending them, and at last lay quietly asleep in the green wilderness he loved so well, with a lock of golden hair upon his breast, and a smile on his face which seemed to say that Aslauga's Knight had fought his last fight and was at peace. Stuffy became an alderman, and died suddenly of apoplexy after a public dinner. Dolly was a society man of mark till he lost his money, when he found congenial employment in a fashionable tailoring establishment. Demi became a partner, and lived to see his name above the door, and Rob was a professor at Laurence College; but Teddy eclipsed them all by becoming an eloquent and famous clergyman, to the great delight of his astonished mother. And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family.

Alcott came this close to ending it with "rocks fall, everyone dies." ^__^ Which I have always thought was just fantastic.

We'll see if Johnston pulls off her denouement with half the class.

The Only Cookbook I'll Ever Need

There's a sense of wonderful... ownership when it comes to finally getting something that one has wanted for a very, very, very long time.

No, not the job (though I love the job).

No, not the apartment (though it is a dream apartment).

Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking.

Back in print, and now in my turmeric-stained little hands.

I have to say I'm not thrilled by the new cover design.


I was reading it while waiting for the metro and kind of wanted to hold up a sign saying "Seriously -- I know the cover art is mildly insulting, and I'm only reading it for the recipes."

But oh, the recipes.

When I first came to this country, I took on a job as a guide at the United Nations in order to support myself. This "support" turned out to be more than just financial. Every evening, we guides found ourselves gathering at each other's homes to have heated, informative discussions on international affairs, and to eat superb food. It was Amal, a Palestinian refugee from Beirut, who introduced me to tabouleh.

Now who wouldn't want to learn how to make their own tabouleh after reading that?

It's one of the only cookbooks I've ever read where the cookery is explained through storytelling, which I think is why I've been so successful using it. It's also a great motivator: Madhur Jaffrey lived (and is living) an overwhelmingly interesting life, from her start climbing the mango trees through her theatre and film work through her career as author and international food connoisseur to her current status as giant freakin' Obama supporter... and therefore, if I learn how to cook her recipes, I might have a fighting chance of turning out equally as awesome. ^__^

No Rushdie. Some Fact Checker Really Screwed Up On This One.

Here was the publicity blurb, as written in CityPaper:

Salman Rushdie discusses and signs copies of The Enchantress of Florence. Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW. Mon., 6/30, at 7 p.m. Free.

As you can see, that's why I thought it was free and I could go.

Luckily (or unluckily) I decided to confirm this morning on the Politics and Prose website. Just in case, you know, the newspaper was wrong.

It was more than wrong. It was wrong in every possible aspect.

From the official site:

Monday, June 30, 7 p.m.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

SOLD OUT

IN THE COMMUNITY
@ SIXTH AND I HISTORIC SYNAGOGUE
600 I Street NW, Washington, DC 20001

THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (Random House, $26)
The Guardian calls Rushdie’s new novel “a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments.” The master of magic realism weaves the sensibilities of East and West, of history and fable, in a story that combines the realm of Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great with the Florence of the Medicis and Machiavelli. This is a ticketed event. Two tickets are free with book purchase at P&P, or cost $6 each. Contact P&P at 202-364-1919 or www.politics-prose.com

I feel like I should be playing "Spot Six Differences!"

So, since the lecture was neither at the place it was advertised to be, nor was it free. I... um... didn't go. I actually started out in the direction of the event with the idea that I would sneak in, or take the place of a no-show, but a thunderstorm stopped me in my tracks and left me huddling underneath a bus awning for about an hour.

Ironically, there were probably a handful of no-shows due to weather, so if I had only been able to make it...

But a person like Sir Salman probably wears better in fantasy than in reality, so we'll say it's for the best that I didn't get to meet him. ^__^

Hearing Rushdie Speak Tomorrow

Sir Salman is giving a lecture and book-signing tomorrow evening, and I'm all about being there.

I don't think I'm going to buy the book, though. It's a shame, because the book itself would be the thing to bring me closest (in proximity) to Mr. Rushdie, and he would, you know, write my name! with his own hand!!!!

But I flipped through Enchantress of Florence today in a bookstore and thought "no way am I shelling out $30 for this." Never mind that Rushdie went on the Colbert Report and said it was about magical wizard-women and had lots and lots of sex between its covers.

I think it's because I looked into the book and thought "this is just like Dangerous Beauty," which is a movie that I never really liked.

And I know it's not really like Dangerous Beauty, that it's much more complicated and weaves in Mughal India and a lot of other stuff, and that really I'm making up an excuse not to buy the book because I don't want to pay $30 for it in hardback. (Still poor, peeps.)

If I had my copy of Midnight's Children, the one I dragged across the entire length of India in a series of miserably shabby Sleeper II trains (and one nice shatabdi), I would absolutely flout convention and insist Rushdie sign that. Sentimental value FTW!

Of course, considering Rushdie's reputation, I could ask him to sign a body part.

The more interesting question: will his son be there? *__^

Stolen Meme: The Big Read

Krisan at The Publishing Curve took up a meme related to the NEA's "Big Read" project.

Even though she didn't tag me, I'm stealing it.

Here are the rules (from Krisan's post):

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the website, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

For fun, let's see how many of the top 100 books we've actually read. My list is below. How well did you do? Have you read more than 6?

Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. [Since I can't figured out how to underline using Blogger, I've put these books in square brackets.]
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

So... here we go!


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 [His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 [Little Women - Louisa M Alcott]
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (sorry, got my complete Hardy fix with The Return of the Native)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 [Complete Works of Shakespeare]
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 [Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 [War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy] (almost done counts!)
25 [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 [Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (read half -- never made it through)
33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why do they have LWW and the entire Chronicles on the list?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (wtf is this doing on here?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 [Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery]
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 [The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood]
49 [Lord of the Flies - William Golding]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 [A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth]
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 [Brave New World - Aldous Huxley] (read this, like, six jillion times in HS)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (ashamed to admit it)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 [Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 [The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett]
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 [The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath]
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (again, embarrassed to admit)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 [Les Miserables - Victor Hugo]


43 out of 100.


Who's next?

The Satanic Verses: Once You Go Brown...

It took me three months to read Midnight's Children, but I finished Satanic Verses in two days.

Maybe I don't understand it as well as I would have if I knew the Qur'an, but I feel like... well, like I got the jist of the thing. Chamcha-the-chameleon who, ironically, remains true to himself throughout his many changes; vs. Gibreel (whom Saladin mistakenly views as the "steady" one) metamorphosing himself to fit his angelic form. The "big idea" that is either fought for or forced to compromise. The central theme of the text seems to be this idea of do you change who you are or do you hold the course; and Rushdie -- or, at least, his characters -- is clearly on the side of hold the course. Saladin's essential nature doesn't change, even when he changes his nationality (and back again).

And yes, even though I don't know the Qur'an, I was able to pick out the parts that were offensive/blasphemous to certain audiences. Those sections of the book kind of... made themselves obvious.

I also noticed something of particular interest (to me, anyway): Rushdie's two prominent White characters, Allie and Pamela, are not only both completely immersed in the British-Indian world (Pamela in particular is never shown interacting with a character who isn't Indian), but they also both subscribe to the once you go brown... theory, which Rushdie just treats as something natural, without need of explanation. And that's kinda awesome.

Tomorrow I'm starting a new book. I decided this time I needed something that would last for more than two days. So I picked the longest novel I knew that I hadn't yet read.

Which means tomorrow I'm starting out on page 1 of War and Peace.

Some Books Come With Prerequisites

Right now I'm temping. Like most of the temp jobs I've had, there's some downtime. So I brought a book.

Today, three different people asked me what I was reading.

"The Satanic Verses," I said.

Person A, a young woman, looked a little weirded out. You know, like I was reading some kind of Satan book or something. I suppose it did have Satan's name in the title.

Person B, an older man who I'm guessing is a British expatriate (going by accent alone), was very excited to hear I was reading Rushdie and stopped and chatted with me for a while about language and literature until another person popped her head into the office and hinted that he get back to work.

Person C, a middle-aged man who I'm pretty sure was DBD (again, going by accent), was less impressed.

"Have you read the Qur'an?" he asked me.

"No," I said. "I'd like to. I keep thinking I should."

"Well, you shouldn't be reading this book until you've read the Qur'an," he told me, almost as if he was giving a lecture. "There's no way you can understand it until you understand what it is criticizing."

"I'm only halfway through it now," I said, valiantly defending my honor, "but it seems like the crux of the argument so far is Gibreel's knowledge that he spoke these two contradictory statements -- or our knowledge, the reader's knowledge. Rushdie's saying that what we believe about the nature of God might be based on a false assumption."

He looked at me.

"Am I right?" I asked, smiling.

He smiled back, but it was in that sort of you have no idea what you're talking about way. "Read the book if you want," he told me, "but then do some research."

And then he left.

So... there you go.