Date: 2007-11-15 20:59 Subject: poison toys Security: Public Tags: books, brief, china, consumerism, politics

Worried about lead paint from China?

Buy your kid a book.

Date: 2007-10-11 22:44 Subject: book meme Security: Public Tags: books, memes, procrastination

via Gayle

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, strike through what you couldn't stand, and underline the ones you own but haven't read. The numbers after each one are the number of LibraryThing users who used the tag of that book.
"

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian: A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake: A Novel (47)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Date: 2007-05-25 11:32 Subject: i'm a spider Security: Public Tags: books, film, his dark materials, memes

for anyone curious about how my Golden Compass daemon turned out, the final result is here.

my adjectives after i took the personality test: modest, a leader, sociable, dependable, fickle.

my adjectives after some of you made adjustments: softly spoken, shy, relaxed, humble, proud.

Date: 2007-04-28 14:04 Subject: daemon Security: Public Tags: books, film, his dark materials, memes

it's hard to answer general qualitative questions honestly and accurately. so the publicity machine at The Golden Compass allows the input of friends and peers (and strangers who stumble on your blog in the timeframe allowed).

pasted below is my preliminary result; i took the quiz twice and got the same animal.

for the next twelve days, i think, you can click through and say you disagree with the bot's assessment of me. or just take the quiz and get your own companion. or just roll your eyes about all the ways i find to procrastinate.

maybe i'll try to re-read the Pullman books this summer (as downtime from preparing for comp exams in the fall).

anyway: