Moot Point » Books

1001 Books To Read Before You Die List*

brenda — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:38:27 +0000

Because I am easing myself back in to doing work. The ones I’ve read are bolded; by my count I’ve read 91 of the 1,001 (which are by the way from this book), which isn’t bad but is less impressive when you remember that I was an English major so a bunch of them were assigned. Ones I’ve started but not finished (not necessarily because I didn’t want to in most cases) and/or read part of are in Italics. I took the list from here, via kottke; the whole thing is reproduced behind the fold so that if I ever have time to read novels again I’ll have some ideas. I bet I’d do better on the movies list.

*Which frankly seems overly weighted toward current fiction (there are 70 books from the last nine years, but only a couple hundred from the entire 19th century, which makes sense because the field has kind of been winnowed down there, based on what survived — I really think that historically the 19th and 20th century will be seen as the peak of the novel) and seems to have like every book by the big contemporary authors. I read Money and I’m glad I did, but I don’t want to read everything Martin Amis ever wrote, you know? Eh, it is flawed, but so are the general requirements of being well-read.

2000s

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Unless – Carol Shields
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
Pastoralia – George Saunder

1900s

Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Untouchable – John Banville
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
The Information – Martin Amis
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Land – Park Kyong-ni
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
Disappearance – David Dabydeen
The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Complicity – Iain Banks
On Love – Alain de Botton
What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
A Heart So White – Javier Marias
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Indigo – Marina Warner
The Crow Road – Iain Banks
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Jazz – Toni Morrison
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
Arcadia – Jim Crace
Wild Swans – Jung Chang
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
Mao II – Don DeLillo
Typical – Padgett Powell
Regeneration – Pat Barker
Downriver – Iain Sinclair
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women – John McGahern
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
Like Life – Lorrie Moore
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
A Disaffection – James Kelman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
London Fields – Martin Amis
The Book of Evidence – John Banville
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
A Maggot – John Fowles
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Queer – William Burroughs
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Legend – David Gemmell
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
La Brava – Elmore Leonard
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Newton Letter – John Banville
On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
The Names – Don DeLillo
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Rites of Passage – William Golding
Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
Shikasta – Doris Lessing
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Burger’s Daughter – Nadine Gordimer
The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Yes – Thomas Bernhard
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
The Public Burning – Robert Coover
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
Fateless – Imre Kertész
Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
High Rise – J.G. Ballard
Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Correction – Thomas Bernhard
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
A Question of Power – Bessie Head
The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
Crash – J.G. Ballard
The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Breast – Philip Roth
The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
G – John Berger
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
The Ogre – Michael Tournier
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
Troubles – J.G. Farrell
Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Them – Joyce Carol Oates
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
Chocky – John Wyndham
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
The Joke – Milan Kundera
No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
Trawl – B.S. Johnson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Magus – John Fowles
The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Things – Georges Perec
The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
Herzog – Saul Bellow
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate – Charles Webb
Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Collector – John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
How It Is – Samuel Beckett
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
The End of the Road – John Barth
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Bell – Iris Murdoch
Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
Voss – Patrick White
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
Homo Faber – Max Frisch
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Barth
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Junkie – William Burroughs
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Molloy – Samuel Beckett
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Victim – Saul Bellow
Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
The Plague – Albert Camus
Back – Henry Green
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
Loving – Henry Green
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
Transit – Anna Seghers
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caught – Henry Green
The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
Embers – Sandor Marai
Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
The Outsider – Albert Camus
In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Party Going – Henry Green
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Years – Virginia Woolf
In Parenthesis – David Jones
The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
England Made Me – Graham Greene
Burmese Days – George Orwell
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Day Off – Storm Jameson
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Living – Henry Green
The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
Quartet – Jean Rhys
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Quicksand – Nella Larsen
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
Nadja – André Breton
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Blindness – Henry Green
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Counterfeiters – André Gide
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Cane – Jean Toomer
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
Amok – Stefan Zweig
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
Summer – Edith Wharton
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
Martin Eden – Jack London
Strait is the Gate – André Gide
Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Iron Heel – Jack London
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Young Törless – Robert Musil
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Immoralist – André Gide
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

1800s

Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born in Exile – George Gissing
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
News from Nowhere – William Morris
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Germinal – Émile Zola
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
Nana – Émile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Red Room – August Strindberg
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Drunkard – Émile Zola
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Erewhon – Samuel Butler
Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth

1700s

Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
The Nun – Denis Diderot
Camilla – Fanny Burney
The Monk – M.G. Lewis
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Justine – Marquis de Sade
Vathek – William Beckford
The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
Cecilia – Fanny Burney
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Evelina – Fanny Burney
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
Candide – Voltaire
The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
Amelia – Henry Fielding
Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Roxana – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700

Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aithiopika – Heliodorus
Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Fortuitous Reading

brenda — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:00:07 +0000

From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, pub. Vintage Books, pp. 71-72

Dating a gay guy is one thing, but lying to your friends about sex is unforgivable.

Perhaps this production of the truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of imagining any new pleasures.

We have at least invented a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing the truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open–the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.

The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our knowledge about sexuality are no to be sought in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream of a complete and flourishing, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex.

The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told to oneself and others, so much curiosity, so much scandal, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained–but not without trembling a little–by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has been cleverly fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex.

Must we conclude that our scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica, and that it is Western, sublimated version of that seemingly lost tradition? Or must we suppose that all these pleasures are only the by-products of a sexual science, a bonus that compensates for its many stresses and strains?

In any case, the hypothesis of a power of repression exerted on our society on sex for economic reasons appears to me quite inadequate if we are to explain this whole series of reinforcements and intensifications that our preliminary inquiry has discovered: a proliferation of discourses, carefully tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure; the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of an exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers.

At issue is not a movement bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that spreads it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it to speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure.

XOXO

when you try hard is when you die hard

brenda — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:11:54 +0000

In daily life music is usually part of other activities, from dancing to to housework to sex to gossip to dinner. In critical discourse it’s as if the only action going on when music is playing is the activity of evaluating music. The question becomes, “Is this good music to listen to while you’re making aesthetic judgements?” Which may explain what makes some bands critics’ darlings: Sonic Youth, for instance, is not great music to dance to, but it’s a terrific soundtrack for making aesthetic judgements. [...] Celine Dion, on the other hand, is lousy music to make aesthetic judgements to, but might be excellent for having a first kiss, or buying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.

It’s book review week!

I’ve been reading Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but I’m really thrilled to report that the book really lived up to the hype. It’s remarkable because it’s such a tiny book and Wilson manages to do at least three distinct things:

Explain Celine Dion to the kinds of people who like “music to make aesthetic judgements by.” He does a great job of tracing Celine’s specific Quebecois cultural context, her musical influences, her relationship to historical schmaltz, and also what makes her so good at what she does.
A brief exegesis of the history of philosophies, from Kant to Bourdieu, basically in that we use our tastes to save up cultural capital.
Bring his own experience as a critic (and person) into the book. It’s jarring and lovely to see a critic’s relationship to both the theoretical material and the object at hand being brought back to his own life and love and feelings and doubts.

I loved it because I’m sort of at a point where I get angry when I see any criticism of anything that assumes that people who like it must be stupid. Also because he winds up finding the feeling in “My Heart Will Go On” by relating it to Gilmore Girls, my TV kryptonite (You know the one with Michel’s dog’s funeral? And Zach plays “My Heart Will Go On”? And then Lorelai goes and breaks up with Christopher?).

It also really made me think about what taste means to me.

For me, it’s not about music, so much, but I’m in one of the few worlds where your taste in movies actually is something upon which you’re judged. I am completely on board with the premise that my tastes are informed by the cultural and social institutions and values that surround me, but it’s not really something I can do anything about. However, I realized I’m sort of an oddball in academia in that I really pride myself on liking basically every kind of movie and generally enjoying most movies that I watch. I even like torture porn! No one likes torture porn! (Okay, so that is totally my perverse desire to “rehabilitate” a culturally detested object, and that is absolutely a learned response. My reaction to those movies would have been way different five years ago. Maybe my gorno essay would have been better if I’d written it like Carl wrote his book? As a first-person oddyssey to unravel what the deal is with those movies that have everyone so pissed off.)

Wilson quotes Valery who says “Tastes are composed of a thousand distastes” and goes on to tell us that when he was 12, he liked “all kinds of music, except disco and country.”¹ And, I do have a “but.” It’s right there in my About page on this blog: “I like movies of all kinds (except those in which someone bets someone else, My Fair Lady-style, that they can make someone over for some kind of annual formal ball, and then they fall in love/befriend with the makeoveree, and the makeoveree inevitably finds out about the whole cruel wager and then stutters “Tell me I was a bet”).” What I really mean by that “except” is really just “bad romantic comedies,” and you can bet your ass that is a distinction about cultural capital: I am saying certain very specific things about myself when I say this, things about my gender and how cool I am. I don’t think knowing this will make me enjoy things that I don’t enjoy, nor do I think there’s no room in the world for aesthetic judgements on a semi-objective level, but I guess it’s good that I know this.

PS It is impossible to hate Celine Dion after watching the highlight reel on fourfour. Impossible!

Why is it always two genres? When I was that age, I liked everything but rap and country, both of which I — of course — love now.

Weekly Movies, not-actually-weekly edition

brenda — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:31:12 +0000

So I was in somewhat of a media blackout in Hawaii. I read the newspaper, but that was it for like a week.

It was great.

(I will at least have vacation pics up at some point, I promise.)

I did see some stuff in Toronto though.

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, ): I’m not going to write a whole long thing about 8 1/2, but I am mentioning it because I watched it on a plane. I generally equate plane movies with “terrible,” so it’s nice to see that I am a niche group someone is marketing to.
Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007): Okay, so for the first half hour, I thought that I had made a horrible mistake. It’s so, so overwritten. The convenience store scene — “That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet.” — what? Then she tells her friend she’s pregnant on the phone and the girl utters one of the worst lines in the history of ever: “Honest to blog?” Ugh. Ooh, and also, all of Juno’s pop culture references were way too old for her. The Blair Witch Project was a media phenomenon in 1999. When Juno would have been 8 years old. No one’s that culturally with it when they’re 8 years old. Anyway, it kind of eventually won me over with the good acting and the sweet relief of characters having quiet moments, like when Juno sees Jennifer Garner’s character playing with a kid in the mall.
I don’t really talk about actors’ performances a lot when I talk about movies, because I think it’s overemphasized in the press, etc., but I don’t think you can understate the importance of the ensemble in Juno: every actor was working really hard (but not trying really hard) and doing fabulous stuff. I’ve liked Ellen Page since Hard Candy and I’m glad she’s getting famous from this, and Michael Cera takes a character I would have hated had any other actor played him and actually makes him real and sympathetic and wonderful.
Also, and I want to phrase this right, because I made fun of someone who had these complaints about Knocked Up¹, but I don’t really know what to do with the way abortion was portrayed. Not like, she should have had an abortion. But now that “unplanned pregnancy movies” are a trend, they are kind of giving me pause. Individually, the handling of abortion in Knocked Up or Waitress or Juno isn’t bad — though Juno’s bugged me personally the most — but taken as three relatively successful, well-reviewed, newsworthy movies, it’s kind of sending a weird message, especially given the place American society is right now. None of these movies is particularly conservative in terms of its message, its filmmakers’ reputations, or even who it’s marketed to, but as a whole, it’s kind of…weird. I’m not sure what it means, if anything, all this baby-based energy, but like I said, it’s giving me pause.
Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007): My official line on this is that I’m not really sure if it’s that great a movie, but that I really liked it. I thought Johnny Depp was freaking great, I’m not really sure that it was totally successful as a musical or even as a movie. My hypothetical essay would either be on how everyone in the movie (even the ethereally beautiful wife and daughter) was kind of funny looking, or on how hard Tim Burton worked to make it clear that the blonde women in the film are just these fungible markers for the male characters to act out their various crazy issues. I have never seen a character have less agency than Joanna does in this movie, and I have to think Burton did it on purpose for irony’s sake.
Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007): I really wanted to like this movie, because I think a lot of the issues it brings up about graphic design and ideology and society and the connotative versus denotative (or I guess purely graphical) elements of type were really interesting. Hustwit also clearly got a really diverse and impressive set of important designers to talk about their work and their philosophies, many of them really intelligently. However, I thought a lot of it could have been better-presented. It seems to have been made with the assumption that its viewers would all know enough about design to know who all these people were and why their words had weight; I wish the filmmakers had done more to give us context. On the context note, I also wish they had made a bit more effort to talk larger social context. The designers weren’t particularly hermetic in their comments, but the film really didn’t do much to create a larger sense of historical (or even artistic or hell, architectural) context. Talking about architecture in particular would have been pretty on-point, given that I think the same kinds of art-commerce discussions happen there as in the design world. Finally, and maybe this is just me, but I really wish the film had been more self-reflective. There is a point to be made about the trendiness and fetishism inherent in the act of making a movie about a font, and it would certainly have been significant to the discussion they were having. I guess it was effective because it made me think a lot, but a lot of that thinking was about how the movie could have been more interesting. Alex said maybe it was a subject for a book, and I’m not sure he’s wrong.
The TV Set (Jake Kasdan, 2006): This definitely wasn’t like, a significant achievement in film art, but it does have: a great cast (David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, and Judy Greer!) , a script that’s full of insidery TV industry fun, and a pretty dark core when you come down to it. Jake Kasdan, the director, is the Jake Kasdan who worked on Freaks and Geeks (definitely on my to-watch list if the strike keeps up, but I still have half a season of Dexter³ and The Wire to get through), so he’s working from experience. Definitely worth a rental, especially if you’re a TV nerd; it’s pretty harsh on networks.

So that’s it. I’m deciding what to order from Chapters with my $60 gift card. So far my list is:

Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi

I am kind of torn between getting responsible books (either big things that I “should read” by people like Frederic Jameson or things that I would actually use for school) and getting fun books (novels? maybe Tree of Smoke? Harper’s really liked it).

Other than that, I didn’t get very many presents for Christmas. My parents’ main present was a lavish family trip to Hawaii, but they felt the need to buy me a DVD player as well, despite the fact that I already own a DVD player. So I exchanged it for an apple green iPod Shuffle.

Oh, and Alex bought be a glorious KitchenAid mixer in cobalt blue (on sale, thank goodness). I haven’t baked anything with it yet, but expect endless amateur closeups of cookies and airily whipped cakes in the near future. FYI.

¹ Which I still think was a really good movie and, moreover, a really terrible example around which to centre a discussion about sexism in comedy. Apatow certainly doesn’t get it right 100%, but the movie is clearly trying and I feel like the way the edges show is a good thing, and I think that’s what people are responding to.²
² I should totally write an essay about Knocked Up and reception. I think it would be good.
³ OMG did you guys read that Michael C. Hall is dating Jennifer Carpenter who plays his sister are a couple?! It would be weird and confusing to play siblings with someone you are sexing. Or to sex someone who plays your sister.

Weekly Movies, October 15-21

brenda — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 06:11:23 +0000

Now that I have begun my new “get up in the morning and spend several hours working in the office school provides me” initiative, I will hopefully be able to catch up on all my movie watching.

Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932): This was convenient after watching the amazing Black Caesar. There are lots of plot parallels. This is one of those movies where you can really see the internal industry censorship (and actually the external government censorship — movies weren’t considered protected speech until the 1950s) working! And it is awesome for that reason. If the word “overdetermined” didn’t exist, someone would have to make it up for this movie. I love when moralizing characters from the community actually point at me. Also, how there is lots of moralizing about gun control, but none about the more obvious gangster-prevention step of repealing Prohibition.
Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2001): This is really…interesting. It is about a Jewish strongman who works with a Nazi clairvoyant in the early 1930s. It’s super-fascinating in the way it stages a lot of Weimar-era stuff: I kept thinking about Kracauer and “The Mass Ornament” and all that stuff.
The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006): This definitely benefited from a second viewing. The first time I saw it, I as expecting a different movie, and I definitely watched from a “perverse” point of view: I found the Stasi perative protagonist really creepy and I kept rooting for him to get caught, even though that meant I was rooting for the State, not for the loveable playwright with the awakening political consciousness. That was not really the point of the movie, which is about how people survive in a totalitarian state and about the transformative power of art, but it doesn’t let artists off the hook in terms of political engagement. It is really kind of nice. I think we were supposed to take the creepiness as part of the condition of living in a surveillance society. Apparently it’s a pretty unrealistic movie, in terms of what it was actually like in the GDR, but that’s never really bothered me before, and if anything makes the whole thing more interesting. It’s like filmically trying to recuperate the lingering lack of trust and whatnot that characterized East German life. Or something. As an intriguing “otherwise unrelated German films have something in common besides a complex relationship to the past” note, both this and Invincible feature a character playing a piece of music on the piano as a pivotal, emotional moment.
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977): While I totally get why people like this movie, I fail to understand why it has this privileged position of sacredness for so many people. It’s really not a very good movie in many, many respects. It’s slow to start, the acting is horrible, the pace is kind of plodding. I was really looking forward to watching it again (even the crappy updated version that school had on DVD¹) but man, it was really boring right until the last half hour, when there is a big fight with airplanes. I know that Star Wars is a classic of cult/fandom-friendly films because of the time it takes to build its story world (a perspective I owe mostly to Henry Jenkins), and further that a lot of the pleasure of Star Wars comes from nostalgia, but honestly? All I see is some slow storytelling, some exceptionalism, and an embarrassingly obvious psychoanalytic reading of Luke’s ability to get his “missile” in the “hole” in the Death Star’s defenses. Sorry, nerdy dudes my age. I like lots of things that are culty or campy or bad but that are enjoyable anyway, but Star Wars just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945): I know that she was supposed to be unlikeable to the point of ridiculousness, but my favourite character in this was Vera, the shrill woman who Al — who “accidentally” killed a dude and stole all his money — picks up and totally controls him by threatening to sell him out to the police. And is dying of consumption maybe. She is awesomely feisty, if the scratchmarks she left on the dead dude (who implies that he tried to rape her) are any indication. That’s what we in the biz call “reading against the grain.” I am feeling contrarian this week.

In other news, there were a couple of excerpts of Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste posted online. I have never bought a 33 1/3 book because I am not that kind of hipster-aspirational pretentious (I am other kinds, don’t get me wrong), but this one seems really interesting. In that it’s a piece, not about the album itself, but about confronting critical issues of “taste,” which I think is super-interesting.

¹ While I’m on it: who cares if Han or Greedo shoots first? I realize that it is supposed to reveal something about his character, and the revision represents Lucas sanitizing their childhood memories, but watching it now, it is two seconds in a two-hour movie. A two-hour movie for kids. Who cares? That’s right, I said it.

“Guys like that do not like Star Trek.” “Wars!”

brenda — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:20:14 +0000

So today I was reading the thread about Becoming Jane on Pandagon, and this one lady linked to her own hilarious parody of said movie.

Maggie Judy Smith Dench:

Hello Austen! I am a cruel and haughty and one-dimensional snob, but I do lament that it is my misfortune to not be very funnym either. Miss Austen, there’s a prettyish sort of wilderness over there.

Jane:

Stop! I must take a moment to crib your writing in a cheap gesture towards my observational talent. [writes it down] Okay, done! Heave, bosom, heave.

I LOLed, and as pleased she thoroughly encapsulated my sadness that what I’d hoped would be an Austen-esque story about Austen, wherein Jane herself has to navigate the restrictive social milieu she was so famous for satirizing was actually a story of how a girl can’t possibly a good writer until she has “experienced life,” and by life, I mean “a penis.”

So I thought, like I do, “What a great blog! I will read some other posts and see if they are as funny and insightful.” And lo, there was a post on Tina Fey. She was responding to criticism of the piece she — the blogger — had written for Bitch that I had really not enjoyed at the time, but kind of just passed over. She basically says that she gets Tina Fey’s comedy, she just perceives it as failing.

But I don’t think she does. To wit, her description of one episode of 30 Rock, “The C-Word”:

But I keep coming back to Fey’s character. In one episode called “The C-word,” Liz gets called a–you know–by a male underling. She fears she’s become a too-demanding boss, bakes treats for her staff as an apology, and promptly loses all authority. After an angry speech and subsequent collapse in exhaustion, the message has been hammered home: women can’t handle authority.

Okay, see, I literally saw the exact opposite thing in that episode. See, she’s a woman boss in a man’s world, so when she tells an underling to do something he doesn’t want to do, he responds by calling her a cunt — reducing her to nothing more than a sex organ in a classic “keeping women in power down” move. Liz feels guilty for being mean — because women are totally socialized to always be nice — and tries to be a nice boss by baking goodies (woo traditional domesticity!) and letting her employees take advantage of her easygoingness. This obviously doesn’t work and she winds up going back to being a bitch.

In other words, this was a pretty clever, spare depiction of a woman personally dealing with the double bind that women in positions of authority (especially in a male-dominated field) have to deal with, and losing in a way, because women always lose. That’s what a double bind is. When the show ended I am pretty sure I said something like “I can’t believe they got all that in there! It was all feminist, but it didn’t actually explain anything! It was lovable on several different levels! I can’t believe it’s actually on TV, it’s so good! Every week this show gets more awesome!”

So, what is it? How can two avowed feminists see such complete opposite things in the same 22 minutes of TV? Is 30 Rock that hard to understand? Am I crazy? I don’t think I am. Initially, when I started writing this, I was going to say something about how maybe the show is more polysemous than I’d assumed, but I don’t think it really is. Obviously since it’s satire, the show’s values aren’t on the surface, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. And the “some people don’t understand it and are just like ‘haha female incompetence’” argument doesn’t fly for me. It’s like saying Jonathan Swift may not have meant what he wrote about eating babies, but maybe he shouldn’t have written about eating babies anyway, because maybe some people wouldn’t get it and think that eating babies was a good idea. It bugs because generally the people who complain about stuff like this (and I’m not just thinking of 30 Rock, I’m thinking of that Vanity Fair cover with Tony Soprano and the naked lady) are the same people who also complain when pop culture plays to the lowest common denominator.

I just don’t see what this girl sees when she calls Tina Fey as “the Valedictorian who wants to be the popular girl,” I see Fey as getting that it’s unfair that the Valedictorian is valued less than the popular girl, and I see her as really brave for letting the joke be on her. There’s lots of comedy that makes people more comfortable with stereotypes, but 30 Rock’s not it. (Seriously, Tracy Morgan is supposed to make people comfortable?) This is the kind of face-value reading that gives feminist criticism a bad name. Also, I’m not going to pretend that Mean Girls was a great stride for feminism, but come on, having Lindsay Lohan play a mathlete is at least a tiny little baby step.

Weekly Movies, July 16-23 (The Week of Harry Potter)

brenda — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:38:10 +0000

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933): TCM showed the full version of this, one of the last pre-Code movies — it apparently got people so mad that they started actually applying the Production Code. It’s kind of great. Barbara Stanwyck (never hotter) is this young girl whose dad runs a speakeasy and pimps her out, then she gets away with him and learns (via Nietzshe, of all places) that she should use her womanly power to get what she wants from life. So she does: they use “St. Louis Blues” to indicate that she is sexing up various business guys in order to get better jobs and stay out of trouble. The thing that’s awesome about it is how little guilt she feels and how jauntily it’s paced. Good times.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007): I thought this was totally one of the best movies, movie wise. Yates tightened up a lot of the lagging and the Harry Potter’s Boring Angst that plagued the book, and did a fantastic job with the banally evil Dolores Umbridge. I really thought he got the tone of the book right.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004): After OotP, I decided I should go back and watch the middle couple of movies, which I missed. I wanted to like this one way more than I did. I hated the children’s choir right at the beginning, when they get to Hogwarts. It’s obviously better than the first two movies — and I love climax with the Time Turner, but I felt like it took too long to get there.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005): Honestly, this book had some of the weakest and some of the best bits in the series, and it turned into one of the best movies, for sure. The stakes are high, you get a way bigger sense of the non-wizarding world, and I loved the short version of “Harry and Ron don’t understand girls.” In general, I think the movies are really well-cast, which is nice, because they don’t always make it clear who everyone is or what’s going on. I don’t think they’re incomprehensible, but I was talking to a friend who saw OotP, but didn’t know the whole series or the books really well and he said there were moments when he assumed things had been more fleshed out in the book.
Hairspray (John Waters, 1988): Love. I missed the beginning, it was on TV when I got home from the bar on Friday, but I think I got most of it. I just kept thinking about how much the new version (which I don’t plan on seeing) will suck: what made this movie good was Tracy’s unerring optimism in contrast with the fact that most of the Baltimore in the movie looked like kind of a shithole and no one was really as conventionally attractive as that creepy High School Musical kid. This was way more upbeat and less confrontational than most John Waters movies, but it still had that kind of unpolished thing, plus the clever camp, not the bad Hollywood camp.
The Princess Diaries (Garry Marshall, 2001): On “The Wonderful World of Disney” and I just couldn’t look away. I don’t have any huge commentary on it or anything, but I did find Ann Hathaway’s performance really charming. I liked how relatively little of the plot revolved around silly misunderstandings, and everything was more or less centred around the character’s figuring out who she was. So it was well-constructed, and charming.

Oh, I also read the last Harry Potter book; I am a casual fan, not a manic one, but I figured it would be really hard to avoid reading what had happened and also, everyone else in the world is talking about Harry Potter, why not just go with it? Moderately (but vaguely) spoilersome thoughts inside.

I mostly liked it. Again, I’m a casual fan, I want things to happen that are exciting. I liked the way she gave hints of the outside world without leaving Harry and his friends’ isolated little circle for much of the book. I think it gave the whole thing more momentum, having the focus really be Harry and Ron and Hermione, but still letting other people be heroic. I think some of the characters who were killed off got short shrift, but for the most part I was happy. I liked that the Truth About Dumbledore was compromising, but that it still made Dumbledore out to be pretty wise, in my estimation. The Truth About Snape was kind of trite, but it made total sense, in a kind of sad way. I also could deal with the whole King’s Cross thing, because Harry obviously = Jesus anyway, and it allowed for the big self-sacrifice and also for the ending to be actually triumphant. The only part I really disliked was the epilogue. Seriously WTF. All we find out is the names of their kids? I wanted to know what they actually did with their lives (besides Neville, the only one who gets his job mentioned); seriously, the book hinted at a lot of injustices in the wizarding world that Hermione would be righting. Or whatever. It was lame, I didn’t need it at all, it’s like she ended the actual story of the book and then decided that wasn’t enough closure. I would have liked a slightly more open, Buffy-type ending, but it was a good read.

Harry Potter and the Shifting Paradigm

brenda — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:41:43 +0000

(Please note, if this is horribly written, it’s because there are roofers at my house, banging around the roof and the deck and everywhere, SO LOUD and irregular. I am running away as soon as I finish my coffee.)

I was really pleased to read Amanda from Pandagon’s rejoinder to the “Harry Potter is bad literature, adults who read kids’ books are stupid” snobby book critic editorial. This is basically that not everyone has the luxury to spend time contemplating Serious Literature.

But what I find more interesting about this passage is that his friends say they simply don’t have time to read and contemplate Serious Fiction. I say to take them at their word—Americans work more hours and have less leisure and make money than we have in the past, which leaves very little time for the leisurely reading of novels. An 800 page book of Serious Fiction—which I love, mind you, so I’m not picking on the pleasures of it—takes much, much longer to read than it takes to breeze through a Harry Potter book. If people are turning to Harry Potter, it’s because they want to have the joys of reading a narrative within the time that’s been allotted to them in our capitalist society to read.

But I think I get why so many critics who spend their time reading Serious Literature are baffled by Harry Potter’s popularity. As someone who does have the luxury to spend time contemplating Serious Literature, I totally get that Rowling’s prose is often…kind of bad. Her phrasing is often clunky and it often feels as though she seems obligated to inform us of every event in Harry Potter’s life, even if no one really cares whether he or Ron won at the chess game they played over their totally uneventful Christmas break. I find myself kind of nodding when I read these columns because they’re right, as Serious Literature, Rowling is a failure.

But she’s a really rich, really popular failure, whose books are beloved by millions. Clearly those millions are unwashed idiots who don’t know what’s good for them. Or, you know, maybe the Harry Potter books are so popular because they appeal to a different literacy. In responding to the critical panning of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Henry Jenkins asserts that POTC’s appeal is in world-building storytelling: “…in many ways, the film’s heart is not in telling a classical linear story. This film wants to explore a world and much of its complexity emerges from the fact that we have been able to accumulate and master more information about that world through the first two films.” To my mind, that argument works even better with Harry Potter. Rowling may not be the most artful crafter of prose, but the appeal to most fans (including me) isn’t in that aspect of the writing: it’s in the wealth of detail, the richness and intricacy of the world created in the book (and which is expanded with each installment), in the way she makes sure that even tertiary characters have arcs, and the sense that there’s a whole lot more happening on the edges of the story.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an academic, and for me it’s more about interpretation than evaluation, but I think there’s a lot more to be gained by looking at the ways readers do engage with a popular text and the kinds of intelligence it engages than by pretending millions of people are engaged in some kind of bizarre self-delusion and incapable of making their own choices about entertainment.

Good ol’ building and loan pal

brenda — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 03:03:39 +0000

“We should go to the good bookstore. They’re having a sale. 30% off film books!”

Alex is trying to cheer me up, because I lost $20 and I am sad. It’s really not the end of the world, but I hate feeling irresponsible.

As I walk to the (typically) tiny film section, the first thing I see is this:

My day is saved! Then I open it up to see how much it costs, and I see this:

!!!*

This is an amazing find. From the introduction:

We spent one more day in Junin, and during that time I found out why we all tripped on that top step. I felt that I should record this in some way so I wouldn’t forget it. As we left for our next stop in Argentina, I remember saying to Gloria–out of the clear blue sky–”The top step in the hotel in Who-neen is mean.” It sort of surprised me that what I had just said rhymed. So that night…

Somebody paid money to publish this book, paid an illustrator to illustrate it, and then actual people paid actual money to purchase it.

*No idea if it’s real, but sources point to yes, because a) cursory google searches turn up pretty similar-looking ones and b) who would fake such a thing?

Not so resolute

brenda — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:50:29 +0000

Oh I totally didn’t do a 2006 best-of list! I like lists. This is for my own posterity, not because I think anyone cares about my bloggerly critical greatness. Best album: I got really lax with the new music this year, so my opinion doesn’t count for much, but The Body, The Blood, The Machine by The Thermals is my favourite new album in like, forever

Best Books I read (for fun): Oh, this is so hard! Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell, Heat by Bill, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Atonement by Ian MacEwan all made huge impressions; I also really liked White Teeth, in the compulsive-reading way, but it didn’t blow my mind

Best movies: Again, there’s lots of stuff I haven’t seen that counts for 2006. Stranger Than Fiction, Little Miss Sunshine, and Tristram Shandy would almost definitely be on the list, as would Brick, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and maybe Shortbus but I still have high hopes for Children of Men

Best TV: Easy. Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Project Runway, the end of Arrested Development, The Office. No special order.

I don’t really hold with New Year’s Resolutions as an idea, because you know, if you want to do something you will do it, and if you kind of like the idea of doing something, you will resolve to do it on New Year’s Day and then do it really regularly for a couple of months before you slowly peter out and then give up, because it turned out to be hard and/or not that fun.

In our travels this Christmas, Alex and I ate a lot of terrible food. The result is: Alex and I feel kind of terrible now. I’m pretty sure I’ve put on weight and I just generally am revolted by the idea of heavy meals involving meat and cake, which are both normally things that I like very much. Between the insane essay-writing of early December, and the eating orgy of later December, I’ve decided I need a break. I was already planning on trying out one new recipe a week (because of the bounty of cookbooks I received for Christmas), but I have now further decided that for the next little while (by which I mean like, two weeks or something), that new recipe will be meat-free. As will all my eating. I went veggie for a month in second year, and by the end I was desperately craving chicken, but I was living in res and relying on the meal hall’s definition of “meat-free alternatives” for like, half my meals. I already don’t eat much meat, so I am re-trying the experiment now that I cook for myself.

Actually, I am already ahead on my one-recipe-a-week deal: tonight we made Aloo Gobhi from New Indian Home Cooking by Madhu Gadia, which is a low-fat Indian cookbook I picked up at BMV like, years ago. We used purple cauliflower, which was pretty. All the potatoes didn’t quite cook as well as I’d have liked — smaller chunks next time, maybe? — , but the flavour was amazing and it was a really pretty dish. We also made the Lentil Curry from the Vij’s cookbook, which Alex got me. It was pretty much your standard dal, using half split mung dal (the little yellow ones) and half masur dal (the little orange ones), but with a simple onion-tomato masala and some cilantro mixed in at the end. It wound up being delicous, but it took way longer to cook than the recipe indicated, and we wound up having to take off the lid and let the excess water boil off at the end. That happened last time I tried to make lentils, too — maybe I’m not letting it boil hard enough before I let it cook? Anyway, I’ll know to allow longer for it next time. So that’s two recipes! And I’m totally planning minestrone or something for Tuesday.

I also want to start baking more: maybe twice a month? Also, and this depresses me: exercising. I should take up jogging or something: Vancouver’s one advantage is that it’s pretty and usually not deadly cold. Also, it requires virtually no investment, as I own running shoes and a supportive tank top from LuluLemon (SHUT UP IT WAS ON SALE).