My First Meme - Big Read

Gacked from Ravings of a VA…

I have some quibbles with the list - HP? Pullman??  No Hemingway!!!???  I’ve read other books by authors - do they count?  And finally, what about the ones I read and would love to get the time I wasted back?  Anyway…

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put an asterisk next to the books you’d rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

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
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
25. The Hitch Hiker’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 in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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 *********************
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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
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
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 - AS 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 *
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

Writer’s Block Angst

From my journal.  Kind of whiny and angsty and stuff…

So what concerns me is this:  If you say you want to write, but you’re not writing, because you can’t think of anything you want to write, does that mean you really don’t want to write or that you have too high an expectation of yourself and you’re afraid or maybe you’re afraid that this is just another time you’ll start and not finish or is it that you have one big gorram case of writer’s block?

 

‘Cause that’s where I’m at right now.  Can’t think of a bloody thing I want to write, at least for longer than a few seconds or so.  And I sure don’t have any stories just bursting to get out of me.  It used to be easy.  First there were the post-nuclear war stories with me and a friend.  Then there were the World War III stories with me and all my acquaintances and friends, Then there were the space stories with my acquaintances and friends, and then there were engineer traveling the world stories with, yep, you guessed it, me and my acquaintances and friends.  And what tied them all together was ME getting the hot chick and having some neat adventures and then getting married and stuff.

 

And then I got married and I stopped writing that kind of thing because, after all, I had MET the girl here at home and married her and started a family.  I also realized that I was most likely not going to get the kind of job where I was often travelling internationally, and really, I didn’t want to be away from my wife and child all the time anyway.  To grow as a writer, I needed to write about somebody that was NOT me.

 

And so, I decided I wanted to write about my hometown. You’re supposed to write about what you know but literature or mystery or suspense were never the genre I read, only international thrillers and war, but not having been very many places you can’t write about what you don’t know…

 

And maybe I’m a very good scene writer but kind of weak at characterization and absolutely unskilled at plots, but there’s no one to teach me how to do that, anyway.  The one time I went to a writer’s group it was a disaster.  They informed me that I wasn’t even writing in their genre and besides, my story should have started in the middle, and the story I’d spent three years polishing and having people tell me was good was, in fact, not good.  And that shook my confidence, and besides, nobody makes a living as a writer, not really, and who am I, and I’m 37, and isn’t it time I grew up anyway?

 

And these and other thoughts are assaulting me because that thing called Resistance is really strong, and that’s where I’m at, because I haven’t come up with the weapons I need to fight it, namely persistence, perseverance, and so on.

 

And worse is that I’ve read truly good books by masters of the craft, and other people have written badly written books about boy wizards and become runaway successes, and I realize that what I turn out probably won’t be either, and that doesn’t help either.

 

And that’s when I just write in my journal occasionally, whining about how I’m procrastinating and stuck and vowing that I will start to write, and then a week or two goes by and I’m writing the same thing in my journal, and so I have accomplished nothing, and the cycle starts again, because I vowed, and as soon as I figure out what genre and locale and what POV I’ll use, and then there’s that whole pesky plot thing again, and creating characters but who wants to spend time on the villain when I want to work on the characters I like, such as the main character, the hero guy, and the hot chick that he has a romance with – not too deep, mind you, just your typical James Bond coupling, except wait, I want to reflect Christian values, so maybe I’ll make them married, except that then the whole situation changes, so okay, he’s married and no relations with the hot chick, but what fun is that, so now what do I do?  And besides, he’s getting awfully suspiciously like me, and that’s not how it supposed to be, so let’s go back and create this character, the hero guy, who gets the hot chick, except not if they’re not married, and here we go again…

 

War was so easy to write.  Just plop my characters into a battle and off I went, and made sure to describe all the really cool hardware while I was at it.  International spy was easy too, because the character just went to exotic locales had had gunfights with the bad guy’s henchmen, and the girl was the one he rescued and fell willingly into his arms (in both types).  Except that real life, of course, is never that easy but who wants to write about real life?

 

And then I wanted to, and I didn’t know how, because I never read that kind of stuff, and couldn’t think of a plot that didn’t involve a gun battle of some type.  Which is great for potboilers and so-called men’s adventure but not so good for getting published in a magazine.  At least it wasn’t too useful for short stories.  I didn’t want to write potboilers, so writing a book length thing was kind of out, and besides, that took me right back into that whole not writing about what I didn’t know scenario.

 

And so that’s where I’m at today, at least part of it.

 

Scott

Gen Y vs. Gen X

I like to think of myself as being pretty up to date with technology, but something happened the other day that showed me I’m getting old.

I was in the bathroom at work- a fairly conservative engineering firm - and I was done with my business and washing my hands, when I heard beeping and booping and music from the the stalls.  Then I heard the sound of a laser firing and a hit being made.

Okay, I admit that a lot of guys take newspapers and magazines to the bathroom.  Personally, I don’t get it because I don’t enjoy sitting there with my pants down and smelling the, uh, smells.  But whatever.

I gotta say, though, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone take a videogame into the bathroom instead!

Am I just getting old? Or is this pretty normal?

Scott

Beating Procrastination: Thoughts

Recently I discovered this blog by Meg Hyatt, whose father is president of Thomas Nelson publishing.  I ran into her dad’s blog via Getting Things Done, and through twitter I discovered his daughter.

Her post is on running in the heat and humidity and I encourage you to read it.  It was one of the comments that caught my attention, and I’m excerpting it here because I think it’s really good:

 6  Bridget  on June 8, 2008 at 8:01 pm

A Few Observations

* The more we make excuses, the more we buy into them, the easier it is to make additional excuses to support our mind-created beliefs. These beliefs become our story, and our excuses become our reality.
* Delaying is addictive. Even if your intention is to put it off “just this one time”. The act of putting it off sets a chain of reactions that will make it easier to delay this task again. In fact, it becomes more likely that the task will be postponed again.
* What we repeat in our mind actually exaggerates the scale of the task involved. It snowballs larger and larger, until the task becomes so big that you will never get it done.
* Constantly thinking about doing something but avoiding the actual act of doing it takes energy. You end up spending more energy pondering about it and making excuses for it than just getting it done. You’ll actually save time and attention energy by just doing it.
* We can only move on with our lives when we can get past our internal conflict between our story of procrastination and our desire to get it done. You really start to be productive when you can change your attitude.
* When you break the cycle and start, you’ll be surprised at how quick and easy the task actually takes. You’ll be wondering why you didn’t just get it done in the first place.

What are your excuses?  How do you beat procrastination?

Scott

Never Eat Alone in Action

What do you call it when you have a birthday party and the guest of honor only knows 5 of the 14 guests?

 

One heckuva good time!

 

On Sunday night I attended a surprise birthday party at the Gypsy Café on the Southside.  The café is very nice, somewhat eclectic, and serves some very good appetizers.  The staff was attentive and responsive.  The prices are a little on the high side for Pittsburgh, but as time goes on and Pittsburgh begins to get more like New York and LA (It IS happening, just really really slowly) the prices will be seen as reasonable.  You can find them on the web here.

 

The party itself was pulled together by my friend Viviana.  She’s originally from Rome and is a master networker.  She had to be, moving to a foreign country and getting involved in as many activities as she could.  Viviana knows people from many different places.  She’s a great example of Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone in action.

 

It was entertaining and fun, as the pics below show.  Special thanks to Alan, who took most of the pics.

 

    Jen loves her chocolate!

  Jen and Viviana - Queen for a day!

  All that and she’s a marksman too!

   Party guests

 

 Make a wish!

  I’ll be in my bunk…(points if you get the reference)

  Okay, time to go…

Misplaced Priorities

I’m not one for writing on politics, and I rarely rant on anything.  I’m also taking my life in my hands to criticize the Pittsburgh Penguins, who just smashed the Ottawa Senators and may be on their way to another Stanley Cup.  (Note:  Go Pens!)

But I had to get this one off my chest.  I have a four and a half year old boy.  He’s my greatest treasure.  And this one’s for him.  Note:  He’s a Pens fan too!

Back at the end of March, the Children’s Center for Creative Play in Edgewood closed down.  My son has been there numerous times and enjoyed himself.  It was a place where there was lots to do and where he could, dare I say it, exercise his creativity.  In this day an age, especially with globalization, creativity is a pretty important thing.  Just read A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink.

Anyway, the Center closed due to lack of funding.  So let me get this straight:  we can build not one, not two, but THREE sports arenas for millionaire athletes playing CHILDREN’s games, but we can’t take care of our own children?  Where are the priorities in this city?  Mr. Ravenstahl, are you not supposed to be a fresh new face doing things different?  No, you’re just like your predecessors pandering to the big money donors and ignoring the little people.  Wouldn’t creative, well-educated kids make a bigger difference in our ACT 47 city than a new hockey arena, a casino, and so on?

I guess not.

I encourage everyone to fight for the Center for Creative Play - there’s a group trying to save it at THIS WEBSITE.

Rant done.

What do you think?  Is it worth saving?

Scott

On Facebook and Readers who Lead…?

I use Facebook, while it’s nice for keeping track of friends, mainly for one thing:  keeping track of the books I read.  I guess I could use other applications to do that but since I am on Facebook once a day (at least) it’s easier just to use the built-in app for it.

But one thing that irritates me is the leaderboard.  I consider myself pretty well read but I know there’re quite a few books I haven’t read.  I’m never going to be in the top ten, and that’s fine with me.  What irks me is that the leaders’ claims seem to be, to me, a tad unrealistic.

For example, the woman in the lead claims to have read over 10,000 books.  Hmmm.  I’ve racked my memory trying to remember all the books I’ve read, and while I know there are a whole bunch that I’ve missed or forgotten about (and a lot of children’s books, both what I read as a kid and what I’ve read to my own child), I would be surprised if the number exceeded much more than a thousand or so.  And I read all the time.

So, 10,000 books.  We’ll assume she’s 30 – she doesn’t look much older.  Say she started reading at 5 years of age – maybe early, but we’ll assume children’s books.  At 1 book a day, that’s around 8,000 books.  Possible?  Maybe.

Except it isn’t.  There are books out there that can’t be read in a day (War and Peace, anyone?).  Even if she didn’t read serious books like that (all Harlequins, maybe) there had to be days where she didn’t have a chance to read (work puts a cramp in my reading time, for sure, as well as family stuff).

Let’s say she did, though.  What kind of quality of books?  If they were all potboilers, then 10,000 is a lot but it’s not very nourishing.  And if she burned through them and didn’t retain a lot, then what was the point?  Entertainment?  Doing that is only slightly better than watching TV!

Harriet Klausner is a (infamous?) name on Amazon that has drawn the same comments.  People say she just reads the summaries of the books and restates it.  Or that she just skims the books.  I don’t know.  But if being in the lead means reading mindless stuff or just skimming like an appetizer rather than tucking in like a main course, I feel pretty comfortable being back at number 870 or so…

What’s your opinion?

Scott

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the Future of Work

Lately I’ve been following Penelope Trunk’s thoughts on the future of work, as well as Richard Florida’s thoughts on the future of cities  (See also All About Cities, an excellent blog on…cities!).  Add to that Jamais Cascio’s thoughts on the Metaverse, and it’s a lot of food for thought.

 

Here are Penelope’s predictions:

 

1.) The end of gender disparity
2.) The end of the stay-at-home parent
3.) The end of the grind
4.) The end of “work friends”
5.) The end of office life
6.) The end of consulting
7.) The end of hierarchy
 

I’m not so sure.  Coming as I do from Pittsburgh, a conservative town, most of this stuff is FAR from reality.  Even with Gen Y coming in to the workplace, very little has changed.  And most of the X’ers I know just adapt - indeed, are co-opted - into the conservative culture.  Five days in the cube, with extra hours when necessary.  No special perks or cool offices.  And everyone goes home at the end of the day and work and home are completely separate arenas, as far as friends, anyway.  Believe me, hierarchy is alive and well here.  Perhaps that’s part of the reason we have outmigration.

Perhaps in tech firms it’s different, but as far as I can see in the engineering industry and the banking industry nothing has changed here.

 

When it comes to parenting and work, most households I know have both parents working full time jobs.  A few, like mine, have one parent working while the other stays home.  We pay the price in that we can’t afford some of the things that others can – for example, we’re still in an apartment although we’re saving for a house.  It also leads to friction since the stay at home parent feels like they work more than a full time job and can’t understand why the wage-earning parent wants to relax in the evening since they don’t get a chance to relax.

 

I want to explore this more in the coming days.  Telecommuting is rare here (as a regular practice, anyway) since most employers are conservative Boomer types.  Gil Schwartz wrote an article in Men’s Health Best Life magazine where he demolishes the idea of telecommuting.  He questions why he would want an employee that doesn’t want to be in the office.  It’s a bit tongue in cheek, and totally opposed to Penelope and Ryan/Ryan’s Gen Y thoughts, but it rings true to me, at least here in Pittsburgh.

 

What are your thoughts?  Do you see a shift to more telecommuting?  Do you see a blending of work life and home life?  Are your friends at work and your friends at home the same or separate?  Is your organization flat or pretty hierarchical?  Let me know in the comments!

Scott

Guest Blog - James and the Urban Experience

Scott’s note:  James and I have been friends for almost two decades.  We were friends before it was “cool” to have an interracial friendship.  We’ve grown because of it, in many ways.  James grew up in Wilkinsburg, a distressed area of Pittsburgh, and worked his way out and is now the father of two awesome little boys.

James and I have had many conversations about God, and also on racism, what it’s like to be black, and so on.  Helped open up the eyes of a suburban white boy to the urban world of minorities.  I value his friendship! 

  I wanted to share some of his stuff here.  Check out his blog, too!

I drove into Wilkinsburg Memorial Day. I noticed the same garbage in the same place along the main street. Two women of the night plyed their trade in broad daylight.

Their pimp monitored them a block away. He moves swiftly for senior with a pronounced limp. I wonder if  they get holiday pay? The union steward in me I guess.

In my heart I judge the young men on bicycles, circling cars like carrion, expert eyes pick out the suburban white Guys looking for drugs. 

Why dont these brothas clean up their town? 

I consider making a statement by picking up the trash myself. But no, I really dont have the time. Truthfully I’m not comfortable with parking my car. What if it gets vandalized?

 I stop judging the people around me. I consider myself; Am I a coward? Am I a hypocrite? Am I just lazy?

 ——————————————————————————————————-

poem about religion in pittsburgh 

A knock on my door from an earnest Jehovah Witness 

a bean pie from an angry black Muslim 

a postcard from a zealous protestant conservative 

a bumper sticker praising libreral catholics 

Its great to be American!

What I’ve Read Lately

 

Thomas Mellon and His Times, by Thomas A Mellon

This man was really something.  He was the Irish patriarch of the Mellon banking clan.  I don’t agree with everything he says but he definitely believed in hard work.  He also was very active in raising his children.  He made his fortune by taking his earnings from the law profession and investing in real estate and construction of houses, as well as coal mines and the like.  Some railroads and stuff.  And then the bank.  Very conservative, thorough, and detail oriented was Mr. Mellon. 

Surprisingly, Thomas Mellon states that you don’t have to be a salesman to be successful in business.  He was however, apparently a master networker.  He knew he was going to be a lawyer and met most of his future clients working in the prothonotary’s office, though.  The legacy he left to his heirs is amazing in that it has lasted a long time. 

Spook Country, by William Gibson 

Not as good as Pattern Recognition, but interesting nevertheless.  Learned about some interesting concepts, such as Spatially Tagged Hypermedia, or Locative Art.  Some other interesting things: 

• “Music today is atemporal.” 
• “Intelligence is advertising turned inside out.”
• “The holding of knowledge in dignified privacy helps ensure desired results.” 

And oh yeah, about shipping containers, so I eventually want to read The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson.  Anybody ever notice how in the first episode of Firefly the crew of Serenity is at the Eavesdown Docks on Persephone and surrounded by shipping containers? (See pic at top of post from stillflying.net) Cool! 

The Golden Ratio, by Mario Livio 

An interesting book describing Phi, which is a mathematical ratio that somehow shows up naturally in nature, in music, in math.  I’ve always been interested in the Knights Templar, who apparently were interested in so-called “Sacred Geometry.”  Livio debunks the use of the ratio in many architectural wonders such as the Great Pyramid as well as in Renaissance art.  It’s doubtful, I suppose, that the Templars knew of it since the ratio made an appearance in Europe in the Renaissance and after their time, although they may have learned of it from the Arabs (who learned it from the Greeks!) and then kept it secret.  If so, Livio doesn’t comment on it.

Virtual Light, by William Gibson 

Part of his Bridge Trilogy.  The scenes involving the security guard, Rydell, weren’t as interesting as those involving Chevette and Yamazaki.  His portrayal of the squatters’ community on the bridge was great.  I liked how it shows that a neighborhood tends to grow organically and not by top down control.  (Ahem – I’m looking at you, Pittsburgh Government!  Luke, are you listening?) 

Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath 

An interesting read on how to make messages more interesting.  There are six characteristics of “sticky” messages – Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories – the acronym is SUCCES.  The idea is to incorporate as many of these characteristics into your message as possible.  A perfect example is how urban legends stick in your mind years later but corporate initiatives don’t.  There’s more on Wikipedia and their website, but I recommend reading the book for both the examples and for the summary in the back of the book.

Scott