…after a rough couple of weeks in which Shelly and I were very, very, very sick in rapid succession. All manner of nastiness, misery, vomiting, and so forth, which resulted in the two of us missing movies with the Smoosh and camping with smoocherie…suck!
Shelly is an angel, though, and even put up with me whining and throwing up a lot. 🙂 phyrra is also an angel, and called often to check up on us. She and nihilus even came over to keep us company, which was very sweet.
And to watch Lexx, which I still don’t know how I feel about.
In any event, all better now, so without further ado (from femetal via phyrra and khepra)
Banned Books, with snarky comments
Bold=read, italics=partly read, underline=want to read, snarky comments by yours truly
#1 The Bible–impossible to read cover to cover and remain a Christian. God really doesn’t come off well in it.
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran–same god as the Bible, and he comes off even less well. The “Satanic” part is interesting.
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne–Hester was the original “Take Back Power” chick!
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman–the poetry of Walt Whitman should be banned by the Geneva Convention. It’s proof that there is no God.
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli–Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And don’t shoot the messenger.
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank–The Frank family was wealthy and privileged; they should’ve got the fuck out of Dodge when they had the chance.
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin–Okay, so the man was a lech.
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck–Am I the only one in the world who found this book insufferably tedious?
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon–Has anyone in the world read this entire thing? My God!
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy–Read it, made no impression on me whatsoever.
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin–By the way, Darwin did not use the term “survival of the fittest.” He used “natural selection.” The phrase ‘survival of the fittest” came later.
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell–Boring, pompous anti-Communist agitprop. Would long have been forgotten had it had a different title.
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck–Now this, amazingly, is just a reallyy, really, really good story.
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx–Everything Marx knows about human behavior would fit in the white space of a postage stamp.
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley–I like the way he describes someone who’s good in bed as “pneumatic.”
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchel–Insufferable civil-war drama-queen soap opera. I want the part of my life I spent reading this dreck back.
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway–Papa Hemingway was better, I think, at drinking than at writing…
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury–Not his best work.
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant–Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable…
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller–This book is SO funny. It’s also sad and kind of depressing, but oh my God is it funny. I like the dead man in Yossarian’s tent.
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath–Did i say that Gone with the Wind was about a drama queen? Sylvia Plath was the original drama queen!
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle–the man who was wrong more often and more consistently on a wider variety of topics than any author since. He taught that heavy objects fall faster than light objects and that women have fewer teeth than men.
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner–Read it for a lit class. It went in my eyes, through my brain, and out my ears. Don’t recall anything about it except thinking that Faulkner could never say in two words what could be compressed into ten.
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood–Hmm, can’t figure out why this one may have upset people!
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess–And the movie is just as brilliant, even though the ending changes the meaning somewhat.
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein–Okay, boys and girls, repeat after me: Robert Heinlein was not a very compelling writer.
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Very glad you guys are feeling better. You were missed this weekend… but honestly, the weather was horrid, and certainly not good for healing. Will let you guys know next time we go camping.
Very glad you guys are feeling better. You were missed this weekend… but honestly, the weather was horrid, and certainly not good for healing. Will let you guys know next time we go camping.
Grapes of Wrath was tedious and depressing.
But hey it was the depression.
Your commentary was much appreciated 🙂
I found it amusing that I read most of those books in school.
All of my teachers wanted you to read stuff from the banned book list.
How was a Handmaid’s tale, really?
You still don’t know how you feel about Lexx, but I bet secretly you enjoy it 🙂
Meow!
Handmaid’s Tale is a worthwhile read, if only as a cautionary note about the dangers of a repressive theocracy. (You’re familiar with the premise of the book, yes?)
The scene that most stics in my mind is near the beginning, where a man is raping his handmaid while his wife looks on to make sure that neither one of them enjoys it. *shivers* Ugh!
Grapes of Wrath was tedious and depressing.
But hey it was the depression.
Your commentary was much appreciated 🙂
I found it amusing that I read most of those books in school.
All of my teachers wanted you to read stuff from the banned book list.
How was a Handmaid’s tale, really?
You still don’t know how you feel about Lexx, but I bet secretly you enjoy it 🙂
Meow!
Okay, so what’s the deal with Heinlein, anyway. I mean, apart from the concept of plural marriage (which was a pleasant surprise), why do a great number of people absolutely adore this guy to no end? I mean, I read “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and frankly couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Did I pick the wrong book to start with?
No clue. I have absolutely no idea why so many people adore Heinlein. I find his writing style bland, his plots flat and contrived, his characters boring and two-dimensional, and his overall attitude sexist. I can not for the life of me figure out why he’s so adored, except perhaps that he dared to write about things like non-monogamy in a positive light.
I enjoyed Number of the Beast because it had a window into Oz 🙂
I think about it his books and I think about the time during which they were written and they weren’t as sexist as they COULD have been… and he was stretching the envelope some….
Perhaps. He did come from a sexist time…but that doesn’t excuse the flat characters or contrived plots! 🙂
I like some of his stuff. His short fiction is better, I think, as it moves faster and seems more cohesive. “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” and “Starship Troopers” (nothing like the movie of the same name) are a decent starting place. His longer stuff just seems to bog down and drag on. I got all the way to the final chapter of “Number of the Beast” and just said fuck this and tossed it.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of people who adore him have been reading his stuff since way back when. I imagine it was quite the thing back in the day. I like Asimov, Clarke, and Cherryh and many others better myself.
That being said I really liked the concept of “Grok”. It’s hard to define the term but I’ve always explained it as “understanding something so completely that it becomes a part of oneself”.
Okay, so what’s the deal with Heinlein, anyway. I mean, apart from the concept of plural marriage (which was a pleasant surprise), why do a great number of people absolutely adore this guy to no end? I mean, I read “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and frankly couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Did I pick the wrong book to start with?
No clue. I have absolutely no idea why so many people adore Heinlein. I find his writing style bland, his plots flat and contrived, his characters boring and two-dimensional, and his overall attitude sexist. I can not for the life of me figure out why he’s so adored, except perhaps that he dared to write about things like non-monogamy in a positive light.
I like some of his stuff. His short fiction is better, I think, as it moves faster and seems more cohesive. “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” and “Starship Troopers” (nothing like the movie of the same name) are a decent starting place. His longer stuff just seems to bog down and drag on. I got all the way to the final chapter of “Number of the Beast” and just said fuck this and tossed it.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of people who adore him have been reading his stuff since way back when. I imagine it was quite the thing back in the day. I like Asimov, Clarke, and Cherryh and many others better myself.
That being said I really liked the concept of “Grok”. It’s hard to define the term but I’ve always explained it as “understanding something so completely that it becomes a part of oneself”.
You are a well-read dude. 😉
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable…
Yay! Glad I’m not the only one who thought of that. heehee
You are a well-read dude. 😉
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable…
Yay! Glad I’m not the only one who thought of that. heehee
no snarkies for Little House huh?
😉
To be fair, i read it when i was quite young. It’d be easier, I think, to snark the absolutely dreadful TV show t inspired–didn’t one of the little girls on the show go on to be a porn star or pose in Playboy or something?
fie!
That was one of my favorite shows growing up….
*shakes head to clear if of that imagery*
Almost as upsetting as when Anne of Green Gables actress (the one who played her teacher) showed up in a Canadian soap opera as the sleazy boss who was sexually harassing an employee *shivers*
no snarkies for Little House huh?
😉
To be fair, i read it when i was quite young. It’d be easier, I think, to snark the absolutely dreadful TV show t inspired–didn’t one of the little girls on the show go on to be a porn star or pose in Playboy or something?
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
I had to read that for a class. Dear ghods was it awful. I wanted to take every single character who had even one line of dialog out behind the building and kick him or her.
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Read it a couple of years ago for a class. Aggravating; too many points of view (which was, I know, deliberate).
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
I had to read that for a class. Dear ghods was it awful. I wanted to take every single character who had even one line of dialog out behind the building and kick him or her.
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Read it a couple of years ago for a class. Aggravating; too many points of view (which was, I know, deliberate).
fie!
That was one of my favorite shows growing up….
*shakes head to clear if of that imagery*
Almost as upsetting as when Anne of Green Gables actress (the one who played her teacher) showed up in a Canadian soap opera as the sleazy boss who was sexually harassing an employee *shivers*
I enjoyed Number of the Beast because it had a window into Oz 🙂
I think about it his books and I think about the time during which they were written and they weren’t as sexist as they COULD have been… and he was stretching the envelope some….
Perhaps. He did come from a sexist time…but that doesn’t excuse the flat characters or contrived plots! 🙂
Handmaid’s Tale is a worthwhile read, if only as a cautionary note about the dangers of a repressive theocracy. (You’re familiar with the premise of the book, yes?)
The scene that most stics in my mind is near the beginning, where a man is raping his handmaid while his wife looks on to make sure that neither one of them enjoys it. *shivers* Ugh!
Where I come from, we call those Playboys. 😀
Where I come from, we call those Playboys. 😀
I found your post very interesting. Adding the new knowledge (of not knowing much about!) epigenetics, people are constructed very differently, not just because of mutations/different genotypes, but because of environmental influence.
Knowing the DNA-sequence hardly says anything, it’s the state of activation and inactivation that holds much of the key for genetic expression. And as a student, I feel like the knowledge is still rudimentary at best, especially for epigenetics and neuroscience.
I found your post very interesting. Adding the new knowledge (of not knowing much about!) epigenetics, people are constructed very differently, not just because of mutations/different genotypes, but because of environmental influence.
Knowing the DNA-sequence hardly says anything, it’s the state of activation and inactivation that holds much of the key for genetic expression. And as a student, I feel like the knowledge is still rudimentary at best, especially for epigenetics and neuroscience.
Thank you! I had missed this. Priceless.
Thank you! I had missed this. Priceless.