I mentioned the other day that I felt like I was starting to get blogged out. That I’m running out of things to say, or at least it seems that way. I promised myself that I was going to write something every day, no matter how worthless it was just to stay in the practice of doing so but it’s beginning to get a little more difficult. Soon I’ll start degenerating into vagaries, hollow platitudes and comments about the weather. Either that or I’ll go back to posting endless memes and YouTube videos. Gah!
The last few times I’ve opened up the silly WordPress dashboard to make a post, I’ve ended up staring at it for an hour or so before finding anything worthwhile to burble about. Most of the time I’ve spent my time random link jumping to other blogs on WordPress looking for inspiration. I usually start at Jon’s fine blog and click the little arrow in the top right corner and off I go.
Some things I’ve learned in my travels. First, there are an inordinate amount faith based bloggers out there on the WordPress site, from the hardcore Christian to the moderate Islamic ones. If I was a religious man, I might take comfort in this but as I’m not, it’s just one more blog taking up space on my internet. Second, Club Penguin is apparently very popular with young people (I had to look it up on wiki to figure out what it is. No. I’m not going to tell you. You’ve got a brain, go look for yourself). Third, for every English speaking blog there are about three that aren’t. They primarily seem to be Filipino, Islamic or Japanese. Maybe I just end up on them as they’re the ones active or most recently updated when I’ve been surfing. Who knows.
Anyway, I’m starting to meander from my original point (go figure). I managed to find a blog worthy topic while surfing about today. It looks to be about a month old but that’s one of the wonders of the internet, everything old is still new. I’d trackback to the original poster (or at least the one I stole this from) but I was an idiot and closed the tab before I started this. So, thanks to my anonymous donors. Your inspiration for this post is greatly appreciated. Follow the instructions below and enjoy. (As my bookshelf is currently in storage, I’m going to play fast and loose with that rule and just + any book I own.)
Here are the instructions:
Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs,
strikethroughthe ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf. (Note that DNF=”did not finish”)
My Reads of the Unread
+ Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell **
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
+ One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
+ The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
+ The Name of the Rose *
+ Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
+ Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
+ War and Peace
+ Vanity Fair
+ The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
+ American Gods ***
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
+ Quicksilver
+ Wicked : The Llife and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
+ The Canterbury Tales *
The Historian
+ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
+ Love in the Time of Cholera *
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
+ Foucault’s Pendulum *
+ Middlemarch
+ Frankenstein
+ The Count of Monte Cristo
+ Dracula
+ A Clockwork Orange
+ Anansi Boys ***
+ The Once and Future King *
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
+ 1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno [Ed Note: I’m assuming this is referring to the first canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but I’m unsure]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
+ The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
+ Gulliver’s Travels **
+ Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
+ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
+ Dune *
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
+ Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
+ Cryptonomicon
+ Neverwhere ***
+ A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
+ The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
+ The Confusion
Lolita
+ Persuasion
+ Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
+ On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
+ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
+ The Aeneid
+ Watership Down
+ Gravity’s Rainbow
+ The Hobbit **
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
+ Treasure Island **
David Copperfield
+ The Three Musketeers **
So I guess in summation, I’m not a big fan of Ayn Rand and I have a lot of books still left to read.
Whee, that was almost fun. Now I guess I should get back to pruning the Categories on the right into something a little more manageable and converting the unused ones to tags and then seeing why my tag cloud shows up as a list rather than a cloud (I suspect, once again, that it’s thematically related).