Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Mossy Monkey's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
8:35 am	A Definition Zsa Zsa Gaborn again: an obnoxiously pious celebrity who is also prone to drunken confrontations with the LAPD. See also "Mel Gibson."  (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
11:25 am	Cheap Thought o' the Day You can take scripture literally, or you can take it seriously. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
8:56 am	Oil and the Art of Speculation So, let me get this straight. US drivers have been driving less. In response, the price of oil hit new record highs. The Saudis have upped production. In response the price of oil hit new record highs. The major oil companies signed agreements to pump Iraqi oil into the global market. In response, the price of oil hit new record highs. All this and the oil companies, industry analysts, all the mainstream mediacs, still say that the primary reason we're seeing these prices is "simple supply and demand." Is there something I'm missing here? How is this not ample evidence that supply and demand have nothing, or little, to do with it, that these prices are almost entirely due to speculation?   If the precious free-market worked the way its adherents say it should, shouldn't the oil companies have shifted away from the oil pumping business long ago, say starting in 1970 when the largest oil consumer, the US, reached peak production? You don't see the Fisher company making bodies for horse-drawn carriages anymore; they've long since switched to making car bodies for GM. You don't see IBM making typewriters anymore. Why are oil companies stuck on this single, finite, outdated product? Of course it's a lot cheaper these days to buy the presidency, and more importantly the vice-presidency, than it is to retool. It's even better when that presidency comes with its own army, so you can enforce your energy hegemony "for reals." Speculation itself is both the highest, most esoteric of the investment arts created by Capitalism and a signal of its dissolution as practical economics. Speculation is investment for its own sake and by means of concept, in the same way that abstract art is no longer practical representation but the conceptualization of the elements of art themselves. The difference is this: if Rothko wants to delve into blocks of color on canvas, no one suffers, nobody loses a job--aside from maybe Rothko. Art, literature, philosophy are about what isn't there; they absent the world in order to speculate about it within their infinite realms of greater or lesser imaginative abstraction. An economy is about living in a practical sense; it's how a culture survives within its environment. There is no room for speculation there.         (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
9:54 am	It's Way Too Soon But I can't help imagining the tornado that wiped out K-State's wind erosion lab last night had a sense of irony.  It does look like the same system killed one in Chapman, though, and wiped out about 85% of the town. It's amazing it wasn't worse, considering the I-70 corridor (broadly speaking) is pretty heavily populated for this part of the world. It has been a very unsettled spring weather-wise, and, I hate to say it, but more frequent, more violent storms for the nation's midsection have been predicted by climate-change models since the '90s. We're also shifting pretty consistently from four distinct seasons to a rainy and dry seasonal pattern: rainy running from October to mid-June, dry July through mid-October.    Not that I've been paying attention or anything. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
9:04 am	Simple Solution As the Republicans once again block any effort to get the oil companies to do anything other than screw Americans and the economy, I have come up with a simple, direct, and elegant solution to our energy issues that will, for exactly those reasons, be completely ignored. It is this: Instead of just taxing the oil companies, remove their existing tax breaks and subsidies with the caveat that they will be returned as the oil companies bring renewable fuels to the market. It's not good enough for them just to "show progress toward" or "research and develop" but they must actually have viable renewable fuels for sale. Even better would be to make it a competition: those who are fastest to get their products to the people would be rewarded with more tax breaks than the slower ones with the slowest ones getting no, or few, tax breaks at all. That would reflect the severity of the problem and how dire our imperilment, in fact, is. We would also be surprised at how fast non-food sources of those fuels would appear; from organic waste and switchgrass for ethanol to  algae for biodiesel, the problem is not the technology but the lack of investment.   In complement to the supply side, we should pledge to take on the retiree benefits packages of the Big Three auto manufacturers as public responsibilities if and only if these companies offer vehicles across their lines that operate on renewable fuels and as they retrofit older vehicles to run on them. This solution would make conservatives happy as their favorite companies would get their precious tax breaks. It would make liberals and environmentalists happy as it would move toward carbon-neutrality in a real way. It would satisfy free-market capitalists since it would create market-based competition to be the first to supply viable alternatives to gas. For all these reasons, it's no doubt doomed, as even worse than a solution that harms "us" is one that benefits "them," even if it benefits all of us as well.           (Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
11:21 am	Meme Doubleteam Since  ammutbite and deusdiabolus both memed out on this, I suppose I can't avoid it. "List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to." Like them, I won't tag but leave it up to you-all. 1. Hilary Hahn - Bach's Violin Concerti (BWV 1041, 1042, 1043, & 1060) 2. Thelonious Monk - "April in Paris" (Thelonious Himself) 3. Cheap Trick - "I Want You to Want Me" (Live at Budokan) 4. Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic - Brahms's Symphony #1. 5. Charlie Mingus - "Orange was the Color of Her Dress, then Blue Silk." 6. Muddy Waters - "Thirteen Highway" 7. Steve Reich - "It's Gonna' Rain."    (2 Comments |Comment on this)
10:50 am	Idle Thoughts Systems of values reward behaviors and states of being that those who hold those values think are good or in line with those values and punish behavior they do not like or do not think uphold those values. In America, this means that the system of values rewards wealth and privilege and punishes poverty and disconnection. The greatest predictor of being wealthy in America is having grown up wealthy; the greatest predictor of poverty is having grown up poor. But our system is ambiguous: it also exists within a system of stated values that posits that equality and individual initiative are good, that they reward and should be rewarded. Over time, a few from the lower classes have used these countervailing values to rise to the top—or close to it. They are able to purchase a certain type of acceptance, though that acceptance is never total (see Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon). Those few have made those on the bottom and in the middle believe in the myth that they, too, can make it to the top with hard work and perseverance. Ironically, by allowing a few to reach near their ranks, those on top have successfully placated the masses below by letting reality reinforce their mythology—a mythology now more strongly adhered to by the lower classes than the upper. Revolution is therefore unlikely in the United States; the nation most likely to be able to do revolution effectively and without bloodshed and through constitutional means is the least likely to do it at all. Tocqueville was perhaps the first to see that the nation's character is more or less what kept it from flying apart: the U.S. Constitution is nothing compared to the U.S. constitution. What keeps that frail document in place is that it has become something of a tradition, a bit of sport for us. This is, incidentally, why the vice-president's abuse of presidential power is so dangerous. But thus our make-up sometimes makes a mockery of our ideals. It also explains why we tolerate, on a social level if not a legal one—the kind of hate and ignorance that we do: despite free and compulsory education, we believe that it is a person's right to be ineducable, to “get there” by other means, not knowing where “there,” in fact, is, and settling for a reasonable facsimile of 4,000 square feet on a suburban cul-de-sac. This should not surprise us: we're being rewarded for staying put by accepting the lie that we're upwardly mobile. We're being punished for our ignorance and disconnection by living it as a positive consumer boon—on credit, of course. This isn't much different in effect than the feudalist values system when it incorporated the power of the cross to conquer and divide. Humbleness was preached to those who needed humbling in order for the kings and princes to retain power; meekness was taught to the otherwise collectively powerful masses freeing it up to be distributed from God to country and King. Those who had no wealth to work miracles for them hoped for miracles, salvation, from above. In order for Jesus's message, which is inherently antithetical to power, to be used effectively by those who wished to wield power, a situation of temporal dominance had to be established so that liberation could be shunted safely into the afterlife where it could do no harm to the worldly aristocracy. This process was so effective that even a contemporary Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, genuinely believes it, even though the simple facts of history and decent translations of scripture give heavy evidence to the contrary. Perhaps culture can be seen as a way of managing systems of power, of establishing countervailing values when the existing ones begin to fail or are abused. Perhaps our arts and letters, our activism, our speeches, must be brought to bear to make this happen. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
10:58 am	On Chickens, Eggs A recent post by slit on a study suggesting that the differences in math and science score between men and women are not biologically based has me thinking about that age-old nature vs. nurture question. As something of an educator, I'm more and more coming down on the side of nurture, or at least that the environment has a much greater influence on ability and behavior than we give it credit for. This is based on some pretty specious anecdotal evidence of mine. The female-dominated nursing program where I work has women students who express a good deal of math/science phobia in my English classes also doing complex pharmaceutical calculations with nary-a-complaint. The only class that's viewed as being "impossible" (most of the other classes are are "hard" or "challenging") is the microbiology class taught in a rather patriarchal manner by an otherwise not-so-patriarchal male. This is not to say that women can't learn math and science from men but that they are taught at a fairly early age that they can't or shouldn't; often, there's a good deal of psychological baggage by the time they're college freshmen. We know now that the brain develops and changes in response to its environment, and a tremendous amount of brain change takes place before formal schooling even begins. Even forward-thinking people like my brother and sister-in-law had trouble raising my nephew in a gender-neutral way. If it hadn't been the fact that my nephew's grandfather and one of his uncles are mechanics and that many of the hand-me-down toys he had to play with were cars and trucks, he was still bombarded by media images--even between 0-3 years of age--that little boys like cars and trucks and that he is a little boy. Now, given this environment, how can we honestly say that his genes had anything to do with it? My niece, the daughter of my other brother and sister-in-law, will be instructive. She's too young to tell, at this point, but her mother is rather traditional in terms of gender roles while her father has surrounded the house with cars, motorcycles and ATVs. Further complicating the issue, her mother's actual life differs from her expressed values as she has not put her career on hold to raise her child--a career launched in the very nursing program discussed above. Will my niece follow the expressed role or the lived one? Will she imprint on the mechanically-inclined culture of her father's family or the uber-cultural expectations imported into the home through various data streams? Will she do none of the above and just be uniquely her own person? I suppose I'd be proudest of all of that last outcome.                (Comment on this)
Monday, May 26th, 2008
9:58 am	New Stuff! New issues of Take2 and Eastwesterly Review are up at postmodernvillage.com! Featured work includes newly discovered films from the DI Arbeit Studios and, of course, more of the ubiquitous Bean Newton poems. Thanks to jenniker for making it all work and for the hot(tt) new redesign! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
10:12 am	A Definition An entrepreneur is someone who has convinced others to invest in his own sense of entitlement. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
11:14 am	What's Missing For a variety of reasons I ended up watching a “debate” between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza one night on C-SPAN2 on the subject of the relative merits of religion, particularly Christianity vs. atheism. You can figure out who was on what side. I use the term “debate” for lack of a better one, but really, I can't think of two worse representatives of the respective positions. Hitchens was soused, and D'Souza made his typical nuanced-on-the-surface-but-blindingly-simplistic-beneath arguments. The audience showed about the same level of sophistication as that of the Jerry Springer Show—slightly less as some in Springer's crowd watch with a good dose of irony, and at this little circus all seemed committed. This is too bad, as a genuine debate about the roles of religion and science in how we view the world is still a compelling one. Instead of tackling the issues with the kind of reflection they deserve, both Hitchens and D'Souza fell back on the same moribund arguments that have sullied these waters for as long as anyone can recall: Hitchens contended there was no scientific proof of the existence of God, so there isn't one; D'Souza countered that science is too internally conflicted and has too little evidence to prove its own theories, and that therefore there is only one alternative, that being a traditionalist view of creation. D'Souza's explanation is a leap of faith that he posits as pure science, and Hitchens's is just bad science since the lack of something does not obviate its existence. If Hitchens were being honest, he would have to say that science is agnostic on the matter of God, but that the lack of positive proof would tend to indicate there isn't one. If D'Souza were being honest, he would have to say that the limitations inherent in science force him to appeal to faith and that his traditionalist view makes the most sense for him. If we were all being honest about this, we would say that the complexity of things like DNA might seem miraculous to us in comparison to everyday experience, but, given the nature of our physical laws, they are not beyond the realm of possibility. If we were all being honest, we'd say that these same laws that give rise to DNA, in some sense, create us, though obviously not in the same way that insists on a Big, White, Bearded Man in the Sky. D'Souza, naturally, clung to the idea of God as a font for morality enforced by the promise of eternal salvation or damnation. Hitchens contended that the moral sense is innate, a product of evolution, corrupted by our flawed societies and the religions they espouse. D'Souza pointed out the mass murders of Stalin, Hilter, and Mao as being “secular” and “atheistic” in origin; Hitchens countered with the Crusades and feudalism, and that there never would have been a Stalin or a Hitler without the bad behavior of the religiously backed reigns of the kings and the czars. This back-and-forth does not seem to make sense when you consider that the justification for mass murder always comes from what is most readily at hand—faith, tradition, racial purity, ideological uniformity—but that it always comes down to power, taking it and keeping it. And while our capacity for morality may very well be innate, individual expressions of it are certainly not, and that furthermore, they vary from culture to culture and era to era. Morality is more like language: by our natures we can always acquire it, but which form of it we do acquire is determined neither by God nor by genetics. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Moral relativism makes morality no more real; it merely acknowledges the complexity, ambiguity, and instability of the human condition. Likewise, it's just fine to say that certain positions on the existence or lack of a divine being is not, maybe even cannot be, a scientific one. Science must be limited in its scope to pursue its methodology, and the more comfortable we are with that, the better off we'll be when it inevitably reverses itself. Faith will always require a certain amount of unprovability, and the more comfortable we are with that, the more rested out spirits will be. What really bothers me about the positions of both D'Souza and Hitchens is that they are both fundamentalist: both require a level of certainty entirely unjustified by our limited epistemology. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 19th, 2008
11:25 am	The Market Is Not Wise We hear a lot about the “wisdom of the market” these days, especially from neo-con free-market zealots posing as savvy 30-something hipsters. But with oil at $126 a barrel on nothing more than speculation, we see further evidence that the market is not wise at all: it is short-sighted and flighty, idiotic, bullheaded, and daft. $126 a barrel oil simply ignores current supply and demand, with relatively high production and declining demand in the US of A. It rose this high first on what journalists called “jitters,” as if the traders had had too much caffeine. Actually, they were acting like spooked cattle in response to the distant thunder of the Bush administration's threats of war with Iran from a few months back. (Could it be this is part of the president's and vice-president's retirement plan? But that would be too cynical a postulation.) The market responds to pressure with the same lack of rationality and bandwagon mentality that leads to the mediocrity that is American Idol. By this point, of course, it's buoyed up by that speculation: there's money to be made in them thar irrational behavior, and so traders bid the price up higher hoping to dump it at just the right time. This is from the same generation of traders who seem to have learned nothing from the housing bubble and the tech bubble and biotech before that. Some of them may even be old enough to recall the collapse of savings-and-loans in the '80s. Thus their behavior is even less that irrational: it's bordering on criminal since their actions lead directly to the suffering of millions, in this case millions who can't afford food anymore because it costs too much to grow and transport. Beyond this, the mere fact that we're still trading in oil in the first place is a good indication of the lack of market wisdom, as we've known for 30 years that there's simply no future in oil since it's a finite resource and we'll run out of it sooner or later. Granted, there's plenty to be made in the meantime, but you can make a short-term bundle by liquidating all your household goods and living in a cardboard box too, and I don't see many traders doing that. A wise market would have acknowledged the inherent risk in investing in alternatives a long time ago, but would have plunged ahead anyway because the alternative is riding out a dwindling resource until there's no market upon which to trade at all. (Comment on this)
10:45 am	Not Tom Cruise, but Psycho-Bashing Anyway I get offended at contemporary psychology's use of the term "suicidal ideation," which implies, by its very presence, dire mental imbalance necessitating medication if not hospitalization. For most of the writers I know, myself included, "suicidal ideation" is just part of the cognitive background noise. For some of us it's louder than for others, but for few, if any, is it not present at all. What's really offensive about how psychology deals with the situation is that it substitutes a monolithic, clinical definition that eliminates all complexity and nuance for what we recognize as a complex and genuine set of existential questions.    (5 Comments |Comment on this)
9:53 am	Cheap Thought o' the Day Film is the perfect medium for contemporary society since it is a substitute for genuine interaction. This is why it is difficult for a film to be warm without being sentimental or analytical without being cold. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
3:06 pm	From Actual Student Papers I've heard of some kinky stuff, but . . . "His assignation consisted of being cut into pieces, which Satrapi shows." Bow down before the one you serve: "He sends his brother-in-law Creole to an oracle to look for answers. At this time, it is beginning to be explained that Oedipus was not the original king of Thebes. It was formerly ruled by King Labius and he was described as a great and charismatic ruler . . ." (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
10:31 am	Righting Pomes Iz Hard Had to look up how to spell "scapulimancy" for a poem I'm writing and stumbled across a pretty good Wikipedia entry on oracle bones. Better than my anthropology texts in college were, anyway. Also, looks like Honda's ASIMO has conducted a piece with the DSO. It's a great advance in blah blah blah blah. Really, my reaction to this is the same as it is to most attempts at creating androids and artificial intelligence: We have such a right to create artificial intelligence because, after all, we've done such a wonderful job using our own. Current Mood: Ganky Current Music: Diane Rhem (Comment on this)
Monday, May 12th, 2008
10:19 am	Perpetual Adolescence, an Insider's Perspective Yet again my students prove they cannot listen—that simply hearing is beyond them. They must be distracted because otherwise they might actually start thinking about something in the world around them, or, worse yet, they might start thinking about something in the past or something in the world that is not immediately around them, maybe something from a cubicle or from a rat-infested Mumbai slum. They might accidentally think about some massive machine slowly leaking fluid onto a factory floor. They might realize there's a price somebody else pays for their comfort or that others unknown pay for their suffering. Aside from the children of the very rich, the children of America's middle class are the most privileged beings on the face of the earth. They—which is to say “we,” as I was one too--do not suffer in the sense that others do, from famine or war or the violence and paranoia of political oppression. Yet any one of them will moan of a terrible life, of privation from all that's holy and cool, of a series of arbitrary parental usurpations of rights and entitlements. He'll also tell you that the poor just don't work hard enough, that the wealthy have all earned what they have, that the smart are far from cool. They'll tell you that they're all going to be basketball stars and captains of industry, rappers and designer clothing moguls, actors and celebrities-without-portfolio, that the future is boundless and full of glory on the court, the screen, and the stage. The American adolescent is a creation of marketing. No one is more sure of who she is than the American adolescent, and one of the things she's sure of is that she's “finding herself,” that this is a “difficult” and an “awkward” age. He knows this because he's been told it. She knows what she is supposed to listen to on her iPod, indeed that she should be listening to it on an iPod. Jazz is off-limits, classical is for commercials when an air of sophistication is meant to be portrayed. Everything is better with a hip-hop beat. These are a people sure that carpenter pants are out for now and that ripped jeans are back in. They know precisely what's bad or ugly or old skool and precisely what's hawt and new; though they may very well disagree on the particulars, that does not change the precision of their opinions. The American adolescent wears his neediness like an American Eagle t-shirt that she changes from day-to-day. She wears it as a badge of her hurt and her vulnerability which she's sure of because that is part of what's packaged as adolescence. Margaret Meade may have been the first to recognize adolescence as a Western concept, but now we must wrangle with it as a product of marketing. Adolescence is an exploitation of the indulged offspring of the middle class, whose buying power itself is a projection of the status of their parents. The best training they'll ever get in being consumers happens here, and as such it is a de facto right of passage. Here is learned that there is no distinction between their best interests and their “style,” that individual style is a definition of self, and, because of this, that there is no distinction between political liberty and consumer choice. This pattern is maintained long into, if not throughout, adulthood, with style and image-creation largely supplanting personality. Image is a boon to marketers, since it must be continually updated, continually groomed for the next life stage. And so Americans don't develop much until they are in their 20s, and may not develop at all, or may never develop past their glory days of being marketed-to at 16 or 17 or so. This is not here, as it may be in some societies, a detriment. It may even be an asset. The current president of the United States was elected precisely for his adolescent brashness, bullheadedness, and peevishness, all of which we find endearing. The irony is that many Americans who view themselves as most grown-up are the ones who encourage and promote perpetual adolescence: America's conservatives. Conservatism in America is associated with fanatical militantism, intolerance, black-and-white thinking, an absolute hatred of ambiguity, and an unswerving faith in marketing and in the private sector generally. It also worships power, and so American conservatives encourage in their children behavior that would be seen as outré in most civilized societies: bullying, schoolyard vigilantism, unwarranted aggression of the field of play. Indeed, American football can be seen as perhaps the condensation of the American conservative ethic; it is hierarchical but also anarchical, violent, competitive for its own sake, and reliant on a purely externalized set of purposes and goals. It is no surprise that many notable American conservatives are football fanatics, from Patton to Nixon to Condoleeza Rice. This is something they share with many male American adolescents. The confluence of politics and marketing creates perpetual consumers, perpetual adolescents, and a group of people absolutely certain of what they're about, as their values-as-lifestyle-choice are reinforced at very turn. That we would blunder into Iraq the way we did, and that this particular president would do it, should not surprise us at all. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2008
10:39 am	Comparison Disc Poems These arise from the challenge I set out for myself when I have my Comp. 1 students listen to music as a lead-in to their comparison assignment: I try to write a poem about or relating to each song during the duration of that song. Sometimes, it doesn't work out quite that way, and so not all the tracks get a corresponding poem. The results can be interesting, but they're generally unpublishable, not because they're bad, necessarily (or no worse than what I usually write), but because editors have no idea what to do with them. I ran across a recent batch and present them below. Most references are obvious, and, I think, probably only the last one would have a chance of standing on its own. I might actually try to sell that one to a little magazine somewhere sometime. Short Skirt, Long Cake is easy as rising, yeasty as soda, long as the jacket covers, a barely-skirted bum, as sweet as sweat in fluid neon light-curves of rave. Sweet Jane Your smile, purled by one tiny stitch—older, you'd regret the lines left, traces of joy, traces of pain. Ice Cheese, even then, poof-cake, but despite all that cool in the white-kid-from-the-suburbs kind of way that perpetual adolescence reinvents adolescence as perpetually cool. Under Pressure For your pleasure the street, the pressure of the yes but squished into a baseline, a trans- Atlantic fright, stretched from London to the sparkling New York sidewalk mica—humanity, finally, is geology. What “U” Can't Touch Hammer hit harder than we recall, but slammed, mostly, his own fingers, and, lamed now, preaches what perhaps all along should have been: the Gospel according to Hammer, M.C. Superfreak An unlikely subject for the soul: the girl you don't take home to mother, but the one you most want to be with when you're with the one you will. Even her toenails make a scene. But such is obsession: the most interest is, after all, the prurient. Spanish Harlem No love is innocent, not even that rose, picked so to grow: in my garden is possession, the “special,” one of dreams, the stem of a blossom from the deepest place imaginable, Spanish Harlem, the exotic within; the depth of dreams is the bloom of sex, the blush of id in broad day. Blues for Johann The writer of the Coffee Cantata must have been blue, the organist who fathered a nation of notes and played into perpetuity, who, dutifully, fulfilled every Sabbath's obligation for music for a measure of grain and a casket of beer. Melancholia and introspection are intertwined, the epigenetics of existence, the essence of worship, a dedication that is meditation, a tonic for the unworthy, the blessed grazing safe in the fields of the great masses, the unwashed. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
4:02 pm	From Actual Student Papers  Should I be worried? "The smell of glue also makes it presents known."  Also: Oh. My. God: "School are going with the mindset that when kids reach a cretin age that they know how to read and right but that's not always true and you know if your in 6 the grade that you would be imbersided to tell some one that you don't know how to read." (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 28th, 2008
5:51 pm	What, no Paradise Lost? Instructions via slit. This is as close as I can remember, which isn't. What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. The Horrible Meme (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 The Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler’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 : a memoir in books Memoirs of a Geisha Middlesex Quicksilver Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West The Canterbury Tales The Historian : a novel 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 : a novel 1984 Angels & Demons The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) 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 : a memoir 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 : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values The Aeneid Watership Down Gravity’s Rainbow The Hobbit In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences White Teeth Treasure Island David Copperfield The Three Musketeers (3 Comments |Comment on this)