Pretentious Book Meme

I've seen this called both the Pretentious Book Meme or The Top 106 books most often marked "unread" by LibraryThing's users.

Here are the rules: BOLD the books you have read, italicize the books you started but did not finish (DNF), *STAR* the books you've read more than once, underline books that are on your TBR pile, and cross out books that you hated.

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 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
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

Montana, Hey It Ain't So Bad!

I'm back from my adventures in Great Falls proper. Damn they have a lot of casinos here. Would you call a converted 7-11 a casino? It seems too small to be called that.

In driving around I was on the lookout for a grocery store, knowing the liquor laws in other states are sane and just. I stopped by an Albertsons and I found this:


This brand, Schmitt-Sohne, was one of the first I tried in my sampling of various types of wine. I fell in love with this wonderful little german wine and haven't been able to find it in any of the Utah liquor stores.

For this, Montana, I'll let you sit next to me at lunch and look cool.

*Pause* Hi. I'm In Delaware.

I'm not actually in Delaware, I'm in Montana but the quote seemed entirely appropriate. Do people go to Montana on purpose?

Don't be mad Montana-ites (Montanans?) I'm mostly joking. Big Sky country is great, even if I haven't seen the sky since descending through the clouds. At least it's cooler than Salt Lake and there's something thrilling to having a hotel room to yourself, a rental car, and the company paying for your meals.

I'll only be here for one night but I intend on enjoying the hell out of that one night!

In Montana.

Meet my new mistress, WoW

Yeah yeah, I've been gone. There's this new girl I've been hanging out with quite a bit lately. She's at least 6'5" with horns and hoofs and can take away your pain in an instant.

Ok, that's about as nerdy as I want to get with this. I can feel the ick factor creeping up if I continue any further.

I recently built a new desktop PC after Age of Conan laughed and spat on my "gaming" laptop. A few of my gaming buddies gave it a try but the game will bring all but the most hardy or brand new systems to their knees. I forgot that MMO's are no fun if you don't have friends to share them with and though it's a new spin on the genre, it's still no fun alone.

So those bastards sucked me back in, and good this time.

Around the time of my separation Blizzard released The Burning Crusade, the first expansion pack for WoW. As a way to focus on something other than what was going on at the time, I re-subscribed and started as one of the new races, a Draenei. I'd had a brief flirtation with the priest class when I'd last played a year before and I had enjoyed the helping rather than hurting aspect of the class. Even when face-melting as a shadow priest you still help your group. I made it a she instead of a he because I still haven't seen a dress-wearing male character in WoW that doesn't look goofy as all get-out. Besides, the Draenei females have nice cans and if I'm going to be staring at the same thing for hours on end it might as well be some enjoyable scenery.


When I unsubscribed I left her at level 38. Between then and now there had been a few patches that made leveling insanely faster and I was having a blast as they flew by. This time I seemed to find time to group with friends more often and it all sort of clicked in a way it hadn't in the past. Last week I hit 70 and had my first real raid experience, headset and all.

I'm in my own house but I'm still sharing this virtual space with real friends. We get to go these fantastical places and do cool shit together. We get to share experiences, whether it's killing a boss in a dungeon or wiping the horde in a battleground.

Now the only thing I have to figure out is where the brakes are.

More Cavedoll

If you read the comments below on my review of The Faint show you'll notice that Knessa, the female lead vocals of Cavedoll, was cool enough to stop by and say thanks. Her husband Camden, male lead vocals, also e-mailed me thanking me for the review.

For being such incredibly nice people I figured I'd plug them one more time. That and I can't get enough of their stuff.

Full of Awe



Thanks guys!

(Not) Freecreditreport.com

Since I got burned I thought I would toss it out there for all my faithful readers. Don't use freecreditreport.com as they automatically subscribe you to their monthly reporting service with little in the way of notification of their intent. I noticed a $15 deduction from my checking account and searched for the source. I found I wasn't the first to be burned.

Learn from my mistake and follow the links from the FTC's site to get your Free (as in beer) credit report.