BBC Book Dare

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How many have you read?

*I will do this survey again in two years, after the Peace Corps. Maybe that would be one way to measure the amount of free time I have.
X = yes = 33
O = partly read

1 Pride and Prejudice X
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling O
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible - O
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens O
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller O
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare O
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurie
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaet Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy O
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez O
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
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 - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
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 X
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 Inferno – Dante
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo O

turbo jam

Pollution plus a belly full of peppers makes running painful, which is a shame because I love running in this cool weather. But today I found Turbo Jam on tudou.com, the in-China solution for the forbidden YouTube. Gen was right, Chalene is crazy but her dancing and boxing combos are fun! So this evening, I blasted Turbo Jam, not caring if it disturbed the visiting American who is staying upstairs. I know that's quite rude of me, but the first thing she said to me was that she worked for Bush. harrharrharr
She's also the reason Rach and I have to attend a rice wine marathon tomorrow night.

the female complaint

Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is a gift that keeps on taking.

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

It does matter that I decided to stop giving.
It does matter that I will never live for him.
The bastard keeps taking.
And I keep complaining.

According to Berlant, the personal is general. If she is right, then you must understand.

(not predictable enough)

Parenthetically powerful:

(To readers who do think that women in the United States are subordinated no longer, here is another view. In modern liberal democratic societies, most inequality is partial, contradictory, and contested: it is often more informal [in behavior] than formal [law or policy]. Yet these complex conditions are not so complicated that their negative impacts are unpredictable. Disrespect for women is not unpredictable enough. It is more often affectively sensed or experienced in episodes than objective and dramatically fixable. Popular culture is terrible at dealing with mixed bags and mixed feelings when the register is ideological and the topic is intimate, and women remain the default managers of the intimate. Even if social negativity and antagonism are intricate and uneven and not merely top-down, the social field is still shaped powerfully by them.)

- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint

(Berlant is not saying that formal subordination no longer exists. Surely some women are formally subordinated more than others.)

sheaves of reality

I'm still stuck on Mrs. Ramsay. Why didn't she stand up againt her husband's "tyrannical" rationality? Why didn't she say something in her own defense? I don't buy that she's shy and docile by nature. Pshh.

I'm reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and while her sections on psychoanalysis are just mumble jumble to me, she's got quite a few powerful passages that make the book a worthwhile read for anyone as easily confused and bored by psychoanalysis as me.

This passage offers an explanation for Mrs. Ramsay's silence.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body.

- Monique Wittig

Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression - that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility. This presumptive heterosexuality, she argues, functions within discourse to communicate a threat: "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be." Women, lesbians, and gay men, she argues, cannot assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compuslory heterosexuality. To speak within the system is to be deprived of the possibility of speech; hence, to speak at all in that context is a performative contradiction, the linguistic assertion of a self that cannot "be" within the language that asserts it.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

body: flying in the face of facts

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf beautifully illustrates the tension inherent in the Cartesian dualism of mind/body and its "tyrannical" inscription on the man/woman dichotomy. From a "female" perspective, the "male" virtue of rationality, when pursued for its own sake, as done by Mr. Ramsay, is nothing short of tyranny with a cool explanation.


"The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. 'Damn you,' he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine to-morrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack for consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said."

Just Do It! crisis

"The pressure to "do something" is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence. Are not our acts often such gestures? The old saying "Don't just talk, do something!" is one of the stupidest things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much, such as intervening in nature, destroying the environment, and so forth. Perhaps it is time to step back think, and say the right thing. True, we often talk about soemthing instead of doing it; but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Such as throwing $700 billin at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose in the first place."

- Slavoj Zizek, "To Each According to His Greed"
Harper Magazine, Oct. 2009