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Sep. 3rd, 2019 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Book Meme
Haven't done one of these in a while...
ganked fromwendelah1
"The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read." I have elected to put the books I started but didn't finish in italics. Just because.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ( Hardy, Alcott and Dickens make me itchy for some reason...I don't know why.)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've haven't read all of his plays.
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -- I tried twice, I don't understand how so many people made it through this book.
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky - own it, every once and a while we flirt with one another. I own in paperback.
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -- Tolstoy also makes me itchy -- could be the translations.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (I disagree with this entry as it's 6 books and one is further down the list)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (This is a partial duplicate of 33, BBC editors)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -- tried...
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden - read for a book club ages ago.
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown It's terrible. So terrible -- yep. And somewhat dumb. I do not understand what the appeal of this book is.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving Loved this book in my twenties.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery --- I read the play adaptation, does that count? Probably not.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Hardy and I are not friends.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood - grim. Made it through two of hers, the Robber Bride, and The Blind Assassin. She definitely dislikes men.
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan -- hated this book. It was a painful read.
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel - saw the movie sort of killed my desire to finish the book.
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-time – Mark Haddon - Own it, never read it.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck - read the play adaptation, which probably doesn't count.
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov -- I liked Pale Fire better.
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 -- own it, and have a signed copy no less
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker - me and late 19th Century literature are unmixy things.
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Why is this book on this list? Actually I've wondered this about a lot of the books on this list. The BBC and I are not in agreement over what people should read.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery I've read it in French, too, she said proudly.
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -- this feels familiar but can't remember if I read it or not.
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 (See #14 above. The BBC must have copy editor positions open, clearly.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I've read a lot of books.
I'd have put some Toni Morrison on there along with Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin. Less Dickens, less Hardy, less Shakespeare. Honestly, less 19th Century stuff. But that's just me.
2. Parents are still on the road to Charlott, they were the last bus to leave, but they are getting closer. They left evacuated at 2. Good news? They'll probably get there long before the hurricane hits. With any luck the Hurricane will mosey out to sea and not inflict any more damage.
3. Two Year Study Shows This One Activity Destroys Your Emotional and Physical Health
Want to stay healthy, both emotionally and physically? Researchers from UC San Diego and Yale have some simple advice for you: Limit the amount of time you spend on Facebook. While this may sound like typical anti-social media crankiness from academia, this time they have some impressive research to back up their case. Holly Shakya, assistant professor at UC San Diego, and Yale professor Nicholas Christakis spent two years following 5,208 adults who are part of a Gallup long-term study. After asking permission, they monitored these subjects' Facebook use directly from Facebook, rather than asking subjects to report their own use. (People often don't realize how much time they spend on the social network.) And they checked in with subjects on their emotional and physical well-being, as well as their body-mass index (BMI), three times over the course of two years.
"Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being," the researchers wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. "These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year." Yikes.
Why is too much Facebook bad for your emotional health? Previous research has shown that the social network creates a sort of false peer pressure. Since most people are cautious about posting negative or upsetting experiences on Facebook, the social network creates a misleading environment where everyone seems to be doing better and having more fun than you are. As the researchers put it, "Exposure to the carefully curated images from others' lives leads to negative self-comparison."
No comparison for the real thing.
But what of Facebook's magical ability to connect you to friends and family even when they're far away? To help you find long-lost friends and relatives? To help you keep up on what's going on with all the important people in your life? There's lots of research to show that having a social circle and an active social life and community leads to better health and greater longevity. The researchers wondered if a virtual social life and community would create the same benefits.
No, they don't, as these results make clear--in fact they have the opposite effect. In addition to negative self-comparison, the researchers note, increased use of Facebook and other social media tends to take up a lot of people's time and can create an illusion of closeness. To the extent that time spent on Facebook takes you away from real-world social gatherings, you lose the benefit of being in a community, the researchers say. The same is likely true if you're at a gathering in body, but your eyes and mind are locked on your smartphone, checking out your friends' latest posts.
So what should you do? I'm not going to tell you to stop using Facebook. You wouldn't listen to me anyway, and with so many people the world over using the network, it's impossible to just ignore it. But limit your use to no more than the hour or so each day that the average Facebook user spends on the site. And try to put down your phone more often, look up at the people around you, and join the conversation that's happening in the real world.
I'd agree with this. My problem with social media is well -- the same problem I have with small talk. A lot of it is superficial bragging. It's exhausting. I've been limiting my time on it -- and if I'm on it, it's mainly to follow a television series spoiler site, which only really posts spoilers and discussion topics for the television show.
DW isn't quite the same. In an odd way -- it's more intimate. We share more on a deeper level here, and it's less superficial and less about how great we're doing.
It's the difference between receiving a letter and receiving a text message, I think.
4. 7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes
1. Watterson to Spielberg and Lucas: Thanks, But No Thanks
Lee Salem, Watterson’s editor at Universal Press Syndicate, recalls fielding several calls in the 1980s from a who’s who of celebrities and producers who wanted to either get in business with the author or just pass along their admiration for his work. At one point, both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas reached out asking to meet with Watterson, but the artist, who felt schmoozing and publicity took his focus away from the strip, politely declined. (Salem did, however, forward a fan letter to Watterson from Stephen King. The editor didn’t open it, but we’d like to think it expressed satisfaction at the numerous decapitated and suicidal snowmen that populated Calvin’s front yard over the years.)
2. Calvin and Hobbes … and Robotman?
When Watterson was busy trying to find a home for Calvin and Hobbes in its earliest incarnation—the two were supporting characters in a strip titled In the Doghouse, about the grown-up struggles of Calvin’s older brother—United Feature Syndicate made the cartoonist an offer: Would he shoehorn an existing character, a sentient machine named Robotman, into some of Calvin’s fantasies? The syndicate had licensing deals cooking and was looking to get their intellectual property into newspapers to help push merchandise. Watterson, displeased with the crassly commercial nature of the request, refused. (Robotman got his own strip in 1985. And no, we don’t remember him, either.)
3. The Complete Collection Isn’t Quite Complete
To celebrate the strip’s 20th anniversary in 2005, publisher Andrews McMeel issued a hernia-inducing collection of Watterson’s entire body of work—sort of. Salem recalls a minor blow-up from readers when Watterson published two strips in the 1980s that depicted Calvin mocking the idea he might be adopted. In one strip, Calvin’s complains that “I’ll bet my biological mother would’ve bought me a comic book…” It was later changed to, “I’ll bet a good mother would’ve bought me a comic book…”
Another strip, featuring Hobbes in a washing machine, is missing from the collection entirely. Some have speculated that putting the tiger in a spin cycle might be an unwelcome hint he’s not real. No one, including Watterson, ever wanted to have that question answered.
4. Watterson Did License. A Little.
The persistent affection for Calvin and Hobbes is attributable in part to Watterson’s adamant refusal to water down his characters with toys, coffee mugs, and backpacks. While there was never a Garfield-esque empire of merchandising, he did occasionally offer his blessing for ancillary items. Calvin appeared on a Museum of Modern Art shirt commemorating an Ohio State University exhibition of comic art in 2001; two calendars, for 1989 and 1990, were issued; the book Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes was a tutorial intended to help students improve their language skills; finally, the duo mugged for a postage stamp in 2010, part of a Postal Service sheet of comic strip icons.
5. Urine Trouble
While any true fan of Calvin and Hobbes finds the ubiquitous, unauthorized car decal of Calvin peeing on automotive logos distasteful, at least one state took legal action: In the late 1990s, South Carolina slapped drivers sporting it with a ticket for $200, declaring it “obscene.” In a 2005 Q&A with readers to promote the Complete collection, Watterson dryly noted that he “clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo.”
5. An Illustrated History of How Sugar Conguered the World
8,000: Sugar is native to, and first cultivated in, New Guinea. Initially, people chew on the reeds to enjoy the sweetness. 2,000 years later, sugar cane makes its way (by ship) to the Phillipines and India. Sugar is first refined in India: the first description of a sugar mill is found in an Indian text from 100 A.D.
400-350: Recipes call for sugar in the Mahabhashya of Patanjali. They include rice pudding with milk, sweet barley meal, and fermented drinks with ginger.
327: Greeks and Romans learn about sugar during visits to India. Nearchus, Alexandria’s general, writes of “a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made, though the plant bears no fruit.” Small amounts are brought back to the Mediterranean and traded to physicians who use it for medical purposes.
500-600 A.D.: Jundi Shapur, a university in Iran, becomes the meeting place for the world’s scholars (at least those west of China). Greek, Christian, Jewish, and Persian scholars gather to create the first teaching hospital. They study texts from various cultures, and by 600 A.D. they are writing about a potent Indian medicine: sugar. They also develop better methods for processing sugar cane into crystallized sugar.
Circa 650: The Arabs were masters of growing, refining, and cooking with sugar; they begin to conceptualize it not just as a medicine or spice, but as a rare delicacy for royalty and the most wealthy. They combine it with ground almonds to create a moldable sweet still popular today—marzipan—and sugar sculptures become regular parts of lavish dinner parties.
As armies of Muslims take over Egypt, Persia, India and the Mediterranean, they bring their knowledge of sugar with them. Many European doctors learn of the medicinal uses for sugar from Arab texts. Under Arab rule, Egyptians master the refining process and become known for making the purest, whitest sugar.
6. Work was hectic and exhausting. I stole thirty minutes after my walk (at lunch) to work on my novel. Then sent it to myself, to hopefully work on some more tonight.
But it is sunny here, and I did get a twenty-thirty minute walk at lunch.
Haven't done one of these in a while...
ganked from
wendelah1"The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read." I have elected to put the books I started but didn't finish in italics. Just because.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ( Hardy, Alcott and Dickens make me itchy for some reason...I don't know why.)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've haven't read all of his plays.
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -- I tried twice, I don't understand how so many people made it through this book.
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky - own it, every once and a while we flirt with one another. I own in paperback.
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -- Tolstoy also makes me itchy -- could be the translations.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (I disagree with this entry as it's 6 books and one is further down the list)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (This is a partial duplicate of 33, BBC editors)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -- tried...
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden - read for a book club ages ago.
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown It's terrible. So terrible -- yep. And somewhat dumb. I do not understand what the appeal of this book is.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving Loved this book in my twenties.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery --- I read the play adaptation, does that count? Probably not.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Hardy and I are not friends.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood - grim. Made it through two of hers, the Robber Bride, and The Blind Assassin. She definitely dislikes men.
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan -- hated this book. It was a painful read.
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel - saw the movie sort of killed my desire to finish the book.
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-time – Mark Haddon - Own it, never read it.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck - read the play adaptation, which probably doesn't count.
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov -- I liked Pale Fire better.
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 -- own it, and have a signed copy no less
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker - me and late 19th Century literature are unmixy things.
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Why is this book on this list? Actually I've wondered this about a lot of the books on this list. The BBC and I are not in agreement over what people should read.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery I've read it in French, too, she said proudly.
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -- this feels familiar but can't remember if I read it or not.
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 (See #14 above. The BBC must have copy editor positions open, clearly.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I've read a lot of books.
I'd have put some Toni Morrison on there along with Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin. Less Dickens, less Hardy, less Shakespeare. Honestly, less 19th Century stuff. But that's just me.
2. Parents are still on the road to Charlott, they were the last bus to leave, but they are getting closer. They left evacuated at 2. Good news? They'll probably get there long before the hurricane hits. With any luck the Hurricane will mosey out to sea and not inflict any more damage.
3. Two Year Study Shows This One Activity Destroys Your Emotional and Physical Health
Want to stay healthy, both emotionally and physically? Researchers from UC San Diego and Yale have some simple advice for you: Limit the amount of time you spend on Facebook. While this may sound like typical anti-social media crankiness from academia, this time they have some impressive research to back up their case. Holly Shakya, assistant professor at UC San Diego, and Yale professor Nicholas Christakis spent two years following 5,208 adults who are part of a Gallup long-term study. After asking permission, they monitored these subjects' Facebook use directly from Facebook, rather than asking subjects to report their own use. (People often don't realize how much time they spend on the social network.) And they checked in with subjects on their emotional and physical well-being, as well as their body-mass index (BMI), three times over the course of two years.
"Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being," the researchers wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. "These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year." Yikes.
Why is too much Facebook bad for your emotional health? Previous research has shown that the social network creates a sort of false peer pressure. Since most people are cautious about posting negative or upsetting experiences on Facebook, the social network creates a misleading environment where everyone seems to be doing better and having more fun than you are. As the researchers put it, "Exposure to the carefully curated images from others' lives leads to negative self-comparison."
No comparison for the real thing.
But what of Facebook's magical ability to connect you to friends and family even when they're far away? To help you find long-lost friends and relatives? To help you keep up on what's going on with all the important people in your life? There's lots of research to show that having a social circle and an active social life and community leads to better health and greater longevity. The researchers wondered if a virtual social life and community would create the same benefits.
No, they don't, as these results make clear--in fact they have the opposite effect. In addition to negative self-comparison, the researchers note, increased use of Facebook and other social media tends to take up a lot of people's time and can create an illusion of closeness. To the extent that time spent on Facebook takes you away from real-world social gatherings, you lose the benefit of being in a community, the researchers say. The same is likely true if you're at a gathering in body, but your eyes and mind are locked on your smartphone, checking out your friends' latest posts.
So what should you do? I'm not going to tell you to stop using Facebook. You wouldn't listen to me anyway, and with so many people the world over using the network, it's impossible to just ignore it. But limit your use to no more than the hour or so each day that the average Facebook user spends on the site. And try to put down your phone more often, look up at the people around you, and join the conversation that's happening in the real world.
I'd agree with this. My problem with social media is well -- the same problem I have with small talk. A lot of it is superficial bragging. It's exhausting. I've been limiting my time on it -- and if I'm on it, it's mainly to follow a television series spoiler site, which only really posts spoilers and discussion topics for the television show.
DW isn't quite the same. In an odd way -- it's more intimate. We share more on a deeper level here, and it's less superficial and less about how great we're doing.
It's the difference between receiving a letter and receiving a text message, I think.
4. 7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes
1. Watterson to Spielberg and Lucas: Thanks, But No Thanks
Lee Salem, Watterson’s editor at Universal Press Syndicate, recalls fielding several calls in the 1980s from a who’s who of celebrities and producers who wanted to either get in business with the author or just pass along their admiration for his work. At one point, both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas reached out asking to meet with Watterson, but the artist, who felt schmoozing and publicity took his focus away from the strip, politely declined. (Salem did, however, forward a fan letter to Watterson from Stephen King. The editor didn’t open it, but we’d like to think it expressed satisfaction at the numerous decapitated and suicidal snowmen that populated Calvin’s front yard over the years.)
2. Calvin and Hobbes … and Robotman?
When Watterson was busy trying to find a home for Calvin and Hobbes in its earliest incarnation—the two were supporting characters in a strip titled In the Doghouse, about the grown-up struggles of Calvin’s older brother—United Feature Syndicate made the cartoonist an offer: Would he shoehorn an existing character, a sentient machine named Robotman, into some of Calvin’s fantasies? The syndicate had licensing deals cooking and was looking to get their intellectual property into newspapers to help push merchandise. Watterson, displeased with the crassly commercial nature of the request, refused. (Robotman got his own strip in 1985. And no, we don’t remember him, either.)
3. The Complete Collection Isn’t Quite Complete
To celebrate the strip’s 20th anniversary in 2005, publisher Andrews McMeel issued a hernia-inducing collection of Watterson’s entire body of work—sort of. Salem recalls a minor blow-up from readers when Watterson published two strips in the 1980s that depicted Calvin mocking the idea he might be adopted. In one strip, Calvin’s complains that “I’ll bet my biological mother would’ve bought me a comic book…” It was later changed to, “I’ll bet a good mother would’ve bought me a comic book…”
Another strip, featuring Hobbes in a washing machine, is missing from the collection entirely. Some have speculated that putting the tiger in a spin cycle might be an unwelcome hint he’s not real. No one, including Watterson, ever wanted to have that question answered.
4. Watterson Did License. A Little.
The persistent affection for Calvin and Hobbes is attributable in part to Watterson’s adamant refusal to water down his characters with toys, coffee mugs, and backpacks. While there was never a Garfield-esque empire of merchandising, he did occasionally offer his blessing for ancillary items. Calvin appeared on a Museum of Modern Art shirt commemorating an Ohio State University exhibition of comic art in 2001; two calendars, for 1989 and 1990, were issued; the book Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes was a tutorial intended to help students improve their language skills; finally, the duo mugged for a postage stamp in 2010, part of a Postal Service sheet of comic strip icons.
5. Urine Trouble
While any true fan of Calvin and Hobbes finds the ubiquitous, unauthorized car decal of Calvin peeing on automotive logos distasteful, at least one state took legal action: In the late 1990s, South Carolina slapped drivers sporting it with a ticket for $200, declaring it “obscene.” In a 2005 Q&A with readers to promote the Complete collection, Watterson dryly noted that he “clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo.”
5. An Illustrated History of How Sugar Conguered the World
8,000: Sugar is native to, and first cultivated in, New Guinea. Initially, people chew on the reeds to enjoy the sweetness. 2,000 years later, sugar cane makes its way (by ship) to the Phillipines and India. Sugar is first refined in India: the first description of a sugar mill is found in an Indian text from 100 A.D.
400-350: Recipes call for sugar in the Mahabhashya of Patanjali. They include rice pudding with milk, sweet barley meal, and fermented drinks with ginger.
327: Greeks and Romans learn about sugar during visits to India. Nearchus, Alexandria’s general, writes of “a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made, though the plant bears no fruit.” Small amounts are brought back to the Mediterranean and traded to physicians who use it for medical purposes.
500-600 A.D.: Jundi Shapur, a university in Iran, becomes the meeting place for the world’s scholars (at least those west of China). Greek, Christian, Jewish, and Persian scholars gather to create the first teaching hospital. They study texts from various cultures, and by 600 A.D. they are writing about a potent Indian medicine: sugar. They also develop better methods for processing sugar cane into crystallized sugar.
Circa 650: The Arabs were masters of growing, refining, and cooking with sugar; they begin to conceptualize it not just as a medicine or spice, but as a rare delicacy for royalty and the most wealthy. They combine it with ground almonds to create a moldable sweet still popular today—marzipan—and sugar sculptures become regular parts of lavish dinner parties.
As armies of Muslims take over Egypt, Persia, India and the Mediterranean, they bring their knowledge of sugar with them. Many European doctors learn of the medicinal uses for sugar from Arab texts. Under Arab rule, Egyptians master the refining process and become known for making the purest, whitest sugar.
6. Work was hectic and exhausting. I stole thirty minutes after my walk (at lunch) to work on my novel. Then sent it to myself, to hopefully work on some more tonight.
But it is sunny here, and I did get a twenty-thirty minute walk at lunch.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-04 01:23 am (UTC)I'm always interested in who makes those "essential" book lists. How to choose with so many amazing options? (The lists are usually pretty slanted toward white male authors, I've noticed. This one does better than most.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-04 01:40 am (UTC)I'm always interested in who makes those "essential" book lists. How to choose with so many amazing options? (The lists are usually pretty slanted toward white male authors, I've noticed. This one does better than most.)
I've wondered this as well. The Great American Read was a wee bit more diverse in its decisions, which were chosen by polling people on the internet. And around the country.
If I had to guess? I'd say some English Lit graduated who spent a bit too much time studying the 19th Century writers. Actually the vast majority of English Lit majors, who end up in publishing companies and in academia and writing book reviews, spent all their time studying British 19th Century Writers. I talk to them and they really haven't read much out of the 19th Century, nor appear to have much respect for the writing that is outside of it.
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Date: 2019-09-04 01:50 am (UTC)2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -- Tolstoy also makes me itchy -- could be the translations.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood Hated it, and won't ever watch the tv series
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
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-time – Mark Haddon .
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
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
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath Did not like.
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
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
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 - Could not finish this to save my life. Don't know why people love it. And my favorite author championed it. (sigh)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
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Date: 2019-09-04 02:42 am (UTC)Confederacy of Dunces is a guy book. It took me months to read the thing. I didn't find it funny, just depressing, and painful. Read it my thirties when I was working at evil library reference company. So intellectually bored. It was highly rec'd by a friend, so I was determined to get through it. I can't remember 98% of it. Just the gist. Actually this is true of a good portion of the books up there.
I do however recommend A Town Like Alice -- that was an interesting book. It's sort of a story of a woman's survival in Japanese held territory during WWII (they basically kept marching them around) and how she makes a home for herself in the Australian Outback. It was made into a miniseries in the 1980s, I think.
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Date: 2019-09-04 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-04 12:13 pm (UTC)I don't know if it is a good escapist book. OR if I could read it now. Right now, I can't seem to read anything but escapist fiction or happy books.
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Date: 2019-09-04 12:17 pm (UTC)I'm thinking maybe when I retire I will be able to read non-escapist books again.
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Date: 2019-09-04 12:51 pm (UTC)Either when I retire or when Trump and his cronies leave office, one or the other or both. ;-)
A Town Like Alice does end well, unlike Shute's other books. But, you have to go through a very dire bit that takes place during WWII, when the Japanese invaded British held territory in Asia and marched people about and put them in camps. So escapist/happy book it's not. I read it over twenty years ago (during less volatile times and when I was in my early twenties), so my memories are positive -- I loved it at the time, but I don't remember it vividly.