Summer Reading? 100 Novels to Consider

How many have you read?  Like all lists of this kind, it's plenty arbitrary and subjective.

I must confess that I thought Joyce's Ulysses was a bloated behemoth and a hot mess that isn't worth your time.  I can be an insufferable masochist, and even I could not force myself to get past the first half of this miserable monstrosity.  If you want Joyce, do yourself a favor and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Wuthering Heights is a bit of Gothic nonsense with two of the worst characters I've met in literature.  Heathcliff and Catherine are both terrible people, and they pretty much deserve each other.  There, I said it.  If you must read a Bronte, read Jane Eyre.

Read more Jane Austen, please.

Mamma Mia! 30 Best Fictional Parents

Atticus Finch et al!

Around the World in 196 Books

Never mind 80 days!

Summer Reading ... Or Not

The season's most unread books as listed by a math professor.

Nerd News: Trigger Warnings, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom

Oh, for Pete's sake.  Read this and this, which also gives us the quote of the day:

"Trigger warnings are presented as a gesture of empathy, but the irony is they lead only to more solipsism, an over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings—much to the detriment of society as a whole. Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them."

Speaking of triggers, how many warnings do you think this bit of classic Weird Al hilarity would now require? 

Trigger Happy.

Happy 450th Birthday, William Shakespeare!

Take a moment to appreciate his lasting influence and also to take part in Talk Like Shakespeare Day today!  Have you thought about just how many words and phrases we owe to the Swan of Avon?

Friday Fun Videos: Thug Notes

This is some kind of brilliant.  The video series covers a gloriously wide array of famous literary works from Shakespeare to Orwell.  Here's the Thug Notes take on The Hobbit.  Don't be fooled by the fun of it all; the analyses are often very insightful indeed.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Kristen Stewart to Star in a Rom-Com Version of "1984"

I don't want to life on this planet anymore.

Shakespeare in Taiwan

Celebrate the 450th birthday of the Bard!

Monday Therapy: Literature Hath Charms ...

It's not just music that hath charms to soothe a savage breast!  Literature can too.  Since Mondays are by nature savage, let's see if we can get some literary therapy to take the edge off the day.

I think a whole lot of people would be much more interested in lit if we got more wonderful people to do more poetry readings.  I don't even really LIKE e.e. cummings, subject of the first reading, but the reading is remarkable.  Reading is a performing art, all right.  Let's start, shall we?

Does Bob Dylan Deserve a Nobel Prize for Literature?

This op-ed in today's New York Times thinks so.  Do lyrics count as literature?

Life Imitates Science Fiction: 10 Examples

10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Became Science Fact by alltime10s

Government Literary Stimulus!

Read up, bookworms!  

Here's an accompanying bon mot: "It should be a point of consensus that any chief executive that sends the public flocking into the loving arms of Orwell and Rand is probably not doing the job correctly." Heh.

Happy 449th Birthday, Will Shakespeare!

Join the fun with the third annual Happy Birthday, Shakespeare online project sponsored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and remember that it's also Talk Like Shakespeare Day!  You can join your fellow fans on Twitter all day long with the #happybirthdayshakespeare hashtag too.

Happy birthday indeed to the sweet swan of Avon, who has given me so much pleasure from the first moment I met him in a children's storybook to right now, when every re-reading of every play yields something fresh and new and wonderful.  The haters can hate all they want; Shakespeare is immortal.

For the quote of the day, I'll give you Ben Jonson's poem "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us" and its peerless assessment that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time.

Forgotten History: Artistic/Intellectual Feuds

Spanning the Renaissance to the modern age, here are some delicious tales of brilliant people engaging in some memorable feuds. 

BiblioFiles: Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Dream of the Celt"

It's the Peruvian author's first novel to appear in the US since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.  Here's more about it.  I previously posted about (and praised) the freedom-loving Mario Vargas Llosa here.  Here's his website. In fact, I'm going to pluck the Quote of the Day from an archived interview with him (the lines are from his 2000 novel "The Feast of the Goat"):

 "It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will."

Mark Steyn, Mark Twain, and the $ 1 Trillion Coin

Do read.  Now I want to read that Twain story!

Publishing the New Nobel Literature Prize Winner

This year's Nobel for lit goes to Chinese writer Mo Yan, and the English translation of his novel Sandalwood Death will be published by .... *drum roll* ... the University of Oklahoma Press!  That's quite a coup for the academic publishing house.

Top 100 Books of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Let the debates begin about this list!  Hey, where's The Eye of Argon?  (Just kidding!)

Life Imitates Aldous Huxley?

Kyle Smith ponders Brave New World in 2012.