Wednesday, March 30, 2005
50 book challenge
13 Digital fortress, Dan Brown. Lame. Review to follow.
14 A Thousand Acres. Good. Iowa farm teems with hidden drama. Won Pulitzer.*
15 A Walk to Remember. Nicholas Sparks. I had posted a review of this but took it down as too personal. It's sweet, a tearjerker coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-south.
16 The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West, 1939.
A not very good book to my taste, but then it's sort of like F.S. Fitzgerald who I don't much like either. The main thing this book has going for it is a character named Homer Simpson.
17? I have started 'bless the beasts and children' and 'ciderhouse rules' but am not sure I'll finish either.
I've had a few days that have felt unproductive - no work done, no blogging or cartooning, a few minor chores got done. Small claims court today so I'm up with too little sleep.
* Pulitzer: On the list of books I'll never get around to writing, is one that covers a handful of great inventors, men of the gilded age who changed the world.
Pulitzer would fit right in. Specificly I'm thinking Tesla and Farnsworth.
Radio and TV respectively, although that underestimates Tesla's accomplishments.
Twain and Edison fit in there too as supporting characters. Men born on farms who made possible the transformation into suburbia. Maybe Alan Turing would fit.
Sort of a Profiles in Courage. Profiles in Courage is a book that may or may not have been written by JFK, about senators who stood up for the right thing and were crushed by it.
Tesla, Farnsworth, Twain, Turing had their personal and business difficulties and did not always benefit from their accomplishments. I guess part of the point of this for me is that a person may be a failure at one level and a success at other levels.
I'm having to come to terms with being a failure at many levels. This does not mean I have to give up trying at some of my grander quest type projects. My roommate, for example, delivers pizza. I don't. If I stopped trying so hard to save the world, I could do better at something like delivering pizza, and settle for attempting mediocrity. I think I'm better off continuing to tilt at windmills.
Day of the Locust was West's 4th book, and then he died in car crash, ran a stop sign while driving from Mexico while late for Fitzgerald's funeral. His books were not financial successes, and he could have stoped writing sooner, and then we wouldn't have "Homer Simpson", or anyway Homer would probably be called something else. I'm assuming Groenig's Homer is based on West's, if in name only. It seems like an unlikely coincidence, and Groenig uses lots of literary and Hollywood allusions.
I'm not one of those who study Simpsons' scripts for deeper meanings, but there are those who do. Ok that's all for now - need second cup of coffee.
13 Digital fortress, Dan Brown. Lame. Review to follow.
14 A Thousand Acres. Good. Iowa farm teems with hidden drama. Won Pulitzer.*
15 A Walk to Remember. Nicholas Sparks. I had posted a review of this but took it down as too personal. It's sweet, a tearjerker coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-south.
16 The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West, 1939.
A not very good book to my taste, but then it's sort of like F.S. Fitzgerald who I don't much like either. The main thing this book has going for it is a character named Homer Simpson.
17? I have started 'bless the beasts and children' and 'ciderhouse rules' but am not sure I'll finish either.
I've had a few days that have felt unproductive - no work done, no blogging or cartooning, a few minor chores got done. Small claims court today so I'm up with too little sleep.
* Pulitzer: On the list of books I'll never get around to writing, is one that covers a handful of great inventors, men of the gilded age who changed the world.
Pulitzer would fit right in. Specificly I'm thinking Tesla and Farnsworth.
Radio and TV respectively, although that underestimates Tesla's accomplishments.
Twain and Edison fit in there too as supporting characters. Men born on farms who made possible the transformation into suburbia. Maybe Alan Turing would fit.
Sort of a Profiles in Courage. Profiles in Courage is a book that may or may not have been written by JFK, about senators who stood up for the right thing and were crushed by it.
Tesla, Farnsworth, Twain, Turing had their personal and business difficulties and did not always benefit from their accomplishments. I guess part of the point of this for me is that a person may be a failure at one level and a success at other levels.
I'm having to come to terms with being a failure at many levels. This does not mean I have to give up trying at some of my grander quest type projects. My roommate, for example, delivers pizza. I don't. If I stopped trying so hard to save the world, I could do better at something like delivering pizza, and settle for attempting mediocrity. I think I'm better off continuing to tilt at windmills.
Day of the Locust was West's 4th book, and then he died in car crash, ran a stop sign while driving from Mexico while late for Fitzgerald's funeral. His books were not financial successes, and he could have stoped writing sooner, and then we wouldn't have "Homer Simpson", or anyway Homer would probably be called something else. I'm assuming Groenig's Homer is based on West's, if in name only. It seems like an unlikely coincidence, and Groenig uses lots of literary and Hollywood allusions.
I'm not one of those who study Simpsons' scripts for deeper meanings, but there are those who do. Ok that's all for now - need second cup of coffee.
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