Category: News & Blabber

Okay, this is slightly off-topic, but I know that many of you are writers and might know some things. I was sniffing around the web looking for software that would help me track my story/article/book submissions. There are lots of options out there…as long as you write on a PC. Which I don’t. So the one I actually did find was full-fledged “novel writing software” called WriteItNow.

I downloaded the demo, and it’s pretty hardcore. For each project, you get all these tabs that help you organize your thoughts on characters, locations, and events. There are also sections for “ideas” and “notes,” and interesting features like event and relationship charts, character generators, and readability analyses. Once you’re ready to print something, the software exports the piece in rich text format (RTF) to be opened in a word processor.

Now maybe I am missing something, but I have never felt the need for anything like this. For every project, I just create another Word file for notes. (I also create another Word file for omitted text, which interestingly in WriteItNow does not get its own tab.) It seems to me that this kind of software would just encourage people to slack off, dinking around in all the fancy tabs rather than getting any actual writing done.

But I’m curious. Have any of you used similar programs? Did it make writing easier and more organized, or did you start messing around with your relationship-charts seven years ago and never return? I may still buy the real software…but I think I need to hear some real-life case studies. If you’ve used something like this, let me know!

So I do this sick thing when I stay at B&Bs. Before I tell you what it is, let me emphasize that I love these froofy little inns, with their bad decor and jacuzzi tubs and wine-and-cheese hours and fancy breakfasts. In fact I have been known to sob inconsolably when a pre-ordered and much anticipated breakfast was delivered to another room. (I wanted everything to be perfect, okay?)

Anyway, so you know how B&Bs always have a guest book. Or three. I always read them. The typical guest book is filled with rapturous reminiscences of wedding nights and anniversaries, pulsing with infinite hopes and seasoned with the occasional reference to Christ’s love. All in all, it’s just way too upbeat. My love of tragedy demands a somber note, and it’s sure as heck not going to come from the sappy and starry-eyed.

So I add my own. I just make stuff up. About my divorce, or my family feud, or my battle with cancer (I was going to say RLS, but I don’t want those people all up in my business again). I’m not all depressing, mind you. I talk about how the stay at the inn has refreshed my tender spirits and stuff like that. I just need to add a little more balance to the official record.

Anyway, now that I’ve confessed, I hope you’ll all follow in my footsteps, because the world really needs more interesting guest books. But that actually wasn’t the point of this post. The real point is that I always get a kick out of the desperately tasteful books found in B&Bs. This last one (John and I went away this past weekend) had, among some other desperately tasteful tomes, the short stories of Hemingway and the complete works of O.Henry. And, of course, a book of Love Poetry. I capitalize that because you have to say it that way: Love Poetry. Preferably with some ridiculous accent.

Does anyone ever read those books? Earlier this year I did actually pick up Moby Dick in a B&B and read 30 pages or so. But I think that’s the first time I’ve ever done that, and it was a book I had been meaning to read anyway. Would people be more likely to read the B&B books if they were written by Dan Brown or John Gray? I’m not sure, but the presence of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus in a romantic guest suite would quite make my day.

So this list is going around revealing the top unread books in the Library Thing catalog. It’s apparently all over, but I saw it on SPM’s blog, pages turned, so I’m going to give her all the credit. Her poor husband has RLS and her parrot has gout, so for god’s sake she deserves it.

Anyhow, the list of books is below!

But before I post them…For the record, I don’t think the list says a whole lot about reading habits, or even the actual books that got nailed. Anyone who is going to be on Library Thing is a big fat nerd (in a good way, of course!), so I highly doubt these folks are opting for Your Best Life Now! instead of Foucault’s Pendulum. This list is composed of classic literature and contemporary literary bestsellers, books that well-meaning readers just haven’t gotten around to yet. But it’s still super fun and so I had to jump in and share my own anecdotes. You’re supposed to do all this fancy formatting to indicate your various shades of affection for the titles, but I just bolded the ones I’ve read.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and punishment
4. Catch-22 (One of my favorite books ever.)
   
5. One hundred years of solitude
6. Wuthering Heights (Love that Heathcliff!)
7. Life of Pi : a novel
8. The name of the rose (Latin nerds unite!)
   
9. Don Quixote (I bought this from a homeless man for $4 about 10 years ago, but haven’t read it yet. Now that I think about it, he probably stole it. But I hope not.)
10. Moby Dick (Read about 30 pages in a B&B earlier this year. Actually liked it—I was surprised.)
11. Ulysses (Haven’t worked up the courage.)
12. Madame Bovary (I played the heroine herself in a brilliant high school video that my teacher carelessly misplaced. God that was a good video.)
13. The Odyssey
14. Pride and prejudice (It took me several tries to get past the first chapter, but now I love Jane.)
15. Jane Eyre (Not this Jane. She was kind of annoying.)
16. A tale of two cities
17. The brothers Karamazov
18. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
19. War and peace (Took me forever. I think I picked the wrong Tolstoy.)
20. Vanity fair
21. The time traveler’s wife (Best romantic book ever.)
    
22. The Iliad (Yeah, the whole thing, even the catalog of ships. For best effect, read near smoky campfire.)
23. Emma
24. The Blind Assassin
25. The kite runner
26. Mrs. Dalloway
27. Great expectations
28. American gods : a novel
29. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
30. Atlas shrugged
31. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
32. Memoirs of a Geisha
33. Middlesex
34. Quicksilver
35. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
36. The Canterbury tales
37. The historian : a novel
38. A portrait of the artist as a young man
39. Love in the time of cholera
40. Brave new world
41. The Fountainhead
42. Foucault’s pendulum
43. Middlemarch
44. Frankenstein
45. The Count of Monte Cristo
46. Dracula
47. A clockwork orange
48. Anansi boys : a novel
49. The once and future king
50. The grapes of wrath (Never got around to it. As a native Californian, I think I’m betraying my state.)
51. The poisonwood Bible : a novel
52. 1984
53. Angels & demons (John had to read this one, ha ha. Don’t bother, everyone—it’s the same book as The Da Vinci Code.)
54. The inferno
55. The satanic verses (Loved it)
    
56. Sense and sensibility
57. The picture of Dorian Gray
58. Mansfield Park
59. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
60. To the lighthouse
61. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
62. Oliver Twist
63. Gulliver’s travels
64. Les misérables (Sooo much more boring than it had to be. Read the abridged version.)
65. The corrections (Wonderful)
    
66. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
67. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
68. Dune
69. The prince
70. The sound and the fury (Wrote my AP English essay about this one. “Caddy smelled like trees.”)
71. Angela’s ashes : a memoir
72. The god of small things
73. A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
74. Cryptonomicon
75. Neverwhere
76. A confederacy of dunces (John gave this to me about 10 years ago, telling me how the author died a failure before his book got published and went on to great acclaim. I hadn’t been published at the time. Somehow he thought this story was supposed to be inspiring.)
77. A short history of nearly everything
78. Dubliners
79. The unbearable lightness of being
80. Beloved : a novel
81. Slaughterhouse-five
82. The scarlet letter
83. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
84. The mists of Avalon (OK. I’m not really into the women stuff.)
85. Oryx and Crake : a novel
86. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
87. Cloud atlas : a novel
88. The confusion
89. Lolita (One of my favorite books ever.)
    
90. Persuasion
91. Northanger abbey
92. The catcher in the rye
93. On the road
94. The hunchback of Notre Dame
95. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (John read it)
96. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
97. The Aeneid
98. Watership Down
99. Gravity’s rainbow
100. In cold blood
101. White teeth
102. Treasure Island
103. David Copperfield
104. The three musketeers
105. Cold mountain (I knew this one would be on the list!)
106. Robinson Crusoe
107. The bell jar
108. The secret life of bees
109. Beowulf : a new verse translation (I don’t know about this “new verse translation,” but I’ve certainly read some translation, and that counts, dammit.)
110. The plague
111. The Master and Margarita
112. Atonement : a novel
113. The handmaid’s tale
114. Lady Chatterley’s lover

Isn’t this fun? It makes me feel like I should go read one of the titles I have in my library but haven’t read yet. It also makes me think of that homeless man. I hope he’s okay, even if he did steal Don Quixote.