Monday, July 14, 2008

Dial "L" for Listiness

3 jobs I wish I Had In The Summertime Instead Of Working Inside A Blazing Inferno Bakery:

  • On-site camerawoman on March of the Penguins II: Revenge of the Penguins
  • Inventory Control Supervisor at Ben & Jerry’s Headquarters
  • US Ambassador to Greenland

3 foods currently comprising 75% of my diet:
  • Cottage cheese
  • Macadamia nuts. The saltier the better.
  • Half-price berries from Fresh & Easy. Mmm, spoilage makes them sweeter
3 Delightful Procrastination Tools:
  • Ask Metafilter. I especially enjoy the anonymous questions…other people’s lives are so screwed up.
  • So You Think You Can Dance, taped via my computer doohickey. Can I get a ticket on the Hot Tamale Train?!
  • Oh No They Didn’t! Surfing and consolidating all of the juiciest celebrity slander.

3 Songs I Can’t Stop Playing:

3 Books I’m In the Middle of Reading But Will Most Likely Never Finish:
  • Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. The fact that I found this at the bottom of a pile of books under my night table does not bode well for the completion of this masterpiece of postmodern fiction. The fact that I didn’t even remember that I owned it, much less that I read over 100 pages, is perhaps a more damning sign.
  • Don DeLillo, Underworld. Pro: It’s DeLillo. Con: It’s 1000 pages of DeLillo.
  • Orhan Pamuk, Snow. No “most likely” about this one. After eight months of forcing myself to read this one torturous page at a time, I finally gave in (just 50 pgs from the finish!) and read the ending on Wikipedia. I am now convinced that I’ll never be chosen as a Nobel judge.
That last list got me all riled up and reminded me how much I hated slogging through Snow. To make myself feel better (ie, justified in my loathing) I checked out the Amazon page for Snow, and found some corroborating reviews. Check out some of these brilliant review titles:
  • “Did they like it because they're supposed to like it?”
  • “pretentious, vacuous, and down right boring”
  • “Mud would have been a more apt title because this was like a slog through it”
  • “Just Say No to SNOW”
  • “What's the reason behind the Nobel Prize?”
  • “tedious to the bitter end”
  • “Wooden Characters Make for Tortuous Reading”
  • “I challenge you to stay awake”
  • “Dry as toast”
  • “After a certain point, it's unreadable”
And, my personal favorite:
  • “Complex novel made me feel stupid”
Morrissey and his pompadour agree: Snow was rubbish!

1 comments:

Jason said...

I love the lists. I especially love that you've admitted to (and perhaps half-heatedly embraced?) the unfinishing of books. Sorry to have subjected you to Snow, which must rank as one of the worst books-given-as-a-gift ever.