About the World Books Challenge; Maps

As far as I know, there are three of us doing the world challenge. We aren't reading the same books, but when we see interesting books on each others' goodreads lists or updates, we sometimes read them, too. I've just become a member of a goodreads group that's reading a book for every African country, and I'll join them on some of those. However, some of their choices are about the country rather than by a person who lived there, and I'm reading only the latter (with folktales, a national epic, anthropologist-collected narrative, or tale by a long-term but not-native resident permitted if necessary).

It's interesting to compare a map of where I've been to where I've read. I've obviously read more broadly than I've traveled, but my travel map also demonstrates a distinct northern hemisphere preference, and probably could be mapped onto "relatively peaceful regions" as well. This will be even more true after I take a Baltic cruise sometime next summer, adding several northern countries. Thailand is the most southern country in my travel plans for the year, though there is still a slim chance I'll get to Laos. Perhaps I'll post both maps for comparison.

Julian Conqueror and Octavian Nothing

I'm enjoying the synchrony of reading Wilson's Julian: A Christmas Story while waiting to buy a copy of Anderson's first Octavian Nothing book, and discovering a similarity of manner and tone. The unlooked-for resonance pleases me in a way that sought likeness does not (as, having read Anderson's Feed, I wanted some adult cyberpunk and thus turned to Gibson's Spook Country).

The Borrowers

Long ago I read Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952), a middle reader book about little people who live in houses and take your stuff. This was an omnibus edition (1967) that included The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, and The Borrowers Aloft, chronicling, as you might imagine, the Borrowers' non-domestic adventures.

During my library sojourn earlier this week, I was excited to see a fifth volume, The Borrowers Avenged (1982). I didn't have my library card with me, but intend to return soon for what is undoubtedly an exciting wrap-up of the Borrowers' otherwise picaresque adventures. I'm pretty sure it won't be necessary for me to re-read the previous four books.

Garth Williams

Hugo Cabret

In my review, I said that Selznick's illustrations in The Invention of Hugo Cabret evoked Garth Williams.

Almanzo Wilder

Williams illustrated not only Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also The Rabbits' Wedding. I read both when I was young.


Later, I was exposed to Williams's pigs (Wilbur) and mice (Stuart), but Laura and her family have always reminded me of rabbits.

I suppose I should also mention that I was very troubled when I read Stuart Little, an otherwise excellent book with an indeterminate ending that does not neatly resolve the plot. Even at 7, I knew from my Scholastic Book Club selections that newborn mice were tiny enough that several would fit in a tablespoon, and I was preoccupied by the question of how a human mother would even know that she had given birth to a mouse. I was so concerned about this that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief about the invisible car.

Library as Dayroom for the Mission

I spent several hours in the public library yesterday. I was there for the same reason as many of the other patrons: To escape the snow and cold. Unlike most of the patrons, I was reading. I first sat in the comfy chairs near the stairs, but there were any number of people who were in that area to talk, drink soda, and strategize about who was meeting whom where to go back to the Mission. After conversationalists sat on both sides of me, both incredibly smoky, sweaty, and stinking of old alcohol, I moved farther into the room. This still left me on the edge of a circulating mass of non-readers. Reflecting on where stray, boozy, ungroomed men were least likely to be tolerated by library staff, I finally moved to the children's room, where ignoring the occasional shrill scream seemed like a reasonable trade-off. This was fine and I was able to read several middle reader/young adult novels I've intended to get to for a while.

On the one hand, I'm all for libraries as a warm respite. On the other, I don't think it's unreasonable to wish that the rules be enforced so that the library isn't hard to use for its intended purpose.

Birding Update

Source

Updating the bird list in this review, we've added these birds during a recent visit to Oahu:

Fulvous whistling-duck*
Sanderling (Hunakai)
Common waxbill (once you start looking, they're everywhere. It's a tiny passerine.)


I picked up a book called Hawai'i's Invasive Species at the Bishop Museum, so let the nerd fun begin.


*"Fulvous" means "dull yellowish brown" or "tawny" ("I delight in ~ port").

The Banned Books Meme

From Scavella's Blogsphere and beyond:

Banned Books Meme

Look through this list of banned books. If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, *** it.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert***
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway***
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal***
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway***
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison***
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

Amusing myself

It amuses me to be reading Gretel Ehrlich's This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland while sitting on a lanai in Hawaii. Quite the contrast between her semi-hallucinatory descriptions of endless night and frozen seas and my sweating and watching surfers practicing for the Banzai Pipeline Masters.

(sources: iceberg and wave)