Thursday, May 08, 2008

News about and for librarians today, plus a huge list of books as part of a meme. Onward!

The big news story today is the FBI getting involved with the curator of the Internet Archive, and the EFF jumping in to defend the right to privacy. Keep fighting the good fight, librarians.

From the people who brought you LISNews: LISWire! Subscribe now to get all the library news, and get your own library involved.

The British Library has been having all sorts of problems since they let the common people show up. Gee, that's too bad. On the other hand, web users in the UK get to win prizes by using an Indiana Jones-themed search engine from Microsoft, so maybe it all balances out.

Meanwhile, the hottest TV show in Abu Dhabi is similar to American Idol...except that it's called Millions' Poet, and it features competing poets. Yes, really!

Something for the law librarians: lawyers are starting to experiment with using Twitter, and you can now subscribe to an RSS feed for the U.S. Code via Cornell's Law Instiute. This could come in really handy if you're waiting for changes to take effect.

And finally, the meme! As explained via this post, the idea originated from LibraryThing's "top unread books," listed below. "The rules: bold the books you have read, italicize books you’ve started but not finished, strike the books you read but hated (likely for school), add an asterisk to books you’ve read more than once, and underline those you own but still haven’t read yourself." What I have learned from this: I haven't read a lot of "unreadable" books, but when I do read them I finish them, and while I did indeed read and hate some books in school, none of them was on the list. (I had to read a different book by Faulkner for school!) Also, many of these are on my "to read" list, which I hope to get to one day.

My list:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
The Odyssey by Homer
The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ulysses by James Joyce
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
*The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Iliad by Homer
Emma by Jane Austen
Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
The historian: a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi: a novel by Yann Martel
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
Dracula by Bram Stoker

The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
*The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I)by Neal Stephenson
American gods: a novel by Neil Gaiman
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The poisonwood Bible: a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
*Dune by Frank Herbert
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
*The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The inferno by Dante Alighieri
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay: a novel by Michael Chabon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Anansi boys: a novel by Neil Gaiman
The once and future king by T. H. White
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson
Oryx and Crake: a novel by Margaret Atwood
Dubliners by James Joyce
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Angela's ashes: a memoir by Frank McCourt
Beloved: a novel by Toni Morrison
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
In cold blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Les misérables by Victor Hugo
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman
Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous
*A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

The Aeneid by Virgil
*Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The road by Cormac McCarthy
Possession: a romance by A.S. Byatt
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
The book thief by Markus Zusak
Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire
Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The plague by Albert Camus
Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
Cold mountain by Charles Frazier


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