Books Received
Posted on June 29, 2008
in Undressing the Internet, books, design, music, top whatever lists
Books Received is a periodically updated feature on Design Observer of some books they like. Some design books, as you might have guessed.
Staff picks:
Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections
Tod Lippy, Esopus
Alix Lambert, Crime
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Mel Bochner, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews
Indi Young, Mental Models
Luke Wroblewski, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
Bonus!: ESOPUS Magazine has a stream of the mix CDs that came with the first seven issues. Artists range from A to Z, and the themes for each mix are fantastic. (e.g., CD #2 is “Musician-couples wrote a song inspired by the Craig’s List “Missed Connection” personal ad of their choice.”)
The Spring 2004 issue of Cabinet Magazine contained a timeline of timelines, the perfect companion to Wikipedia’s list of lists (my favorite being list of fictional things).
(specifically CO2 Emissions)
While earlier this year China over took the US as the number one CO2 emitter, we are still 5 to 6 times the polluters as those bike-riding rice eaters in per captia terms. Take that you bamboo huggers.
Sure G.W. brought the dollar back to the value when his dad was in office, but America is home to the richest man in the world. So what if his dollars aren’t worth all that much, he still has a whole lot of them. It’s like having a really big Pog collection.
So China has US beat as the country that executes the most people per a year but who wants to deal with all that bureaucracy [communism] when you can have your citizens do the killing for you! For years now, the US has been leading the world in production of serial killers, which also doubles as viable income for lazy screenwriters.
With all those killers roaming our streets, no wonder we have the most lawyers per capita with 1 lawyer for every 265 Americans.
While we only come in as the 9th fattest country, behind Kuwait and Palau, we can still pride ourselves on creating the World’s Best Sandwich, and in New Jersey nonetheless. The Fat Darrell: Chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, and French fries crammed onto a roll and covers in marinara sauce. OK, ok, so it was only ranked number 1 sandwich in America, but so what? We’re fucking America, does any where else really matter?
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is an edited list of, you guessed it, 1001 great books from pre-1700 to the present. Picking up the book will get you a critical essay accompanying each entry, or you can just check out the full list on its own.
The few I have read:
| # Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro # Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami # Choke – Chuck Palahniuk # After the Quake – Haruki Murakami # House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski # Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami # The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami # Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons # White Noise – Don DeLillo # The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera # The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien # Herzog – Saul Bellow # Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges # To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee # Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov # Lord of the Flies – William Golding |
# The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway # The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger # Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell # The Plague – Albert Camus # Animal Farm – George Orwell # Cannery Row – John Steinbeck # The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry # Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck # The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien # The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway # The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald # The Trial – Franz Kafka # We – Yevgeny Zamyatin # Siddhartha – Herman Hesse # The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy # Candide – Voltaire |
Faced with a list of notable books throughout history, I quickly see that I do not read nearly as much fiction as I would like; 32 out of 1001 is far from impressive. In my defense, most of my reading these past few years has been non-fiction (periodicals or books) or short stories, but it makes me feel no less guilty. At least my obsession with Haruki Murakami finally came in handy.
New life goal: read 500 books from the list not counting ones already read. A book a month for 42 years? Easy.
Three days before the new year, quiet reflection on the past year is not hard to find. Surely this year has been tumultuous, with great lows contrasted be even greater highs. The arts, sciences, and everything in between have been just fantastic, but so what? How did 2007 compare to 2006?
According to The BEAST, not well. All else being equal (and the all else of 2006 is unlikely to be worse than 2007’s), the 2007 list shows the beginnings of a dangerous trend: You are getting more loathsome every year.
Now, don’t kill the messenger. It’s true, The BEAST lists You as #9 on the 2007 list, a solid 7 slots worse than the 2006 list. They have gracefully removed themselves from the charts (check #12 on the 2006 list), but You remain, more detestable than ever before. (The Britney Spears whose children you supposedly care about moved from #14 to #27, which is more like what we were hoping would happen with you. But alas…)
Of course, this little bit of condescension could be argued for just about every year. The public accepts and allows horrible circumstances all the time, and it strikes me as nothing but haughty condescension to name You as one of the year’s most loathsome people. Last year it was an amusing counterpoint to Time’s Person of the Year (You). This year? Downright pedestrian.
I commend The BEAST for acknowledging the (if I may be so underhanded) shortcomings of the American people (and Britney Spears, and Glenn Beck, and Jesus, and Cheney, and Bush, and…), but are there not enough loathsome people to make each year’s list unique? Anyway, I am going to end here before you get the wrong idea. I actually do think the list is an amusing bit of reading for that ten-minute coffee break.
Notable abhorrents: #47 Mike Huckabee, #34 Joe Francis, #23 Bill O’Reilly
Update: You are #3 on the 2002 Most Loathsome list, #3 on the 2004 Most Loathsome list, and #4 on the 2005 Most Loathsome list, so you’re doing much better lately.
After seeing the movie Juno last night, I am happy to report it has taken the #1 slot in Roger Ebert’s ten best films of 2007 (and other shenanigans).
Juno is, as Ebert says, an extremely wonderful, heart-warming film, and absolutely reaffirms the moviegoing experience. It manages to be consistently hilarious despite (or, I should say, in spite of) its serious topic. The half-Kimya Dawson soundtrack and almost pretentious obsession with punk and b-movie horror keeps pushing the film toward being a generic, forgotten indie flick, but the comedy, superb acting, and delicately crafted characters propel Juno far from the grasp of humdrumness.
Make it through the first ten minutes or so of forced one-liners, and you’ll be rewarded with this year’s finest film.
Fimoculous: Best of 2007 - Since 2001, Fimoculous has been compiling a list of all the various “Best of” lists for the year. The lists cover books, music, ideas, people, words, and more. For instance, Cryptomundo’s Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories. Also notable: The New York Times’s The 7th Annual Year in Ideas.
CD ripping still illegal - In a recent RIAA lawsuit, the recording industry revealed it still considers CD ripping illegal. Yes, that’s right: you bought it, but in no no no no way can you back it up. Ars Technica reports.
Google Chart Generator - Google’s list of completely uneconomical services has just grown a little longer. With a bit of fairly straightforward syntax, you can now display charts (from bars to pies) dynamically created by Google. This seems like too big of a bandwidth hog to last long, but maybe Google has some revenue stream up their sleeves.
Preview of HTML 5 - As HTML 4 nears its tenth birthday, perhaps an update is in order. HTML 5 is still in development, but the work so far looks nice. The snazziest addition to me is definitely the built-in separation of content and design. And the forced tree structure could go far in making code easier to read.
Edit your photos on Flickr! - This one is ancient news by now, but a partnership between Flickr and Picnik means you can now do some basic editing on you photos right in Flickr. Combine that with an Eye-Fi wireless memory card and you really have online-only workflow.
CommandShift3 - It’s like Hot or Not. Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.
Immanuel Kant - Wrong on metaphysics. Wrong on ethics. Wrong on aesthetics. Wrong for America.
PC Magazine has compiled a list Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. I recognize only about one or two per category (a sad zero for Music, but a good few for the tech categories), so I can’t really speak to the overall veracity of the list. But its inclusion of ACT-I-VATE, the webcomic blog, means they’re getting something right.
Other good mentions:
In honor of this upcoming Sunday’s illustrious holiday, the top 100 April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time.
#23: Guinness Mean Time
In 1998 Guinness issued a press release announcing that it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England to be the official beer sponsor of the Observatory’s millennium celebration. According to this agreement, Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time until the end of 1999. In addition, where the Observatory traditionally counted seconds in “pips,” it would now count them in “pint drips.” The Financial Times, not realizing that the release was a joke, declared that Guinness was setting a “brash tone for the millennium.” When the Financial Times learned that it had fallen for a joke, it printed a curt retraction, stating that the news it had disclosed “was apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof.”
Also from the Museum of Hoaxes: the origin of April Fool’s Day and the top 10 worst April Fool’s Day hoaxes.
