(no subject)

21 Books You Don't Have to Read and 21 You Should

This is an interesting idea, but some of the suggestions puzzle me – the “read this instead of this” format suggests some kind of oranges-to-oranges comparison, but Tolkien and Leguin, frex, are doing *really* different things in LoTR and the Earthsea books. Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy I can see both falling into the category of “18^th-century satire;” I do consider Shandy a kinder, if equally gritty and absurdist, book, and being slightly less well-known it probably could use the extra recommendation, though telling the reader to only bother with the first half feels a bit like damning with faint praise.

 I did like the suggestion that instead of Gravity's Rainbow one should read a later Pynchon that touched on the same thing but with several decades' additional experience...

The other thing is that for a lot of these I’d never actually heard of the book I was “supposed” to read, perhaps because I don’t usually spend a lot of time with these “Must-Read” lists in the first place.

(no subject)

 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/pedestrians-struck-white-van-1.4631564

Apart from everything else horrible about this (and similar recent attacks), “malicious driver deliberately rams pedestrians” was one of my major childhood paranoias. Wonder if the giant creepy face floating over the foot of my bed is going to come true as well.