Archive for October, 2005

Christmas.. already?!

Published on 24 October 2005 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I can’t believe 2005 is almost over. Where did it all go? At work we’re rolling into the part of the year where we begin our strategic and operational planning for the new year. It’s a pity I’m feeling tired and a bit flat at this time of year and haven’t got many ideas. I’m also realising that I’m going to have to bite the bullet and do some work at home if I’m going to finish those articles I’m supposed to have written. I wonder if The Boss will accept that I have been writing - just not what he expected.

I know it’s still only October, but we’re all planning our Christmas functions already and I’m doing my best to avoid getting invited to too many of these - I find them exhausting. I’m sure people inviting me can see through my lame excuses about why I can’t go to their Christmas do - I must be the only one on campus with a heavy work load three days before Christmas?! I dislike parties and large social occasions and especially hate being around drunks. One of the most liberating realisations for me was when I acknowledged to myself that I’m no good at big social events (and many small ones!) - my name is CW, and I am an introvert.

Thankfully my work unit has an unusual tradition. Instead of going to some restaurant somewhere and subjecting ourselves to Northern Hemisphere Christmas food on a 40 degree day (soup, turkey, ham and Christmas pudding does not work when you’re sweltering), we take a picnic lunch to the small lake on campus, sit in the shade of lovely trees and eat, drink and be merry with a game of bocce after the feast.

The bocce game is always a source of much hilarity and fun. I have yet to win our Annual Bocce Tournament but will be the first to admit that it’s highly unlikely I’ll win unless I play less erratically. (I’m too fond of doing wild flings that land the ball waaaaaaaaaaaaaay away from anything at all.)

I have no idea why I’ve started thinking about Christmas when the Melbourne Cup hasn’t even happened yet…

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The LibraryThing thing

Published on 23 October 2005 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

I continue to enjoy LibraryThing, even though my compulsion to catalogue our books has waned a bit since the first flush of novelty. I enjoy being able to see, in a neat list, what books we have, and it’s also strangely fun to find out what books other people have in common with yourself, and what books they have that you don’t. It’s almost as good as physically browsing someone else’s extensive collection.

There are a number of memes starting to develop based on people’s collections, which I am keen to do as well, but which I keep resisting because I want to finish cataloguing all our books first. At this stage practically all our fiction is done (just the short story anthologies left, as well as some poetry). The bulk of my Chinese language collection is still waiting to be done. I keep putting it off because many of them will need manual input (no ISBN barcodes!) and I need to be in the mood to work out some of the more complicated transliterations.

The bulk of our nonfiction is still waiting for acknowledgement on the shelves. And then there’s M’s computer books, which I started doing but gave up in a fit of pique because they’re in his study, and they’re big and heavy and I’m not supposed to leave them in a state of disarray.

For a while there our collection was in the list of 25 largest libraries, but the largest collection at the moment has 8,000 books in it so our 1600+ books don’t come close! I also once featured in the list of users with the most reviews written, but I need to pick up the pace again if I’m going to make the list. The problem is my sense of competitiveness is very vague, as in, most of the time, I’m not. I’m usually more content to Do My Best rather than Be The Best. I do occasionally have spurts where I want to be, and get to, the top of the class, but the mania tends to pass quickly. I think I have more fun that way, but could I be accused of being slack?

Anyway, I definitely rate LibraryThing as one of the Finds of the Year for me, along with Flickr and the Art of Early Rising. It’s been quite amazing how quickly the site has grown - there are at the moment a little over half a million books catalogued at LibraryThing. When I think that that is around how many books we have at My Place of Work (MPOW), it staggers me.

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Book List

Published on 23 October 2005 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, you’ll know I love lists. Here’s another list for a Sunday morning. Got the idea from Kimbofo’s Yet (Another) Book list. Time magazine’s literary critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo have published a list of what they consider to be the 100 best English language novels published since 1923 (I wonder why 1923?). Kimbofo lists the books she’s read out of the list, and I’m copying her.

What I’ve read:
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume*
Read this one as a teenager. I don’t really remember it now…
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger*
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
I love this book. Every time I read it (three times now), I get all interested in ancient Roman history. Pity the interest is never sustained for very long.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies by William Golding*
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
I’m stretching it a bit, saying I read this one. It’s more like I dipped into it – it’s one of those books that (I find) is impossible to read page by page.
1984 by George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Possession by A. S. Byatt*
This book was one of the few English language books I had access to during my year in China. I really enjoyed it and read it something like four times during that year. I find I don’t really remember it all that well – my memories of China are stronger. Must re-read.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark*
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Trivia: This author is widely known to handwrite his novels, using a fountain pen. (I wonder what type of pen?)
Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My all-time favourite, I think.

18% is not very impressive. (The titles marked * are books I don’t own at present.)

What amuses me is the fact that of the list the number of books I own but haven’t read is larger (19%) than the number that I have read:

Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Native Son by Richard Wright
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Looking at the list of books I have but haven’t read, it seems to me that I don’t really need to go to the library or buy any new books for a while – I have more than enough to keep me going!

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