(1) A MIGHTY LONG LIST. List Challenges presents “1000 Books You May Have Actually Read” — “Based on the number of ratings each book has on Goodreads. And if you haven’t read them, maybe you can use for a literature bucket list.”
I scored 169. The list has certain biases. If I’d read every book by Nicholas Sparks and Stephen King, I think I could have doubled my number. On the other hand, I got credit for a whole bunch of books I read aloud to my daughter when she was little.
(2) SINCE 9/11. At LA Review of Books, Yxta Maya Murray mines the applications of 2002 Creative Capital awardees to look at how these artists imagined a post-9/11 future: “Art Matters Now — 12 Writers on 20 Years of Art: Yxta Maya Murray on Artists’ Responses to 9/11”.
2002 was a historical hinge. Just a moment earlier, the United States had seemed to be enjoying a period of peace; now it was at war. The art of that year offers a time capsule that reflects the millennium’s complex transitions. Reeling from 9/11 but working on projects begun during the Clintonian boom, before the Towers fell, some artists in 2002 were still able to romanticize millenarianism and the future: rather than imagining the specifics of the violence that would descend with the war presidency of George W. Bush, artists such as Sawad Brooks and Sabrina Raaf, for example, revealed a fascination with a speculative tomorrowland that resembled the visions of sci-fi writers such as Isaac Asimov, Iain Banks, and William Gibson. But others, such as Tana Hargest, Sujata Bhatt, Suzanne Lacy, and Nick Cave, forecasted a more difficult future.
(3) DISNEY’S ARMY OF LAWYERS. IndieWire reports “Disney Is Cracking Down on Sellers of Unlicensed Baby Yoda Dolls”.
Ever since “The Mandalorian” premiered on Disney+ in November, the adorable “Baby Yoda” character has melted hearts and minds around the world. However, despite fervent requests for Baby Yoda dolls, Disney has been rather slow to respond to product demands, reportedly in order to keep Baby Yoda’s reveal in “The Mandalorian” pilot a secret per Jon Favreau’s request.
But the cat was out of the bag after the show’s premiere, and “The Child” quickly became a social media sensation. It shouldn’t then be a surprise that impatient fans have already taken matters into their own hands, with Etsy crafters and sellers creating their own unofficial Baby Yoda toys to capitalize on the demand. And for a while, the bootleg Baby Yoda market seemed to flourish.
Of course, it didn’t take long before Disney discovered this, and began issuing takedown notices, reminding Etsy that it owns the intellectual property rights to all Star Wars characters. And Etsy businesses with popular Baby Yoda products suddenly found their listings deactivated, at the request of Disney, according to The Verge.
(4) LEGO NEWS. In the Washington Post, Abha Bhattarai says that Lego is trying to market itself to Generation X people as a stress reliever, thinking that Gen X types “are more likely to drop $800 on a 7,541-piece Star Wars Millennium Falcon set or $400 for a Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle.” — “Lego sets its sights on a growing market: Stressed-out adults”.
Bhattarai says that Lego is trying to appeal to Gen X nostalgia by offering items such as the Central Perk cafe from “Friends” or a “vintage 1989 Batmobile.” Also next month LEGO Masters will premiere as a competition show on FOX.
Another connection to sf: Bhattarai says Lego posted a loss in 1998 but was saved when they got the license to produce Star Wars products
(5) BRICKS IN SPACE. And io9 spotted a massive Lego Star Wars fan project: “This Custom Lego Version of Echo Base Is Ready for the Empire’s Siege”.
The sheer ambition of Lego creators never ceases to amaze me. Far from being satisfied with what Lego’s sets provide, these sculptors create incredible things. Like this version of Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back, which is ready for battle.
Hopefully, this version will have a better fight than the one in the film, however. Clocking in at over 16,000 pieces, this Echo Base, created by YouTuber The Lego Room, is a custom build featuring the base’s hangar, medical chamber, and pretty much every other part you see in the films. It even has a fully motorized gate to keep the snow and the Empire out. Capping it off is an elaborate build of the Millenium Falcon, taking up a lot of hangar space.
(6) SAD STORY OF HARASSMENT. LA Times columnist Julia Wick writes: “A female mayor denounces the harassment she receives. Hours later, a man is arrested at her office”.
If you are a woman who is so bold as to inhabit a vaguely public stage, chances are high that you will be called a lot of things that can’t be printed in a family newspaper. And then some.
It’s a truism that unfortunately appears to transcend industry or geography. Exist in public, and eventually an online mob will nitpick your looks, rate your sexual desirability in relation to your ability to do your job, and probably make threats vague and specific — regardless of whether you’re a female journalist, the founder of an indie game studio or trying to run a small city in the Central Coast region of California.
San Luis Obispo Mayor Heidi Harmon was fed up when she finally took to Facebook last Monday morning to call out the constant harassment she received.
(7) FIRST TIMER. Twitter user Yubi had never actually seen The Princess Bride and knew very little about it. Until now, when they did a watch through, and livetweeted their reactions. It’s really entertaining seeing them find out where so many common fan phrases and gifts came from. Thread starts here.
(8) MORE ABOUT STEVE STILES. The Baltimore Sun paid tribute to one of their own: “Steve Stiles, Hugo Award-winning comic fan artist of ‘Xenozoic Tales,’ dies at 76”.
…He did a two-year Army stint in the mid-1960s. A commanding officer told him: “If you can draw my girlfriend, you won’t get orders to go to Vietnam.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” said Elaine Stiles, his wife of 38 years. He was stationed instead at bases in Missouri and Virginia Beach.
Mr. Stiles was tasked with using his artistic talents to liven up the Army manuals for rifles and other equipment — following in the footsteps of one of his idols, the legendary comic artist Will Eisner, who had done similar jobs in the service during World War II.
More than 20 years later, while they were serving together on a science-fiction panel at a 1988 convention in Florida, Mr. Eisner complimented Mr. Stiles on his art.
“He was talking about it for the rest of his life,” Mrs. Stiles said.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- January 19, 1967 — Star Trek’s “Arena” episode first aired on NBC. It was written by Gene L. Coon but after the episode aired , it was found to almost identical to one Fredric Brown had published in 1944 in Astounding Science Fiction. Coon then bought the rights to his story and Brown has been retroactively given a story writing credit. Not one but two actors play Gorn (Gary Combs and Bobby Clark), both uncredited, and Ted Cassidy is the Voice of Gorn Captain, also uncredited. This episode, aired in the first season is where the Federation is first mentioned.
- January 19, 1990 — The first Tremors film premiered. It was directed by Ron Underwood and produced by Gale Anne Hurd, Brent Maddock, and S. S. Wilson, as written by Maddock, Wilson, and Underwood. It starred Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter, Michael Gross, and Reba McEntire. It was the only film of six in total to get a box office release. It did poorly at the box office even though critics thought it well of it and thought it has a Fifties throwback vibe to it. It has an 75% rating at Rotten Tomatoes with an astonishing almost two hundred and forty thousand votes!
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born January 19, 1930 — Tippi Hedren, 90. Melanie Daniels In Hitchcock’s The Birds which scared the shit out of me when I saw it a long time ago. She had a minor role as Helen in The Birds II: Land’s End, a televised sequel done thirty years on. No idea how bad or good it was. Other genre appearances were in such films and shows as Satan’s Harvest, Tales from the Darkside, The Bionic Woman, the new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Batman: The Animated Series.
- Born January 19, 1940 — Mike Reid. He’s a curious case as he’s been in a number of SFF roles, usually uncredited, starting with a First Doctor story, “The War Machines” and including one-offs for The Saint, The Champions and Department S. He is credited as playing Frank Butcher in Doctor Who: Dimensions in Time which you can watch here. (Died 2007.)
- Born January 19, 1942 — Michael Crawford, 78. He was the first Phantom of the Opera in Andrew Lloyd Opera’s play. He did thirteen hundred performances in total. He did two other genre plays, Dance of the Vampires and The Wizard of Oz. He did an episode of One Step Beyond as well, though I’m not sure that was genre.
- Born January 19, 1948 — Michael J. Jackson, 72. Shows up on Dr. Who in the Fifth Doctor adventure, “The King’s Demons” as Sir Geoffrey. He played Sean Burns in a recurring role on Highlander, and played Richard I in The Legend of Robin Hood series. He was in The Morons from Outer Space as the Second Scientist.
- Born January 19, 1954 — Katey Sagal, 66. She voiced Leela on Futurama, the spaceship captain and head of all aviation services on board the Planet Express Ship.
- Born January 19, 1957 — Roger Ashton-Griffiths, 63. He’s no doubt best known for his role as Mace Tyrell on Game of Thrones. And yes he was on Doctor Who in a Twelfth Doctor adventure, “The Robots of Sherwood” as Quayle. He’s also had roles in Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic,Tales from the Crypt, Torchwood, Brazil and Young Sherlock Holmes.
- Born January 19, 1962 — Paul McCrane, 58. Emil Antonowsky in RoboCop whose death there is surely an homage to the Toxic Avenger. A year later, he’d be Deputy Bill Briggs in the remake of The Blob, and he played Leonard Morris Betts in the “Leonard Betts” episode of the X-Files.
- Born January 19, 1981 — Bitsie Tulloch, 39. She’s best known for her role as Juliette Silverton on Grimm. (I saw the first three seasons I think. It’s rather good.) She played Lois Lane in the Elseworlds event which she reprised during the Crisis on Infinite Earths even a year later.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Close to Home shows a certain kind of gourmand in action.
- The Duplex took a photo of my dating life from back in the day.
- Free Range has a new idea for a nature park.
(12) PIXEL PACKIN’ POWER. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the January 15 Financial Times, Tom Faber reviews a concert at the O2 Brixton Academy in London by Hatsune Miku, a hologram who has a repertory of 100,000 songs.
Here, on her second European tour, she was performing to a mixed crowd: ‘otaku’; Japanese subculture obsessives dressed in elaborate aqua wigs and microscopic skirts; other excited teens; and a smattering of baffled dads. There was a real four-piece band on stage to support the synthesized vocals, but the players were left mostly in the dark as they tore through the signature J-pop genre crush of pop, metal, techno and trance. The dreams and emotions were turned up to 11 from the first chorus, and for two hours they did not come back down She sang big hits such as the buoyant, melodramatic ‘World is Mine’ and the English-language ‘Miku’ (sample lyric: ‘Blue hair, blue tie, hiding in your WiFi’). The misses outnumbered them, though, with an excess of polite guitar shredding and a particularly bloodless salsa number.
…While the 10-year-old hologram technology used in the show was not particularly impressive, Miku’s star continues to rise; she has just been added to the line-up at Coachella 2020. Her name translates from Japanese as ‘first sound of the future,’ and while she doesn’t convince as a harbinger of the future of pop, she does suggest the future of fandom. After her last song, Miku exploded into a thousand cyan pixels. The house lights came up and the crowd roared. Next to me a man, sweaty and euphoric, screamed, ‘Thank you, Miku!’ into the empty air.
Hatsune Miku’s website is https://piapro.net/intl/en.html .
(13) RADIX OFFERS COPIES FOR AWARDS CONSIDERATION. Radix Media is offering review copies (printed or PDF) to anybody interested in considering their 2019 releases in the Futures: A Science Fiction Series for awards: “2020 Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards Eligibility”.
(14) DUNE WHAT COMES NATURALLY. MovieWeb talked to somebody who attended the screening: “First Dune Remake Footage Earns Big Praise, Gets Compared to Lord of the Rings”.
The first Dune footage has screened. The preview footage was shown to a small group of industry insiders and has already been hailed as “epic.” Principal photography wrapped not that long ago and Denis Villeneuve is currently in the post-production phase to prepare the long-awaited movie for release at the end of the year. As for the footage that was shown, it was mixed in with cast interviews and behind-the-scenes shots. It does not seem like it was intended for public release, so don’t expect to see it any time soon.
Sci-fi novelist Brian Clement was one of the lucky viewers of the first Dune footage and he has shared his thoughts online for fans. First of all, the footage did not have completed special effects, though Clement describes the cinematography as “beautiful,” while stating, “I’m not exaggerating when I say a lot of people will have goosebumps/tears when they see this movie (I might!). Heck, when they see the footage I saw they will.” The author had to choose his words wisely as not to catch any trouble with Warner Bros.
…A small amount of footage of Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Harkonnen was seen also seen in the Dune footage, along with a tiny bit of Jason Momoa. Brian Clement went on to tease that the choice of actor for playing Kynes will be a surprise for audiences, while Dave Bautista apparently looks “creepy” in the footage.
(15) OUT FOXED. “Disney culls ‘Fox’ from 20th Century Fox in rebrand”.
Disney executives have cut the word “Fox” from their 20th Century Fox film studio in an apparent bid to distance it from operations of the previous owner, Rupert Murdoch.
US media suggests Disney does not want to be associated with the media mogul’s highly partisan, right-wing Fox News network.
However, Disney has not clarified its reasons.
It bought the studio, with other media operations, in a $71bn deal last March.
20th Century Fox is known for producing some of the biggest films of all-time, including Avatar and Titanic.
(16) AVENUE 5. This is going to be longer than a “three-hour tour” — “Review: HBO’s ‘Avenue 5,’ a Tale of a Fateful Trip (in Space)” in the New York Times.
How far is Armando Iannucci’s new HBO comedy, “Avenue 5,” from his previous one, “Veep”? About a billion miles, give or take, or the distance from earth to Saturn, where the spaceship of the title is thrown off course, greatly increasing the time its load of unlucky tourists will have to spend on their interplanetary cruise.
Set 40 years in the future aboard a vessel that looks like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a high-end mall, Iannucci’s new show would seem to be a radical departure from the acrid, of-the-moment political satire of “Veep” and his earlier British series “The Thick of It.” (Several of those shows’ writers, including Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Will Smith, have joined him on “Avenue 5.”)
But there are recognizably Iannuccian things about this space-com, which debuts Sunday. Like the politicians and operatives guiding the ship of state in “Veep,” the crew members of the Avenue 5 are an often amoral, small-minded and quarrelsome bunch whose constant sniping provides the bulk of the humor. Leading them is a captain, played by the “Veep” alumnus Hugh Laurie, who, like Vice President Selina Meyer, is not ideally qualified for his post.
(17) SAFETY FIRST. “SpaceX completes emergency crew escape manoeuvre” — includes video.
SpaceX has conducted a test of the abort manoeuvre it would use if one of its crew-carrying rockets ever developed a problem during flight.
The rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center saw a Falcon-9 vehicle’s ascent into the sky deliberately terminated just 80 seconds after lift-off.
The Dragon astronaut capsule on top fired its escape engines to carry itself clear of the “faulty” booster.
Parachutes brought the vessel to a safe splashdown some 30km off Florida.
No humans were involved in the practice abort; the only occupants of the Dragon ship were a couple of Anthropomorphic Test Devices, or “dummies”.
This was considered to be the last major milestone for California’s SpaceX company before the US space agency (Nasa) certifies the firm to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year.
(18) NOT FOREVER MAN. Hey, don’t laugh, these’ll be very useful the first time there’s a mission to take over an integral tree: “US Space Force mocked for unveiling camouflage uniforms”.
The US Space Force has defended its newly unveiled camouflage uniforms after they were roundly mocked on social media.
The force, officially launched by US President Donald Trump last month, posted a picture of the uniform to its Twitter account.
The uniform in the picture has a woodland camouflage design with badges embroidered on the arm and chest.
Reacting to the uniform, many critics had the same question: “Camo in space?”
[Thanks to Rose Embolism, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Scott Edelman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, N., Michal Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Andrew and Meredith.]
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First!
Integral Tree. HA!
Wow, was it that late in the first season that the Federation gets a name?
7) That was delightful
1) 138, if I counted right.
Thanks for the title credit (and thanks for the assistance, Meredith).
(1) 134 on that list. But I haven’t read King or Sparks, and I have no clue who Dessen is. I know I’ve read one Hemingway, one Steinbeck, at least one Tolstoy and a Dostoevsky, but whether they’re on the list I’m not sure. I picked one of each….
(The list seems to be skewed to recent series and to best-sellers, which I don’t generally read.)
Clickity
@1: 170, not marking any of the ones I was uncertain about or any of the Shakespeare that I’ve seen but not read (several titles, and I wonder how many Goodreads people were also using that principle…). I’ve read a few of the King but nothing from the last ~30 years (except his latest, which isn’t here) and I don’t remember hearing of Sparks before this.
@15: or: Out, out, damned fox!
edit: Fifth! (but I only had two glasses with dinner…at a new spot, just a mile from the Arisia hotel, where the first thing you see on the way downstairs to the bathrooms is a door inscribed “9 3/4” in what could be a good approximation of the sign from the movie (although not the one on the real station)).
@Andrew
I think this is the closest I’ve got to titleifying so thank you for the piggyback ride, and I’m off to appertain a celebratory beverage. 😀
(1) 263. I’ve actually read all the Shakespeare, and not seen as much as I’d have liked to.
(3) I’ve seen a number of links to patterns for making your own Child (knit or crocheted). I’m tempted.
1) 273 from that list, plus maybe ten more books made up of parts of other books I read but never finished. I’m looking at you, Moby Dick!
(1) I’d hate to have to count how many of those I read for school, going back to junior high. But a lot I read for myself. (I never read “Ulysses”. But I did read “Finnegan’s Wake”. I’m also not into horror or a lot of romance.)
(9) One of my favorite things about the remastered Star Trek series is the blinking eyelids that they gave the Gorn captain.
(10) Katey Sagal was wonderful, I thought, in her several appearances as Locke’s flashback/sideways GF/wife/(?) on Lost.
(5) Something very similar to this was on display at the Art Show of the Dublin Worldcon. I can’t tell if it’s the same one because I didn’t see any wide-angle shots of the assemblage in the video.
@P.J. Evans
I’m making one now, adapted from a crochet pattern I found online. So far, there’s only a head, but when he’s finished, I’ll post a photo.
@Rich Lynch
Yes, I also was reminded of the Lego Hoth base that was on display in Dublin. Not sure if this one is the same, but it looks very similar.
1) 164, which seems like a reasonable number.
9) While the Wikipedia entry for “Arena” says at the top, “After the episode was released the story was found to be similar to one by Fredric Brown,” further down it says that the resemblance was discovered “before it was shot and broadcast.” I think the latter is true, because I’m pretty sure the Fredric Brown credit was there on first airing.
A friend of mine in college wrote a number of short stories which he gave to me to read, and about half the time I would say to him, “This is like the Fredric Brown story ___________.” I can’t remember now if he had read Brown, or was just on the same wavelength.
Back to Star Trek, I remain impressed that anyone at Desilu had read enough sf to catch this.
(7) FIRST TIMER.
If you enjoyed that, they’ve also done a livetweet of Avatar: The LastAirbender (the animated version) which is EPIC!
Thread starts here [WARNING: CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE]
https://twitter.com/uzbadyubi/status/1205232467726262272
1) 143. Missed out on lots of the childrens books, especially Dr. Seuss.
@9: A visit to Gorn Rock is on my bucket list. I’m still annoyed with myself for not going to the Westercon/ConChord in the vicinity the other year, but I was just too tired at the time.
@16: Josh Gad’s character really needs to go out an airlock. Ideally, first thing next episode.
@Paul Weimer: Indeed. For the first few episodes, instead of the Federation and Starfleet, there was United a Earth and the a United Earth Space Probe Agency.
279.
They should probably cull “20th” from it as well.
Meredith Moment: Blue Salt Road by Joanne Harris is a UK kindle Daily Deal. As is sometimes the case with Amazon, the page listing tries very hard to avoid saying if it’s genre or not, but her twitter description is of a gender flipped selkie story, so that counts. Also, I had the pleasure of registering Joanne Harris at Dublin 2019, so she’s one of us.
1) 177
Soon Lee reminds us:
I am guessing that “bender” doesn’t mean the same thing in the US to the UK.
(15) Apparently the studio was called 20th Century Pictures (including the big logo with the searchlights) for 2 years from 1933 until the merger that created 20th Century Fox.
I seem to remember some joker in the 1980s or 90s registered 21st Century Fox Ltd and then wouldn’t sell it for less than One Meeellion Dollars, and they just said they didn’t need it.
I see from wikipedia that Fox did in fact use 21st Century Fox for some internal division from 2012 until the sale to Disney.
And of course Futurama is made by 30th Century Fox.
(10) I recently read that Tippi Hedren single handedly kickstarted the Vietnamese-American nail salon industry: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343
1) 199 completed, and bits and pieces of maybe 50 more.
I’m back home from a fantastic weekend at ConFusion 2020, feeling both energized and horribly sleep deprived.
1) 226. Like many of these lists it’s sort of an odd mix of recent bestsellers and literary classics. The children’s books are a little unusual. Also, I’ve had several copies of “Joy of Cooking” and used it fairly heavily for 30 years or more, but I can’t say I’ve read it, so I didn’t count it.
@1 224 for me. I counted the plays I’d seen that were specifically written to be seen performed whether I’d read them (most of Shakespeare) or just seen them (Tennessee Williams, Samuel Becket). I did not count movies or dramatizations of novels that I’ve not actually read.
Camouflage for space… At least they weren’t playing baseball .
(Photo: Das bildbuch der Weltraumfahrt, 1960)
104 on the list. Skipped quite a few as I think I read them 40 years ago, and there have been movies. I thought I was a Stephen King fan, until I saw how many I was skipping.
Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick looked interesting. Not at all in my theoretic wheelhouse, but it’s still on my TBR list.
Regards,
Dann
“Too often … we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” – John F. Kennedy
1) 129, which is between their reported median and mean. And I did count Joy of Cooking, even though I haven’t read every single recipe in it. I think I’ve read all of the other material in it, such as discussions of ingredients and techniques.
I got 159 read; I’m tempted to go back and check how many I have both finished and remember anything about beyond the title and maybe something like “read that for school” without anything about the book, not even a character name, setting, plot summary, or whether I liked it.
315, mainly because I had to read a lot of the classics for high school and college, plus one summer I went on a rampage through our collection (the Harvard Five Foot Shelf of Classics, if I recall correctly).
Loved the tweetstorm for Princess Bride, and now I must remember to show the grandkids (and corrupt the next generation!)
Niall McAuley says I seem to remember some joker in the 1980s or 90s registered 21st Century Fox Ltd and then wouldn’t sell it for less than One Meeellion Dollars, and they just said they didn’t need it.
Nice story but the action described is not legal under the international laws governing how names are given out. It would a clear instance of cybersquatting a name and not allowed by Internic or any other domain registrar which would award it without hesitation to the legit name holder. I hardly think that Fox would lose such such a fight if they just filed an admin appeal which all they needed to do.
Cat, I don’t mean someone registered the website name, this was before anyone cared about website names, I mean the story went that they registered the actual company name 21st Century Fox Ltd.
But searching now, I can’t find any evidence that this actually happened.
Or even that anyone else ever heard the story!
In fact, I cannot find anything online about why they did not rebrand as 21st Century Fox at the turn of the century at all.
253 here, possibly 10-15 more that I may have read but don’t remember. But I’ve read all of Hemingway, Shakespeare, Austen, and Steinbeck so that makes a difference, plus a lot of classic lit. And just who the hell is Nicholas Sparks and why is he so popular?
With the King, it’s a moderate selection of his work. And after I read one Sedaris, that was plenty.
1) 143 read, apparently (there’s an estimated 10 where I went “I have read some books by this author, but not sure if this was one of them”).
NPR’s commentary on @16: Star Boors: Humanity Is Cruising For A Bruising In Sci-Fi Comedy ‘Avenue 5’ :
I am alternately impressed and depressed by the number of people who have read massively more of the list than I have — although there’s a few things on that list that I wouldn’t touch. Does anyone have any recommendations for a Nicholas Sparks that’s seriously worth reading? I’ve read other works by a number of the authors listed and decided they just weren’t my cuppa (and enough poor or horrifying reviews of the Kings I haven’t read that I don’t intend to add to my list) but I don’t remember any Sparks at all.
@nickpheas: I’ve known of Bent for decades; is that noun form also used?
@Cassy B: I’d get another ~4 if I counted Shakespeare I’ve only seen (now up to 25 total after “Shakespeare on the Common” did Cymbeline, but I’m not sure how many more I’ll add given what I’ve read of a number of the histories and “Roman plays”); I got a fair number dumped on me in school.
@Vicki Rozenzweig: I think I remembered something about each of the ones I claimed, although very little for some of the school assignments (Joyce, Hemingway).
@Cat Eldridge: you have more confidence in Internic than a lot of people I’ve run into; IIUC, somebody’s squatting on a local fannish name (probably noreascon.com) but none of the legal or net talent in the group has suggested the squatter could simply be blown away.
1) 163. I didn’t count Joy of Cooking, but I did count one Shakespeare play that I’ve seen performed live but not read (King Lear).
1) 188 here. I included audiobooks in the total. Book I read longest ago: HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON, 2nd grade I think? Book read most recently: THE OUTSIDER by Stephen King, finished day before yesterday.
9) Not sayin’ TREMORS gave me a crush on Reba McEntire, but TREMORS totally gave me a crush on Reba McEntire.
@Joyce Reynolds-Ward–
Sparks is a quite popular writer on the border between “respectable literature” and romance. Every public library will stock him, and you’re quite likely to never notice him if your reading tastes aren’t at least adjacent.
1) 195, not all of which I would necessarily admit to reading….
1) 85 that I’m sure of–and me an ancient ex-English teacher and lifelong compulsive reader. On the other hand, the list is heavily weighted with relatively recent popular/best-seller fare, in which I have no interest, and YA/children’s lit, of which I read nearly none. The top three tell me a lot about the reading population on which the list is based.
Similarly, the historical-novel list that’s linked on the last page is interestingly skewed toward the romance end of that category, which shows the audience demographic represented in Goodreads. I saw one quite recent Bernard Cornwell and no Patrick O’Brian, nor much of the historical-mystery/intrigue subcategory (e.g., Philip Kerr, Alan Furst, Jason Goodwin, Ellis Peters) beyond Girl Waits With Gun (which looks promising).
1) This makes my „4000lists thare way too long“ list
Looking forward to Avenue 5!
Just finished 6 wakes, which I really liked and now reading How to invent everything which I also really liked, so I feel good about this reading year.
We have always filed in the pixel
(1) 161. Similarly to Vicki Rozenzweig, that includes a number that I read in middle school or high school and don’t remember much (if anything) about. (And does not include most of the YA/children’s books released since then.)
1) again: Well, I swan. I went back and actually clicked and I’m up to 98. Still nothing to brag on. (I’d have better numbers if I could include books I never finished.)
@Bruce Arthurs — Totally agree re Reba McIntire in Tremors.
1) 296, with another 20 or so owned but not yet read. It helped that I’ve read all of Shakespeare’s plays and I’d read the “classics” seen as required reading 50+ years ago. About half the King and the SFF more than 20 years old. Better than I expected to do.
Chip says to me that you have more confidence in Internic than a lot of people I’ve run into; IIUC, somebody’s squatting on a local fannish name (probably noreascon.com) but none of the legal or net talent in the group has suggested the squatter could simply be blown away.
Checking Internic shows me that that the domain has been registered with the same party for eighteen years now. Noreascon Four was fourteen years ago. Did they dispute it during the time they were actually holding cons by that name?
Chip, they apparently regained the url as it now rolls over to http://www.mcfi.org/noreascon2/ which is owned by Massachusetts Convention Fandom. So there is no cybersquatting nowadays as that’s the group that ran the first, third and fourth Noreascons.