Bookies unite!
So next to kissing a really hot intelligent guy, my favourite thing is reading a really good book. Followed closely by drinking a cold Pepsi on a hot October day and finding a pair of jeans that make my ass look good.
On the book topic, Time magazine has a list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923 (Dunno why they picked that year, but I'll work with that). I spent the morning looking it over to see how many of these books I own/have read or have yet to read/buy. I was glad to see some old faithful friends in there...and was surprised at having not heard of some of these..(Needless to say, I Wikipedia'd the books/authors as soon as I could).
Here's the complete list.
Books I've read out of that list:
You may buy me dinner, buy me a drink, dance close at a club, laugh at my jokes, praise my kissable lips, even kiss me. And then I'm off home to read the other 56 books on this list. You may watch me read. God knows there's nothing sexier than a man who reads.....(or can talk intelligently about the books he's read).
Sigh. I'm off to Strand this weekend to look for some of the books I'm missing out on. IF you wanna cruise me there, I'll be the glasses wearing (to look intellectual), witty tshirt wearing (to show my disregard for propriety), low rise jeans wearing (so you may admire me as I reach down to the bottom shelf of books) guy sipping from an Aquafina bottle while mentally calculating just how much phatka I'll be taking on this huge book purchase.
Current Music:
Baby I love your way - Big Mountain
I loved Reality Bites (the movie this was from). I think I fell in love with Ethan Hawke then..(and not during Dead Poet's Society as I usually assumed)
On the book topic, Time magazine has a list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923 (Dunno why they picked that year, but I'll work with that). I spent the morning looking it over to see how many of these books I own/have read or have yet to read/buy. I was glad to see some old faithful friends in there...and was surprised at having not heard of some of these..(Needless to say, I Wikipedia'd the books/authors as soon as I could).
Here's the complete list.
Books I've read out of that list:
- All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
- An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- Are you there God? It's me, Margaret - Judy Blume
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Beloved - Toni Morrison
- The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
- A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
- The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
- The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
- Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
- Deliverance - James Dickey
- The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
- Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
- The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
- A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
- I, Claudius - Robert Graves
- Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
- Light in August - William Faulkner
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
- Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
- Never Let me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
- 1984 - George Orwell
- ONe Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
- A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
- The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
- Rabbit, Run - John Updike
- The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
- Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
- The Spy who came in from the Cold - John LeCarre
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
You may buy me dinner, buy me a drink, dance close at a club, laugh at my jokes, praise my kissable lips, even kiss me. And then I'm off home to read the other 56 books on this list. You may watch me read. God knows there's nothing sexier than a man who reads.....(or can talk intelligently about the books he's read).
Sigh. I'm off to Strand this weekend to look for some of the books I'm missing out on. IF you wanna cruise me there, I'll be the glasses wearing (to look intellectual), witty tshirt wearing (to show my disregard for propriety), low rise jeans wearing (so you may admire me as I reach down to the bottom shelf of books) guy sipping from an Aquafina bottle while mentally calculating just how much phatka I'll be taking on this huge book purchase.
Current Music:
Baby I love your way - Big Mountain
I loved Reality Bites (the movie this was from). I think I fell in love with Ethan Hawke then..(and not during Dead Poet's Society as I usually assumed)
posted by Vikster @ 3:38 AM
18 Comments:
At 5:04 AM,
roswitha said…
You make me feel very stupid! And your awesome well-readedness can't even be excused on grounds of having been an English student. (Or were you ever?) I finished my English B.A. last year and I've read, like, 20 of those books.
I feel guilty about having missed out on, say, Faulkner, or Ellison, but that list mostly seems to be made up of boring white American men - boring straight white Americans - which is sort of bleh. I think you've read all the coolest ones. Hurrah for John Fowles!
At 8:17 AM,
Anonymous said…
" God knows there's nothing sexier than a man who reads...."
hear hear!!
At 8:46 AM,
Anonymous said…
What time at Strand...Sat or Sun
At 9:02 AM,
kate said…
I loved Before Sunrise. Though he was already pretty much a hottie in Reality Bites...:)
At 9:09 AM,
Anonymous said…
I was about to suggest Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I guess Kate got here first...hmmpffftt !
I personally love Before Sunset better. It is so much more deeper. And that it happens in real-time lends it that edge.
And Julie Delpy is just YUM !
PS : For folks who love conversation flicks like Before Sunset/Sunrise, be sure to check "My Dinner with Andre".
At 11:06 AM,
Anonymous said…
hehehehe! the kiss post was ridiculously funny! on de promenade, eh? lol.
At 10:05 PM,
Anonymous said…
Roswitha feels stupid because she has read about 20 from the list. I guess you guys will have a fit when I say I have read 1 book from THE LIST. But I don't feel stupid. Of course I can't make any claims to be well read (there goes my dream of a date with THE VIKSTER). But I do like reading. And I read whenever I can. I don't know the names of the genres that I'm into, but seems like most of the books that I have read and enjoyed find no place in THE LIST. P G Wodehouse anyone? Or Saki? And I hope you don't cringe when I mention John Grisham or Sydney Sheldon.
I am like one of those people who can't stop reading a book because it is boring. If I start reading a book, I finish reading it no matter what. That's probably one of the reasons why some of the books from THE LIST are gathering dust in my book shelf (courtesy by sister) but I haven't read them. Can someone recommend 2 - 3 books from this list that I should absolutely read if I want to go to heaven?
Sanjay
P.S.: My comment seems more like a blog post in itself. Hope V doesn't mind.
At 10:15 PM,
Vikster said…
Roswitha: I've been reading for years..My parents didn't buy us kids toys, we got books instead. I'm so glad for that!
Ash: Reading makes a guy sexy...which is why there are so few sexy gay men in Bombay.
Anonymous: LOL! Do I have myself a stalker then?
Kate and Balaji: I agree. Both movies are AWESOME. And I've met Ethan Hawke in Central Park. He's even hotter in person.
Closetalk: Comment on wrong page?
Sanjay: I would recommend Midnight's Children, The Grapes of Wrath and The Lord of the Flies to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with Wodehouse. He's provided me with hours of laughs. And you can't get a bigger Asterix fan than me. So there!
And finally, well read guarentees you conversation with the Vikster. A nice smile and cute ass guarentees you a date. (OMG! How shallow of me!)
At 10:47 PM,
Dunce Happy said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 10:54 PM,
Dunce Happy said…
oh darn! all you people who read. i feel so left out. There goes my hopes of hooking up with the Vikster.
it was i think the second year of college when i gave up on reading books. it was too addictive was my excuse. it was really starting to affect my studies. so then i used to just curl up with my ex-love at night (who reads at the speed of light by the way - thats what then future ivy league phd students do) who used to cuddle up with me and recount to me of the books he read that week before we both went to sleep in each others arms. there were times when we used to read together. i read one page out loud and then he read one page out loud. oh so romantic those days were. I am in a yearning mood this week.
warning: reading out loud doesnt work very well in reality. kinda gets tiring after a few pages.
These days all i take to bed with me are childrens/teen books in spanish and my laptop so i can look up every other word in the book. and its a good night if i finish one chapter a night. my only comment is how morbidly depressing kids books in spanish are, as opposed to the almost always sunny ones in English that i am used to.
At 11:30 PM,
Vikster said…
To reiterate:
Vikster will hook up with you whether you read or not.
Dating you, on the other hand, if you don't read? Not so much.
At 11:59 PM,
roswitha said…
Uhuh, my parents were like that too. Until they stopped buying me books because I preferred them to math. homework. My criminal lack of organisation was showing as far back as age seven, when I was already getting 'incomplete, omg!1!' remarks in my school calendar.
Still, school equips no one to deal with the likes of Thomas Pynchon.
At 12:55 AM,
oook said…
I've read only 15 of those books if that many... Now I feel even more stupid!
Does it help if I say I always wanted to read some of them but never got around to it?
What about if I started some but never finished? (Like Zadie Smith's White Teeth) and plain didn't like others?(Like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart)
At 9:14 PM,
Anonymous said…
Good, my score is 4/100. Latest I read was 'To kill a Mockinbirg'. Vikster I plan to overtake you in an years time, since I've started reading only few months back. After I'm done, I'll ask you out, and you can't say no. Perhaps that'll carry more weightage than cute butts or nice smiles.
Well, I was also trying to impress you about the 'why 1923' question. Here goes the reason: The TIME magazine debut was in 1923. Ok now what do I get in return for this 'gyaan'
- Priyank.
At 3:29 AM,
Dumaketu said…
I doubt if it was fair to exclude Joyce from the TIME list that has two Evelyn Waughs...hmmm...otherwise,about the TIME list, I guess we have to make allowances for an American magazine to cater to the ordinary American readers who might mostly know American writers...many more books could probably have made it to that list. One can probably debate endlessly (as it has been done before)what goes into making these list etc etc etc Well, Vikster its nice to know that you are a well read guy than most, with the most luscious lips of course...
At 3:59 AM,
Vikster said…
Roswitha Mol: Your teacher gave you Incomplete OMG marks? Was she blonde?
Ook: You're far too intell for me to care about how many books you've read. Seriously. In your case, it don't matter.
Priyank: By the time you catch up, I'll be miles ahead....But do try it. Reading is amazing.
As for the gyaan, you get my thank you and my flirtateous banter over a cup of coffee (provided you're not hidesouly ugly. Hey! I may read but I'm as shallow as they come!)
Dumaketu: I agree with the American specific reasons..though I actually like Waugh over Joyce. I've had to sit with a Joyce primer when I was reading Ulyyses.
As for the luscious lips...*blush*
At 5:15 PM,
Dumaketu said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 5:49 PM,
Dumaketu said…
Now you know why the cut-off was 1923! Ulysses was 1922 and it simply could not have been left out otherwise!! :) I guess that the Joyce fan in me speaking, but that apart, Finnegan's Wake is probably worth it to make it to the list...can't think of any other reason for 1923, can you?!
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