Victory!
I have completed one of the major projects of my life: converting all my CDs to MP3s. Everyone with a >40GB IDE drive is welcome to come to my house, hook up and get a copy. We can plug right into the IDE bus of my firewall machine or just hook into the network. (That reminds me — the internal facing NIC on my firewall is only a 10Mbps NIC. Arrgh! I must fix this since I am squandering my 100Mbps NIC by connecting it to the DSL modem.)
Anyway, if you want to see if you have musical taste than the N. family, check out this list. Whenever I go to someone’s house, I impulsively check out their CD collection (and if they have one, their library). Now you can do this from the comfort of your own home.
I didn’t rip any of my classical CDs unless they are ones that I need to return to people. I have set my Linux box to randomly play through this list. I still don’t recognize about half of the CDs. It’s like getting a bunch of new CDs!
While I’m making lame-ass lists for posterity, here is a list of most of the books I have read. I say most because before I bought my Compaq iPaq I used to keep this list on my various Palm Pilots. It turns out that the Palm OS has this little quirk where it chops off the end of files that get too big. So I think I’m missing a few books from this list. I could go through my old notebooks and library and figure it out, but it would take a too long.
Rereading the list, I’m amazed that I can remember what was going on in my life while I was these books. I’ve never kept a very good diary, but this book list is almost as good.
I didn’t read all these books cover to cover. Sometime in my mid-20s I had a sudden realization that if I didn’t like a book it might be because the book sucks. Before this realization, I figured that if I didn’t like a book it was because I was too stupid to appreciate it. I think this is related to my engineering background, as there is no concept of a “sucky equation” or “sucky circuit” in the same sense that there is “sucky art.” When encountering a bad circuit, one is tipped off by obvious clues (it doesn’t work; it is on fire), but a bad book looks almost identical to a good one and takes much investigation and energy to determine its true nature. Anyway, some of the books on my list are to remind me that I read enough of it to determine that I didn’t like it.
As I went through the list, I grabbed the books that jumped out at me as being the ones I enjoyed the most:
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (Male Edition) by Milorad Pavic
(The first hardcover book I bought with my own money)
Hercules Amongst the North Americans by Mark Marek
(The funniest book I’ve read)
My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber
(The first of many books that Emily would recommend that I read)
The Beatles: Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisson
The Real Frank Zappa Autobiography by Frank Zappa
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Vagabonding in America by Ed Buryn
The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
(I like the scene where he is carefully arranging his room for a girl who is coming over)
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
(I like how the main character gets over being pee-shy by pretending he’s peeing on the heads of his co-workers)
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley
(He was alchoholic, got fired from his job, was obsessed with Gloria Steinem, then died of cancer. Cool)
The Vintage Mencken by H.L. Mencken
(My big thing with Mencken I usually don’t know — or care — what he is writing about, I’m just amazed by the life force underneath the writing. When I had an free day during a business trip in Washington D.C., I drove up to Baltimore to see Mencken’s house rather than see the local sites)
Rivethead by Ben Hamper
(He hated his factory job so much he got panic attacks. I had a panic attack at work once. It was during a meeting, and I had no idea what was happening)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
(I like the introduction where Agee regrets that he won’t be able to beat up anyone who doesn’t take his book seriously enough. I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of being a writer)
In Praise of Older Women by Stephen Vizinczey
(I even have a signed first edition. Plot: a young guy runs around making love to older women)
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by James Abbot McNeill Whistler
(Whistler was a kook. It’s too bad Usenet wasn’t around while he was alive)
Laughing Matters by Gene Shalit (ed.)
(A great comedy anthology)
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
(actually anything by him)
Private Parts by Howard Stern
(I love the parts where he battles his idiotic bosses)
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
(“We’re having liver tonight” “I had it last night”)
Honk If You’re a Writer by Arthur Plotnik
The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollman
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov trans. By Mirra Ginsburg
A Rebours by J.K. Huysmans trans. By ???
(This is the most messed up book I’ve ever read. I read this book because it was mentioned in Picture of Dorian Gray)
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Miss America by Howard Stern
(I love the part where Howard goes after his competitor in Philadelphia and destroys his job and then his personal life. You could take parts from this book and Private Parts and make an excellent business book)
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by C.D.B. Bryan
(The best book about UFOs and abduction with transcripts from hypnotized abductees)
The Prince and Other Political Writings by Niccolo Machiavelli, ed. by Robin Kirkptrick, Everyman Edition
(I had an idea to make this into a business book, but apparently so did everyone else in the whole world)
The World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jaques Barzun
(This book affected me the most — page after page about individuals who changed the world. It made me sad to read a bunch of reviews that called Jaques Barzun an old, convervative kook.)
This one wasn’t on the list, so I need to update it:
Anthology by The Beatles
(I waited in line to buy this book and didn’t do anything until I had finished it)
Now I’ve finally shown the whole world what an autodidact pseud I am! Fortunately, admitting it is half the cure.
Oh, here is a picture of Yoda from the moving and talking picture entertainment event that I saw Saturday.
“Open a can of whoop-ass on you, I will”