Top Ten TBRs

I know that I'm going to be posting later today for the BBAW topic, but I love my Top Ten Tuesdays and just wouldn't be able to get through the week without my fix...

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme run by The Broke and The Bookish (if you're hopping around for BBAW, definitely go check this one out!). Every Tuesday they post a Top Ten Topic for us to answer. This week's question is "Top Ten Books I'm Dying to Read." I'm struggling with this one, which is surprising since I have a TBR pile that is slowly taking over my room...


Top Ten Books I'm Dying to Read

1. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages by Guy Deutscher. I've always been interested in the ways language shapes our understanding of the world (and of our place with/in it). I've had Deutscher's book on my shelf for a while now but live keeps interrupting!

2. High Tide in Tuscon: Essays From Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver.  (One of) My mission for the year was to familiarize myself with essay writers/writing and, since BK is one of my all-time favorite writers (Poisonwood Bible!!) I grabbed her collection to get myself going. Still haven't managed to crack the cover though...

3. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Language games, conspiracy theories, meta-fictionality... there are so many juicy tags attached to this book. Friends are always shocked (and appalled) that I haven't gotten to this yet.

4. The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins. Before you start yelling at me about this.. I KNOW I have to read it, I KNOW it's supposed to be wonderful (except, possibly, Mockingjay?)


5. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I'm not allowed to watch the movie until I've read the book. And I hear the movie's incredible...


6. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. An epic Whodunnit about censorship that takes place at a library known as The Cemetery for Forgotten Books? Yes Please!


7.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.


8. Songs of Enchantment by Ben Okri. This is the sequel to Okri's Booker Prize winning The Famished Road. Loved the first one, feel guilty I haven't touched the second


9. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. I've read his controversial stuff (Satanic Verses in particular), so it'd be nice to engage with him as a storyteller instead of being caught up in the politics.


10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon.

Logophilia!!

It's hard to be excited about this Tuesday. I had a fabulously relaxing holiday weekend (hanging at the beach, exploring the history of St. Augustine, going wine tasting... all kinds of lovely-ness) and then this morning reared its ugly head and forced me to rejoin the real world. Booooo!! I came home to an email Inbox absolutely flooded with angsty, "Why aren't you responding to meeeee" type messages. My students are working on drafting their first papers of the semester. For most of them it's their first college paper ever.... so they're freaking out. I'm amazed by how much hand-holding this year's gang seems to expect -- they email about evvvverything and expect me to pass out answers/excuses on demand. They're a charismatic, really bright group, but they have a hard time accepting responsibility for their work. Drives me batty!

Anyway! Despite all the stress of getting back to teaching, and of responding to all the questions/demands I "neglected" over the weekend, I'm stoked that it's Tuesday! Why? Cause it means that it's time for Top Ten Tuesdays at The Broke and the Bookish. Woot Woot!

This week's topic is... Your Top Ten Favorite Words. That's a tough one, but I'll do my best :)

1. Facetiously- adj. not meant to be taken seriously or literally.  I love this word for a number of reasons-- it's fun to say, it has all the vowels in alphabetical order, and it contradicts itself (starts out by presenting you with a "Face" but you can't take it at "face value").

2. Onomatopoeia- n. a word that sounds like its referent. The world would be a much more musical place if all words were onomatopoetic. 

3. Brouhaha- n. excited public interest, a hullabaloo (bonus points for sneaking my 11th favorite word into a definition!) When I try to practice my mad scientist cackle I just repeat Brouhaha with a creepy, drawn-out accept.

4. Tintinnabulation- n. the sound of bells. You can almost hear them ringing ...

5. Orangutan- n. King Louie from the Jungle Book. The epitome (12th favorite word) of awesomeness

6. Amoeba- n. a protozoan bottom-dweller. Not sure why I dig this one... it's not like it comes up in regular conversation... but it has a fun ring. I'd totally name a kid Amoeba.

7. Indubitably- adj. cannot be doubted, unquestionable. Great word when you want to sound pretentious. It also has a fabulous rhythm when it comes off your tongue. Kind of like a kettle falling down stairs. Also... rhythm is a weird word. Where are the vowels? How does that "thm" thing work?

  

8. Frumious- adj. blend of fuming and furious. I love love love the the Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/ Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/ the frumious Bandersnatch!" Oh so fantabulous! 

9. Smite- v. to deliver or deal a blow.  It's always fun to play with the tenses of this one. "I have been smitten" "I was smote" "He smit me"... good times :)

10. Ken- n. knowledge, understanding. I enjoy this one because one of my best friends is named Ken, so whenever he's confused about something we can say "Ah, so sad, it's beyond our ken..." Plus, it works best when you assume a Scottish accent (i.e. pretend to be Sean Connery) and that always makes for a good time!

My Lit Ladies

        Is it too dorky to admit that Tuesdays have quickly become my favorite day of the week? Part of that new-found Tuesday-love is probably due to the fact that it's my one day off from teaching... the one day I can dedicate to MY reading, MY projects, and MY LIFE!  But the other part of my preference for Tuesdays is definitely the Top Ten Tuesday meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. I love the opportunity to go digging back through my reading-memories to come up with answers to the weekly question, and I've really enjoyed checking out other people's answers. Every once in a while somebody will talk about a book I haven't read in YEARS and I'll float away on a tide of nostalgia... or run right over to the bookshelf to get reacquainted with the old favorite (last week's major re-find was The Giver... love love love that book)

Anyway! This week's episode is Top Ten Favorite Heroines! So, in no particular order... away we go!

1. Beatrice from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. She's snarky, sarcastic, a quick-thinker, and not willing to put up with any crap from any of the men in the play. Plus.. Emma Thompson plays her in the 1993 movie version.. and that gives her instant bonus points.

2. Lucy Snow from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. While I'm not huge on the whole 'repressed Victorian maiden' thing, I do love how self-reliant and resilient Lucy is. She's an intensely introverted character, but she also easily understands and reacts to the more emotive needs of others.

3. Precious in Sapphire's Push. It hurt to read this book-- the story was uncomfortable, disgusting, and horrifying. But no matter what happened, Precious managed to find a silver lining that was creative, hopeful and often hilariously funny. By the end of this book I was literally cheering out loud for her.

4. Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I love Elizabeth's spunk and her willingness to thumb her nose at convention. If I ignore the whole 'I won't really fall in love with Darcy until I see his fantabulous estate' business, she's pretty much perfect!

5. Jo March from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. In elementary school, my friends and I used to pretend that we were the characters from Little Women. It was a great way for girls with different interests to hang together- some of us could play house (the Megs and pre-death Beths), some of us could play dress-up and be lovely young ladies (the Amys) and some of us could be skallywag tomboys (the Jos). I always wanted to be Jo, but I usually got cast as Laurie because I couldn't seem to be lady-like enough to be a March daughter...

6. Thursday Next from Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. I'm still new to Fforde's series, but I have already decided that I want Thursday Next's life. She a literary detective (LiteraTec) who runs around INSIDE books trying to keep plots in place and characters happy. It's pretty much my dream job.

7. Ada from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. This is my all-time favorite book, and Ada (or Adah, depending on her mood) is a large part of the reason why I can't seem to go a month or two without rereading. She was born with a condition called hemiplegia (half of her body and brain is impaired) and she believes this condition changes the way she views and understands the world. Ada has an unusual way of looking at things (she often reads backwards and is obsessed with palindromes) but she has such heart and humor that you can't help but relate to her. 

8. Kambili from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. This is one of the books that really started the genre known as African Gothic, and Kambili, in her way, is just as determined to face her demons as any of the Victorian Gothic heroines who came before her (Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw). She's also more successful than many of them tend to be..

9. Hermione from the Harry Potter Series. Wicked smart, somewhat snarky, and perfectly willing to punch Draco Malfoy in the face when he deserves it. 

10. Petra in the Enders Game series. Petra has a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibralter, but (as you see in the later, Bean-focused books) she also has a huge heart and a willingness to do just about anything to help those she loves. 

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. This Week's Episode...Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read.  I want to point out that this is a list of books that I, myself, am shocked to admit I've never read-- my professors have their own (lengthy) list of holes in my education...

1.   Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. I've had this in my TBR pile for years now but every time I go to the shelves to pick out a new read I seem to just waltz right past this one. 

2.  Actually... I've never read ANYTHING by Nick Hornby. I hear such good things, but we just never seem to be in the same place at the same time.

3.  The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. It seems like every third person on the street is reading a Suzanne Collins book this week. I've read blurbs and reviews and the series sounds like a good time. Maybe when I get a break from 'academic reading (of Doooooooooom!)...

4.  The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. This book sits on my TBR pile and taunts me from across the room. It's not necessarily something that I WANT to read, but in order to consider myself a good little English scholar.. I probably ought to have read something by both of these guys! They seem to be kinda important...

5.  Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I think I've started this book twice, but life interrupted.

6.  The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. 

7.  Atonement by Ian McEwan.

8.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers. I want to read this one just for the title. Dude's got some cajones to put that one out there...

9.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick. I got embroiled in a long conversation with a friend last week about whether or not Adam and Eve (or Frankenstein, or most of the Greek Gods for that matter) had belly buttons. If you're not born in the 'usual' way there doesn't seem to be any need for an umbilical cord and, therefore, no need for a belly button! At the end of the conversation I declared that if I ever wrote a novel about an android I would call it No-Navel Nanette. My friend then replied that Philip Dick had already written a book about this exact topic and that I should read it before wasting my time scribbling away.  

10.  Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  

Tuesday Top-Ten

I'm jumping on the book-blogger bandwagon and adding my two cents to the Weekly Top Ten List run by The Broke and the Bookish. This Week's Episode...Top Ten Most Dislikeable Characters

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In no particular order...

1. Little Father Time from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Normally I'm all for brooding, precocious children- they usually have the darndest things to say, but LFT manages to be creepy without being interesting. He's an uncomfortably bland presence for 99% his time in the book and a flat out bizarre and morbid force for the final 1%. Not a FAN!

2. Jane Porter from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes. This book is full of monkeys (and their less adorable but more complex cousins the Apes) and therefor I am contractually obligated to love it. And I do, really! Tarzan himself is a wonderful character, as are Le Rou and (I hate to admit it..) Clayton, Lord Greystoke. And Jane does improve throughout the course of the Tarzan series so I can't hate her as a fully developed literary character... but in the first book of the series she is a spoiled, snobby, damsel in distress who totally does not deserve either of her hunky suitors.

3. Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. I'm an academic. I'm a huge nerd who spends ages in musty libraries reading up on world mythologies and comparative studies. I probably hate Casaubon because he makes people like me look like insecure, pedantic, stuffy, out of touch, Ivory Tower snobs. Which.. okay... sometimes we are. But I don't like to see it!

4. Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's Emma. I actually think she's a great, well-developed, (relatively) complex character with some fun psychological knots worked in... but she's just so dratted ANNOYING.

5. Achilles in Homer's The Iliad. I feel bad about this one. But why is it that nothing is evvvvver his fault? Pretty sure a whole lot of bloodshed (Hector!!!) could have been avoided if pretty-boy had just gotten over himself a couple hundred pages earlier.

6. Ashley from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Whine whine whine, fuss fuss fuss, make up your mind and stick with it!

7. Susan Barton from J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Loved the book, enjoyed reading the character, but she's not likeable in the sense that I'd enjoy sitting down and taking tea with her. She's manipulative, invasive and incredibly self-centered. If we met in a dark alley in London... we'd have words.

8. Amy March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Little brat single-handedly tore apart my favorite literary relationship of all time, 'nuff said. Jo and Laurie 4ever!

9.Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Pretty sure she's what's rotten in the state of Denmark

10. Shiva of the Knees from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. This is a love-to-hate situation not a this-is-terribly-written!!! situation. I adore this book- I read it at least once a year. Shiva is an evil little snot (ha! Sinai reference!) every single time.