So much for posting every (or almost every) day. I've been very pleased with our wedding planning so far, because it's been surprisingly low-stress. And then we hit our RSVP due date. I guess it's still not super-stressful, there are just a lot of things to do and remember now - forms and lists to send to our venue, a dinner tasting to go to (ok, this part I'm really looking forward to), a photographer to haggle with, honeymoon flights and accommodations to book...I feel like there's always at least one thing that I'm forgetting to do! It doesn't help that I started watching Lost last month, and I'm totally, tragically hooked. I found out this week that Hulu has the entire series, so now my lunches are 43 minutes long, instead of 30. Yikes.
At any rate, here's an interesting little activity that Claire (provider of all links funny, whimsical, and gorgeous) forwarded to me ages ago: The Influential Books Game.
In mid-March, a blogger started a listing exercise, urging readers to compile a list of the top ten books that have influenced their view of the world, and recommending a "go-with-your-gut" approach, rather than thinking about it for a long time. Another NYT blogger wrote an opinion piece on the idea, and listed a few other bloggers who had compiled their own lists; they made my head hurt (he says of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: "This is still the best book on interiority". WHAT?! Who says that?!) until I realized that most of them are economics bloggers and thus their "literary" range just barely intersects with mine. This is the original blog post. This is the NYT article it was in. Firstly, these comments from the original blog post make me giggle in their earnestness:
"Heidegger is out of fashion."
"...the claim about [Willard van Orman Quine's Word and Object] demands an explanation. It strikes me less as a heterodox reading and more of a non sequitur."
"Hayek adds an informatics complexity element that some of the other authors mentioned simply don't. Also missing from the list is growth theory, in which case a bit of Solow would be a good addition too."
*cue my brain exploding*
And secondly, here are my top ten influential books, in vague chronological order and mostly without defense or explanation:
1) The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton
2) The Stray, by Betsy James Wyeth (illustrated by Jamie Wyeth)
3) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
4) Love in the Night, by F. Scott Fitgerald
5) Watership Down, by Richard Adams
6) The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
7) "The Maze", "The Ogre" and "The Unknown Citizen", by W.H. Auden
8) Othello, by William Shakespeare
9) The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
10) Galatea, by Philip Pullman
...er, I mean, top 15:
11) Lamb, by Christopher Moore
12) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
13) Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (lay off - it got me all riled up in a way no book had ever done before)
14) The Giver, by Lois Lowry
15) The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
Eat it, economists.
