Steamed Puddings

I avoided blogging while I was in early pregnancy because I didn’t want to let anything slip. Now that the secret is out, I find myself wanting to get back to blogging. Here are a couple of things that have caught my eye.

Anali and Kerry have both done a smashing job of tackling a meme on the top 106 books tagged as “unread” on LibraryThing. Here’s my take on the list:

Like the others, I have bolded the books I have read, underlined the titles I read for school, and italicized those I started but didn’t finish.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: A novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. A Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian : a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
65. Dune
66. The Prince
67. The Sound and the Fury
68. Angela’s Ashes: A memoir
69. The God of Small Things
70. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
71. Cryptonomicon
72. Neverwhere
73. A Confederacy of Dunces
74. A Short History of Nearly Everything
75. Dubliners
76. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
77. Beloved
78. Slaughterhouse-Five
79. The Scarlet Letter (shhh, don’t tell Mrs. Holland I never finished it)
80. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - I am a grammar stickler, but this book put me to sleep!
81. The Mists of Avalon
82. Oryx and Crake
83. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
84. Cloud Atlas
85. The Confusion
86. Lolita
87. Persuasion
88. Northanger Abbey
89. The Catcher in the Rye - meh.
90. On the Road
91. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
92. Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
93. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
94. The Aeneid
95. Watership Down
96. Gravity’s Rainbow
97. The Hobbit
98. In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
99. White Teeth
100. Treasure Island
101. David Copperfield

My conclusions: I’m not nearly as well-read as I should be, as there are some classics on this list I’ve never broached. (Austen, Dickens, I’m looking at you.) Most of what I had to read for school didn’t make it onto this list, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Camus’ The Stranger, and Ender’s Game (thanks, Mrs. Kepner’s science fiction lit class!).

And now for something completely different:

Katie from Minor Revisions has finally started her dream job - she’s moved from being a postdoc at a Southern university into an industry position in the Midwest. She blogged today to recap her first week in the new job, and her observations about doing science in industry ring true. If you’re an academic postdoc, and you want to know what “the dark side” is like, check out her entry. (Aside: One academic postdoc friend has the same attitude I did when I was in the US: PhD students are somehow given the idea that once you leave academia for industry, you “can’t go back” to academia. There are great counterexamples, of course, like my friend’s own PhD supervisor, but Katie’s entry helps to justify my retort: Why would you *want* to go back to academia? Industry is great!)