Daily Archives: October 14, 2003

It’s a list

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It’s a listFrom London. They are naming the 100 greatest novels. Naturally, they miss all kinds of good ones and elevate some ones I don’t think deserve it.

But here’s my score of which ones I’ve read:

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes YES

2. Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan YES

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe YES

4. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift YES

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding NOPE

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson NOPE

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne NOPE

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos NOPE

9. Emma Jane Austen NOPE, but read others byher

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley YES

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock NOPE

12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac NOPE

13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal NOPE

14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas NOPE, I could live without Dumas

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli NOPE

16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens NOPE, but read others by him

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte NOPE

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte YES

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray OWN IT, haven’t read it yet

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne YES

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville YES

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert YES, love it

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins NOPE

24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll YES, pure genius

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott YES

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope NOPE

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy IN PROGRESS

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot NOPE

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky NOPE, but read others by him

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James YES, I love this novel

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain YES

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson NOPE

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome NOPE

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde NOPE

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith NOPE

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy NOPE

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers NOPE

38. The Call of the Wild Jack London NOPE, but read others by him

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad NOPE, but read others by him

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame YES

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust NOPE

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence NOPE, but read others by him

43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford NOPE

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan YES

45. Ulysses James Joyce STILL IN PROGRESS

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf YES

47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster NOPE

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald YES

49. The Trial Franz Kafka NOPE

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway NOPE

51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine NOPE

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner NOPE, but read others by him

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley NOPE

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh NOPE

55. USA John Dos Passos NOPE

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler YES

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford NOPE

58. The Plague Albert Camus NOPE

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell YES

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett NOPE, but read others by him

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger YES

62. Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor NOPE, but read others by him

63. Charlotte’s Web E. B. White YES

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien YES

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis NOPE

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding NOPE

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene NOPE

68 On the Road Jack Kerouac YES

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov YES

70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass NOPE

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe YES

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark NOPE

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee YES

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller YES

75. Herzog Saul Bellow NOPE, but read others by him

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez YES, LOVE IT

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor NOPE

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre NOPE

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison NOPE, but read others by her

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge NOPE

81. The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer NOPE

82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino YES, it was very highbrow

83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul NOPE

84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee NOPE

85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson NOPE

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray NOPE

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster NOPE

88. The BFG Roald Dahl NOPE, but read other by him

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi NOPE

90. Money Martin Amis NOPE

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro NOPE

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey NOPE

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera NOPE, but read others by him

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie READ IT, own it, love it

95. La Confidential James Ellroy NOPE

96. Wise Children Angela Carter NOPE

97. Atonement Ian McEwan NOPE

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman NOPE

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth NOPE, but read others by him

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald NOPE

The bus has come to the end of the line

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I am forced to fall back on using my car. The bus mechanics are striking, so all the busses are stopped in solidarity.

Now, I think it is important to band together to be heard, but you have to pick your battles.

The public transportation system is something that many city dwellers rely on. There are some that use it exclusively.

the MTA website has this to say about the strike:

MTA Media Relations – Press Release

The biggest issue dividing MTA negotiators and union leaders is over contributions to health benefits. MTA deposits $16.8 million annually into a trust fund administered by the maintenance union which buys medical coverage for 2,000 employees plus retirees. An independent audit of the trust fund shows the union has wasted millions of dollars in recent years through duplicative coverage, poor record keeping and other problems.
Among other issues, the audit faulted the union for transferring $36,000 a month into union operating funds but union officials refused to provide documentation for how the money is spent. The audit also noted that the union has been paying a consultant up to $15,000 a month since 1998 to automate their record keeping but the task still has not been accomplished and the data is kept manually so the union has no real time information about how the trust fund is doing.

—

We already know that the last bus strike lasted for more than a month. It is a crisis, really.

LA has been coming to terms with it’s Metropolitaness, and creating public transportation systems that were approaching usefulness. A lot of my co-workers have been learning to rely on busses.

But this is not a step forward. In addition to the massive inconvenience, this same MTA article repeats a figure I have heard elsewhere.

The bus strike costs the local economy 4 MILLION bucks A DAY.

I don’t know that I’m terribly supportive of this strike.