poor unloved little books

From uscathena  via sawcat:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. 


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights - oh, the pain, the paaaaain!
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose - after the third murder it picks up a bit  :-)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair - one of my favorites
The Time Traveler’s Wife - not one of my favorites
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods - wonderful book
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - I really disliked this, but I did finish
The Canterbury Tales - some for school, finished on my own
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World - oddly enough, I have practically no memory of this
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel - please make it stop!
1984
Angels & Demons - alternating between hysterical laughter and *headdesk*
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park - it's my favorite Austen, and I am not ashamed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury (no, but I was subjected to Light in August)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid - very large chunks, in the original
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Apparently a lot of people buy Austen and Neil Gaiman and then never read them. Odd. It's also funny to me that people apparently have lots of unread books on their shelves. I think I have fifteen.

I'm also forcibly reminded of how pathetic the assigned reading in high school was. *sigh* One Shakepeare per year, like they needed to be rationed. We even read Julius Caesar in American Lit, to make sure we had our Recommended Yearly Allowance of iambic pentameter. Plus I remebmer having a very early wtf moment in ninth grade when I realized we were reading an abridged version of Frankenstein.  Anyone know what high schools assign now? I'd be interested to know. If they are still making students read The Catcher in the Rye I officially give up. I went through high school thinking I hated Steinbeck because of the texts they assigned, then read Cannery Row and completely fell in love with his prose. Why is it always the "best known"/least enjoyable book of famous authors that is assigned?

(I'm having paragraph issues today...I'm feeling a bit stream-of-consciousnessy)

Gee, soy flour

Now, I never thought I'd feel compelled to share thoughts on soy flour (I never thought I'd have thoughts on soy flour), but there are some interesting things.

For one, you can use one heaping tablespoon of soy flour plus one tablespoon of water to replace one egg in baking. I ran out of eggs while making a double batch of pumpkin muffins the other day and had to try this. I couldn't even tell the difference. For anyone who is watching cholesterol this could be extremely useful. You don't even lose any protein in the swap!

I decided to do the math, and realized that this is also significantly cheaper as well. The cheapest I can get eggs in southeastern Virginia is 14.9 cents an egg. I can buy a 1.5 lb box of soy flour (containing 88T) for $3.14. That works out to 3.6 cents per tablespoon. I do about three batches of muffins a month, six batches of sandwich buns, and a weekly batch of cookies or brownies. All together that's 24 eggs for regular everyday baking.  $3.58 for eggs v. 86 cents for soy flour. It's not a ton of money, but there's other places I can use that $32.65 a year.

Secondly, one cup of soy flour, boiled for twenty minutes in six cups of water and then strained, makes a little over a quart of soy milk. Again, through the magic of word problems, that's 57 cents for a quart of soy milk. Call it 65 cents if you want to add vanilla and a little sweetner. Bruce drinks about a gallon per week, for a monthly total of $20 from the market, or 10.40 homemade, flavored and sweetened.

This lesson was brought to you by the letter 'S' and the number 5.

Dr. Who - Runaway Bride

Yay! Library got Season 3 in for me! (We don't have cable, so I get my Dr. infrequently and in large doses)

My only real thought so far is that I sincerely hope the rest of the season has a hell of a lot less shrieking women (human and alien) than the first hour has.

I think I need a Motrin.