I’m 27.

A spirit jumping from cumulo to nimbus:
lightning follows in its wake.
You, awake and dreaming, sense the other
world imposed in a brilliant second.
You, here and elsewhere,
are the saint that can see.

A billion songs driving into the earth,
dust rising and settling in their craters.
You, dimly away, hum along
to an impossible sonata.
You, here and elsewhere,
are the saint that can sing.

Good night, always a good night,
we are all together, hunkered down,
waiting for your windows to
subside, to darken.
We, here and elsewhere,
honour the saint that notices
little things.

I have shamelessly stolen this list from Kari. She writes:

I am not exactly sure what this list is, but it has something to do with the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program, though I couldn’t find this list on their website to verify that claim. I stole it from CJ. Apparently the NEA estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. At least, that is the statistic that is bandied about the internet. So, basically, this is a random unverified list with a random unverified statistic attached to it. But let’s see how I do anyway, shall we? (Hint: more than six.)

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Mark in red the books you LOVE. (Not going to do this!)
4) Reprint this list in your blog

Oh, yeah, I am not so much for making things red. So we are ignoring that rule. But feel free to use it if you’d like.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Yes. If it’s Austen, I’ve read it.
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - What a lot of tough slogging. The films were so much better withouth Tolkien’s ridiculously overwrought descriptions of everything.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Didn’t like it. Very boring stuff.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Everything so far!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yep. Read it at the cottage last fall because I had absolutely nothing else to read. It was good, I guess.
6. The Bible - Did one of those read-the-bible-in-a-year things. Some of it is awesome, some is dreadfully skull-poundingly boring.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - This Bronte person, I do not like her.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell Yes! What an awesome, terrible book.
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I own the entire series. They start off well and end badly, like most explicitly atheistic tracts.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - They sure did love their meandering sentences back then.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Of course! And Little Men, and Jo’s Boys, and whatever else she wrote.
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - I remember reading it, don’t remember much about it.
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - Heard of it, never read it.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I own it, but I’ve only really browsed the highlights, and of course the sonnets. Ole Shake sure rocked the iamb good and proper.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - No idea what this is.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Much better in tone, much more light-hearted than LotR.
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - No.
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Laura has a desperate attachment to this book. Read King Dork for more details on how annoying that can be. But of course I’ve read it too.
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - This book is fabulous but suffers at the end.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot - Sounds… dreary.
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No. I watched the film and that turned me off enough thankyouverymuch.
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - No real book reader can skip this. It’s impossible. F. Scott is like a force of nature.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens - I am unhappy with the Dickens I have read and wonder if people had a lot more time on their hands back then.
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I can only remember thinking that the outline for this book must have itself been thirty or forty pages long.
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Odd that it makes this list.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - What a horrible load of tripe.
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I picked it up once. That was enough.
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - I liked this book.
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Through The Looking-Glass was better.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Marvellous, wonderful book. Should be given to every child everywhere so they can grow up and catch the themes later.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Tolstoy has stolen enough of my life. No more.
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - They made me read this one.
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Of course. C.S. Lewis understood more about writing books for children than Pullman ever will. Narnia is inhabited with the sort of wide-eyed wonder that children exhibit. HDM was, instead, dreary and oppressive.
34. Emma - Jane Austen - Delicious.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen - Not her best effort.
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Because, you know, it’s not part of the Chronicles.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - An awfully boring book. I can’t imagine the sort of people that read this and actually enjoy it and want more. Sickos.
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No. Think I’ve heard of it.
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Maybe someday if I run out of back issues of National Geographic and word-of-the-day toilet paper.
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Love these.
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - Somebody doesn’t like communists. Good show!
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - I read the first seven or ten pages of a DB novel once. I strive not to repeat those sorts of awful misadventures.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Meh.
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - LOVE this book. Irving’s a bit of a perv, though.
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No.
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Sadly, I was reading these when I was thirteen. As the series went on, either the books got rather blase or I was growing too old for them. I prefer to think the latter.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No. I have read some Thomas Hardy, but this was not one of his most daring and original works, from what I hear.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - Margaret Atwook makes me alternately crazy and appreciative. Mostly crazy. I am ambivalent about this book.
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding - READ THIS BOOK KARI.
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan - Between this and The Cement Garden I begin to see a theme in this man’s novels. Perhaps a classier, gentrified Irving?
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - I came away from this book thinking, what have I just read? Of course, that’s often a favourable thing in my books.
52. Dune - Frank Herbert - After Dune it all goes down-hill. There should be no sequels or prequels to this novel. Anything else spoils it.
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - Never heard of it.
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Duh.
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - Sounds a bit dirty.
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Sounds foreign and loquacious and moreover quite boring.
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Could not finish this. Fine beginning sentences, though.
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - I love Huxley, and I want him to have my genetically-altered soma-sipping children.
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Laura and I both owned this book when we got married. Not sure why it’s on this list.
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I hate, hate, hate this book so much more than any other book I have ever read.
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Just this year!
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Strange book. Not what you think from the title.
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt - Never heard of it.
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - This is a crap book I’ve heard.
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - This book is so frickin’ long… he was being paid by the word for a serial publication, so naturally he stretched everything out. I read it after I saw the film. The film was marginally better.
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac - I love the style, hate the content. It’s this rumbling, rushing, busy prose with no plot or anything else of interest.
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - Oh yeah. Good book.
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - WTF
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - I read the other one he got in so much trouble for.
70. oby Dick - Herman Melville - I was forced to read this. I did not do it voluntarily, let me tell you.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Nor will I.
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker - Good book.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Another great book.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - No.
75. Ulysses - James Joyce - I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to this.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - Yes. Such a good book.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - Surprised to see this here! All these books about sailing made me want to own a boat when I was kid. If not duffers… won’t drown!
78. Germinal - Emile Zola - What is this?
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No.
80. Possession - AS Byatt - Don’t remember what it was about.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - No.
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No.
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker - Maybe. Sounds familiar.
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - And I suffered through the film! I’m practically a martyr for this story.
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - It has such a charming name.
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No.
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White - Hells yeah!
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - WFTH?
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Every single one, cover to cover.
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - What?
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - Yeah. Good, not great.
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - No.
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - Such a creepy, weird, off-kilter book. Loved it! Read this, if you ever have a chance. Unless you’re squeamish.
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams - I hate rabbits because of this book.
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - Dunces by Toole? Nice. But no.
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No.
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

- Yeah. This guy needs a good editor, seriously.

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare - I haven’t read much Shakespeare, I confess / But this play is one of the few I’ve read.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Dahl’s a genius. FYI.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No WAY am I ever going to read this.

Boos begin when a cello slips into the background of the piece, a solo disjointed note, the first of many to come. They are discomfited, they are annoyed, this is not what they came to see.

Conducting, he hears them. Pushes their unplanned discord from his head. Continues.

There is an argument beginning where the crowd grows poorer. They dislike what they are hearing. They dislike what they are seeing.

He winces at the noise. But he will overpower them. Soon the theme of his piece will rise and meet any challengers.

They seem to hear him, growing steadily louder. No longer paying attention. Brawling in the aisles.

The orchestra plays on. It cannot do anything else. It rises and swells and begets noise upon noise upon beautiful noise.

Someone starts a fire. That is it. The police and intermission arrive simultaneously.

He looks out on the heaving, brawling audience. The police swinging clubs. He had hoped they would listen, that it would hypnotise and delight them. Something awful, something new, something unlike anything before it.

He sprints to the back door. Throws it open. Angry, but anger turns soon to bitter sadness. He begins to weep as he walks aimlessly through the anonymous back streets.

It begins to rain but he does not turn around.

If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s solicitors coming to my door and telling me things I already know and don’t care about.

Consider Yak. They knocked today, at 8:00pm of all times, to tell me that they’ve leased the lines off Bell! (Like so many, many other companies have!) That they were offering great internet service! (Using Bell lines? Pffft.) At a low price! ($8 a month more than I pay with Acanac.) With unlimited downloads! (Using Bell lines? Unlimited in the sense that you can download as much as you like at 30kbps.)

When they asked how much I paid, I lowballed and said about $200 a year. They were like, “That’s a lot!” And I was like, “You can’t do math! Not even simple math!”

Then I decided I no longer wanted to talk to them, so I asked them if they allow an SSH tunnel into a remote virtual desktop with 100gb online storage like Acanac does. Their eyes glazed over. I asked if they supported DDNS (a red herring, it’s your router that supports DDNS) and they stammered an I-don’t-know.

I’m completely satisfied with the internet service I have. Acanac’s a pretty good company to deal with, and I like them. It’s hard for me to find things that I like, so I’ll keep them for now.

When he is thirteen, before he can even be rightfully called a man, he falls asleep and wakes up in deep in a forest, the sort of forest drenched in a thick haze, where light filters down to lush undergrowth and disappears. He will later discover, when he is in British Columbia, that this is a rainforest, but he doesn’t know this yet. He is lost, he knows that, but unafraid.

He sees her at the edge of his vision, just a glance. She is beautiful, the sort of beauty composed of opposites so well put together you don’t realise they’re opposites until much later, the dark and light superposed wonderfully, magically. Perfectly assembled for this dream-scape.

She is moving away from him, and in the peculiar logic of dreams, it seems to him worse to lose her that to become more lost in a place he has never before been.

Moving through the undergrowth, she almost out-paces him at every turn, but still he follows, deeper and deeper into the growing gloom.

Then finally he breaks through into a sort of clearing and she is staring directly at him. It seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant.

He wakes up to his own bed, his own room. Every detail of the dream fresh in his mind, he vows never to forget. The years roll by, he becomes older and more prone to believe he’s wise, but he re-vows time and time again that he will never forget. And he never does.

He grows older but he still looks for her face in crowds. He spends ten years looking and convincing himself that this girl or that girl has inside themselves something that makes them like her. He is wrong, and he is wrong, and he is wrong again.

Then he sees her.

There is a moment when his heart simply refuses to beat, when all the blood in his body seems to have rushed to his head and stayed there, when the world spins down on its axis and time stops and all there is in the world is her.

But she is, of course, on the periphery of his existence, and when he manages to strike up a conversation she slips away. Over the ensuing months, she keeps moving away from him, an in the peculiar upside-down logic of real life, he decides to let her go.

She disappears and he settles for a simulacrum.

His life becomes a dream he can’t wake up from. He folds himself into the masses and tries to forget her, and sometimes he is successful. Sometimes fails desperately. He keeps himself too busy to think and finds his mind takes over and he is again elsewhere in dreams.

He awakes in the rainforest night after night. It is empty of life, empty as the distant reaches of space, oppressively silent. He calls her name out, for he has found it out, silence broken and flung into the air like a flock of birds. Nothing. He wakes up. Nothing.

In the years proceeding he finds someone. He falls in love or something like love or something she will come to call not love at all, though that will be after the fact. He settles on her. He settles for her. She leaves him, leaves him, leaves him, leaves him fraught with the ever-present dread that she will leave him. Finally, he leaves her, like a coward he leaves her, or she leaves him and it is all over and there is nothing but ashes and fall-out remaining.

Deep in the ashes of it all he dreams, he remembers another her, deep in a forest. He remembers finding her. He realises everything is not lost.

When he is twenty-five, before he can rightfully be called a man, he wakes up and understands that it matters, and that it always has mattered. He can’t convince himself otherwise, though he has tried.

It is as if he has emerged from the ocean and can see as he was meant to. She has always been there, even when she was not there.

One day, she touches his arm ever so slightly, so shyly, so impossibly, and he somehow knows what she is and will be. He gathers her into his arms and looks down and it seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant. There is in him a flash of untamed fear that he will wake up. But he never does.

One of the first songs I consciously remember writing and wanting to save. Circa maybe seven years ago. Also perhaps the most ridiculously self-indulgent I’ve ever written.

Who pushed splinter in my side?
I reach and feel the water and the blood.
Is this love, to let me go?

Who pushed these thorns into my head?
These barbs are oh so bloody and so red.
Was it love, to let me go?

Oh I know just the words to say.
The words to tear us all apart.
Oh I know just know to break
a girl’s heart.

You touch your finger to my side.
Horrified to feel the wound so wet.
Is this love, to let me go?

You tremble, hammer in your hands.
You know exactly how this story ends:
Was this love, to let me go?

Oh I know just the words to say.
The words to tear despair apart.
But I know just how to break
a girl’s heart.

Pray that I won’t break yours.
I’m scared to speak and then regret.
Pray that I won’t break yours.
I’ll bite my tongue. There’s still hope left.
Pray that I won’t break yours.
How far can we get? How far can we get?

Oh you knew just the words to say.
The words to tear my soul apart.
Oh you knew just to break
my heart.

Super-old song. Just getting the lyrics online.

Does it surprise you,
what’s going on in the places
where you haven’t looked in so long?
Do you wonder if you know how
to pick up the pieces again.

You pick them up. You pick them up.
You pick them up but they fall down again.

It was written that
it would be written:

An improbable prophecy offered,
a lithic blossom snatched
from the periodic fist:

Then without words you wander
the bright heart of an eloquent world:
Then without rancour you wither
beneath a thousand tongues of flame.

• Romaine lettuce with a balsamic vinegar + olive oil + honey + goat’s cheese = awesome dressing
• Boiled potatoes
• Rye bread with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dipping sauce
• Tabbouleh (Note to self, needs finer chopped parsley, fewer pieces of onion, more lemon juice, and more fresh ground pepper, plus some tomatoes and red peppers)
• Red wine from France (but not good red wine from France, mind you

That was delicious..