Mr

Posted by megnetic in Uncategorized on January 23, 2011

Another cookbook, another groupie

Trying hard to mimic and prove

Their tongues gold, their palates divine

Rinsed only in creme fraiche

and truffle foam

They cut, they slice, they take a picture

They wine; they dine; they take another

After each click, they declare each other

An epicure and chef

like Mr Oliver

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Posted by megnetic in Uncategorized on January 13, 2011

The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
2. Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
4. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift’s vision.
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
‘Call me Ishmael’ is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman’s passion for a younger man.
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master’s death.
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Conrad’s masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children’s classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame’s son.
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
45. Ulysses James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf’s position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
49. The Trial Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.
55. USA John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome – and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
58. The Plague Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man’s struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte’s Web E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert’s obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler’s Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer – and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
‘[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.’
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.
81. The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.
90. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis’s place on any list.
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.
95. La Confidential James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
Lyra’s quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children’s book.
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy’s Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.

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ALL TIME 100 Novels

Posted by megnetic in Uncategorized on January 13, 2011

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present
Full List

A – B
•The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
•All the King’s Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
•American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
•An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
•Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
•Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O’Hara
•Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
•The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
•At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O’Brien
•Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
•Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
•The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
•The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
•The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
•Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
•Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
•The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder

C – D
•Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
•Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
•The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
•A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
•The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
•The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
•The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
•A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
•The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
•Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
•A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
•The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
•Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
•Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone

F – G
•Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
•The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), by John Fowles
•The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
•Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
•Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
•The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
•Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
•The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald

H – I
•A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
•The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
•The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
•Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
•Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
•A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
•I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
•Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
•Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison

L – N
•Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
•The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
•Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
•Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
•The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
•Loving (1945), by Henry Green
•Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
•The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
•Midnight’s Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
•Money (1984), by Martin Amis
•The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
•Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
•Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
•Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
•Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
•Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
•1984 (1948), by George Orwell

O – R
•On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
•One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
•The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
•Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
•A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
•Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
•Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
•Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
•The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
•The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
•Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
•Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
•The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
•Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
•Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates

S – T
•The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
•Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
•Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
•The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
•The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
•The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
•The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
•The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
•Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
•Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
•To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
•To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
•Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

U – W
•Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
•Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
•Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
•Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
•White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
•White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
•Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

Graphic Novels
•Berlin: City of Stones (2000), by Jason Lutes
•Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson
•Bone (2004), by Jeff Smith
•The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), by Kim Deitch
•The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller
•David Boring (2000), by Daniel Clowes
•Ed the Happy Clown (1989), by Chester Brown
•Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), by Chris Ware
•Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003), by Gilbert Hernandez
•Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Solitude and Leadership (article taken from The American Scholar)

Posted by megnetic in Uncategorized on December 30, 2010

An interesting article on Solitude and Leadership taken from The American Scholar:

– The American Scholar – http://www.theamericanscholar.org –

Solitude and Leadership

Posted By William Deresiewicz On March 1, 2010 @ 3:18 pm

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year.

My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.

Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

Read the rest of this entry »

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