Beautiful Fotos 8: Ink + Water

How Well Read Are You?

What makes a person well read?

Every once in a while some newspaper -- usually a hoity-toity one from the UK, publishes a list of the 100-or-so books everyone should read in their lifetime and makes a big deal about how few of them people have read.

I admit to cheating on these surveys, or at least fudging a bit.

• If I took a class in college where I was supposed to have read the book and I read at least part of it, I click Read It! 
• If I was supposed to read the book, didn't but managed to write an "A" paper about it. Read It! 
• Saw a critically-acclaimed BBC production of a classic novel -- Read It! 
• Heard smart classmates and a good professor have a really good discussion about a book while I was hoping not to be called on? Yup. Read it!

In truth, I am not as "well read" as I should be, or as I believe I should be, considering both my bachelor's degree and my master's degree are in  English Literature. People expect that I have read all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, everything by Chaucer, Carroll, Dickens, Woolf, Austen, Bronte, Alcott, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Tolkien, and lots and lots of poetry.

Truth time. Below is the BBC's famous "How many have you read" list that was circulated back in 2009. I've highlighted the ones I've read from start to finish -- no fudging (41 books). I've put the ones I really want to read (someday) in red. I've put snarky notes in blue.

41%. Am I well read?

Although looking through this list makes me feel like I'm missing key entries in my Reader Resume, there are so many other books -- hundreds -- that I've read which are not on the list that have contributed greatly to my life, emotionally and intellectually, and even socially. Where is Elie Wiesel? David Sedaris? Michael Chabon? For that, try this list: 1,000 Books Everyone Must Read

How many have you read? Which books would you have on a "must read to be well read" list?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -- planning on reading it with the kids.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible  -- I don't believe anyone has read this in it's entirety. I have read every word of the Torah, however, and the 4 gospels, and Revelations was a kick.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell  -- living it. No need to read it.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -- again, eith the kids.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- OK. Yeah. No. Not all of them are worth reading.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe 
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy. 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert 
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth. 
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -- another one to read with the kids
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt. 
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- Honestly, I'll just watch the BBC series and Robert Downey Jr.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman

I was first introduced to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov by Rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom. He used to share the rebbe's stories during services and taught about him often during Torah study. It was one of the great moments of my professional Jewish life to be able to hear one of Rebbe Nachman's stories from the great Arthur Green.

The rebbe wasn't a liberal, and he melded kaballah with fervent Torah study, but he also advocated free-form prayer -- talking to the divine as you would a friend, or an imaginary friend.

He also advocated that we always be happy.

Meh.

One can't always be happy, and Rebbe Nachman's real life story speaks to that. Green's biography, Tormented Master speaks to the rebbe's possible bipolar disorder. Happiest of happy; lowest of lows.

But my absolute favorite thing about Rebbe Nachman are his followers, who take "always be happy" to the extreme, dancing ecstatically to techno music about their rebbe in the streets of Israel. How can you not love these guys?

#Stop#StopKony

By now, everyone has heard of Joseph Kony, and many of us heard of him for the first time this past week because of this video:

If you haven't taken the time to watch it, I strongly recommend that you do, but not for the reason you might think. Unlike so many people who have linked to this video on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, I don't want you to buy a bracelet or put up a poster, and I am not interested in spreading "awareness" about Joseph Kony. It's questionable whether this video contains enough truth to be a vehicle for that.

I am once again wishing I still taught Hebrew High. One of the reasons this video spread like wildfire throughout the interwebs is that young people linked to it, tweeted about it and posted it on their Facebook pages -- most of them, I assume, without doing any fact checking or additional research first. It's so easy to click "retweet" or "share". Too easy.

In the Kony 2012 video the filmmaker says explicitly that he is performing a social experiment. He wants to make Joseph Kony famous, so famous that someone with power will finally take notice and capture him.

I can't help but wonder if the real social experiment was to see how quickly one video could take over the national conversation. How many young people would blindly sign on to the campaign. How many "action kits" (just $30!) could they sell?

It's Propaganda

One of the many Kony 2012 posters online.

There are many problems with the video, and they have been widely reported. Among the most important:

Kony left Uganda more than six years ago, and though the video mentions this very briefly, the filmmakers actually make it appear as if Kony's army was growing into other countries, not fleeing to them.

His army -- the Lord's Resistance Army -- has shriveled down to a few hundred soldiers. While it is true that, over 25 years, Kony abducted 30,000 children, the film makes it seem as if there are currently 30,000 children under his control.

President Obama has already sent in 100 advisers to help the Ugandan government in its efforts against the LRA.

The video is distracting everyone from Uganda's real problems, most notably, a growing epidemic of "nodding disease" in Northern Uganda. More: Reuters

It's Calling for War
The filmmakers strike me (and others) as sanctimonious, white, Western do-gooder hipsters who know what's best for African affairs -- and what's best is apparently Western military intervention, and all its consequences. I'm left wondering what the #stopkony supporters see as the endgame.

Another war? If you knew that's what it took to Stop Kony -- more American lives lost; more foreign policy nightmares; more more entanglements with less-than-savory governments (Uganda's current government is not a paragon of democratic virtues) -- would you still join the campaign?

It's Slactivism
One of the goals of the #stopkony campaign is similar to many other internet campaigns -- raising awareness. Getting an issue in front of the people. It's happened with every single type of cancer and all sort of natural disasters.

You too can change the world, just by clicking "like" or "share". It takes less than a second and accomplishes what, exactly? For me, slactivism is much like prayer. It makes you feel good to have done it, but the effects for those who need real help are nil.

If you want to make change happen, do more than like or share -- do your research and then give. Give your time, your effort or, if you can, your money. If Invisible Children and Stop Kony still make the cut, give without guilt.

You might want to with t he articles linked below, but certainly don't take my word for it.

Articles about Kony 2012:
Kony 2012: A Lesson in Critical Thinking -- Huffington Post
Fact Checking Kony 12 -- NPR
Invisible Children Responds to Criticism
Should I Donate or Not? -- Vice.com
Kony -- The New White Man's Burden -- The New York Times













                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Charles Dickens' Fake Books

When Charles Dickens moved into Tavistock House in 1851, he decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented.


And so, on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following "list of imitation book-backs" to be produced. My favorites are highlighted in green.


History of a Short Chancery Suit
Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington
Five Minutes in China. 3 vols.
Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols.
Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols.
Mr. Green's Overland Mail. 2 vols.
Captain Cook's Life of Savage. 2 vols.
A Carpenter's Bench of Bishops. 2 vols.
Toot's Universal Letter-Writer. 2 vols.
Orson's Art of Etiquette.
Downeaster's Complete Calculator.
History of the Middling Ages. 6 vols.
Jonah's Account of the Whale.
Captain Parry's Virtues of Cold Tar.
Kant's Ancient Humbugs. 10 vols.
Bowwowdom. A Poem.
The Quarrelly Review. 4 vols.
The Gunpowder Magazine. 4 vols.
Steele. By the Author of "Ion."
The Art of Cutting the Teeth.
Matthew's Nursery Songs. 2 vols.
Paxton's Bloomers. 5 vols.
On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets.
Drowsy's Recollections of Nothing. 3 vols.
Heavyside's Conversations with Nobody. 3 vols.
Commonplace Book of the Oldest Inhabitant. 2 vols.
Growler's Gruffiology, with Appendix. 4 vols.
The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols.
Burke (of Edinburgh) on the Sublime and Beautiful. 2 vols.
Teazer's Commentaries.
King Henry the Eighth's Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols.
Miss Biffin on Deportment.
Morrison's Pills Progress. 2 vols.
Lady Godiva on the Horse.
Munchausen's Modern Miracles. 4 vols.
Richardson's Show of Dramatic Literature. 12 vols.
Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep. As many volumes as possible.


Source: http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/03/fake-books-of-charles-dickens.html

Life goes on...

My parents are in Florida this week, and I sent with them a rock from our house here in Colorado to be placed on my grandparents' grave. It's a grave I may never visit again, now that my parents have moved to Colorado.

There are lots of supposed reasons that Jews put stones on the gravemarkers of our dead. I've heard these:

• It signifies that this person is honored enough to have visitors -- the deceased has not been forgotten.
• It is reminiscent of biblical times, when graves were marked with a pile of stones.
• Stones were originally used to hold down notes that visitors wold place on graves, lest they blow away.
• The stone opens a channel of communication between the visitor and the dead.

I've always thought the stone on the grave was a nice gesture, though clearly for the living. My grandparents graves in Florida have a flat marker, and often the groundskeepers just push the rocks to the side, where they become part of the sandy soil, framing its edge with the evidence of years' worth of visits. Like the tree in the picture, they have become part of the graves' permanent landscape and will remain, even when the visits stop.

 

Beautiful Fotos 7: Velcro, Very Close