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Just came across references to the NEA Big Read Meme in Cocktail Party Physics.  The NEA is trying to “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture”, a worthy goal questionably stated.  I would think a Trojan horse approach (reading that entertains, books that are fun) would work better than a return to the past and an attempt to displace the web and mp3 players.  But that’s non-profits for ya. 

The list below, and I haven’t found the original source yet (and see no point in trying to having found the same list three times already), has 100 books that are somehow worthy of people’s attention.  It’s a mix of popular and fun (Harry Potter, LOTR) and more traditional classics (Lolita, Pride and Prejudice).  The viral activity around it is to see what we have read, intend to read and which ones we love.  Great fun to play  with, critique, and build your own.

One thing around the categories worth doing is distinguishing between “Read and discarded from thought” which would apply to most of Tess of the D’Urbervilles which was part of AP English, “Read and Internalized”, “Read but should Re-Read”.  Not all read-s are equal.

Look at the list and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE.

I’ve also put a footnote anchor by incomplete reads, with notes at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [1]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 [2]
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 - CS Lewis
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 [3]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving [4]
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 [5] (Currently reading this.)
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
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 (No, but I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that was enough for me!! )
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 [6]
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 [7]
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

Kid in my neighborhood, just back from magic camp, doing card tricks on his stoop for tips and the pleasure of performing.

He had moves too, shuffles, lifts and patter had us mystified. In between tricks he was reading Ian Fleming! This kid will go far.

Just saw this monster.com ad:

when you move your mouse, the little lemming/candidates follow it.

In the last month, there has been a cognitive convergence about personal taste as a source of design and creativity. The documentary The Pixar Story has John Lasseter and team talking about how they make movies they want to watch. Seth Rogen, in a pre-Pineapple Express release interview told the NYT that he and his collaborators make movies they want to watch. And iD founders Romero and Carmack (remember them?), said that their work was all about making games what they wish they could be (ie, the ones they want to play).

I was at a project kick-off a few months ago when an account lead asked me when design would start — politely wondering if audience research was scheduled aggressively enough to allow time for design. When I stated that we had already started design explorations, the room was silent. The project hadn’t even started and we were already sketching and photoshopping?!? There was stunned disbelief that design could be done without lots and lots of research. One person asked, “you’ll just go off of personal taste?” What followed was a three month, still unfinished, dialogue about whether there is such a thing as creative expertise: is it possible to do design without lots of data driving you in the right direction? Is design that isn’t heavily informed by data a matter of personal taste?

The statements from Lasseter, Rogen, and the iD boys aren’t purely assertions of personal taste. Each of these people were students of their crafts: storytelling, animation, comedy, programming, games. Each was also a student of his market, deeply familiar with the work of others, and a passionate fan of his medium. The gauge “would I like it” isn’t an assertion that they are the audience and their needs are the ones that need to be met. It’s actually a means of holding themselves to a higher standard: “I have seen the best, I know why it’s the best, and I enjoy the best, so can I create something that I will enjoy?” It’s a much tougher standard than it sounds, and one that both assumes and creates empathy with the final audience.

… of .22 guns, that is. I recently bought a .22 Plinkster long rifle for target practice (only) at my place upstate. The clip for the gun holds up to 10 cartridges (according to the manual, but I can only get 9 in). The box for the cartridges comes in a clever little case:

The case’s lid clicks back one row at a time to reveal a line of 5 cartridges which you can drop into your hand. Slide it another row back, and you’ve got all your cartridges for loading. A thoughtful convenience for the casual target shooter.

Doing some work-related research, I came across two quotes about the role of public art and museums in our lives:

The only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place is that … they produce in us a kind of exalted happiness.  For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle, we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky.  — Kenneth Clark

It is the judicious exercise of the museum’s authority that makes possible that state of pure reverie tha an unencumbered aesthetic experience can inspire.”  — Phillipe De Montebello

Walking through the National Gallery of Art the other day, I was lucky enough to catch this shot of a man repairing the iconic Calder mobile in the lobby:

I’ve always enjoyed Calder (at Storm King Art Center, especially, but also the more intimate Calder’s Circus), but this was revealing on several levels. Of course, you get to see the scale of the work in a way that looking up at the ceiling only partially conveys. But to see that fin/scale piece up close, and to see its shape, and the connective tissue to the rest of the piece, makes you appreciate the elegance of the shape and how perfect it is. It’s also cool to see the guy using nylon thread to stabilize the mobile (pardon the pun). . .

Nice reminder that even the highest art (another!) is craft, artifact, and human.

From a NY Times article about Jon Stewart’s status as one of the most trusted journalists in America, a nice quote from Stephen Colbert about the craft of satire.  It can apply to so many things where you are looking at the difference between amusing and brilliant, mockery and satire, good and great:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”