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A Guy's Moleskine Notebook

Thoughts and reflections on works of fiction and literature. Pondering of life through pictures and words. Babbling about gay rights. Travelogues and anecdotes.

  • [1] Annie Proulx: Brokeback Mountain
  • [2] Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
  • [3] Yu Hua: To Live
  • [4] Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
  • [5] Colm Toibin: The Master
  • [6] Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
  • [7] William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • [8] Charles Higham: The Civilization of Angkor
  • [9] Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case
  • [10] Dai Sijie: Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
  • [11] Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library
  • [12] Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
  • [13] Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship
  • [14] Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
  • [15] Ross King: Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
  • [16] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
  • [17] Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
  • [18] Colm Toibin: The Story of the Night
  • [19] John Banville: Shroud
  • [20] Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection
  • [21] Peter Hessler: River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze
  • [22] Ian McEwan: The Atonement
  • [24] Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  • [25] Ignacio Padilla: Shadow without a Name
  • [26] Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
  • [27] Richard Russo: Straight Man
  • [28] Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
  • [29] Alan Hollinghurst: The Spell
  • [30] Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil
  • [31] James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
  • [32] Ken Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • [33] Xingjian Gao: One Man's Bible
  • [34] C. Jay Cox: Latter Days
  • [35] Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
  • [36] William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew
  • [37] Daniel A. Helminiak: What The Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
  • [38] James Baldwin: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  • [39] Kenji Yoshino: Covering - The Hidden Assault of Civil Rights
  • [40] Italo Calvino: If, On a Winter's Night A Traveler
  • [41] Arthur Phillips: The Egyptologist
  • [42] George Orwell: 1984
  • [43] Michael Warner: The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and Ethics of Queer Life
  • [44] Andrew Sullivan: Virtually Normal
  • [45] Henry James: The Wings of the Dove
  • [46] Jose Saramago: Blindness
  • [47] Umberto Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
  • [48] Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code
  • [49] Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  • [50] Ken Follett: The Pillars of Earth
  • [51] Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • [52] Michael Thomas Ford: Alec Baldwin Doesn't Like Me
  • [53] Jonathan Franzen: How To Be Alone
  • [54] Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
  • [55] Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club
  • [56] Zadie Smith: White Teeth
  • [57] Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Double
  • [58] Jose Saramago: The Double
  • [59] Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance
  • [60] Heinrich von Kleist: The Marquise of O & Other Stories
  • [61] Andrew Holleran: In September, the Light Changes
  • [62] Tom Perrotta: Little Children
  • February 19, 2006

     

    Moleskine is always under construction

    Caught up with updating the template for this blog so this is an overdue post. By the way, A Guy's Moleskine Notebook just turned one month old yesterday with over 300 readers. I wish to express my gratitude to everyone who has checked out the blog. The latest revamp to the site is the incorporation of LibraryThing | Catalog your books online. This is almost like a dream come true when I recently discovered the catalog helper from other literary blogs. Basically I can catalogue my entire book collection through this service, which tabulates books alphabetically by titles, genres, or authors' last names. Since LibraryThing is an online reader community, every member catalogs together, I can use the shared network to find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with my tastes. It's great fun to watch my graphical shelf of books to grow and immediately links to those who share my titles. LibraryThing also allows me to tag my titles literature, gay studies, history, philosophy and so forth. One can be creative about these tags. For example, one person might tag War and Peace "Russian lit", while another tags it "religious, philosophical," and still another "novel I can never finish>" To add more style to my blog, I can copy-and-paste the script to include a wiget showing random books of my library on the blog. To share a bit of fun stat, here are the books in my library that are most unique and eclectic in LibraryThing:

    Naguib Mahfouz: The Day the Leader was Killed (0)
    Naguib Mahfouz: The Beggar, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail (2)
    Grace Tiffany: Will (2)
    Michael Thomas Ford: Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me and Other Trials from My Queer Life (2)
    Charles Higham: The Civilization of Angkor (2)
    Cao Xueqin: The Debt of Tears, Dream of the Red Chamber Vol.4 (3)
    Michael Lowenthal: The Same Embrace (3)
    Dai Sijie: Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch (4)
    Yu Hua: To Live (4)
    Cao Xueqin: The Dreamer Wakes, Dream of the Red Chamber Vol.5 (4)
    Colm Toibin: The Story of the Night (5)

    ( ) denotes the number of LibraryThing member who shares the same title with me. I'm very surprised that after the smash-hit debut Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie does not kick off a domino effect for his latest release, which came out last fall. Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, who is most known for his Cairo Trilogy, is also not very well-read among LibraryThing readers. The last two volumes of Dream of Red Chamber also reap a meager audience. Maybe the Chinese epic is too long and philosophical to engross a lasting readership. Now the top five shared titles in my library:

    Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (997)
    J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (927)
    Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (591)
    Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (511)
    Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha (499)

    What can I say to this? All classics but one - a toast to Arthur Golden. How do my all-time favorite reads fare in this community?

    Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose (469)
    Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment (373)
    Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (227)
    Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (213)
    Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty (88)

    3 Comments:

    Blogger Greg said...

    LibraryThing sounds like an ideal site for me! I'll have to check it more thoroughly tonight. Thanks for the info!!

    2/20/2006 10:54 AM  
    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    It is pretty addictive once you start adding books. I think it is interesting to see which ones I have that others have as well. I have a hard time deciding just how many tags to use for each book, and once I start a category will I remember it for the rest of my books? But it is nice just to have a place to list them and be able to sort and keep track!

    2/21/2006 8:38 AM  
    Blogger Amelia said...

    Congratulations on your one month anniversary!! And to have had over 300 readers within that short amount of time is incredible! How wonderful :) I've seen many postings about LibraryThing - it sounds pretty cool. I might set up an account with them but I'm scared I'll spend more time cataloging my books and viewing other catalogues than actually reading. I can be pretty obsessive when it comes to making lists.
    Like I've said before, you have a wonderful site! Again, congratulations :) :)

    2/21/2006 9:12 AM  

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