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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
  • March 04, 2006

     

    The undertow of construction around the site

    The launch of LibraryThing book catalog was one big step toward taking inventory of the charivari around my house, as books have taken over patch of my bedroom floor. With more and more books coming "out of the closet," my account will soon become a lifetime membership for $25. As Greg pointed out in the comment, we are on the lookout for similar site that will catalog CDs, DVDs, and anything of which we have a fetish to catalog! Maybe it's time to work on a searchable database for my books and media collection so any title can become just one click away.

    Then I discovered Flickr, yet another addictive online community that enables new way of organizing photos. Flickr makes possible for us to share some of our most memorable, goofiest, funny, interesting, esoteric, artistic pictures to the whole world or just a private audience for maybe more than 30 seconds of celebrity. Once I have uploaded my pictures, Flickr can also add one of those cool photo strips to the side of your blog. Just design your badge (HTML or a flash one like the one on the left sidebar of this blog), and cut and paste the code to your blog template! And another cool thing you can add to your blog is the Flickr Zeitgeist. Cut and paste to your blog. You can even set it up so it just shows your pictures and those of your Flickr contacts. Did I say it's addictive?

    An interesting idea comes to mind when I'm writing this post. For those who are on the quest for love and dating online, Flickr lets people see and find out more about you than just some legalistic, stat-oriented profile can offer. Just a thought. Anyway my Flickr account just burgeons so I'll upload more pictures of my travels. Pictures from the most recent Thailand and Cambodia/Angor Wat trip are up. The intricacy and details of the carvings, bas-reliefs, and architecture are fabulous. The pictures from Bali, Indonesia will be up next on the flash badge and followed by a collage of pictures of friends.

    Another project would be to re-do the blog to a three-column format. TypePad automatically formats blogs in three columns. Maybe I'll study the source code of some of the pages like Danielle's so I can align links to recent posts and book reviews on one side and links to favorite /daily pursuit blogs to another to enhance navigate-friendliness. Another glitch that I would like to correct is the Blogroll site update alert. It seems that Blogroll doesn't alert update of *some* but not all Typepad blogs. Anyone knows why?

    3 Comments:

    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    I really like Typepad and for me (who is really clueless at HTML) it is well worth the money. They have all sorts of templates that you can use, or you can create your own (which I am not proficient enough to do). I really should use Blogroll to keep track of updated blogs, but I have been to lazy to use any of those types of services.

    3/05/2006 4:25 PM  
    Blogger mattviews said...

    Unfortunately I didn't discover TypePad until after I am hip-deep with Blogger. I guess I can still work around the problem of three-column format.

    Blogroll is amazing in the way it provides one-click to add the blog you like to your link.

    3/06/2006 2:35 PM  
    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Matt I love your photos! Thank you for sharing. I will have to check them out again. I love to travel and can just look at travel photos for hours.

    3/06/2006 8:54 PM  

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