Goodreads

I know that a lot of people aren't crazy about Goodreads, but I love it, not least because it helps allay my fears about ever-more-intense cultural fragmentation. I find it genuinely comforting to know that a book I've read has been read by people I know, particularly since I live in a place where discussion of reading is exceedingly rare. Based on a quick survey of the site, I came up with this list of all the books that have a) been published in the last decade or so and b) have been been read by me and marked as "read" or "to-read" by at least four of my Goodread friends. Of the 16 books, 13 are novels, which is unsurprising. Of the three nonfiction books, one is about Iraq, and the other two are all or in part about food (and The Omnivore's Dilemma doesn't even appear here because I haven't read it yet). What will historians say about our preoccupation with the politics of food during wartime?

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (13 people, including myself)
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (8)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (8)
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (7)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (7)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (6)
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (6)
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (6)
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (6)
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (6)
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (6)
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (5)
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (5)
Arthur Phillips, Prague (5)
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (5)
Richard Russo, Straight Man (5)

Some Boxes

People sometimes ask what I "am." Now I can just refer them to this blog post.



Green = Native Hawaiian
Red = Chinese (some combination of Han and Hakka)
Blue = Some combination of English and Scottish
Grey = German

Biography

I'm not a huge fan of biography, and in fact I've only read six (or rather, six and a half) biographies in the past decade. But recently, a friend's enthusiasm about Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy has got me thinking about the genre, and about what my sparse biographical reading list suggests about me:

Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (read in 2009)

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009)

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (2006)

Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2006)

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (2004)

Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (2001, never finished)

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (2000)

India is Really Big

I've been reading a lot about India in preparation for an upcoming trip. Even though I know, like everyone else, that the nation's total population is about 1.3 billion, I'm still astounded every time I read about how many people live in a given state. Inspired by this map, which replaces the US states with the flags of countries of equal population, I created the map above. As in the United States map, each state or territory is represented by the flag of the country whose population is roughly equivalent to that of the state. I took a few liberties, such as omitting the smaller union territories and leaving out the boundaries that are disputed by India and its neighbors.

Here are a few unexpected things that showed up in the map:

- The state of Gujarat is closest in population to South Africa. Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat, spent over two decades in South Africa before returning to India.

- Because Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are represented by the UK and Australian flags, respectively, they appear at first glance to be connected. In fact, Chhattisgarh split off from Madhya Pradesh in 2000 to become its own state, so the connection is appropriate.

- The flags of Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia, real-life neighbors in southern Africa, here represent the adjacent northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur (though it can be hard to tell because the northeast's already-crazy jumble is made more confusing by multicolored flags).

- The state of Haryana, here represented by the flag of Syria, is shaped a lot like Iraq, whose flag looks a lot like that of Syria.

Gmoticons

I don't use GChat as much as I used to, because the IT department at my current job monitors employee internet usage. However, I've recently discovered (or rediscovered, in the case of the monkey) the following "hidden" commands within the program. Though they are secret only in the sense that "animal style" at In-N-Out Burger is secret, these functions surely deserve greater acclaim and usage:

:(|)

V.v.V

[:|]

Street Names

Amazing streets in whose vicinity I have resided:

Melville Street. Probably named around the turn of the century, before the resurgence of Melville's literary reputation. In West Philadelphia Melville St. is a tiny north-south street tucked between wider, numbered streets.

Sigel Street. Apparently Beanie Sigel's name is derived from the South Philadelphia street (though he lived on the west side of Broad Street).

Keanu Street. I would like to believe that the actor, who is part Hawaiian, was named after the street. I find parking on this street to be oddly satisfying.

Bastille Day

Five French people I like:

* Claire Denis

* Fernand Braudel

* Pierre Mendès-France

* Franck Ribéry

* Jacques Vergès