Lake Tahoe, book meme

[tarigwaemir]

Stanley Hall, on the Feast of the Guardian Angels

Happy belated birthday, clocklike! Agh, late by a day. I meant to post last night but ended up coming back late from lab. While I'm at it, an early happy birthday to darcenciel. ^_^

The latest issue of imaginarybeasts, Ghost Story, is out. I submitted The Silent City, and I rather like the premise of the story even if I did write it in a terrible rush, so please let me know what you think. ^_^ You know, it's almost becoming a tradition for me to submit stories about cultures and historical periods I know very little about (also known as My Research Is Pastede On Yay).

I got back from the divisional retreat on Sunday afternoon. Got a ride from Iris (one of the few first-year MCB grad students that I manage to hold real conversations with) and collected quite a few music recommendations from her iPod along the way. I actually didn't fall asleep during any of the talks, which were all held in the evening after dinner; part of that was due to coffee but it was also because there's just a lot of interesting research going on. Also, they did put in some effort to keep us entertained: each lab was introduced by a grad student who poked fun at the lab members in some way. Plus, whenever a professor presented, they usually said something opinionated or outrageous or sniped at each other amiably. ^_^

Lake Tahoe is as gorgeous as people say, with mountain slopes covered with evergreen forests. I'm used to seeing deciduous trees in the mountains, so the landscape felt very different. It was also quite cold, and although I'd brought some warm clothes, I hadn't anticipated the conference center to be laid out so that we'd need to go outside when we left our rooms. On Friday night, it even snowed--one of those warm, wet snows that spatter you lightly and melt quickly into slush. The Californians kept referring to it as "the snowstorm", but I was polite and refrained from laughing. (The snow did stick to the ground but barely made an inch.) It turned out that we had some free time on Saturday to explore the area--at conferences, you barely get such breaks, but the retreat schedule was much more relaxed--but I ended up napping for most of it. I did go out and take a walk around the conference center though and stumbled my way onto the cross-country trail. The snow had melted by then, and I walked past one of the bare ski slopes. It was very quiet. The trees were motionless, but I felt very keenly how alive they were. Almost as if they were watching me, not in a menacing way but simply alert and aware, as if my gaze was being returned. There was a bright burst of gold when I stumbled across a small grove of deciduous trees, whose leaves had turned color.

There's a vastness to these landscapes out West that make me understand a little better what spurred the pioneers with their dreams of Manifest Destiny. The land is raw and new, but it doesn't alienate you with its massiveness; it embraces you as you inhabit it.

Going on another retreat this weekend at the exact same place, but for a different division in the department. I should have paid more attention when I signed up for the retreats because if I'd known that they were going to be two weekends in a row, I would have skipped out on this upcoming one. Don't want to think about what havoc it will wreak on my experimental schedule. -_-

Meme from worldserpent and litalex: These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117) - Had to return the book to the library before I could finish it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91) - Just finished it this summer, in fact.
Don Quixote (91) - Read the first volume but not the second.
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83) - Found it depressing, but I should finish
it one of these days.
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80) - Austen >> Brontë.
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79) - I need to finish this book but it's at home.
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73) - Actually, I think I skipped to the ending.
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67) - First few chapters failed to grab me, I'm afraid.
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66) - I found it exasperating but I still enjoyed the story.
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian: A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63) - Several times in fact.
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61) - And I'll probably never finish it, since I found it rather boring. I liked Silas Marner though.
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56) - Really ought to finish this book as well.
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54) - First "classic" I attempted to read, though I never got past the chapter where Oliver gets taken in by Mr. Brown.
Gulliver's Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51) - But did I understand it? Not at all.
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50) - Also a particular favorite.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake: A Novel (47) - Scared me, in a good way.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (45) - My mother owns a copy at home.
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Hilarious lecture on the history of developmental biology this morning from Prof. Levine (who was predictably late and failed to have a syllabus ready). May recount some of the more interesting ones later. (At this rate, this LJ is going to turn into "Fun Facts About the History of Biology" blog.)

Yours &c.

Comments

[pyee.livejournal.com]

So.. Watched any tv lately?

[troisroyaumes]

The season premiere of Ugly Betty in fact! Plus a lot of commercials. And my roommate has taken to watching CNN news. ^_^ Thanks so much once again!

[jaebi-lit.livejournal.com]

Oops! Sorry for telling you it would be warm! Snow of any variety this early in the season is bizarre, though. Seriously, what's happening?

How old were you when you read Jane Eyre? I loved it the first time I read it, and then my 10th grade Brit Lit class read it and I couldn't stand it.

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, no worries. I mean, it was warm during the day but the temperature dropped at night, which I guess is predictable. ^_^

I read it when I was 12. Actually, I think I'd like it better now, because I'd have more tolerance for the characters and the more Gothic elements of the story. At the time though, I wasn't much of a Romantic, and I didn't like Jane or Mr. Rochester. >_>

[clocklike.livejournal.com]

Thank you, 언니~!! ♥

Oooh! I've actually read quite a few of those books on the list. XD How weird!

[troisroyaumes]

You're welcome! And yeah, the list has a lot of well-known classics, doesn't it? ^_^

[schwimmerin.livejournal.com]

When I flew to LA on Monday for my interview I could see the aspens having changed color as we flew over the mountains, but I haven't gotten to see them up close. They're kind of boring after having East Coast falls, but it was still neat.

I bet you'd like Colorado, actually, at least our part, because the mountains are fairly similar to what you describe.

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, what was the interview for? The position that you're applying to in Germany?

East Coast fall foliage is probably unbeatable, but the evergreens are a novelty for me. I mean, I've seen pines and spruces and firs before, but never so many of them all at once. From what I've seen of your photos from Colorado, it sounds really lovely. I should visit you sometime! XD

[ldmoonflower.livejournal.com]

There's a vastness to these landscapes out West that make me understand a little better what spurred the pioneers with their dreams of Manifest Destiny.

I'm glad, because driving through the flatness of Kansas made me wonder why they bothered to keep going West.