Being a list which I mean to update from time to time, and which I have just decided will be only fiction, because the nonfiction entries are mostly too boring.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It is short and easy, along the lines of Fahrenheit 451, worth reading even for no better reason than to properly appreciate the references you see everywhere.

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (The 'Good Parts' Version) by William Goldman. I felt like I should read this sooner or later. Now that I have, the movie really is pretty much the same thing, honestly.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac comes up if you are reading about Buddhism and Zen, so I thought I would see what he is about. It was all right, but I think we learned that the Beat Generation is not for me. I must be a square, man, a cube, because what I see in their idea of "Zen" is mostly a hefty dose of "California hippie layabouts doing whatever the hell they want." My own prejudices formed these past eleven years in hippie California might be coloring this judgement just a touch.

08 Sep 2007 18:18 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments