Listologies: October 2009

Best Performance by a Mustache on a Celebrity

>> Saturday, October 24, 2009

Inspired by Adam's wayward ability to creep me out with unneccesary facial hair and prompted by Lindsays idea to make a best of list I have put together a smattering of the best (and worst?) of mustache madness. Rather than rank these bad boys I've categorized them below. Note that while some of these fine staches were created for movie roles many were the result of personal (bad) choice...

The "I'm a pretty boy who is tired of being pretty" -stache:

The "I can barely grow a stache" stache:

The "Mustache Ride" -stache:

The "Porn-Stache" -Stache:

Extra Credit:

To be continued...

A Comparative List

In my last entry I posted the Time magazine 100 Best Novels of all Time. To contrast that I thought I would post the Newsweek Top 100 Books of All Time which took a different approach (i.e. not just taking the opinions of two Time magazine critics and rather selected books from the top book lists) including non-fiction and fiction as well as books published before 1932 and I found this one to be a little more, um, modern reader friendly. And yet many of my favorite books were missing and I hadn't read more than a handful (okay 26). Thoughts?
Once again, note: *I've read it, **I own it but haven't read it yet, ***I plan on reading this someday.
1.
War and Peace (F) Leo Tolstoy 1869
2.
1984 (F) George Orwell 1949 ***
3.
Ulysses (F) James Joyce 1922 *
4.
Lolita (F) Vladimir Nabokov 1955 *
5.
The Sound and the Fury (F)William Faulkner 1929 ***
6.
Invisible Man (F) Ralph Ellison 1952
7.
To the Lighthouse (F) Virginia Woolf 1927
8.
The Illiad and The Odyssey (F) Homer 8th century B.C. *
9.
Pride and Prejudice (F) Jane Austen 1813
10.
Divine Comedy (F) Dante Alighieri 1321 *
11.
Canterbury Tales (F) Geoffrey Chaucer 15th century
12.
Gulliver's Travels (F) Jonathan Swift 1726 *
13.
Middlemarch (F) 1874
14.
Things Fall Apart (F) Chinua Achebe 1958
15.
The Catcher in the Rye (F) J. D. Salinger 1951 *
16.
Gone with the Wind (F) Margaret Mitchell 1936
17.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (F) Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1967***
18.
The Great Gatsby (F) F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925*
19.
Catch-22 (F) Joseph Heller 1961**
20.
Beloved (F) Toni Morrison 1987*
21.
The Grapes of Wrath (F) John Steinbeck 1939 *
22.
Midnight's Children (F) Salman Rushdie 1981
23.
Brave New World (F) Aldous Huxley 1932
24.
Mrs. Dalloway (F) Virginia Woolf 1925
25.
Native Son (F) Richard Wright 1940
26.
Democracy in America (NF) Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
27.
On the Origin of Species (NF) Charles Darwin 1859 (bits and parts I've read)
28.
The Histories (NF) Herodotus 440 B.C.
29.
The Social Contract (NF) Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762
30.
Das Kapital (NF) Karl Marx 1867 (bits and parts I've read)
31.
The Prince (NF) Niccolo Machiavelli 1532
32.
Confessions (NF) St. Augustine 4th century
33.
Leviathan (NF) Thomas Hobbes 1651
34.
The History of the Peloponnesian War (NF) Thucydides 431 B.C. (I'm sure I've read part of this)
35.
The Lord of the Rings (F) J. R. R. Tolkien 1954
36.
Winnie-the-Pooh (F) A. A. Milne 1926*
37.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (F) C. S. Lewis 1950*
38.
A Passage to India (F) E. M. Forster 1924
39.
On the Road (F) Jack Kerouac 1957*
40.
To Kill a Mockingbird (F) Harper Lee 1960*
41.
The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. NA*
42.
A Clockwork Orange (F) Anthony Burgess 1962***
43.
Light in August (F) William Faulkner 1932
44.
The Souls of Black Folk (NF) W. E. B. Du Bois 1903
45.
Wide Sargasso Sea (F) Jean Rhys 1966
46.
Madame Bovary (F) Gustave Flaubert 1857
47.
Paradise Lost (F) John Milton 1667
48.
Anna Karenina (F) Leo Tolstoy 1877
49.
Hamlet (F) William Shakespeare 1603*
50.
King Lear (F) William Shakespeare 1608 *
51.
Othello (F) William Shakespeare 1622*
52.
Sonnets (F) William Shakespeare 1609*
53.
Leaves of Grass (F)Walt Whitman 1855 (bits and parts I've read)
54.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (F) Mark Twain 1885 *
55.
Kim (F) Rudyard Kipling 1901
56.
Frankenstein (F) Mary Shelley 1818
57.
Song of Solomon (F) Toni Morrison 1977
58.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (F) Ken Kesey 1962*
59.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (F) Ernest Hemingway 1940 *
60.
Slaughterhouse-Five (F) Kurt Vonnegut 1969 ***
61.
Animal Farm (F) George Orwell 1945
62.
Lord of the Flies (F) William Golding 1954*
63.
In Cold Blood (NF) Truman Capote 1965
64.
The Golden Notebook (F) Doris Lessing 1962
65.
Remembrance of Things Past (F) Marcel Proust 1913
66.
The Big Sleep (F) Raymond Chandler 1939
67.
As I Lay Dying (F) William Faulkner 1930
68.
The Sun Also Rises (F) Ernest Hemingway 1926 *
69.
I, Claudius (F) Robert Graves 1934
70.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (F) Carson McCullers 1940
71.
Sons and Lovers (F) D. H. Lawrence 1913
72.
All the King's Men (F) Robert Penn Warren 1946
73.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (F) James Baldwin 1953
74.
Charlotte's Web (F) E. B. White 1952 *
75.
Heart of Darkness (F) Joseph Conrad 1902
76.
Night (NF) Elie Wiesel 1958
77.
Rabbit, Run (F) John Updike 1960
78.
The Age of Innocence (F) Edith Wharton 1920
79.
Portnoy's Complaint (F) Philip Roth 1969
80.
An American Tragedy (F) Theodore Dreiser 1925
81.
The Day of the Locust (F) Nathanael West 1939
82.
Tropic of Cancer (F) Henry Miller 1934 *
83.
The Maltese Falcon (F) Dashiell Hammett 1930
84.
His Dark Materials (F) Philip Pullman 1995
85.
Death Comes for the Archbishop (F) Willa Cather 1927
86.
The Interpretation of Dreams (NF) Sigmund Freud 1900 (bits and parts I've read)
87.
The Education of Henry Adams (NF) Henry Adams 1918
88.
Quotations from Chairman Mao (NF) Mao Zedong 1964
89.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (NF) William James 1902
90.
Brideshead Revisited (F) Evelyn Waugh 1945
91.
Silent Spring (NF) Rachel Carson 1962
92.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (NF) John Maynard Keynes 1936
93.
Lord Jim (F) Joseph Conrad 1900
94.
Goodbye to All That (NF) Robert Graves 1929
95.
The Affluent Society (NF) John Kenneth Galbraith 1958
96.
The Wind in the Willows (F) Kenneth Grahame 1908
97.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NF) Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1965
98.
Eminent Victorians (NF) Lytton Strachey 1918
99.
The Color Purple (F) Alice Walker 1982*
100.
The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; (NF) Winston Churchill 1948

Time Magazines Top 100 Books of All Time

So this list is not technically my own but since I am constantly making lists of books I thought I'd see what everyone thought of this list as well. This is from the Time magazine Top 100 books of all time. I'd say my taste in literature is pretty vast although I tend to get in to little ruts (like all Jodi Picoult books, or all travel journals, or all coming-of-age stories). This list is not for those of us that enjoy brain candy but rather true literature in its finest form (at least according to Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo critics from Time magazine). I'd love to see what you think- what have you read? What do you love? What do you think is missing from this list that should be read? Keep in mind these are novels from 1923 to the present.
Note: An * means I've read it, **means I own it but have not read it yet, & *** means I intend on reading this some day.

The Adventures of Augie MarchSaul Bellow

All the King's MenRobert Penn Warren

American PastoralPhilip Roth

An American TragedyTheodore Dreiser

Animal FarmGeorge Orwell***

Appointment in SamarraJohn O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, MargaretJudy Blume*

The AssistantBernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-BirdsFlann O'Brien

AtonementIan McEwan*

BelovedToni Morrison*

The Berlin StoriesChristopher Isherwood