I am interested in basketball.

I am interested in the Kobe Bryant rape trial.

I am not interested in hearing an update on how Kobe feels now that he's eaten a burger for lunch, or whether Kobe's new shoes are chafing him, or how his "personal troubles" have or have not contributed to said chafing.

I am not interested in hearing more arguments for why Kobe is innocent that go something like this:

• Kobe is famous and his accuser is not. Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• Kobe is the man. How could you not want to sleep with Kobe? Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• Celebrities have affairs all the time. Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• The Lakers really need to practice, because even though they have a ton of talent, it's going to take time for Kobe and Shaq to gel with Karl Malone and Gary Payton. That'd be a whole lot easier if Kobe didn't keep trotting off to Col-o-fucking-rado. Therefore, this whole shebang is a conspiracy, and Kobe is innocent.

And then there are the arguments the defense is actually using, which often aren't much better.

I might be interested in hearing someone say they just don't know what happened, but they'll update me when they have more information. And by "information," I don't mean a piece on whether or not Kobe's accuser set off some bellhop's rape-dar.

Ironically, as I was typing this, a stray dog walked over and started checking out our front patio. I went outside to see if it had a tag so that I could either bring the dog home or call its owner. It was the golden retriever from down the street. His name? Kobe.

I'm pretty sure he didn't do it. He did, however, get so excited that he pissed all over my doorstep. It's a good thing that dog isn't really good at basketball. If he was, I'd no doubt be hearing all manner of anecdotes about how much chicks dig it when celebrities piss on their "welcome mats."

I am currently reading "A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of Naked Breasts and Shoulders: Written by a Grave and Learned Papist" (1678). Next up: "Arrowes Against Babylon: Or, Certaine Quaeries Serving to a Cleere Discovery of the Mystery of Iniquity" (1656). Fanatical conservatives seem much funnier after they've been dead for a few centuries. And it's a good thing they do, otherwise I might be reluctant to spend a Friday evening downloading material from Early English Books Online.

Just a few years ago, I would have had to look up all these citations, locate each of them on a separate microfilm reel, load them up, and pass the section I needed eight or nine times, because microfilm machines only run at "warp speed" or "geologic time." Once I got to the right section, I'd have the option of either printing the document out at 25 cents per page or spending the next week in a dank library basement that smelled vaguely of the tuna fish sandwich some grad student ate there in blatant disregard of library rules, because come on, they're not going to send the pop cops down to the microfilm room.

I'd like to say that those long hours built character--that I somehow emerged from the library basement a better scholar and more admirable human being. Unfortunately, that's not true. I do, however, hold out some hope that after the cyborg revolution devastates modern computing as we know it, it will once again be important that I know how to use a card catalog. The kind with cards.

Out of the ones I haven't read, there are only ten or so that I feel any compunction at all about having missed. Who put together this list? Anyway, at the top of my really-should-have-read-it list is Nabokov's Lolita. The two James Joyce books I haven't read would be next. I wouldn't mind reading more Henry James, and I do like Willa Cather, and I've meant to get to the Dos Passos trilogy for years now. I'm curious about Under the Volcano, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and a few of the others.

D.H. Lawrence is soft porn for people who feel too guilty to buy themselves some real porn. Also, the only reason to put more Naipaul than Rushdie on this list is that Naipaul is easier, and that's not a very good reason.

1. ULYSSES - James Joyce
2. THE GREAT GATSBY - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN - James Joyce
4. LOLITA - Vladimir Nabokov
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD - Aldous Huxley
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY - William Faulkner
7. CATCH-22 - Joseph Heller
8. DARKNESS AT NOON - Arthur Koestler
9. SONS AND LOVERS - D.H. Lawrence
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH - John Steinbeck
11. UNDER THE VOLCANO - Malcolm Lowry
12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH - Samuel Butler
13. 1984 - George Orwell
14. I, CLAUDIUS - Robert Graves
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE - Virginia Woolf
16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY - Theodore Dreiser
17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER - Carson McCullers
18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE - Kurt Vonnegut
19. INVISIBLE MAN - Ralph Ellison
20. NATIVE SON - Richard Wright
21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING - Saul Bellow
22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA - John O'Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) - John Dos Passos
24. WINESBURG, OHIO - Sherwood Anderson
25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA - E.M. Forster
26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE - Henry James
27. THE AMBASSADORS - Henry James
28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT - F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY - James T. Farrell
30. THE GOOD SOLDIER - Ford Madox Ford
31. ANIMAL FARM - George Orwell
32. THE GOLDEN BOWL - Henry James
33. SISTER CARRIE - Theodore Dreiser
34. A HANDFUL OF DUST - Evelyn Waugh
35. AS I LAY DYING - William Faulkner
36. ALL THE KING'S MEN - Robert Penn Warren
37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY - Thornton Wilder
38. HOWARDS END - E.M. Forster
39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN - James Baldwin
40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER - Graham Greene
41. LORD OF THE FLIES - William Golding
42. DELIVERANCE - James Dickey
43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) - Anthony Powell
44. POINT COUNTER POINT - Aldous Huxley
45. THE SUN ALSO RISES - Ernest Hemingway
46. THE SECRET AGENT - Joseph Conrad
47. NOSTROMO - Joseph Conrad
48. THE RAINBOW - D.H. Lawrence
49. WOMEN IN LOVE - D.H. Lawrence
50. TROPIC OF CANCER - Henry Miller
51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD - Norman Mailer
52. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT - Philip Roth
53. PALE FIRE - Vladimir Nabokov
54. LIGHT IN AUGUST - William Faulkner
55. ON THE ROAD - Jack Kerouac
56. THE MALTESE FALCON - Dashiell Hammett
57. PARADE'S END - Ford Madox Ford
58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - Edith Wharton
59. ZULEIKA DOBSON - Max Beerbohm
60. THE MOVIEGOER - Walker Percy
61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP - Willa Cather
62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY - James Jones
63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES - John Cheever
64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - J.D. Salinger
65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - Anthony Burgess
66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE - W. Somerset Maugham
67. HEART OF DARKNESS - Joseph Conrad
68. MAIN STREET - Sinclair Lewis
69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH - Edith Wharton
70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET - Lawrence Durell
71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA - Richard Hughes
72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS - V.S. Naipaul
73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST - Nathanael West
74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS - Ernest Hemingway
75. SCOOP - Evelyn Waugh
76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE - Muriel Spark
77. FINNEGANS WAKE - James Joyce
78. KIM - Rudyard Kipling
79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW - E.M. Forster
80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED - Evelyn Waugh
81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH - Saul Bellow
82. ANGLE OF REPOSE - Wallace Stegner
83. A BEND IN THE RIVER - V.S. Naipaul
84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART - Elizabeth Bowen
85. LORD JIM - Joseph Conrad
86. RAGTIME - E.L. Doctorow
87. THE OLD WIVES' TALE - Arnold Bennett
88. THE CALL OF THE WILD - Jack London
89. LOVING - Henry Green
90. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN - Salman Rushdie
91. TOBACCO ROAD - Erskine Caldwell
92. IRONWEED - William Kennedy
93. THE MAGUS - John Fowles
94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA - Jean Rhys
95. UNDER THE NET - Iris Murdoch
96. SOPHIE'S CHOICE - William Styron
97. THE SHELTERING SKY - Paul Bowles
98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE - James M. Cain
99. THE GINGER MAN - J.P. Donleavy
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - Booth Tarkington

In response to my post about that Modern Library book list, my friend Sean says: "Any list designed by committee is kind of pointless - weird decisions that arise from the normalizing effect of group work, rather than weird decisions that arise from some interesting individual character tic." And I figured, hey, I'm all about the character tics. I therefore present you with Shasta's Official List of the Hundred Best Books Ever.*

* Except I limited it to fiction, short stories, drama, and poetry, so that cuts out a bunch of books. I also didn't include any books I haven't actually read, so that cuts out a whole bunch more. When I was trying to decide between two or more books, my decisions were ultimately based almost wholly on whimsy and shelf positioning, so that detracts somewhat from the force of my claim that these are the Best Books Ever. But they are damned good books!

In no particular order:

1. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
2. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
3. V. – Thomas Pynchon
4. The Complete Poems – Marianne Moore
5. The Collected Poems – Wallace Stevens
6. Opus Posthumous – Wallace Stevens
7. The Company She Keeps – Mary McCarthy
8. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
9. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
10. Beloved – Toni Morrison
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
14. The Collected Poems – W.B. Yeats
15. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
16. The Roaring Girl – Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
17. The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (cheating! I know. It’s my list and I can cheat if I want to.)
18. Collected Works - Flannery O’Connor
19. The Viking Portable Library – Dorothy Parker (I actually like her criticism better than her poetry or her short stories, but this edition gives you all three in one place.)
20. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
21. Troilus and Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer
22. Leaves of Grass (the big Norton edition) – Walt Whitman
23. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
24. The Old Order – Katherine Anne Porter
25. Volpone – Ben Jonson
26. Bartholomew Fair – Ben Jonson
27. The Alchemist – Ben Jonson
28. The Plague – Albert Camus
29. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
30. The Oz series – L. Frank Baum (So it’s been over twenty years since I read these. I loved them. Plus, that’s where ’s username comes from.)
31. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White (Same comments as above. Except for the part about .)
32. White Noise – Don DeLillo
33. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
36. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
37. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
38. Dracula – Bram Stoker
39. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
40. The End of the Road – John Barth
41. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
42. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 – Elizabeth Bishop
43. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
44. Ramayana – as retold by William Buck
45. Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
46. The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories – Franz Kafka (everybody knows about “The Metamorphosis,” but don’t miss “A Report to an Academy,” which is narrated by an ape who manages “to reach the cultural level of an average European.”)
47. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
48. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
49. Passing – Nella Larsen
50. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
51. Paradise Lost – John Milton (It’s good. Really!)
52. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
53. Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (Love Song of the Dark Lord) – trans. Barbara Stoler Miller
54. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
55. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
56. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
57. Collected Poems, 1909-1962 – T.S. Eliot
58. Light in August – William Faulkner
59. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
60. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
61. Ceremonial Songs – Pablo Neruda, trans. Maria Jacketti (I chose this one because it has the Spanish and English versions on facing pages, which is great if your level of Spanish, like mine, is “kind of used to speak it ten years ago”)
62. Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
63. Lord Byron: The Major Works – Lord Byron
64. The Complete Poems – John Keats
65. Candide – Voltaire
66. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – Sir Philip Sidney
67. Amphitryon – John Dryden
68. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
69. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
70. Gallathea – John Lyly
71. Galatea 2.2 – Richard Powers
72. The Complete Poems – Emily Dickinson
73. Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
74. Selected Poems - Langston Hughes
75. The Poetry of Robert Frost – Robert Frost (“Good fences make good neighbors” has become the slogan for fence companies across the country. Oh, the irony!)
76. Collected Poems 1947-1980 – Allen Ginsberg
77. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
78. My Antonia – Willa Cather
79. Pictures from Brueghel – William Carlos Williams
80. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
81. The Woman Warrior – Maxine Hong Kingston
82. The Way of the World – William Congreve
83. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
84. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
85. Neuromancer – William Gibson
86. Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews (Kidding! I did actually read this, though. What can I say? I was young.)
87. The Aeneid – Vergil (I cried when Dido killed herself. I probably shouldn’t admit stuff like that. But hell, I just admitted that I read Flowers in the Attic. It could only go uphill from there.)
88. Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
89. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
90. The Complete Poems - Andrew Marvell
91. The Duchess of Malfi – John Webster
92. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer – Aemilia Lanyer
93. The Satyricon – Petronius
94. Utopia – Sir Thomas More
95. The Inferno – Dante
96. Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
97. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
98. Provinces: Poems 1987-1991 – Czeslaw Milosz (my copy is signed, even!)
99. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
100. Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe

Sometimes, when you wake up before 6:00 am for no good reason and decide it's important that you have soup for breakfast, you don't want a Wolfgang Puck hearty penne kind of soup. Nope. You don't want that, and you don't want Amy's Organic lentil soup, either. You don't even want your leftover homemade sweet potato chowder, which any reasonable bacon-eater would agree is a damn good soup.

What you want is ramen: long, bland noodles boiled for however long you feel like boiling them, because hey, it's not like you're going for an al dente texture. Ramen: with little floaty bits that may or may not have once been sea monkeys. Seasoned with chunks of bouillon-flavored sodium from a foil packet. Ramen: if you're feeling highly motivated, you might crack an egg into it. It's an egg! It's fancy!

This is why it's a shame that I seem to have stopped purchasing ramen when I stopped living entirely on student loans. Maybe I'll have mac and cheese for breakfast instead. It's not ramen, but at least preparing it will require that I open a foil packet.