This is a meme imported from LiveJournal; since I don’t use my LJ account other than to comment others’ posts, I’ll do the meme here.

The Instructions:

1. Go look at The Guardian’s list of 30 books UK librarians think everyone should read. Copy the full list. Bold the books you read and liked, strike out the ones you read and HATED, and italicize the ones you read and don’t care one way or the other about. Only count books/series you’ve actually finished; don’t even think about movie versions. (Parenthetical comments are optional but welcome!)

2. For every book you crossed out, list another book you’d rather have seen on the list instead. Feel free to add more if you want to.

* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I could talk at length about why I disliked it so much, but I won’t, not in this post anyway.)
* The Bible (I have read maybe three quarters of the Old Testament, and all of NT)
* The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
* 1984 by George Orwell
* A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I didn’t like it much but nor did I hate it. It was rather boring, with uninteresting characters.)
* Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
* All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque (the list actually said “All Quite on the Western Front”!)
* His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman (have read the first two books twice. Both times I lost interest completely in the second half of book two. I’m not even curious to find out how it ends.)
* Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
* The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
* Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
* Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
* Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
* The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
* Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (The first novel I read in English. I was 13, IIRC. Re-reading it as an adult I didn’t like it as much, I must admit.)
* Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
* The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
* The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
* The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (have only read parts of it but like it well enough.)
* David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
* The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Nothing I have heard about this book has made me want to read it… how can it be on this list?)
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
* Life of Pi by Yann Martel
* Middlemarch by George Eliot
* The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
* A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
* A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

I would replace To Kill a Mockingbird by…
* The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson.

Shiny new toy I covet: iPhone. Will cost a bundle and not be available for ten months or so. But still.

I wonder just how revolutionary the phone is, though. I mean, will it cause an industrial or cultural revolution, or just overthrow the natural order in society? Will it collaborate with the cats to make them the decision-makers? I think Apple should make these things a bit more clear.

Also, and slightly less flippantly, it does sound a bit dangerous to be able to make a call just by pointing at a phone number in the phone book. I mean, I sometimes call the wrong person as it is, by being absent-minded. Not to mention that we sometimes receive “pocket calls” from people whose mobiles (in their pocket) wasn’t locked, and we are first in their call list - is it really a good idea to make it easier to do that? Not that I know just how this one-click call system actually works, mind you.

Anyway. Shiny toy. Shiny.

Here is a nice blog I found not very long ago: Sociolinguistics and CMC. (CMC in this context being computer mediated communication, which is what my PhD is all about). It’s written mostly by graduate students, and there are more posts that raise interesting questions than posts that answer them; but the field is too young to have a lot of decisive answers anyway. I think it’s quite interesting reading.

Rebecka was here today. She’s a very cheerful kid, and ridiculously cute. Pictures may well follow.

Also, I’ve started tagging my posts. It takes a very long time to tag the old posts, but I am slowly doing it all the same.

Ooh, look, here’s a sample (the entire first episode, 91 strips) of the Moomin comic!

Ära vare glad!! I have wished for years and years to get hold of the Tove Jansson Moomin comic in its English-language original form; Tove made the comic for the Evening Standard and its original language was English. I have only read it in Swedish translation, an excellent translation to be sure (since Tove naturally translated it herself) but as I say, I have wanted to read the original as well. When I was a kid, before I knew it was originally in English, I used to wonder why the props in the comic strips always had English text: “Explosives”, for instance, or “Mixed Seeds”.

Now, the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly are publishing Tove’s comics in five books; the first one is already available. I need to get hold of it. By hook or by crook. (Or by buying it, probably.)

A note for the bibliographically inclined: the Moomin comic is episodic in nature, with long finished story arcs. Tove wrote and drew the comic from 1954 until 1959; then she and her brother Lars worked together on a few episodes, after which he took over and drew and wrote it until 1975. Their styles are not identical, nor are their storylines. I like them both. Drawn and Quarterly’s publication appears to be only the Tove strips.

Language Log is one of the best linguistic weblogs around. Read this post by Geoffrey K Pullum, for instance. (It concerns less and fewer and why less than three is a perfectly grammatical construction). I could give you lots of other example posts to read as well, but on the whole, it is almost always worth reading. (No, not only if you are a linguist.) Relevant topics, often entertainingly discussed. A really good blog about language. How could it possibly be better?

Here it is: Language Log.

My Christmas holiday is winding down. I went to the department today, saw my tutor briefly and discussed my time plan. Once back home, I started tidying up my reference lists and making todo lists. Tomorrow I’ll start writing again.

I feel fairly good about the thesis right now. I think I can finish it on time - more or less. I feel less sanguine about the quality of my research, though. Sometimes I don’t think what I’m doing is relevant at all. But at the moment I’m not too panicked about that.

Ho hum. Here is a good link regardless of your nationality: The Local, English-language news from Sweden. Only from Sweden, and by a team of native English-speaking editors who live here (mainly expatriate Brits, I think). I enjoy reading The Local for many reasons - their articles are well-written and usually well-researched; even if the news are the same I get in DN the language factor makes it seem as if the perspective is somehow different; and knowing that Sweden is very small and very insignificant it nevertheless feels good to be able to point to news articles (not to mention in-depth articles about Swedish society, culture, traditions, science, politics…) for the benefit of foreign friends. Read The Local, it’s a good newspaper. Especially if you’re a forriner.

Incidentally…

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Not forget Poland. Get your resolution here.

I haven’t broken my resolution yet!

Woo, posting now works with Firefox again! I am pleased.

I have posted links to the GROW! games before; two new games have appeared there since last time I checked. These are less complicated than the ones on the site earlier — in fact they are called GROW! 1 and 2, respectively, whereas the previous one was GROW! 3 — but quite enjoyable all the same. Here is GROW! 2 and GROW! 1. The latter is extra fun because once you have found the correct sequence you can go back and see what happens if you make other choices, which is often quite fun and very different. I like that kind of light-hearted creativity, very much.