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Finally, my list of 100 books that still make newnoise
1. 1984 - George Orwell
2. 84 Charing Cross road - Helen Hanff
3. A burnt-out case - Graham Green
4. A deafening silence - John Miles
5. A dry white season - Andre P. Brink
6. A man for all seasons - Robert Bolt
7. A town like Alice - Nevil Shute
8. Alice through the looking glass - Lewis Carrol
9. All quiet on the Western front - Erich Maria Remarque
10. At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie
11. At thy call we did not falter - Clive Holt
12. Atlas shrugged - Ayn Rand
13. Brave new world - Aldous Huxley
14. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger
15. Cat's eye - Margaret Atwood
16. Claudius the God - Robert Graves
17. Deliverance - James Hickey
18. Diamond mind - Rob Nairn
19. Dice man - Luke Rhineheart
20. East of eden - John Steinbeck
21. Evening class - Maeve Binchy
22. Exodus - Leon Uris
23. First lines - Gemma O'Conner
24. I never promised you a rose garden - Hanna Green
25. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
26. Illusions - Richard Bach
27. In cold blood - Truman Capote
28. Jung and the story of our time - Laurens van der Post
29. Life before life - Helen Wambach
30. Lila, an inquiry into morals - Robert M. Pirsig
31. Long walk to freedom - Nelson Mandela
32. Lord of the flies - William Golding
33. Mafikeng road - Herman Charles Bosman
34. Man and the meaning of life - Victor Frankl
35. Many mansions - Gina Cerminara
36. Matilda - Roald Dahl
37. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
38. Misquito coast - Paul Theroux
39. Not a penny more not a penny less - Jeffrey Archer
40. Of human bondage - Somerset Maugham
41. One child - Torey Hayden
42. Operators and things - Barbara O'Brien
43. Ordinary people - Judith Guest
44. Pippy Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren
45. Promised land - Karel Schoeman
46. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
47. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank redemption - Stephen King
48. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
49. Seize the day - Saul Bellow
50. Selected to live - Johanna-Ruth Dobschiner
51. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
52. Spud - John van de Ruit
53. Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
54. Sybil - Flora Retha Schreiber
55. Tao te Ching - Lao Tze
56. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
57. The age of innocence - Edith Wharton
58. The anthology of fantastic literature - Alberto Manguel
59. The bell jar - Sylvia Plath
60. The Bible
61. The Border - A. J. Brooks
62. The Cinderella complex - Colette Dowling
63. The covenant - James A. Michener
64. The crucible - Arthur Miller
65. The death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy
66. The devil's advocate - Andrew Neiderman
67. The devil's advocate - Morris West
68. The egg and I - Betty MacDonald
69. The electric kool aid acid test - Tom Wolfe
70. The fountainhead - Ayn Rand
71. The French leuitenant's woman - John Fowles
72. The glass bead game - Herman Hesse
73. The grapes of wrath - John Steinbeck
74. The hitchhikers guides to the universe - Douglas Adams
75. The importance of being Ernest - Oscar Wilde
76. The life and times of Michael K - J.M Coetzee
77. The little prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
78. The millionaire next door - Thomas J. Stanley and William D.Danko
79. The money-changers - Arthur Hailey
80. The moon and the sixpence - Somerset Maugham
81. The outsider - Albert Camus
82. The outsider - Colin Wilson
83. The power of now - Eckhart Tolle
84. The power of one - Bryce Courtenay
85. The power of positive thinking - Norman Vincent Peale
86. The practice of the presence of God - Brother Lawrence
87. The prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
88. The richest man in Babylon - George S. Clason
89. The road to Mecca - Athol Fugard
90. The shoes of the fisherman - Morris West
91. The silence of the lambs - Thomas Harris
92. The sneeches on the beeches - Dr Zeuss
93. The teaching of Buddha - Bukkyo Dendo Kyoki
94. The trial - Franz Kafka
95. The vestibule - Jess E. Weiss
96. Two years before the mast - Richard Henry Dana
97. Voyage beyond belief - Terence Kelly
98. Your erroneous zones - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
99. Zen and reality - Robert Powell
100. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
Rushing the ReadThe saying goes that you shouldn't buy shares on media reports. This is easy to say but what are you suppose to do? Go out there and work for the company for a few years?
Look at the news I scanned through today:
One news report claimed that according to Ricky Ponting, the Australian cricket team captain, the pitches they were playing on are life threatening. Then, when I watched the game, the commentators couldn't get over how wonderful the pitch was. So, I probably scanned so fast and through some twist of fate still don't know where they were playing today. Okay, so I fell asleep once or twice during the game and missed out on that part.
So this left me quite confused in a day when I needed every bit of my alleged intelligence to try and understand why Julius Malema was raving on about Nedbank. It's like I've missed some important episode of Dallas - the one where JR got shot. How hard to I have to concentrate to know what's going on!!?? The entire thing sounds like you need to have at least some post graduate training to understand the issues. I think what I'll do is go to Nedbank and open an account and while I'm there perhaps they'll kindly inform me on what the hell is going on.
The other thing I picked up in the Business Report this week is that e-books will do well in South Africa but hand held reading devices are more popular in America. My conclusion in the end was that to download an e-book to your computer is probably cheaper than buying a reading device to do it with. Your guess is as good as mine.
Other confusing news is that FNB is quite optimistic about house prices starting to rise soon while Standard Bank isn't or something like that. How's that for noise?
My snarky day so far
I am 40-something with a number of responsibilities that include not jumping off a cliff on the spur of the moment. To get me to laugh out loud twice in less than 10 minutes is quite an achievement. That's why I have added Miss Snark to my links list even if the blog is only open for viewing and closed for contributions.
In her blog, Miss Snark, a book agent, gives acidic editing advice to sometimes clever, more often clueless questions from what she has named her "snarklings".
No surprise then that you will find a category headed: "Miss Snark sets her hair on fire". If you have ever edited documents where the same mistakes are repeated over and over, you will feel like an alma mater of Miss Snark and pass her the blow torch. If you are a writer you will find a treasury of information on what to do too drive editors and agents nuts.
While I am sad that Miss Snark's blog is now closed it is also a relief. At least I will not be tempted to send her a book proposal in the early morning hours after a bottle of wine or five.
Miss Snark gets the newnoise badge of the week.
Further on my snarky day, I am rereading Alice in Wonderland for my intended plan to identify newnoise in books. I am a bit stuck with progress on Alice as I've also just picked up a copy of Deliverance by James Dickey and it's quite a promising start. Also I have been reading for 4 hours straight about blogging and so forth.
My list of 100 books that make newnoise
I have an ambitious plan. The plan involves listing 100 books that I have read more than three times and that I feel contains newnoise. I wil then do a short analysis on why I think the book makes it to my newnoise list. I am not looking at the date the book was printed, a book that was written 2 000 years ago can have more newnoise than a book printed yesterday.
I'm sure I can learn something through doing this and I hope that this micro-analysis will inspire you to find your voice. My first submission will be Alice in Wonderland.
District 9 - the best disgusting movie I've ever seen
In District 9, Director Neill Blomkamp, is saying something like nobody has ever said it before, in other words, its pure newnoise.
Starting with the hilarious notion that if aliens should visit earth, they will, of all places, hang around Johannesburg for longer than a week, the film zooms in on the slum conditions the aliens soon find themselves in after being secluded behind razor wire in District 9.
The new government, having followed the seclusion solution as set by the apartheid government, now proceeds to follow it some more by getting rid of the aliens through forced relocation. The relocation is documented on video and during the filming an entire subculture of alien life emerges. Crime, especially. As one poor human in the film complains about the aliens, "They steal your tekkies off your feet while you're walking down the street." Crime . . .South Africans joke about it like communist Russian's use to joke about the KGB.
It's not just the fantastic science fiction special effects or the disgusting habits of the aliens that makes this a must see. The mockumentary brilliantly brings together the global apartheid between the rich and the poorest of the poor. Spine chilling sensations crawl down your back as you realize you don't need aliens for these slum conditions to arrive at a theatre near you soon, they have always been around. To top it all you have paid cash to have all your illusions ripped from your head.
Soon you will be gagging on your pop-corn as you realize that you to could mutate, become poor and join the ranks of the aliens. You too will develop cravings for cat food and love to eat from dustbins. You to will be seen as the refuse of society, misunderstood, unable to operate in a technologically sophisticated world, uneducated and encouraged to have an abortion if you are pregnant. The government could even decide to use you in medical "research" and nobody will know.
While I watched the movie, the guy next to me was eating his pop-corn kernel by kernel as pop-corners like to do. This normally freaks me out to the point where l I feel like grabbing the pop-corn bucket and flinging it to Mars. Then, about fifteen minutes into District 9, it dawned on me that at least pop-corn is clean and I'm sitting in a soft seat in an air-conditioned movie theatre. I felt comforted by the normality and watched the screen, closed my eyes every two minutes, held on to my lunch as best I could and enjoyed the comforting, crunching noises the pop-corn eater made.
Revolting, disgusting . . . if any woman older than sixteen can sit through all of that without closing her eyes, at least once, I suspect she has seen sides of life that's not worth seeing.
All in all, the aliens turn out to have, despite their prawn like features, hearts that beat to the same rhythm that human hearts do. Seclusion has a way of stopping us from seeing this, as wires and walls tend to do.
The film refuses to include any of South Africa's famous tourism hotspots such as Table Mountain or the Apartheid Museum or any breathtaking, sunny beaches, or even one of the big five. It's Mad Max slumming it, all the way as the space ship hangs in the air above Johannesburg like a gigantic ball of pollution. Ironically, the film was shot in Soweto named by the apartheid government - SOuthWEsT, one of the biggest "townships" in South Africa, where high electric lights use to shine night and day to keep track of what residents were up to.
This is a must see, even if you see it with your eyes closed half the time.Remember to make some newnoise this week, find your voice!
Think ahead . . . your move has consequencesI'm always listening for something to write about. Often I hear something worth writing about but don't get around to writing it down. So something happened that I think is worth sharing. I'm not sure what the moral of the story is.
We were having a sports day at work. I chose to play chess and landed up playing against a black man who was somewhere in his fifties. He was a good player. His face was square and silent as he moved. No surprise, even if chess is a quiet game, memories of a life time of being treated like slaves by white women taught older black men in South Africa that it is wiser to be quiet in certain company.
After the game, I asked him where he learned to play. He said he had learned to play in jail.
"I was jailed for killing a white man." his face was expressionless, only the warmth of his voice distracting from the severity of the comment.
Stunned, I just sat there, not moving, I was playing against a co-worker who had murdered someone - how rare was that?
"That was very long ago, many years," he said. "In jail I learned many things, how to play chess, also to weld." He looked straight at me while I tried to remove all expression from my face.
"So I changed from a bad man . . . when I was released the company gave me this job as a welder." He smiled a big, broad smile, strong white teeth flashing against his dark skin. With that he turned around and left. His humility stunned me as one of a dozen impressions zoomed through my mind.
Did he think it was more important to me that it was a white man that he had killed? How could he be so open about it? I looked down at my white hands and wondered how big the divide between one human being and another can be.
I considered that the one thing we did have in common is that people were willing to teach us and we were willing to learn. Of course he had much tougher circumstances to rise above than I who use to be part of the then privileged white minority.
We crossed the divide in the game of chess, the game that teaches you to think ahead, work out a strategy, think before you make a move and remember . . . your move as consequences.
Here are some ideas for your to write about. Send your story (500 words) to edmuse22@gmail.com and I will edit it and send you my opinion. The 10 best stories will be published on my blog.
1. A man comes home and finds he has been burglarized.
2. A woman's purse is stolen.
3. A child fails his year at school.
4. A mother remembers her youth.
5. A woman decides she wants to be rich.
6. Her first day at school.
7. His first day at work.
8. A man has a problem that he solves.
9. Six characters you invented.
10. An achievement.
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