First, I'd like to plug some new sites by talented friends.

The Poet is now playing in a Baltimore-area band, Red Tractor Factory. Their MySpace page includes some sample songs. They remind me of early Velvet Underground.

Another friend, The Drummer (no connection to The Poet's band), who is currently a DC lawyer and has written for my online literary quaterly, Wild Violet, has started a brilliant political blog, Inside-Out the Beltway.

And here's the personal page of an artist I've known for several years, Jacqueline Bayer. You can purchase her jewelry, artwork and photos from her site.

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The following is a meme being passed around on LiveJournal.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read them for school in the first place.

I've read 33 of them all the way through. Not too shabby, I guess.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment.
Catch-22 *
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey *
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad *
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations *
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha (This is on my "books to read" shelf)
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales *
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein *
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula *
A Clockwork Orange *
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 *
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray *
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury *
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces *
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved *
Slaughterhouse-Five *
The Scarlet Letter *
Eats, Shoots & Leaves *
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye *
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values *
The Aeneid
Watership Down *
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield *
The Three Musketeers

Moral:
You shouldn't have to think too hard on Fridays.