(no subject)

From the Guardian's silly polls. (I note that many of these books are, trala, Great Classics, by which I mean "frequently required reading." Or are books that people think make them look cool and well-read.)

I've read everything in bold.

Men's "watershed" books. I have read

The Outsider by Albert Camus (though I usually see it translated as "The Stranger.")
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Women's "watershed" books.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (for class; I didn't care for it)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (because everyone told me I should; I don't remember it)
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (for a project on dystopias, for which I also read my only Kafka)
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (this one I actually like)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Little Women by Louis May Alcott
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (ick)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

idiolect

So I once again caught myself saying "thank you kindly" to the fellow at the Green Line Cafe. Verbal Tics Learned From Television apparently stick around; I mean, I'm not Southern, so I have no excuse at all for this. (Then again, when I was a kid I somehow developed a substitution problem, "briefly" for "shortly" -- I would say "I'll be there briefly" and mean "in a minute" -- so perhaps I shouldn't blame my adverb abuse solely on due South. I worked very hard to expunge that usage of briefly from my vocabulary, but it still happens sometimes.)

Also, I refuse to use either past participle of "to get." Because I ... just don't get it. This is one of those absorbed grammar lessons that just completely fails to take when you read both American and British English as a kid. He's got? He's gotten? Okay, sure, you can tell me that in American English the first means "he possesses" and the second means "he acquired," and that in British English the first means "he possesses" and the second doesn't exist, but frankly a sentence like "they've gotten the check" freaks me out. Except in idiomatic usage that has to take "to get" (like "got married," and even then I'll avoid the probably correct "they've gotten married"), "gotten" doesn't exist in my dialect and "got" appears rarely. Sad but true.

Also, I find myself pondering the usage of "woman" as an adjective. Remember that scene in Gaudy Night, in which Harriet Vane writes a stern letter to a newspaper saying something like "woman students would be seemlier than undergraduettes?" I hit the same usage in one of the first Amanda Cross mystery, c. 1968: Kate Fansler talks about the sudden interest in "woman writers." We certainly still talk about women who write, but I don't think that the phrase "woman writers" would be as likely as "female writers." Is this just my dialect? Or is "woman" as a collective adjective out of fashion? (A quick google picks up several pages, though the text on most of them actually says "women writers." Google informs me that there are 38,000 pages using "wome/an writers" and 232,000 using "female writers.")

Also, I have decided to start using the word "eesome" in casual conversation.