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100 book challenge: part six: miscellany
Down to the final fifteen of the 100 Book Challenge! As long as we're coming out of the graphic design shelf, we might as well move into Beautiful Evidence, by design critic Edward Tufte Re-Search #11: Pranks! Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge Along these same "formative" lines, I'm not sure I can part with any of what I consider to be the three key Advanced Dungeons and Dragons texts: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual. Continuing with games, I'd bring the Redstone Editions Surrealist Games book-in-a-box... ...and the Oulipo Compendium, which defines a mind-boggling number of literary constraints to play around with... ...and Jeff Noon's Cobralingus, which takes the idea of literary constraints and fascinatingly updates it by mashing it up with the kind of gate/filter/patch mechanism familiar from real-time sound synthesis programs like AudioMulch. And ultimately, for when I was through with the wacky wordplay and wanted to get back to writing normal English-language sentences, I'd bring a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. I'd cram in a few more great works of fiction... Cathedral, by Raymond Carver Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson my version of Moby Dick, by Herman Melville ...and one excellent work of humor: Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source ...and maybe one exemplary picture book for children: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg And that'd be 100 (OK, closer to 115, given the various cheats and bundles I stuck in there.) Could I live with this 100? Maybe, although there's a lot of good writing in the piles left that remain. I find myself already wanting to make a list of a second hundred... the "honorable mentions," perhaps... Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects
Monday, July 07, 2008
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