What Have I Read? Traveling Blog Meme

• 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
• The 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
• 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 : a novel
• 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

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I Found a Frog: Episode 1

Herps of Minnesota: Cope's/Eastern Gray Treefrog

There's no reliable way to tell the difference between the Cope's Gray and the Eastern Gray Treefrog without counting chromosomes, and both are ubiquitous in Minnesota.

This frog is probably the most urban herp in the state, as well, and can be found stuck to office building windows at night, looking in over your shoulder, wishing it could come in and use your computer to look for rims on craigslist.

The Gray Treefrog is an almost exclusive insectivore, and is able to cling to almost any surface, including glass, using its mucous-covered toe discs.

I found this little fella outside the back door to my office, where he had just finished polishing off a moth. Spending 12 hours in front of a computer screen, at night, completely alone in a dark office building can get to you after a bit, so it's nice that I can step outside almost any time, and find an amphibious friend to hang around with on my break.

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I'm a bit behind

This list of the most important works of sci-fi/fantasy has been making the rounds lately (I got it from PZ Myers), and it fits in neatly with the agony of the Science Fiction/Fantasy Literature class I've been in. I'm not saying I know more than the professor, necessarily, I'm just saying I can't make that judgement based on the rather unsophisticated analysis and discussion in the class.

Ones I've read are bold, added some comments, as well.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien [Read (the first time) in 3rd grade]
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert [Read (the first time) in 4th grade, buuut.... I don't think I had any idea what was going on]
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson [Since I was already fairly well steeped in cyberpunk as an established genre (see Snow Crash), I wasn't that impressed]

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe [A revelation for me in the way Tolkien never was, Wolfe is probably my foremost literary idol]
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey. [Ugh, ugh ugh ugh. A friend of mine once remarked, after watching the movie Underworld "how do you make a movie about a secret war between vampires and werewolves so boring?" I have the same feeling about what McCaffrey did with sentient, telepathic dragons and their elite riders]
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card [Read it first in Jr. High, and, in boot camp in San Diego, I was allowed to have the book in my gear because it was on the Commandant of the Marine Corps' Reading list. Probably owe Card a great deal for the mental trauma I did not suffer because I had this excellent novel]
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson [I can recognize the importance of this as one of the first wave of post-Tolkien published fantasy, and some of the anti-heroic elements, but, just like Brooks' Shannara work from the same 2nd wave, it does not hold up for the modern reader]
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling [I read the first 3 books to try to understand the fad. Mostly, it just made me sad that Roald Dahl is still dead]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice [Not a fan]
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin [I read this in 7th or 8th grade. I have a vague memory of what happened... and I'm pretty sure I didn't understand it]
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson [Sorry Gibson, this is Neuromancer for my generation]
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks [See above comments on Thomas Covenant.
Additional note a friend and I found when discussing it: Brooks uses the phrase "Elven longbows hummed about every other page. It's like punctuation to him]
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

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