zamiel's blog

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Don't forget to read them all!

Those in bold I have read:

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, 1848

2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, 1925-26

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, 1966

4. The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey, 1948

5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey, 1916

6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx, 1867-1894

7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, 1963

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte, 1830-1842

9. Beyond Good and Evil, Freidrich Nietzsche, 1886

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes, 1936

Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich

What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin

Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno

On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner

Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel

The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly

Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin

Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb

Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead

Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader

Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud

The Greening of America, Charles Reich

The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome

Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

Copied from Tiny Little Librarian another (probably old) Blog Meme:

The idea is to post the following list with the books I have actually read in bold lettering or otherwise highlighted. As a Canadian I think there should be a few Canadian works in there, some Attwood, Hugh McLean or "Two Solitudes". I'll google for a Canadianized version but here is my original version posted.

I find this meme interesting as an informal survey of what books people have in common.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I have three (3) Gmail account invitations available to give out. Since I cannot seem to interest my friends or family in them, I will give them away to the first three people who comment on this thread. If you want me to send the invite to your LIS account, make sure you are configured to receive e-mail that way. I suggest you do not post e-mail in plain text. I will be able to figure out any obscured addresses (i hope).

Paper leader tape?!? Who thought of this? I can only guess that using paper as leader tape is useful when editing 1/4 inch audio tape but for archival purposes it's not an alternative. So far every splice on the current recording I am working on has "exploded" during rewind and I must apply new leader tape before I can make a dub of it which is not my preferred method. I can only imagine how much mositure paper will absorb over the years. In this case the recording is approximately 20 years old but the paper tape seems dry to the touch.

Ampex audio tape from the 1980's or so exhibit the "Sticky-Shed" problem on playback in 2004. Lately, all the Ampex I find is exhibiting this syndrome and I have to submit these tapes to our resident expert to work them over to allow a useful dub.

(Note: These pictures are gathered from internet sources and are not actual pictures of "my" tape machines)Last week I had my old Studer A807:

< img src=http://www.stefansen.org/music/studer/Studer_A807/Studer_A807_C.jpg">
Picture from: http://www.stefansen.org

From www.caterina.net

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"announce verb (-cing) make publicly known; make known the approach of. announcement noun.

from: The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English, seventh edition 1994.

Dub a nice recording of Canadian pianist Adrienne Shannon to CD, apparently recorded in a studio sometime before June 1975. The documentation is skimpy but it does say it is Dolby Noise Reduction encoded (and it is!).

- A nice recording of the Montreal Symphony from the mid-seventies. This fine 1/4 inch audio tape is encoded with Dolby noise reduction.

- Argh, no it's not. Re-jig dubbing equipment.

- Wait! The label and documentation say it is Dolby encoded! Argh! Throw out CD-R. Start again tomorrow.

[next day]

- Re-jig dubbing equipment to decode Dolby.

- Wait! That timpani doesn't sound right! (No CD-Rs harmed this time) Argh^3

- "Audio engineer, is this encoded with Dolby?"

Just dubbing and documenting/cataloguing recorded concerts today:

- '75 Toronto Symphony plays: Wagner, Mozart, Roh Ogura and R. Strauss.

- '75 Toronto Symphony plays: Stravinsky and Orff.

Here is my first entry by way of a test message.

Score so far for this journal = boring but perhaps I will think of something useful to post soon.

Sam