Let’s face it, a large chunk of literature and non-fiction sales are nothing to do with people reading and everything to do with being seen to read. It was no surprise to early e-reader adopters that the romance and erotica genres took off as people on the bus to work could now read the stuff they wanted to without being judged. The Guardian posted this survey of readers (although I can’t find the source) listing off everyone’s favourite reading cred books, you know, the ones you claim to have read but fell asleep at page 2.
A recent survey of 2,000 people suggests that the majority of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent, with more than half of those polled displaying unread books on their shelves and 3% slipping a highbrow cover on books they’d rather not be seen reading in public.
The books most likely to be lied about are, naturally, the books most often filmed, talked about and studied in school (some of the respondents must have been lying since GCSE onwards). Are any of them in your pretend-I’ve-read/never-finished pile, or do you save your literary fibbing for Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest? Share your guilty secrets below.
1) 1984 by George Orwell (26%)Â I have actually read this classic. I read it because Animal Farm was one of the only books I had to read in English Lit class that I actually enjoyed (I’m not counting plays, you’re not meant to read plays, you’re meant to see them performed!!!). I enjoyed it, but I can see how people would battle to read this one.
2) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)Â Haven’t read this one and have no intention of trying. People always talk about battling through it in small chunks because it is such an important and blah blah blah book. If it was really important it wouldn’t have been so boring as to necessitate reading it in small chunks.
3) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)Â I watched the old black and white film, does that count?
4) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (15%)Â I’ve read this many times and hated it every single time. Each time I’ve re-read it I’ve done so because I felt I was too young and/or stupid to get it, so I must re-read it because I’m so much older and smarter now. Although, John Green did manage to convince me of its literary merits via Crash Course Literature, not that I’ll bother revisiting this novel.
5) A Passage to India by EM Forster (12%)Â I can honestly say I’ve never heard of this book.
6) Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (11%)Â I’ve read it, but I will admit that I did so only after seeing the first movie. I really enjoyed the book, but it was long and waffly and I can see why others wouldn’t actually finish it. I will also say that I started reading The Hobbit when I was in school and then realised that life was worth living and stopped.
7) To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee (10%)Â Okay, I’m guilty of this one. It is on my TBR pile. I have it on Kindle and DTB.
8) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)Â See #2
9) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)Â I’m going to read the zombie version.
10) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)Â If there is a zombie version of this I may read it.
Have you ever suffered from this? I often have this problem with names, especially those from a Dravidian or Sino-Tibetan base. The earliest word I can remember reading but not knowing how to pronounce was acknowledge and its derivatives. It was a favourite verb of WE Johns in his Biggles books, using it instead of said in dialogue. I know, acknowledge is phonetic so there shouldn’t have been a problem, but I was young and my dictionary was very small.
It isn’t just reality TV, it is quite a bit of TV programming that is killing books and, thus, us.
Think about the worst book you’ve ever read. Now remember that, with few exceptions, the movie is always worse than the book. Now think about the best programming on TV being movies and high calibre drama shows. So what I’m insinuating is that the best programs on TV are inferior to just about any book.
For every half-hour wasted watching bad TV, that is 5-10% of a decent novel that you’ll never get to read. Scary, isn’t it!
NB: If people are interested I might write about my favourite TV shows, because not all TV sucks.
I still think that the best bookends are other books. Our bookshelves are actually two layers deep, and that isn’t accounting for the two boxes of young adult books that are sitting in a cupboard because they don’t fit on any shelves.
Word limits are a funny thing. I’ve never had a problem being succinct, in fact I can be too brief in my writing. Yet other writers are known for sitting down with editors to cull half their manuscript. There are other writers still that should have sat down with an editor and culled half their manuscript and saved the readers all that page skipping.
This is one of the reasons to like Twitter. It forces you to practice creating a thought or sentence in a manner that may be foreign. For example, the complex phrase:
I disagree with your supposition as it is currently unsupported by any evidence, either presented by yourself or in the scientific literature, thus there is no way you can sway my position.
Can be replaced with:
Lol, moron!
This says everything that is needed and doesn’t dance around the topic. Conversely the reply to this can be shortened from:
Whilst you are allowed to disagree with me, my opinion still stands. I cannot provide a summary of the relevant scientific literature at this time, but this is information that is readily understood and referenced in the literature. Thus I will endevour to provide a few examples when I am able to, but in the meantime I’d invite you to read further on the topic, as I suspect that you will agree with me once you have.
Can be replaced with:
Well screw you and the horse you road up on.
The trick is to start with what your key points are and not overuse exposition to explain those points. The 140 character limit can help with this a lot.
In the meantime, if you aren’t a fan of See Mike Draw, I suggest you become one now.
Walk in a crooked line
Let’s face it, walking in a straight line is something people now practice. Make the line crooked and you’ll quickly have people staggering like drunken zombies, regardless of the number of drinks they’ve had.
Not buy a kebab
Somewhere between the pub and home there is always a kebab store. If someone can walk past it and not buy a kebab, then they are sober.
Discuss politics without yelling
Although this may just mean the person yelling is a politician. Either way, just lock them up to be on the safe side.
Not heckle a comedian
Unless they are on this list, in which case don’t stop at heckling, molotov invented a drink that needs to be served to them.
Check that they don’t use the phrase “I’m not drunk.”
May be combined with the phrases “I’ve only had one/couple of drinks” or “Just a wine with dinner.”
Refuse to sing karaoke
Much like the kebab, there is no way a drunk person can refrain from busting out a classic tune in all its warbling, tone deaf, shouted glory.
Look for Picasso abstract facial features.
You may have to wipe away the drool from their face to properly assess this.
Look them directly in the eye and then glance sideways to see if they have another head.
Not to be mistaken with conjoined twins or a couple with separation anxiety.
Do you have to shake their hand or just hold it?
Could they also mix some paint or a good martini for you?
Check for matching leg lengths.
Some inbreeding mountain people have one leg longer than the other to aid with circumnavigation of mountainous terrain.
Problems answering questions in clear English.
Although this could just mean they work for Fox News and don’t have the teleprompter on.
Okay, just to be serious for a moment: Do you see a difference between these two cartoons?
Some of you may have seen the awesomeness displayed on The Oatmeal in response to people stealing his cartoons and taking his authorship off of the picture. Well, here is another example. The second cartoon was the one I was going to post, but I realised that it didn’t have the creator’s signature on it and it would be good to make sure that they were able to be tracked down. Ideally, I’d link to the original, but that isn’t always possible, especially when someone has decided to edit out the part that would help us all identify the author. It is clear that the author isn’t even asking for money, the cartoon is freely published on the web, yet someone has decided to remove the content creator as though they aren’t important.
Free content is great, so many people with great ideas are creating stuff to entertain others just because they enjoy it. I’m going to try and make sure the authors (content creators) are acknowledged when possible, I hope everyone else does too.
There are a lot of guns in the world. The figure is something like 639 million firearms, or to put it another way, one gun for every 9 people on the planet. Yet the average person knows diddly squat about guns. People probably have a better idea of how Nicki Minaj managed to become a star than express knowledge about guns. Most of our knowledge is likely to come from movies:
Or professional Russians:
As an author I really wanted to make sure I didn’t base my gun knowledge upon misinformation, otherwise I’d have to work as a reporter covering the gun debate. So here are a few myths to be busted.
Machine guns are not monsters of death
They may fire great big bullets at hundreds of rounds per minute but machine guns really are given the fashion magazine airbrushing treatment. A great big gun letting off a whole lot of explosions in a short amount of time has a habit of getting hot. Really hot. We’re talking change the barrel over every minute hot! Yes, that’s right, at the maximum rate of fire your machine gun needs a new barrel every minute to keep firing without causing problems – which I imagine as a gigantic explosion like Bugs Bunny sticking his finger in the end of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. But it isn’t just the barrel changes, most of the time you aren’t actually firing the machine gun at people, you’re firing it at super mean looking inanimate objects, or as the military call it, suppressive fire (250,000 rounds for one kill!!!). Essentially the machine gun is a tool that performs a very different role from the one gun noobs think it does. Well, unless you don’t mind the thing catching on fire (yes, I know that isn’t technically a machine gun):
Guns aren’t really death machines
For death machines, these gun things really don’t kill enough people. In science we talk about effects, rates and how to blow up stuff with the things you find under the kitchen sink, as such it is hard to look at the gun deaths and gun injury rates and not think guns kinda suck at their job. The USA use guns to kill roughly 30,000 people a year, one third of those are homicides, but that is less than half the people they injure with guns, roughly 65,000. But that isn’t really fair, because not every time a gun goes off is it being used to shoot at someone else or a particularly nasty piece of paper. If you just look at homicides and attempted homicides, guns are still only getting the job done 21% of the time.
Guns suck for self defence
Not everyone can have Chuck Norris camped out in their house for self defence, nor carry Steven Segal around where-ever they go. But as mentioned above, guns really do suck at their job. Whether it is only being 23% effective in legal interventions, or the fact that you’re 4.5 to 5.5 times more likely to be shot for carrying a gun, you really start to think running away looks like a better option, even if you are as fat as Steven Segal has gotten lately.
Handguns are about as accurate as the horoscopes
A handgun is a really convenient weapon to carry around with you, but if the side of a barn is more than a few metres away, you’re not particularly likely to hit it. Even cops can’t hit much with these things, even when the bad-guy is less than 15m away. Half the problem is that bad-guys shoot back, which means you don’t stand around collecting holes, you run for cover, which really ruins your accuracy. But I’ve already mentioned that guns suck at their job, well, your handgun might hit the bad-guy 55 times and still not kill them.
Guns sure do help kill people
As much as guns suck at their job, as I’ve just pointed out, guns still do a better job of killing than many of the other methods we’ve devised for killing each other. Sure, people love their tools to kill one another, but guns are a really good tool to use for killing one another. I can’t wait to see the military being sent off to war with hammers and cars instead of a gun.
Being shot doesn’t mean you can fly
The trick to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing. So being shot clearly can’t make you fly. Don’t know why people think that shooting someone can disobey this simple fact, let alone Newton’s Laws of Motion. But what good is a trope if it isn’t always on display?
Semi-auto rifles are not assault rifles
Every time someone refers to a semi-auto rifle as an assault rifle, or worse, the made up term assault weapon, a puppy dies. You don’t want all the puppies to die do you? Well then, it is time to learn the difference between the military configured select fire rifle, called the assault rifle, which is capable of fully automatic and (sometimes) burst fire, and the civilian one trigger pull, one shot, semi-automatic rifle. I know, they may look the same to the untrained eye, but some people think cars are all the same thing too.
Mags, clips, high capacity…
While we’re on the topic of rifles, I have a dictionary and an abacus for people talking about magazines, clips and high capacity mag clips. A magazine is something you read, a clip is something you watch and high capacity is a Japanese train at rush hour. Different guns have different sizes of magazines (which may or may not be loaded with a clip), which means 30 rounds may be high capacity for one gun and normal capacity for another. Also, when one of these these rifles go through 700 rounds per minute and even soldiers only carry 210 rounds, from a standard 30 round magazine, then no gun fight is really lasting that long.
It’s a suppressor not a silencer!
Remind me, is +120 decibels loud or quiet? It sure is a lot quieter than a normal gunshot sound (+160db), but calling it “silent” is like calling bagpipes a little annoying. When the best suppressors on the smallest calibre weapons still manage to be as loud as a jack hammer or AC/DC, then suppressors have again gotten the Hollywood make-over. But 30db is a decent drop from ear splitting to “say what” territory, so I’d say these things should be compulsory.
There is no smell of cordite
If someone describes the smell of cordite in the air after a gun fight, you either know that the book is set before 1950 or that there is a sub-plot about a time traveller who comes from the past to assassinate a future self. It seems really odd that so many books use the time traveller sub-plot, because it is usually a one off. It would be far more interesting if this was built upon more, maybe have Gengis Khan show up to knock down a wall, or something, as well.
Less guns are a good idea
Shooting is fun, hunting is very primal, but at some point your neighbours start to get worried when you look more like you are going to war than to the shooting range. Aside from guns sucking for self defence, they also suck at not shooting your loved ones, are handy for suicide, and unless you are in a warzone, more guns in society equals more gun violence. But it is also worth thinking about what gun figures actually mean, like 300 million guns in the US, enough for one for every American despite there being only about 80,000 gun owners. Sounds like a lot, but that means each gun owner has a rifle, a handgun and a shotgun, which is clays, targets and pistols at the local range on the weekend. Perfectly reasonable to go shooting, just not at your local school.
Not all music can be as awesome as AC/DC or Steel Panther, some of it has to suck like Nickelback and *inset generic pop star name here*. The problem is that amongst all of that suck there is the occasional gem that rises above its mediocre origins and digs deep into my skull like a Ceti-Aal. So here is some of the music that is on my iPod despite how bad it is.
Katrina and the Waves – Walking on Sunshine
This saccharine peppy pop song revels in its bouncy good-times vibe: how can you not enjoy it? Little known fact: Nine Inch Nails were created to counter the peppiness of this song. During my aspiring musician days (also known as my terrible poetry phase) I was actually trying to develop a cover version of this song that took all the peppy pop and blend it with my favourite dark-angst driven rock music. This would have been the music equivalent of dividing by zero.
Dragonforce – the entire Sonic Firestorm album
At some point you have to turn off Dragonforce to remove the copious build up of cheese from your ears. The insanely fast riffs, the power metal vocals, the lyrics inspired by too many fantasy novels, the video game inspired guitar sounds, all add up to something everyone should be embarrassed to listen to. Still rocks.
The Beatles – most of their career
She loves you…. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah… Need I say more? The Beatles are awesome, but you really have to cringe when you step back to look at some of the banal pop music they produced. Not to mention their drug phase which produced such gems as I Am The Walrus and Dude, Where’s My LSD? My favourite Beatle moment was the guitar duel between Clapton and Harrison over Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd. Now you’d battle to find two great musicians who wouldn’t just resort to a threesome.
Dream Evil – The Book of Heavy Metal
It is a good thing these guys don’t take themselves seriously, because otherwise the joke would be all on them. They absolutely rock, are made up of fantastic musicians from metal bands across Europe, and are doing the “we love metal” fandom with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Creed – Higher
A bunch of God botherers form a band and produce pretentious pop-rock albums swamped with FM-radio friendly rock-ballads. They should suck. Actually, they do. But in among the trash is this little gem. Now if only a decent band would cover it.
Bon Jovi – Wanted: Dead or Alive
The highest praise that can be heaped upon Bon Jovi is that they wrote a couple of songs that didn’t suck. Sam and Dean even cranked out a rendition of Wanted: Dead or Alive. The main thing is that the Northern Kings did a cover of this song so you don’t have to listen to Bon Jovi to enjoy this song.
Poison – Unskinny Bop and Nothing But a Good Time
If there was an iconic example of everything wrong with hair metal of the 80s, it was Poison. Before there were metrosexuals, there were hair metal-ers wearing eye-liner, lip gloss and getting their hair permed so that they could jump around on stage in crotch stuffed spandex pants. At least they knew how to party.
MC Hammer – U Can’t Touch This
A guy I used to know was in a band that did a cover of this song. Before I heard them do their cover I couldn’t stand this song. After hearing it, I now don’t cringe when I see Hammer-time jokes on the internet.
Have you found Jesus?
First of all, I didn’t know he was missing. So I did a bit of checking, turns out Jesus is the reining world hide and seek champion, 33AD to present. Given how many people are now out door-knocking, trying to find him, it must be only a matter of days before Jesus will be found and people will stop knocking on our doors.
Are you happy with your telecommunications provider?
It seems odd that none of the telecommunications providers offer a service that stops you being bothered by marketers trying to get you to switch providers.
Would you like to donate to a good cause?
I love donating to good causes. Sadly I’m often lacking in cash on hand and none of the donation collectors seem willing to accept sperm bank cheques.
Our ball went into your backyard….
As long as there has been neighbours there have been kids deciding their backyard is too small for the games they play. Thankfully children are very useful for household chores like hand weeding my backyard in order to find the lost ball that may, or may not, have found its way inside with the dog.
We’re from the Church of Latter Day Saints, could we come in to speak to you?
Religious people are interesting, going out and visiting everyone and wanting to have a chat about their religion. How do they coordinate their visits so that all the religious people aren’t all out door-knocking so no-one is home to talk about religion with them? I wonder how many Mormons (or others) have been invited in so they can help with the filming of the low budget home movies that are popular on the internet.
I’m campaigning for the local member of parliament.
You really have to wonder how these people manage to avoid the bear traps I set in our front yard. Thankfully our dog enjoys chasing down fair game.
We’re going door to door to see if anyone saw or heard anything?
Do the police actually get much useful information out of this? Won’t most people who heard or saw something be out at the crime scene taking pictures on their phone? Sometimes it is very tempting to reply with, “No, I was too busy going all Dexter on my neighbour. “
We need to read your meter.
Why?
So we can bill you the correct amount.
Wouldn’t it better if I don’t let you read my meter and have you not charge me?
Tyson Adams 