Well...Shit

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
13. interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
16. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
17. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
18. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman

Looks like I might be making another trip to Barnes and Noble a lot sooner than I thought I would have to. There was a lot of fascinating things in Blink; one that I actually want to try (but am a bit apprehensive about) is an Implicit Association Test (IAT), a version of which can apparently be found here. One interesting passage talks about a pair of facial expression researchers who found a correlation between their actual emotions and the facial expressions they were making; that while facial expressions are typically considered to be the effect of emotions, the reverse is also true: that is, facial expressions, properly made, can trigger an emotional response. I just find that fascinating, and not really surprising, given that study from a bit ago noting that people who smile more are generally healthier than those who smile less, or they live longer, or whatever it was. Personally, I tend to be a pretty smiley person, and also a pretty unstressed person (you know those Scientology people who sit at the tables and ask if you're stressed? NOT ME!), so I guess that bodes pretty well for me.

Speaking of Scientology, I finally managed to watch the Scientology episode of South Part on YouTube. "Tom Cruise, John Travolta still will not come out of the closet!" Brilliant. I have a virulent hate for that "In the Closet" song of R. Kelly's, though. It's just so atonal and it goes on forEVer and I wonder if the point of it is that he was sitting around, wondering how long he could get people to sit and listen to a song so horrible it could only have been written as part of a bet that he could just make the stupidest crap up and people would sit and listen to it for like 20 minutes because it's by the dude who sang "I Believe I Can Fly." Ugh. I also find Trey Parker and Matt Stone's response to Isaac Hayes quitting the show pretty spot on.