TickTickTick

He asked me innocently then what had brought me to his home - and without a minute's hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is it...I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will invite him in and say "why are you doing this?" And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death - it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That's what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.

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
19. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
20. the namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
21. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
22. seven types of ambiguity, Eliot Perlman
23. Unhooked Generation, Jillian Straus
24. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
25. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
26. This Book Will Save Your Life, A. M. Homes
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
28. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
29. jPod, Douglas Coupland
30. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
31. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
32. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
33. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson
34. No Acting Please, Eric Morris
35. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust
36. Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, William J. Mann
37. The 9/11 Commission Report, Various
38. The Aeneid, Virgil
39. Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk
40. No Logo, Naomi Klein
41. Jimmy Stewart, Marc Eliot
42. An Illustrated Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
43. Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
44. Collected Poems 1909-1962, T.S. Eliot
45. Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller
46. Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman

I had actually considered getting a Klosterman book - this one specifically - quite some time ago, but eventually decided not to because he seemed to just be a bitter dude who could really use a hug. My opinion hasn't really changed, but after having been exposed to a bit more of his writing via the pieces he does for the various men's magazines, I've revised that to a bitter dude who could really use a hug, but who is at least entertaining, which is probably more than you can say about most people. That could also be why he gets to write for a living and I don't, but I'm gonna chalk that up to cake instead, just because I can.

Pie > cake.