The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds—and that would include me.

18 out of 100 – most of which I read as a teenager. The size of the Dune book intimidated me.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible – X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – X
41 Animal Farm – George OrwellN- X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Another meme from Facebook..

Once, you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things. At the end, you choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I’ve done this meme before (see previous note) but have been tagged a couple more times since I wrote the note. So here goes. Again I’m not tagging anybody even though I love reading friend’s random things.
2. I’m not what you call a morning person.
3. I wish I could play the guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn.
4. I wonder what life would be like marooned in space aboard a spaceship with a hologram of my best buddy, a life form evolved from a cat, an android and a hyper-intelligent computer that runs the ship.
5. I took remedial reading in grade school; there I discovered my talent for computers.
6. I once met a guy whose legal name was Tiger Love. He freaked me out.
7. Books that contain over 400 pages intimidate me.
8. My favorite author is Ray Bradbury.
9. I refuse to watch movies in which Bruce Willis stars.
10. I’ve held the Daredevil’s and the Kingpin’s prop canes.
11. I’ve pushed the button at the Milwaukee convention center that reads “Push to play Polka”.
12. I know the secret phrase to enter the Safe House in Milwaukee.
13. Tony Dungy signed my Gen Con Indy badge one year.
14. I have a profile on an online dating website.
15. My father loved “The Screwtape Letters”; it’s on my book list.
16. I have so many unfinished video games that if I completed one a week, I wouldn’t finish until July.
17. I don’t understand the appeal of televised poker.
18. It seems like I spent a majority of my 20s working inside a cubicle.
19. It’s almost 2010. Where’s my rocketpack?
20. I had a high school crush on a couple Facebook friends. Of course if you’re wondering, then yes, it was totally you, darling!
21. I have a propane grill and intend one day to master the art of the BBQ.
22. I like chili esp Cincinnati-style chili.
23. I ask people about the jewelry they wear; there’s always a story there.
24. I’ve been to the Chicago Blues Festival three times; ran into the guys who run the Creepy Crawl in St Louis there one year.
25. My mailbox has 121 Mb worth of messages; just 1% of what Google mail has allocated.

Archon is a few weeks away. I have been putting together a Kobolds Ate My Baby LARP for the Atomic Squash gaming group to run there. The game is called “Tabriz School of Magick”. All of the players are Kobold freshmen trying to avoid death and destruction to win the school cup for their house.

We learned a few lessons from the last game and are using them to make this year’s game better. First of all, I expected all of the players to act as individuals looking out for their own self-interest and survival. What happened was amazing. The players joined together in a group leaving the group occasionally to pursue their own goals. This year we are grouping players in two houses to give them a group of which to be a part.

I gave everyone in the last game a goal of escape and did not give anyone a clear way to accomplish it. This year we have the school cup that one group of players will win.

A player familiar with the tabletop game suggested that we include edges and bogies. This rules are indeed hilarious and work well. But I haven’t thought of a way of including them in the LARP without disrupting game balance. In LARPs it is important that no single player is overly powerful. If there is a powerful vampire for example, it is important to have a powerful vampire hunter. Last game I gave players special abilities taking care to maintain balance. I think it worked well but am thinking about how to improve them.

We charge money for the game. We ask the players to pay one dollar. We aren’t in this to make money. We do this because we limit the game to twelve players and want to insure that players who sign up actually show up to play the game. By the way the money are got last time we gave to a group who came from out of state to run games at Archon.

CptSquash and Pancake have already given me some great ideas that I need to write up in our private wiki. I’m trying to organize a brainstorming session with them for this weekend. I think our players are going to love the great material and improvements we have made this year.

During my trip I finally read C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Although he is better known for the Narnia series, it is considered one of his better books. He considers the fact that we know relatively little about the afterlife. In his fantasy world the afterlife is a strange and dangerous place where souls take a phantom shape. Residents of the strange world try to coax the phantoms into repenting and entering into Heaven. Interestingly he compares a soul’s time on Earth to being in Hell. It is an existence of joyless, friendless unhappiness. Hell is represented by “grey town”. an ever expanding metropolis that is grey and grim. In some ways it reminds me of playing some MMORPGs.

I am looking forward to the arrival of Prince Caspian in theaters. Although the critics have panned its overt Christian references, that is exactly what makes it interesting and, yes, refreshing.

It is time for my third annual list of underrated items. The past year, 2006, once again gave us its share of hype and hero worship. This is my list of underrated items that I feel deserve some exposure.

Last year I mentioned a gazpacho dot net podcast netcast. I am still toying with the idea. I am especially inspired to produce something light-hearted and funny.

Here is my planned book list for 2007 in no particular order.

• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists – Neil Strauss
• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle – Matthew Symonds
• Canada’s Secret Commandos: The unauthorized story of Joint Task Force Two – David Pugliese
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language – Steven Pinker
• Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
• Friday – Robert A. Heinlein
• From a Buick 8 – Stephen King
• Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
• The Great Divorce – C. S. Lewis
• Jack: Straight from the Gut – Jack Welch

Of course, I have a series of Harry Potter and Middle Earth books I’d like to read as well.

I posted all of the characters sheets and game master project files online. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. If you use them, I ask that you give me credit.

The good stuff can be found at koboldslarp.com

Enjoy, you naughty Kobolds!