While it's a long-standing custom with you folks, it might be a good idea to give up the celebratory firing of weapons into the air, at least when you're in a war zone, and there are US combat aircraft in the area. "BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. helicopter gunships and jets attacked a house Monday while a wedding was under way, killing and injuring scores, witnesses and hospital officials said. U.S. officials said an AC-130 gunship and a B-52 launched an attack after American forces came under fire.

Bismullah, communications chief of Uruzgan province where the attack occurred, said Afghans were firing weapons in the area during the wedding as is common in rural Afghanistan." Repeat - not a Good Idea. Those tracers coming up from the ground look just like you mean business. Have y'all ever heard of the Darwin Awards?

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I got this email today from a list I'm on, and there's this bookstore pimping their list of the novels every adult should own. (or at least read, one presumes) It's here.

Needless to say, there are a few selections with which I have to disagree.

They got some things right. There are the Classics - The Oedipus Trilogy, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, etc. Given my tastes, no problemo. But I don't know that if I had to pick one Shakespeare, that it'd be Lear. And I'm not sure Candide would make my cut.

Moby Dick and Huck Finn, the two novels that vy, in my mind, at least, for the title of Greatest American Novel, along with all the other Greatest Hits, the novels that you learned to hate in high school, Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, Pride And Prejudice, yatta-yatta...

But there are some selections there that I don't understand at all. It may be my elitist classical leanings or just plain ignorance of most of the stuff written after WWII, but c'mon...

The Wapshot Chronicle? July's People? If Not Now, When? A Lesson From Aloes? The Moviegoer? The Scarlet Mandala? Their Eyes Were Watching God? Things Fall Apart?

These may be fine works, but are any of them more important than oh, say, The Grapes of Wrath, or 1984?

Seems to me that a work needs to have aged a few decades before it gets to be called one of the best of all time, but again, my tastes are obvious and my ignorance considerable. It looks to me like the list has as a hidden agenda the need to move some slow moving titles out of a warehouse somewhere, or as if the publisher is underwriting this. Some of the selections positively reek of PC affirmative action, but that's a whole 'nother issue.

There are a few glaring holes (no Hemingway?) and a complete lack of any sci-fi or fantasy - not even a Fahrenheit 451 or The Hobbitt to appease fans of the genre.

I know Kipling is out of favor these days for being an imperialist racist pig, but how do you leave out Kim, or the Jungle Books? (unless you are considering the latter to be kid's fiction)

Anyway, the polls are open. Now taking nominees for the 100 Greatest Works of Fiction...

I'm thinking of this as the list I'd hand to my kid and tell her this is what she needs to have read before she leaves home for college. Other than Shakespeare and Sophocles (and the rest of the ancient Greek playwrights), I'm leaving all dramatic works aside, maybe for their own list.

I'll get started by listing some classics that I think will be consensus picks. In no particular order:

1. Shakespeare - Complete Works (cheating, I know, but this is my poll)
2. Homer - Iliad & Odyssey
3. Dante - Divine Comedy
4. Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
5. Sophocles - The Oedipus Cycle
6. Cervantes - Don Quixote
7. Twain - Huck Finn
8. Melville - Moby Dick

And my personal selections, again in no real order, and limited to books that I've actually read. There are lots of books that would be consensus entries, as an example, Pride And Prejudice, that I've left off for the latter reason. Another would be that I didn't really like them, which is why I've not put obvious works such as The Great Gatsby (soap opera) and The Catcher In The Rye (I wanted to shoot that whiny twerp Holden Caulfield by the fifth page) on the list. I'm going to let someone else do that - they're not getting my Seal of Approval. :-)

1. Twain - Connecticut Yankee
2. Huxley - Brave New World
3. Conrad - Heart of Darkness
4. Conrad - Lord Jim
5. Vergil - The Aeneid (I know, Roman GeekFreak tastes showing)
6. Orwell - 1984
7. Orwell - Animal Farm
8. Rand - The Fountainhead
9. Hemingway - A Farewell To Arms
10. Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front
11. Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath
12. Steinbeck - Of Mice And Men
13. Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
14. Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
15. Card - Ender's Game (with the sequels)
16. Steakley - Armor
17. Heinlein - Starship Troopers
18. Heinlein - Job
19. Heinlein - The Number Of The Beast
20. Heinlein - Just about everything else he wrote...
21. Frank - Alas, Babylon
22. Dickey - Deliverance
23. Wilder - The Bridge Of San Luis Rey
24. Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse V
25. Graves - I, Claudius
26. Heller - Catch-22
27. Joyce - Ulysses (man, I hate to do that to her, but...)
28. Dickens - Great Expectations
29. Nabokov - Lolita
30. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
31. Golding - Lord Of The Flies
32. Adams - Watership Down
33. Tolkien - The Hobbit & the LOTR trilogy
34. Adams - Hichhiker's Guide and sequels
35. Twain - Letters From Earth
36. Pressfield - Gates of Fire (a sleeper, I know)
37. McMurty - Lonesome Dove
38. Burroughs - Tarzan Of The Apes
39. Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
40. Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
41. Baum - The Wizard Of Oz
42. Twain - Tom Sawyer
43. Rice - Interview With A Vampire
44. Wells - The Time Machine
45. Sinclair - The Jungle
46. Swift - Gulliver's Travels
47. Ovid - Metamorphoses
48. Boccaccio - Decameron
49. Unknown - The Epic of Gilgamesh
50. Rabelais - Gargantua And Pantagruel
51. Kazantzakis - Zorba The Greek
52. Various - The Bible (it is fiction, you know)
53. All the extant tragedies of ancient Greece

Well, that makes up almost half the list - I suppose I need to leave room for the rest of you. :-)

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