My wife’s brother’s wife’s sister’s daughter had her first child the other day. Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly a close relation, in-laws of in-laws, I’ve never had a chance to even meet them. Still, there is a certain implication in this new arrival.
To that new baby, I happen to be – a remote and far from direct – but a GRANDFATHER!?!?!?!?
The thought helps me none in overcoming my age hangups.
——–
Sorry, you have to be of Russian-speaking background to fully comprehend the situation. While English-language cultures label the relationship such as I have to the new baby as something like “Great Uncle” or maybe “cousin once removed”, in Russian, a family member two generations older might be called “an Uncle” or “an Aunt” for simplicity, but would in fact be a “grandparent” with an “x times removed” modifier depending on their relation to the direct grandparents.
Being silly
A number of people whose blogs I read did this meme, where they took the recently compiled NPR list of Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books and marked those they’ve read (or at least attempted to read at some point in their lives). At first, I just scanned through the list with a mild competitive interest, just to see how well I stack up against others, but then I figured that I might as well make a blog post about it, given how few of those I do lately.
I recognize that no such “best of genre” compilation can be entirely definitive, and as others before me, I have several issues with omissions, inclusions, or choices of individual books versus series that are present herein. Most importantly, I don’t recognize some of the authors’ names, let alone their books’, while titles that I would consider world-known veritable classics are missing from this list in non-trivial numbers. But I have to admit, I am almost tempted to load up my e-reader with a good portion of these entries.
I’ll bold titles that I’ve read, as per this meme guidelines, but I will not italicize those that I started but could not finish for the simple reason that I can think of only a couple of books in my entire life that I did not finish reading. Instead, I will italicize those titles which I’ve never read but watched big-screen versions of. For most of those, I can’t see myself picking up the book now that I’ve seen the movie, but I am nonetheless familiar with the work, and that should count somehow.
Read below the cut for the actual list.
Read more…
Books