J.R. Carpenter has assembled a charming canine lexicon for the Winter issue of Geist. Carpenter’s “Words Dogs Know” are on the sophisticated side: phenomenology, conquest, corruption; they’re probably pretty representative of the average Geist-reading dog’s vocabulary. My favorite:

trust:  When they say: "We’ll be right back," they may not come right back, but they always do come back eventually. When they say: "It’s all right," it may not be all right yet, but it will be soon. When they say: "Stay," for no apparent reason, it’s best to just do it. Who knows, maybe there’s a car coming.

Source: Geist

Image by rgdaniel, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Everyone makes lists: to-do lists, shopping lists, work lists. A writer at Smith puts all of my lists to shame with a list she compiled of all her lists. The results are illuminating about her and list-makers in general. My favorite section is the one labled “Neurotic?”:

Things I haven’t seen through
Number of days w/out smoking
Number of days w/out calling you know who
Number of days of exercising since resolved to exercise every single day
Things that make me sneeze
Diseases I think I might have
Other places I want to live
Other professions I might want to have
Things I wish I did more of
Things I’ve missed, skipped, cancelled, escheduled...

British television writer Richard Wilson can’t be arsed to do a lot of things. (Translated from the British, that means he’d rather not do them.) There are 101 such things, to be precise, collected in his new humor book Can’t Be Arsed: 101 Things Not to Do Before You Die, excerpted in the London Times.

Ten of those things are “essential” books that Wilson argues are overrated piles of rubbish not worth our time. His own book isn't on his list of 10 Books Not to Read Before You Die, but you will find such classics as Ulysses, A Remembrance of Things Past, and War & Peace.

Best/worst lists are primarily meant to provoke debate, and one assumes Wilson is being contrarian for humor’s sake. All the same, I’d love to see the angry emails he’s been getting from literature professors and other bookworms in response to this list, and plenty of readers have already weighed in with their comments.

This list made me wonder if there are books I couldn’t be arsed to read. There aren’t many, but I will admit that I have never made it beyond the first hundred pages of A Confederacy of Dunces. 

There. I said it. I feel so much better now.

What Big Important Books do you find not-so-essential? Are there sacred cows you’ve always been afraid to slaughter? Let us know in the Great Writing Salon.

(Thanks, Minnesota Reads.)

Image by  Ian Wilson , licensed by  Creative Commons .