Is this guy for real?!?!? In the small business consulting “biz” and particularly in the restaurant industry, one gets onto some interesting mailing lists, but here’s something I’ve never seen:

And that’s what bothered me. The guy’s name is Kamron Karington, no clues there except that he has Utah roots; that state is famous for creative name mispellings. The 6 google returns for his website (click pic) and the 556 on his name search yielded unreliable results, most of them were his own or affiliated pages. He DID buy a full-page ad in Fast Casual‘s Apr/May Issue [What, you don't read Fast Casual magazine? ] And I read the whole thing through. I was also seduced into reading this questionable source and his homepage here.

I was asked by a friend to compile a list of the books that were important for him to read in order to be a Literate and Contributing member of modern culture.
This is my first attempt — The main criteria for this list was to cover the books that are referenced either directly or in allusion in the literary community. For obvious reasons, that turned out to include all the “staple” books that are required reading for middle school and high school students.
NOTE: This is not a listing of “great books,” or even “good books,” and not a list of my favorite books, which would be MUCH different. This list is designed to guide young readers in their desire to cover the [quote, unquote] literary basics.

In alphabetical order by the first non-“the” in the book title.

• 1984–George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer–Mark Twain
• A Farewell to Arms–Ernest Hemingway
• A Lesson Before Dying–Ernest J. Gaines
• A Separate Peace–John Knowles
• A Tale of Two Cities–Charles Dickens
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland–Lewis Carroll
• All the King’s Men–Robert Penn Warren
• The Ambassadors–Henry James
• An American Tragedy–Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm–George Orwell
• As I Lay Dying–William Faulkner
• Atlas Shrugged–Ayn Rand
• The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
• Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman–Ernest J. Gaines
• The Awakening–Kate Chopin
• Beloved–Toni Morrison
• Bless Me, Ultima–Anaya Rudolfo
• Brave New World–Aldous Huxley
• The Bride Price–Buchi Emecheta
• Brideshead Revisited–Evelyn Waugh
• The Brothers Karamazov–Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Call of the Wild–Jack London
• Candide–Voltaire
• The Catcher in the Rye–J. D. Salinger
• Cat’s Cradle–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Catch-22–Joseph Heller
• The Chosen–Chaim Potok
• The Clan of the Cave Bear–Jean Auel
• The Color Purple– Alice Walker
• The Count of Monte Cristo–Alexander Dumas
• Crime and Punishment–Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Deliverance–James Dickey
• Democracy–Joan Didion
• The Divine Comedy–Dante
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–Philip K. Dick
• Doctor Zhivago–Boris Pasternak
• Don Quixote–Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde–Robert Louis Stevenson
• Ellen Foster–Kaye Gibbons
• Empire of the Sun–J. G. Ballard
• The End of the Affair–Graham Greene
• Ender’s Game–Orson Scott Card
• Ethan Frome–Edith Wharton
• Faust–Goethe
• Flowers for Algernon–Daniel Keyes
• The Fountainhead–Ayn Rand
• Frankenstein–Mary Shelley
• The Giver–Lois Lowry
• Go Tell It on the Mountain–James Baldwin
• Gone with the Wind–Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath–John Steinbeck
• Great Expectations–Charles Dickens
• The Great Gatsby–F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Grendel–John Gardner
• Gulliver’s Travels–Jonathon Swift
• Heart of Darkness–Joseph Conrad
• The Hobbit–J. R. R. Tolkien
• House Made of Dawn–N. Scott Momaday
• In Country–Bobbie Ann Mason
• The Invisible Man–H. G. Wells
• Invisible Man–Ralph Ellison
• Ivanhoe–Sir Walter Scott
• Jane Eyre–Charlotte Bronte
• The Jungle–Upton Sinclair
• Kindred–Octavia Butler
• The Kitchen God’s Wife–Amy Tan
• The Last of the Mohicans–James Fenimore Cooper
• The Left Hand of Darkness–Ursula K. Le Guin
• Les Miserables–Victor Hugo
• Less Than Zero–Bret Easton Ellis
• Like Water for Chocolate–Laura Esquivel
• Lord of the Flies–William Golding
• Love Medicine–Louise Erdrich
• Moby Dick–Herman Melville
• Moll Flanders–Daniel Defoe
• The Naked and the Dead–Norman Mailer
• Of Mice and Men–John Steinbeck
• The Old Gringo–Carlos Fuentes
• The Old Man and the Sea–Ernest Hemingway
• On the Road–Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest–Ken Kesey
• Out of Africa–Isak Dinesen
• Pride and Prejudice–Jane Austen
• The Prince–Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Red Badge of Courage–Stephen Crane
• The Remains of the Day–Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Return of the Native–Thomas Hardy
• Robinson Crusoe–Daniel Defoe
• Roots: The Story of an American Family–Alex Haley
• The Scarlet Letter–Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Screwtape Letters–C. S. Lewis
• Shogun: A Novel of Japan–James du Maresq Clavell
• Slaughterhouse Five–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Slave Dancer–Paula Fox
• Something Wicked this Way Comes–Ray Bradbury
• Song of Solomon–Toni Morrison
• The Sound and the Fury–William Faulkner
• The Stranger–Albert Camus
• Summer of My German Soldier–Bette Greene
• The Sun Also Rises–Ernest Hemingway
• The Sweet Hereafter–Russell Banks
• Ten Little Indians–Agatha Christie
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles–Thomas Hardy
• Their Eyes Were Watching God–Zora Neale Hurston
• Things Fall Apart–Chinua Achebe
• The Time Machine–H. G. Wells
• To Kill a Mockingbird–Harper Lee
• To the Lighthouse–Virginia Woolf
• Treason–Orson Scott Card
• Treasure Island–Robert Louis Stevenson
• V.–Thomas Pynchon
• War and Peace–Leo Tolstoy
• The Waste Land–T. S. Eliot
• Watership Down–Richard Adams
• The World According to Garp–John Irving
• Wuthering Heights–Emily Bronte

I was going to keep this list down to 100 books, but there are probably closer to 120. I would be interested to see submissions from readers, because I know I left off some that were important (i.e.: everybody’s read them). Scan through and see if your favorites are on the list.

It is the weekend. After an especially long week of work.
Some weeks just feel longer than others.
Much like some days can feel longer than others.
I have made a list of other things in my life that I have done for 8 hours straight.
1. Slept. Not often, but when I did, I’m pretty sure it was awesome. Although I recently learned that this could kill me.
2. I took an 8 hour flight to Oahu. It was a rather uneventful plane ride, but there was an exotic and tropical locale awaiting me on the other end. That was a good 8 hours.
3. I spent 8 hours learning how to use Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, which is the tool I used to create my website. Thanks, Macromedia. Sorry I didn’t pay you for the program! I promise I will next time.
4. Made love. Okay, I haven’t actually done that for 8 hours straight, but I’ve taken my wife on exciting and romantic weekend getaways. I’m probably at about an 8 hour cumulative total for our 2 years of marriage. Ha!
5. My buddies in college and I took a Road Trip from Provo to L.A. to go to the beach. 5 of us in a Geo Metro for 8 hours each way. It was cramped, but I think we each pitched in about 5 bucks and covered gas.
6. I spent 8 solid hours after Christmas playing CITY OF HEROES. I breaked periodically for food, water, and bathroom, but even those took 2ndary status. By the time my free 1 month had expired, I was a level 14 blaster. And I am not allowed to buy the CITY OF VILLAINS upgrade. Doctor’s orders.
7. I took the GMAT, that took about 8 hours. If I add on my breaks, travel time and an additional 2 hours for emotional distress.
8. It took me about 8 hours to Read the entire 209 pages of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. But it probably took me atleast another 8 hours to figure out what that book was really about.

I have a friend that Blogs. She says she does it to kill free time.
I replied, “Kill it? I don’t even have free time.”
She said, “Don’t you read books a lot?”
I said, “Yes, but that is during my ‘read book’ time. I certainly don’t have much of this ‘free time’ commodity at all.”
She explained to me, “‘Free time’ is any moment when you are free to do whatever you want.”
And then, of course, I asked, “What kind of people have all this ‘free time’?”
She thought for a moment. Then she responded.
“Bloggers have a lot of free time.”
And that’s when I knew –I wanted to be a blogger–
I, too, wanted to enjoy the luxury of having “free time,” complete with the masochistic freedom to kill it, to slaughter time in all of its gory splendor.