the joys of random books

One thing my parents’ house in Marion has is books. Tons and tons of books. I often look at them, sometimes pulling something out to leaf through it. Just now I opened up the Book of Lists (that link is to a new edition – of course this one is original, dusty, and much less spiffy looking). Opening to a random page I found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 21 pieces of advice on living:

1. Worry about courage
2. Worry about cleanliness
3. Worry about efficiency
4. Worry about horsemanship
5. Don’t worry about popular opinion
6. Don’t worry about dolls
7. Don’t worry about the past
8. Don’t worry about the future
9. Don’t worry about growing up
10. Don’t worry about anyone getting ahead of you
11. Don’t worry about triumph
12. Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
13. Don’t worry about mosquitos
14. Don’t worry about flies
15. Don’t worry about insects in general
16. Don’t worry about parents
17. Don’t worry about boys
18. Don’t worry about disappointments
19. Don’t worry about pleasures
20. Don’t worry about satisfactions
21. Think about: What am I really aiming at?

This list strikes me as a curious mix of micro and macro. I don’t know that I agree with all of them, but it’s a side of the man we rarely saw.

I kept leafing through and found Clifton Fadiman’s 10 best books of fiction:

1. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
2. Ulysses – James Joyce
3. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
4. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
5. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
6. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
7. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
8. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
9. The Brothers Karamazov – Fedor Dostoyevsky
10. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Notable to me is how few of these books I have read (only 7, 9, and 10) – and even how few of these writers have even sampled (have never read Fielding, Rabelais, Proust, Cervantes). There are several best novelists/best writers/best books lists but Fadiman’s seems to me the most authoritative and credible.

And then I discovered 60 celebrated persons and their brain radiation levels. Oscar Brunler invented a process to measure measured brain radiation, which he deemed an accurate accounting of personal evolutionary progress. 95% rated below 300, and “genius” was 500 or above. A sampling of the list:

1. Leonardo da Vinci – 720
2. Michelangelo – 688
13. Napoleon – 598
14. William Blake – 580
20. Greta Garbo – 538
25. Grigori Rasputin – 526
30. Pablo Picasso – 515
31. George Washington – 512
40. Thomas Edison – 470
43. Queen Victoria – 458
45. Henry Ford – 448
49. John F Kennedy – 421

While I am not smart enough (I am surely below 300 on this test) to assess the science here, it’s surely a fascinating list! Here I was thinking I was evolved because I was born with only two wisdom teeth.