EDMONTON—Everytime I say “I’ve never seen Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle China” I get an aston­ished gasp from my brother-in-law or from my friend the Space Cow­boy. I tell peo­ple I’ve never read Lord of the Rings* or The Hob­bit and they give me that side­ways look like a quizzi­cal dog, as if to say “How do you live?”

So here’s a list of things I’ve not read or seen. Things that may sur­prise you. Or may not.

1. Solaris–nei­ther the book by Stanis­law Lem, nor either of the film versions.
2. Glad­i­a­tor, the film by Rid­ley Scott.
3. Titanic, the end­less movie by James Cameron.
4. Any of Isaac Asimov’s Foun­da­tion novels.
5. Any of Isaac Asimov’s nov­els, in fact. I’ve read some of his short fic­tion, but I just couldn’t get into the nov­els, no mat­ter how hard I tried.
6. Deep Impact. I saw the other dis­as­ter movie that year, Armaged­don, and thought, Meh.
7. Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, though I know what “grok” means.
8. Eragon, and I have no inten­tions of read­ing it either. Or see­ing the movie.
9. Cow­boy Bebop or most anime. For what­ever rea­son, anime doesn’t turn my crank, although some peo­ple seem to assume it should.
10. Seven Samu­rai or in fact any of Kurosawa’s cor­pus. This I intend to remedy.
11. Any Shake­speare short of a cou­ple son­nets and Mac­beth. This too needs to be remedied.
12. Any of the egre­gious Dune pre­quels. IMHO, they should’ve just pub­lished Frank Herbert’s notes and called it a day.
13. The Stand mini-series, some­thing which I still hope to see sometime.

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* Not strictly true; I started, but around the mid­dle of the sec­ond book, I real­ized that I was read­ing a highly-detailed trav­el­ogue, where I had been expect­ing an action epic.

Tech­no­rati

Com­ment and I’ll add you! (But since I’m on the road, it may be a lit­tle while before I get around to adding you…)

• Doug’s Movies list (I swear I didn’t see this before doing mine up)
• 13 things about Jack’s Rag­ing Mommy
• You could be next!