07/01/2008
Top 100 Books
So I got this from my friend's blog...
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
[Louise: I had to add another category, i.e., books I have partially read, but have not finished or have only read in parts; I've put these in square brackets.]
Wait, added another markup: (M) if I've seen a movie adaptation. I also didn't bother to mark books I hadn't heard of with "??", since there would be a lot of them!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (M)
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien] (M)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (M)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (M)
6 [The Bible]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Golden Compass
Subtle Knife
Amber Spyglass
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (M)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (M)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (M)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um, doesn't #36 belong within #33??)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (M)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (M)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 [Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas]
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (M)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (M)
So, I'm doing slightly better than average; 8 books! There are a lot of interesting books in this list, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to make it through them all. Not that I'd really want to, anyway. There are some I have no intention of ever reading.
It was fun to go through this list though!
19:40 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
05/10/2008
Literary Books and the Wandering Mind
I'm about 50 pages into Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has been in my to-read pile for at least a year now. It's one of the books that looks interesting in terms of the overall concept of the story. In general, I'm not a fan of literary novels, nor am I a fan of Canadian Literary novels. So far, this is the only book of Atwood's that I've even been remotely interested in reading.
The Handmaid's Tale, like many literary novels, is so far kind of devoid of plot. The 50 pages have been describing routine life in the Republic of Gilead and in this one Handmaid's life. It's an eye-opening environment worth describing, but the whole thing is spent describing this environment and mundane daily life rather than actually doing something. So far the plot consists of this handmaid going shopping for eggs and meat, looking around her room, and walking down the street. I hope something interesting happens soon!
In these 50 pages though, I've come to realize what it is I don't really like about literary novels. They try to make too much of my (the reader's) thought process explicit. We all know about bad novels with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or the ones that treat the reader like an idiot by explaining the dead obvious. These are the ones containing passages like, "Kayla was backed into a corner by the machete-wielding madman, who smiled like the cheshire cat beneath his black mask. She shook like a leaf and screamed. She was really really scared." Obviously (or, Hopefully) novels like this will never sit on the bookshelf of timeless classics. To me, many literary novels are a less obvious but equally potent version of this.
As I read The Handmaid's Tale, I realize that Margaret Atwood can get away with something pretty plotless so far because she's allowing us into the Handmaid's mind, and the Handmaid is toying with random observations, snippets of thought, and out-of-the-blue comparisons in her mind. For example, the Handmaid walks past a wall where there are bodies on display, hanged. The Handmaid comments about the unoccupied hooks on the wall, "The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." What's good about the whole passage where the Handmaid is observing the bodies on the wall is that it really shows how emotionless her reaction to them is. She observes how things look and makes visual connections only; she represses emotional connections. But the whole novel is like this; making random connections. This is often how my own mind operates too: I'll see or hear something, and make weird connections to other things in my mind, unusual comparisons, etc. My problem with literary novels, then, is that the author is trying to do this, and my mind would normally also be doing this, so they interfere with each other. I guess it's kind of like doing chest compressions on someone who is already living; you can interfere with the heart's natural function. When I read a novel that is constantly making the connections my wandering mind normally would, it interferes with the smooth running of my mind and it gets irritating.
I suppose those people who are not bothered by this problem, and who love this sort of literature, fall into one of two categories:
1. They can focus so intently on the novel that they can reign in the wandering mind.
2. They just don't make any connections on their own; they have to wait for authors to do it for them.
Anyway, I'm going to try to make it through The Handmaid's Tale because I am fascinated by the context, even though my semi-conscious "back of mind" is having a rough go of things!
10:53 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/27/2008
Cool New Book...
I just finished reading the book Spunk & Bite, by Arthur Plotnik. Spunk & Bite takes its name from the Strunk & White Elements of Style book, which I have not read, but which is supposed to be one of the bibles for writers looking to know how to write properly. Anyway, Spunk & Bite is basically about how rules can (and possibly should) be bent to create interesting writing. Overall I didn't think the book was the greatest, but there was one memorable chapter called "Magic in the Names of Things", which tells about finding just the right word for the things in your writing, rather than something like, "the thingamabob that does such-and-such".
I'm so excited now, because after reading that chapter, I've discovered that books like the Random House Webster's Word Menu exist, and is apparently a glossary of all sorts of interesting words. I also discovered what a thesaurus really is.
Yes, you heard that right! I actually thought I owned a proper thesaurus, but as it turns out, the book I had was called the 21st Century Synonym and Antonym Finder which is not quite the same thing. In that book, you look up a word, and it has alphabetized lists of synonyms and antonyms below it. In a thesaurus like Roget's Thesaurus, ideas are mapped out in tree-like structures at the beginning, and once you find the idea that's close to, or related to, what you want to express, then you go find the topic number and there it gives synonyms and related words, organized by flavour. How cool!
So yesterday I was at a second hand store and spotted a nice copy of Roget's Thesaurus for $1, so now I'm the proud owner of a proper thesaurus. I'm so pumped! Now I'm truly on the way to being a proper writer. :-) Or, at least, I'm taking a step in the right direction!
Step 2: Stop dilly-dallying and start writing again.
10:14 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/08/2006
Happiness is a Sad Song
Happiness is a Sad Song is the title of an old book I got from my Aunt Judy quite a long time ago. It's a compilation of Peanuts (i.e., Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and so on) comics, each page illustrating a theme which begins with "Happiness is..." Other than sad songs, happiness includes things like:
Waking up, looking at the clock and finding that you still have two hours to sleep.
A Christmas vacation with no book reports to write.
Being too sick to go to school, but not too sick to watch TV.
I like the Sad song one the best though, because it can be so true. Today actually I've been transcribing a piece of music called "Hear My Prayer O Lord" by Orlando Di Lasso (who lived in the 1500s). It's very beautiful but the words are, well, melancholic to say the least:
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee.
Hide not thy face from me in the time of my trouble;
incline thine ear unto me when I call
O hear me and that right soon;
For I have eaten ashes as it were bread
And mingled my drink with weeping.
My days are gone like a shadow and
I am withered like grass.
But thou O Lord shalt endure forever
And thy remembrance throughout all generations.
Let's just say it's written in a minor key. ;-) I'm going to try recording the various parts on my cello (so you won't hear the words unfortunately) and try mixing it to form the cohesive song again. I'll post it to my website if the experiment works.
It's a very sad piece but at the same time inspiring. Basically it's saying, life sucks so bad I would practically rather be dead, but Lord, you're still so great I'll teach my children to love you. The faith is so strong even when life was so rotten. How many times people nowadays, even me, stumble in faith when things start to get a little rocky!
Last night I also just finished reading a book: Dragonfly in Amber, by Diana Gabaldon. Let's just say I went through more than one kleenex! There's a very sad part where the two main characters (husband and wife) must part, as the husband heads to certain death. They both know it and both know it can't be avoided, and try to enjoy their last few moments, trying to record last memories of each other. Boy, is it EVER sad. Even though I know it can't be the end of either of them because there are 4 more books in the series, I was still acutely feeling that anguish. (The sign of a good book!) Like with a sad song, happiness can be a sad book. :-) I can't wait to read more! Anyway, I'll probably find time in a later post to wax poetic about all the things that are right about Jamie, the highlander who's the lead male character (whose "certain" death I alluded to earlier), and why so many women wish that more men were like him! :-) (Might start with the kilt. I think if men knew how sexy they are in kilts, it would be a whole lot more fashionable that it currently is!!)
00:35 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/31/2006
Governor General's Literary Awards - here I come!
I've decided (likely in a fit of insanity) that I'm going to read, or at least attempt to read, all the books that have won Governor General's Literary Awards in English fiction. They've been awarded continually since 1936, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but I'll give it a shot. The thing is, I'm trying to figure out why these books win the awards they do. Is it because they are actually really that good, or because there's a tight clique of stuffy literary friends that arbitrarily assign these awards to big-name Canadian authors? I'm also wondering, how much in common does Canadian literature have? Is it really all about the universal Canadian theme of "victimization"?
Now for those of you that are puzzled, yes, I'm an engineer, not an English major. And thank goodness for that. I can say, "yep, I liked the book", and leave it at that, and nobody can dock marks. I don't need to worry about who is having Oedipus complexes or god only knows what else. However, sometimes, it's fun to just muse about this sort of stuff. In high school, my grade 11 English teacher told me he thought I'd be getting my PhD in English Literature one day. It really was hard not to laugh my butt off, because it was pretty much the last thing I could imagine myself doing. Growing up, I was HUGE into creative writing. I loved it to pieces, and since English class, early on, involved a lot of creative writing, I loved English class. Then, somewhere around grade 10, English class went from do-your-own-writing to study-someone-else's-to-death, and English class went from my favourite to basically my least favourite. I think high school killed my appreciation for literature for a long time.
So, I've decided to try to revive it. Back in the fall, there was a book sale at UVic, and I picked up a dusty old book from around the turn of the century (1900-ish, that is) called Literary Taste - How to Form It by Arnold Bennett. I thought, now THERE'S a book I can relate to. Reading it, despite the title, age, and subject matter, was actually quite a hoot. It's written in stuffy Victorian language (I can almost feel the corset strings digging into my ribs!) but it's actually almost amusing to read. One funny aspect is how it mentions people would rather read contemporary stuff than classics, and the list of "contemporary" works is basically a list of what we would also consider classics!
Anyway, with the help of this book and some determination, I'd like to get through the GG awards for fiction list. I actually already have a bit of a head start. Quite a few years ago, around the time it came out, I read the 1994 winner A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe, which was indeed an awesome book. Then a couple of years ago I tried to read Elle by Douglas Glover, the 2003 winner. That was a whole other can of worms. The writing was indeed superb, for the most part. It was about a French woman in the late 1500s who got kicked off her ship onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Labrador. So far so good, and the characters were well-rendered, as was the landscape and so on. But Glover has a very annoying habit of interspersing the beautiful, rich writing with very crude, badmouthed interjections which I can only envision as a sporadic unleashing of a nasty fetish for anything that happens between the legs - sex, pee, poo (and these are all the nice translations of the words he uses). It's almost like listening to a beautiful symphony, but with a 13-year-old pubescent boy screaming toilet talk into a microphone at one-minute intervals during the symphony. I read somewhere (which I can't seem to find now) that this shock factor was intended to shock, to make it more interesting I guess, but for me it was such a turn-off that it turned a book that could have been an all-time favourite into something I just couldn't bear to read beyond page 70 or so. I guess the good news is that with all the potty-mouthed talk in there, it's not likely to be foisted on unsuspecting high school students anytime soon.
The 1968 winner, Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, is a collection of short stories that I ended up studying as an independent study in grade 12. I remember disliking this also. I think the problem in this case was that I felt trapped in sepia-coloured 1960's images of rural Ontario where the fact that nothing ever happened was an event in itself, or that a dandelion sprouting through a crack in the sidewalk was worthy of three pages of text. I have my theories about what makes Can.Lit. what it is, but I'll leave that for another post as it's kind of a humour piece. :-)
The 1971 winner was St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler, which I am not looking forward to reading. I've only read one of Richler's books so far - Son of a Smaller Hero - but that was already enough for me. It's the book that sticks out in my mind as THE most boring book I ever read in my whole entire high school English career. (Well, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway was right up there but at least it was a whole lot shorter than Son of a Smaller Hero.) Son of a Smaller Hero gave new meaning to deathly boring - most of the time I felt it sucked so much energy out of me that I was on the verge of cardiac arrest. Almost like the electrons orbiting my atoms were deciding they can't be bothered to orbit any longer. I could skip twenty pages and still be in the same scene as before. Yes, it was that bad. So as you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of Richler. Let's just hope that either St. Urbain's Horseman was more interesting, or that I've matured with time and somehow what used to be boring isn't so bad anymore. Unfortunately, I think my attention span is even shorter now than it was in high school, so who knows what will happen.
Let the experiment begin! Right after I finish the Wave energy paper, that is. (Yes, Andrew and Peter, it's nearly done and I'm working on it today!!)
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