Chez Louise - books

Top 100 Books

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 19:40:00 -0400

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!

Literary Books and the Wandering Mind

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:53:04 -0400

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!

Cool New Book...

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:14:31 -0400

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.