books meme

[fpb]

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.NB: since I do not know how to strikethrough a piece of text, I will just write NO WAY alongside.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman NO WAY
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
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
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres NO WAY
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 NO WAY
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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 NO WAY
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (My feelings about this one are complicated. It is a masterpiece, but so horrifying I will not read it again)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
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 maybe
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
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 Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce tried once or twice
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 Tried once
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

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I read the two first chapters of The Amber Spyglass. It was far more than enough. And, mind you, I hated it before I even began to realize that it had anything to say about Christianity. I simply could not bear the style. Of course, when I found out what it was meant to say, I was pleased.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

Dude, I know it's ancient history, but when you flamed me for praising HDM, I was convinced you'd read the whole thing and had based your opinion on a good understanding of the story. I think this is rather poor form, really! If you're gonna hate something so much, at least read the whole thing to make sure you haven't got the wrong end of the stick.

I mean, seriously. Wouldn't you have a thing or two to say to anyone who flamed a book you loved, which they'd only read a small part of?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are a doctor. Never mind whether you have your degree just yet, you have years of experience and theory behind you. You do not need to sit through six hours of pain to see when a procedure or operation is being badly botched; in fact, your self-respect and your care for your patients will not let you look on without protesting much earlier. Well, I have been a writer for longer than you have been alive. It is my trade. I know it. I knew practically from the moment I started on the first chapter of The Amber Spyglass that this man was a fake; that he wrote, as I repeatedly said, not for children but for literary reviewers, indulging in a big fat sequence of descriptive writing to show off his mighty "creative-writing" skills - a sequence which, where children are concerned, would simply be wasted time. Even where children do like description, and not all of them do, a few words are enough. You have to remember that the writer is supposed to collaborate with the reader, working to activate the reader's mind rather than to force-feed it. And of all readers, there are none who need less effort to be activated, than children. They only need some indication of setting and time, to supply their own vision. They live in imagination to a much greater extent than adults do. This is one area where JK Rowling shows her supreme excellence in this field. She rarely spends more than one or two sentence in description - and yet, we all feel we know Hogwarts. She allows our own imagination to run riot, and, in a sense, makes us all children again. As compared with her, stylistically and narratively, Pullman is both a dictator and a fraud. And I wish you would read what a more successful writer than myself, johncwright, had to say about his plotting.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

I have read all of the HDM sequence but I agree with you at least to the extent that it's monstrously over-rated; he is a better writer than he is a thinker, but he's still not a particularly good writer. But then I'm afraid that's roughly my feeling about HP as well (all of which I have also read) - only that I am less irritated by them because those books are so much more honest about what they are and are not claiming to be.

Maybe I should do this meme.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should. As for JK Rowling, as I said to another college lady about Dickens - your loss.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

My issue isn't with the fact that you don't like his writing style. My issue is with the fact that you picked up a book, opened it in the middle, and then decided you knew everything it was about, and actually presumed to lecture people who'd read the entire thing and loved it. I remember thinking, when reading your interpretation of the story, that it seemed like you and I had read an entirely different book. And it turns out I was right! I'd read His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pullman. You'd read a couple of chapters from the middle of the story, and a whole lot of discussion by other people about the story.

I accept that you disliked his writing style from what little you read, and that what you'd heard about the book didn't make it sound like something you'd like. But in all honesty, that's about all you can say about it. "I don't like the writing style, and from what I've heard about the story, it doesn't appeal to me."

If you're gonna tell other people what it's about, or what message it sends, you really ought to read the whole thing.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is all I could say about it in a comment answer. If you want an essay ripping the whole bloody thing to pieces, you have only to ask. I am both willing and able to do it. My considered judgement as a person who has done his bit of reading and writing in his time is that the book is crap, and that it is crap precisely because the author is constantly shoving his great big fat ego in the reader's way all the time. At the end of the trilogy, I gather, it becomes so obtrusive that any semblance of plot flies out the window. John C. Wright, unlike me, has taken the trouble to read the bloody thing from cover to cover, and his essays were very instructive indeed.

Yes, I do claim the right to throw a bad book across the room without having to stick to the last page. I did the same with Dan Brown's messterpiece, and as a result I missed one important plot development (the revelation of Teabing's villainy); but people who read my review still seemed to agree that it had something to say on the book. Life is too short to read to the end a book you are going to obviously hate. Again, I stopped reading Edward Said's miserable Orientalism after twenty pages; it was by then clear to me that the man was both a fraud (he claimed to speak about Oriental studies, but all his talk was in fact about Islam alone, as though India, China, etc. did not exist) and a vicious ideologue with a very bloodthirsty axe to grind. Guess what? It turned out that I was right; at least, that many people who knew the subject better than me, and who had made the effort to read the stinking thing through, confirmed everything I had seen.

Of all the really bad and vicious books I have read, there are only two I have read to the end: Robert Graves' The White Goddess, and Michael Moorcock's Gloriana. But I was eighteen when I came across them, and in the case of Gloriana I was bewildered by the prestige of Moorcock's name, then at the apex of his critical successs. I was at the stage where a boy feels that if he cannot see the great merit that all the reviewing sages find in this or that writer, or even follow the connection and see the sense of his claims, it must be because of insufficient understanding - and not because they are really not there. And as a result of taking the views of others seriously, I wasted my time reading filth like Gloriana, and, in the case of The White Goddess, I was actually misled into a number of blind alleys of research.

Yes, I do claim the right to conclude that a book is bad after two chapters. To a man of the trade, they are quite enought. And I do claim the right to tell people that it stinks. Especially if the author has done something to make himself detestable to me on principle - and you know perfectly well that Pullman has.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

At the end of the trilogy, I gather, it becomes so obtrusive that any semblance of plot flies out the window

The operative words being "I gather".

If you didn't want to read it, fine. But don't go telling others it's crap - you haven't read it. Even if someone you respect tells you it's crap. This is art, and art is subjective. You really ought to judge for yourself. As I have. And I say I loved it. And you can pull age and intellectual superiority on me all you like, but I still say: I'm judging a book I've read. You're judging a book you've only heard about.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Art is no more subjective than medicine. As a doctor, you know that in the end you will have to trust your skills, your intuition, your experience and knowledge, to make a correct diagnosis. (And given the modern mass media, Heaven help you if you do not!) You know that it may be a matter of luck if you spot a case of meningitis or a rare cancer before it starts doing real damage - and that if you get it wrong, even though you are probably guilty of nothing and have done your best, there is a good chance that the Press will rip you to pieces. But it is still a skill; you do not base your intuition on nothing, but on years of demanding study.

WELL, WRITING IS THE SAME. And especially plotting. Plotting is not an opinion: a thing is either well plotted, with every line significant and properly resolved, or it is not. And plotting is a skill you learn. And if Pullman fucked up his plot, that is not a matter of opinion, but of plain and proper fact. To go back to the comparison with medicine, it is not a matter of an innocent mistake in diagnosis by a practitioner who knows her stuff and means well, but of not having bothered to do the homework. It is a basic error in craftsmanship. End of story.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

And if Pullman fucked up his plot, that is not a matter of opinion, but of plain and proper fact.

That would be a great point... if you'd actually read the book and knew something about the plot.

Face it, my friend. I've caught you dissing a book you haven't read. Like I said before: poor form.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you want to believe that, go on believing it. I just hope you do not apply the same principles to your practice.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The atrocious overwriting that was the first thing that struck me in the damned thing is no less a matter of bad craft than rotten plotting. And you are not so ignorant of writing yourself that you should not understand this. The truth is that this has brought back an episode you did not enjoy, and now you want to get your own back on me. Go ahead and do it if it makes you feel better. The fact is that I knew from the beginning that this was a display of ego in the shape of a book, and that I knew it because of what I know as a writer about the craft of writing. But if you do not want to understand that, that is your privilege. If God has given us the faculty of understanding, He has also left us free to refuse to use it if we please.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but this time I'm sticking to my guns. If you haven't read the book, you can't judge it for yourself. And while medicine may be said to be an art, art is not medicine. Personal tastes do matter.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The time will come when you know I am right; and when you will actually let in the things you are refusing to listen to. For the present, this thread is closed.