The Book Tower

Two vastly different Penguin covers:

H.G.Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau. Penguin first edition, 1946 (no. 57).

From my phase of collecting Penguin firsts, and I’m sure I also have a copy of The Time Machine somewhere. The white on orange stripe is still instantly recognisable, but does it tell us anything about the book? Admittedly, in my Penguin collecting I cared little for the authors in question and only wanted to fill the gaps in the numbers 1-200.

How many of those early Penguins titles do we recognise today? These are the first ten of their paperbacks published:

1. Ariel by Andre Maurois
2. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
3. Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater
4. Madame Claire by Susan Ertz
5. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
6. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
7. Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols
8. William by E.H.Young
9. Gone to Earth by Mary Webb
10. Carnival by Compton Mackenzie

I can’t name all of the authors or all of the titles, and I must confess I’ve read none of them.

In the 1960s Penguin began to get a little more daring. It was the cover of this book that inspired me to want to read it aged 14. Although the 60s were long gone by then, I still found something adult, daring, even promiscuous in this cover.

Edna O’Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss. Penguin (1967).

The colourful text is hard to read, but it’s selling the book with:

Tearful Kate bored with her grey husband in their grey stone house is driven to indescretions she can hardly handle without Dava’s help. But Dava has her own hands full with the passions of her rich and vulgar builder…

Hmmm…the Penguin blurb is selling Girls in Their Married Bliss to me all over again…

Comment

Here’s another bookish meme that’s been doing the rounds. I saw it first at Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant and at Myrtias.

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. + The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. + Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. + To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. + Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. + Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. + Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) (abandoned)
16. + Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. + Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. +Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. + The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. + The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. + Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. + 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. + The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) (abandoned, but I’ll try again)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) (why so much Mitch Alborn?)
45. + Bible
46. + Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. + Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt) (abandoned)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. + A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) (abandoned)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. + Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. + The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) (abandoned)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. + Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. + The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. + The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. + Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. + War and Peace (Tolstoy) (abandoned)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. + Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. +Les Miserables (Hugo) (abandoned)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. + Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. + Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. + Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. + Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. + Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. +Ulysses (James Joyce) (abandoned)

I’d love to know where this list originally came from. Why include all of the Harry Potter books, two Dan Browns and two Ondaatjes? Maybe I’m just cross because I haven’t been able to put many titles in bold although Austen, Atwood and Robertson Davies are authors who have crossed my radar.

Comments [4]

George has been having a bad time. He thinks he might have cancer, and is prepared to do something quite drastic about it involving a pair of scissors. His discovers that his wife is having an affair. His son has split up with his boyfriend. His daughter is getting married to an unsuitable man. And so on…

A Spot of Bother charts a family crisis from four different perspectives. It’s an enjoyable although fairly untaxing read, with its best chapters by far being those that deal with George’s own particular nightmares. Convinced he is dying, sure he is going mad, he begins to drift from one waking dream to the next:

The film was rather good.
Some forty minutes in, however, the camera lingered on the face of Christopher Lee who was playing the evil Saruman and George noticed a small area of darkness on his cheek. He might have thought nothing of it except that he remembered reading a newspaper article about Christopher Lee having died recently. What had he died of? George couldn’t remember. It was unlikely to have been skin cancer. But it could have been. And if it was skin cancer then he was watching Christopher lee dying in front of his eyes.
Or perhaps it was Anthony Quinn he was thinking about….
When he looked at the screen again he found himself watching close-up after close-up of grotesquely magnified faces, every one of them bearing some peculiar growth or region of abnormal pigmantation, each one of them a melanoma in the making.
He did not feel well.

Haddon handles George’s breakdown very well, and I challenge any reader not to be moved by his plight. His son, Jamie, is also very well drawn but I didn’t have as much enthusiasm for the female characters in the book because I suspected that Haddon wasn’t as excited about them either, or maybe George and Jamie are the only likeable characters in the novel. The story should really belong entirely to George, and although Haddon does tackle an interesting and worthwhile topic, I just wish he’d dipped his toe in the water a little more often.

What’s lacking in this novel is an original first person voice to take the reigns and really run with it. At times Haddon is content to coast along in a comfortable school of Nick Hornby/Guardian columnist turned author writing style, introducing such well worn characters as tedious toddlers, odd but sympathetic doctors, eccentric uncles and aunts and annoyingly over-smart sisters of lovers and friends of the bride. We do, however, get some interesting prose that seems to have crept in from the cutting room floor of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, references that could have been culled from the unusual although original imagination of a young boy:

His hands were shaking and there were ripples in the tea like in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex was approaching.

Suddenly she was in a great deal of pain and walking like the butler in a vampire movie.

He was lying in the centre of the bed with the duvet pulled to his chin, like a frightened old lady in a fairy tale.

Although there’s not enough of this type of writing, A Spot of Bother can be very funny, despite it dissolving into farce at times, such as in the climactic wedding scene. Fans of Tony Parsons’ suburban drama will enjoy this, although anyone expecting another Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will be forgiven for not wanting to bother at all.

Contine reading A Spot of Bother