The Book Tower

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]

In a couple of his recent posts, Simon over at Inside Books has started me thinking about the books I studied whilst at school. Were they good choices? Did I benefit from them?

O Level Texts

From memory, these are the texts forced onto me aged 14-16:

• Travesties by Tom Stoppard
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift
• The poetry of Edward Thomas
• The Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Chaucer
• The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare

Stoppard is always a syllabus favourite, from this level right up until graduate. It’s his cleverness that excites the exam question setter. Tricks with words and plot, time and memory, Travesites – in its archness – tied in neatly with Wilde as a man with a failing memory (who once acted in a production of Earnest ) finds his reality slipping in and out of Wilde’s drama. Clever stuff. More than two decades on, Tom Stoppard still continues to irritate me.

I really enjoyed Shakepeare because you can discuss him endlessly but he’s not obviously trying to be clever. It’s achievable to argue from both sides of an argument because his plays are so rich.

A Level Texts

Aged 16-17, although bearing in mind I made my own choice to stay on at school:

• Hamlet and Measure for Measure by Shakespeare
• The Spire by William Golding
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• The White Devil by John Webster
• The Millers Tale by Chaucer
• Professional Foul by Tom Stoppard
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

More Stoppard. Why not Pinter, Orton or even Arnold Wesker?

Shakespeare and Beckett had the most effect on me here. Shakespeare for the same reasons as above. Beckett was just strange, none of us had ever encountered anything like this before. I’ve realised since that – oddly – the closest thing to it we did know was Shakespeare. Scenes from The Tempest are very pre-Beckett Beckett, although we didn’t know that at the time. Anyway, we were excited by Waiting for Godot. The humour, depth and, as I’ve said, strangeness of the play.

Golding – again a favourite of question setters. The Spire provided perfect examples of symbolism that you could discuss until you’re blue in the face. Unfortunately it’s a boring novel.

Chaucer? Well, you just get used to him. When I returned to my books as a mature student years later he was there waiting for me. As were Shakespeare, Hardy and Beckett. And – dammit – Stoppard.

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Very slowly, I’m getting ready for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It’s taking me a while to get enthusiastic, but I’m sure I’ll be jumping around in my wizard’s hat in time for July 21st.

I saw something in the paper this weekend about William Hill’s odds for the book’s grand finale. It’s no secret that Harry meets his maker in Rowling’s final instalment of the series. I can’t find the paper now; I’ve either put it with the recycling or my wife has it by the bed upstairs. I daren’t wake her by rustling around up there. But I’m interested, do many people really bother betting on a Harry Potter book? After much frantic searching I’ve found what I believe to be the odds on who kills Harry:

• 2/1 Lord Voldemort
• 5/2 Professor Snape
• 6/1 Draco Malfroy
• 6/1 Ron Weasley
• 6/1 Harry Potter

And the less likely:

• 12/1 Neville Longbottom
• 14/1 Lucius Malfroy
• 14/1 Hermione Granger
• 20/1 Proffessor Slughorn
• 25/1 Hagrid
• 25/1 Cornelius Fudge
• 33/1 Arthur Weasley
• 33/1 Dawlish
• 40/1 Professor McGonagall
• 50/1 Lupin
• 50/1 Mr Filch
• 50/1 Dobby
• 100/1 Ginny Weasley
• 100/1 Tonks
• 100/1 Fred/George Weasly
• 100/1 Uncle Vernon
• Other On Request

The desperate:

If Harry Potter survives all bets will be void and stake money will be returned -You cannot lose!
Other Potty Potter Punts Hills Have Accepted:

• Ron and Hermione To Marry with Harry As Best Man-8/1
• Ron and Hermione to have a child 16/1 ….called Harry 25/1
• Ron to cause the demise of Draco Malfroy in a duel-20/1
• Harry Potter to catch the snitch in a Quidditch world cup-33/1

Has the world gone crazy? Why not just make up the most far fetched scenario you can think of? There’s no mention of Dumbledore or Sirius Black coming back from the dead although, as my two favourite characters from the series, I’d love to see them again.

Interesting that William Hill will return your money if Harry survives, which – in a way – is a sort of tribute to Rowling. The fact that he will die, and it’s such a certainty that William Hill are betting on it, isn’t what’s exciting or interesting. It’s how.

To be perfectly honest, I am a big fan. I always find one or two fantastic sequences in a Harry Potter book. At least. In the last instalment, I remember Harry and Dumbledore’s journeys back into the early days of Voldemort particularly effective. And that other journey across the lake…

Talking about it though, I’m getting excited again. Where’s my cape and wand..?

Comments [3]

Today is the last day of the From the Stacks reading challenge. I’ve only managed to finish three of the five books, realising how undisciplined I am. Although, in my defence, I have read a pile of alternative titles from my shelves. As for the Winter Classics challenge, which has another month to go, I have read only two of the five books. Oh well. I was never any good with deadlines, although I do still intend to read all of the books before the year is out!

Now onto memes. Jack Pickard has recently taken the baton for the Things Beginning With… meme. He mentions in his responses that he’s been flirting with the idea of posting his own fiction on his blog. This got me thinking as, although some people might argue that some of my posts veer off into pure fiction anyway, I’ve thought about doing something similar from time to time.

So what do people think? Are you a frustrated writer or do you already post your fiction on your blog? Do you like fiction blogs? To be honest, I haven’t found that many. I’ve subscribed to a few, but find they sit uncomfortably next to the blogs I read for information, reviews, web stuff and memes. Plus what everyone else is reading, of course. But what type of fiction best suits the web, short stories or longer fiction in instalments?

Still talking of memes, I was recently asked to explain what one was. The Wikipedia explanation is long winded to say the least, so how would you best describe a meme in 20 words or less?

Farewell then, January. Coming in February: The Book Thief, Iain M.Banks and more Mervyn Peake.

Comments [2]

Variations on this meme have been doing the rounds, although I first saw it at Stainless Steel Droppings.

Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror?

Anyone reading my recent posts will know that I’m currently juggling all three of them, but horror probably wins as my favourite.

Hardback or Trade Paperback or Mass Market Paperback?

Hardbacks when I can, trade paperbacks when I can’t. Hardbacks if I were a rich man.

Amazon or Brick and Mortar?

Amazon is always easiest, until you get home from work and you’ve had a missed delivery, or a parcel is soggy from being left in the rain. Trips to bookshops are more exciting, especially when you don’t quite know what you’re going to come away with.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?

Borders, and my daughter enjoys our weekly visit.

Bookmark or Dogear?

Bookmark. Show some respect! People who dogear are also the type of people who borrow books and never return them. They are also the people who tear the last chapter out of a really long book they are reading to take on holiday.

Alphabetize by author Alphabetize by title or random?

Sounds nerdy, but often by genre, or keeping new fiction in one place and classics in another.

Keep, Throw Away or Sell?

Keep forever. My wife is always threatening to clear out lots and lots of books. My solution is to buy an additional bookcase.

Keep dustjacket or toss it?

Keep forever.

Read with dustjacket or remove it?

Keep forever. If I’ve gone to the trouble of purchasing a hardback I will want the dustjacket to go with it. Removed dustjackets remind me of when I worked in a library and always wondered where they’d go…

Short story or novel?

Novel I guess, although I’d like to make the effort to read more short stories.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

Harry Potter I’m afraid, although I’m growing increasingly bored with him. I didn’t like the Lemony Snicket film, but I suppose that isn’t a proper introduction. After all, I think the Harry Potter films are terrible.

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

I always try to get to chapter breaks, unless I fall asleep, but then maybe I shouldn’t be reading a book that does that to me. The sign of a good book is when you keep saying just one more chapter.

“It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?

A dark and stormy night, as it usually is.

Buy or Borrow?

I always feel nervous about borrowing books, probably because I hate lending them. Let’s face it, you rarely get them back. True confession: I once stole a book back.

Buying choice: Book Reviews, Recommendation or Browse?

Recommendation, which for a long time was only a trickle of books per year. Until blogs came along. Also browsing, and I’ve found some real gems in secondhand and charity shops.

Collection (short stories by the same author) or Anthology (short stories by different authors)?

Anthologies of different authors (when I get round to reading more short stories).

Golden Age SF or New Wave SF?

Increasingly New Wave.

Tidy ending or Cliffhanger?

Ambiguous ending. Did they get away with it or are they going to slip off the edge of the cliff.

Morning reading, Afternoon reading or Nighttime reading?

I have a slight visual impairment so I need lots and lots of natural light. I’m best at morning reading, although I never find the time. Ditto for afternoon reading, so the most reading I do is at night. By then my eyes are tired and I struggle with lights and lamps. Sigh.

Standalone or Series?

I like a good series, a trilogy to indulge yourself in like His Dark Materials. I’m currently wading through the Gormenghast novels. You might have noticed!

New or used?

I love brand new books, although there is nothing better than an old but lovingly cared for book. Read and cherised by a bookmark and not dogear reader…

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