Book meme, etc.

[vaznetti]

Seen here, there, and everywhere:

The Museum, Libraries and Arts Council's list of 30 Books Every Adult Should Have Read. Bold the ones you have read. Italicize the ones you would like to read. Strike out the ones you never plan to read, or started but couldn't finish:


To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
The Bible Enough of it to count, anyway.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien Many, many times, as I believe I might have said earlier.
1984 by George Orwell I may have been too young for this book when I read it (I'd just read and loved Animal Farm), because I didn't enjoy it at all.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I have a feeling that I have in fact read this text, but it's possible that I've only seen film and TV versions.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Some summer I expect I'll get around to this.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Best comfort book ever.
All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. This is a WWI book, isn't it? BH, whose job it is to know such things, believes A Very Long Engagement to be the best novel written about the First World War. But Birdsong is on our shelves at home, and I expect I'll give it a try someday.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck I'm a little ashamed not to have read this already.
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon Why is this book here? It's not that good.
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy. If I could ban one author from all libraries everywhere is would be Hardy. I loathe this book, and really do think that young girls, in particular, should be prevented from reading it.
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne OK, a classic, but why is it here?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham I don't have anything against it, but I suspect that I missed my window of opportunity on this one.
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Don't much care for Dickens. See below.
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger I've seen this, and it looks pretentious.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold If I were going to read this, I would have done it by now.
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran I'd rather read a real religious text, frankly.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The original cause of my loathing for Dickens. My seventh grade English teacher set me Catcher in the Rye, and when I came back and told him I didn't like it, he gave me Copperfield instead. God, I hated this book. And it just went on, and on, and on.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Isn't this some kind of weird, new-agey thing?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Everything I've heard about this book suggests to me that I really, really need to read it.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel I have a bad feeling about this book; not sure why.
Middlemarch by George Eliot Tried, failed, and anyway, I saw the BBC version.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Enjoyable, but not a "must-read."
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Not going to happen.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn I expect I'll read this someday. Maybe. Anyway, I read The Gulag Archipelago as dissertation research -- surely that gives me an automatic out?

This is a very strange list -- I don't understand why some of these books are here. Why is there so much Dickens? And where is Moby Dick? I may hav my issues with C.S. Lewis, but there's no way that Pullman deserves "must-read" status and Narnia doesn't. When I make myself absolute dictator, there will be a very different list, that's for sure! Out with Dickens and all this modern novel stuff -- people will have to read Herodotus and Thucydides and Homer.


I'm reading Njal's Saga at he moment, in the dull, prosy Penguin translation, and like it very much. Considering that it's about cycles of violence and revenge, the style is surprisingly soothing. That Hallgerd woman really is a piece of work, though, isn't she?

Comments

Re: P.S.

[vaznetti]

BH dislikes the "Regeneration" trilogy because he finds the main character completely unbelievable within that historical context (I think if he knew what a Mary Sue was he might use a term like that) -- so although there's a lot of historical detail, they just don't feel right to him. I haven't read them myself.

You know, now that I think about it, I've read some other Faulks which didn't really appeal to me -- it was OK, but not much to my taste.

Re: P.S.

[reginaspina.livejournal.com]

Hmmm! But the main character is someone who was a real person - he was a psychiatrist who introduced new techniques to the treatment of shell shock and he was also a noted anthropologist. Or is that not the person your husband is referring too? I don't know how someone can be a Mary Sue if they really did that stuff ;)

Re: P.S.

[reginaspina.livejournal.com]

P.S. to my earlier P.S.

The main “real” character is Dr. William Rivers, who really did treat Siegfriend Sassoon in 1917 when Sassoon was sent to a mental hospital after he published a piece denouncing the War (his friends – particularly Robert Graves – arranged for this because otherwise Sassoon would have likely been tried for treason for what he wrote. Here’s more on Rivers (http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-shellshock.html), the best I could do on short notice.

As for Billy Prior, who’s the other main character in all three books, I think he’s quite realistic, but obviously people have different opinions about that sort of thing! ;)

Re: P.S.

[vaznetti]

I was going to say that I couldn't answer this question, because I hadn't read the books myself. But now I remember that Billy Prior is the character he doesn't think is realistic in the historical context -- I remember him saying something about his having too many attributes -- that he was gay and from a working class background and all these other things.

But BH has a lot of uncommon opinions about WWI, as you'd expect since it's his field.

Re: P.S.

[reginaspina.livejournal.com]

Aaah! Well, I can't speak to that but billy's not actually gay - if anything he's bisexual, but even that could simply be read as his way of getting along in the world (i.e. he's not attracted to men, but not above using their attraction to him to smooth his path?)

I still think the Barker books are quite amazing and much, much better than Faulks - I'm always amazed at how much publicity Faulks's book gets compared to Barker's and this little list is another example of that.