Bookworm or Loser?

The BBC came out with a Book List, the Top 100 of the Nation’s (UK) “best loved” books. I read on another blog (Some Have Hats) that the BBC claims most people, on average, have read only 6 of the 100. Below is the list and I’ve put my x next to the books I have read. Total: 43. Not bad for a British book list. Am I a bookworm or a loser with no life? Don’t answer that.

How do you compare?

1 Pride and Prejudice- x
2 The Lord of the Rings- x
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte- x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling- x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee- x

6 The Bible-x
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte- x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell- x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman-
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens- x

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott- x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy- x
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller-
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier- x
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien- x
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk-
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger- x
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger-
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot-

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell- x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald- x
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens-
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy-
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams- x
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck- x
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll-
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame- x

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy-
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens- x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis- x
34 Emma – Jane Austen- x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis- x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini-
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres-
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden-
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne-

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell- x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown-
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving -
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins- x
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery- x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy- x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood- x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding- x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan-

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel-
52 Dune – Frank Herbert- x
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons-
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen- x
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- x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon-
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck- x
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- x
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-x
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett- x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson-
75 Ulysses – James Joyce-
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome-
78 Germinal – Emile Zola-
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray-
80 Possession – AS Byatt-x

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens- x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell-
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker-
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro- x
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert-x
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- x
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery- x (and in French. Take that!)
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- x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo-

That’s Writing

As I’m reading Moon Tide by Dawn Clifton Tripp (see my teasing about the book here), I’m reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop also. Cather can describe a scene without trying:

The two friends were roused from their reflections by a frantic beating of wings. A bright flock of pigeons swept over their heads to the far end of the garden, where a woman was just emerging from the gate that led into the school grounds; Magdalena [...] advanced in a whirlwind of gleaming wings, and Tranquilino dropped his spade and stood watching her. At one moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and disappeared as salt dissolves in water. The next moment they flashed around, black and silver against the sun.

First Novel Syndrome

Even the cover is atmospheric.

Recently I was at Mom’s down in Dartmouth, MA. She has a ton of books so I was looking for some reading material for the summer. I picked out Moon Tide: A Novel by Dawn Clifton Tripp because the author lives in the next town over, Westport, and the book is based in that same town during the 19′ teens. I asked my Mom what she thought of it.

“I didn’t finish it…I couldn’t get into it…read it and you’ll understand why.”

I skimmed the first few paragraphs and immediately thought, “First Novel Syndrome.” Here’s a sample from pages 8-9:

When Elizabeth was twenty-one, she met Henry Lowe, the only son of a prominent Transcendentalist. She married him the following summer under the grapevined trellis in his father’s apple orchard. Lowe was a graduate student in zoology at Harvard, obsessed with the relationship between the migration of glaciers and obsolete fish. He shared the belief of his professor, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, that while climactic and geologic change could bring about extinction, each new species was a thought of God. He helped Agassiz start an experimental school for marine science on Penikese, the afterthought of an island off Cuttyhunk on the fringe of a deep rip shoal in Buzzards Bay.

[...]

They made love in the juniper woods and Elizabeth lay there afterward, her bare arms scathed in sunlight on the dark cool soil. She looked up toward the new pine shell of their house rising against the sky, the inside still damp with the smell of mason’s glue and paint mixed from a base of linseed oil. She did not know then that in less than a year she would bear a son and her husband would leave to go in search of God among the ice floes…

In fairness, I am reading the novel to the end. So far there’s a servant having an affair with the local grocier and a young girl, whose mother committed suicide (the body found by the girl) and in her grief, the girl hoards food to watch it rot. If I knew this stuff went on in my area of the world, I would have moved out much sooner than I did.

Willa Cather Quote O’ the Day

Father Vaillant began to pace restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

- Death Comes For The Archbishop

Yet Another Graham Greene Quote of the Day

This man just hits it out of the park. (O.K. all you English Lit people, don’t roll your eyes. I’ve never read Greene before in my life. I went to a school system that had us read classics like One Fat Summer. ‘Nuf said.)

Yesterday I bought a crucifix, a cheap, ugly one because I had to do it quickly. I blushed when I asked for it. Somebody might have seen me in the shop. They ought to have opaque glass in their doors like rubber-goods shops. When I lock the door of my room, I can take it out from the bottom of my jewel-case. I wish I knew a prayer that wasn’t me, me, me. Help me. Let me be happier. Let me die soon. Me, me, me.

[...] Dear God, I’ve tried to love and I’ve made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I’d know how to love them. I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don’t mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.

The End of the Affair

Another Graham Greene Quote of the Day

She had said to me – they were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation – ‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other…” She had already made her decision, though I didn’t know it till next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the silent open mouth of somebody found dead. She said, ‘My dear, my dear. People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’

‘That’s not our kind of love.’

‘I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind.’

The End of the Affair

Your Graham Greene Quote of the Day

Something to ponder during Lent:

G. Greene

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself [...] into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

The End of the Affair