Book List Mania and Ratings Games
Aug. 15th, 2004 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatWandering around livejournal last night I realized why so many people think we are nuts. Honestly, anyone who ranks, rates, creates as many lists and ratings of cultural items as live journal users do, either has way too much time on their hands, is incredibly bored, or posting from the local asylum. I’m posting from the asylum, can’t you tell?
A friend of mine hates these things. She doesn’t understand how you can decide one episode or one book is definitely best while another is worst, when each is very different from the other. It’s like saying an apple is better than an orange. Another believes that it is all subjective anyway, so what’s the point. Not sure. I think because it tells us something about one another – the desire to list and rate and rank things shows a desire to organize and control one’s universe, to make sense of one’s own likes and dislikes and figure out how compatible those likes and dislikes are with others. Can I like you, if you loved Ann Rice’s The Vampire Lestate but hated Ulysses? Probably, since I enjoyed both for different reasons.
The latest in these ratings games – is a community that has set itself up as * the authority* on good literature. This group made me laugh. It was like reading fanfic_hate forum all over again. They appear to have read some decent novels and certainly have very strong opinions on these novels, but no clue how to convey to others why one novel is good and another isn’t. One thread was informing a young woman who had applied for acceptance, it’s an exclusive community, why they were voting against her purely because Ann Rice was one of her favorite novelists. Did they explain why Ann Rice was a bad writer in their opinion or unacceptable? No. Instead they resorted to name calling – “I liked her when I was oh 12.” Excuse me? What does that tell me? There are 12 year olds who adore Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances Burnett, JR Tolkien, and CS Lewis. Or she’s on the bestseller list. Again, I ask, what does this say about the writer, except that over a million people have bought her books, she is still in print, and she has joined the ranks of other novelists such as JR Tolkien, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare in sales? Nowhere in the thread do they explain why this writer is not considered literary or why someone who reads her works should not be admitted to their group. In short, why read them or even visit such a community? Or waste your time joining it? Appears to be a community for disgruntled literature majors who haven’t figured out how to write a simple book review. A pet peeve of mine is folks who disparage cultural works or works of art without sampling them first or thinking about why this work is distasteful to them. Or at the very least coherently explain why they dislike the writer/artist/hack so intensely, that they are willing to exclude people from their community that did. Add to this the tendency to condemn others for enjoying these works. Then of course we have folks who disparage certain novelists, say such things are * beneath me *, only to write the same things themselves. People are amusing.
At any rate this community apparently was the source of the 20 Favorite Book Meme that went around livejournal recently. I’m still not completely sure what the criteria was for choosing the 20 books. Is it the books you enjoyed the most? The books you found the most memorable? The books you think are the best written? The ones that moved you the most? The ones you want to re-read over and over again? The only category that I could possibly limit it to 20 is the most “memorable”, because then I’d just go by the books I can actually remember the story. This meme seems impossible to me otherwise – but then I’ve read more books than I can count, so maybe the people who came up with it haven’t read that much? (Shrugs)
Here’s my attempt at it. Liable to change at a moments notice: My 20 Most Memorable Books – I’ve used the following bits of criteria to attempt to limit the list, ie. Once again I’m manipulating someone else’s meme to create my own:
1. Can I remember the story? (Also it can’t be anything I’ve read in the last 12 months, because of course I can remember those, okay, well most of them.)
2. Did it move me in some way? Or make me think? Did it tell me something new? Teach me anything? Show me another angle of life? Do I care about it in that special way you do about a close friend? Remember fondly or even with a little aggravation?
3. Did I enjoy it? Did it pull me into another world, was I captivated by the characters so that it continues to haunt me?
4. Was it well-written in my opinion? Ie. Did the writer develop and evolve the characters, create an interesting world, and did they have something new to say through those characters? Did their technique aid or hamper them?
5. Was I satisfied? Or did the story leave me hanging?
6. Was it clear or did I need to re-read it over and over again to get the meaning?
In no particular order, because limiting it to 20 was hard enough, ranking them is a whole other issue. This list spans things 6th grade to now. Oh and unlike the snobs who created this little meme, I’m actually going to attempt to explain why I liked these books. (Yes, to the annoyance of anyone reading this, I'm already altering the list because I'm unsatisfied with two of my answers.)
1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ( I read the novel once in the 8th Grade and can still to this day remember it vividly, even the bits that aren’t in all the movies, I remember the voice of the hero, and I remember falling in love with him. Twain perfectly captured the issues of his Time and world within the pages of the novel, using a variety of difficult writing techniques to accomplish this: 1. First person close narrator, 2. Dialect (demonstrating the difference between classes and how people viewed one another based on vocal mannerisms), 3. Setting – the Mississippi River is as much a character in Twain’s novel as any of the others, you feel the Mississippi. The only draw-back to reading Huckleberry Finn – is I had no interest in ever reading Tom Sawyer afterwards, since I despised him as a cruel self-centered bully in the first novel. The fact that Twain does not hold back from showing one of his heroes in a less than heroic light, is yet another accomplishment.)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Another novel I read once, a very long time ago, but have ingrained on my skull. I also enjoyed it. What appears on the surface to be a conventional romance is actually both a wicked commentary on the conventional romances of her time and the game of manners. Austen also uses a difficult technique – third person omni, you never are that close to her characters, you feel, in fact, at times, as if you are held aloof from them, watching over their shoulders. You hear a definite narrator’s voice in the work. She painstakingly chooses just the right words to convey politeness, and often will rely on a letter to propel action. The conflict in her novels arises often from the conflict between the characters and the restrictions society places upon them, but unlike Richardson, and others, Austen seldom falls into melodrama, if anything she makes fun of the situation and allows her reader to laugh with her at the characters. )
3. Palefire by Vladmir Nobokov (I read it once, about ten years ago, borrowed from a friend, haven’t forgotten it. A perfect commentary on pretentious literary criticism – where the critique of the poet lapses into his own agenda. The book uses a technique I’ve never seen before or since – we get the poem and the story takes place in the footnotes, endnotes. What you are reading is a critique of a poem and within the critique you find out more about the critic, than the poem. It’s a beautifully wicked satire on literary criticism, poetry, and groups like the one who created this meme. Every time I find myself falling into snobbery or pretentiousness I remember Palefire.)
4. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald (I read this book once in high school, at least 20 years ago. It still haunts me. I can still vividly see the scene in the novel where Daisy hits and kills her husband’s low class, blousy lover, unintentionally. I can still remember the bit where Gatsby’s father sits by the pool and tells the narrator who Gatsby really was, and as a reader I find myself liking the real Gatsby more than the image he constructed. Fitzgerald uses first person reflective narration to convey his tale – a technique that others have tried and failed miserably at. His narrator, Nick Carraway feels like a cipher, we get so little on him, yet he works as Fitzgerald’s voice – acting as a commentary on the snobbishness and insular nature of the times. You feel for Gatsby, and hate the narrator a bit for his own prejudices, prejudices that Fitzgerald points out through him are societies. He’s a stand-in for Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, for a society that judges people based on what image they construct, how much money they have and if they behave according to a rigid set of rules.)
5. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Harper Lee only wrote one novel, and this one pulls you in from the opening paragraph. Lee also uses a difficult technique, first person reflective, but unlike Fitzgerald, her narrator is less of a cipher. Through a child’s eyes we see the racism of the times she lived in and the colors of a small town. Each character is complex in the novel, and she doesn’t provide easy answers, just tells it like it was, keeping in mind the hazy threads of memory. I read this book in high school as well and still remember it. It’s not exactly like the movie, there are differences.)
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison ( A haunting novel about slavery and the ghosts we carry with us. Morrison’s novel is not an easy one for her reader. Her technique is stream of consciousness, and she uses it to startlingly good effect to convey the thoughts of a baby ghost. The ghost itself is more of a metaphor for the pain and suffering that the mother can never quite escape and threaten at times to overwhelm and consume her. Through poetic prose, Morrison shows both the ugliness and beauty of the times, captures the voice of characters who lived long before she did. A book that could have come across as preachy, as Barbara Kingslover’s Poisonwood Bible often threatens to, actually allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. Reading Beloved felt at times like reading a long prose poem.)
7. The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien (Tolkien manages to create a complex world with it’s own rules, guidelines, and language, and stays consistent throughout. I read this book once as a child, and can still remember it vividly. I adored it. The characters, the language, the action – and the world that Tolkien developed so painstakingly. Tolkien doesn’t take the short-cuts so many fantasy writers take in developing characters: here’s the Wizard, here’s an elf, here’s a dwarf – instead he describes them, depicts who they are, their foibles, and how they relate to his world. Even the Goblins have issues. He also uses them as metaphors to expound on issues ranging from environmentalism to the impossibility of war. He doesn’t preach to you, he shows you. And he builds on each character he creates. If memory serves, the point of view was third person close with a bit of a shift to Omni from time to time. But I could be wrong on that. I read the book in 1980.)
8. The Bone People by Keri Hume (a novel about the Maori people in New Zealand. Hume’s book deals with the difficulties of domestic violence, preserving an ancient culture in a modern world, and the struggle between man and woman. Inter-twined within all that is the myths of the Maori people. Reading the novel feels at times like examining an intricate body tattoo, others reading a complex poem, the words are chosen carefully in Hume’s novel and leave you feeling a bit as if you’ve been punched with them. I don’t remember the story of this work as clearly as the others, but I do remember the emotions. It was that type of book, what it left behind was an emotional imprint, or impression, not a mental one. Rare and beautiful. )
9. Changing this to The Grapes of Wrath because I just read East of Eden by John Steinbeck 12 months ago and therefore broke my own rule, which I'm prone to do. Grapes - I still remember having last read it in 1984 or 83, a book that so clearly describes despair and the struggle to perservere. I like East better, actually, but I also read it recently so probably just remember it better.( Steinbeck uses first person reflective here as well as third person omni. This may, in my opinion, be his greatest piece of work or possibly the one closest to his heart – it is certainly one of the most emotionally gripping. I read it a year ago and still vividly recall each and every detail. The interweave of Bible story, California folklore, history, and character is an accomplishment by itself. Steinbeck shows us his characters, comments on them, and still lets us make up our own mind. The characters are a complex dark bunch. We see them in their entirety, Steinbeck shows us each and every wrinkle, he can fall into melodrama at times and yes, a few of the characters are drawn a tad too romantically, but there’s an emotional honesty to his words that leaves behind an impact.)
10. Possession by A.S Byatt (Admittedly not a book for everyone. And I can’t say I’ve enjoyed her other novels. Perhaps you need to have been an English Lit major and have run into one too many pretentious academics to truly appreciate Byatt. Or have studied fairy tales? Not sure. Byatt does what Nabokov does in a way, she critiques literary criticism and those who engage in it. Establishing that the people who spend all their time critiquing and studying others works may in fact be avoiding their own lives. That we tend to romanticize writers and poets as something more than they are. In the midst of the book she plays around with several difficult techniques, such as writing her own fairy tales, creating a series of poems, and footnotes on them. The point of view is third person omni. She uses letters as well. Her voice never wavers. And by the end of the novel you feel as if you have been in this world. )
11. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin ( A psuedo-autobiographical story about a female writer in Australia during the early portion of the 20th century, who turns down a marriage proposal and life on a rich neighboring farm to become a writer. Franklin describes life in the outback in almost the same detail as Steinbeck described the dustbowl. Her narrator is spunky and first person. She is more or less telling her own tale, but never falls into the pitfalls that others do, coming across as either pathetic or fantastic. I read the book back in the early 90s, so I may have some of the details off here and there. But it affected me deeply and I remember it.)
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gaberial Garcia Marquez ( I fell in love with this novel. It wasn’t easy reading. Stream of Consciousness. Prose poetry throughout. But when I read it in 1987 one summer, I felt every word. Marquez weaves a ghost like tale of life and suffering through five generations. He conveys the cycle of life and random patterns within it through his characters and their actions. A book to read on a lazy summer day, to fall slowly into, as one might the sea. Letting its pages sweep up and over. Not an airplane book by any stretch of the imagination.)
13. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick ( Not what I expected when I read it. An odd novel about artificiality and what it is to be human in an insane world. The noir structure holds throughout and Dick sticks closely to his first person close narrative. I remember this novel years after I read it. I feel the narrators desire to have * real * living pets as opposed to constructed ones. The twist ending is beautiful – making us wonder as the narrator does – what is real and what is fake and is there a difference?)
14. Grass by Sheri Tepper ( A book no one appears to have heard of. It’s not literary cannon, but it haunts me. I read it over ten years ago. And I haven’t been able to get into any of Tepper’s other novels. This science fiction novel does something unique with the form, it steps beyond it – creating a world completely alien to our own and within that world uses metaphor to comment on certain societal and cultural issues. It is a sociology/anthropology sci-fi as opposed to technology sci-fi, which is also why it fascinated me. Most sci-fi is tech, space-opera, or monster. Rarely do we see sociological or anthropological issues explored. I saw Maria Doria Russell attempt the same thing with The Sparrow, but I’m not sure she is as successful as Tepper. Tepper creates an alien race where the young despise the creatures they become, they wish to destroy the creatures they themselves will eventually evolve into. While the new creatures feel nothing but an odd concern and compassion for what they once were. Sexuality is also commented on through the means that the young creatures known as the Hippi who seduce the humans through sexual manipulation. Instead of the human riders controlling the Hippi (which are similar to horses but nothing like horses), the Hippi control their riders. It’s impossible to explain without sounding silly, you have to read it, but it gave me the shivers.)
15. Dune by Frank Herbert (Herbert accomplishes with Science Fiction what Tolkien did with fantasy, he creates a complex universe complete with language, philosophy, political structure, and characters that is outside our own yet comments on our own at the same time. The intricacies of the plot and the conspiracies are enough to embrace a series. I only loved Dune though. Which I read in high school and have never forgotten.)
16. Ethan From by Edith Wharton (another high school book that haunts me. Filled with anti-heros, Wharton doesn’t pull any punches. The characters in this book are not only complex they are doomed by their own desires and foibles. Wharton is fascinated whose desires conflict with the times in which they live. Like Austen she will often comment on the manners of her society and how emotionally suffocating they are. Unlike Austen, her characters are doomed. A short book that we were all forced to read, I find it fascinating that over 20 years later, I cannot forget it.)
17. Ulysses by James Joyce (and yes, I’m cheating here, because I did not read this baby easily and I did read it more than once and it is hardly clear. Yet. Yet. I fell in love with it when read it and still remember it clearly over 15 years after the fact. Another prose poem that takes place within one day. The character of Leopold Bloom is possibly Harry Pekar’s predecessor, an everyman, who works, shits, pisses, and struggles to understand his wife – who is having an affair with another man. Bloom is comical and tragic in his foibles. But always compelling. To tell his tale, Joyce experiments with the prose form turning it this way and that, playing with point of view, narrative style, finding a way to tell us not who the characters are so much as show us how and what and why they are thinking what they are thinking. To do this, one can’t be linear because we don’t think that way. So Joyce departs from the linear narrative almost completely at times. In doing so, he wisely uses myth to ground himself, because myth is tied deeply in with the subconscious. Our dreams. The result is a complex piece of work that requires more than one sitting to truly appreciate.)
18. The Yellow Wallpaper by Gilman (can’t remember her full name and too lazy to look it up). (Horrifying novella about insanity. It gave me nightmares the first time I read it. I can’t forget it. A story about a woman who is sane and is driven insane by the prisons set up by her husband, her society and times she lives in. The wallpaper metaphor is used throughout to convey how women are treated and how this woman struggles with her place in the world. )
19. Replacing this with Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being a poetic novel about finding someone who shares the same music and the impossibility of this. Kundera's work defies convention, he doesn't follow normal narrative structure, so much as create his own, proving you can break the rules if you know them. The story follows a Czech writer in a war torn country. It flips between the points of view of three people and takes you inside their psychological and sociological landscape. A true work of art that I read about five or six years ago. While I adore The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath it doesn't come close to Kundera's masterpiece in my memory. Although I will never forget her descriptions of the NY City publishing world and how impossible that world truly was. A description that is unfortunately as valid today as it was when Plath was there over 40 years before. ( her only novel – takes place in New York City. A pseudo-autobiographical work about a woman who is painfully depressed and struggling to cope. Both horrifying and oddly moving, the book continues to haunt me to this day, even though a read it several years ago.)
20. Brave New World by Adolus Huxely –( a book I understood better as an adult than when I read it in high school. I still remember discussing it with my English teacher and having a lively and interesting discussion. The concept of the perfect utopia, which requires placing everyone in boxes, everyone perfectly controlled, no messes and showing the warts within all of that. In some respects this novel haunts me more today than the more famous George Orwell novels: Animal Farm, or 1984, same with Ayn Rand’s Anthem. This little book seemed in a way to comment on what they were, yet expand on those themes – showing a great utopia that underneath is not so great, while Rand’s and Orwell’s novels depict horrible utopias. I enjoyed the twist.)
Oh added bit: ten guilty reading pleasures in the last few years, in other words, I loved them, re-read many of them, because of and in spite of their flaws.
No particular order.
1. Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters (She has a delicious anti-hero theif)
2.Queen of The Damned by Ann Rice (yes, everyone prefers Interview with The Vampire, and yes that's the more conscise and better written work. But I'm a myth/folklore junkie and I adored her retelling of the eating the dead practice in some African myths - also how the Egyptians reacted in horror to it.
I guess you have to have been an ancient religion, comparative religion or myth major to have appreciated this.)
3. Friday by Robert Heinlein (he actually created a cool female character - I love Friday, partly because she's the first spy I've seen under torture who basically says, look I'll tell you everything you want to know because let's face it eventually you'll find a way to torture it out of me anyways, so why go through all of that? )
4. Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand (again you may have to be myth major who wrote a thesis on the Goddess to appreciate this fully, but lovely horror piece.)
5. The Secret History by Donna Tartt ( pokes fun at small holier than thou ivy league colleges and discusses myth at the same time.)
6. Obsiddian Butterfly by Laurel K. Hamilton (haven't been able to get into the rest of her novels yet, but adore this one. It's dark. It's creepy. It's noir. The characters are complex. There's little sex though which may be why I liked it better - erotica I've found gets boring after a while and most people tend to write it more as titillation than to actually evolve character, which is fine, but like I said, it gets old. This baby is all about character.)
7. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett (the political wrangling is so fun, the characters juicy, the love story nicely painful,
ah what's not to love?)
8. Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix ( I cried during this novel. I love the edges to the characters. It felt like leaving old friends).
9. The Flanders Panel by Artero Perez Reverte (close second is The Seville Communion, although still like Flander's better. Nifty chess game of a mystery. Particularly adored the sleuth.)
10. The Dresden Novels - delightful fun. light reads. Interesting hero. Not great literature perhaps, but does help me escape on subway rides and wind down after work.
Oh should add Neuromancer by William Gibson - which still haunts me, was a great read, and kept me going when I wandered about Wales trying desperately to collect stories. A tale that hinted at what the world could become if it focused too much on information and the internet. I crave Gibson's most recent novel Pattern Recognition.
Whew. Frustrated lit major is satisfied now. Maybe I can veg for a while in front of the tube, then write a little of my own stories.
A friend of mine hates these things. She doesn’t understand how you can decide one episode or one book is definitely best while another is worst, when each is very different from the other. It’s like saying an apple is better than an orange. Another believes that it is all subjective anyway, so what’s the point. Not sure. I think because it tells us something about one another – the desire to list and rate and rank things shows a desire to organize and control one’s universe, to make sense of one’s own likes and dislikes and figure out how compatible those likes and dislikes are with others. Can I like you, if you loved Ann Rice’s The Vampire Lestate but hated Ulysses? Probably, since I enjoyed both for different reasons.
The latest in these ratings games – is a community that has set itself up as * the authority* on good literature. This group made me laugh. It was like reading fanfic_hate forum all over again. They appear to have read some decent novels and certainly have very strong opinions on these novels, but no clue how to convey to others why one novel is good and another isn’t. One thread was informing a young woman who had applied for acceptance, it’s an exclusive community, why they were voting against her purely because Ann Rice was one of her favorite novelists. Did they explain why Ann Rice was a bad writer in their opinion or unacceptable? No. Instead they resorted to name calling – “I liked her when I was oh 12.” Excuse me? What does that tell me? There are 12 year olds who adore Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances Burnett, JR Tolkien, and CS Lewis. Or she’s on the bestseller list. Again, I ask, what does this say about the writer, except that over a million people have bought her books, she is still in print, and she has joined the ranks of other novelists such as JR Tolkien, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare in sales? Nowhere in the thread do they explain why this writer is not considered literary or why someone who reads her works should not be admitted to their group. In short, why read them or even visit such a community? Or waste your time joining it? Appears to be a community for disgruntled literature majors who haven’t figured out how to write a simple book review. A pet peeve of mine is folks who disparage cultural works or works of art without sampling them first or thinking about why this work is distasteful to them. Or at the very least coherently explain why they dislike the writer/artist/hack so intensely, that they are willing to exclude people from their community that did. Add to this the tendency to condemn others for enjoying these works. Then of course we have folks who disparage certain novelists, say such things are * beneath me *, only to write the same things themselves. People are amusing.
At any rate this community apparently was the source of the 20 Favorite Book Meme that went around livejournal recently. I’m still not completely sure what the criteria was for choosing the 20 books. Is it the books you enjoyed the most? The books you found the most memorable? The books you think are the best written? The ones that moved you the most? The ones you want to re-read over and over again? The only category that I could possibly limit it to 20 is the most “memorable”, because then I’d just go by the books I can actually remember the story. This meme seems impossible to me otherwise – but then I’ve read more books than I can count, so maybe the people who came up with it haven’t read that much? (Shrugs)
Here’s my attempt at it. Liable to change at a moments notice: My 20 Most Memorable Books – I’ve used the following bits of criteria to attempt to limit the list, ie. Once again I’m manipulating someone else’s meme to create my own:
1. Can I remember the story? (Also it can’t be anything I’ve read in the last 12 months, because of course I can remember those, okay, well most of them.)
2. Did it move me in some way? Or make me think? Did it tell me something new? Teach me anything? Show me another angle of life? Do I care about it in that special way you do about a close friend? Remember fondly or even with a little aggravation?
3. Did I enjoy it? Did it pull me into another world, was I captivated by the characters so that it continues to haunt me?
4. Was it well-written in my opinion? Ie. Did the writer develop and evolve the characters, create an interesting world, and did they have something new to say through those characters? Did their technique aid or hamper them?
5. Was I satisfied? Or did the story leave me hanging?
6. Was it clear or did I need to re-read it over and over again to get the meaning?
In no particular order, because limiting it to 20 was hard enough, ranking them is a whole other issue. This list spans things 6th grade to now. Oh and unlike the snobs who created this little meme, I’m actually going to attempt to explain why I liked these books. (Yes, to the annoyance of anyone reading this, I'm already altering the list because I'm unsatisfied with two of my answers.)
1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ( I read the novel once in the 8th Grade and can still to this day remember it vividly, even the bits that aren’t in all the movies, I remember the voice of the hero, and I remember falling in love with him. Twain perfectly captured the issues of his Time and world within the pages of the novel, using a variety of difficult writing techniques to accomplish this: 1. First person close narrator, 2. Dialect (demonstrating the difference between classes and how people viewed one another based on vocal mannerisms), 3. Setting – the Mississippi River is as much a character in Twain’s novel as any of the others, you feel the Mississippi. The only draw-back to reading Huckleberry Finn – is I had no interest in ever reading Tom Sawyer afterwards, since I despised him as a cruel self-centered bully in the first novel. The fact that Twain does not hold back from showing one of his heroes in a less than heroic light, is yet another accomplishment.)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Another novel I read once, a very long time ago, but have ingrained on my skull. I also enjoyed it. What appears on the surface to be a conventional romance is actually both a wicked commentary on the conventional romances of her time and the game of manners. Austen also uses a difficult technique – third person omni, you never are that close to her characters, you feel, in fact, at times, as if you are held aloof from them, watching over their shoulders. You hear a definite narrator’s voice in the work. She painstakingly chooses just the right words to convey politeness, and often will rely on a letter to propel action. The conflict in her novels arises often from the conflict between the characters and the restrictions society places upon them, but unlike Richardson, and others, Austen seldom falls into melodrama, if anything she makes fun of the situation and allows her reader to laugh with her at the characters. )
3. Palefire by Vladmir Nobokov (I read it once, about ten years ago, borrowed from a friend, haven’t forgotten it. A perfect commentary on pretentious literary criticism – where the critique of the poet lapses into his own agenda. The book uses a technique I’ve never seen before or since – we get the poem and the story takes place in the footnotes, endnotes. What you are reading is a critique of a poem and within the critique you find out more about the critic, than the poem. It’s a beautifully wicked satire on literary criticism, poetry, and groups like the one who created this meme. Every time I find myself falling into snobbery or pretentiousness I remember Palefire.)
4. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald (I read this book once in high school, at least 20 years ago. It still haunts me. I can still vividly see the scene in the novel where Daisy hits and kills her husband’s low class, blousy lover, unintentionally. I can still remember the bit where Gatsby’s father sits by the pool and tells the narrator who Gatsby really was, and as a reader I find myself liking the real Gatsby more than the image he constructed. Fitzgerald uses first person reflective narration to convey his tale – a technique that others have tried and failed miserably at. His narrator, Nick Carraway feels like a cipher, we get so little on him, yet he works as Fitzgerald’s voice – acting as a commentary on the snobbishness and insular nature of the times. You feel for Gatsby, and hate the narrator a bit for his own prejudices, prejudices that Fitzgerald points out through him are societies. He’s a stand-in for Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, for a society that judges people based on what image they construct, how much money they have and if they behave according to a rigid set of rules.)
5. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Harper Lee only wrote one novel, and this one pulls you in from the opening paragraph. Lee also uses a difficult technique, first person reflective, but unlike Fitzgerald, her narrator is less of a cipher. Through a child’s eyes we see the racism of the times she lived in and the colors of a small town. Each character is complex in the novel, and she doesn’t provide easy answers, just tells it like it was, keeping in mind the hazy threads of memory. I read this book in high school as well and still remember it. It’s not exactly like the movie, there are differences.)
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison ( A haunting novel about slavery and the ghosts we carry with us. Morrison’s novel is not an easy one for her reader. Her technique is stream of consciousness, and she uses it to startlingly good effect to convey the thoughts of a baby ghost. The ghost itself is more of a metaphor for the pain and suffering that the mother can never quite escape and threaten at times to overwhelm and consume her. Through poetic prose, Morrison shows both the ugliness and beauty of the times, captures the voice of characters who lived long before she did. A book that could have come across as preachy, as Barbara Kingslover’s Poisonwood Bible often threatens to, actually allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. Reading Beloved felt at times like reading a long prose poem.)
7. The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien (Tolkien manages to create a complex world with it’s own rules, guidelines, and language, and stays consistent throughout. I read this book once as a child, and can still remember it vividly. I adored it. The characters, the language, the action – and the world that Tolkien developed so painstakingly. Tolkien doesn’t take the short-cuts so many fantasy writers take in developing characters: here’s the Wizard, here’s an elf, here’s a dwarf – instead he describes them, depicts who they are, their foibles, and how they relate to his world. Even the Goblins have issues. He also uses them as metaphors to expound on issues ranging from environmentalism to the impossibility of war. He doesn’t preach to you, he shows you. And he builds on each character he creates. If memory serves, the point of view was third person close with a bit of a shift to Omni from time to time. But I could be wrong on that. I read the book in 1980.)
8. The Bone People by Keri Hume (a novel about the Maori people in New Zealand. Hume’s book deals with the difficulties of domestic violence, preserving an ancient culture in a modern world, and the struggle between man and woman. Inter-twined within all that is the myths of the Maori people. Reading the novel feels at times like examining an intricate body tattoo, others reading a complex poem, the words are chosen carefully in Hume’s novel and leave you feeling a bit as if you’ve been punched with them. I don’t remember the story of this work as clearly as the others, but I do remember the emotions. It was that type of book, what it left behind was an emotional imprint, or impression, not a mental one. Rare and beautiful. )
9. Changing this to The Grapes of Wrath because I just read East of Eden by John Steinbeck 12 months ago and therefore broke my own rule, which I'm prone to do. Grapes - I still remember having last read it in 1984 or 83, a book that so clearly describes despair and the struggle to perservere. I like East better, actually, but I also read it recently so probably just remember it better.( Steinbeck uses first person reflective here as well as third person omni. This may, in my opinion, be his greatest piece of work or possibly the one closest to his heart – it is certainly one of the most emotionally gripping. I read it a year ago and still vividly recall each and every detail. The interweave of Bible story, California folklore, history, and character is an accomplishment by itself. Steinbeck shows us his characters, comments on them, and still lets us make up our own mind. The characters are a complex dark bunch. We see them in their entirety, Steinbeck shows us each and every wrinkle, he can fall into melodrama at times and yes, a few of the characters are drawn a tad too romantically, but there’s an emotional honesty to his words that leaves behind an impact.)
10. Possession by A.S Byatt (Admittedly not a book for everyone. And I can’t say I’ve enjoyed her other novels. Perhaps you need to have been an English Lit major and have run into one too many pretentious academics to truly appreciate Byatt. Or have studied fairy tales? Not sure. Byatt does what Nabokov does in a way, she critiques literary criticism and those who engage in it. Establishing that the people who spend all their time critiquing and studying others works may in fact be avoiding their own lives. That we tend to romanticize writers and poets as something more than they are. In the midst of the book she plays around with several difficult techniques, such as writing her own fairy tales, creating a series of poems, and footnotes on them. The point of view is third person omni. She uses letters as well. Her voice never wavers. And by the end of the novel you feel as if you have been in this world. )
11. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin ( A psuedo-autobiographical story about a female writer in Australia during the early portion of the 20th century, who turns down a marriage proposal and life on a rich neighboring farm to become a writer. Franklin describes life in the outback in almost the same detail as Steinbeck described the dustbowl. Her narrator is spunky and first person. She is more or less telling her own tale, but never falls into the pitfalls that others do, coming across as either pathetic or fantastic. I read the book back in the early 90s, so I may have some of the details off here and there. But it affected me deeply and I remember it.)
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gaberial Garcia Marquez ( I fell in love with this novel. It wasn’t easy reading. Stream of Consciousness. Prose poetry throughout. But when I read it in 1987 one summer, I felt every word. Marquez weaves a ghost like tale of life and suffering through five generations. He conveys the cycle of life and random patterns within it through his characters and their actions. A book to read on a lazy summer day, to fall slowly into, as one might the sea. Letting its pages sweep up and over. Not an airplane book by any stretch of the imagination.)
13. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick ( Not what I expected when I read it. An odd novel about artificiality and what it is to be human in an insane world. The noir structure holds throughout and Dick sticks closely to his first person close narrative. I remember this novel years after I read it. I feel the narrators desire to have * real * living pets as opposed to constructed ones. The twist ending is beautiful – making us wonder as the narrator does – what is real and what is fake and is there a difference?)
14. Grass by Sheri Tepper ( A book no one appears to have heard of. It’s not literary cannon, but it haunts me. I read it over ten years ago. And I haven’t been able to get into any of Tepper’s other novels. This science fiction novel does something unique with the form, it steps beyond it – creating a world completely alien to our own and within that world uses metaphor to comment on certain societal and cultural issues. It is a sociology/anthropology sci-fi as opposed to technology sci-fi, which is also why it fascinated me. Most sci-fi is tech, space-opera, or monster. Rarely do we see sociological or anthropological issues explored. I saw Maria Doria Russell attempt the same thing with The Sparrow, but I’m not sure she is as successful as Tepper. Tepper creates an alien race where the young despise the creatures they become, they wish to destroy the creatures they themselves will eventually evolve into. While the new creatures feel nothing but an odd concern and compassion for what they once were. Sexuality is also commented on through the means that the young creatures known as the Hippi who seduce the humans through sexual manipulation. Instead of the human riders controlling the Hippi (which are similar to horses but nothing like horses), the Hippi control their riders. It’s impossible to explain without sounding silly, you have to read it, but it gave me the shivers.)
15. Dune by Frank Herbert (Herbert accomplishes with Science Fiction what Tolkien did with fantasy, he creates a complex universe complete with language, philosophy, political structure, and characters that is outside our own yet comments on our own at the same time. The intricacies of the plot and the conspiracies are enough to embrace a series. I only loved Dune though. Which I read in high school and have never forgotten.)
16. Ethan From by Edith Wharton (another high school book that haunts me. Filled with anti-heros, Wharton doesn’t pull any punches. The characters in this book are not only complex they are doomed by their own desires and foibles. Wharton is fascinated whose desires conflict with the times in which they live. Like Austen she will often comment on the manners of her society and how emotionally suffocating they are. Unlike Austen, her characters are doomed. A short book that we were all forced to read, I find it fascinating that over 20 years later, I cannot forget it.)
17. Ulysses by James Joyce (and yes, I’m cheating here, because I did not read this baby easily and I did read it more than once and it is hardly clear. Yet. Yet. I fell in love with it when read it and still remember it clearly over 15 years after the fact. Another prose poem that takes place within one day. The character of Leopold Bloom is possibly Harry Pekar’s predecessor, an everyman, who works, shits, pisses, and struggles to understand his wife – who is having an affair with another man. Bloom is comical and tragic in his foibles. But always compelling. To tell his tale, Joyce experiments with the prose form turning it this way and that, playing with point of view, narrative style, finding a way to tell us not who the characters are so much as show us how and what and why they are thinking what they are thinking. To do this, one can’t be linear because we don’t think that way. So Joyce departs from the linear narrative almost completely at times. In doing so, he wisely uses myth to ground himself, because myth is tied deeply in with the subconscious. Our dreams. The result is a complex piece of work that requires more than one sitting to truly appreciate.)
18. The Yellow Wallpaper by Gilman (can’t remember her full name and too lazy to look it up). (Horrifying novella about insanity. It gave me nightmares the first time I read it. I can’t forget it. A story about a woman who is sane and is driven insane by the prisons set up by her husband, her society and times she lives in. The wallpaper metaphor is used throughout to convey how women are treated and how this woman struggles with her place in the world. )
19. Replacing this with Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being a poetic novel about finding someone who shares the same music and the impossibility of this. Kundera's work defies convention, he doesn't follow normal narrative structure, so much as create his own, proving you can break the rules if you know them. The story follows a Czech writer in a war torn country. It flips between the points of view of three people and takes you inside their psychological and sociological landscape. A true work of art that I read about five or six years ago. While I adore The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath it doesn't come close to Kundera's masterpiece in my memory. Although I will never forget her descriptions of the NY City publishing world and how impossible that world truly was. A description that is unfortunately as valid today as it was when Plath was there over 40 years before. ( her only novel – takes place in New York City. A pseudo-autobiographical work about a woman who is painfully depressed and struggling to cope. Both horrifying and oddly moving, the book continues to haunt me to this day, even though a read it several years ago.)
20. Brave New World by Adolus Huxely –( a book I understood better as an adult than when I read it in high school. I still remember discussing it with my English teacher and having a lively and interesting discussion. The concept of the perfect utopia, which requires placing everyone in boxes, everyone perfectly controlled, no messes and showing the warts within all of that. In some respects this novel haunts me more today than the more famous George Orwell novels: Animal Farm, or 1984, same with Ayn Rand’s Anthem. This little book seemed in a way to comment on what they were, yet expand on those themes – showing a great utopia that underneath is not so great, while Rand’s and Orwell’s novels depict horrible utopias. I enjoyed the twist.)
Oh added bit: ten guilty reading pleasures in the last few years, in other words, I loved them, re-read many of them, because of and in spite of their flaws.
No particular order.
1. Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters (She has a delicious anti-hero theif)
2.Queen of The Damned by Ann Rice (yes, everyone prefers Interview with The Vampire, and yes that's the more conscise and better written work. But I'm a myth/folklore junkie and I adored her retelling of the eating the dead practice in some African myths - also how the Egyptians reacted in horror to it.
I guess you have to have been an ancient religion, comparative religion or myth major to have appreciated this.)
3. Friday by Robert Heinlein (he actually created a cool female character - I love Friday, partly because she's the first spy I've seen under torture who basically says, look I'll tell you everything you want to know because let's face it eventually you'll find a way to torture it out of me anyways, so why go through all of that? )
4. Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand (again you may have to be myth major who wrote a thesis on the Goddess to appreciate this fully, but lovely horror piece.)
5. The Secret History by Donna Tartt ( pokes fun at small holier than thou ivy league colleges and discusses myth at the same time.)
6. Obsiddian Butterfly by Laurel K. Hamilton (haven't been able to get into the rest of her novels yet, but adore this one. It's dark. It's creepy. It's noir. The characters are complex. There's little sex though which may be why I liked it better - erotica I've found gets boring after a while and most people tend to write it more as titillation than to actually evolve character, which is fine, but like I said, it gets old. This baby is all about character.)
7. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett (the political wrangling is so fun, the characters juicy, the love story nicely painful,
ah what's not to love?)
8. Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix ( I cried during this novel. I love the edges to the characters. It felt like leaving old friends).
9. The Flanders Panel by Artero Perez Reverte (close second is The Seville Communion, although still like Flander's better. Nifty chess game of a mystery. Particularly adored the sleuth.)
10. The Dresden Novels - delightful fun. light reads. Interesting hero. Not great literature perhaps, but does help me escape on subway rides and wind down after work.
Oh should add Neuromancer by William Gibson - which still haunts me, was a great read, and kept me going when I wandered about Wales trying desperately to collect stories. A tale that hinted at what the world could become if it focused too much on information and the internet. I crave Gibson's most recent novel Pattern Recognition.
Whew. Frustrated lit major is satisfied now. Maybe I can veg for a while in front of the tube, then write a little of my own stories.
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Date: 2004-08-15 01:03 pm (UTC)Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, but they fall more into folk, blues than country after a while. True, Dolly Parton, Crystal Gale, Loretta Lynn country makes me cringe - it's the nasality of the vocals, can't handle it. Also one too many of the songs begins and ends with "My lover left me oh what am I to do...", friends in college created parodied songs of country music tunes that may or may not have forever warped me.
In all seriosuness, I think you've hit on the real difference between elitism and common snobbery. A true elitist would provide examples of why their favored lit/art/whatever is superior - a common snob is just being cliquish based on what's popular with the group. Posers.
LOL! I think you are right. The difference between the intelligent informed snob who actually has a brain and the common snob who just follows the crowd.
Honestly if you can't tell me why you dislike it, why should I bother? Stand behind your opinion, dang it! Give it power! Be persuasive! (I say these things fully aware that I can be as lazy as the next person and resort to short-hand, which may be why I avoid doing too many critical reviews.)