![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fifteen Memorable Books in Fifteen Minutes
Name fifteen books you found memorable in fifteen minutes then explain why they are memorable to you.
1. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
This is the last in the Chronicles of Lymond Series and my favorite, partly for the romance, but mostly for the intricate political maneuvering, which takes place in the court of Queen Mary, prior to Queen Elizabeth's take over. It's during the religious battles between the Protestant/Calvinist Scots and the Catholic English. Dunnett deftly discusses the political battle between the powers behind the two religions, and how much of the war/battle was about land. It's a fascinating study - particularly considering we are still fighting these wars today, just between different religions and on different lands. She also deftly creates the classically flawed hero in Lymond.
2. Kindred by OCtavia Butler
Perhaps the best time-travel novel that I've read. Also by the far the most disturbing. For those of you hunting a science-fiction novel that deals with racism and black social history from a minority perspective - read this book. The heroine is snatched back into time to the era before the Civil War, and via her blood connection to the son of slave owner, a brutal boy, who she must keep alive, at much cost to her own life. Each time she goes back and forth in time, she suffers bodily injury. She's married to a white man, who also ends up back in time through the same conduit, and works with the underground railroad. The novel delves into the murky history of race relations in the US, and the characters are complex.
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora NEal Hurston
Skip the Oprah movie, and read the book, which is prose poetry. Hurston writes in the language of the time. And the novel is the quintessential romantic tragedy of two doomed souls, aching to survive in a better world. I remember the sound of it, more than the story.
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison
A ghost story and perhaps the most disturbing one that I've read. Again, skip the movie. In the stream of consciousness prose, we enter three characters heads, including the ghost child...Beloved, who died because she was the spawn of slavery. Beloved, the character, in all her aching cruelty and beauty works as a metaphor for the horrors of slavery. What it did to the people enslaved, and how much like the Jewish Holocauste, and the Native American Trail of Tears, and the Killing Fields, not to mention the dead of Dafur, it is not something that can be forgotten, it has become part of our cultural heritage and haunts us..much as Beloved haunts. Morrison tells the tale with aching poetry and candor. It is deservedly amongst her best.
5. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The quintessential heroes journey, except the hero is a little man with big feet who yearns for his hearth and home. At it's closure is an anti-war parable, that deftly explains why no wars are good. Far better book than the others that came after, partly for its simplicity, and partly for its warmth. It ends with hope. On its surface perhaps, it is a children's tale, but at its heart it is a parable for adults - as all the best sci-fantasy is.
It was my favorite novel for many years, and I still remember it vividly. I loved it so much, that one summer, in the 6th grade, I took an acting class and starred as the Great Goblin (due to my height, couldn't very well be a dwarf or an elf. Was okay with it, I had more lines and got to learn how to do a staged sword fight with glowing swords - which is a lot more fun than just standing prettily in the forest as the elf Queen lectures for two minutes.)
Read the book only once - in the sixth grade, yet I recall it vividly along with the deep abiding love I felt for it and the Aunt who gave it to me. If you get the chance rent the Ralph Bakshi animated film - it's the closest and best adaptation I've seen to the book.
6. The Subtle Knife by Philip K. Pullman
The second novel in Pullman's His Dark Materials Series (also known as the anti-CS Lewis Chronicles) - is a bit of a horror tale, not that first wasn't. As well as a romance.
It is about a boy who leaves our world for a world occupied by ghosts. And his knife cuts the fabric of reality, but at a cost. The book much like the first is about growing up, trading a black and white morality for shades of gray, and the pain of that process. It also much as the other books in the series - shows children as they are, not as we adults tend to think or wish them to be. Less preachy than the other two, and more suspenseful, while still getting the essential point across. Shame the movie series didn't continue - for it is this novel that I would like to have seen on-screen.
7. The Witches of Worm by Zilphia Keatley Snyder
A horror tale about a girl and a cat that she doesn't want, believes is a witch, hates, yet also comes to love. Very odd book and very haunting. Read it when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, which was more than 30 years ago, and haven't seen or read it since, yet it still haunts me to this day. Remember being obsessed with it and the writer for quite a bit at the time.
8. Ship of Fools by Russo
Another horror story - this one is science-fiction and takes place in deep space. The last vestiges of humanity come across an alien ship. It is told from the point of view of a socially awkward misfit/dwarf - who is the hero/protagonist of the story. Gripping. Kept me up one night reading.
9. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
A science fiction novel written by a cultural anthropologist about the dangers of cultural misappropriation and cultural anthropology in an alien culture. The story is told in flashback, as a bit of mystery, regarding what happened to the optimistic/kind-hearted souls that journeyed to a distant galaxy to meet an alien race. The story addresses how we view other cultures, how we attempt to change or interfer with those aspects which we don't understand or determine to be wrong, and the consequences of our actions. It also discusses the misunderstandings between cultures and language. As well as religion's role in the whole thing. The protagonist is a disillusioned Jesuit Priest, who was once devout and now is cynical and not. Like or hate it? I guarantee you will never forget it.
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Another book that I remember the sound of more than the story. It's the story of a family, and of the pain, sorrow, that family feels. It is also the tale of a culture, its struggle and evolution, and why it is what it is. Garcia takes into that culture's heartbeat. You see the world through his perspective and for just a little while become emmersed, to the degree, that you almost, not quite, forget your own. I remember falling in love with this book one hot summer, devoring the copy my brother had. It took me maybe three months to read it, but when I did...I wished it continued. If it weren't for Marquez, I would never have read Ulysses, or decided to do my thesis on it. Marquez was the spainish version. My only regret was I didn't know Spainish.
11. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Tartt went to school with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInery - at Bennetton, in Vermont. This novel is her take on that experience, and of the three writers, her's is by far the most memorable, even if she's only written it and one other in her lifetime to date - or as far as I am aware. The novel is mystery, but not about what and who - we know that at the beginning. The prologue tells us that someone has been murdered and literally who do it. What we don't quite know is the how and why. It's also about dangers of groups, group psychology, ritual, and devotion. A group of Greek Classics Majors, who set themselves apart from everyone else, engage in a woodland ritual a la the Bacchia, and something goes tragically wrong -resulting in the murder. The novel may remind you a bit of Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, without the preachy feminism and silly theaterics. Tartt wisely shows us little of the ritual, and does not tell us if anything supernatural occurred, leaving that to our own imagination and determination. Indeed, it is the gaps in this novel - the things that Tartt leaves to our imagination that haunt long after, and make the novel successful.
12. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The rare novel that has banned and censored by both whites and blacks. When it was first published, and in the 1950s and 1960s - it was banned by whites, describing it as offensive - due to the friendship between Huck and the escaped slave Jim. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was banned by blacks due to the depiction of Jim and the use of the word "nigger" in the novel.
The fact it has triggered emotions on both sides of the fence alone - shows how effective Twain was in describing his own era and delving inside the mindset of these people.
The story is told completely in first person, in slang, by Huck Finn. It is the words of a poor white boy who is riding the Mississippi with his friend, a runaway slave named Jim.
Through Huck's eyes we see the world of Post-Civil War Missouri, and delve into Huck's own mixed feelings about race. What he has been taught by his abusive father and those around him, and what he has seen. Jim has rescued Huck as much as Huck has rescued Jim. At the core of the tale is their friendship - that is the love story, and it is one that resonates long after the novel is over.
13. Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is the popular one and much as I adore it and Emma, I have a certain fondness for Persuasion - which is a tale about a woman who almost loses the love of her life in order to appease those around her. She listens to a beloved friend's advice, and over time must learn to shirk it, and listen to her own heart and mind instead. The book, much like Austen's other novels, is a deft satire of the manners/cultural mores of her day. And the theme is simple enough - do not blindly follow others advice, follow your own, they can't and don't live your life and besides they are self-interested, with their own agendas.
14. A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville
A fun little known novel by the writer of The Eight (which I didn't like as much). It's protagonist is a woman in her 30s, who is a virgin, successful, and wickedly smart. The romance is between her and an equally wickedly smart man. They have a battle of wits to see who can steal from the wicked corporation that framed her the fastest. It's sort of Leverage meets Mr. & Mrs. Smith - except no guns are involved only wits.
15. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
This book surprised me when I read it - since I had not expected to like it. It is rather good twist on an old old tale. The story of Cain and Able, yet mostly from Able's point of view. An "Able" who discovers over time that he has and is in danger of repeating his father's sins. If you loved the father/son issues in the Angel series - Steinbeck's version is the original take on it, and in my view a far more complex and textured one, sans the metaphors. It is also, at the same time, a story of California...and a family. Told in the form of a memoire, the narrator feels like Steinbeck himself...looking backward over his own bewildering family history. Yet it isn't one and therein lies it's beauty. No villians and no angels in this peice, just people. Flawed, damaged, people. The narrative dares us to judge them, and we do, we do, up until the end, where we find ourselves seeing it from their point of view. Skip the miniseries with Jane Seymore and Timothy Bottoms, Bruce Boxelietner,
and watch if you must the old James Dean version, but trust me when I tell you the book is so much more.
Name fifteen books you found memorable in fifteen minutes then explain why they are memorable to you.
1. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
This is the last in the Chronicles of Lymond Series and my favorite, partly for the romance, but mostly for the intricate political maneuvering, which takes place in the court of Queen Mary, prior to Queen Elizabeth's take over. It's during the religious battles between the Protestant/Calvinist Scots and the Catholic English. Dunnett deftly discusses the political battle between the powers behind the two religions, and how much of the war/battle was about land. It's a fascinating study - particularly considering we are still fighting these wars today, just between different religions and on different lands. She also deftly creates the classically flawed hero in Lymond.
2. Kindred by OCtavia Butler
Perhaps the best time-travel novel that I've read. Also by the far the most disturbing. For those of you hunting a science-fiction novel that deals with racism and black social history from a minority perspective - read this book. The heroine is snatched back into time to the era before the Civil War, and via her blood connection to the son of slave owner, a brutal boy, who she must keep alive, at much cost to her own life. Each time she goes back and forth in time, she suffers bodily injury. She's married to a white man, who also ends up back in time through the same conduit, and works with the underground railroad. The novel delves into the murky history of race relations in the US, and the characters are complex.
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora NEal Hurston
Skip the Oprah movie, and read the book, which is prose poetry. Hurston writes in the language of the time. And the novel is the quintessential romantic tragedy of two doomed souls, aching to survive in a better world. I remember the sound of it, more than the story.
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison
A ghost story and perhaps the most disturbing one that I've read. Again, skip the movie. In the stream of consciousness prose, we enter three characters heads, including the ghost child...Beloved, who died because she was the spawn of slavery. Beloved, the character, in all her aching cruelty and beauty works as a metaphor for the horrors of slavery. What it did to the people enslaved, and how much like the Jewish Holocauste, and the Native American Trail of Tears, and the Killing Fields, not to mention the dead of Dafur, it is not something that can be forgotten, it has become part of our cultural heritage and haunts us..much as Beloved haunts. Morrison tells the tale with aching poetry and candor. It is deservedly amongst her best.
5. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The quintessential heroes journey, except the hero is a little man with big feet who yearns for his hearth and home. At it's closure is an anti-war parable, that deftly explains why no wars are good. Far better book than the others that came after, partly for its simplicity, and partly for its warmth. It ends with hope. On its surface perhaps, it is a children's tale, but at its heart it is a parable for adults - as all the best sci-fantasy is.
It was my favorite novel for many years, and I still remember it vividly. I loved it so much, that one summer, in the 6th grade, I took an acting class and starred as the Great Goblin (due to my height, couldn't very well be a dwarf or an elf. Was okay with it, I had more lines and got to learn how to do a staged sword fight with glowing swords - which is a lot more fun than just standing prettily in the forest as the elf Queen lectures for two minutes.)
Read the book only once - in the sixth grade, yet I recall it vividly along with the deep abiding love I felt for it and the Aunt who gave it to me. If you get the chance rent the Ralph Bakshi animated film - it's the closest and best adaptation I've seen to the book.
6. The Subtle Knife by Philip K. Pullman
The second novel in Pullman's His Dark Materials Series (also known as the anti-CS Lewis Chronicles) - is a bit of a horror tale, not that first wasn't. As well as a romance.
It is about a boy who leaves our world for a world occupied by ghosts. And his knife cuts the fabric of reality, but at a cost. The book much like the first is about growing up, trading a black and white morality for shades of gray, and the pain of that process. It also much as the other books in the series - shows children as they are, not as we adults tend to think or wish them to be. Less preachy than the other two, and more suspenseful, while still getting the essential point across. Shame the movie series didn't continue - for it is this novel that I would like to have seen on-screen.
7. The Witches of Worm by Zilphia Keatley Snyder
A horror tale about a girl and a cat that she doesn't want, believes is a witch, hates, yet also comes to love. Very odd book and very haunting. Read it when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, which was more than 30 years ago, and haven't seen or read it since, yet it still haunts me to this day. Remember being obsessed with it and the writer for quite a bit at the time.
8. Ship of Fools by Russo
Another horror story - this one is science-fiction and takes place in deep space. The last vestiges of humanity come across an alien ship. It is told from the point of view of a socially awkward misfit/dwarf - who is the hero/protagonist of the story. Gripping. Kept me up one night reading.
9. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
A science fiction novel written by a cultural anthropologist about the dangers of cultural misappropriation and cultural anthropology in an alien culture. The story is told in flashback, as a bit of mystery, regarding what happened to the optimistic/kind-hearted souls that journeyed to a distant galaxy to meet an alien race. The story addresses how we view other cultures, how we attempt to change or interfer with those aspects which we don't understand or determine to be wrong, and the consequences of our actions. It also discusses the misunderstandings between cultures and language. As well as religion's role in the whole thing. The protagonist is a disillusioned Jesuit Priest, who was once devout and now is cynical and not. Like or hate it? I guarantee you will never forget it.
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Another book that I remember the sound of more than the story. It's the story of a family, and of the pain, sorrow, that family feels. It is also the tale of a culture, its struggle and evolution, and why it is what it is. Garcia takes into that culture's heartbeat. You see the world through his perspective and for just a little while become emmersed, to the degree, that you almost, not quite, forget your own. I remember falling in love with this book one hot summer, devoring the copy my brother had. It took me maybe three months to read it, but when I did...I wished it continued. If it weren't for Marquez, I would never have read Ulysses, or decided to do my thesis on it. Marquez was the spainish version. My only regret was I didn't know Spainish.
11. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Tartt went to school with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInery - at Bennetton, in Vermont. This novel is her take on that experience, and of the three writers, her's is by far the most memorable, even if she's only written it and one other in her lifetime to date - or as far as I am aware. The novel is mystery, but not about what and who - we know that at the beginning. The prologue tells us that someone has been murdered and literally who do it. What we don't quite know is the how and why. It's also about dangers of groups, group psychology, ritual, and devotion. A group of Greek Classics Majors, who set themselves apart from everyone else, engage in a woodland ritual a la the Bacchia, and something goes tragically wrong -resulting in the murder. The novel may remind you a bit of Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, without the preachy feminism and silly theaterics. Tartt wisely shows us little of the ritual, and does not tell us if anything supernatural occurred, leaving that to our own imagination and determination. Indeed, it is the gaps in this novel - the things that Tartt leaves to our imagination that haunt long after, and make the novel successful.
12. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The rare novel that has banned and censored by both whites and blacks. When it was first published, and in the 1950s and 1960s - it was banned by whites, describing it as offensive - due to the friendship between Huck and the escaped slave Jim. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was banned by blacks due to the depiction of Jim and the use of the word "nigger" in the novel.
The fact it has triggered emotions on both sides of the fence alone - shows how effective Twain was in describing his own era and delving inside the mindset of these people.
The story is told completely in first person, in slang, by Huck Finn. It is the words of a poor white boy who is riding the Mississippi with his friend, a runaway slave named Jim.
Through Huck's eyes we see the world of Post-Civil War Missouri, and delve into Huck's own mixed feelings about race. What he has been taught by his abusive father and those around him, and what he has seen. Jim has rescued Huck as much as Huck has rescued Jim. At the core of the tale is their friendship - that is the love story, and it is one that resonates long after the novel is over.
13. Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is the popular one and much as I adore it and Emma, I have a certain fondness for Persuasion - which is a tale about a woman who almost loses the love of her life in order to appease those around her. She listens to a beloved friend's advice, and over time must learn to shirk it, and listen to her own heart and mind instead. The book, much like Austen's other novels, is a deft satire of the manners/cultural mores of her day. And the theme is simple enough - do not blindly follow others advice, follow your own, they can't and don't live your life and besides they are self-interested, with their own agendas.
14. A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville
A fun little known novel by the writer of The Eight (which I didn't like as much). It's protagonist is a woman in her 30s, who is a virgin, successful, and wickedly smart. The romance is between her and an equally wickedly smart man. They have a battle of wits to see who can steal from the wicked corporation that framed her the fastest. It's sort of Leverage meets Mr. & Mrs. Smith - except no guns are involved only wits.
15. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
This book surprised me when I read it - since I had not expected to like it. It is rather good twist on an old old tale. The story of Cain and Able, yet mostly from Able's point of view. An "Able" who discovers over time that he has and is in danger of repeating his father's sins. If you loved the father/son issues in the Angel series - Steinbeck's version is the original take on it, and in my view a far more complex and textured one, sans the metaphors. It is also, at the same time, a story of California...and a family. Told in the form of a memoire, the narrator feels like Steinbeck himself...looking backward over his own bewildering family history. Yet it isn't one and therein lies it's beauty. No villians and no angels in this peice, just people. Flawed, damaged, people. The narrative dares us to judge them, and we do, we do, up until the end, where we find ourselves seeing it from their point of view. Skip the miniseries with Jane Seymore and Timothy Bottoms, Bruce Boxelietner,
and watch if you must the old James Dean version, but trust me when I tell you the book is so much more.
