Are you well read?

I saw this list over a Dead End Follies and Too Many Books, Too Little Time and thought I'd play along.  Supposedly the BBC put together a list of 100 books and claim that people will only have read 6 of these books on average.  I'll bold the books I've read, italicize the books I've read a part of.

I say "supposedly" because I noticed these 2 blogs have 2 different lists of books.  So I tried searching for the list the BBC put together.  And I can't find it.  I found a list of the top 100 nation's best beloved books but this didn't say anything about how only 6 of these books are read on average.

I then found the list Too Many Books was using over at LibraryThing, but again, nothing about the BBC or 6 reads.

Kristjan Wagner over at Pro-Science noticed the same thing I noticed, namely that this BBC list isn't around.

So from all I can see the BBC doesn't think people will only read 6 books on the list below, but I still want to see how many I've read so here we go.  I'm using the list off of LibraryThing only because that's the list I've seen repeated a couple times.  If someone can find an actual list by the BBC please let me know!

Let's see how I stack up:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien -- I read the first two books of the series but just couldn't make it through Return of the King. I tried but couldn't do it.

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- I've read a lot of Shakespeare but I can't say I've made it through all of the works (Timon of Athens, A Winter's Tale)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (at least twice)

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis -- So the Chronicles of Narnia was just mentioned at number 33.  Does this not count as part of it?

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 – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

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

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

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

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

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

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

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. 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

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery -- read it in English and French! Don't ask me to do that again, I don't remember enough French to do it.

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 -- This list is repetitive.  It already asked if I'd read the complete works.  Come on people!

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


I have 30 bolded and 7 italicized.  How do you stack up to this completely arbitrary list?

Update!  My good friend Paolo is far better at internet research than I (and probably doesn't give up after 5 whole minutes of looking) and found what looks to be the original list on the Guardian.  No mention of the BBC or 6 books but if you want to check it out, here you go! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news

You breached

Hope all that celebrate it had a happy Thanksgiving and if you had to travel there was minimal groping at the airport.  I was in the middle of nowhere the last few days which meant I had limited online access so I'm just catching up on everything now.  It was nice to unplug but my email and Google Reader are a bit daunting at the moment.  In between stuffing my face with far too much food and playing with my dad's terror of a dachshund Puccini (my grandmother likes Italian opera and my dad likes puns), I did manage to finish The City and The City.  


I was honestly let down by the book and I partially blame this on expectations set by a blurb* on the back of the book.  A blurb from The Times says: "The names Kafka and Orwell tend to be invoked too easily for anything a bit out of the ordinary, but in this case they are worthy comparisons."  I expected the dual cities to be explained and to offer some sort of social commentary for the modern world.  But that never happened.  The two cities make for an interesting setting but the story remains a fairly straightforward murder mystery.  Woman found murdered because she was getting too close to The Truth, detective has to discover The Truth to solve the mystery.  It's not a bad story or a bad mystery but that blurb made me expect so much more.

The mystery itself was interesting and I wasn't able to guess it before hand.  Of course I usually don't guess the outcome before hand so take that with a grain of salt.  Just because the book wasn't what I expected, the setting felt like more than just a gimmick.  The setting is integral to the mystery, I just wish the setting had been more important than the mystery.

I've sat here staring at this entry for awhile and I'm not sure what else to say about the book.  Give it a try, it was an interesting story but Kafka and Orwell it is not.

*Greg at The New Dork Review has a great post about the importance of blurbs so check it out if you get a chance.

Top Holiday Books...and Movies

The good people over at The Broke and the Bookish have asked us to name our top 10 holiday books.  Here's the thing, I don't really have holiday books and certainly not 10 of them.  I hardly ever make it to 10 on these lists anyway but I won't come close to naming 10 books.  But I still wanted to play so I'll include movies as well.  I still don't think I'll make it to 10, but I'll get closer.

First, the books 

1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  I got this book when I was little and I love it because it's so funny.  Yeah it has the schmaltzy story but if that's all I want there are thousands of versions of the story.  I like Dickens voice and tone and humor. 
 2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss.  I love Seuss and while this isn't my favorite of his books it's wonderful anyway.

Well, I exhausted my holiday books quickly.  I know there are others but they aren't ones I read as a matter of tradition and so they stay off the list.  So onto movies.

3. A Muppet Christmas Carol.  Like I just said, there are thousands of versions of A Christmas Carol out there but this one is the one I regularly watch.  Why?  Because it is almost exactly Dickens version of the story and quotes it directly over and over again.  Plus I love muppets.
4. Babes in Toyland.  For those that aren't familiar with this one, it's a Laurel and Hardy movie that was always on TV around the holidays.  I got excited the other day when I saw it'll be airing on Thanksgiving.  I should remember to set up the DVR for that, since I don't think I'll be able to talk others into watching it.
5. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I don't really branch out much with my movies but I love Seuss and this one has singing by Tony the Tiger!  What's not to love?

OK, so that's actually the end of my regular books and movies.  I guess we don't have a lot of regular traditions.  For Thanksgiving we usually watch a movie but it depends on what's on TV.  There's usually a Bond marathon going on so we'll catch part of that.  Last year we all watched Die Hard and I wouldn't mind if that ended up a tradition.  After I told my dad about my Halloween he asked me to bring Rocky Horror with me this year so maybe that will end up a regular thing because nothing says family gatherings and giving thanks like a group of singing alien transvestites. 

What are your favorite holiday books, movies, TV shows, whatever?

Update! While I looked through other people's lists I remembered on more movie/TV show I love around the holidays.  The Rankin and Bass TV movie The Year Without Santa Claus.  I love the Heat Miser and Snow Miser songs. I like the other Rankin and Bass movies but this is my favorite, followed in close second by the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie because of the Island of the Misfit Toys and the Abominable Snowman.  

Dopplurbanology

I've clearly fallen down on getting posts up and my reason is no better than the book I'm reading, The City & The City by China Mieville, is difficult to get into. For the first part of the book I haven't really had too much to say.  It's not that it's uninteresting, it's just difficult for me to give all of my attention to it because it's difficult to really grasp the world the story takes place in.  I still have more than half the book to get through but I want to try to explain the setting and try to work out whether the setting is helping or hurting the story.

The story is a fairly typical crime story: a woman's body is found and Inspector Borlu has to solve the murder.  But the setting is what makes the story something more.  The woman's body is found in Beszel but she was most recently working and living in Ul Qoma.  These two cities actually exist in the same physical location but due to a schism that has yet to be explained, the two places don't interact.  Not only do they not interact, they're not allowed to interact.  Even if your neighbor's house is an arm's length away from you, if your neighbor lives in Ul Qoma and you live in Beszel you have to "unsee" their house.  If you failed to unsee, you will have breached, which means a committee that is above the laws of either Beszel or Ul Qoma will come and deal with you and you will not be heard from again.  Here's Borlu explaining some of the (very little) leniency with Breach.

"If I or one of my friends were to have a moments failure of unseeing (and who did not do that?  who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger.  If you were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken." (64)

The two cities inhabit the same physical space but they must live in different worlds.  The people do acknowledge that the places are sharing the same space but to claim that the two cities are one in the same is blasphemy.  The citizens have a word for same physical space but vastly different places: grosstopical. 

These two cities don't exist on some foreign land or even distance future where all countries are like this.  The girl that was found murdered is from the US, studying in Canada and attending her universities campus within Ul Qoma to work on her archaeology PhD.  They don't go into much detail about how other countries view the cities unique position but, from the standpoint of the locals, it is certainly tolerated.  The girl and others who wish to visit either Beszel or Ul Qoma must take a 2 week long intensive course so they can learn to unsee the other city-state before they are issued a visa.    Tourists have to learn to not only unsee foreign buildings that are right in front of them, but also unsee foreign people who are sharing the same sidewalk as them.  You cannot notice them but you also can't walk through people as if they aren't there.  You have to avoid them without noticing them or be guilty of Breach. (If you notice them, Breach!  If you do such a good job of not seeing them that you run into them, Breach!)  Borlu describes an incident from his childhood, when Breach showed up after an Ul Qoma van skidded on Ul Qoma streets and hit a Beszel vehicle.

In seconds, the Breach came.  Shapes, figures, some of whom perhaps had been there but who nonetheless seemed to coalesce from spaces between the smoke of the accident, moving too fast it seemed to be clearly seen, moving with authority and power so absolute that within seconds they can controlled, contained the area of intrusion. (81)

It takes a little while to learn all of the rules for the cities.  At no point does the narrator give all of the information to the reader.  You get clues that something isn't quite right for awhile until finally the details fall into place.  The problem with this is I had trouble focusing on the text, which was very clearly avoiding  the details.  In World War Z the reader doesn't get all of the details because it's clear that everyone is already familiar with the details and this style works.  You're given enough to follow what's going on while enough is held back that it a) feels real and b) lets you fill in some of the details yourself to make it even scarier.  The City & The City isn't a horror story so there is no reason for the reader to fill in the unknowns to make it scarier and the missing details are confusing.  My friend that recommended the book to me had tried to explain the dopplurbanology (as it is called in the book) but it is hard to explain.  I'm not sure if already having an idea about the 2 cities made the beginning more confusing or not but now that more of the rules are explained the narrative flows better.

As it stands I am more interested in the 2 cities than I am in the murder, now that I have more information and can follow the setting better.  So far the cities have served only as an interesting setting but I'm hoping the schism will be examined and will end up being more than just a trick.

Title quote from page 113

Top Ten Villains, Criminals and Degenerates

Another Tuesday, another Top Ten hosted by the good folks at The Broke and the Bookish.  This week's topic is the top ten villains, criminals and degenerates.  The villains are usually more interesting than the heroes so I'm hoping to make it to 10.  Let's see...

1. Acheron Hades from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde Acheron is the primary villain of The Eyre Affair, the first book in the Thursday Next series.  He can "lie in thought, deed, action, and appearance", is incredibly strong and more than anything else, he is incredibly intelligent and completely immoral.  His only purpose is to be evil, "committing loathsome and detestable acts...purely for their own sake". What more can you ask for in a villain?
2. Aornis Hades from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde Aornis is Acheron's little sister.  She may not have all of Acheron's powers but she has her own tricks up her sleeve and she's just as evil.  She is a mnemonomorph (trying saying that three times fast.  Or, you know, once.  I can't.) meaning she can alter memories.  She is not quite as intelligent as her brother but she is by no means dumb and she causes plenty of damage.
3. Iago from Shakespeare's Othello I love Shakespeare and Iago is one of my favorite characters.  He embodies the Machiavellian archetype; he uses what's around him, can think on his feet and is extremely smart and manipulative.  He doesn't seem to have a motive.  Sometimes he says he hates Othello because he promoted Cassio over him.  Other times he claims Othello slept with his wife Emilia.  Then other times he says he's in love with Desdemona and I've read read interpretations where he was actually in love with Othello.  He is remorseless and refuses to explain his actions.
4. The zombies in World War Z by Max Brooks These guys go a different route from the other 3 I've mentioned: they aren't intelligent, they don't really have any special "powers" (unless you consider being able to exist in general a power) and they aren't even evil.  But I just finished reading World War Z and I don't want to go up against them. I won't make it.
5. Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris Back to the crazy smart villains! Crazy smart and crazy, smart describe Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter. Harris gets you to root for him without ever really trying to make you sympathize with him.  And Hannibal is a scarier villain than Buffalo Bill, who is making a lady suit out of real lady skins.  The fact that he can outshine that says more than I could describe.
6. Annie Wilkes from Misery by Stephen King Oh Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon's number one fan. She has so much power over Paul and very little grasp of reality, a dangerous combination. And she's pretty good at wielding that electric knife...
7. Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling There are lots of villains in the HP universe but Umbridge is the one I hate the most.  Her punishments are sadistic and every time she did her little passive aggressive cough thing I wanted someone to punch her.  I know that wouldn't have actually fit in the story, it just would have been nice.  
8. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis Considering how often I've said how much I dislike this book, I seem to talk about it a lot.  Bateman is a sociopath who engages in "murder, rape, cannibalism, torture, necrophilia and other wholesome activities."  He describes his horrendous acts in the same tone he describes the outfit of every single person around him (I hated when he went to parties) or detailing the history of the band Genesis.  The movie is great though, especially the business card scene.  

Well I made it to 8.  That's not so bad.  What are some of your top villains?

Temporary re-reading hiatus

I re-read books a lot.  It comes down to a couple reasons.  One of the top ones is that I'm cheap.  The library is an option I suppose, but it's not one I usually use.  I prefer to have my own copies.  I don't write in them, which would be a reasonable excuse for wanting my own copies.  I just like having my own.  Logic doesn't always come into play with my reasons.

I also like re-reading because I like the books I'm reading again.  If I like a movie, I can watch it over and over again (see: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Dogma, Zombieland).  Books are the same way for me.  Some are short and sweet stories that I use as a literary palate cleanser, like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).  I know that play well enough I can mostly recite it.  I know there are a lot of books out there but I am hardly planning on reading everything out there so I may as well enjoy what I am reading.

And then of course there are books I read awhile ago that I liked and want to talk about on this blog.  World War Z falls into that category.  I don't know what I would have re-read it quite so quickly if I didn't have this blog but I wanted to write about it, so I re-read it.

Both Brother and Friend have lent me a few books, so I will be reading some all new stuff.  In addition to World War Z, Brother lent me Doctor No by Ian Flemming.  I've mentioned Brother isn't a big reader, but he is a Bond fan and he enjoyed this one so I thought I'd check it out.  Then Friend sent a package, c/o Agent Thursday Next (my friend and I are geeky), containing a copy of Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut I'd lent him a while back as well as 2 new (to me) books: The City & The City by China Mieville and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

The Mieville book is actually another Friend's book, he who recommended Kitchen Confidential to me.  A while back we were sitting at dinner and he was telling me about this amazing book and how it's kind of odd and I had to check it out because odd is kind of up my alley.  I was going to take it home with me and I, of course, forgot because I have the same memory as a goldfish.  My forgetfulness was in my other friend's favor, as he got to borrow the book first.  He also said it was a good read so I'm looking forward to it.

The Pessl book makes me a bit nervous, because "physics" is in the title.  I know some people find physics amazingly interesting, like my friend who had an except from a Richard Feynman lecture read at her wedding.  I am not part of that group.  I also know (hope!) this isn't actually about straight physics.  I trust my friend wouldn't steer me wrong.

So that's on my book reading schedule.  Of course I tend to pick what book I'll read next by my mood, so all "upcoming reads" items are subject to change at a moments notice.  And of course I have a Bryson re-read thrown in there as well.  Just can't get away, what can I say.