Between The Stacks: October 2003

I had quite a few favourites in the top twenty so these are a few other ones in no particular order:

1. The Colour Purple/Alice Walker - read this years ago, yet still resonates. Sad and moving, made me appreciate my life.

2. A Gesture Life/Chang-Rae Lee - beautifully written, absorbing tale.

3. The Prophet/Kalil Gibran - thought provoking and wise.

4. The Road to Wigan Pier/George Orwell - Great descriptions of mining (doesn't sound exciting I guess) but a well written docu type book about those times.

5. The Wind in the Willows/Grahame Greene - I enjoy this even more as an adult!

6. Make your Mind Like and Ocean/Lama Yeshe - sensible stuff, lucidly written by a renowned buddist teacher.

7. Wuthering Heights/Emily Bronte - made me realise not everyone can be a great novelist!

8. A child called It/David Pelger - unbelievable what happens to this guy and how he manages to survive never mind write a book.

9.The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - v.funny tale.

10. Leaves of Grass/Walt Whitman - O captain, my captain! Some of the poetry is inspirational.

I think this has been a really stimulating forum topic Fiona. Contributors have sent in such a range of ideas, and their enthusiasm has given me ideas for future reading.

My choice would also take me through various stages of my life, but would all be books which I could read again today.

1. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier - I first read this when I was about 8, and identified very strongly with the hero, Jan, who was a refugee in the aftermath of World War 11

2. The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett - a real revelation at the time (I think I was 9), since at that time most children's stories were about families who had servants and where the children had ponies and went to boarding school. This, on the other hand, dealt with the doings of a working class Cockney family and was very funny.

3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - very much the architypal coming of age novel, but it seemed to speak the language late adolescence perfectly. Later, when I could no longer identify with Holden, I just wanted to mother him!

4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - I first read this for 'O' level and it made a terrific impact on my, because of the sheer brilliance of the writing and the insight into the human mind. I have loved Joyce's work ever since.

5 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - which helped by define what sort of person I wanted to be. Not Emma Bovary, for sure!

6. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy - inspirational, almost unbearably tragic, but brilliantly written.

7. Chateau de ma mere/Gloire de mon pere by Marcel Pagnol - this was when I really fell in love with the French language, but the stories are wonderful, humorous and human and worth reading in any language!

8. Memoirs of a dutiful daughter by Simone de Beauvoir - in the spirit of the Big Read, I have mostly stuck to fiction (although the Pagnol books are largely autobiographical), but I couldn't leave this one out. It was the book which inspired me to continue with my education, and to sign up with the OU (back in 1971).

9. The Rabbit books by John Updike - this is cheating a little bit, because this is four books, but he has encapsulated the spirit of our times better than any contemporary author that I know. Quite simply, he has written about my lifetime.

10. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - a wonderful, rich, exotic and poetic romp through places quite unknown to me and I love it for that reason - because it takes me beyond my own experience.

Firstly, as a newcomer, can I say I wish I'd discovered this message board earlier!
I've chosen my top 10 books as being representative of different stages of my like & have put them roughly in the chronological order I read them, as far as I can remember.
Winnie the Pooh - I loved all the books and read them to my little brother & then to my sons.
Five children & It - E. Nesbit - or any of her books.
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett - I still love a book that makes you cry.
Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee - one of the first adult books I read.
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene. Again one of many of his I could have chosen.
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy. I later saw the film & fell in love with Terence Stamp.
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy. I read a lot of Russian novels at that time (in English!) most of which have become a blur, but this one remains.
The Barchester Chronicles - Trollope. I had got out of the habit of reading in my early 20s & these got me back in.
Babel Tower - A.S.Byatt. Her books contain so much of interest - psychology, linguistics, literary discussion- as well as a brilliant story.
What to choose for my current favourite book? I'll cheat & mention a few: The Little Friend- Donna Tartt (I preferred it to The Secret History), A Man in Full - Tom Wolfe, Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood (yet again one of many I could have chosen), Brazzaville Beach- William Boyd, The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen.
Ok, that's enough for now.

Wow! how can you narrow it down to ten. I'd need a lot more than that!

As a child I loved the Swallows and Amazons series - read every one of them over and over. And Jennings and William and Billy Bunter. Those were the days when I would cadge every library ticket in the house, walk a mile and a half to the library on Saturday morning and stagger back with twenty books, which would all have been read by Monday morning!

I would have to have Richard II in my list. If you've never read/seen this then give it a try. Treachery, greed, murder and love all rolled into one glorious play (oh and some comedy as well, just in case the other topics aren't of interest...)

I've always found Dickens quite hard going, personally. Don't know why, as I have read a lot of Hardy, George Elliot and Conrad. I would say my favourite period would be 1880 - 1950 - what a fantastic crop of writers! Conrad, Kipling, Wells, Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Stephen Crane Henry James Hardy and so many others

Hi everyone, mine would have to be, in no particular order:

1. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) - The painful realism of how we all need structure
2. 1984 (George Orwell) - The painful realism of when structure goes wrong
3. Brighton Rock (Graham Greene) - One of the most powerful endings I have ever read
4. American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis) - A startling realisation of what is wrong in society
5. Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis) - Possibly the funniest novel ever written
6. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) - A book decades ahead of its time
7. A confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) - A hilarious novel, vastly underrated
8. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) - Absolutely stunning use of language and imagery
9. The Cathcer in the Rye (J D Salinger) - Deceptively simple
10. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess) - Powerful use of language and an extremely though-provoking read

My top ten books but in no particular order...right here goes...and I'm fickle I could probably write a different list every week I've read too many brilliant books but these probably gave me what I needed at the time!

Testament of Youth- Vera Brittain Just opened my eyes to exactly how traumatic WW1 was for that generation.It stayed with me for ages afterwards
Our Mutual Friend - Dickens, did this for A level and the teacher staggered in with this huge pile of huge books and as we groaned and moaned endlessly, she then said right go away and read the first 3 chapters and on no condition go any further by next lesson.....needless to say none of us could put it down!
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd magical book
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall- Smith, this whole series is a joy to read
Lake Wobegon - Garrison Keillor - just makes me laugh aloud then I read out a passage to someone and it doesn't sound in the least bit funny
Skallagrigg- William Horwood, to date the only book that has actually made me spontaneously burst into floods of tears on p622!
The Victorian Chaise-LongueMarghanita Laski - a superbly sinister macabre little book that leaves you shivering and slightly wary of chaise longues!
An Equal Music - Vikram Seth One of the few books I've read twice and superb with the CD of the music playing alongside
Middlemarch- George Eliot I know everyone groans and finds this pretentious when someone adds it to their fave list and I only read it because I had to study it and I hated it to start with but eventually I came to realise just how clever GE was and I ended up loving it.
Northern Lights - Philip Pullman, hype means a book has to work very hard indeed to meet with my approval, I can't argue with the rest of the world this is brilliant stuff

So, it seems only fair that I should offer up my top ten novels, too - though, as other people have observed, it's not an easy thing to do. But, for what it's worth, and in no particular order:

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson. I'd probably sell my soul to write like Winterson, to just have the confidence with handling of the language that she shows. And narrowing it down to just one book of hers is almost impossible, but this is the closest to perfection.

The Secret History - Donna Tarrt. Once described to me disdainfully as being "a little like a Famous Five book for grown ups, isn't it?" - which, on reflection, it may well be; perhaps the very reason why I love it. And it ends, too, which The Little Friend never quite managed to do. A large number of people I know seem to love this book, but nearly everyone seems to think it's about something different - murder, or alienation, or the loss of childhood…

Love and Rockets - Los Bros Hernandez. Is it cheating to pick a graphic novel? In terms of characterisation, plot and scope, any of the books in the Big Read Top 100 would be given a run for their money by the brother's fictionalised worlds where the fantastic sits alongside the everyday and you sometimes have to wait the best part of a decade for a pay-off. The story arc of Maggie and Hopey is proving virtually impossible for Hollywood to boil down into a treatment, which is as it should be. Sometimes, stories are born in one medium for a reason.

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Attwood. Bought on the spur of the moment in a Newcastle WH Smiths after reading Attwood's description of how she was inspired in its writing by 1984; probably one of my better sudden urges. I'm fond of a good dystopia, and Attwood's tale of how a new American regime perverts Biblical teachings to create a class of women valued solely for their fertility - and one woman's attempts to survive her Handmaid status is compelling.

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis. Roundly condemned, mostly by people who hadn't read it, certainly unpleasant at times (the chapters eulogising Huey Lewis And The News albums, for example, are difficult to stomach) but worth persevering with for the sudden rush of realisation two thirds of the way in about what the story really is.

Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe. (There seems to actually be a theme developing to my choices of 'books which were made into lousy, lousy movies) The closest thing to Dickens in the second half of the Twentieth Century, serialised in a magazine the same way David Copperfield would have been, and with a narrative that pleasingly sees a vast cast of characters interact without becoming soap-opera entwined. It manages to be a love letter to a city while shuddering at what goes on there, and probably has the most perfect evocation of place I've come across in any novel.

The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham. It's hard to choose a single novel by Wyndham; Midwich is perhaps the most unsettling because the human-like nature of the supernatural threat - telepathic 'children' impregnated in all the women in a village - raises stark ethical and moral questions at the same time as giving you the creeps.

No Highway - Nevil Shute. Again, it's a tricky toss-up between this book and On The Beach, Shute's tale of Australians awaiting the inevitable move southwards of the post-nuke radiation that will eventually kill them; No Highway wins out because Shute's writing what he knows, and it shows - about aeroplanes and loneliness and feeling like an outsider, as the central character struggles to raise his daughter and get his employers to take seriously his warnings of a serious design flaw in a passenger jet. (For the record, the film version of this was quite good, but you can't go wrong with Jimmy Stewart)

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby. When he published Fever Pitch, I couldn't quite work out how Hornby had managed to describe how I felt about certain bands, only about a football team. Then he followed it up with this novel, and it all became clear - you too, eh, Nick? The listing of rules for making compilation tapes and the scene where he finds out his ex-girlfriend's dad has died are two of the sharpest pieces of writing in the book, but there are many more.

For The Good of the Cause - Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Another little cheat, as this isn't quite a novel, but is a bit more than a short story. The battle between innate human optimism and the ease with which power corrupts played out as the students college in the Soviet Union build themselves a new block, only to have it taken off them by the local Party - "for the good of the cause" - it was a novella which came to make more and more sense to me when I found myself working in a company with a similar mindset a few years back.

just thought of a book that i hated but could not put down J G Ballard's Concrete Island.

barren, stark, dry, suffocating, infuriating and compelling

I'm not sure I would pick Colour of Magic, though

Oh, it's not my favourite, by a long chalk, just the first one I read. It's the first in the Discworld series, and I read it when it was first published. I'm that old!

Louise (managed to log in this time!)

How could I forget Tom Robbins? (Easily: I have a gift for forgetting names; it's called nominal dysphasia.) Still life with woodpecker, Fierce invalids home from hot climates, Skinny legs and all ... as weird as they come, but unputdownable!

Anything illustrated by Shirley Hughes must be worth reading; and with name like "Bogwoppit", I'd have to pick it up regardless. Shame my kids are grown up -- I've no excuse to spend any time in the children's section at the library!

I read no end of science fiction (SF, not Sci-Fi!) in my younger days, but I'm a bit of a purist about "real" science. I don't think Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, James Blish (especially!) will be appearing on my re-reading list; and Ian Banks (with or without the "M") is just plain nasty. John Wyndham is definitely on the list, excet for his very early work, which is abysmal; must have ben before he sold his soul ... Terry Pratchett somehow rises above the dreary mediaevalism of the sword-and-sorcery genre, probably because he doesn't take himself seriously.

Cider with Rosie was the first in a trilogy -- do read the others!

I read Thackeray's Vanity Fair recently. It's wonderful! he's stood in Dickens' shadow far too long, in my opinion.

I could go on forever (I think I'm well on the way!), but I'd better let someone else get a word in edgeways.

Like others here, I find it's hard to pick out just ten books. I've tried to think of books that have haunted me, although often I'm not sure why...

Bogwoppit by Ursula Moray Williams. Always identified with the grumpy little creatures, even as a child. The illustrations by Shirley Hughes played an important part in that, though.

Dune by Frank Herbert. The first time I found a whole universe laid out before me. I couldn't believe it all came from just one person's mind. After I read Dune I thought no universe could ever be as satisfyingly separate and complete, until many years later I came to...

Excession by Iain M. Banks. Generated in me the same sense of wonder.

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee. I read this at school, but have gone back to it ever after for the beautiful poetry of Lee's writing.

Possession by A.S. Byatt because the breadth and depth of the author's knowledge, her sheer intelligence, inspired me to lift my head up and look around, and eventually to study with the Open University!

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Because I think for a lot of people, finding the Discworld is like coming home.

Pollen by Jeff Noon. Back to the language and imagery theme here, I suppose. I think the writing in Pollen comes the closest I've ever found to echoing what dreaming is like. My dreams, anyway.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. This book just has a lovely feel to it. The unresolved puzzle haunts me. I re-read it when I'm nightshift, it seems to go perfectly with the peaceful darkness, the sound of patients sleeping.

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins. I had never read anything like this when I first came across it. It had never occurred to me that an author could interfere, be opinionated, more or less be a character, in his novel. And I couldn't believe that a girl with huge thumbs could be a credible thing to write about, and not annoyingly unreal. So this one expanded my horizons a bit! and stands up to repeated readings, which is, I suppose, the basis for this list.

The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. I had tended to gravitate towards more complex books, and this reminded me that simple storytelling could be wonderful.

I am always interested in finding new authors to read, so if anyone reading this can recommend a book they think I might like, I would love to hear from you. Of course, to really get a feel for a person's preferences, we would need to include our Bottom 10 Books We Most Hated!

Louise.

Just re-read Fiona's original post, and she says What are the top 10 books that changed your life? When did you read them and why did they have such significance?

Well, way back in nineteen-fifty-how's-your-father, I'd just started school. I could read a litle bit already, but they gave us all a reading book: Janet and John, brand-spanking-new, hot off the press, smelling of that wonderful new-book smell that almost hurts your nose, with enormous crisp lettering, lots of white space, illustrations; and all set in a strange alternative universe not unlike the one Agatha Christy wrote about. That was it for me -- I was hooked, and I've never stoped reading since.

I've long since discovered the joys of second-hand books, of course; but there's nothing to beat the sheer thrill, the exhilaration, of opening a brand-new book for the very first time.

Sirs,
the best book I have ever read is One Fish,Two Fish,Red Fish,Blue Fish by Dr Seuess. A life changer for sure.
Regards,
Mark Keogh,
British Mens National Ice Ball Manager.

Well said, Simon! Okay ...

Patrick O'Brian's A&M stories, as I mentioned earlier;
Colin Dexter's Morse books (what else has he written? Must find out)
Reginald Hill's Dalziel & Pascoe books (Joe Sixmith comes further down the list)
Michael Dibdin's ... well, anything I've read so far
Anything by E Nesbit and most things by France Hodgson Burnett
Everything by E M Forster (only six novels)
J K Jerome's Three men in a boat (for a quiet weekend in Upton-on-Severn) and
Idle thoughts of an idle fellow for odd quiet moments at other times

Tomorrow's list wil be different..!

I see Orwell's 1984 is mentioned up there. I read it when I was 14, a long time ago; then years later I heard someone on the radio say it was a black comedy, so I read it again ... and it was! And bear in mind it was originally titled "1948", till the publisher persuaded him to change it. Read it again in this light: I promise you'll see it very differently!

After you've done that, get hold of a copy of 1985 by Anthony Burgess (Arrow, 1978). The first part is an excellent critique, and the second a very different take on the story.

Speaking as a horny-handed Son of Toil myself (well, all right: but my father was) Orwell was a bit of a snob, and it shows in his work. Doesn't stop me enjoying it, though!

K

Hmm... bit of a problem: it would have to include all the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian for starters, and there are twenty of them!

I don't want to come across a miserable old so-and-so, but I've always felt lists are for adolescent girls to write on their pencil cases. (I know whereof I speak: I had one fairly recently; she's 19 now.) If I were given to lists, there would have to be two or three: those I shall read (yet) again and those I shan't; and maybe the maybes. I might manage a top ten of authors, but only because I'm very bad at remembering names!

When I was at school, I never did the "set book" thing properly; if I enjoyed the book, I'd read everything else I could lay my hands on by the same author. I expect that's why I only got a grade 3 at Eng Lit 'O' level ...

K

The big read is excellent, the one thing that intrigues me is the title - The top 100. The top 100 – what – of all time. But hold on, aren’t some of the books/authors transitory. To make my point: - try to Compile, say, the 1983 top 100 list by taking out the books in the present top 100 written between 1983 and now and fill the gaps with 1983’s and before. Similarly, and obviously this is impossible, compile the 2023 top 100, some new will have to added and some of the present top 100 removed. Interestingly which do you think will be removed and why?
Any of these in the top 20?

My favourite book is D.H. Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers'. We read it for 'A' level and it felt almost as though the writer had put down on paper the story of my family. My mam read it too, and she felt the same. At the time Glenda Jackson was interviewed on Parkinson, and said that everyone goes through a Lawrence phase then they grow out of it! This sounded so condescending that I nearly threw something at the telly. Perhaps it made me all the fonder of the book. It was a shame there were no Lawrence books in the final Big Read 100. (No Woolf either, by the way).
Another fave is Olive Schreiner's 'The Story of an African Farm', which literally did change my life.....
I like A.S. Byatt's 'Possession' - the ending is exquisite and sometimes I read the last bit on its own, just for the sheer pleasure of it.
Rose Tremain's 'Music and Silence' is wonderful. it manages to be both funny and moving.
I am also a big fan of John Steinbeck, and would put both 'East of Eden' and 'The Grapes of Wrath' in my top ten.
Recently I've been reading 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver - about a family of missionaries in the Congo. The story is narrated by the mother and each of her four daughters, so there are lots of different 'voices'. It has proved to be a very popular book in reading groups.
Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy' is a great read - plus you can feel really smug afterwards for lasting out for so many pages!
'To Kill a Mockingbird' would be near the top of my list if I ranked the books. Harper Lee only wrote one novel, but how could she have followed this?
I think I would include 'Middlemarch' in my top ten. George Eliot made such a huge contribution to the novel, and to women's writing, and some of the passages are very moving.

Navigation through unfamiliar grounds without the need for a guide is overtly intresting; moreso where the fear of getting lost and most of all, fear of being exploited by locals, is made by one way or the other impossible.
Navigation and tracking at sometime in the past was possible through the use of constellations and land marks but in todays world the need to carry large sized maps is fast disappearing thanks to technology.
Even technology itself is advancing and shrinking the size of equipments for convinience on a daily basis.
This technology has in recent times been merged with means of navigation and tracking, thanks to GIS, hence PDAs are seeing the inclusion of GI OS in their frameowrk.
Based on this and also that I'm seeking to write a dissertaion in this area, I would appreciate people with similar ideas communicating in a bid to build a vast resource of information in this area in our little community here.

Are you enjoying The Big Read? What are your thoughts on the books featured on the programme? Do you agree with the celebrity reviewers?
Let us know what you think!

My top 10-ish as follows! in no particular order and some of them are short stories rather than novels. I like the short story writers ability to get so much in to so little...so many people and books waffle on for too long!

1-Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - The langugage is beautiful, the story epic
2-His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman - So good to have a different moral centre
3-Faith of our fathers - Philip K Dick
4-Life after God - Douglas Coupland - I actually cried when I finished it
5-Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - A Classic. What girl doesn't want Lizzies brains and spirit never mind Mr Darcy
6-Bleak House - Dickens - OK pretty much any Dickens really, but the whole "The lawyers always win" moral appeals to the cynic in me...
7-Miss Smilas Feeling for Snow - Peter something or other - I also like Borderliners
8-The turn of the screw - Henry James - ARGH too scarey. I always jump when I read it.
9-Linden HIlls or anything by - Gloria Naylor - brilliant and passionate. Discovered during a module of African-American Literature whilst at Uni. Such a relief to get away from the 19th century corsets that make up the usual Literary Canon.

urm that's it for now, I always change my mind about my favourite novels plus there are a good few inspiring non-fiction ones that I like more... anything by William Dalrymple for example.

can't say any of these books changed my life but can say they were a great way to escape:

* their eyes were watching god - zora neale hurston. the story is great but it is the language which i am drawn to time and again.

* the hand i fan with - Tina McElroy Ansa. great love story

* twelve - Nick Mcdonnell great first novel about drugs, moneyed youth, the not so moneyed and alienation

*the picnic - can't remember the author but i read this as a child over and over it was a great comforter

* the curious incident of the dog in the night time - Mark Haddon. the central character who is diagnosed with asperger's syndrome reminded me of someone dear to my heart.

*the colour purple - Alice Walker. again a story of survival and self determination. if you've only seen the film you are in for a treat.

*the remains of the day - Kazuo Ishiguro. transplanted me in a world of restraint and unfulfilled desire i was deeply moved.

*tess of the d'urbervilles - Thomas Hardy sent a chill to my bones

* i'm loving Philip Pullman's tilogy at the mo

*jane eyre- charlotte bronte. engrossing.

books that helped to change my thinking
Alice Walker Living by the Word
Anything by Maya Angelou
Anything by bell hooks
Germaine Greer the whole woman