10 Books I think should be on any Top 100

That “100 Novels Everyone Should Read” list got in my head a little bit. Not in a bad way — I’m not worried about my lack of numbers on the list — it got me thinking about the criteria for making such a list. The Telegraph list that I linked to the other day doesn’t give any reasons for the books on the list, or reasons for the existence of the list. That has lots of people around the blog-o-sphere scratching their heads. Search on 100 novels everyone should read and check out the posts!

Back to my thinking about the list. I decided that a book should be read by lots of people if it gets in my head and resonates in my imagination, if I remember it without difficulty long after I’ve finished it, and if it calls me back for a re-read now and again. With those criteria in mind, here is a list of 10 books that meet them, from my reading experience. After 1 and 2, these are in no particular order.

1. Possession by A.S. Byatt. Are you surprised? If so, read this. I think about this book a lot because I do research on 19th-century writers. The book is about academics who read and research 19th-century poets. It resonates. It is also well-written (won the Booker Prize), has loads of layers, and plays on the title word. Byatt is brilliant.

2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. This book hits most top 100 lists. It is a well-told tale that withstands re-reading. It can be an acquired taste, but once the taste is acquired, it is an addiction.

3. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. What? by Who? I hear you saying. Seriously, this Stephenson book has been in my head since I first read it. It is a cyberpunk novel, the first one I read. Mind-blowing experience.

4. Tigana by Guy Gavrel Kay. I’ve talked about Tigana before I think — it is an historical fantasy that deals with memory and the loss of memory/history and so the loss of identity for a people. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I read it.

5. Runaway Jury by John Grisham. Really? A Grisham book? This one I liked because of the moral ambiguity in the characters, and the means-end conflict. The setting also spins around in my head, along with the way the characters hide and re-make themselves.

6. Snow by Orhan Pamuk. (No more titles with snow in them, promise.) The structure of the story and the poetry of language in this one blew me away.

7. Room by Emma Donoghue. How does this one not get in your head with the five-year-old narrator who has never been outside the room of the title?

8. Mystical Paths by Susan Howatch. Ok, all of Howatch’s Church of England books get in my head, but this one sticks out to me. All about spiritual gifts and their use and abuse, clearly a theological connection.

9. Children of Men by P.D. James. The mystery books are good, but this one is great. James portrays humanity on the brink of extinction very vividly. There are clear theological overtones in this book too.

10. Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher. I hesitated over this one, but it meets the criteria. The theme given in the title echoes through the book in lots of ways. This one sticks in my head.

You are not me. What are your top ten books that meet the criteria listed? Remember the criteria are: the book resonates in your imagination, you remember the story long after you are done, you want to re-read the book. Top ten. Or five even. With all of us together, maybe we can collaborate on a new top 100 list!

The Book is Better than the Movie

In my last post I said that Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt is the best book I’ve ever read. What made me pick up Possession in the first place? you might ask. I’m glad you asked. Let me tell you. I watched the movie.

In 2002, Possession was made into a movie staring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. I heard about the movie and thought it sounded interesting because of the connection of the present and the past. Time travel has long been an interest of mine, and it seemed like this movie might go there, but it wasn’t clear from the trailers. It turns out there was no time travel in the conventional H.G. Wells sense in the movie. The time travel happened through documents long hidden that revealed a mysterious past. I quite enjoyed the movie (on video) and noticed it was adapted from a book. The same evening I watched the movie, I looked up the book in the U of T library system and the next day checked it out.

The book is so much better than the movie. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is quite good, it is very enjoyable. There isn’t anything wrong with the movie. It is a good adaptation of the book. The book is just better. The book contains so much detail, it develops the characters, it contains so many things that cannot be captured on screen. For example, Byatt is a ventriloquist of extraordinary range, but this is only evident in the book. Two of the fictional characters are poets with a large – and of course fictional – body of work. How do you quote a fictional poet? You make up his or her poems. And short stories. And letters.

The book is just so good I cannot say anything else other than go read it. It did win the Booker Prize in 1990, so there are a few people other than me who think it is worth reading.

Really, I’m done talking about Possession now.

Best Book Ever

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt is the best book I’ve ever read.

Why? you may legitimately ask. Where to start? I’ll start with it is a great story. It has interesting characters, hidden mysteries from the past, a grave-robbing episode, and romance. What more could you want? Oh, you might want some great writing. Yes, it has that too. The writing is so good that you cannot possibly read this book only once and see all its nuances. This book compels what C.S. Lewis would call good reading (see his Experiment in Criticism).

I could go on and on about this great book, and I’ll probably go on in another post or two. To start, let me tell you what the sub-title means. A.S. Byatt uses a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables as an epigraph to Possession. The Hawthorne quote contrasts a romance with a novel, claiming that a novel aims at narrating “the probable and ordinary course” of human experience, while a romance “presents truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” The Hawthorne quote ends, appropriately, with a sentence that describes Possession. “The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.”

Possession connects the past with the present. Its two main characters are academic researchers who study writers of the nineteenth century. I first read Possession while writing my doctoral dissertation on a woman who wrote between 1789 and 1810. The connection of the past and present was part of what I was trying to do. This was clearly a book that related to my life. But I’m not convinced I’d like the book less if I’d never studied Sarah Trimmer. I’d like it differently.