Ideal Bookshelf part 2

I said that I’d come back to the idea of an ideal bookshelf later in the week after I thought a little. I’ve thought some. If this is a bookshelf for me in the Swan station, I’m allowed 10 books, because according to all the LOST lists, there are ten books on the Swan shelf in the LOST show. I’ve already chosen two books, Possession and an unspecified reference work. Let me specify the reference work: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought edited by Alistair E. McGrath. To these let me add the following:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible (4th Ed’n) hardcover, NRSV with Apocrypha. This and the theological reference listed above are for the theologian in me.

A single volume translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante, I’d like the Sayers translation but am not sure if that comes in a single volume or not. This is on my to be read list, and there’s nothing like a desert island to get you to read Dante, right?

Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James. There is no point to bringing mysteries to the Island, I might as well bring Baroness James’s thoughts on writing mysteries and attempt to write my own.

I’m still working on the final five (no Battlestar Galactica reference intended). Stay tuned.

Movies before Books?

Sometimes a movie points me to a book. On the weekend I watched “The Hours” which I quite enjoyed. I know the movie is based on a book (The Hours by Michael Cunningham) which is based on a book (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf). So many layers. Anyhow, I’ve read neither The Hours, nor Mrs. Dalloway, but now I’m much more likely to read both. I watched “Possession” before even realizing there was a book called Possession by A.S. Byatt, and now I think that is the Best Book Ever. The BBC serial adaptation of Pride and Prejudice helped me re-read the book by Jane Austen which I’d initially thought tedious. That book gets better every time I read it.

Which movies enhance your enjoyment of books or introduced you to books?

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!

What to Read Next? I is for Internet

Today’s post, brought to you by the letter

is all about finding books on the Internet — because I is for Internet.

Obviously, I write this blog about books thinking that people might find it helpful in figuring out what to read next, and this blog is on the internet, so the internet MUST be a helpful source of information to figure out what to read next, right? Yes and no.

Let’s start with No so we move in a positive direction. In the past when I’ve followed advice from internet-people-I-don’t-know, I’ve been disappointed. In a usenet group I read a positive comparison between Codex, by Lev Grossman to Possession (which is my selection for The Best Book Ever). It turns out the comparison between Codex and Possession was made in the New York Times Book Review and did not originate with the person who continued the comparison in the usenet group. All I have to say to the reviewer is You Must Be Joking. And: Have You Read Possession? Possession has a depth to it that Codex certainly does not have. Codex barely sustained one reading let alone the multiple readings I’ve subjected Possession to. There are some similarities in subject matter, but there the similarities end. I was thoroughly disappointed in Codex and am surprised it is still in print. This bad experience means a few things. (a) I’m suspicious of recommendations from people I don’t know in usenet groups. (b) I’m really conflicted about trying Grossman’s later books — which look interesting — because of the bad earlier work. (c) No one should ever compare books with Possession. IMHO of course.

On the other hand, Yes, I’ve found the internet helpful in figuring out what to read next. I use the fantastic fiction site regularly to keep up with favourite authors, and to find out which book comes next in the series I just found. This is the website that alerted me to the fact that Margaret Atwood and Kate Atkinson contributed stories to the same collection called Crimespotters. I ran out and read Crimespotters and quite enjoyed it. I also use the LibraryThing recommendation lists. I think there are flaws in the recommendation algorithm at LibraryThing and you do have to be a member with some books entered for this to work (I think) but it gives me a sense of what people-with-books-like-mine have in their collections. Then there are social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Last year the Toronto Public Library FB page offered to recommend books if people sent them three books they really liked a lot. I did this. It took a while for the TPL staffers to get back to me — I think they probably got flooded with requests — but the list they sent was helpful. And I liked the books they recommended.

What about right now? Has the Internet recommended any books to me lately? Yes. And I’m of two minds about the recommendation. On the NPR site is a new blog post by Lev Grossman recommending books for one’s inner geek. I classify myself as a geek. I’m suspicious of Lev Grossman (see above). Reading a blog post isn’t too much of a commitment, so I clicked on the short link in Twitter. Grossman recommends three books: Possession (which I love), Snow Crash (which I also love, but which is so different from Possession), and Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, which is on my to-be-read shelf. Rats. I think I might take Grossman’s advice and read Fifth Business. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

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.