30 Books Meme

via various:

The Museum, Libraries and Arts Council's list of 30 Books Every Adult Should Have Read.
Bold the ones you have read.
Italicize the ones you would like to read.
Strike out the ones you never plan to read, or started but couldn't finish.
***
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Bible
I had enough of it in school, ta very much. A useful resource, more easily navigated via online searching and commentaries. And why is this included but no other sacred texts? No Koran? No Sikh scripture? No Vedas?

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien.
Out of a sense of duty. It was widely known to be The Classic Fantasy/Hippy novel, so I read it because I thought I should. I far prefer the Hobbit which covers the majority of the same themes but without all the waffle. Or the Ents.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Just a few times.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Yes, but not twice. I only like A Tale of Two Cities, a novel which Dickens's fans always tell me is atypical. I love his work in adaptation, but I simply don't enjoy reading his prose.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Reader, I read it a few times.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
See all my previous rambles about Jane Austen.

All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque.

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman.
I felt the last book dragged rather compared to the first two, and I can see why it provokes lots of discussion about plot flaws, theolgical flaws etc etc but I would rather a child read this and those dubious Narnia books than Harry Potter since at least Pullman and Lewis can write imaginatively and originally.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
I recently read Charlotte Grey which is the third in Faulks's war triptych. Whilst I enjoyed it I was ultimately left rather cold by it, so I doubt I'll bother with other work by him.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
I have this memory of doing it at school, despite recalling nothing of it. Then again, given some of my other school texts and how keen I was to forget them, this should not be surprising. One for the reread pile, maybe?

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.
Yes. I could have sworn I wrote about it, but apparently not. There's a short note on my del.icio.us kidlit tag about it, which reveals I read it in December 2004. That's when I wasn't blogging here due to writing my own stuff.

Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
See 'Hardy, T. Why I Don't Like His Work'.

Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne.
And The House at Pooh Corner, which is better on account of having Tigger.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
Read the book, sang the song, sniggered at the semaphore.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.
There was a subcatagory of children's fiction I never liked and that was anthropomorphic stuff. I never read Beatrix Potter as a little girl, or this, or anything else. Winnie the Pooh is different because we all know Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore were anthropomorphic toys. Animals were...animals. They didn't wear little blue jackets or drive motor cars.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
After all, tomorrow is another day in which I could read a long epitaph to a dubious past. I'm always torn about Gone With the Wind: it romances the Deep South, which is something I find rather distasteful, but I'm a sucker for a Beatrix/Benedict romance and Scarlet/Rhett have got it by the wagonload. Even better, in the book she ends up with a whole passel of brats.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
See Christmas Carol.

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
See my comments.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Already on the TBR pile.

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
Don't know it.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
3 Dickens novels out of 30? Are the compilers of this list sadists? Surely there are more interesting and diverse options than bloody Dickens?

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
already on the TBR pile.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
already on the TBR pile.

Middlemarch by George Eliot.
Tried. Hated.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
Don't know it.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
I was a Freaks & Geeks kinda teen. So as I skulked around the corridors of my school, with my pierced ears, and lace ribbons and liquid eyeliner, one of my badges of freakery geekery was my copy of this, always visible in a pocket or my bag. I love novels with constructed languages like this, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Riddley Walker. Also, the film was illegal in the UK at the time, so having the book was like saying "hey, I'm rebellious and literate!".

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn.
already on the TBR pile.

***

So I've read thirteen out of the thirty, plan to read eight more, don't know two and have no plans to read the other seven. Of those seven, six I'm rejecting due to previous experience of either the book (the Bible, Middlemarch) or the authors (Dickens, Faulks) or both (Great Expectations, Tess). The remaining one is rejected on the grounds that, having avoided it as a child, I'm not convinced I would like it as an adult. Also, frogs don't drive cars.

Obviously, these lists exist more to bring in some handy publicity to some organisation who wants to get a few chattering heads going in culture vulture circles but that British librarians think Gone With the Wind is a more important book to read before you die than, say, any non-Christian religious text makes me wonder about other choices. When a librarian is picking some books to put in the display racks - the 'quick reads', or 'we recommend' or 'classics' displays designed to make choosing a book in a library faster - what preconceptions are they bringing about their users? The Bible should be read, but not the Vedas? If the books on this shortlist end up being displayed in libraries across the UK as part of the promotion what message do they give about libraries? The classic Dead White Males are there, white chicks write romances, we're still not over WW1 and we like our Russians (more Dead White Males, you notice) to be repressed.

I'm not sure whether to be pleased or annoyed that I have read over a third of these and intend to have read two-thirds before I die.

Universally Acknowledged Truths

Pemberley: Or Pride And Prejudice Continued
by Emma Tennant
(1993)

It is a truth universally acknowlegded that all Pride & Prejudice pastishes, spoofs or reviews must be in want of an opening line which mimics the opening line of P&P. Right, that's that over with.

I'm pro-fanfic. My Microcon talk a couple of years back was on the history of forms of fanfiction and the idea that, once a story is 'out there' a sign of its universality is if becomes reworked, rewritten and generally posessed by the audience. You can argue that the myth cycles (Arthur, Norse, Indian) etc are such stories: they capture your imagination to such an extent that you want more about the characters and situation. It is only in the industrial age that the notion of copyright, and the related idea of idea theft, comes into its own (I could disgress here about the commercialisation of the printed word but this isn't the review for that). There's notions of 'canon' and 'fanon' etc etc. It's a fun world of shifting ownership of ideas.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) is one of the first novels to gain a fan following, way before Dickens was packing them into the theatres or queues were forming outside the Strand magazine for the next Holmes installment[1]. P&P echoes through English culture: Gaskell's North & South (185?) suggests the Mancunian novelist was utterly smitten by Elizabeth and Darcy's sparky romance whilst Bridget Jones' Diary reworks it as a modern chicklit novel. Obviously Lizzy & Darcy are not unsimilar to earlier romances (Beatrix and Benedict spring obviously to mind[2]) but they are the ur-romance of the last two centuries. Women still fall for Darcy.

Which is where Pemberley, Or Pride & Prejudice Continued comes in. Austen herself continued to consider her heroines' lives but she had no knowledge of the intimacies of marriage. Indeed, there's an argument that we never see happily married couples in Austen (Mr & Mrs Bennett being the most extreme example but Maria and Mr Collins is clearly only a sanguine relationship due to Maria's diligence in avoiding her husband's company). Tennant picks up the story of Lizzy Bennett a year into her marriage to Mr Darcy and, as one might expect, things are not perfect in this 'happy ever after'.

Tennant, as far as I can tell from having read about half of The Bad Sister, writes about the interior lives of women and Pemberley, naturally, focuses on Elizabeth's reaction to her new life. Jane is married to Bingley and about to produce a second child. Lydia has a whole passel of brats with Wickham. Mr Bennent has been summarily despatched to the great beyond and Mrs Bennent is concerned to secure a future for her two as-yet unmarried daughters, bookish Mary and impressionable Kitty. Elizabeth has yet to have a child and Lady de Burgh is preparing to ship in a distant cousin to take over should no heir arrive. And it's going to be a family Christmas at Pemberley.

As with P&P, the differences between exterior and interior life - both mental and physical - are played with: the extended families go on a shooting party to the Yorkshire moors and Lizzy chided for wandering about the countryside. Confusions abound, causing Lizzy and Darcy to seperate. One major element is Lizzy's belief that Darcy has had a child with "the Frenchwoman" who has now died. Combined with the Yorkshire moors and Lizzy's running off to become a governess there are moments where this seems to be borrowing as heavily from Jane Eyre as from P&P (I must get around to Wide Sargasso Sea).

This could be a great sequel but for one key element: I didn't find Tennant's authorical voice convincing enough. We'll slide over the fact she gives Mrs Bennent a narrative point-of-view (unlike the almost entirely Lizzy-based narrative of P&P) because really it's the lack of a wickedly sly authorical voice which meant the novella left me cold. A Lizzy who lacks her spark is not terribly interesting, and Darcy's absence makes this into a rather lacklustre sequel. Obviously, some of the point is to show the banality and new worries and fears of an older woman who is now married into social and familial responsibilies but it doesn't put any relish into the authorial commentary on Lizzie's behaviour.

Having been searching for this book for a while, as it helps me move into a more literary discussion of the story-reclaiming urge, I was pleased to find it in a charity shop. Having read it I'm vaguely disappointed that it does not make me want to believe it is 'canon'.

---

[1] Although the Doctor's "I'm your biggest fan!" scene with Dickens in the new Who made me roar with delight.

[2] "I do love nothing in the world so much as you, is that not strange?" Benedict remarks - a sentiment Darcy shares with his "I have struggled against my reason..." proposal.