10 Favourite Books on my Shelf

As the shelves in my study finally begin to be ordered, I thought about which books I would keep if I were only allowed to have ten of them. These are the ones that I treasure the most today:

1. Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs

I have just about everything that I could find by Raymond Briggs from his Mother Goose treasury to his magnificent anti-Thatcher tirade "The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman". Fungus, however, is my favourite, combining my loves of graphic storytelling and existentialist despair. He always cheers me up. Plus, my paperback edition is autographed. I forced poor 7-year-old Noam to queue with me for ages at the Puffin Club Exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute to collect the inscription.

2. Penguin Modern Poets:  The Mersey Sound

Except for readings by family friends, these guys are the only poets I've gone to listen to voluntarily. My copy of this edition is also autographed by all three after a gig somewhere near the River Thames, or maybe it was just that I was also keeping an ear on the Boat Race via a pocket radio during the poetry reading rather than we were actually near the river. I know we were in central London, and I went with Sophie Manham. Anyway, it's a battered old paperback but they wrote in it and I like reading it.

3. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler by E L Konigsburg

No autographs here. Just a cool book that still comes to mind each time I visit a museum and wonder where I'd hide and what I'd do once everyone else had gone home and I had the place to myself. Maybe my niece the daughter of a museum curator will find it on my shelf one day and enjoy it like I do.

4. Hannah Senesh:  Her Life and Diary

It was a choice between this and Anne Frank's diary. Anne is more famous. She is more innocent, more universal, more optimistic; more most things perhaps. Hannah was only 23 when she was executed, not that much older than Anne. Yet she seemed more grown-up to me, and her bravery was more dramatic. That was the appeal of the book itself. In terms of volumes I treasure, however, I choose this because it was always hard to find and the copy that I have is a precious gift from my other sister that reminds me of a time when we were closer to each other.

5. The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Next to the Tanach, to which by virtue of my current profession I refer to constantly, I probably quote the five books of this trilogy more than any other writings I have read. And when I've read this and laughed and felt better, I'm hopeful again.

6.  The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leonard Q Ross aka Leo Rosten

With this book I have wooed those friends of mine for whom English is a second language. I love to read it aloud to them. And it makes me laugh too. What better way to spend a little time?

7.  Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

If you have strong wrists and an earlier, lighter edition; this is the all-time perfect book for the bathroom. Also useful if you keep forgetting what it means to be hoist on your own petard.

8. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Having grown up in the UK I take the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood very seriously (I still haven't forgiven Kevin Costner for Prince of Thieves). Don't mess with my legends. Unless you are Mark Twain, and put Sir Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table on bicycles.

9.  The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

I don't know what it was like in other countries and for other generations, but the romantic heroes of my childhood as I was taught in school came from the lost generation of the First World War - those who died, and those who lived but were forever damaged by their experiences. I preferred Wilfred Owen and my sister went for Rupert Brooke, but we all still cry at the sight of poppy petals falling in November.

10.  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Apparently the fact that this book had a female protagonist in a sci-fi genre was the reason for its initial rejection and of course exactly the reason why I went for it. Anne Shirley, Katy Carr or Jo March but science fiction! Also, I fell in love with the character Aunt Beast. Back then I wished she were my mother. Now I'd like to be more like her.

This list took quite a while to put together. As I review it I think, o no, what about

how could I leave that out and which book should it replace and I really don't want to do any more editing. It is top of the list of near misses which also includes Fahrenheit 451, The Book of Letters and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. But it's time for bed. And there's always another blog post. 

Welcome back, Winnie the Pooh

It is hard not to be cynical about the upcoming publication of "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" - a sequel to the beloved Winnie the Pooh books by the late A A Milne. The publishers say:

""We hope that the many millions of Pooh enthusiasts and readers around the world will embrace and cherish these new stories as if they had just emerged from the pen of A A Milne himself.""

Excuse me, but yeah, right! Why would anyone even think of doing something like this? Could it be that some marketing person had the brilliant idea of trying to exploit a ready-made audience? Why do we need more of these stories, new ones? Who will benefit most?

Maybe I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning ... read the BBC article yourself here, and make up your own mind. Feh!

end of the week procrastination aid

this was my favourite candidate for the bookseller magazine's diagram prize for oddly-named publications. sadly, it was pipped to the post by 'greek rural postmen and their cancellation numbers'. noted the grauniad:

""I think the voters wanted a feelgood story about rural postmen because of all the news of post offices closing around the country," said The Bookseller's charts editor Philip Stone. He has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to contact the book's author Derek Willan to let him know about his win. "There's no prize but the boost in sales is surely prize enough," Stone said. "When we announced our last shortlist, sales increased by 1,000%, from one copy sold in the two weeks previously to ten afterwards.""

for other losing titles, see here. for an explanation, see here.

hurrah!

while the following quote from a recent interview in the telegraph throws a little wobbly into my respect for patricia cornwell:

"She flies helicopters, rides motorbikes and is terrier-like with her causes. Several years ago she set out to prove that the British Impressionist painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, and she is still on the case. "The Sickert Trust had better watch out," she warns tantalisingly, "when copyright expires on his letters in 2012.""

i was still excited to discover that she is now prepared to be more open about her spouse, Staci, and their relationship. the rest of the interview may be of interest if you are a fan of her books. you may find it here.

the meme of unread books (long)

sorry but could not resist this meme. in order, these are the top 106 books unread. no idea where the list originated! one is supposed to bold books one has read, italicise ones that you've started but cannot finish, and strike through those you couldn't bear. the shortcuts are not working so i shall be putting an asterisk for those i have read, dot dot dotting those i did not finish, and ignoring the unread. go on, have a go! one of the better tools of procrastination i have found in recent weeks :-)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
**Anna Karenina
...Crime and punishment
**Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
**Wuthering Heights
**The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
...Moby Dick
...Ulysses
...Madame Bovary
**The Odyssey
**Pride and prejudice
**Jane Eyre
**A tale of two cities
...The brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
**War and peace
**Vanity fair
The time traveler's wife
**The Iliad
**Emma
The Blind Assassin
...The kite runner
**Mrs. Dalloway
**Great expectations
American gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
...Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
**The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
**A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
**Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault's pendulum
Middlemarch
**Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
**A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
**The once and future king
**The grapes of wrath
**The poisonwood Bible : a novel
**1984
**Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
**Sense and sensibility
**The picture of Dorian Gray
**Mansfield Park
**One flew over the cuckoo's nest
**To the lighthouse
**Tess of the D'Urbervilles
**Oliver Twist
**Gulliver's travels
Les misérables
The corrections
**The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
**The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
**Dune
The prince
**The sound and the fury
Angela's ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
**A confederacy of dunces
...A short history of nearly everything
**Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
...Beloved
**Slaughterhouse-five
**The scarlet letter
**Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
**The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
**Lolita
**Persuasion
**Northanger abbey
**The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
...Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
**The Aeneid
**Watership Down
...Gravity's rainbow
**The Hobbit
**In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
**White teeth
**Treasure Island
**David Copperfield
The three musketeers

having now done this list, i am a bit embarrassed *blush*. haven't read as many as i thought, and also seem very light on the contemporary books. excellent - the worrying about this is more procrastination. and worrying about appearing pretentious, and worrying about editorialising, and cetera ad nauseam. help, i'm a procrastinator. somebody get me out of here!

a moment of mirth

well into the task of packing myriad books for the journey to our next home, of course i stop now and then to look at old favourites. i'll say it before i type this out - possibly you had to be there, but the following passage by bill bryson from 'notes from a small island' (the one with the belisha beacon on the cover) makes me laugh out loud and is bloody brilliant.

Bryson is in Corfe, about to eat dinner at Mortons House, an Elizabethan manor:

"Given the nature of the hotel, I'd expected the menu to feature items like brown Windsor soup and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but of course things have moved on in the hotel trade. The menu now was richly endowed with ten-guinea words that you wouldn't have seen on an English menu ten years ago -- "noisettes," "tartare," "duxelle," "coulis," "timbale" -- and written in a curious inflated language with eccentric capitalizations. I had, and I quote, "Fanned Galia Melon and Cumbrian Air Dried Ham served with a Mixed leaf Salad," followed by "Fillet Steak served with a crushed Black Peppercorn Sauce flamed in Brandy and finished with Cream," which together were nearly as pleasurable to read as to eat.

I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented 'au nature' in a cylinder of glass, and when he came around with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondelle of blanched wheat, oven baked and masked in a poppy-seed coating. I was just getting warmed up to this and about to ask for a fanned lap coverlet, freshly laundered and scented with a delicious hint of Lemon Daz, to replace the one that had slipped from my lap and now lay recumbent on the horizontal walking surface subjacent to my feet, when he handed me a card that said "Sweets Menu" and I realized that we were back in the no-nonsense world of English.

It's a funny thing about English diners. They'll let you dazzle them with piddly duxelles of this and fussy little noisettes of that, but don't mess with their puddings, which is my thinking exactly. All the dessert entries were for gooey dishes with good English names. I had sticky toffee pudding and it was splendid. As I finished, the waiter invited me to withdraw to the lounge where a caisson of fresh-roasted coffee, complemented by the chef's own selection of mint wafers, awaited. I dressed the tabletop with a small circlet of copper specie crafted at the Royal Mint and, suppressing a small eruction of gastrointestinal air, effected my egress."

pp 98-99, or where the crack is on the spine of my paperback copy. now to return to the boxes ...

kurt vonnegut r.i.p.

kurt vonnegut was my favourite author for so many years. i read everything he wrote that i could find. he is famous enough that more eminent writers will dissect his life and work. i shall find some links.

yahoo
ny times
bbc
times online
telegraph
grauniad

more later i am sure.

it may be utterly banal, but kv gave me my favourite curse: 'go take a flying fcuk at a rolling doughnut, (go take a flying fcuk at the moon)'! meanwhile, he died my number two stupid death: just falling on your head. well done sir! (number one is tripping yourself up putting on your trousers and then falling on your head)

famous rats

why on earth am i writing about rats today, and before the sun comes up? i was thinking of a list of my favourite children's books, and thought of the rats of nimh, and then the rat in charlotte's web, and thought i'd see how many other famous rats i could come up with and, with a teensy bit of reminding help from google, came up with nine examples:

1. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien
the first book i ever read that had something positive in it about rats. still would not consider one as a pet, even though some people do. we once looked after the class pet for a weekend. apparently our school could not afford a hamster or guinea pig so we had a pet ... lemming. it got out of its cage and was eventually found when my sister got into bed and it nipped her toes. my family is really not into rodents. and we never did have any pets while we were growing up :-(

2. The Rats by James Herbert
some boys at the boys' school were reading this when it came out and so i did too. i must have been about 12, and my sister 10. i read her the passage that first describes the mutant rats devouring humans from the inside out. this was during the day. that night, i played the worst trick i ever did. i crawled into my sister's room, reached up under the covers, grabbed her leg and cried: "the rats are here!" her screams turned on lights in flats across the road. nobody was very impressed with me for quite a while.

3. 1984 by George Orwell
winston's fear of rats is how he is forced to betray his lover.

4. Templeton the rat in Charlotte's Web by E.B.White
oh how i hate this rat for being greedy and unkind. oh how i cry when charlotte dies.

5. Basil the rat in Fawlty Towers
Manuel the waiter has a pet in his room. The hotel inspector is coming to the hotel to inspect it. Mr. Fawlty sees the pet and identifies it as a rat. Manuel insists that it is a hamster, a "filigree siberian khamster." the rat and the inspector meet.

6. Ratbert drawn by Scott Adams
a rat that has no bite, ratbert is quite a sweet character (for a rat) in the world of dilbert

7. Amy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
i never really liked this character, but she is in one of my all-time favourite tv shows and she is a rat so here she is

8. Roland Rat
one of the first star presenters on tv-am for channel 4 in the early '80's. awwright ratfans!

9. Scabbers
ron weasley's familiar in the first couple of harry potter books that turns out to be peter pettigrew/wormtail, the animagus that betrayed harry's parents.

ok, done with rats. from now on, consider this blog an outpost of the isle of man, where it is taboo and very unlucky to mention a "longtail".

talking about naughty bits

a couple of days late on this one, but was saving it for when i had a free moment. the newbery medal is one of the most prestigious awards in children's literature. previous winners include:

holes, by louis sachar
sarah plain and tall, by patricia maclachlan
bridge to terabithia, by katherine paterson
mrs frisby and the rats of nimh, by robert c o'brien
from the mixed-up files of mrs basil e frankweiler, by e l konigsberg
a wrinkle in time, by madeleine l'engle
(the last 3 are favourites that i still own)

so this year's winner is in very good company. anyway, it is suddenly in the news for the use of the word 'scrotum'. as the ny times reports:

"The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”"

read the rest of the article here.

o for crying out loud! at least lucky is in good company with holden caulfield and harry potter.

where do you stand with regard to names for genitalia and what is age-appropriate? my mother always felt that when we were old enough to ask we were old enough to know. as with other things, like alcohol, she felt that making things taboo made them mysterious and attractive in a subversive kind of way, and thus more likely to be problematic later in life. i think it worked well for me. meanwhile, my american friends always laugh when i say 'bottom' instead of 'ass' (or 'ar$e') :-)

thursday thirteen meme ix

Thirteen Sports Books I Own & Love



1. Once More Around the Park by Roger Angell
2. Stan the Man: The Autobiography by Stanley Bowles
3. The Glory Game by Hunter Davies
4. Only a Game by Eamon Dunphy
5. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
6. The Life You Imagine by Derek Jeter
7. The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
8. Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella
9. Ajax, the Dutch, the War by Simon Kuper
10. Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy
11. The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinnis
12. The Natural by Bernard Malamud
13. Brilliant Orange by David Winner



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Thursday thirteen meme vi

Thirteen Science Fiction Novels/Novellas I Love 1. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 2. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick 4. He, She & It by Marge Piercy 5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 6. Dune by Frank Herbert 7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 8. Glory Road by Robert Heinlein 9. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card 10. Foundation by Isaac Asimov 11. Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein 12. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 13. The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

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joy comes in the morning

just finished reading this book by jonathan rosen. auntie d. left it for me at pesach, and i just opened it yesterday. inside was a post-it note written in her handwriting: "a folk saying based on a saying in the talmud. a rabbi whose congregation does not (want) to drive him/her out of town, isn't a rabbi; and a rabbi they drive out of town isn't a man(woman)!"

well, i'm still here.

meanwhile, on p. 142, i read the following:

"... he realized how rudimentary his religious thoughts and feelings were; he had ignored them for so long. He had once written an article about art therapy for the elderly and one of the therapists had explained that you only draw as well as the last time you drew. For most people, this was in childhood, so most adults draw like ten-year-olds. Perhaps his religious life was like that, undeveloped and childish."

is it so for many people? that the last time they really believed in god it was the god they were shown as children: a white old man with a beard on a big throne up in the sky who knows if you've been bad or good and responds accordingly?

then you grow up and realise there is no santa, no tooth fairy and your parents screwed you and the whole world up so there is nothing left in which to believe except what you can hold in your own two hands.

has my religious life grown and matured since i was ten years old? at first i think that i had more faith then, because i believed in happy endings. on the other hand, having some small knowledge of how the world is, and all the evil and horror in it today, perhaps it is a greater sign of faith to remain within it, rather than to run screaming into the dark cloud. my father believed in the thread of gold that is the harbinger of the dawn to come. and he experienced the dawn, surviving the nazi peril and continuing to become a husband, parent and teacher. i'm still waiting.

octavia e. butler

d. lent me this book to read a couple of days ago, and i just sat down with it this afternoon. would not have stopped to write here, except i am trying to savour the last few chapters and not finish too greedily.

"A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you'll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?" Parable of the Sower pp 13-14

and if it helps, and does not hurt anyone else, what is the problem with that?

she also writes a few pages later:

"God is Power -
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable -
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.

This is the literal truth.

God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve. If they're used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent." ibid p 24

kind of alongside the buddhist idea that all our suffering derives from attachment to material things ... as if having stuff makes us real, because we own it, have power over it ... what i hear her saying this evening is we should shed the illusion that god is a deity that may indulge our whims upon supplication. god has god's own plan. our choice is to accept that and deal with the hands we are given, or not. if we do not, shit still happens. if we do, things may be different. or not. but at least we take part in our own destiny.

off to play ping-pong. small objects that may be struck with great force and yet suffer no damage nor cause it to other persons and objects. excellent.

emerson lishma

luckily for my job, the voiceless part of the stinking cold i have was during my day off. tomorrow, i can make use of the ample supply of tissues in my office as the catarrh comes to the fore. meanwhile, in between feeling a bit sorry for myself, mainly because my throat was too sore to enjoy singing marlene dietrich songs deeply and badly, i decided to read a book.

d. has noted that since we met, i have read an awful lot of childrens' books. ok i did reread all the harry potters again but that was because the paperbacks were next to her bed. and i discovered the 'lionboy' books, and 'inkheart'; and reread the philip pullman trilogy. today, however, for some strange reason, probably all the advil, i picked up a collection of emerson's essays and decided to read 'self reliance'. apparently i read some of this at university, but have no recollection of that whatsoever. o well. i couldn't sleep and this is what i read.

"to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius."

&

"trust thyself ... accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events."

at this point, i had to remind myself what transcendentalism was.

ok - so emerson was living in an era and an area where the forging of a truly american literary and philosophical identity was a contemporary cause. o dear i'm starting to sound a bit victorian. i guess what i am trying to say is that i can identify with his call to rebel against the status quo:

"society is a jointstock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. the virtue in most request is conformity. self-reliance is its aversion. it loves not realities and creators, but names and customs ...

...whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. he who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

wouldn't it be luverly to have the time and resources to speak out. enough money to be able to say no without fear, someone to clean and cook and wash for you, and someone to hold you and say 'there, there, m'love, they are all horrid and you are wonderful.'

nevertheless, despite his style coming across to me today as a pompous git, i rather like him so far. more, perhaps, when i have read more. time now to search through the medicine box and see if i still have any english sudafed ...

w.c. whimsy

i don't know what you read when you're on the toilet. i cannot assume that you do read at those times. for those of us who do, however, there are the things we are already reading that we may bring in with us, e.g., a newspaper, a book we can't put down, something that must be studied for work or a test. there are also reading materials that stay in the bathroom for a while. i'm not so interested in the old magazines, although what they are may give new insight about one's host. i'm wondering what you think are good books to leave in there on purpose - for one's guests, and for oneself.

my current offerings:

Poems on the Underground
(a selection of the poems posted in london underground trains amid the ads in the carriages)

The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code

Tragically I was an Only Twin
(a collection of sketches from the career of peter cook. gut-wrenchingly funny, which seems kind of appropriate ... )

somebody left The Dance of Anger in there, but i think i should put it back on a shelf asap :-)

a favourite story about my father: one year for my birthday treat the whole family went to see victoria wood live, at the aldwych theatre. there were five of us - the four women, and my father, who was also possibly the only heterosexual male in the auditorium. the first-half monologue was a story wound around a tampon, and at the interval my little sister said, "poor daddy - i bet you didn't understand a word of that." "nonsense!" he replied stoutly, "when i am in the bathroom, I read everything!"