100 Books, Sort Of...

At a loss for a topic (or beleaguered by too many potential topics), I stole this meme from Candy's blog. The idea is, go through the list and bold the ones you've read.

An interesting aside: regarding the psychology of the book mix: in a study where subjects were presented with a list of high-brow (Schindler's List) and low-brow (Mask) movies, high-brow movies made up a very high percentage of their lists. When they were told they'd actually have to WATCH those movies, the high-brow choices were suddenly 13 times less likely to be chosen.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of fine films you keep passing over for Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. And why every 'Top 100' book list is full of books people think they 'should' like...



Without further ado:


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Thanksgiving Values

I missed the turkey this year, but kept the, ahem, *proper* sentiment...

A Little Early Christmas

This is how I want Christmas to roll in my house. I've already got the accordion....




(The writing goes well...)

No two people are not on fire.

Some people need to laugh.

Steve needs a full-throttle laugh!

The Truth About Hobos

Beverage alert!

Or if I didn't embed it right, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1JIa5r5nkE

Okay, let's see if I've figured out how to do this....

Because, you know, these studio jerks are really getting to me.

Japanese Human Art

Ho ho ho! Wacky.

Ahhh.... YouTube.

Like Em Bad, Do Ya?

83,000 words (and it's like two trains on a collison course, shovelling on more coal)

Charles gave me a good idea for today's post. He was talking about identifying with fictional characters, even if they're a different race, gender or even species. Except Charles seemed mostly to talk about the heroes. I'm going to talk about the villains.

We see ourselves in others. We can't help it. It's some of the deepest hard-wiring the human brain has.

Long before we had speech, or even tools, we had body language and tribe. Today we're able to see faces in everything from a light socket to a car's front grille, to accept a dog or cat as a member of the family (Midge sits on my lap right now) and to see our own heart's pain in the projected drawings of animals (Bambi, anyone?)

You want to really give your readers a good time? Make them see themselves in the villain. Want to make them remember you long after they close the book? Make them halfway cheer the villain on!

Having a clear and consistent motivation for your villains is the bare minimum for any story. Otherwise, the baddy runs the risk of sounding like the mad scientist in Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town: "I didn't do it for money, and I didn't do it for glory. I'm... just.... MEAN!"

On the other hand, Frankenstein's monster wants an end to his loneliness. Iago is well and truly pissed off about being passed over for promotion, and Mrs Danvers resents the intruder trying to replace her former love and mistress, Rebecca.

We see a bit of ourselves in these villains because we know their pain. We've been lonely. We've been rejected. We've been jealous. Even if we don't approve of their actions, we know where they're coming from.

Want to make that identification stronger? Give the baddy a bit of the postive. When Hannibal Lecter defends Clarise's honor by killing Miggs and helping her with her case, he becomes a little more real to us.

But be aware. making strong, rounded villains is harder than it looks. Too much 'rounding out', and you've got your hero fighting a milksop. Now, while I'd pay good money to watch Jack Reacher bitch slap the holy tar out of I-molested-my-foster-daughter Woody Allen, it wouldn't exactly be a worthy challenge for Mr Reacher.

Also, it's not altogether necessary. The out-of-tribe Others are ancient storytelling villains. Part of us doesn't *want* to know why they're coming over the hill. We just want them defeated. Making them alien and unknowable is part of how we justify the terrible things we'll do to them (Native Americans in 19th century penny dreadfuls, anyone?).

And some villains are little more than the personifications of the vast dark beyond that fragile circle of firelight. That's a balancing act with its own set of tricks and challenges, but I'd be lying if I said it couldn't be done.

Dracula's got a clear motivation, the need to feed, but at the heart of it, the guy's basically just an asshole. Why'd he do it? He's evil, that's why. Now shut up and turn the pages.

On a lighter note, recut trailers! Watch these here and here. They're a hoot! (Links from Neil Gaiman's blog.)