Since nobody has nominated me for this curious Facebook 10 Favourite Books thing, I have decided to just go ahead and do it myself, as it seems harmless enough and doesn't involve ice or buckets. Or giving to charity. And at least I have the decency to do it on my blog, so you can just go right on and ignore it if you fancy. You want to ramble on about books? Get a blog.
Regular readers of my blog, of which there are none, will know that I love a list. Refer to Posts 13-16 if you want proof of that.
Lists are good. Everyone loves a list, especially these days where bitesize information, soundbites and other bite-related metaphors used to couch the fact that nobody has an attention span anymore, rule.
Saying 'I could never whittle a favourite book list to just ten' and other equally pretentious remarks are rubbish, subconsciously and piously informing everyone how well read you are. If nothing else making a list will merely clarify and inform your own internal-reader what it is you most like in a book. Or film, or whatever.
My internal-reader likes books that he can imagine playing out as a film in his mind. He also likes books that make him utterly despondent, thrillingly uplifted or in any way moved, for better or worse. He likes books that depress him that he could never shape sentences or paragraphs or expressions quite as well as the author he is reading, although he won't stop trying. (Damn you Jonathan Franzen.) It's a bit of a dichotomy, but the best books are the ones that simultaneously depress, uplift and entertain him.
He is a picky chap, for sure, my internal-reader.
My list, as per Facebook's darn 'rules' will only contain books I clearly remember as loving and having meaning to me at the time I read them, without recourse to scouring my bookshelves for ones that will make me seem well-read or interesting, or going on Amazon and picking ones out I like the look of.
So here goes:
1. Freedom - Jonathan Franzen. (Damn you Jonathan Franzen)
2. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
3. Watchmen - Alan Moore
4. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
5. The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
6. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind
7. The Captive Flesh - Cleo Cordell
8. Slaughterhouse-5 - Kurt Vonnegut
9. IT - Stephen King
10. Destination: Moon - Herge
OK, so the earlier paragraph about only idiots not being able to whittle down to ten I utterly retract, as I had typed eighteen titles before I knew it. Wow, I killed some darlings there, for sure. Oh well.
I will end by paraphrasing Stewart Lee, which as anyone will tell you is a dangerous thing to do in your blog because he is quite evidently a better writer than you are:
"The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to have read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, sixteen volumes of The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson... In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs." - Stewart Lee
Regular readers of my blog, of which there are none, will know that I love a list. Refer to Posts 13-16 if you want proof of that.
Lists are good. Everyone loves a list, especially these days where bitesize information, soundbites and other bite-related metaphors used to couch the fact that nobody has an attention span anymore, rule.
Saying 'I could never whittle a favourite book list to just ten' and other equally pretentious remarks are rubbish, subconsciously and piously informing everyone how well read you are. If nothing else making a list will merely clarify and inform your own internal-reader what it is you most like in a book. Or film, or whatever.
My internal-reader likes books that he can imagine playing out as a film in his mind. He also likes books that make him utterly despondent, thrillingly uplifted or in any way moved, for better or worse. He likes books that depress him that he could never shape sentences or paragraphs or expressions quite as well as the author he is reading, although he won't stop trying. (Damn you Jonathan Franzen.) It's a bit of a dichotomy, but the best books are the ones that simultaneously depress, uplift and entertain him.
He is a picky chap, for sure, my internal-reader.
My list, as per Facebook's darn 'rules' will only contain books I clearly remember as loving and having meaning to me at the time I read them, without recourse to scouring my bookshelves for ones that will make me seem well-read or interesting, or going on Amazon and picking ones out I like the look of.
So here goes:
1. Freedom - Jonathan Franzen. (Damn you Jonathan Franzen)
2. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
3. Watchmen - Alan Moore
4. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
5. The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
6. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind
7. The Captive Flesh - Cleo Cordell
8. Slaughterhouse-5 - Kurt Vonnegut
9. IT - Stephen King
10. Destination: Moon - Herge
OK, so the earlier paragraph about only idiots not being able to whittle down to ten I utterly retract, as I had typed eighteen titles before I knew it. Wow, I killed some darlings there, for sure. Oh well.
I will end by paraphrasing Stewart Lee, which as anyone will tell you is a dangerous thing to do in your blog because he is quite evidently a better writer than you are:
"The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to have read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, sixteen volumes of The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson... In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs." - Stewart Lee
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