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xiphiasSo long as I'm doing this, I may as well write a sentence or two about how they affected me, or not. . .
1984: haven't read it in years. I think I read it in 1988, when I was 14; Creeped me out, as was intended. Fundamentally affected how I veiw governments, as it was intended to do.
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland: one of my all-time favorite books. My favorite version is The Annotated Alice, with notes by Martin Gardner.
Animal Farm: Like 1984, I read it when I was a teenager, and it creeped me out and fundamentally affected how I view governments, meaning that Orwell can be proud of his effect on me.
Anne Of Green Gables: Honestly, I can't remember whether I've read this one. I know that, as a kid, I read a fair number of books of this sort of genre, like The Secret Garden, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but I can't remember if I've read this one.
Artemis Fowl: I enjoyed this one quite a bit. I suppose that it is possible that my friends who've actually put a lot of effort into studying Irish mythology, and for whom it is important to their religion might find it somewhere between stupid and blasphemous, or they might find it fun. As an example of what I'm talking about -- leprechauns are actually "Lower Eschelon Police, Reconnaisance Division" -- "LEP Recon"
The BFG: I liked, as I tend to like all Roald Dahl, but it wasn't one of his stronger or more clever books.
Black Beauty: Honestly, I found this book boring. I owned it and read it several times as a kid, and never quite enjoyed it. I couldn't really tell why I was supposed to care about a horse.
Brave New World: File with 1984 and Animal Farm. Fundamental to how I see the world. One thing that baffles me about modern political discourse is the fact that I can hear people saying things that sound like they come from any of those books, and I can't understand how the rest of the people listening don't always have the same squick reaction that I do.
Catch 22: Loved this. Deeply influential to how I think.
The Catcher In The Rye: I suppose I can understand why people find this book boring, whiny, and self-indulgent -- but I was one of the people who really related to that when I read it. One of my friends growing up always had a copy of it, because it could reliably toggle her depressive state -- if she wasn't depressed, it would make her so, if she was, it would snap her out of it.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: Now, this one, while still not one of Dahl's absolute strongest, was more clearly an example of Dahl really on his game than BFG. I'd still say that Danny, the Champion of the World is stronger. My favorite Dahl book growing up, though, was The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six Others, a collection of short stories.
A Christmas Carol,: Read it, disliked it. It's better than much of his other work, purely because it's shorter and therefore the pain is over more quickly.
The Clan Of The Cave Bear: Best, most accurate comment I've ever heard about this book was from
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jadasc, who has never read the book. browngirl and I were explaining the plot of the book -- "It's about this woman who goes around Neolithic Europe having sex with cute guys, and, in the process, she invents the spear thrower, domestication of animals, making fire with flint and steel, basket weaving, surgery, and oral sex." jadasc said, "Ah. I see. 'Ayla' is Neanderthal for 'Mary Sue.'"The Colour Of Magic: I suspect I need say nothing about this book. I like.
Dune: I find this book boring and pointless. My cousin, however, is currently re-reading the entire series. He finds the odd-numbered ones okay, and the even-numbered ones dull as heck. Given that this is one of the ones he likes, I fear the rest of the series.
Emma: I fell off my chair laughing the first time I read this.
The Godfather: I do enjoy this one. . .
Good Omens: Lis made me read this. It's one of the few books that she is actually willing to pressure people to read. It's worth it. I absolutely love this book. Lis bought two copies -- it's one of the only books of which she has dedicated a lending copy.
The Grapes Of Wrath: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT GODDAMNED TURTLE??
Great Expectations: AARGH! MORE DICKENS!
The Great Gatsby: I liked this one, although it seems dated. Not for the politics, or the lifestyles or any of that, which all translate fine. It's for the scene where they're talking about how wild and crazy people are for driving thirty miles per hour!!. . . wooooooo.
Guards! Guards!: Yeah, this is one of my favorite Discworld novels, too.
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: This is the only volume that I have anything to say about. Lis and I bought the book the night it came out, at midnight. One of the -- actually, many of the bookstores around opened at midnight to sell it; the lines stretched around the block and several blocks away. I remember how delighted some of the eight-to-ten year olds were at the length -- they felt they were getting a book that would LAST for a couple days. And I am happy that the length and success of Goblet of Fire allowed, for instance, Tammy Pierce to turn in Squire at 390 pages. Because that book needed 390 pages, and it moved at a good pace at that length. But Goblet was ponderous, overwritten, had plotlines that never went anywhere and were dropped (Hermione and the house-elves, for instance), had too many characters, and dragged in the middle. And, fundamentally the MacGuffin plot made no sense -- Voldemort's plan violated probably 20% of the "Things Not to Do if You Are an Evil Overlord" list . I don't have a problem with a 734 page book, including a 734 page children's book. But if you turn in a book that's going to be of that length, you better be damn sure that you couldn't have told the story in 733 pages. In general, I enjoyed that book, and will probably buy the next book at midnight on the day it was released, too. But Goblet wasn't well edited, and that worries me. Poor editing ruins more books than poor writing does. There are professional authors who turn in manuscripts with rarely an excess word. Also, an occasional hen has a tooth on the end of her beak. It's an editor's job to rein in an author -- to be willing to say, "You've got dozens of good ideas in this story. Pick two of them and throw out the rest", and able to enforce it. It's a bad sign when an author turns in a book with that length, and, frankly, sloppiness. I think Goblet would have been a much stronger book at 400 pages, maybe even shorter. If JK is now such a big-name author that editor's no longer have the power to force her to be brutal to her manuscripts, that's not a good sign for the future of the series. She doesn't seem willing to show the necessary brutality to her own prose without being forced to by an editor.
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
His Dark Materials: I love this book. It gives me nightmares. It's kids' fantasy book in which the cosmology is more or lessed based on
Gnosticism, which modern Satanism is descended from. I find it hysterically funny that Southern Baptists can be up in arms about Harry Potter, yet actually miss the actual Satanist kids book. . . (okay, calling this book "Satanist", is, of course, a vast oversimplification, and it's certainly the worldview expressed is not what the unwashed barbarian masses consider to be "Satanist", but I stand by the statement, even if Pullman's denied it.)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: I loved this book. I found the quality of the series to drop off precipitously, to the point that I've never been able to finish Mostly Harmless. I don't know whether the actual quality dropped, or if it's simply that my tastes changed over time.
The Hobbit: For a long time, this was the only Middle Earth book I'd read.
Holes: This is one of the most tightly-plotted, well-thought out fairy tales written in recent years. The fact that this book has become so popular gives me great hope for the literary taste of modern Tweens.
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe: This was one of the books I learned to read upon. Every night before bed, my father would read me a chapter from the Narnia books, with me reading along with him. By The Last Battle, it was actually me reading to Dad. I must have been three or four. I didn't find out about the Christian allegory stuff until I was a teenager. I felt slightly betrayed by CS Lewis for a few months, then I got over it, realizing that this was how Lewis saw the world, and it would be unfair for me to expect him to not express his vision of the universe, just because I didn't share it, and, in any case, it was a vision of Christianity that I could respect, even as I am not Christian, and it certainly didn't lessen the excellence of the stories themselves. A few years after that, I nearly wet myself laughing when I heard about Fundamentalist Christian groups trying to get Narnia books out of the schools as Pagan.
Little Women: I really liked this book, but my favorite in the series was Jo's Boys.
Lord Of The Flies: It didn't do as much for me as it did for a lot of my friends. To me, the observation that kids are basically savages is really too obvious to sustain a book. Especially when you read the book when you're a kid.
The Lord Of The Rings: Only read it last year. I have to agree with Lis -- the main reaction to reading this book as an adult geek is, "Oh, so THAT'S where that thing in AD&D comes from -- NOW I understand that Nethack reference. . . "
Matilda: I read it first as an adult. I like it as much as I like most Dahl. Which is to say, quite a bit.
Mort: While I liked this one, it wasn't one of my favorite Discworld books.
Night Watch: This one, though, is.
Pride And Prejudice: Jane Austen is easy to like.
The Secret Garden: I love this book. I don't entirely know why.
A Tale Of Two Cities: "It was the most pretentious of openings, it was the most boring of openings. It was the most high-falutin' sounding first sentences, it was the least actual semantic content first sentences. It was a book written for sappy romantics, it was a book written by an author who was paid by the word."
To Kill A Mockingbird: I just love this book. Did you know that Harper Lee thought the book was about Scout, and that it was a story about a girl growing up? Ha. What did SHE know about the book? SHE just wrote the thing.
Treasure Island: I was just talking to my cousin and my father-in-law about this in the car last night. We were specifically talking about how much fun RLS is, and how he really wrote Crap For The Ages -- stupid pulp adventure stories that really stand the test of time. I like Robert Louis.
Vicky Angel
Watership Down: Hey, I've read, and own, the book, I've seen the movie, I own and have read the sequel, I even own the roleplaying game -- at least, the GURPS version thereof. It's one of the best gamer-books out there -- you've got your Bruiser (Bigwig), Psychic (Fiver), Engineer (Blackberry), Leader (Hazel) -- they're clearly a PC group.
The Wind In The Willows: Speaking of anthromorphic animals. . .
Winnie-the-Pooh: We have it in English, Latin, and Yiddish. In high school, my friends and I used to give dramatic readings of "Poohsticks", among other stories, which would leave us laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. It's all in the voices. That, and in making sure that you, as the reader, can say things like :
" 'That's funny,' said Pooh. 'I dropped it on the other side,' said Pooh, 'and it came out on this side! I wonder if it would do it again?' And he went back for some more fir-cones. It did. It kept on doing it. Then he dropped two in at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first; and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one. So the next time he dropped one big one and one little one, and the big one came out first, which was what he had said it would do, and the little one came out last, which was what he had said it would do, so he had won twice ... and when he went home for tea, he had won thirty-six and lost twenty-eight, which meant that he was - that he had - well, you take twenty-eight from thirty-six, and that's what he was. Instead of the other way round."
-- without cracking up. I mean, try it. Go read that out loud. In the voices. As if it makes sense. We also have a tendency to read "In Which Eeyore Has a Birthday" to people, on their actual birthdays. Much of the humor in Winnie-the-Pooh depends on devoping a really good Eeyore voice. Mine is slow, pedantic, depressed, and pompous, which works well.
Wuthering Heights: I have no idea why I like this one. It's obvious, it telegraphs all its plot points, it's slow-moving. . . and I like it. One of my friends threatened to run an RPG based on Wuthering Heights once. Or maybe I threatened to run it, I don't remember.
So, that's what I think about the books on the BBC's Hundred Novels list.