claudine_c

I (inexcusably) have not been keeping up with current Australian fiction, so I can't comment on the literary merits of the listed authors. I am simply surprised that, in 2009, only 30% of the long list and 0% of the short list were written by women.

(Don't let me get started on ethnicity...)

[Because lots of my friends are doing it. Grumble: some of these 'books' are really series or anthologies; I've listed as 'read' the ones where I feel I've read a good proportion.]

[Oh, hello. Yes, I'm back online -- briefly. Will disappear again in a few days.]

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (don't know how to rate this -- I gave up somewhere in the middle of The Two Towers)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (hmph, this isn't a book, it's an anthology!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Another series! I've read the first two of the trilogy so far.)
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 Bernieres
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 Meaney - 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
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
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

Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson is the first part of the trilogy The fortunes of Richard Mahony. What better way to observe Australia Day than to start reading one of the country's great literary series?

Today is a public holiday. Due to overtime last week I also took Monday and Tuesday off. My supervisor would like the first draft of my final report tomorrow.

These are some of the books I should have been reading as I work on my report:



These are some of the books I have actually been reading or browsing:



It's not as bad as it looks, but I do seem to be lacking some energy for this project.

I was happy to let the Harry Potter craze pass me by, and did so for about four years. Just another children’s fantasy series, I thought: a good way of getting children, especially boys, to read, but there was nothing in it for me. Then, last year, I found myself staying in a Perth suburb with a cousin and her partner, who were much more besotted with Harry than their children were. The film of Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban had hit the cinemas, and my hosts insisted on taking me along, and lent me the first three books so that I could catch up with the story. In holiday mode, with not much to do, I read the first book in little more than a day, skimmed through the next two and went along to the film.

I’m not a hardcore Harry fan by any means. I’ve read the first and fourth books and have seen the second and third films. The fifth book, Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix, is crying for attention on my coffee table, buried under anthropology textbooks and assorted Penguin Classics. I won’t even think of buying Number 6 until I’ve finished reading Number 5. Some of my reluctance in picking up Number 5 is the sleepless nights that Number 4 caused: the first of the fat books, it took me three or four sittings to get through over six hundred pages.

I haven’t spent enough time with the books to really say, but I wonder whether Rowling has been increasing the complexity of each progressive book. Compared to my memory of Harry Potter and the philosopher’s (or sorcerer’s) stone, the fourth book, Harry Potter and the goblet of fire -- as well as being much longer -- seemed to have longer words and sentences, and a general sense of greater maturity in the writing, as well as the characters. After reading the first book I thought that the writing was very simple -- appropriate for eleven-year-old readers -- but the ideas and the setting were very promising.

One of the reasons I keep up with the series is that I can recognise myself in some of the characters, especially Harry, Hermione and Neville. I didn’t go to a boarding school, but an exclusive private school in Melbourne comes close enough. Like Harry and Hermione, I was noted both for my brains and for coming from a family background that wasn’t quite up to the standards of most of the students. Like Neville, I was shy and had a habit of making a fool of myself. Character empathy is a good way of getting people to keep reading. An awkward or nerdy child can find comfort in seeing people like them appearing as heroes in these stories, and even triumphing over the bullies.

So mark me as an admiring, but not driven, fan of the boy wizard. I didn’t go to any of this morning’s Harry Potter parties. I haven’t pre-ordered Harry Potter and the half-blood prince. I’ll eventually read it, maybe this year, maybe next year. I will probably see the film of the Goblet of fire when it finally arrives in Australia. But I don’t think I’ll be grief-stricken when the series comes to an end. There are always other books to read.

Cory Doctorow's new novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town has been published by Tor. As with his previous novels, this has simultaneously been released on Doctorow's website in electronic format with a Creative Commons license. The license for this novel is the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License, which "lets anyone living in a country that's not on the World Bank's list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain."

I like Doctorow's fiction and I also admire his ongoing experiment in simultaneously publishing books in conventional book format and on the web. It doesn't seem to have hurt his career or his livelihood. I'd never heard of the CC Developing Nations License until now, but I think it is a laudable move.

In his Sandman series of comics, Neil Gaiman took familiar stories from mythology and history and created a dark and mysterious version of our own reality. In American Gods, Gaiman again invited some old friends into our modern world and revealed them to be complex and multi-faceted beings.

The big idea behind this novel is how old European and African myths might be translated into a modern American context. In this world that is not entirely unlike ours, gods and other mythological creatures may have originated as ideas or symbols in the minds of their believers, but faith made them real. Faith is the life-force of gods; without faith, gods fade into oblivion. (This is an idea that Gaiman’s friend Terry Pratchett has dealt with in books such as Small Gods.) A whole host of gods travelled with their believers to America, and found themselves stranded there as Americans gradually adopted the new gods of technology, media and their ilk. The principle narrative of this book describes the final months of an epic showdown between the old and new gods, played out amidst an unsuspecting population of ordinary mortals.

I have read two other novels by Gaiman: Good Omens, written with Pratchett, and Neverwhere, which began as a TV series. While those stories were original and captivating, I thought the writing style was rather mundane and simple. In contrast, American Gods proves that Gaiman is an accomplished prose writer as well as an imaginative world-maker.

[Reviewed for Blogcritics.]