Yet Another “Definitive List”

The Guardian (UK paper/website) has published the “1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list” – you can find it here:

1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list

I’m losing ground. For the Big Read, I pretty much came in at 62 out of 100 books read, no matter the variations on the list. For this list of 1000 novels, one might expect then that I’d have read somewhere around 620; but no, I didn’t even hit 3x. 146. How’s that for a pitiful score? I thought I’d do much better in the science fiction and fantasy category, but even there it was only so-so.

Of course, they only count the Discworld series as one book, and I’ve read all of them but one so far (and it’s coming up as soon as Brian is done with it – Making Money). C’mon – there’s something like 30 books right there! And to list The Chronicles of Narnia as one book – there’s another 6 – so already my score is up by 35. I’m feeling better about this all the time – 181, woo-hoo!

Now if I can just eke out another 5 books, at least I could feel like I made the 3x mark. Maybe I should count the books on my shelf that are on the list but that I haven’t read yet, but at least I’ve *touched* them. . . That oughta be good for another 20. And what about the ones that I’ve seen the movie, but not read the book? That’s probably good for a couple dozen. At this rate, I might be hitting around 25 percent; still disappointing compared to 62% of the Big Read. Maybe I should add the ones that I’ve been meaning to buy that are on the list, that’s probably another 50. Or books that have the same name as one I’ve read, by a different author? I’ve read “The Hollow Man” by Dan Simmons, but they list “The Hollow Man” by John Dickson Carr. Surely that should count for something?

But what about all these books that I’ve never even heard of? I mean, “No Bed for Bacon” by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon? Come on! Where did they dig this one up? Why don’t they have classics like “Peter Pan” and “The Wizard of Oz”; or “The Last of the Mohicans”? I would accuse them of being Anglocentric, or Eurocentric, but they do include Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list. What about all those Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Three Investigators books – shouldn’t they be on the Crime list? And what’s with only listing five Agatha Christie books, and two Peter Whimsey books? Really. Who made up this list?!?

But I’m not one to complain. It may take me the rest of my life, but I will keep working on the list. Even if some asinine panel of experts comes up with a list of the “Definitive 2500 Must-Read Novels” or the “10,000 Most Important Books Ever, Ever, Ever!”, I will keep reading.

That’s not to say that I might not get sidetracked by books that aren’t on the list, like this one:

A new take on Jane Austen

Another one bites the dust . . .

I have put myself on a stash diet – I have enough books to last me for (well, I was going to say a year, but probably not) a few months at least, just sitting on my shelves. In addition, I have several books that I’ve started reading but never finished for one reason or another.

I did finally finish Don Quixote, in one night, after all the delaying tactics finally reached the ridiculous point. Don’t ask me what I thought of it, because currently it is still colored by the angst I built up at *not* finishing it. I need to mull over it some more before I can really decide if I loved the book overall, or if the second half ruined it totally for me.

Another book that was on hold was Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes.

This one I can tell you exactly why I wasn’t reading it: bad stuff happening to an innocent person.

I’ve been through this with other books – although I read Jane Eyre as a young child, and loved it, I remember squirming at all the injustices that poor Jane put up with. I was a quiet, shy child, and didn’t fit in with the cliques at school or anywhere, so I related very heavily to Jane. Even though I read it through then, and have many times since, I always have trouble getting through the early parts without putting the book down for a while.

It wasn’t always just downtrodden characters, sometimes it was just when bad things happen – I couldn’t read Mistress of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts for years because I couldn’t get past the first few pages of the first chapter because a 12-year-old boy dies. When I did finally read it, I enjoyed the book very much, but that negative connotation is forever linked in my mind to that book, and it’s the first thing I think of when I see it or something brings the book to mind.

So Arthur & George sat for many months – I don’t remember when I first picked it up. Based on a true story from the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first half of the book deals with the story of George Edalji, half Eastern Indian, half Scot, who is framed and wrongfully imprisoned for a vicious attack on a pony. I read one quarter of the book, up until the sentence “He does not realize that these are the last normal twenty-four hours of his life.”

Barnes did such an excellent job of setting up the scene and making one feel the inevitability of George’s conviction and imprisonment that I just could not get past that sentence. I tried picking it up more than once, but each time put it down again after reading a paragraph or two, because that one sentence was all I could hear in my head.

But I finally persevered, and am glad I did. The story is well worth the read. Although the ending is not necessarily a thoroughly happy one for George, it is still satisfying. George makes sense as a person – sometimes authors who are trying to novelize an historical figure aren’t able to make the character’s emotions or thoughts believable in the context of the facts of the story, but that is not a problem with George.

Arthur is almost too good to be true – based on his documented public life and the causes he supported, he was a progressive, passionate man. Racially unbiased, intelligent, genial, well-loved. But in some ways, he comes across as a caricature of the bluff, hearty Englishman; sporting, rooting for the underdog, a social butterfly, still bound by the class system, even though he believes he is not.

He definitely has flaws: a temper, he’s a bad loser, he does not believe in women’s suffrage, he abrogates responsibility for his children’s upbringing to his wife, he has a (chaste) love affair for almost a decade while married to an invalid, he is arrogant and egotistical. But he fights injustice, he loves passionately, he does not cave to negative opinions when voiced by people higher on the social scale than himself, and he allows common sense to overcome his impulsive nature when it is voiced by one he trusts and/or loves.

I found the elaborate description of Arthur’s funeral interesting. The inclusion of his spiritism (belief in clairvoyance, that ghosts can speak through mediums to the living) within the story made sense, because although it wasn’t part of the detective story, it was part of who Arthur was. Even using the funeral to tie together two people who hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in over two decades worked for me; but the blow-by-blow description of the funeral and George’s musings seemed forced. I can see why Barnes did it – the scene of George almost getting sucked in to the hysteria of the moment and nearly believing in something that he intellectually refuted (spiritism) nearly makes an apology for the people who *did* get sucked in to believing that George committed the awful crime he was accused of; if someone as unemotional and logic-driven as George can be so close to falling into a type of mob hysteria, how much more likely that those who are less educated and feel even normal emotions will believe false evidence that is presented to them in an emotionally charged way?

And that is one thing that slightly disappointed me – many of the people who believed in spiritism as Arthur did were as intelligent and logic-minded as either Arthur or George; it seems as if Barnes is saying that only people who don’t feel much emotion are able to resist blindly succumbing to misleading evidence, be it in the court of law or in social and religious beliefs. True? Not true? Being an emotional creature myself, I have to leave myself out of the judging.