Books you can't live without: the top 100

I saw this on Mother Reader, and I'm such a sucker for a list, I had to play. The list is from a while ago (spring of 2007), but I doubt the rankings have changed much. As explained in The Guardian, 2000 people were asked to name ten books they couldn't live without; these are the top 100. I'll bold those I've read; I actually did a version of the survey myself, so while I'm at it I'll note any overlap. And, like Mother Reader, I'll mark those I really love with an asterisk. And by "really love," I mean, have read more than once and expect to read again, and look forward to reading again. I re-read so much, professionally, that I lose my love sometimes, or I start to flirt with other books. So the asterisks here are used relatively sparingly, for books that I cannot imagine never reading again, with pleasure. For example, to take one at almost random, I like The Woman in White a lot, but I think if I never got to read it again I'd be ok with that. Not so Alice in Wonderland. (This is why I switched from specializing in Victorian lit to specializing in children's lit, by the way.)

1 Pride and Prejudice* Jane Austen (I listed Persuasion instead, though if I could cheat and have all six of her novels bound as one, I'd choose them all)

2 The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre* Charlotte Bronte (also on my list at #4)

4 Harry Potter series* JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

6 The Bible (also on my list, though I can't claim to have read the whole thing)

7 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

=8 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell

=8 His Dark Materials* Philip Pullman (also on my list at #8)

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 William Shakespeare (I'm pretty sure there are one or two I've missed, but I'm close)

15 Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong Sebastian Faulks (OK, so if you're counting, I got to #17 before there was one I hadn't read)

18 Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch* George Eliot (on my list at #6)

21 Gone With The Wind* Margaret Mitchell (I know, it's embarrassing, but there it is...

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 (is it possible that I've never read this? There was a period when everyone I know was reading it, so I probably at least opened it, but I have zero recollection of it, really.)

26 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh (I love funny Waugh, but never read got into the whole Brideshead thing...)

27 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland* Lewis Carroll (on my list at #5)

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 (on my list at #1, though now that I think about it I'm not sure my list was ranked...)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernières

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 (this is the first one on the list that I have no intention of ever reading; I may not get to the others, but I'm not ruling them out.)

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 (and can I just say that Dune followed by Cold Comfort Farm is my favorite juxtaposition on this list?)

54 Sense and Sensibility* Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafon (this is the first one I haven't even heard of!)

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 (another one that I've probably at least tried to read...)

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 Misérables Victor Hugo

OK, so I have read 75 out of the 100, a perfectly respectable percentage. I'm terrible on French literature, though, aren't I? Maybe that's what I'll remedy on my next sabbatical...

Six Things

Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays just tagged me for this meme, and since I'm grateful to her for introducing me to her blog, I'm playing.

Here are the meme rules:
1. link to the person who tagged you
2. post the rules
3. write six things about yourself
4. tag six people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their sites.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Okay, so here are six things you wouldn't necessarily know about me from reading this blog.

1. My second toe is much longer than my first. My mother used to tell me it indicated noble birth, but I've always thought of it as a monkey-characteristic. It makes some shoes hard to wear, and probably has something to do with my preference for open-toed shoes.

2. I used to read mysteries a lot, but I can barely get through one anymore. I wrote my senior thesis on Dorothy L. Sayers, whose mystery novels were a kind of comfort food for me for many years. Since I've had children, though, I find myself unable to take pleasure in novels that require a death to get them moving. This is troubling on many levels.

3. I love finishing things--knitting projects, novels (reading them!), writing projects, furniture assembly, etc. This makes it hard for me to start things when I can't see an end in sight--anything from housecleaning to long writing or knitting projects. Short stuff, I'm your girl, any day of the week.

4. If there are truly two kinds of people, puzzle-people and plot-people, as Jeanne suggests, then I have multiple personality disorder. I love puzzles and word games (check my facebook profile if you don't believe me), and I also love heavily-plotted novels, which is why I got a PhD in Victorian literature. This combination of affinities is probably why I used to like mysteries so much (they are plot-and-puzzle books, aren't they?), and why I miss them at times.

5. This summer I'll make my second trip to France and I still will not see Paris. I think I'm saving it for a rainy day.

6. I've always sung alto but lately I find myself trying for the high notes, and even singing an occasional descant. What's up with that?

I'm supposed to tag six people, so here they are:

Caroline

Becca (do you even do memes, Becca?)

Jennifer

Magpie

Lilian (because now you have time for this kind of thing, right?)

Elrena

and anyone else who wants to play, of course!

Meme: Passion Quilt

The amazing Tricia Stohr-Hunt, my friend and colleague who blogs at The Miss Rumphius Effect, has tagged me for a meme. Here are the rules:

• Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I'm tackling this meme the day after following Tricia through some doors, and I couldn't help but notice that she posted pictures of open doors, for the most part, whereas the three I posted were all closed. Hmm. And Tricia's signature line on e-mails reads, "Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. -- Chinese Proverb." Hmm, again.

So, here's the thing. I noticed while we were in Oxford how many closed doors, locked gates, and forbidden entrances there were throughout the various colleges of the university. It began to seem like a metaphor to me: there is knowledge being created, disseminated, and shared here, it said to me, but only among those who have the keys, the right credentials. Now, I realize that credentialing is necessary; we want our pilots to know how to fly, our engineers to understand bridge-building, our doctors to be up on the latest about disease and prevention. But I work in a field where the baseline credential is simply the ability to read. Too often, I'm afraid, we English professors scare our students with technical jargon, complex terminology, arcane knowledge; when we do that, we say to them, "this door, this book, is closed to you." How much better if we showed them an open book, an open door; if we talked about the pleasures of the text, the additional doors that reading a book can open? How much better if we acknowledged that not everyone comes to the text with the same tools, the same experiences, and if we tried to make some more tools available? Some of those tools are indeed theoretical ones, some involve arcane knowledge--but they should be all about increasing access, not denying it.

I stand by my closed doors. Quite literally, I think--some days what I want to do as a teacher is simply to stand by a closed door and indicate that it can be opened. Like Alice trying to get into the beautiful garden in Wonderland, or Mary Lennox trying to find the door to the Secret Garden, or Lucy finding the door to Narnia and then losing it, or Will cutting doorways into other worlds, we all know that doorways can lead us to amazing adventures. Closed or open, the very first step is knowing that they are there.

So here are three more doorways, all in their own way representative of my hopes for my teaching.

Keep the doorways clear .


a poem is a doorway

keep the book open

I'm thinking of several teacher types to tag, even if most of you don't blog about teaching or aren't currently employed as teachers. So, Caroline, Susan, Dawn, Lilian, and Jo(e), feel free to take this on. But you can also consider yourself tagged if you're reading this and are involved in teaching--as a parent, a workshop leader, a teacher, a librarian, or just a wide-awake person. There are lots of kinds of teaching, after all.

Doors around the world

I saw Tricia's doors today and had to join in; there are blogs all over the place with pictures of doors today. They're amazing! Check out the Marrakech doors, and these from Finland, and Frank Gardner's Mexican doors (scroll down for a great one advertising a service...). Sara Lewis Holmes at Read*Write*Believe contributes thoughts on doors, too. Mine are doors in Oxford, doors that made me realize how realistic Alice's Adventures are, in some ways. The beautiful garden door, for example, was locked all summer long while we were there--like Alice, we stood looking at the door, wishing we could get in. (We could not, however, shrink ourselves to fit.)

this is the gorgeous blue door of the house we lived in during our stay in Oxford.

I can't remember exactly where this door is; near the Oxford Museum, anyway.

this is the (locked) door to the garden at St. John's College, Oxford.

Writing Meme

Tricia tagged me with this and I've been mulling it over all weekend, and on into the week. The idea is to identify my strengths as a writer. Hmm. My first thought was simply to replicate Tricia's list, actually--it's a good one, and other than the persistence (I have the attention span of a grasshopper) I have it pretty well covered. But this is supposed to be about me. So here are some of my strengths as a writer:

• I like to write. Truly. It's fun for me. I've never understood the writers who find it painful. Revision can be painful--my desk chair can be painful--rejection is terribly painful. But actually putting words on paper--or, more often for me these days, on the screen--is really something of a pleasure: just seeing them form up there, and reaching for the right one, and being surprised by what comes out--that's all fun. I don't really remember ever not liking it. Don't hate me for this. I can't say that it actually makes it easier to finish anything, honestly.
  
• I have a terrible memory. An odd strength, to be sure, but it means I have to write a lot of stuff down. Just recently I found some scratchings on a scrap of paper--things Nick said about his pre-K classmates. (He's in fifth grade now.) I had completely forgotten them, but seeing them brought them right back to life. I find lists, beginnings of stories, paragraphs cut from articles, and random quotations in my notebooks and on my hard drive all the time--and, sometimes, those scraps make it into something I'm working on, striking a new chord when they reappear. I also, because of my bad memory, have to do a lot of re-reading, which I find endlessly helpful as a writer. I get to see how books are put together, how writers work themselves through various situations (how do you get that character to the door? how do you segue from anecdote to analysis?), over and over again. It sinks in, even when I think it doesn't.
• I lived abroad for six formative years: 1st through 6th grade. I like to think this has given me a bit of an outsider's perspective, even if it was now over 35 years ago. (Gulp.) I was an outsider in Japan, sure, but I was also an outsider when we moved back to the States. It's given me a sensitivity to language, an attention to difference, and a pretty good case of wanderlust, all of which seem to me pretty useful for writers.
  
• I had teachers in both high school and college who insisted on frequent, brief, quick writing. My 11th grade English teacher used to walk into the room and say "Twenty minute shot" and then name a topic. She's leave to go smoke a cigarette and we'd write. I learned to be concise. I also learned to write my way into understanding a topic--if I didn't know what to say, I just started anyway, and often ended up crossing out the first paragraph and/or moving the last one up to the top. It worked surprisingly often. In college I had more than one class that required frequent one-page papers, and another one in which assignments were given at the end of lecture and due three hours later. I still love writing to deadline.
• I come from a family of writers. My father writes a letter to all the family members who aren't at home every Sunday. I've been getting these letters since the fall of 1974, when I went away to boarding school. (And, yes, I have kept all the paper ones; the e-communiques are, I hope, archived on various hard drives and flash drives, though I can't swear to have them all.) Not surprisingly, his second (post-retirement) career is as a writer. His sister was a writer. My sister is a writer. My grandparents kept up voluminous correspondences and wrote prayers, sermons, lectures, talks--you get the picture. We might, some days, need to scale back the textual communication--sometimes a phone call really does work better--but writing is, for better or worse, what we do.

I'm tagging Caroline with this one, because I'm curious to see if hers are different from mine, and Susan, and anyone else who wants to play.