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...

Two links..and a short note

So it's possible the newest Disney princess movie could have racist elements? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. (Or maybe, as the article suggests, classist? Which seems even more likely...)

I love The Guardian's coverage of literature. This little piece on a new contract that requires children's book writers not to misbehave is a classic. Read the comments, too.

Today is Nick's birthday, and he is currently happily engrossed in a volume of Asterix stories that his sister gave him. He acquired one in French, while we were in France, and the volume she bought includes that one in English. Go, Mariah! He has also--so far--received copies of The Little Prince, The Magician: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (he finished The Alchemyst yesterday), and The Discworld Graphic Novels. And all this is before today's mail has arrived...

Teaching at Hogwarts

Well, I don't teach at Hogwarts, of course--my building is neo-Gothic, not medieval--but I have some fun considering Harry and Ron as students in my latest over at Inside Higher Ed.

Recent reading

As you can see from the sidebar, I did not complete my assigned reading while on vacation. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy both Out of the Wild* and Little Brother--and I passed the latter on to my brother-in-law, who enjoyed it as well. Part of the pleasure for both of us--more for him, a San Francisco native--was a familiarity with the locations. It's always fun to find a place one knows in fiction. But what I enjoyed even more was the unapologetic political nature of the novel, and the unabashed geekery. I have to confess I couldn't much follow the latter, but I found it compelling anyway--and more than a little paranoid.

The day before we left for France, I field a call from our bank for Mariah. She was out on her scooter, and the bank was concerned that her debit card had been used twice at gas stations in the last hour and a half. That's a pretty typical fraud pattern, they explained, so they just wanted to make sure she really did have the card. I called her and all was well, and we were grateful to the card company for checking. But after reading Little Brother I reflected again on how that information could be used. While I trust our bank (mostly) to keep our data safe, the fact that the information is out there means it could be misused, as it is in the novel. (For those who haven't read it, in the novel government agents use credit card, cell phone, internet, and toll-pass data to track citizens whom they suspect of terrorist involvement.) When do the potential harms outweigh the real benefits of this kind of data gathering? How do we know how our data is being used, and what can we do to protect it? The novel asks these questions in an always-entertaining, fast-paced adventure that explores the role of civil liberties in a civil society.

I can imagine Little Brother as one of the "surprise" YA titles of the sort discussed in Margo Rabb's piece in the New York Times, a book that began life as simply "a novel," that was then picked up and marketed as YA. Or maybe not--I don't know what Doctorow had in mind. But the book seems to me an obvious candidate for crossover, regardless.

Rabb, it seems to me, is saying much more diplomatically what Frank Cottrell Boyce said a month or so ago about YA literature: it's literature, and/but some people find the YA label off-putting. Others don't, of course (read Justine Larbalestier and Little Willow for more on this). But I did find myself defending the book a bit to my brother-in-law before passing it on. Maybe I have to work on my own attitudes...

*More on OOTW in another post. I am still mulling over some of the implications of the series and its attitudes towards fairy tales. I'll come back to it soon, I hope.

anticipation

I'm off on a trip tomorrow, and I have assembled for my reading pleasure:

• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
• Out of the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst
• The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley

and some magazines, not too terribly trashy...

It's all I can do not to start reading now. Can I start in the airport departure lounge, or do I have to wait until I'm on board? Do I start on the first (short) leg, or do I wait until we're really and truly on our way? Ah, decisions, decisions.

Blog hiatus approaching, due to aforesaid travel. Details on my return.

Nick reviews Rapunzel's Revenge

I got an ARC of Rapunzel's Revenge along with HTDYF, and I think that's a pretty good pairing. Both are irreverent takes on fantasy; both are smart and funny; both feature kick-ass heroines. Because Nick is a graphic novel fan, I handed Rapunzel's Revenge over to him as soon as I finished it, and he sat almost motionless on the couch until he was done with it. (He did take a break for lunch and for his afternoon day camp, but I had to nudge him a bit.)

When I asked him what he liked about it, here's what he said.

Well, it helps that I like graphic novels. And I like when they take something everyone knows, and it's all boring, and they say, no, that's wrong, it really happened in this awesome way.

He also suggests a sequel in which Rapunzel and Jack team up again and she dispatches the giant for him. What do you think, Hales? Are you up for it?

Details: Rapunzel's Revenge is by Shannon Hale (author of The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, Princess Academy, Austenland, etc.), Dean Hale (her husband), and Nathan Hale, the illustrator, who is no relation to either other Hale. I received an ARC from the publisher; the book is due out in August.

Also: now available--The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson. Get it while it's hot!

More brief reviews

It's been a great summer so far for catching up on reading and movie-viewing. I can't remember the last time I've seen so many movies in a week (three!)--probably last summer. I've also been making my way through a pile of ARCs and other books that have turned up in my mailbox, one way and another, and it's been a pleasure to do so. Here are two books to look for:

• The Proof that Ghosts Exist, by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman. I know Perry Nodelman as a very fine scholar of children's literature. I use his co-authored (with Mavis Reimer) book, The Pleasures of Children's Literature, to teach my introduction to children's literature course, and it is that rare thing in a textbook, a pleasure to read. So when I read that he had a new novel coming out (he's already published several others), I jumped at the chance to get an ARC. And I'm glad I did. The Proof that Ghosts Exist introduces us to a pair of siblings, Molly and Adam, who are as different as two siblings can be. She's orderly, reasonable, and rational; he's imaginative and a bit off-kilter. (Hmm, Dorothy and William Wordsworth?) The novel begins as they head off to a summer house with their father, whose own father and grandfather both dropped dead the day before their 35th birthdays. And, yes, it is the day before their father's 35th birthday, so they're a little concerned. This is a funny, imaginative excursion into the world of ghost-hunting--highly recommended for middle-grade readers. (Received from the publisher; the book is out in Canada but not yet available in the US, according to Amazon.)
  
• The Seems: The Split Second, by John Hulme and Michael Wexler. This is the second "Seems" book--the first, The Glitch in Sleep, came out last year, but somehow I missed it. The Seems is a world behind our world, where The Powers that Be arrange things so that our world...works, sort of. Only sometimes it doesn't, so there are Fixers to try to get things back on track, and Becker Drane, at age 13, is the youngest Fixer. And right now, someone's split a second, time is out of time, and Becker needs to get to work. The novel reminded me a lot of Jasper Fforde's books, with the clever wordplay and antic movement between different levels of reality, but without the reliance on classic literature that might slow down a middle-grade reader. This book isn't due out until the fall, but you can start with the first one--I plan to go back and read it myself. (Received in ARC from the publisher along with How to Ditch Your Fairy and two graphic novels I haven't gotten to yet.)
  

OK, this one's not a book, and you can read about it anywhere, really, but I just have to put in a plug for Wall-E as well. As you probably already know, one of the triumphs of the movie is how well it conveys emotion with very few (and, for the first few minutes, no) words. In its emphasis on the visual it reminded me a bit of The Arrival, and I was delighted to learn from the smart people on the child_lit listserv that Shaun Tan did some work on it. It's also the bitingest satire I've seen in a while: the movie really doesn't pull its punches in depicting environmental degradation, and the huge corporation (Buy-N-Large) that controls, seemingly, everything, has clear connections to Wal-Mart. The irony of the movie is that it takes two robots to restore people's humanity--and Pixar manages to convey this in a completely believable, almost inevitable, way. You'll walk out of the movie saying "Wall-E" in the robot's creaky little voice, just as you walked out of E.T. saying "phone home." I promise. (You may also find yourself adding Hello, Dolly! to your netflix queue...)