The List Is Growing!

The List was at 51 books last time I posted it - thanks to many more suggestions from visitors to the site - it is now numbering 74 amazing books.  Is your favourite book on the list?  

1.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

2.    Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

3.    Iliad – Homer

4.    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

5.    Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

6.    1984 – George Orwell

7.    Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

8.    Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

9.    Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

11. Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

12. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

15. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

16. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

18. Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

19. Middlemarch – George Elliot

20. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

21. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

23. The Time Machine – HG Wells

24. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

25. Foundation – Isaac Asimov

26. Ulysses – James Joyce

27. Paradise Lost – Milton

28. The Pearl – John Steinbeck

29. Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

30. I Claudius – Robert Graves

31. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

32. East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

33. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

34. Odyssey – Homer

35. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

36. Diceman - George Cockcroft

37. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

39. Persuasion – Jane Austen

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell

41. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

42. Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

43. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

45. Neuromancer – William Gibson

46. A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

47. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

48. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

49. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

50. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

51. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

52. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

54. Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce   

55. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

56. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

57. The Sound and The Fury – William Faulkner

58. Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence

59. The Wings Of The Dove – Henry James

60. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh

61. As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner

62. The French Lieutentant’s Woman – John Fowles

63. Howards End – EM Forster

64. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

66. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

67. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

68. The Call of the Wild – Jack London

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

71. Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

72. The Magus – John Fowles

73. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

74. A Town Like Alice – Neville Shute

Why are the classical works important to the world?

This is the text from the Notes page from Wuthering Heights, I think it is highly relevant to my Classical Literature project - so here it is unabridged for you to read.

What is a literary classic and why are these classic works important to the world?

A literary classic is a work of the highest excellence that has something important to say about life and/or the human condition and says it with great artistry. A classic, through its enduring presence, has withstood the test of time and is not bound by time, place, or customs. It speaks to us today as forcefully as it spoke to people one hundred or more years ago, and as forcefully as it will speak to people of future generations. For this reason, a classic is said to have universality.

About Emily

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in England. She was one of six children, five girls and one boy. The Brontës moved to a village near the Yorkshire moors, a wild and desolate area of England and also the inspiration for the setting of some of the sisters' books. Theirs was a difficult and tragic existence, with the specter of disease and death a constant presence. Before Emily turned ten, her mother had died after a short bout with cancer, and two sisters had succumbed to tuberculosis. Elisabeth Branwell, an aunt, raised the remaining children. Although she was an authoritarian and imposing figure, Elisabeth did not stifle the children's imaginations; they read many books from the large family library and constructed their own worlds of imaginary people and situations.

In 1846, Emily and her two sisters published, using male names, a collection of their poems; it was titled The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, pseudonyms that stood for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. The book, despite some of Emily's poems being singled out by a critic as excellent, sold only two copies. This disappointment did not discourage them, however, and they each began writing a novel.

Emily and her sister Charlotte went to Brussels in 1842 to learn foreign languages, but Emily soon returned home, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Emily wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), but it did not become an instant success like her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre did. As with Charlotte's book, critics were reluctant to admit that a woman who lived a sheltered life, could have written such a passionate book, especially one filled with “such vulgar depravity.”

Emily Brontë died on December 19, 1848, only three months after her brother's Branwell's death; she had caught a serious cold at the funeral and refused any medical treatment.

This information about Emily is taken from the notes page of Wuthering Heights

Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights video

Whilst on the subject of Wuthering Heights - I can't forget how much my Dad loved Kate Bush back in the 70's, and this crazy video just about sums her up!

Wuthering Heights Video by Kate Bush

Wuthering Site

I found this website when looking around the internet,  it is very informative and well built, take a look at it to add value to your Wuthering Heights reading experience.






This cool website which is making for a great companion to the Wuthering Heights audiobook I am currently deeply immersed in.


http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/


The site was created by a fellow Devon dweller like me, Paul Thompson, and it is comprehensive.  I have spent a while there recently exploring the character studies, the story timeline, character genealogy, it is really well done.

Next up: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

 

I read this book as a teenager and was captivated by the gothic passion, the ungoverned emotion, the desolate landscape, the cruelty.  It is one of the most popular and highly regarded novels in the English Literature cannon, and Emily Brontë is revered as one of the finest writers of the nineteenth century .

Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte wrote shortly after her death, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is.”

Wuthering Heights does not stray far from the gothic traditions of the desolation of the moonless landscape, visitations from the supernatural, forgotten tumbledown ruins and a pervading sense of fear and unease. But it surpasses the genre, it offers so much more for the reader, it’s haunting themes and symbolism, and most of all its turbulent, doomed love story.

I have bought an audiobook to revisit this masterpiece, it came highly recommended for the wonderful accents and I can't wait to start.

War and Peace review by Adam Thirlwell

War and Peace


by Leo Tolstoy

(Anthony Briggs
 Translation)

Reviewed by Adam Thirlwell in Guardian Books

"As for Tolstoy," James Joyce wrote to his brother, when Joyce was 23, "I disagree with you altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!"

What did Joyce mean by not being theatrical? "Then suddenly the most fearful scream - it couldn't be hers, she couldn't have screamed like that - came from inside the room. Prince Andrey ran to the door. The screaming stopped and he heard a different sound, the wail of a baby. 'Why have they taken a baby in there?' Prince Andrey wondered for a split-second." That is the untheatrical, impure, confused, comic way of describing a man as he waits for his wife to give birth. Tolstoy's War and Peace, whose unparaphrasable plot covers Russia during the Napoleonic wars, is a 1,400-page exercise in - a treadmill of - irony; and it is gleefully experimental.

With War and Peace, Tolstoy introduced two novelistic innovations, both based on his new principle of length, which was part of his constant principle of irony. The first is luxurious detail. There is suddenly space to record deft things such as: "A doctor in a bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it." There are bad jokes, an emperor in trendy narrow shoes, mispronounced place names, dresses that have to be mended just before someone goes out. The second innovation is the way he breaks into the narrative, introducing historical essays. Flaubert and Henry James disliked them, considering them irrelevant and un-novelistic. But they can be exhilarating too: like the details, these essays are ironic. They are exercises in deflation.

Such fun with form, however, has not always been obvious from his English translations. In 1889, for example, a man called Huntington Smith (working from a French version) abridged the novel into two sections - one for stories, one for essays - retitled it "The Physiology of War", and explained that Tolstoy was significant because he "had a message to deliver, a message worth hearing, and the world has shown itself ready to hear". This depressing sentence can stand as an allegory of the things that can go wrong in translation.

But things have more often gone right. There are excellent translations by Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds and, my favourite, by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose version was approved by Tolstoy. And now there is a new translation, by Anthony Briggs, which is accurate and clear; and, in general, faithful. But there are problems with fidelity. Everyone, after all, has different definitions.

Tolstoy, says Briggs, in his note on the translation, is "an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualised but always natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue."

I have three reasons for feeling that Tolstoy has been betrayed here. First, this idea that he is an easy read in Russian. Vladimir Nabokov would remind his students that "simplicity is bunkum. No major writer is simple", and go on to show how Tolstoy's style is made up of "creative repetitions" - "he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words". For instance, Russian allows a gap between an adjective and its noun, and Tolstoy loved to elongate that fact. So in the final chapter, when Natasha is in the middle of a happy ending, Tolstoy describes her (literally) like this: "And a joyful, and at the same time pathetic, asking forgiveness for her joy, expression, settled on Natasha's face." This is not smooth Russian, but deliberate complication. In Briggs's translation, it reads: "And Natasha's face had shone with happiness, though it also had a pathetic look as if to apologise for any happiness." It is not that English offers him many ways of imitating Tolstoy's weird syntax, but that is no reason then to make out that nothing has been lost. It is no reason not to try. "Have you noticed Tolstoy's language?" asked Chekhov. "Enormous periods, sentences piled one on top of another. Don't think that it happens by chance or that it's a shortcoming. It's art, and it only comes after hard work."

Secondly, this idea that a translation should be happily smooth. I agree with Milan Kundera: "Partisans of 'flowing' translation often object to my translators: 'That's not the way to say it in German (in English, in Spanish, etc.)!' I reply: 'It's not the way to say it in Czech either!'"

And thirdly, there is the dialogue. The three great previous translators of War and Peace were all educated women. Briggs is impatient with them, on the grounds that their language could not be equal to the brute earthiness of the soldiers' dialogue on battlefields. But it is not obvious that Briggs is so earthy either. "'You all right, Petrov?' inquired one. 'We gave it to 'em hot, men. That'll keep 'em quiet,' another said. 'Couldn't see nothing. They were hitting their own men! Couldn't see nothing for the dark, mates. Anything to drink?'" How much better is this than dialogue which Briggs dislikes: "I say, fellow-countrymen, will they set us down here or take us on to Moscow?"

No, this novel is spikier than it now looks. While Moscow collapses, Pierre Besukhov is trying to predict the future, using a weird key which combines numbers with the French alphabet. Napoleon adds up to 666. Besukhov then tries to find Napoleon's numerical equal. Having failed with the Emperor Alexander, and the Russian nation, Pierre thinks, naturally, of himself: he doesn't work either. Finally, after adding in his nationality in French - russe - and then misspelling it, Pierre gets it right: "Dropping the e again (quite unjustifiably) Pierre got the answer he was after in the phrase l'russe Besuhof - exactly 666!"

L'russe. If you needed an emblem of the novel, an un-French word - thrussian - made up by a French-speaking member of the Russian aristocracy would be it. And yet, in this translation, the loopiness of Pierre's bad French is mildly lost, because Tolstoy's sporadic French ambience has been cut out. It provides, therefore, a stray, enforced moment of polyphony.

It is a small stylistic moment, but everything in this novel is small. Because War and Peace is a great novel not because Tolstoy's characters worry about God and death and nations, but because they make up weird words. Its subject is not grandiose: it is chance. And the only way to show this is minutely. Tolstoy is the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical. This outlandish, wonderful novel - which survives all of its impossible, necessary translations, including this thorough but imperfect one - is a masterpiece of reduction, and has style.

The nature of Danger

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.

War and Peace - Tolstoy

Book X, Chapter XVII

Hollywood's Take on Tolstoy

War and Peace was given the Hollywood treatment in 1956 apparently.
The lavish production starred the incomparable Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Henry Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov.

Check out the trailer.....

Hepburn was nominated for Best British Actress in the 1957 BAFTAs for her role in War and Peace.  And the film got excellent reviews.  I have not seen it myself but will keep an eye out for it.

Sorrow and Joy

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

War and Peace - Tolstoy

Book XV, Chapter I

Everything comes to those who wait

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

War and Peace - Tolstoy

Book X, Chapter XVI

The height of human wisdom

My favourite excerpt from War and Peace today was...


"Nothing has been found out, nothing discovered" Pierre again said to himself. "All we can know is that we know nothing.  And that is the height of human wisdom"


Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Book V, Chapter I

Seize the moments of happiness

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! 

That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. 

Book IV, Chapter XI

The necessary society of clever women

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women."”  


Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Book I, Chapter IV

Kicking off with Tolstoy

Time to start the fun bit - working down the list.  I thought I would start with a big one, an epic, to get the ball rolling.


Following the maxim "go large, or go home" I decided to kick off with Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'.


I already have a copy of the book, but it is currently in a cardboard box along with everything else in my bookshelf, as we bought a house in June and we move house in 2 days time.  I realise that I may not have mountains of free time for reading and bubble baths (my absolute favourite place to unwind with a good book) in the foreseeable future, so I have also made use of my audible account to buy the unabridged audiobook too, narrated by Frederick Davidson and published by Blackstone Audio Inc.  The translation of this version is by Louise and Aylmer Maude.  I know that there is always furious debate about which translations give the most authentic interpretation of Tolstoy's own nuances and connotations, so I will use my book (when it get's unpacked) as a cross reference for my own benefit.


The audiobook weighs in at 10 mins shy of 61 hours of listening time, so this should keep me occupied in the coming weeks as I pack up my life into boxes, clean the rented house from top to bottom, make umpteen trips back and forth between my old place and the new place (40 minutes in the car each way).


I will be starting tonight as I cook, I will dock my ipod n the kitchen and get started on the journey into Tolstoy's story about the French invasion of Russia in the 1800's and effect that the Napoleonic era had on Tsarist Russian society.  Really looking forward to it!

The Lit List

My Book List so far....

1.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

2.    Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

3.    Iliad – Homer

4.    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

5.    Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

6.    1984 – George Orwell

7.    Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

8.    Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

9.    Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

11. Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

12. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

15. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

16. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

18. Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

19. Middlemarch – George Elliot

20. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

21. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

23. The Time Machine – HG Wells

24. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

25. Foundation – Isaac Asimov

26. Ulysses – James Joyce

27. Paradise Lost – Milton

28. The Pearl – John Steinbeck

29. Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

30. I Claudius – Robert Graves

31. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

32. East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

33. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

34. Odyssey – Homer

35. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

36. Diceman - George Cockcroft

37. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

39. Persuasion – Jane Austen

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell

41. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

42. Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

43. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

45. Neuromancer – William Gibson

46. A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

47. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

48. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

49. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

50. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

51. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
52. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

An Odyssey in Literature

I have always had a desire to read as many of the books that are considered to be Literary classics as possible.  Some of these are ancient classics, and some are modern classics, many are classics of English Literature, others are classics from other languages and cultures.

It is my birthday today and next year is a milestone birthday (ouch).  Life is rushing past so fast so I have decided to make a formal plan to start ticking these greats off my list, as frankly, I am not getting any younger!  (My Gran says she is glad to hear I am 'bettering myself')

I already have a decent number of these books under my belt, having read them already, so rather than revisiting them all again in written form, I plan to approach this book list in a different way.  I will read many of these books, particularly the ones I have not read before, but in revisiting the ones I have already read, I plan instead to listen to them, as read by some fantastic narrators.


I have been a bookworm from early childhood, and always have a pile of books by bed, I will always love the feel of a book, the smell of the ink and the paper, that will never change.  But, in recent years I have also become a fan of audiobooks.  A well read audiobook can really bring a story to life, and add another dimension to the stories remembered from the written words I have previously enjoyed.  Also, when all the accents are done perfectly, it really adds a lot of drama and authenticity to the story hearing it that way.    Audiobooks are an opportunity to be listening to fantastic stories, instead of tacky radio stations, while I work at my desk, in the studio, travelling, or pottering around the house.  I look forward to chores and driving now, as I can immerse myself in epic stories of love, heroism and adventure while I go about my daily grind.  

This list will be evolving and expanding.  As a start point, I asked the people in my life and my followers in the twitterverse too, to give me suggestions of their personal much loved classics for my list.  My next post will have the first 50 essential books we came up with between us for my list.