Book lists

[lederhosen]

cleolinda asked:

...there's sort of a "twenty favorite books" thing going around at JournalFen... Here's the problem:

Favorite does not equal best. I'm not talking about which books you think are, objectively, the best. I think Faulkner is one of the all-time great writers. That does not mean I ever want to read one of his books ever, ever again. My definition of "twenty favorite books" is "the books you keep picking up, time and time again, possibly flipping to three or four specific sections worn into the spine by the number of times you've read them." I think that says a hell of a lot more about a person than "top twenty books people agree to be fabulous and I can actually stand."

(In a pinch, you can substitute an author for a number of his books, and specify which ones you like best, so as not to take up too many numbers on your list.)

I ended up with an even dozen. Some are these are books I would reread again and again, but either don't have a copy handy these days or know well enough that I don't need to.



Looking at this list, I've realised something: one of the things that fascinates me in history is the contrast between the 'official' morals societies professed to follow, the way we remember those societies, and the way people actually lived.

1. Anon., The Thousand Nights And One Night (Mardrus/Mathers translation).

I picked this up in a four-volume hardcover set, second-hand, in excellent condition. It's about three thousand pages worth; I read it through, end to end, back when I was doing the long daily commute. I haven't reread *all* of it since, and possibly never will, but I like it for all sorts of reasons.

If you ever want to appeal to a mathematician, you can't do better than recursion, and the 1001 Nights has that aplenty with its stories-within-stories structure.

The tales are *not* all the work of one author; they've come from a wide variety of sources, and the range of stories beautifully illustrate that contrast I mentioned up above, the inconsistency between strict Islam and the world in which these tales were told.

There are pious tales of noble heroes who Walloped The Unbelievers In The Name Of Islam, and young women who dazzle experts with their knowledge of the Qu'ran. There are bawdy tales of tricksters and cuckolds, earthy enough to make Chaucer feel right at home. (Story #27 is 'The Flowering Terrace of Wit and Garden of Gallantry'; the first story within that one, #27a, is 'Al-Rachid and the Fart'.) And there are romantic tales in which Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back.

Or, in one case: Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Finds Girl, Boy And Girl Marry, Boy Loses Girl Again, Girl Dresses Up As Boy, Girl-Dressed-As-Boy Meets Second Girl, Girl Marries Girl, Girl And Girl Meet Boy, Boy Marries Second Girl Also, And Domestic Bliss ensues.

There are any number of translations around; the bowdlerized versions are a LOT shorter, and even supposedly-complete versions differ more than a little.

Byron, collected works esp. Don Juan.

Byron was another who noticed that the morals his society preached and the ones they actually lived by were two vastly different things; his appeal to me is not so much as a pure poet (if any such thing exists), but in the way he treated this gap, both in writing and in life.

Phil Foglio, collected works esp. XXXenophile.

A hundred years from now, I doubt anybody will put Phil Foglio on lists like this, but he deserves at least a mention.

For those who aren't familiar with him, Phil Foglio is a comic-book artist responsible for things like the wonderful Girl Genius and a great deal of gaming art. (A good deal of it in collaboration with his wife Kaja.)

He is also, unashamedly, the creator of XXXenophile, which could uncharitably be described as a pornographic comic. And it is, but it's vastly better than those words imply. It treats sex as something that should be positive for everybody involved; it's clever, affectionate, and very very funny. Good sex shouldn't be a subject for shame.

Neil Gaiman, collected works. Hard to pick one, but I'll go with Dream Hunters.

Not much I can say about Gaiman you won't already have heard.

Mary Gentle, Grunts.

Fantasy told from the orcs' point of view. The author's photo makes her look like such a sweet lady, until you read the book. Macabre and funny. (Though she has a habit of elliding large chunks of story to get to the Interesting Bits, which can be disorienting.) It's not great literature, but lots of fun.

Joanot Martorell & Marti Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc.

Martorell was a fifteenth-century knight of Valencia; de Galba, another knight, completed this book upon Martorell's death, and it was published in 1490. It's the fictional tale of Tirant, a paragon among knights, who travels across Europe adventuring among other knights and fighting the Turks. Tirant was one of the key influences on Don Quixote, written a hundred years later.

Again, contrasts - this time between our modern perception of Middle-Ages chivalry, and the reality. Not that Tirant himself is a realistic character, far from it; he's intended as a perfect knight, and the reality may well have fallen short of that. But the chivalric ideal he exemplifies is a very long way from modern interpretations. Tirant travels around Europe picking often-lethal fights on the faintest of provocations, and his long-running attempt to win the Fair Princess' hand in marriage is eventually resolved by a method that today we'd call 'rape'.

I found this book particularly interesting when I encountered the uglier side of SCA politics, and discovered first-hand that the people who work hardest at *looking* chivalric and honourable are often the ones with the most to conceal. There are plenty of good people who really do uphold the virtues the SCA talks about, but there were some who treated them as sticks with which to bludgeon potential threats to their position.

Andre Maurois, Byron.

Not just because I'm a Byron fan; Maurois is a damn good biographer, with a knack for getting under the skin of his subject and making you feel like you know the man. Curiously enough, he also wrote the children's book "Fattypuffs and Thinifers", which was a childhood favourite of mine.

Kim Newman, collected works esp. Life's Lottery.

Kim Newman is best known as the author of Anno Dracula, which I like, but on the whole I prefer his short stories. Horror and alternate-history with a political bite to it, and identifying all the cameos is fun.

Life's Lottery is effectively a Choose Your Own Adventure book for grownups. More than that, the way it's written shows that Newman understands how people read those things - with half a dozen fingers jammed in the book, trying to find out what would have happened if they'd taken a different path.

Antoine de Saint-Exuperie, The Little Prince.

I first read this when I was fairly young - about ten, I think, about the time my grandmother died. It's a terribly sad and lonely tale, teaching that it is impossible to have love without grief, and yet I don't find it depressing. Somehow, I don't know why, it soothes and settles me.

Oscar Wilde, collected works esp.The Fisherman and his Soul.

Again, I don't entirely know why I like Wilde as much as I do. He writes a great deal about love, and what it costs to love somebody, and I like those stories, but that's only a small part of The Fisherman and his Soul. The greater part is about the idea of being a whole person, and perhaps about there being more than one level of happiness.

And a couple of non-fiction:

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority.

I've posted enough about this one recently that I won't go over that ground just yet.

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Everybody who works in visual design should be forced to read this one. It's about how the way in which information is presented can obscure or reveal that information, along with some excellent examples of both. Occasionally he takes things a bit too far, with his fixation on the data-to-ink ratio, but those sins are small compared to the good things in this book and Tufte's other work.

Comments

[jesusandrew.livejournal.com]

"Fattypuffs and Thinifers" - I hadn't even remembered I knew the title until you mentioned it! I must find out more... although the childhood books I most want to reread are Tove Jansson's "Moomin" books (as soon as I can assemble a complete set).

"Life's Lottery" is a great recommendation. There are so many things I admire about that book. After a number of abortive attempts to say why in a few concise words, I think I'd better leave it at that for now.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I believe brandtotter has a fairly good collection of Moomin books...

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

Everyone else does that thing with choose your own adventure books as well? That's reassuring. I've never seen anyone else reading one.

The only Kim Newman story I've read is Andy Warhol's Dracula, and that was because it was in the same volume as a Michael Marshall Smith story. It was pretty good, but I liked the MMS better.

The Thousand and One Nights is something I'm going to read, but I'm hoping to find a nice second hand copy. I've read some of the stories in collections of fairytales and short stories. I must have more!

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, 'Andy Warhol's Dracula' isn't one of my favourite KN stories. It's OK, but I liked the first and second in the series best.

Back in his early days, Kim Newman wrote some Warhammer & Dark Future novels for Games Workshop, under the name of 'Jack Yeovil'. Unlike 99.99% of RPG-spinoff novels, several of these are actually quite good, and GW has been re-releasing them lately. I recommend 'Drachenfels', 'Genevieve Undead', and 'Comeback Tour' especially.