Fifteen Really Good Books

I started out making a list of my five favourite books. Couldn't decide, even after leaving out plays to make my life easier. So I increased it to ten. Still couldn't decide. Then I made it fifteen... And, faced with possibility of fifteen turning into twenty, I abandoned the idea of enumerating my favourite books and listed instead fifteen Really Good Books (henceforth RGBs).

Oh, and all these opinions are mine alone.

They are (in alphabetical order):

Animal Farm (1945)

Author: George Orwell

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Its just-plausible-enough-to-be-eerie atmosphere, Boxer and Muriel.

Impact on Modern Culture: Beast would not have occasioned his guards half as much merriment if he had been sitting in his cell reading 1984 in that X-Men episode.

Most Memorable Line: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Dr. Seuss's A-B-C (1963)

Author: Theodor Geisel

Best Thing(s) about the Book: You learn the alphabet and you find out what a fiffer-feffer feff looks like.

Impact on Modern Culture: Well, eventually kids have to learn that A can stand for more exciting things than "Apple".

Most Memorable Line: "Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo."

Gone with the Wind (1936)

Author: Margaret Mitchell

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Its Really Good Heroine.

Impact on Modern Culture: It gives actresses an option other than "Lady Macbeth" when they are asked to name their dream role.

Most Memorable Line: "My dear, I don't give a damn."

The Iliad (circa 800 BC)

Author: Homer (we hope; and if the wrong man has been getting the credit for twenty-eight centuries it might be a bit too late to do anything about it)

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Kleos, Hector and the Fury of Achilles.

Impact on Modern Culture: The Ban-Poetic-License Brigade would be out of work if they didn't have to spend their time proving that there really couldn't have been that many Greek soldiers at Troy.

Most Memorable Line: (In Chapman's translation) "Infinite is that I offer you,/Myself conferring it, expos'd alone to all your odds,/Only imploring right of arms. Achilles, fear the gods."

Inferno (1308 - 1321)

Author: Dante Alighieri

Best Thing(s) about the Book: That Circle of Ice. Somehow it is far more terrifying than all the previous rings combined.

Impact on Modern Culture: "The lowest circle of hell is reserved for traitors and mutineers," said Captain Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. I don't know if he was in fact refering to Dante, but all indicators are that he is surprisingly erudite.

Most Memorable Line: (In Longfellow's translation) "Cruel indeed art thou, if yet thou grieve not,/Thinking of what my heart foreboded me,/And weep'st thou not, what art thou wont to weep at?"

The Lord of the Rings (1954)

Author: JRR Tolkien

Best Thing(s) about the Book: That nice mythic down-spiral that just manages not to be depressing.

Impact on Modern Culture: The twentieth century had its full quota of Elves and epic journeys and everyone in New Zealand got to have their name mentioned on stage at the Kodak Theatre.

Most Memorable Line: "And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Making Money (2007)

Author: Terry Pratchett

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Lord Vetinari

Impact on Modern Culture: It turns banking into a profession that does not always employ geeks.

Most Memorable Line: "'That is almost ten tons of gold,' said Bent reproachfully. 'It does not have to look big.'"

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Author: Agatha Christie

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Poirot's trials with those vegetable marrows. Seriously. That is such a brilliantly incongruous image.

Impact on Modern Culture: People (or at least Pierre Bayard) wrote books about whether or not Agatha Christie was accurate in her identification of the culprit. And it's not even a hundred years old yet.

Most Memorable Line: "I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone."

The Pickwick Papers (1837)

Author: Charles Dickens

Best Thing(s) about the Book: It gives you the pleasure of Dickens without the starving orphans.

Impact on Modern Culture: It has a syndrome named after it - what more could a book ask for? (And, on a more serious note, this was probably the first real attempt anyone made at selling secular book-related merchandise. I doubt they realized that they were setting out on a road that would eventually have "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" as one if its main stops.)

Most Memorable Line: "Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses - a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness; it was Mr. Winkle's fate to figure in both characters."

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Author: Oscar Wilde

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Unquestionably, indubitably, Dorian himself.

Impact on Modern Culture: They had someone delightfully, amorally evil for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and without being reduced to introducing Mephistopheles (which would have been cheating). Although, to be honest, Stuart Townsend is not quite what I imagined when I read the book.

Most Memorable Line: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Author: Jane Austen

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Mr. Bennet. That's the kind of man who would have been a sore trial to his wife and a delight to everyone else.

Impact on Modern Culture: Austen gives us the original rebellious tomboy (who, of course, settles down eventually).

Most Memorable Line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Author: P.G. Wodehouse

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Mr. Spink-Bottle addressing the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

Impact on Modern Culture: Anybody who volunteers to do a book-reading to any audience anywhere in the world has a nice safe fall-back option just in case everything else gets booed.

Most Memorable Line: I don't think it would be strictly legal to quote the entire book, so I'm just going to skip this part.

The Three Musketeers (1844)

Author: Alexandré Dumas

Best Thing(s) about the Book: The original swashbuckler.

Impact on Modern Culture: Anyone who claims not to have heard phrases from the book used, and abused, and then some, is either exceptionally fortunate or exceptionally tolerant.

Most Memorable Line: I hate to have to say this, but, "All for one, one for all." You can't blame Dumas for the fact that it has been done to death.

Vanity Fair (1848)

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Becky Sharpe. Well, it's very difficult to like her, but you have to admit that without her it wouldn't have been much of a story.

Impact on Modern Culture: People who want to make movies or write books in which you don't really like anybody and honestly don't care if nobody has a happy ending now have the perfect excuse: they can look injured and say, "But critics didn't mind when Thackeray did it."

Most Memorable Line: "Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

Author: A.A. Milne

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Pooh Bear and his hunny.

Impact on Modern Culture: Without a doubt, Bertie Wooster's comments on Christopher Robin going hoppity-hop-hop.

Most Memorable Line: "PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD. PLEZ CNOK IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID." (All right, I'm not which of the books that one's from, but a line that makes you remember the spelling mistakes has to be a good line.)

The Antiquity You Miss

I'd never have thought there could be an argument, even a foolish, fallacious, just-to-be-the-devil's-advocate argument, against plunging oneself wholly and unabashedly into classical Greek literature. But there is a danger, and even in lauding those incomparable poets and playwrights you spring the trap.

Homer's Hellas is no part of the Balkan peninsula, not even geographically. How can you apply a word normally seen in the firm black print of the modern cartographer to the orderly wildness of his ancient world? How can you possibly call Achilles or Perseus or Helen "Balkan"? And yet there is a Balkan peninsula, one whose stories you will never know if you have not ventured further north than Illyria (and that only in company with the exiled Alexander).

And so, even when the crags of Illyria are described, although you have a vague idea of jagged mountains dark against the night sky, it is still Artemis in her chariot in that sky, because it is still Homer's world. And the Oracle of Dione takes on something of the quality of the Pythian shrine at Delphi: the slightly amused, slightly mocking, ultimately benevolent nature of the god.

North of that? You do not know; you imagine a few nebulous uninhabited mountains and then you are happily feeling the cold breath of Boreas and watching the Viking longboats, regretting only that so few of their ancient writings are extant.

But if you are forced, just for a moment, to abandon the sophists and go south of Poland instead of north of Greece, it is different. The crags, free of the association with Arcadian meadows, are more threatening, the moon is the symbol of things darker and more dangerous than a virgin goddess, and Dione is suddenly Dione as she was when the world was under Kronos. War is the bloody struggle that accompanied the spread of the Ottoman Empire, more terrifying in its savagery than the epic heroism that was the fall of Troy.

Does this make you want to abandon Euripides and Sophocles? Not in the least. But it does give you an odd chill, because sometimes the inventiveness of human beings is far more terrible than the wrath of gods. It does make you wonder what might have been.

Voting in Mumbai

Normally I wouldn't post about things like this - poets and politics, and all that, and what happened to Ovid is a matter of public record. (He annoyed Augustus - or, I suppose, annoyed Livia - and was exiled, a dismal fate for one whose work depended on access to the libraries of Rome.)

However, having been exceedingly funny at the expense of the Election Commission when interesting things happened with my voter registration form, it's only fair to give them a tip-of-the-hat when they get things right.

April 30 was assuredly a thing they got right.

I will admit than when I first heard that the electoral rolls in the polling booths would be on paper, I was appalled. I think my reaction was something like, "Books? You mean actual books? But there are millions of people in the city! It'll be like having to sort through hundreds of phone books. I'll be in line for ever." I finished with a sort of despairing wail.

It wasn't as bad as all that - in fact, it wasn't bad at all.

I planned to leave home at eight-thirty, actually left at ten to nine, and was pointed in the right direction by helpful policemen. When I got to the polling station, there was a man sitting at a table outside. He had four books. Four very slim books. If they had been stacked one on top of another, an ant standing on a pencil would probably have been able to see over the pile.

He was helping some people find their names, but, once he had established that I was literate, he didn't make me wait while he finished with them. He gave me a book with the injunction to locate my own name (which took ten minutes or so, but that was entirely my fault, since the first time around I forgot to check the last page for the supplementary list).

Then I went in. State name to chap with list, chap repeats name to confirm, chap examines driving license, ink spot on finger. The Electronic Voting Machine was concealed from view by an upturned carton with the bottom and one side cut off, which, when you get down to it, is every bit as effective as reinforced concrete walls (provided, of course, that there is no danger of a strong wind). The EVM was easy to use - locate name of candidate, press button - and that was it.

I was back home, to my own astonishment, at nine-fifteen.

Sure, it would have rated far higher on the coolness scale to have had biorhythm sensors identifying people as they went in and voice-activated voting machines recording their choices. But until someone finds a cheap way to manufacture several hundred thousand of those, the system works pretty well.