Friday, May 15, 2009

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.)

8 comments:

juggi said...

great list!...u need to do one for movies as well!

akk181154 said...

And why have you left out Harry Potter?

Srimati Krishnakumar said...

Why not 'To Kill a Mockingbird'?

Abhinav Sharma said...

Do you think that the movie LOTR was much better than the book?

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