things that need editing include.....

POPULAR TOP 100 NOVEL LISTS

For some reason the other day as I was on my stoll through the green fields of the internet, stopping to pick metaphorical daisies, I found this list of the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels. Upon first glance this seems to be a super idea.....because then you know what kind of books are awesome and you might enjoy. However there are some obviously inherent problems with the selections. Being that whoever this "board" is has their priorities way out of whack.

The Board List- First of all, two James Joyce novels in the top 10 indicates a serious problem. Look, we all know he was a misunderstood genius. But mistaking "stylized" novels for "top" novels does no one any favors. No one actually enjoys trying to read James Joyce except people who have brought intellectual masturbation to a new refined level.
Secondly, there are many other books where I do not disagree that they are a great novel, but the ranking was chosen by drunk monkeys. For example:

9= Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
93= The Magus by John Fowles

The Magus blows Sons and Lovers out of the water like hillbillies out fishin' with dynamite. DH Lawrence was a pantywaist. You know that's true.

And then! Then! Beside this list of novels is a list of the Top 100 as chosen by readers instead of aforementioned intellectual wankers. This list is good just for its humour value. Because it contains:
3 Ayn Rand novels in the top 10
3 L. Ron Hubbard novels in the top 10
IT by Stephen King
and other such choices that cause one to double over with laughter.

So I started searching the internet to see if there were any Top 100 Novel lists I could get behind.

Here is one created as a "rival" list to the Modern Library's. It is basically the same although it contains Charlotte's Web and Winnie the Pooh and may have had child jurors. Plus the biggest redeeming merit of the first list was that No. 4 was Lolita, and on this list it's been demoted. Boo.

This one is by Time Magazine. At first glance it seems to be a little more hip than others because it contains Ubik by Philip K. Dick and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Which I can totally get behind. However, it is almost instantly ruined by the fact that it also contains, Are You There God, It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume. Seriously.

This list by the Guardian is a little more international. Also, FINALLY, someone had the sense to include One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. Which is obviously one of the best novels ever. However I feel they've also neglected so many good books in favor of including things like Virgil and Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales weren't even meant to be a book, so much as an oral tradition. Duh.

Anyway. You get the point. I know that everyone has different tastes and so on. But I feel like of all the books that were ever written, the Top 100 list should contain things that almost anyone could read and find enjoyable. Book that are both engaging and thought provoking. Yet light and fruity with an essence of oak. You get me.

So. Anyone up for making a new and improved list? I think I might try it. Suggestions welcome.

quantum mediocrity

{brief: novel; 300-ish pages}

Standing around at Jason Christie’s incredibly, mind-blowingly, well-attended book launch, Rhianna, Jonathan and I all agreed: Mobius Dick = Worth Reading (but just barely).

rating: If someone offers to lend it to you for the weekend, go ahead. If you go out and buy a copy for yourself? Well, I was not the one who sent you.


It started off in a way that reminded me of that abominable piece of spiritual lit. (yes, I’ve read it, embarrassingly enough…) The Celestine Prophecy. Stress and suspense are placed on coincidence after coincidence, though the narrator keeps reminding us: all is chaos and random and random again. Between the narrator’s own deluge of coincidences, we’re witness to a historical, chatty, whorish, mish-mosh of scientists, musicians, writers, etc and another contemporary storyline involving a man who has no memory (or no stable memory to speak of), locked up in a hospital for people who suffer from a particular “disease”, wherein they create and re-create their own memories. Time loops around, merges at points, and occasionally knocks the characters into one another.


I enjoyed:
a) quantum mechanic bits, because I am a highschool dropout and those things make me feel a little more secure around highly learned company.
b) if you know me, you know I enjoy interesting time frames, done right.
c) some of the characters were pleasant…
d) the cover art.

However:
a) ….sure, there was some quantum mechanics, and I learned. I just didn’t feel like I learned nearly enough.
b) …the interesting time splices were a little clumsy and predictable- gimmicky?
c) …in a watered-down, Catch-22 sort of way.
d) no, I stand firm in my position on the cover art. It’s totally nice cover art.

For similar-but-better, a slightly mis-guided but pretty neat-o blogger { Grumpy Old Bookman} recommends:
Alfred Bester’s Tiger, Tiger (aka: The Stars My Destination).

For a more “gushing review” of this book {and wow, do I mean “gushing”- ANDREW CRUMEY WRITES LIKE A dream and dreams like a writer inspired to make mischief about the difference between writing and dreaming.} I turn you over to:
The Scotsman

Erebus by Robert Hunter

New to this blog, I thought I'd post about something old. I recently discovered this bizarre book, which I am currently reading amongst my other reading. Not sure whether it's a "neglected classic" or a "justly neglected book" yet, but I encourage you to check out the strangeness that is Robert Hunter's Erebus.

Robert Hunter is best known to the world as the founder of Greenpeace. Before founding Greenpeace he was a reporter in Winnipeg and wrote a strange novel representing Winnipeg as "a place of darkness halfway between Hell and Heaven." Needless to say, it is intense and uncommonly comic. Here is the first paragraph of the novel for you:

The remains of the sun are shuddering. Fumes rise as it rots. It has a green skin, punctured, with stains running from the sores. It is nothing more than a decaying grape. Its light is putrification. At the moment, it is retreating into the anus of night. In the morning, it will be dumped like a turd on the horizon.

If you want to read this book, you will have to seek it out. To the best of my knowledge, it is out of print, and so you'll have to look it up in the library or on a site like www.abebooks.com. Enjoy!

Kelly Link for Beginners

{brief: paperback; collection of short stories; roughly 300 pages; worst & most inappropriate cover quote of recommendation i've ever read}

rating: pick this bitch up, pronto


I was mid-ravage at my favourite bookstore {pages, kensington} when the woman behind the counter gave me pause. I stilled my frenzied grappling long enough to join her at the bookshelf.

"You like some of the more experimental fiction, don't you?"

"Oh, I do."

After re-establishing my adoration of Garbiel Garcia Marquez and other fantastical whatnots, she informed me that there was some underground following for Kelly Link's fiction and that I would likely be the next banana on the boat. Well, paint me yellow and have a woman with a fruit basket for a hat, sing about not letting me ripen in the fridge: because I am all over that boat.

Alright, so I have a hard time reading & recommending books that don't have really mind-blowing covers- at least very clever ones. Inventive typography, etc. I'm vain and like the attention that clever books draw to me while i'm reading. And, it is safe to say that Magic (for beginners)'s cover is not my favourite and won't be winning me over with any curious, erudite barista boys. To make it worse, the cover quote involves traces of Harry Potter:

"[Link] spins her stories in such charming, matter of fact tones that you almost don't realize you're entering a hybrid world that's part Muggle and part magic" -Time

Muggles? I mean come on- Muggles? Okay. J.K-fucking-Rowling can lead you from A to Z in a plot, but she exercises very little by way of literary device, vocabulary, phrasing and pleasing me in any way. Link, on the other hand, has very practiced, equal-parts charming/eloquant use of english.

Rowling takes reality and splits it down the middle, fencing off her new and invented magical realm from the familiar with very little overlap, let alone intertwining. For the most part, Link doesn't construct a new fantasy world or erect any fences: she takes familiar breeds (zombies, witches, gypsies & ghosts); backs them with an invented foundation (rules & understandings); and nets them into present-tense stories (often with jarringly contemporary references like Bring it On) or ambiguously timed fairy-tales. Also unlike Rowling, Link doesn't get off on real-world derivatives and, though it's seamless writing, there is no question when it's fantastical. It is beautiful storytelling, long before it is "clever inventing" (which should be left to the self-congratulating Mary Shellys of our time).

As a side-note, she lives in Massachussets and that is relieving for me. Authors are so obvious when they are writing as a Canadian Writer.

If all you want to know is, "how does it relate to McSweeny's?":
What can I say? The titles are short and I think Dave Eggers's gang is starting to make that a little embarrassing. But, apparently, they like her quite a bit and she's included in the Mammoth Treasurey of Thrilling Tales. I happen to like it much more than I've liked anything pumped out of the Eggers Factory for awhile now...


If you like any of the following, pick this bitch up pronto:

* Catskin:
Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way– their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses.... One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out.

* Lull: Pete isn't really into this. Imaginary houses are sexy. Real ones are work.

* Magic for beginners:
Jeremy runs all the way,slapping his old track shoes against the sidewalk for the pleasure of the jar, for the sweetness of the sting. He likes the rough, cottony ache in his lungs

Talis opens the door.. She grins at him, although he can tell that she's been crying, too. She's wearing a T-shirt that says I'M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. "Hey," Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn't so goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows. Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. She's an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to Calvin Coolidge, "Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words." Coolidge said, "You lose." Jeremy can imagine Talis as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she was one of those dogs that don't bark.


The Great Divorce:
Sarah wondered why the living, who were so very much more solid, after all, than te dead, so often looked shifty and deceitful to her. She tried not to be prejudiced. But the dead were so beautiful, so fixed and so fluid, like sheets of calligraphy. They belonged to her, although she told herself that she was wrong to feel this way.


Favourite Stories:
Catskin
The Cannon
The Faery Handbag
The Hortlak

[ currently reading:Misfortune by Wesley Stace & Literature and the Right to Death by Maurice Blanchot ]

good old fashioned murder

So yesterday after reading a movie review for like, the second recent movie to come out about Truman Capote, I decided to finally read that copy of In Cold Blood that has been kicking around.

Survey says? A tempered sort of enjoyment. It's far more artfully written than I would have immediately suspected. I found myself wanting to read ahead in the chapters to gain answers to questions that Mr. Capote deftly dangled just out of reach. Which is strange because given the lurid subject matter, what really strikes me about this how calmly and tepidly the story presents itself.

Which leads me towards what I feel is really the most interesting thing about this book, which is how much you can tell that it was published back before action movies and crime thrillers as we know them. It's interesting to reflect on how the jerky, overblown, slick way we make movies has influenced how many people write.

Also, the description of Mr. Clutter, "...his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and strong enough to shatter walnuts..." is really superb because usually when reading character descriptions I always tend to wonder what their teeth could shatter.

Biggest drawback? Besides the lack of sensationalism I've grown culturally addicted to? Is that, Mr. Capote, we get that you based this book on a lot of firsthand research and interviews and put a great deal of your life into personally talking to many of the people involved. But we would understand that without you putting every other word in quotation. For example:

"...and "more than anything in the world" he desired a reunion with this man, his "real and only friend", the "brilliant" Willie-Jay...if things "didn't work out with Willy-Jay" he might decide to "consider Dick's proposition."

This might be the "correct" way of referencing "documents" and "interviews" but I find it a little "distracting" as a "reader".

Seriously Mr. Capote. How do you go from mass murder to Breakfast at Tiffany's anyway.

heavy boots book-buying compulsions...

in the worst of moods, i ravaged shelves of pages, kensington:

The Believer current: {october} + backissues: { august & september - all '06. what a splurge}
Found II Davy Rothbart
The Ten Commandments of Typography Paul Felton

& the prettiest editions that i've ever seen of:

Beowulf
The Descent Into Hell
Sagas & Myths of the Northmen
Cupid & Psyche

ordered:

over the rainbow? hardly. chandler brossard
the dead fish museum charles d'ambrosio
tiknor: a novel sheila heti
G john berger {despite the fact i already had this book. it got stolen.}