The Top Ten (writers pick their favourite books)

This is a book of lists, edited by J. Peder Zane – a book review editor for a newspaper. He evidently wrote to a lot of writers and asked them for their top ten books. He then wrote a one-paragraph review of every book listed. There’s also some longer reviews by a few of the writers, and two longer essays about books and reading.

The purpose of this book and the reason I bought it is one and the same; to isolate, from the mass of books out there, a few that you simply shouldn’t miss. There’s definitely a couple which hopefully will appear on this blog in the near future. The shortcomings of the book, however, is that he didn’t ask any children’s literature authors, with the result that only maybe five of the three hundred and sixty five books listed are children’s lit. And he missed on the probably unique points of view he would have gained by included the greats such as Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowry and Madeleine L’Engle (most of his authors are American – most, I hadn’t heard of, although there’s Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey, and a fair few Brits as well). The other shortcoming is that most of my top ten aren’t listed at all, which means the kinds of books I like are probably not the kinds of books these authors are keen on. But out of the several hundred there’ll be a few I’ll be very glad to discover, I’m sure.

Letter from New York

This is a series of five-minute “talks” that Helene Hanff gave on BBC radio between ’78 and ’84 about everyday life in New York, where she lived. They’re witty, exuberant and inoffensive, and filled with all sorts of interesting details about how Thanksgiving was celebrated, what happens at Easter and on St Patrick’s Day, and how Autumn is the unofficial new start to the year. She meant all this to be how it’s different from living in London (or even any other city in the world or in the US), but now of course it’s about how it was a different time, as well as place. 1984 doesn’t feel like so long ago, but it is, I guess.

She details the lives of her friends (and their dogs; far, far too much time is taken up detailing the lives of dogs!) as well as her own; she talks about the history of particular incidents, and she describes special places such as Central Park. It certainly does make you want to go visit there. I picked up the book because of her name, of course – 84 Charing Cross Road is a really original classic – and it’s her personality, rough and generous, that makes this little book of letters stand out as well. It’s a tame read, but a good one, about a time that I suppose has disappeared, even if the place has remained.

The Discovery of Slowness

I can’t get over how good this book by Sten Nadolny is. When you think how lauded all sorts of crap is, and then you come across this lying on the shelf, it’s astonishing. I had no idea. You really think this would be especially talked about in Australia, set as a text etc, but no. They go with rubbish like Life of Pi.

This simply and clearly written story follows the life of John Franklin. He experiences life more slowly than other people. He can’t catch a ball, he can’t catch a bully. It takes him longer to perceive things and therefore he has to soak himself in the details and really know something before moving on. At first he sees this as something to overcome; it comes to him later that it is a gift of sorts, or at least a personality type. Later he decides that it needs a slow person and a fast person together to make good decisions.

He joins the navy and experiences a battle, and therefore a life-long distaste for war and violence. He joins Matthew Flinders on his trip to Australia. He travels to the Arctic to seek the North-West passage. It was only at this point that it clicked that this wasn’t just a novel. He wrote a book about it and became famous and then became governor of Tasmania and did some great reforms. Then he went to the Arctic again and died. This had actually been the only thing I had known about John Franklin; his ship getting stuck in the Arctic and everyone dying. How incredible, when he did all these other things!

What an amazing life, and what an amazingly well written book. It’s written by a German, I can just imagine the purplish horror this would have been if an American had written it. It’s so understated, perfectly so, the sentences so quiet, every word placed together carefully and neatly. He has turned a diamond of a life and shown it from a completely unique angle, so that it is something never seen before, something beautiful. I need to seek out other books by this brilliant writer.

The Road

I heard about this new book by Cormac McCarthy on the ABC. I quite like end of the world novels, so I thought I’d give it a go. It’s certainly very readable; I got through it in just a few hours. I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to say, however.

A man and his son are trudging along the roads through a burned USA, trying to get south to where they hope other people and a better life might lie. It’s really just a hopeful destination as they’ve got nowhere else to go. Most people are dead, and they scavenge food and shelter as best they can, protecting themselves from the bad people who are likely to eat them. In the end, the man dies, and the boy – who seems about four or so – latches onto another family group.

There’s no explanation of what has caused the end of the world scenario, although it’s inferred that it’s worldwide and there are barely any people or animals left. It’s funny reading about burned forests as a symbol of hopelessness, because as an Australian a burned forest is about renewal; it’s the only way, actually, that certain native plants can be propagated at all. That’s certainly not what’s meant here.

This book is a snapshot rather than a narrative. McCarthy has decided to throw out both commas and apostrophes in negative contractions (e.g. won’t, shouldn’t) – and if there’s some deep dark reason for that, it eludes me. There’s a lot of long plain sentences, and the style does feel slightly derivative. A great book should have a voice of its own; this doesn’t, but it’s still a pretty good read.

The Three Incestuous Sisters

I don’t really like the title of this visual novel by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s not the kind of thing you want sitting on your shelf, when the actual book itself is something I feel proud to own – proud, because it was selling for sixty bucks and I got it for a fraction of the price. It’s a beautiful concrete piece of artistry, something real and solid in a way that an ordinary book isn’t. It’s filled with amazing artwork (it took her 14 years to create) and a very simple storyline. It’s a fairytale, albeit a dark and twisted one, and so there does have to be three sisters in it. They’re not incestuous however, and you feel she chose the title for its sensational nature.

The three sisters are divided by a man, one who loves, one who is rejected, one who is tormented by possibility. There’s strange magic at work and there’s ordinary love and extraordinary bitterness. The end reminds me of a Margaret Mahy story about a trapeze artist and a forest or the Jostein Gaarder story about the lost little girl who is found. It’s messy and very, very weird, but it’s really beautiful and different, which is why I like it.

Pictures of the Night

This final book in the Egerton House series by Adele Geras uses the Snow White fairytale as its basis. Bella’s stepmother has hated her all her life, and now Bella is wondering whether she’s even trying to kill her . . . three odd attempts on her life, not easily explained, end with Bella taking her life in her own hands and choosing exactly what that life is going to be.

The details of being in Paris in the sixties are fascinating, as are the different characters she meets. This tale leans a little more towards the supernatural than the other two, but Geras sensibly leaves it unexplained. As in the previous books, it’s told in a mixture of letter and diary entries, and the story fairly races along. The only problem with these books is that they’re too short! This was a great end to a great trilogy.

Postcards from No Man's Land

This is a coming-of-age YA novel by Aidan Chambers. It’s about a teenage boy who goes to Amsterdam to attend a ceremony in honour of the English soldiers – including his grandfather – who died in WW2 in Holland. It’s also the story of the teenage girl who met and loved his grandfather during the war.

For some reason, I really disliked Chambers’ style. It’s a fascinating story about a particular incident during the war, but I didn’t feel that it was well-told; in fact, his style seemed to hinder understanding of what actually went on. There’s Jacob (the boy’s) story of discovering his sexuality etc in Amsterdam; there’s Geetrui (the girl’s) story of discovering love etc in wartime; and then there’s bits and pieces shoved in from other people, soldiers and women who were there, about one of the battles. There’s no clear overview of what actually did happen; Chambers instead focuses on the fact that Geetrui had the grandfather’s baby, which you could see coming a mile off. The language which Chambers deliberately tries to keep modern has sadly already dated, only a few years after its publication, and the things that the writer seems to find so shocking just aren’t to a modern reader. It won all sorts of awards, and I can see it being set as a high school text (especially the passages where Chambers amuses himself with various big words – there’s a term for that, but I won’t write it -) but it doesn’t work as a story, which is a pity, because it’s a particular time in history that I’d like to know more about.

The Sea

John Banville’s novel won the Man Booker prize last year, and after reading it I understand why that decision was so controversial. It’s not a bad book – it’s very readable, with interesting language and a good flowing storyline – but it’s fairly pedestrian, especially compared to the competition – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Apparently in his acceptance speech he said something about being grateful to the judges for rewarding a ‘real novel’; by which I suppose he meant a ‘real old-fashioned honest to goodness novel novel’. Old-fashioned can mean classic or it can mean dated, though, and I feel that in the 21st century, his book is dated.

Basically – Max has lost his wife. He goes to live in a boarding house where he once holidayed as a child, and where he had all his ‘coming-of-age’ moments; first kiss, finding out about adult secrets, witnessing death. He’s losing it to alcohol and to the past, and in the end his adult daughter comes to take him away. A simple enough story, and it’s fairly well told, but the language is pretentious (although near the end I did wonder if it was deliberately so, because it’s written in the first person about an unpleasant art critic, who would of course speak and write pretentiously – for example, he never uses contractions, even in direct speech, and that’s just crazy). The twist at the end is rather silly (landlady turns out to be Rose, the girl in the background got old, and she’s a lesbian, though he doesn’t state it so blandly). It’s one of those books which focus on the ugly and unpleasant – deliberately, I’d say, he’s depressed and so forth – but in spite of that it’s not too difficult to read. Of course, Ishiguro has already won a Booker prize, so fair enough giving it to Banville, but if you’re going to award prizes on that basis, you may as well hand it over to Martin Amis and be done with it. It’s an all right book, but it’s not one to jump up and down about.

Watching the Roses

This time, Adele Geras tackles the Sleeping Beauty fairy-tale, and manages to inject an enormous sense of impending doom as she does so. Alice has had her 18th birthday – something terrible happened there. She lies in her room seemingly in a coma while the lives of those around her stop in sorrow and grief. The roses which her father lovingly cultivate rot and grow wild around their home.

The interesting choice Geras has made here is the kiss which begins the horror and the kiss which ends it. There’s the difference between a chosen embrace and a forced one; the difference between two men, or boys, fighting to get what they want or fighting for the right to it. As in her previous book, Geras decides to return the choice to the woman in the story which again makes it a far more interesting version of the fairytale.

Ballerina

This novel by Vicki Baum reminds me of a lot of other 1950’s vintage ballet stories – the old ballerina reliving her life and wondering if it was all worth it, etc. This one is quite well written and interesting, but at the same time pretty depressing, in the same way most of them are, because for someone who is not a ballerina it simply doesn’t ever seem worth it. The actual dancing part is difficult, maybe impossible, to express in words, which leaves the performance and the hard work and the insecurity of it all – in other words, the negative side.

Like most novelists, Baum focuses on the relationships – one with an arrogant ballet dancer, with an arrogant Spanish bull fighter, with a not so arrogant American doctor. They’re all slightly stereotypical, but interesting enough. The language is the same – typical 1950’s attempt to be realistic and hard-bitten (though for some reason whenever I see Lesbian with a capital in the middle of a sentence it always makes me laugh). In the end the ballerina decides that actually it wasn’t all worth it, gives it up and goes back to her husband. You do feel that it probably wasn’t the best move on either part, but you also don’t feel that any of them deserve any great happiness, either.

The Tower Room

This is a clever take on the Rapunzel fairy-story by Adele Geras. It’s set in an English boarding school in the 1950s, where three girls are champing at the bit to be released into the real world. Megan’s an ordinary sensible girl, and doesn’t expect all that much – certainly not to fall madly in love with the young lab assistant who insists on climbing up the scaffolding outside her window and introducing her to some new experiences.

While it’s a fairly simple tale, it’s intensely readable and has a few clever twists – for example, in this version, her hair is not cut off by the witch in order to foil the prince, but by Megan herself, with the realisation that it’s her hair, her life, her decision. Love isn’t eternal, the witch isn’t all-powerful, and the coming-of-age isn’t neat or complete, either. A pretty unusual and well-thought out YA novel.

My Country, Right or Left

This is a collection of George Orwell’s essays and other writings, from when he was a journalist during WW2. I never realised before what a young man he was – he died at 42 after years of TB. His books have a solid kind of wisdom about them which made me assume he was an older man. His essays, however, betray that like everyone else, he was a man of his time, with only the amount of knowledge and understanding that his age and experience could give him.

There’s quite a few interesting tidbits here – a review of Mein Kampf, a discussion of the Indian freedom issues (with a fair few mentions of Ghandi), some descriptions of being an air raid warden in London. There’s some early discussion about American Imperialism and the growing anti-American feeling in Britain, which is interesting, as well as some views on the impossibility of using peaceful solutions in a violent world (pre-Martin Luther and the exit of the Brits from India, of course!) There’s diary excerpts and letters as well, plus a short autobiography. It’s only one of four books of essays (I picked it out of a box of second hand books) but it’s an interesting one, from a man who did a lot in his short life.