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Nice Books |
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...as Cathy would say. Not a comprehensive course on How to Become Illuminated, but a sort of field guide to the Special Collections wing of my brain: a mish-mash of Desert Island Books, books that delighted me, influenced me or resonated deeply.
The Lady's Not For Burning; Christopher Fry. Read it out loud. A Phoenix Too Frequent is also very funny, but the best of the quotables are in Lady's. "Nicholas went hurtling like Lucifer into the daffodils…"
A Child's Christmas in Wales; Dylan Thomas. If you would understand Stultiloquentias, you need to know about the bellowing he-hippos. Read Under Milk Wood, too.
The Left Hand of Darkness; Ursula K. LeGuin. Worth the read for the explanation of the title alone. And don't skip the introduction. Then read The Dispossessed, which is some of the finest science fiction ever written. Nor are LeGuin's essay collections to be missed: Language of the Night, on the place of fantasy in modern culture, and The Wave in the Mind, on various and sundry.
Possession; A. S. Byatt. Cucumber sandwiches, Norse mythology, Charles Lyell, W.B.Yeats, seances, bicycles, burglaries, Darwin, tidepools, surreptitious snogging, car chases, epic poetry, cat piss, thunderstorms, dusty London libraries, scholarly interludes, Mary Wollstonecraft and Rapunzel. Wonderful beast of a book. Turned my top ten list into a top eleven list.
Animal Dreams; Barbara Kingsolver. Wise and warm-hearted. The poetry of it wraps you up like a blanket.
The Diviners; Margaret Laurence. A gritty piece, set in Canada, that woke up a love for my country I didn’t know I was capable of, for reasons I didn’t expect.
Guns, Germs and Steel; Jared Diamond. Evolutionaryhistoriogeobiology. An explanation of the environmental factors leading to racial and cultural diversity. Completely fascinating, not to mention important. His newest, Collapse, I'm sorry to say, is bloated blither.
The Compleat Works of Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice was the favouritest of my teenaged self, but these days I love all the books dearly and for different reasons. Northanger Abbey is short, spoofy, and has the best hero.
The Lions of Al-Rassan; Guy Gavriel Kay. Historical fantasy set in a pseudo medieval Spain. Rampant with amusing dialogue, contorted politics, and cunning plans. Literary cheesecake. Tigana and A Song for Arbonne are also grand, but leave The Fionavar Tapestry alone until you've read the others. I've heard some say that Kay is but a poor imitator of Dorothy Dunnett, whom I haven't read yet, so there's another twenty-odd books for your reading list.
The Illustrated World's Religions; Huston Smith. Edifying and gorgeous.
The Moonstone; Wilkie Collins. The most fiendishly infuriating mystery novel ever written. He just keeps on relentlessly knocking off possible solutions until you hurl the book across the room shouting there is NO WAY this could have happened! and then you pick up the book again and read one word - ONE WORD - and everything becomes miraculously, brilliantly clear. Or maybe I just missed all the clues. I haven't read it since I was 14 and innocent.
Tam Lin; Pamela Dean. Child Ballad #39 relocated to a small-town liberal arts college. As a piece of literature, it's awkwardly paced and slight, but oh, it's pure nostalgia. Some of the scenes in here are freakishly close to my experiences.
Dreams Underfoot; Charles deLint. A collection of urban fantasy stories guaranteed to improve your subway-riding experience. Of his novels, I've read and liked Someplace to be Flying and Memory and Dream, and I've heard Yarrow is excellent. Don't bother with Jack the Giantkiller.
The Devil's Disciple; G. B. Shaw. Shaw does religion and revolution. Ow-ow-ow. Read Pygmalion while you're at it, for the stage directions and the afterword.
Watership Down. An adventure story. The valiant hero is a rabbit.
A Girl of the Limberlost; Gene Stratton Porter. Sort of L. M. Montgomeryish, though less impish, and stuffed with interesting natural history. Also, Freckles, a prequel of sorts, and The Keeper of the Bees.
The Three Musketeers; Alexander Dumas. "She must have passed this way, for I see a corpse!" Read it for the gorgeous language. Read it for the yellow horse.
Where the Sidewalk Ends; Shel Silverstein. Yep.
Ants on the Melon; Virginia Hamilton Adair. This first volume of poetry was published when Adair was 81 years old and blind.
Shogun; James Clavell. A ripping yarn about 17th C. Japan. Cunning plans galore.
Gnomes; Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet. An elaborate and thorough field guide with superb illustrations. Followed by Secrets of the Gnomes.
The Foundation Trilogy; Isaac Asimov. Gotta read Asimov. I had the good luck to pick this up right after The Dispossessed. They inform each other well.
Cyrano de Bergerac; Edmund Rostand. A hoot.
A Live Coal in the Sea; Madeleine L'Engle. Not as good as some of her other books, but the title quote keeps coming back to me. Just about anything of hers is a good read, especially the Wrinkle in Time books and A House Like a Lotus.
The Nutcracker; E.T.A. Hoffman. Snirt. No sugarplums in sight.
The Mask of Apollo; Mary Renault. Actors and Politicians cavort in ancient Greece. The King Must Die is also magnificent.
The Ordinary Princess; M.M. Kaye. The best fairytale ever. I adore her illustrations.
The Scroobius Pip; Edward Lear. … indescribable.
The Dot and the Line, A Romance in Lower Mathematics; Norton Juster. I don't know how you're going to find this, but if you do, BUY IT.
Master and Commander; Patrick O'Brien. The Age of the Fighting Sail: Mmm-mm. This is the first in a long, adventure-soaked series about the friendship of a captain and a surgeon. It's more literate than Hornblower and there's more of it.
Gaudy Night; Dorothy Sayers. Far and away the best of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, though it's in the middle of the chronology. Check out the short story collection, Lord Peter, and read "Talboys", too.
The Scarlet Pimpernel; Baroness Orczy. It's very, very silly, but I adore it and all three of the ridiculous movie versions, and especially the musical, which has some of the greatest silly lyrics ever penned.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Arcadia; Tom Stoppard. Equal parts philosophical dilemna and absurd wit. Arcadia, moreover, stars my pet period and references my beloved William Gilpin.
Wind, Sand and Stars; Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Most people have read only The Little Prince, but I like this best of all Saint-Exupery's books.
East of Eden; John Steinbeck. Also, Cannery Row.
A Room of One's Own; Virginia Woolf. Judith!
His Dark Materials; Phil Pullman. Steer this one far, far away from the Bible thumpers who thought Harry Potter was dangerous. Do steer it toward Milton scholars.
Homebody/Kabul; Tony Kushner. He's best known for Angels in America, which I also love. This one is a luminous, prescient, dictionary-requiring play about language and history and story and storytelling.
The Name of the Rose; Umberto Eco. A splendidly erudite mystery novel set in a 14th C. monastery. And on a completely different track, How to Travel with a Salmon, a collection of Eco's newspaper columns and various parodies.
The Dark is Rising; Susan Cooper. I loved fantasy as a kid. I still do.
Westmark, The Kestrel and The Beggar Queen; Lloyd Alexander. Fantasy, but a tiny bit more grown up than the marvelous Prydain Chronicles. Unusually, for this genre, the setting is revolutionary rather than placidly feudal.
The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and everything else by J.R.R. Tolkien. The original and insurmountable.
Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. An extremely well-considered poetry anthology for young adults.
Any collection by Adrienne Rich. Her essays are as interesting as her poetry, though not quite so dense and mossy and beautiful.
Circle of Friends; Maeve Binchy. FYI, the film is just a poor shadow of this book, and it mucks about with the ending.
The Shipping News; Annie Proulx. Canada alert! This is hard to get into, but don't give up. By the end of the book you'll love the characters dearly and have a nagging itch to visit Newfoundland.
Incredible Cross-sections; Stephen Biesty. Where's Waldo for the terminally curious.
Sandman; Neil Gaiman. The graphic novel that everybody who reads graphic novels has read, and for good reason. In ten volumes, it's intricate, imaginative and literate. I had high hopes for his novel, Neverwhere, but it read, disappointingly, like an adolescent Charles de Lint.
The Rebel Angels; Robertson Davies. Followed by What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus, books two and three of the Cornish Trilogy. Delicious and fabulously erudite campus comedy. The Fifth Business and the rest of the Deptford Trilogy are also beyond superb. He wrote plays, as well; I'll get back to you on those. :)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; John LeCarre. Smiley's got a place on my top ten list of intriguing characters. What a cool book. It peels like an onion.
Ezra Pound: Translations. He tackles everything from troubadour lyrics to Noh plays to Egyptian hieroglyphs with glee.
Sophie's World; Jostein Gaarder. A survey of philosophy and a wide-eyed mystery story in one. I pilfered it from my little sister's shelf when she had to read it for school.
A History of God; Karen Armstrong. A study of Western monotheism, jam-packed with information, but incredibly lucid.
Paradise Lost; John Milton. Apart from the grandeur and dazzle of it, it's full of unexpected joys, such as Raphael taking time out to have a picnic and explain angelic digestion to Adam.
Tuesday; David Wiesner. Heh. Heh-heh.
John McNab; John Buchan. Three bored aristocrats go poaching.
House of Light; Mary Oliver. Poetry to take to the cottage.
A Short History of Progress; Ronald Wright. The CBC Massey Lecture on the tendancy of humans to shoot themselves in the foot. A short, elegant must-read.
Green Grass, Running Water; Thomas King. The cleverest, funniest book I read that year. When any one of the characters randomly says, "Pay attention," do.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Kate Atkinson. Whitbread Prize winner. A gritty tale about three generations of women in a fairly disfunctional family, but her writing is non-stop hilarious. HEE-larious.
Wit; Margaret Edson. An arrogant, cranky John Donne scholar goes through chemotherapy.
Londonstani; Gautam Malkani. A window on teenage Desi culture. Dazzling writing, mind-blowing finale. Whoa.
Civil Elegies; Dennis Lee. Topical poems from several decades ago, piercing in their continued relevancy.
A Discovery of Strangers; Rudy Wiebe. Governor General's Award winner. In 1820, John Franklin's small group of British officers and Canadian voyageurs, seeking a route through the Arctic, meet the Tetsot'ine. I've never read anything like this. Wiebe's prose is awe-inspiring.
Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet; Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Especially Francesca Coppa's essay, "Writing Bodies in Space." *airpump* Yes!
Created July 31, 2002
Updated March 29, 2008
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