Dooing it for the first time... (Top 10 Books)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Top 10 Books
Date:	16/05/01 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: nothing boring

Disadvantages: may blow your mind

Hmmm, how can I introduce myself to the world of DooYoo?
Should I post a picture of me dancing naked round a bonfire?
Or leave lots of creepy comments around the site? (Maybe later...) What can I do that says something about little ol' me?

Hang on, why am I here?
Well, mainly books, that's why. The brilliant books section.
Some sites don't see the value of books -
they think that expensive electrical goods are more lucrative.
Tell that to Amazon!

So here goes... these are my top ten favourite(ish) novels :-

BILLY LIAR (Keith Waterhouse)
A work-shy northern lad who dreams of being a writer,
invents his own fantasy world, over which he rules as President to escape from the dull responsibilites of adult life in the 1950's.
I'll be posting a more detailed opinion on this book tomorrowish...
CATCH 22 (Joseph Heller)
The most brilliant novel of the twentieth century in my opinion.
A novel which added a new concept to the English language.
It captures the chaotic madness of war, and the way people
cope with it by resorting to eccentric avoidance behaviour.
And it is filled with an array of unforgettable characters such as:-
Yossarian: who just wants to live dammit, who refuses to put his uniform back on after a colleague dies in his arms, and receives
a medal while starkers; Colonel Cathcart: who sees each success as a feather in his cap and every setback as a black eye and who keeps raising the number of bombing runs the men have to fly;
Milo Minderbinder: who buys eggs for seven cents, and sells them for five cents to make a profit; and Major Major: who hides in his office and sneaks out the window to avoid having to face anyone.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH (John Steinbeck)
is a ferocious dissection of unfettered amoral capitalism in action.
(As you can tell, I tend to sit on the fence, politically speaking.)
The story of the Joad fa
mily, forced to leave their mid-West farmland during the 'dust-bowl' era of 1930's America, when banks took advantage of their customers' hard times to gobble up large tracts of land. The Joads are lured to California by the promise of jobs-a-plenty picking fruit - but unscrupulous employers are luring countless thousands like them in order to force down labour costs. The result? Out-of-work people starve, while fruit rots in the fields because it's 'not economic' (i.e. not profitable enough) to employ workers to pick it.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (John Irving)
chronicles the extraordinary life of Garp from his odd conception
to his demise. We see, through his eyes, his mother Jenny Fields, an early radical feminist and her oddball friends. But amidst
the laughs comes a tragedy that stops you dead in your tracks.
John Irving is my favourite living writer, he writes about unique characters and crazy families who live bizarre lives yet seem real. If you've never read a John Irving novel this is the one to start with. And if you've never read a John Irving novel you must start!
His mix of farce and tragedy really can make you laugh and cry.

CANDIDE or Optimism (Voltaire) - This is a satirical masterpiece.
Voltaire was so disgusted by the callous 'God moves in mysterious ways' attitude of the 'optimistic' philosophers of his time towards people suffering misfortunes, (notably the victims
of the Lisbon earthquake in 1756) that he satirised them here
in the shape of the character of Dr. Pangloss. Pangloss holds
to the philosophy that: "everything is for the best, in this the best of all possible worlds" regardless of whatever calamities
he encounters. And boy is he made to suffer! Towards the end
he is asked: "tell me ... when you had been hanged, dissected and beaten unmercifully ... did you still think that everything in this world
is for the best?"

I find dystopian novels particularly interesting, and I've chosen three here that I find the most visionary. They don't include 1984 - Orwell's vision of a totalitarian world with it's image of a boot stamping on a human face for ever. Orwell was too pessimistic and showed a lack of understanding of human nature I feel.

Whereas BRAVE NEW WORLD (Aldous Huxley) published more than a decade earlier, is still frighteningly feasible, with it's vision of a society controlled by free sex, drugs and mind-numbing TV.
Where genetic engineering has removed all individuality, and people are bred into a particular class and for a specific vocation.
A 'perfect' world populated by happy, but personalityless, drones.
FAHRENHEIT 451 (Ray Bradbury) - supposedly named after the temperature at which paper catches fire, also foresees a society dumbed-down by TV. One in which books are deemed to make people unhappy and so are banned. Firemen are now employed to burn them, but one succumbs to curiosity and starts salvaging them from the flames and reading them.

and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Anthony Burgess) grasps the thorny problems of alienation and disaffection among the young and the socially excluded in a disturbing but profound way. It presents an 'us and them' scenario in which both sides' actions are repulsive.
Violent behaviour by a rebellious youth is countered by extreme psychological conditioning by the state.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Roald Dahl)
OK, before you start laughing, answer me this:
What qualities do you expect from a great novel?
Memorable, well-drawn characters? A moral dimension? Wit?
Satire? Observations on society? An intriguing plot? Pathos?
Bathos? D'Artagnan? (Sorry I got carried away there.)
I defy you to name a single characteristic of a classic novel
which isn't present in this - even if it i
s *only* a children's book.
Roald Dahl was one of the greatest authors of the 20th century.

KING - A STREET STORY (John Berger)
This is a moving account of one day in the life of a homeless couple, quite literally living on a scrapheap, in a wasteland, as seen through the eyes of King - a stray dog who befriends them. I don't know why this book mesmerises me so, but it does. Berger paints a picture of real human beings reduced to eking
out an existence by scavenging like animals outside of society.
He makes you CARE for his characters, and in so doing,
wounds your conscience. I implore you to read this book.

I look forward to having to change this list in the future
because that will mean I've found another brilliant book.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Others that missed the cut include:-

The wickedly funny LOLITA (Vladimir Nabokov)
and the poignant DEATH IN VENICE (Thomas Mann)
because I don't want everyone thinking I'm some kind of pervert.

And too much politics gets up some people's noses, so I left out:-
HOWARD'S END (E.M. Forster) - how rich upper-class twits fail
to connect with the consequences of their self-centred actions; KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (George Orwell) - a lefty flees the rat race to be a poet, but gets pulled back to reality (boo); and AGE OF IRON (J.M. Coetzee) an astonishing and frightening novel set in the powder-keg that was South Africa before the ending of Apartheid.

I also thought better of including any of the Arthur C. Clarke books I grew up with, his finest being either:

THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE - which weaves Buddhist mythology with one engineer's dream of a space elevator; or
RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA - in which a perfectly spherical asteroid passing through the solar system is investigated and found to be hollow. (The alien environment inside is a real feat of imaginat
ion)
Nor did I include AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND (Iain M. Banks) - a dark, brooding, but action-packed Sci-Fi blockbuster; because it's, you know, sci-fi ...and I want to be taken seriously. Ha ha ha.
And there's no place for:

OBLOMOV (Ivan Goncharov) because I just can't be bothered to get off my ar*e and read it, and REMEMBRANCE OF THINGUMYJIGS GONE BYE-BYE by Proust, because it's just too heavy to lift,
and besides I'm feeling too weak to get out of bed.

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