Livre d'Or

I've been planning for ages to take advantage of the weak dollar and top up my dwindling book supply with a shopping spree on Amazon. The postage makes it marginal whether it's cheaper to buy books that way rather than in local shops, but the selection of English language books is obviously much greater in Amazon's catalogue than a typical Swedish bookshop. Then

hatam_soferet was generous enough to offer to bring my purchases with her when she next visits England, meaning that I can use the free shipping and not even have to pay postage at all.

I got round to putting this plan into action last night. I'd saved up the part of my budget that I consider pocket money for a week, and I was willing to go a bit over that for a one-off purchase. But between the dollar being practically worthless and books being generally cheaper in America and some handy discounts going on at Amazon, I managed to get everything that I wanted that is available to buy, and added in some random CDs while I was at it... and still spent less than half my not terribly generous weekly friv allowance. Wo0t! Having a kind friend who is willing to carry the books for me means it is actually cheaper to buy brand new books from Amazon than second hand books here or even in the UK.

( the haul )
Anyway, since I usually read about 3 or 4 books a month, this lot should keep me going until Passover time, when I might well go to Cambridge for a few days and raid charity shops for more. I am so looking forward to getting these; it will be like a fabulous birthday present to myself!

Can't resist lists...

( in which I reveal my ignorance of SF but pontificate anyway )

The most fun thing to do with a list like this is to note the glaring omissions. I'm going to talk about books that seem like they ought to be on the list rather than books that I think are better, which means books that are a major influence on SF and fantasy and the culture in general. The list really needs HG Wells, say The Time Machine or War of the Worlds (I've only read the latter), and Jules Verne, perhaps 20000 leagues under the sea or Journey to the centre of the earth. Probably HP Lovecraft and ER Burroughs too, even though the latter is a crap writer; they helped to define the basic expectations of what SF means. Leaving out Brave New World pretty much makes the list worthless right there.

It may be just my prejudice but I would have thought Day of the Triffids ought to get a mention (though personally, I like The Chrysalids and The trouble with lichen better). 1984 and The handmaid's tale I guess are excluded because people argue about whether they're "really" SF, but if On the beach counts then they ought to.

Gaiman I assume missed out because they're too snobby to include graphic novels, and Sandman is clearly the main reason Gaiman is so important. But even something like Neverwhere would have made a lot of sense.

And, you know, something published in the last ten years wouldn't be so much to ask! I nominate Accelerando and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I'm not necessarily up to the minute with recent SF/F.

Today I finally managed to do something I've been planning to do for ages: I joined the local library. I was a bit nervous that I would look ridiculous asking to join the library when I don't speak a word of Swedish, but

hatam_soferet pointed out to me that the sort of people who become librarians are generally the sort of people who approve of using libraries for their intended purpose of looking for information to educate yourself.

She was right; the librarian was delighted with my request, and was extremely lovely and helpful. We kept grinning at eachother like two people who have just discovered that their secret crush is mutual. (Actually, she reminded me quite strongly of

loreid; she's about my age, with dark hair and fair skin, and has the appearance of a goth who is obliged to dress respectably for work.)

So she helped me to choose some suitable children's books which are simple to read without being dire. Pippi Longstocking yay. My new favourite word is julgransplundringskvällen, which means "the evening of the party celebrating taking down the decorations from the Christmas tree". The nice librarian also mentioned that they have a few English books if I get tired of working hard to learn Swedish and just want something to read. And she explained how the library system here is terribly convenient and mostly online and self-service and I can even order books from other libraries in the city, if I run out of the meager collection of English books in Älvsjö.

I have something to read. *happy dance*

j4 is generally brilliant, but she's surpassed even her own standards recently. And I've been meaning to link to her for a while, but have been too busy to collect my own responses together. For a start, her essay entitled She goes on (I'm fond of that song myself) is really lovely.

But the main point of this post is to link to

j4's post talking about World book day. Lists of Great Books are always easy blog fodder, but

j4 has a take on this particular bit of manufactured non-news which is hilariously snarky and makes interesting points at the same time.

j4 ends her post by making a list of books first read while still in full-time education and which I believe significantly changed the way I think. I can't manage a response at the level of her original post, but I can make lists, and this seems an interesting exercise.

I posted on a similar subject last year, so I'll pick a different set this time round. I'm not sure about picking books that have changed the way I think; to some extent, every book I read changes the way I think, just like all my experiences. As a teenager I made a concerted effort to read through every single title on whatever list of a hundred classics was circulating at the time, and I found some decent stuff that way as well as a lot I might just as well not have bothered with. Also

rysmiel suggested in the discussion of

j4's post that the list should exclude books that change one's thinking about books, which seems fair enough, but that is the main effect most books have on my thinking.

( list )There's probably more, but those are the ones that came to mind when I thought of this post.

I have some really interesting people on my friends list. You should all go and check out this comment thread where people are introducing themselves, because there are some really fascinating potted bios!

Also,

tattycat asked me: What do you find yourself reaching for when you need comfort reading?

( my answer )

Anyone else?

In case anyone is living under a rock, they've just released a Narnia film. This has led to lots of fun discussion about Narnia.

daegaer has collected a lot of links, from both traditional and alternative media. On the whole the bloggers do a better job than the journalists, IMO. She has some good discussion in her own journal too.

If you don't want to plough through all those essays, the key one to read is Andrew Rilstone's Lipstick on my scholar. ( my take on the Problem of Susan )

With that preamble, what I really wanted to talk about is

sartorias' recent post: Lewis vs. Susan.

sartorias is reading the pshat of the Narnia Chronicles, rather than the nimshal of the Christian allegory. (If English has any technical terms for analysing allegorical text, I don't know them, so I borrow the terms from Jewish Biblical scholarship.) Why, within the story's own terms as opposed to the wider Christian context, is Susan excluded? The discussion on that post is really fascinating, and covers the religious questions, the feminist issues and all kinds of different viewpoints. There's one thing that stood out for me even with all these lovely thoughtful ideas, though: this comment of

papersky's.

Let me highlight this sentence from

papersky's comment, because I think it really brilliantly captures the experience of feeling yourself to be the only authentic human drowning in a sea of sheeple:

When I was a teenager there was a point where it really did seem to me that my female friends were actually ceasing to be people in their pursuit of being teenagers -- it wasn't sex so much as a desire to be attractive (fashion and make-up and dieting) a desire to have a boyfriend as an accessory and a desire to be "in" (changing, or affecting to change their personal tastes in music, films and culture generally to the majority taste)

The thing is, I think that's a hugely common experience among teenagers: believing you're the only one in your entire peer group who isn't totally superficial. Browsing around on LJ is a good way to get a perspective on this; you can see journal after journal after journal where teenagers, mostly girls, talk about how most of the people they know are idiots who only care about fashion and being popular, and they're the only one with ideals. I have this vision that the girls a particular unique snowflake despises are simultaneously writing in their journals about how they're so lonely being the only person who cares about anything beyond fashion and meaningless "relationships"...

I'm not going to embarrass myself by reproducing here the bad blank verse I used to write (and publish in the school magazine) when I was a teenager. I was luckier than most, because I managed to connect with other real people even before I had the maturity to realize that most people are worth getting to know, and you just have to make the effort. This led to some really intense and precious friendships; feeling that my friends and I were the last bastion of resaon against moronic popular culture was a very bonding thing. I had

blue_mai, and Spanish M, and

doseybat; I wasn't entirely alone.

CS Lewis was of course writing for children. If he actually intended to portray being Christian in a secular world as like being the only teenager ever to care about higher things, he was being very clever in some ways. The trouble is of course that Susan is discarded so suddenly; Lewis' readers are just as likely to identify with Susan (who is of course a very sensible and likeable person for the whole series up to the very last bit at the end) as anyone else. And the other trouble is that any really mature reader, as opposed to a child who thinks they are mature, is going to be able to see the worth even of someone who cares about mainstream culture, and therefore be annoyed that Lewis' Aslan doesn't value such a person.

While I'm (vaguely) on the subject,

cakmpls has a very cool piece on The Outsider in A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, unlike the kids in Narnia, is saved precisely because he learns that he isn't actually superior to everyone else. He doesn't have to be an Outsider. Lewis' characters effectively get divine sanction for their smugness, and maybe that's the problem.

I may have got them all home safely (and my back and shoulders have not yet forgiven me), but now I need to find homes for them. This may prove challenging. Since I have that kind of mind, I have made a complete list of the very few books I managed to leave behind and the ridiculously many that came home with me. Of course, I now want to spend the next several months reading instead of getting on with my life...

( bookies galore )

I hope I've got all the HTML sorted; making a big table seemed like a better idea than it actually was.

This is sort of a meme (well, in the pedantic sense, obviously it's a meme, but setting that aside). Lots of people have been talking about converting people to a new reading genre. The first example I saw was chez

misia; she got over 300 comments but then she has a huge friends list. Other relevant bits:

rho requests out-of-genre recs;

shreena asks why people read SF/F. There's a relevant Making Light post too but it's from ages ago, and I have it bookmarked at work not here and I'm never going to find it in the archives by looking for 'book' or 'science fiction'!

So my take on it is this:

Do you have a preferred genre?
If so, why? What's good about it?
If you don't care for genre distinctions, why not?
If you wanted to convert someone who doesn't read your genre, which titles would you recommend?
Why did you make those choices?

Please assume for the purposes of these questions that mainstream counts as a genre. Otherwise there are going to be too many branching alternatives and it'll get annoying. Also, this is the kind of meme that makes sense as a post in your journal as much as a comment to this post; I'd love a comment with a link, but a long comment here is fine too.

( my answers )

Today is the 46^th day, making 6 complete weeks and 4 days of the Omer.

There was a meme I saw ages ago where people posted a list of ten books that were important in their lives. I like this better than trying to pick ten 'favourites', and meant to post it at the time but never got round to it. So, here goes (in more or less chronological order):

( 10 formative books )

I really shouldn't be displacing like this, but I can't resist questionaires, especially about bookies. I got this rather lovely meme from

rysmiel.

( Read more... )

snow_leopard posted some interesting questions about reading in bibliotheca. While I'm not sure about cross-posting entries from my journal to a community, I don't see why I shouldn't cross-post relevant stuff from a community to here. So here's my answers:

1) What is your favourite book? Boringly, The Lord of the Rings, I'm afraid. There are a couple of other books that come close, notably AS Byatt's Babel Tower, but LotR has been my favourite just about all my life, so it has a special significance that nothing I've discovered more recently can quite match.

2) What is the book that has most affected/changed you? Ooh, what a good question! Excluding certain parts of the Bible (which affect me because I read the Bible in a completely different way from any other book), I think probably Simone de Beauvoir's Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. It puts into words certain ideas that have always been part of who I am, but until I read it I didn't know how to articulate them.

3) Your favourite character from a novel? Ebenezer le Page, the eponymous hero of a really obscure book by GB Edwards. He's this sort of semi-recluse, who lives out all his life on Guernsey. He says the most cynical things but has a real genuine spirit behind it all. I had a crush for ages on Toby Coleman from Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room, and in fact my first bf bears quite a strong resemblance to him. And Treebeard from LotR has to get a mention.

4) The best villain from a novel? No-one particularly comes to mind. I tend to like villains that are a bit three-dimensional, not just evil incarnate. Hmm. Glenin Ambrai from Melanie Rawn's Exiles series is pretty good.

5) What was the last book you read? The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

6) What are you reading now? Renegade or Halo² by Timothy Mo

7) What was the last non-fiction book you read? The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Tags