Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent (1800) Castle Rackrent can claim many English literary firsts, but was most influential as the first regional novel. Set in Ireland before the arrival of (short-lived) independence in 1782, this is a satirical saga of incompetent Anglo-Irish landlords, narrated in the vernacular by their disingenuous steward, Thady Quirk. The Rackrents are [...]
Archive for December, 2009
1000 novels everyone must read: State of the Nation (part two)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
1000 novels everyone must read: State of the Nation (part one)
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable (1935) Bakha, 18, is strong and able-bodied. He is a latrine cleaner, a Dalit, an untouchable, and the novel traces a day in his life. Deep in thought and enjoying a sweet jalebi, Bakha brushes against a Brahmin. The crowd hurls abuse at this “pollution”, leaving him in tears. Later, Bakha [...]
The top 100 books of all time
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Full list of the 100 best works of fiction, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart [...]
The ones that got away: Science fiction and fantasy
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite science fiction and fantasy novels did we miss? Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985) Everybody can fall in love with the little boy who is the hero of this story and then enjoy his ascent to [...]
The ones that got away: War and travel
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite war and travel novels did we miss? Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006) Set in 1960s Nigeria, this novel’s blinding, graphic account of the Biafran struggle for independence is told through three poignant [...]
The ones that got away: Comedy
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite comedy novels did we miss? The Caravaners by Elizabeth von Arnim (1909) This story describes the adventures of an Anglo-German group of holidaymakers who travel through the English countryside in three horse-drawn Romany caravans. Written in the [...]
The ones that got away: Crime
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite crime novels did we miss? The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham (1938) Margery Allingham’s crime novels span the 1930s to 50s and can be rated alongside those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. Her detective, [...]
The ones that got away: State of the Nation
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite state of the nation novels did we miss? Havoc In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett (2004) This superbly driven narrative benefits from Bennett’s comprehensive knowledge of 17th-century England and had me gripped from beginning to end. [...]
The ones that got away: Family and self
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourite family and self novels did we miss? Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhishan Banerji (1929) Translated as Song of the Road by TW Clark and Tarapada Mukherji, this novel came to be known in the west by virtue of [...]
The ones that got away: Love
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Last month we ran a series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read – which of your all-time favourites? These are some of the missing love stories – links to the oversights in the other genres are to the right Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes (1982) Although it is very short and a trifle [...]
Top 10 trivia: Lost manuscripts
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
John Mullan lists 10 manuscripts whose history are almost as adventurous as the stories contained within 1) TE Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom TE Lawrence left Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the cafe at Reading station. He telephoned the station from Oxford when he arrived, but the case with the manuscript had gone and was [...]
The best of WG Sebald
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
The Rings of Saturn (1995) Austerlitz (2001) No other writer of recent decades has matched the speed of WG Sebald’s ascent to the pantheon. It occurred in a little over five years. The Emigrants, the first book of Sebald’s to be published in English, but the second to have been written, appeared in 1996. Then [...]
The best novels about warfare
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
John Harris: Covenant with Death (1961) Anthony Powell: The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968) Nicholas Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951) CS Forester: The Ship (1943) If one should decide to select only from British novels about 20th-century warfare, then the impulse to cheat, or to compress or otherwise [...]
The best of Tintin
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941) Tintin in Tibet (1960) The Castafiore Emerald (1963) To single out three essential works from an oeuvre that spans 50 years and 24 books isn’t easy; especially when, as Tom McCarthy reminds us (in his wonderful Tintin and the Secret of Literature), such a body of work presents [...]
Top 10 trivia: Novels that predicted the future
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Films about the future often look comically of their time when viewed in retrospect. Writers, on the other hand, have displayed a prescient eye for predicting tomorrow’s world. Andrew Crumey lists 10 acts of fortune-telling 1) HG Wells: The World Set Free (1914) Any number of inventions could have put Wells on the list, but [...]
The best dystopias
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953) Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968) Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975) A dystopia, being the opposite of a utopia, must [...]
Radical reading
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928) Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977) Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Geoff Ryman: Air (2005) It was inevitable that, growing up trans in 60s Britain, I would gravitate towards fiction that said that things could be different. Some of what I read was pulp [...]
Imagined worlds
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937) JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000) Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990) The children’s author Anthony Horowitz recently pointed out that all books are doors – [...]
The best of JG Ballard
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
The Drowned World (1962) Crash (1973) Millennium People (2003) When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard [...]
The best of Émile Zola
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Germinal (1885) La Bête Humaine (1890) Émile Zola’s reputation as a novelist of the French left rests both on his campaign for justice over the Dreyfus affair and his monumental novel Germinal. To Madame Dreyfus (wife of the Alsatian-Jewish artillery officer who was court-marshalled, controversially, in 1894 for passing military secrets to the German army), [...]
Top 10 trivia: Novel-writing politicians
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
1) Matthew Lewis One of the earliest examples of a novel written by a British MP, this is proof that there is a bit of the devil in many a politician. Lewis was the Member for Hindon in Wiltshire and the infamous author of The Monk, the most shocking novel of the age: a Gothic [...]
The best British new wave novels
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
John Braine: Room at the Top (1957) Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1958) Stan Barstow: A Kind of Loving (1960) Keith Waterhouse: Billy Liar (1959) David Storey: This Sporting Life (1960) A film adaptation can sometimes destroy a book, but five novels that came out of working-class England half a century ago had [...]
Modern Britain
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Martin Amis London Fields (1989) Jonathan Coe What a Carve Up! (1994) Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty (2004) David Peace GB84 (2004) The modern state-of-Britain novel, paradoxically, has an American model. Published in 1987, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities broke with an introspective tendency in fiction and challenged novelists to depict the [...]
The best of Chinua Achebe
Posted in Literature on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Things Fall Apart (1958) Anthills of the Savannah (1987) In his influential first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe re-tells the story of European colonialist intervention in Nigeria in the 1890s from an African point of view. Inventing a solemn, heightened English to represent Nigerian dialect, he portrays the dignity and beauty of Ibo [...]
Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness
Posted in Literature, Other, tagged Koestler on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
No other writer of the 20th century had Arthur Koestler’s knack for doing odd things, crossing paths with important people and being present when disaster struck. As a 27-year-old Communist he spent the famine winter of 1932-33 in Kharkov, amid millions of starving Ukrainians. Rushing southward through France ahead of the invading Nazi armies in [...]
A Very Tintin Christmas
Posted in Literature, tagged Christmas on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Christmas card from 1942 It’s a good time to be Tintin. The eternally adolescent detective with the loyal dog and odd haircut has featured in a number of recent books, including a new biography of his creator, Hergé, a scholarly study subtitled “Tintin for Adults,” and “The Art of Hergé,” a gorgeous trilogy-in-progress from the [...]
Today in History – December 26
Posted in This day in history, tagged December 26 on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Today is Saturday, Dec. 26th, the 360th day of 2009. There are 5 days left in the year. The seven-day African-American holiday Kwanzaa begins today. This is Boxing Day. Today’s Highlight in History On Dec. 26, 1799, former President George Washington was eulogized by Col. Henry Lee as “first in war, first in peace and [...]
Christmas has its crown again
Posted in Living, tagged Christmas on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Holiday celebration signs hang in the Cedarwood Public School in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The elementary school is in a diverse community and equally displays signs for many religious holidays such as Christmas, Hanukka, Diwali, Kwanza, Ramadan and Eid. The Christian holiday seems to have taken less of a mauling this year It’s a mildly encouraging [...]
OMG, how obsolete am I?
Posted in Computers, Living on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Pete Lalonde, 14, displays some terms used when chatting on the internet, lol (Laugh out loud) and igtg (I’ve got to go). The problem with trying to sound like you’re still with it is that you’re bound to make an idiot of yourself I exchange a lot of e-mail with a certain friend of mine, [...]
How we travelled then, how we travel now
Posted in Living on December 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Hello electronic tickets, GPS devices, packed lunches…goodbye printed tickets, guide books, airplane food 1999 You could pack a snack, but why? Airplane food isn’t great but the price is right. 2009 With the toiletries now outlawed, you have room to pack a lunch. Just leave out the juice box. (Too much liquid, folks.) 1999 [...]
