Larvatus Prodeo is not of course in direct competition with the ABC, but does nevertheless surpass it in many, many ways.
One such way is this: when LP asks you, nay, beseeches you to wax lyrical about your number one desert island book, it is not merely for the sake of contributing to some kind of halfbaked poll, nor even of inviting you to listen to your own voice, or fondly reading and re-reading your own comment which is all the reward you will get on some other blogs I could mention.
In short, tell us about your favourite book, here in the comments thread, make it interesting, and you might win a lifetime membership to LibraryThing, worth $25 USD. I have a membership to give away because I won it myself in an in-house contest and I have one already.
LibraryThing is an online personal library cataloguing tool. You enter your books via ISBN, title, or keywords, and voila! instant cross-referenced personal library catalogue. It is rather like Flickr or Delicious only for books. LibraryThing utilises user-created tags, so you can sort and group your books according to whatever system you desire. It’s a social system, so users can see each others’ catalogues, you can see who’s got the same books as you, whose library is most like your own, how many people own a particular book & what they thought about it - or if you just want to know what books you have, you can make your catalogue private. Believe me, it’s frickin’ addictive.
So, the contest will run for a week - until next Friday, 23 Dec, midnight by the comments box timestamp. Open to anyone and everyone including Larvatus Prodeo authors. You can enter as often as you like (I guess your favourite book might change from day to day.) I am the judge and I will choose the entry I like best. Correspondence will not be entered into, in fact, please send complaints to Box 9994 in Your Capital City.
PS if you just want to talk about somebody’s favourite selection or whatever but not enter the contest, by all means go ahead.
Assuming that a favourite book is one that you read for pleasure rather than edification, then mine is either The Scapegoat, The Fairy Gunmother or Write To Kill by Daniel Pennac. Those three always manage to escape the periodic purges of unwanted trash fiction that go on here in the old dacha.
I’ve also been itching to use CiteULike, but have never quite gotten around to the data entry of it.
I am not a fiction man myself.
I do read Annual reports and like rewriting my CV but I can’t get into fiction.
I always read Lord of the rings each Christmas (dunno why) and sometimes I even make it to the Dune series but Non-fiction is my go.
I am currently going through a hagiography of John Paul 11
I love Lucky Jim. I can read and reread it (I think I must be up to about 6 times now)and it still cracks me up. Many’s the time I’ve feigned attention to a dressing-down and asked myself if I could nip down to the local for a pint and be back before she noticed.
Oh, I love Lucky Jim too. Such a way with words. The urge to quote vast slabs right now is pretty hard to resist.
Catch 22. Hillarious and black at the same time. Speaking of which I must re-read it soon.
I never tire of reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last And First Men and Star Maker. His speculations about where the current human civilisation will end up, and why, are beginning to take on a worrying prophetic tone.
Canticle for Leibowitz, I suppose, although there are many greater books, perhaps not least because this is science fiction, and eccesiastical science fiction at that, if such a genre can be said to exist, in which case Dune is probably the more grandly epic in scope. Nevertheless, it’s got entertainment values as well as being of interest on matters of RC history and the place of the church vis a vis secular politics both macro and micro, both current and past, and of course on matters of faith, which, while not in its specific Christian application, remains fascinating. It’s a bit Cold War-era now, of course, but while that specific model of progress towards destruction may be less of an immediate concern, the tendency of humankind to push itself to the edge of its own capacity for existence seems relevant enough that the book doesn’t become too dated. In any event, there are aspects of my personal history more or less directly related to the themes and motifs, so it doesn’t stay on the shelf or end up in a library donation bin even twenty years on from having first encountered it.
(Lyrical enough?)
My favourite book is only a small one; ‘Running in the Family’ by Michael Ondaatje, about his family history in Sri Lanka. I love its evocation of time and place, the mingling of memory and history, the way he traces out truth from nostalgia. It’s beautiful.
It also contains one of my favourite poems, The Cinnamon Peeler: http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~haddock/poems/cinnamon.html
I need to read more fiction. And more poetry. Sigh.
homer your satire cracks me up. You can’t “get into” like fiction but read Annual Reports and re-write your CV.
So there - you read some of the most expensive glossily presented fiction and also write it, but can’t get into it.
Pretty good Greg. Though I will say for everyone else’s benefit that lyricism can take many many forms, and I don’t have any criteria in mind except “best” (I’d make a good blog contest judge, methinks.)
I have a lot of respect for that book too. I first read it in an undergrad SF course and it made a very big impression. I agree it’s interesting how it doesn’t date even though the strong atomic era stuff would lead you think that it ought to feel dated. The only think about it that makes me slightly uncomfortable is that I think the novel comes down a bit heavy-handedly on the side of the anti-euthanasia priest at the very end - I just think the book would perhaps have been stronger with more showing and less telling around that issue.
I love the library theme in CFL, it’s beautiful.
Any collection of Ray Bradbury’s short stories. Waugh’s Decline and Fall or Brideshead Revisited.
My favourite book on Australian politics right now is old but oddly presecient:
Once upon a time, long long ago, there lay in a valley far, far away in the mountains, the most contented kingdom the world has ever known.
It was called Happy Valley, and it was ruled over by a wise old King called Otto, and all his subjects flourished and were happy, and there were no discontents or grumblers, because Wise King Otto had had them all put to death along with the Trade Union leaders many years before. and all the good happy folk of Happy Valley sang and danced all day long, and anyone who was for any reason miserable or unhappy or who had any difficult personal problems was prosecuted under the Happiness Act.
(from The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, Palin et al London 1973)
Cross-posted at Tug Boat Potemkin
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and its three follow-ups are brilliant and deeply wierd. Everyone should read them.
If we are talking desert island, then I reckon I’d take John’s Gospel. I love its rich imagery, deep feeling and its portrayal of the divine and the human in the central character. I could easily live off that book (and coconuts, presumably) for the rest of my life.
I have started to read (its now almost an addiction) many political and economic blogs. An Australian one I like at the moment is: http://weekbyweek7.blogspot.com/
cheers
I think LP charges for advertising, Roberto.
I have many favourites, but one that is embedded in my mind is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. While its comedy may have dated, its exuberance and cleverness certainly haven’t. It is also eminently browseable. You can pick it up and read bits at random and enjoy it as much - indeed probably more - than if you read it straight through.
A friend who lives in England recently returned to Australia for Christmas and brought me, as a present, a third edition copy from 1769. It’s a lovely, worn old thing, with original leather binding, and about as brilliant a present as I can imagine.
Another reason I like Tristram Shandy is that because my blog is named for its author, people sometimes assume I am related to him. Is it wrong that I don’t go out of my way to correct them?
I would take Phillip Roth’s “The Human Stain” or the word’s fattest Raymond Carver anthology. Probably Carver I think. I feel at home there.
I would not take Roberto’s blog. There would not be powerpoints. If I really wanted sock puppets, I could hopefully use my socks (while they lasted) or improvise with native foliage.
Tim, you actually posted on your blog that Laurence S was your great great great grandaddy didn’t you? Or something.
Roberto, this is meant to be about books mate. BOOKS
Id have to go with Memory of Fire, by Eduardo Galeano.
No, I just said that we, as in the blog, got our name from Laurence Sterne and somebody in the comments thought I meant “we” as in my family. Given my actual surname is Howard, it made a change from the usual assumptions about who I am related to, so I didn’t bother to correct the comment.
I remember now. It amused me at the time because it seemed a bit like the issue of perhaps being kin to Hannah More or W.D. Howells or someone similarly “famous” to about .000001% of the population.
So people assume you’re related to Elizabeth Jane Howard eh? Wow, harsh.
It’s difficult to single out one, but a favourite is Mandy Sayer’s “15 Kinds of Desire”. I was lucky enough to be passed a copy by a friend and I ate it up. Her portrayal of the Cross through a series of linked short stories transported me back to my childhood in inner-city Sydney and being whisked through the Red Light District by my mother.
I love it mostly because she captures the randomness of life and the unexpected directions that it can take. A little girl opens the book saying, “Everyone’s strange around here”. I’ve spent much time (probably too much), in many different locations, pondering that same thing.
Until recently it was the default option when I couldn’t think of a gift for a friend. But I’ve stopped this because I’m just so disappointed (in them) when they don’t love it as much as I do.
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Weds Nabokovian wit, cleverness and tremendous writing to a character you care deeply about. Funny, tragic, hopeful, humane and nearly as complex as Lolita or Pale Fire but more subtly. I know it backwards and forth.
Pick me, pick me! I could hold another contest and write it off twice!
Only one book to a desert island? Way harsh.
I’d take A.S. Byatt’s Possession. It’s got everything: quest, romance, folk-tale, wit, erudition, scholarship, politics (class/gender), international rivalries, multiple landscapes, lots of characters in a plot of Dickensian complexity, chase, race, history, mystery, poetry and sex.
You only have to stay on the desert island for a week. Also it has a palm-leaf thatched bar, white beaches, no jetskis or other motor-powered transport, and the only other inhabitant is Johnny Depp.
Or Julianne Moore if you prefer.
oh well, or Missy Higgins. Why not.
Happy to just struggle along with Johnny, thanks. Not that both the girls aren’t gorgeous too…
I like your thinkin’, Laura. For such an atmosphere I think a collection of Hemingway’s short stories would be perfect. Handsome men, beautiful women, romantic locations, a good cigar (for the smokers), an heroic sense of futility and the faintest whiff of expensive Scotch.
The nostalgic memory of love lost, manhood proved and an epic struggle given away. A cool change and crisp rain to clean the afternoon of its muggy fatigue. One tear. The smell of a woman’s sweat. A closed book.
Let’s go to dinner, they said together, and as they went out the ceiling fan slowed to a stop.
Throw in Human Nature and you’ll get a stream of entries from La Trobe Law School ..
Laura, what criteria are you basing your judgement on? Whether you like the book yourself or whether the nominee gives a good enough reason for their liking of it? I don’t really have a favourite book, I was just wondering, it seems a fairly open ended sort of competition. I guess if I was stranded on a desert island I’d want something mind expanding to read so I think I’d go for one of the sacred texts. The Bhagavad Gita or maybe a The Tao Teh King? The Upanishads? A difficult choice. Then again, leaving civilzation behind would be difficult. Herodotus’ Histories? I did enjoy John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium, but its a bit blood thirsty, don’t know how many times you have to read all that gore though. Hard to choose. Even harder to judge methinks.
Only a week (you say) I now read. Mmm that makes it breezier. The King is a Fink or a Dustbin of Milligan would be my choices (were I entering this competition). Both very short tomes, leaving plenty of time to do absolutely nothing other than gaze empty-headed-like at the distant horizon.
Hi Link, thanks for asking. I hope to be able to give the membership to the author of an interesting, intriguing appetite-whetting comment about a book that person thinks is an extra good read.
You said “whether the nominee gives a good enough reason for their liking of it” - that’s it exactly. The actual book isn’t a consideration. It’s not ten grand I’m giving away here, more’s the pity, so I don’t want to make heavy work of it. Just a bit of fun.
If we end up with heaps and heaps of candidates I’ll ask another LP’ers to help pick a winner.
Ooh yes Laura - Johnny Depp for desert islands ( the only man who outswoons Carlyle and Tennant - though I do have a soft spot for Ralph Fiennes).
Favourite books are the ones that are just perfect for the stage you are at emotionally. Keri Hulme’s The Bone People was a great example of that sort of book for me - I read it when I needed to rebuild and reconfigure my life, and it stays with me still.
Use of Weapons, by Iain M Banks.
A breathtaking deconstruction of a tortured sole, with an ending that will quite literally leave you speechless. Absolute masterpiece.
“A breathtaking deconstruction of a tortured sole”
Is this like a highbrow Finding Nemo?
Is this like a highbrow Finding Nemo?
Kind of, although substitute a clown fish for a slightly unbalanced intergalactic mercenary.
By far the best book I’ve read this year is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
Book Link
(Doesn’t this site follow standard XHTML tags? I can never get a link tag to work here.)
Use of Weapons is a good pick, but if I was stranded on a desert island in the middle of a vast ocean-Orbital (with a cannibal cult lead by a horribly obese blobman) I’d probably bring The Player of Games.
So if I only have to plan for something like a week, I would go with Stanley Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary. It’s an astounding collection of essays, beautifully written (if you like that sort of philosophical writing, which I do very much), oddly funny, and deeply thoughtful but I have only managed one focused reading through the whole thing. I’ve reread a couple of the essays a few times, but there is so much there for me to understand: profound discussion of skepticism, marriage, Romanticism, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, E.A. Poe, Wittgenstein, Emerson, Thoreau, and more. Whenever I get the book out now, I end up flipping through it wishing I could spend a few days focused on it, but it’s really at most tangential to my present set of research concerns, so I can’t (which is probably part of why the book is so enticing for me).
My one favorite book? Where to start I believe is the problem! I don’t think I could live with just one book.
I will have to start with authors first;
JG Ballard: Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, High Rise — even Empire Of the Sun — but I would have to plump for a short story collection I think, like Memories Of The Space Age or The Complete Short Stories.
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris, The Futurological Congress, The Cyberiad.
Ray Bradbury: FAHRENHEIT 451, or any short story collection with the story A Sound Of Thunder.
PK Dick: Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, Man In The High Castle.
Bret Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero, Rules Of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense And Sensibility
OK that’s it for modern non-fiction, let’s move on to Rennaisance writers;
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Shakespeare: Collected Works (if I had to choose just one I would say … Macbeth).
Issac Newtown: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles Of Natural Philosophy), Opticks.
Last but not least, we cannot forget the Classics;
Homer: The Illiad, The Oddessy
Euripides: Herakles; Medea
Aeschylus: Orestes Triology
Herodotus: Histories
Julius Caesar: The War Against The Gauls, The Civil War (Unsure of the first title without going to the bookshelf, but it’s more about the author than the book. Veni Vidi Vici.)
Suetonius: Twelve Caesars
In this section, because of its Classical subject matter, I’ll also put Robert Graves: I, Claudius and Claudius The God, as well as his rather fevered work The White Goddess. Which also leads me to JG Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Actually Shakespeare’s collected works would the one single book I could live with if I had to only have just one.
The problem I fear here is simply that I have left so many books out; books I cannot live without.
Also, I left off the entire Flashman series by George Macdonald Fraser. Enormous fun, and slightly historical too.
My favourite book has long fallen from grace. The author toppled from her inner city pedestal. This is not a literary classic. I don’t mind that the grammar is at times dodgy. I love Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip.
I had flirted with it on the shelf of many bookshops in Sydney, finally buying it early in 1982 as I was about to take flight from the city. I took this tale of torrid Melbourne life with me to Wellington, a rather squeaky clean town at the time. I had only been to the place Garner wrote of briefly, but I could smell the scent of sprinklers on hot asphalt and taste the bacon eaten on the back doorstep of the ‘old brown house a mile from the city’. She wrote of elation and pain, what every young, and not so young, woman knows of love. I dived right in at the deep end and emersed myself in her world.
I now live in Melbourne but it’s a long time since brandy alexanders were 50 cents a shot and most of the old haunts are long gone. I have resided in rambling shared houses in many of the suburbs Nora cried in and torn down the streets late at nights on my own clunky bicycle. Fortunately I didn’t fall in love with a junky, but that is the vicarious joy of fiction. Thanks to Monkey Grip, I don’t need to.
Whenever I am sad I read it. Whenever I feel my life is dull I read it. Like an old, worn t-shirt or vegemite on toast, this is what comforts me during the bumpy bits in my life and a novel any loftier just would not do.
(darn formatting when you cut and paste from Word - needless to say, the Microsoft “Office” manual is not my favourite book)
I’m going to go with Gene Wolfe’s Briah Cycle, particularly “The Book of the New Sun.” Gene Wolfe, now that Ballard and Dick have received mainstream recognition, is one of speculative fiction’s secret treasures. And likely to remain so, for to read Wolfe requires. I believe, an understanding of the conventions, customs, modes and tropes of speculative fiction. A reader of mainstream literary fiction just won’t get it.
A special mention for John Brunner’s quartet of dystopian novels, “Stand on Zanzibar” (on overpopulation); “The Jagged Orbit” (on the military-industrial complex); “The Sheep Look Up” (on pollution); and “The Shockwave Rider” (on progress overload) which unfortunately are just as relevant now as when they were published in the late sixties and early seventies.
There are too many others that deserve mention but the two novels that have been most personally influential are Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed� and “The Left Hand of Darkness� which piqued my interest in anarchism and gender studies respectively.
That’s interesting, Styx, my interest in anarchism was piqued by Michael Moorcock’s work.
I have to have three desert-island books, though I suppose I would settle for any one of these if I absolutely had to.
Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle — I really feel this is the culmination of his work. The prose, the characters, the alternate Earth, the games of Scrabble in English, French, German and Russian…perfect.
Ernest Hemingway Garden of Eden — As a huge Hemingway fan I feel a little funny that my favorite novel of his was published posthumously, but I really think this is one of his more interesting works.
Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — One of his more surreal novels, which really appeals to me.
I would also be happy to take as many short stories by any of these three as I was allowed.
Not suprisingly, I’d also consider Ada as my desert island book. I too think it’s Vlad’s best book. Or maybe TH White’s The Once and Future King, which stands out for me as the most humane, worldly and witty of that amazing wave of English imaginative and fantasty works that emerged around WW2 and just after. Or the collected works of Bill Shakespeare, who wasn’t too shabby a writer either.
Although I’d probably settle for “Desert Island Broadband Access For Dummies.’
My favorite book over the years hasn’t changed. The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban. I am 30 years old and this has been my favorite for 25 years. I bought it for a dime in a library bin. I have read it at least once a year since then. Every time I read it I get something new from it. The awe and magic of being a child, The adventuresome nature of the teenager wanting to explore the world, The wonder of holding my son for the first time and feeling the responsibility that comes with parenthood, seeing the world through my kids eyes, the need to protect them all costs, the trials of being a single father. Love, loss, war, death, redemption. Every emotion about everything can be found in it. Just might be the most allegorical book since Moby Dick. All of that in a kids book. It really is the best. I once got into a fight with a good friend of mine because I said that the Mouse and His Child was the greatest quest novel of all time (him being a Tolkeinoid, this drove him nuts) but I stood my ground and got him to read it and like it, but not as much as Tolkien ;). Bottom line I can’t wait to read this to my kids and share it with them.
If it’s a poll, I would add a vote for Running In the Family.
If it’s a desert island I would take the beloved Melway/s.
If you have the map, the memories follow.
“my interest in anarchism was piqued by Michael Moorcock’s work.” Ah! ‘Behold the Man’ - which will do very strange things to your belief systems - possibly not the best time of year to be reading it. Then again …
Last chance today….get your entries in!
Isn’t it last chance tomorrow, Laura? I was still getting around to writing mine… Waiting for a lyrical mood
For a desert island, I would probably be looking for something along the lines of 101 Things to do with Coconuts, failing that I would take either Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Jack London’s Call of the Wild.
errr, ummm, Mark, in short, yes. Tomorrow at midnight. That was a test. To see who hasn’t lost track of what day it is already.
Although it may be predictable/cliched/boring (take your pick of adjectives) my favourite book is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
I enjoy the simplistic of the story that has ramifications that remain strong in wider society and over time - this little girl can mean and symbolise so much hope for our world.
I adore the book because I think it is a great allegory for our world. I cry for the horrible aspects of the humanity in the story - that we can be so cruel and heartless to our fellow being but then I find comfort in the strength of Atticus. Our world is kind of like that - we look at the shit aspects and bemoan about the quality of our world but beneath all that, lies some hope, no matter how small it may be.
So while it may be incredibly predictable to pick a book like this, it IS my favourite book, not only because I just enjoy the book as is but the wider meaning - both as a representation of modern day society but also in forming me as a person - it remains (and I hope it will forever) as the cornerstone of my philosophy of life. It may sound corny but I think it has shaped who I am as a person.
*apologies for the sappiness!*
My most favorite book is Pat Conroy’s Beach Music. It is a wonderful, touching book filled with glimpses into the inner workings of a disfunctional family.