Kate's Queen City Notes

Blundering through Cincinnati, laughing all the way

Tag Archives: BBC big read


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100 books by 40: GOOD OMENS

Book: Good Omens
Authors: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Published: 1990

The writers of Supernatural, the TV show, seemed to borrow many of their idea from this book. The similarities are so close that I looked to see if one of the authors also write for the show. When I came up dry there, I checked to see if the show credits Gaiman or Pratchett. My less-than-exhaustive research came up dry.

What I did find is that rumors of Good Omens becoming a movie have been swirling for some time. These rumors have been persistent enough that the actor that plays Crowley in Supernatural was asked if he has been approached to play Crowley in the Good Omens movie. The actor denied this.

I wonder what’s up with the intellectual property here? Perhaps the authors or the publishing company lack the motivation to file suit. Maybe the publishing company and authors see the fan fiction that has sprouted merging the two story lines and sense that this is good for all involved. Or maybe the similarities relegated to side characters, aren’t significant enough for a claim.

In the book, an angel and demon join forces to postpone the apocalypse. The unique picture of good and evil that this book paints is reason enough for me to recommend reading this book. The book’s take on the banality of evil is communicated effortlessly; a feat that isn’t lost on me due to my past experience with numerous psychological texts that struggle to convey the same.

The shimmering, dry British humor, also reason enough to recommend the book, is a welcome diversion from the weighty premise of the book. That being said. This book is great for divergent interests; moralists and humorists can unite. If a book can be described as a romp, this would be the book. Read it.


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100 books by 40: ULYSSES

Book: Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
Published: 1920

I was warned about this book. The warnings were justified. Aside from the more obvious difficulty around a lack of quotations, the lack of prose tires my eyes in unanticipated ways.

And then there is my honed scholarly habit of rereading sentances that I failed to comprehend. I find myself doubling back numerous times on the same page. This habit served me well in my studies in organic chemistry and geology. In this context, my habit isn’t useful.

I have to enter a semi-meditative state and let the words flow over me. The book is less a dissection of form and plot and more about learning new reading habits. Allowing my mind to let go of what I don’t understand is liberating.

Will I understand critical plot points? Probably not. I struggled to identify when Leo Bloom was taking a crap, a bit of ammunition used to classify this work as obscene. There are references to Ireland’s relationship to Great Britain for which I am missing critical context. Let it all wash away or commit to reading this book for the better part of 2015.

I know this book is supposed to take place over the course of one day. I also know that there are two main characters who’s lives careen together through the course of that day. I know that the chapters seem to be written from different people’s perspectives, and in significantly different writing styles. I also know that primary themes are the meaning of life and the part that religion plays in our lives.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this book, but I find my feelings for it difficult to grasp as I do many of the details of my dreams. There’s subjective experiences that the book captures better than any writing I’ve seen. The cacophony of a full bar, and the happenstance of new friendships that crop up there are perfectly translated to letters. The flighty nature of consciousness is flawlessly captured. It’s this precise capture that puts this book in my repeat read list. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but the bits I did were beautiful.


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100 Books by 40: BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY

Book: Bridget Jones’s Diary Author: Helen Fielding Published: 1996 Ambivalent is a good word to describe my feelings about this book. It was an easy humorous read, but it made the feminist in me rage. I saw the movie years ago. I recall feeling mild amusement.

The book is set-up as a diary, and Bridget is obsessed with her weight and finding a boyfriend. As though women are incapable of having any interests outside the man in their lives, or getting a man in their lives. Not only is this notion offensive, it’s destructive.

Shame on you Helen Fielding for confirming all the worst things that culture tells us to believe about ourselves. Anyone that hangs all of their happiness, hopes, and dreams on their significant other is promised one thing. Disappointment. You’ve just put all the weight of your life on this relationship and your future partner. No human being can, nor should, live up to this sort of pressure. Bridget Jones is delusional. Relationships at their best are a mixed bag of wonderful and difficult. You will have beautiful moments; you will have terrible moments. That’s what it means to build a life with another person.

I wish I could say the snarky British humor trumps the GOD AWFUL MESSAGES TO WOMEN in this book. It doesn’t. I don’t need Helen Fielding telling me to obsess about my weight and finding a man (or woman in my case), as those messages are constant in our culture. I want to bitch-slap Bridget Jones. And Helen Fielding.


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100 books by 40: BLEAK HOUSE

Book: Bleak House
Author: Charles Dickens
Published: 1853

Bleak is an accurate description of how I felt when I started this book. The gray Cincinnati winter seems the most suitable companion for slogging through this enormous book. I was cheered by the fact that this is the last Charles Dickens book in my list. All of my earlier struggles with The Bronte Sisters and Jane Austen have paid out in how quickly I jumped back into Dickens.

Of the many things to object to with this book, the obsession with 1800’s British legal system was most irritating. Long passages are devoted to the courts. I skimmed over those passages without guilt.

Fortune has put this book toward the end of my list. There are twenty books standing between me and my goal of finishing The BBC’s 100 Best Books list. The momentum of eighty books down and twenty to go carried me to the end of this book.

The sheer number of side characters in this book is overwhelming. I can’t say that the subplots add that much to the book. Actually, scratch that. I can’t say anything about the book added that much to my life. Great Expectations and David Copperfield deserved to be on this list. Bleak House, not so much. If you want to get into Dickens, steer clear of this one.


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100 Books by 40: DOUBLE ACT

Book: Double Act
Author: Jacqueline Wilson
Published: 1995

Sometimes people need to grow apart. That is difficult as an adult, but the twin children in this book are emotionally unequipped for this reality. Shit, I am emotionally unepuipped for this situation, and I am approaching forty.

The twins have some other obstacles in their path, like losing their mother and their dad’s subsequent second marriage. For a book aimed at chidren aged nine to thirteen, I think it does an adequate job of managing the big emotions inherent in the plot. The twins’ perspective of adult decisions resonates.

But I see no reason for an emotionally intact adult to read this book. It’s not particularly imaginative the way that Roald Dahl’s books are. It’s a short inoffensive read, but in a life of limited time and unlimited books to read this one doesn’t make my cut.


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100 Books by 40: THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS

Book: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Author: Robert Tressell
Published: 1955

The past comments on our present.

It may be objected that, considering the number of books dealing with these subjects already existing, such a work as this was uncalled for. The answer is that not only are the majority of people opposed to Socialism, but a very brief conversation with an average anti-socialist is sufficient to show that he does not know what Socialism means. – Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

I worked at Starbucks in the late 90’s. Memorable patrons abounded; I served as caffeine bartender to many jittery addicts. I continue to count myself among them. Socialist Rick was among a colorful list that included Iced Venti Americano Rick and Double Tall Latte Patti.
Rick came in most afternoons and stayed for an hour or two. He was polite, and his drip coffee couldn’t have been easier to prepare. Unlike Grande 2 pump Sugar Free Vanilla Skim Extra Hot Latte Hair Plugs for Men, his drink never seemed to be right. It was always one of the following: too hot, not hot enough, not enough vanilla, too much vanilla, or was more generally bad. He would bark this at me after having flung the lid off his 220 degree latte and taken two impossibly huge gulps of it. It’s a wonder the interior of his mouth had sensations at all given that it must be dead scar tissue in there. After bad drink number 50, I started keeping his drink behind the bar and offered him a baristas choice on his first go. I was vaguely gratified when one morning my choice happened to be a cast off Americano. Those are blistering hot due to the fact that they are comprised of espresso shots and 280 degree filtered water. His eyes watered just a bit when he took his pulls. I wasn’t sorry. He returned his drink less often after that.

In comparison, Rick was an easy customer. Overbearing isn’t an accurate word to describe Rick. My coworkers, already familiar with him, warned me of his fringe beliefs. But a coherent picture of Rick’s views didn’t develop until I had poured him at least thirty cups of coffee across weeks. My coworkers’ warnings looked to be unwarranted, as Rick wasn’t over-eager to discuss his views, but he certainly wouldn’t hold back should discussion wander into economics or politics.

Hindsight demonstrates that I was responding to Rick with indoctrination from history class and our capitalist culture. Going to a conservative Christian school, we were told ghoulish stories of all the martyrs sacrificed to the steely god of socialism. Innocent Russian boys and girls were thrown into the gaping maw of atheism only to be rended limb from limb by satan in the afterlife. (I realize that The USSR was a communist country, but communism and socialist were both painted with the same sloppy brush, so I didn’t perceive a difference between the two.) You should think I use hyperbole, but I don’t. I was raised to be terrified of socialism.

Terrified, I was. When my coworkers told me that Rick was a socialist; they might as well said that we molested children. I coolly responded to Rick’s polite small talk. You can’t let your gaurd down when something so sinister approaches.

Across weeks of interaction, I started to relax. Rick was pleasant. He treated us like people. For those that haven’t worked in the service industry, it’s not uncommon for people to bark orders at you and wholly ignore you otherwise. The most common response to good morning or how are you was GRANDE LOW FAT LATTE with no eye contact or any other non-verbal acknowledgement. This was the case prior to smart phones. I can only imagine that this behavior grows more frequent with each passing day.

This is when the cognative dissonance started. Rick was pleasant and warm. Our interactions only occasionally touched on politics or economics, but when they did he said reasonable things. How can a socialist be kind and say sensible things while simultaneously being Satan’s child molester in chief? HOW?

I opted for the intellectually lazy path forward. I put Rick in the crazy box in my head, and responded to him as such regardless of his kind behavior and reasonable criticisms of the capitalist system. Occasionally, he would say something that would break out of the crazy box. But my discomfort at questioning my indoctrination, caused me to quickly push this away.

I have regrets. I regret that I closed myself off to Rick. Mostly because in the intervening decade I have become disillusioned with the glories of capitalism. I have come to believe that an egalitarian society needs labor to be valued more than capital. And it’s mystifying that of the seventy bucks that are spent on GAP jeans only pennies go to the Vietnamese laborers who made them. WHERE THE HELL DOES THE OTHER $69.96 GO? And more importantly, why does this arrangement make sense?

The Ragged Trousered Philantropists is a socialism text book masquerading as a novel. Typically I am annoyed with this dress-up game, but I appreciate that this book provided the most thorough argument for socialism I have ever read. I bet my indoctrination regarding socialism is representative of most Americans’ indoctrination, mostly lies sprinkled with threats of ruthless dictators. Which is to say that Americans don’t actually know what socialism is. The way the word was bandied about in the last presidential election cycle supports my point.

At other times the meeting resolved itself into a number of quarrelsome disputes between the Liberals and Tories that formed the crowd, which split itself up into a lot of little groups and whatever the original subject might have been they soon drifted to a hundred other things, for most of the supporters of the present system semed incapable of pursuing any one subject to its logical conclusion. A discussion would be started about something or other; presently an unimportant side issue would crop up, then the original subject would be left unfinished, and they would argue and shout about the side issue. In a little while another side issue would arise, and then the first side issue would be abandoned also unfinished, and an angry wrangle about the second issue would ensue, the original subject being altogether forgotten.

They did not seem to really desire to discover the truth or to find out the best way to bring about and improvement in their condition, their only object seemed to me to score off their opponents. – Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

I won’t be waving the socialist flag just yet. But this book was excellent. There are valid criticisms of how we choose to organize ourselves economically. And if the data is right, and we are headed into another guilded age, shit is only starting to hit the fan.

Here’s where I am in my list.
Reading Now
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Books that have been read
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens *I read this when I was too young to appreciate it; I would like to read it again as an adult. I will do so if I have time.
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding *I’ve read this twice. I will read it again if I have time.
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac *I’ve read this twice. I will read it again if I have time. I have the unabriged unedited version and will probably take on that if time allows.

Pending reading:
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie


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100 Book by 40: SECRET HISTORY

Book: Secret History
Author: Donna Tartt
Published: 1992

I started Ulysses and Bleak House this week. I missed this in high school and college. I’m sure I missed it in high school because the content was too scandalous for my conservative Christian high school. I probably missed it in college due to the fact that my only literature credits came in the form of Ancient Greek Lit. In retrospect this seems like time poorly spent, as I recall virtually nothing from The Iliad or The Odyssey.

Secret History would have been a page-turner regardless of my alternate reading option being a bit difficult. I hesitate to call it a murder mystery, because the book tells you all from the outset. If there’s a mystery it’s about laying out the context for a motive.

But it does this so expertly. I am fascinated with the characters, and buzzed through the five hundred plus pages to understand what drove them. The narrator, a California native trying to make sense of affluent New England cultural norms let me ride on his shoulder. His voice as outsider there, let me naturally assume his observations.

My acceptance of the narrator drove my curiosity. I related to him. I found myself accepting his rationalizations for his actions. And that’s the power of this book. Not only did I feel bad for the obscenely wealthy murderers, but I grew convinced that they took the only path open to them.

This book was super. Read it. Prepare to creep yourself out.


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100 Books by 40: And Ode to The Hamilton County Library

Reading 100 books in 2 years, made me grow. Setting that goal with a deadline gave me the motivation that I needed to make reading a bigger part of my life. I have striving to honor my commitments, and this is ss good an exercise as any. I’ve enjoyed the process so much that I am signing up for another list, more on that topic in future posts.

There has been two critical keys to my success. First, my Kindle has enabled me to read while keeping my fitness regimen. I am not naturally a gym enthusiast, but I find regular physical activity keeps my anxiety and depression in check.

Second the Hamilton County Library has granted me access to books without draining my wallet. I have borrowed nearly half of the books on the list from the library. They’ve probably saved me a minimum of $250 bucks. And they couldn’t make it easier for me to get titles. I just browse their catalog with their app on my phone. I put in requests for what I need. When the books are ready, they send me an email letting me know I can come to my local library branch and pick it up.

Hamilton County Library, thanks for the critical part that you’ve played in helping me achieve my goal. Rest assured, I will remember your helping hand when it’s time to vote up your next tax levy. And when I am ready to participate in National Novel Writing Month, I will gladly go to you for encouragement and help.


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100 Books by 40: MATILDA

Book: Matilda
Author: Roald Dahl
Published: 1988

Adults have numerous opportunities to tyrannize children. Teachers, coaches, church elders, parents have ample opportunity to be cruel. Their reasons aside, it’s a wonder that so many of us grow into kind adults.

This book tells the story of some very cruel adults and a few kind adults, and how they influence the children in their lives. I was the kind of kid that took cruelty personally. When and adult humiliated or shamed me, my natural assumption was that they were right and I was wrong. This served me well in that I was open to correction, but it was damaging when emotionally stunted adults would cross my path. I could have used a little Roald Dahl in my life.