TOP FIVE: BOOKS

TOP FIVE: BOOKS

It’s World Book Day and I can’t believe I’ve never shared with you my favourite books – so here is my Top Five…

1. LOLITA - VLADIMIR NABOKOV

This is, despite it’s uncomfortable subject matter, without a doubt, my favourite book of all time. I read it in college for the first time for my English Literature class (my choice though, it wasn’t assigned) and instantly fell in love with it. I read it several times, in fact this is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. The combination of a compelling story along with the most beautifully written prose I’ve ever read, makes this my benchmark against which all other books I read are judged. I recommend it to everyone, despite the raised eyebrows. And may I remind you, probably the most amazing thing about this book; Nabokov wrote this in English, which is not his native tongue. He wrote, what some consider to be the greatest work of the 20^thcentury, in a language not his own!

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2. MARIANNE DREAMS - CATHERINE STORR

I first read this book when I was ten and I thought it was the best thing I’d ever read, and every few years I get it out again and think, ‘man, I had good taste, this still holds up.’ I was an odd kid, with a love of the supernatural and a thirst for the kind of adventure that could just turn up on your doorstep, and this book ticked all my boxes. It’s a story about a girl who dreams what she draws, but it’s dark, almost too dark for a children’s book, but also wonderful. 

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3. ASK THE DUST - JOHN FANTE

This book, I believe, is the reason, my boyfriend and I are together. I recommended this book to him and I think he’s loved me for it ever since. I read it in my late teens, recommended to me while searching for books by Bukowski (who is Fante’s biggest fan) but I can’t remember whom I read first. This book spoke to me, not because of circumstance but because of tone. I felt Bandini’s fear and nerves, I sympathized with his unrequited love and feelings of hopelessness and neglect, confusion about how to be in the world and how to succeed in life. Bandini is probably one of the characters in the literary world I worry and care for the most. I haven’t re-read this for a long time – I hope I still feel the same when I do.

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4. THE OUTSIDER - ALBERT CAMUS

The opening to this book is a stinger and it doesn’t get any easier to read, but it is brilliant. I always find it hard to judge the writing of a translation but I feel that the English version of this book at least keeps the tone and sentiment of the original, although it probably sounds more deep and beautiful in the French language. I read this and a few other existentialist books at the same time during my teens but this was the one that stuck, it stuck with a few others too because it is the inspiration for a lot of works of art and music. 

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5. NAÏVE. SUPER - ERLEND LOE

This book is amazing in it’s simplicity. It is about a man in his twenties who suddenly becomes disillusioned and confused by the world and his attempts to reset his thinking. It’s a truly modern book (almost ahead of it’s time). This is another book that my boyfriend and I bonded over and I would recommend it to anyone maybe feeling a little lost who needs some reassurance in the world but doesn’t want to read a self help book because sometimes they can be patronizing and this book gives the complete opposite notion.

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BOOK 180: JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

LITERARY STYLE: Céline's first novel is probably most remarkable for its style. Céline makes extensive use of ellipsisand hyperbole. His writing has the flow of natural speech patterns and uses the vernacular, while also employing more erudite elements. This has influenced French literature considerably. The novel enjoyed popular success and a fair amount of critical acclaim when it was published in October 1932. Albert Thibaudet, perhaps the greatest of the entre-deux-guerres critics, said that in January 1933 it was still a common topic of conversation at dinner parties in Paris.

INFLUENCE AND LEGACY: Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) opens with a quote from Journey to the End of the Night. The film concludes with a visual of the last paragraph of the book, passing under bridges, arches, and locks along the city's river.

Will Self has written that Journey to the End of the Night "is the novel, perhaps more than any other, that inspired me to write fiction".

The song "End of the Night" by The Doors references this book, as it had a great influence on the work of Jim Morrison.

Charles Bukowski makes reference to Journey in a number of his novels and short stories, and employs prose techniques borrowed from Céline. Bukowski wrote in Notes of a Dirty Old Man that "Céline was the greatest writer of 2000 years".

Céline's literary style greatly influenced Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopian science fiction film Alphaville, protagonist Lemmy Caution dismisses a taxi driver's offer of route options to his destination by stating that he is on "a journey to the end of the night". The film depicts the use of poetry as a weapon against a sentient computer system.

MY VERDICT:

I can understand why this is cited as a great novel, however I did not enjoy it at all. This book probably, of all the books I’ve ever read, took me the longest to complete. The only reason I can give, is because of the disheartening subject matter that although travelling around the world to many different situations almost each one was more, or as, depressing as the last. There is no hope is this book, no humour, no let up, and because of that I found it difficult to get through. The protagonist is more unlikable the longer the story progresses and I found it hard to sympathize with him even when he was in sympathetic situations. I can see that it is well written, I believe there’s no argument on that part, but above all I want to be able to enjoy reading a book and I did not enjoy one part of this.

http://www.boredpanda.com/we-illustrated-the-most-wonderful-literature-locations-in-the-uk/

BOOK 157: MOBY DICK: HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler the Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale which on the previous whaling voyage destroyed his ship and severed his leg at the knee. The novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation as a Great American Novel was established. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".

"Call me Ishmael" is among world literature's most famous opening sentences.

Dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius", the work was first published as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title in New York in November. Hundreds of differences, mostly slight and some important, are seen between the two editions. The London publisher censored or changed sensitive passages and Melville made revisions, as well, including the last-minute change in the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in both editions as "Moby Dick", with no hyphen. About 3,200 copies were sold during the author's life.

The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore, in which Ahab kills the whale and returns to marry his fiancée. The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination", showing how "different readers in different periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon".

BOOK 156: SEIZE THE DAY: SAUL BELLOW

First published in 1956, is considered (by, for example, prominent critic James Wood) one of the great works of 20th century literature. Seize the Day was Saul Bellow's fourth novel. It was written in the 1950s, a formative period in the creation of the middle class in the United States.

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FILM 1503: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

TRIVIA: There was some action in the film at first. But when Jim Jarmusch was asked to add more he instead removed all of it.

According to the script, Eve is 2000 years old and was the druid matriarch of a Celtic tribe. Adam is 500 to 600 years old. Jim Jarmusch decided that Adam and Eve would be aware of each other's true age so he argued they have no reason to state it in the film, but simply informed the actors of the age of the characters. In an extended version of the nude scene, shown in the DVD special features, Adam & Eve do talk about her druidic connections.

The white dwarf Eve mentions to Adam while driving across the city is the star called BPM 37093, also known as Lucy (named after The Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds). Its nucleus is in a cooling down process, which makes the star core pulsate like a giant gong.

Eve books a flight for herself and Adam under the names "Daisy Buchanan" and "Stephen Dedalus," main characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," respectively. Stephen Dedalus also appears as the sidekick in Joyce's "Ulysses." In Joyce's final novel "Finnegans Wake," there is a famous recurring poem with the line "riverrun past eve and adam."

Some of the many pictures on Adam's wall include portraits of Richard Wagner, Jean Michel Basquiat, Max Ernst & Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Christopher Marlowe (who is also represented by the John Hurt character in the film), William Blake, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William S. Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft, Naomi Klein, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi, Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Geronimo, Joe Strummer, Bo Diddley, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Henry Purcell, Nicholas Ray, Claire Denis, Aki Kaurismäki, Luis Buñuel, Robby Müller, Fritz Lang, Bruce Lee, Buster Keaton, Rodney Dangerfield, Harpo Marx and Hedy Lamarr as well as numerous musicians whom Jim Jarmusch has worked with on various films including Tom Waits, Neil Young, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Iggy Pop, and RZA.

One of the books that Eve packs for her trip to Detroit is a catalog of Jean Michel Basquiat's work. Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Watson) played the title character of the movie Basquiat (1996).

All the actors playing vampires wore wigs that were a mix of human, yak and goat hair in order to make them look more wild.

Among the books Eve packs for her trip to Detroit are the play "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett, "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, and "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.