Sunday, October 4, 2009

Old-Fashioned, Bored and Sunday-Stricken. No, this is not an advert.

There is a Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes thingie on Facebook, but I don't want to write a note. So I'm doing it here, mainly because I had plenty of time and knew this would take up a nice chunk. Always happens when I make lists. It's been a full hour and I'm still agonising about all that I left out.

All are books I read in school, I guess those are the ones that have stuck the longest. So there, real reason for post - nostalgia. I wanted revisits because there are solid reasons for all the books being on the list. Proper memories and events and things.

Three books I refuse to include are Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World and 1984. Because they're unlistable. They just are. Also to narrow the margin, no series or comics. Except Sherlock Holmes. I'm sorry, but the first man I fell in love with has to be on the list.

1) Peter Pan - J M Barrie

2) The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

3) The Prodigy - Hermann Hesse

4) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

5) Candide - Voltaire

6) The Sherlock Holmes stories - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

7) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

8) A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

9) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

10) The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories - P G Wodehouse

11) The Moon and Sixpence - Somerset Maugham

12) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

13) Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz

14) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

15) The BFG - Roald Dahl

I miss all the old-fashioned books I used to read. Now everything is avant-garde and analysable and therefore one book blends into another. Disgusting Nonsense. Time to bring out the MacLeans again.

5 comments:

Sroyon said...

No Mockingbird?

Priyanka said...

Oh crap. i'd meant to include that also, i'll put it in place of The English Patient.

Sroyon said...

Noooo don't replace one of your best friends with another. I said Mockingbird because it is about lawyers, but also because I remembered this post.

Unsolicited opinion: I know it's early days, but I rate this blog slightly above carsarelikecaterpillars, though just below butterflyassassin. I particularly like how you pay individual attention to us commenters. Perhaps you are able to do so because not too many people have discovered smudgeorsponge yet. I have half a mind to knock you off my blogroll to further prevent publicity.

Priyanka said...

Why thank you. That's been the longest comment yet :D

And don't worry about it, I can always run off and start a new blog.

Sroyon said...

Ok your posts keep reminding me in some way or the other of The Tin Drum. I had a feeling that the title of this post reminded me of something, and only now have I figured out what. There is a chapter in it called Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. Not much of a connection, I admit, but that is how the mind works.

But I should give you fair warning that The Tin Drum too is avant-garde and analysable, at least in parts.