This is a meme that has been doing the rounds (I am so Out Of Touch). The BBC spent a while working out which were the best or best-beloved books in Britain, and is now of the opinion that most people will have read about six of the following works. Allegedly. I can’t find a link to a BBC page stating this, possibly because I’m not looking very hard, what with being bone-fucking-idle at the best of times.

Anyway, the idea is, one should mark in Bold all books one has really cross-heart-pinky-swear read, and italicize all those one has read a bit of/not quite finished/did an essay on based on the York Notes. And then one can asterisk everything one has seen on the big screen. Or small screen. Or heard on Radio 4. And then count everything up and if more than six are bold, glow smugly.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen*
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien* (Anyone looking at the bookshelves in here, and seeing I own three copies, one illustrated by Alan Lee, also two Hobbits, a Silmarillion, an Unfinished Tales, the Peter Jackson Movies and the BBC Radio version (where Ian Holmes was Frodo, brilliantly. Take that baby-face Woods), will realise that I should not only have bolded this, but put it in 64-point and ornamented it with curlicues. Sorry).
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling*
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
6. The Bible (and an asterisk, if Charlton Heston counts. Also, Last Temptation of Christ and Prince of Egypt).
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte*
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman*
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens*
11. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott*
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy*
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller *
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare*. Yes. Every SINGLE ONE. Even the weird apocryphal ones Shakespeare only wrote bits of. Read, seen on stage, etc. (Except Edward III. Haven’t seen that one).
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien* (I asterisked it for the 1960s BBC radio adaptation, which I have on CD, in which the Stereophonic Workshop so went to town on the Eagles they were practically unintelligible. But it’s narrated by Anthony Jackson of Rentaghost fame. Cool, eh?)
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks. Buried half-way down a minor foothill of Mt ToBeRead with a bus-ticket tucked in somewhere about page 30.
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (I hate teenagers).
19. The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (So many people have told me to read it I have developed a mental block about it.
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot*
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell* (but I haven’t read it. And I don’t think I can be arsed to).
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens*
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Is a cornice of Mt ToBeRead all on its own).
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams* (One of the few things that kept me sane in the Wilderness Years teenagering in Italy. When the tapes or the radio series wore out, and the pages all fell out fo the books, it didn’t matter as I’d practically memorised the lot)
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (Got as far as spanking Aloysius the teddy bear with a silver-backed hair-brush, and threw up. No doubt I am being monstrously unfair).
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky* (I am notoriously bad at Russians. I am ashamed).
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck. (Whyever not? We even had a copy for years and years).
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll*
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame* (Moley weeping for his little house still makes me weep and cringe in sympathy)
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (Did I mention I was dreadful at Russians? Bad Reed! Lazy Reed!)
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens*
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis*
34. Emma – Jane Austen*
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen*
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis* (I thought we’d just had Chronicles of Narnia? See what happens when you can’t be arsed to employ proofreaders?)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (But I did tie dozens and dozens of copies up in red ribbon for the launch! Which is probably why I can’t read it!)
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere (After Notting Hill, not reading this is a matter of pride)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – William Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne* (Disney version is pathetic. Alan Bennetts version is perfect)
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell*
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (I am ashamed. It was SHITE. No, shiter than that even. Offensively, insultingly, smugly, lazily, shite).
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabrial Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins*
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan (I know! I haven’t read a word of it!)
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martell
52. Dune – Frank Herbert* (I would watch Patrick Stewart have a nap on a deck-chair. Lepping about in leather? Count me in).
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons*
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen*
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (The incident with the medals melted down for jewellry made me so steamingly cross I could not continue. Even though the fact I got so steamingly cross proved what an engrossing book it was. And then it avalanched down Mt ToBeRead).
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I have the attention span of a goldfish on uppers)
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens*
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love in the time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On the Road – Jack Kerouac (And I really can’t be arsed to dig it out and finish it. It was like being trapped in a room with my Dad and uncles after someone had proudly brought out a twist of home-grown Hippy Lettuce)
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville* (My grandfather, who means well, gave me the same illustrated Library hard-back edition of this every Christmas for three years running)
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens*
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker*
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson-Burnett*
74. Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce (I wrote an A-grade essay on the first chapter of this. So, I’ve read the first chapter. Scrotum-tightening.)
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (And between 15 and 23 I was convinced I’d never be a poet because I’d not once put my head in an oven, not even to clean it. I think Lolita does less damage to the psyches of little girls).
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray*
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens*
82. Cloud Atlas – Charles Mitchell
83. The Colour Purple – Alice Walker*
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro*
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert*
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White*
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (And after a few pages, I had to compulsively brush my teeth every hour for the rest of the day, the saccharine was so overwhelming)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90. The Faraway Tree collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad*
92. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks (This is the only, the only, Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks I haven’t read (Iain M. Banks is better)).
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams* (As my Dad used to say, ‘you’ve read the book. You’ve seen the film. Now, eat the pie’.)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas*
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare* (I have obsessive compulsive Hamlet disorder. I’m going to see it again, for the *counts on fingers* ninth time in January).
99. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl* (and who do I crush on hardest? Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp?)
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo* (I had nightmares about Fantine’s teeth. Between that and Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice, I ended my teens with a raging dentist phobia)

So, I have read really cover to cover properly, 72 out the list of 100. And am Aware Of a further twelve. I think I can hold up my head at the sort of literary dinner parties I never ever get invited to. Alas, usually I’m the one everyone’s backing away from because when tipsy I will pinion people against the kitchen counters and Tell Them About Titus Andronicus.

This being the Internet Age and all, I listen to podcasts, even though I tend to think of them as ‘OMG my computer’s being a radio!’ [The wireless internet thing Reed's husband installed Did Not Help. I'm trapped in the mind of a village idiot - Ed]. And one of my favourite podcasts is Answer Me This, presented (presented? Narrated? Spoken? Bickered?) by Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann, with the assistance of Martin the Sound Man.

Basically, the General Public email or telephone and leave queries (usually not particularly serious-minded ones), and Helen (who is wise, has GoogleFu, and knows who Herodotus was (I have a teeny tiny girl-crush on Helen Zaltzman. Sorry, but I do)) and Olly (cheerfully lunatic, with inventive line in doolally theories), answer them. Or attempt to. Or get wildly off the subject and have an interesting discussion about something else entirely. Luckily they are very funny, so we none of us mind. And occasionally Martin the Sound Man, lugubrious and/or scabrous, depending, interjects.

(I have a bone to pick with Martin the Sound Man, incidentally. S [Reed's husband. Yes, even the Reeds of this world get married. Unlike the Editors], a long-term Answer Me This fan, had decided to formally introduce me to the gang, as it were, and had loaded up his iThing with episode after episode to play on a car-trip across Blighty. [It was Answer Me This BOOTCAMP]. And as we were parking in the (ridiculously expensive) carpark in Worcester, Martin the Sound Man (damn me sideways if I can remember apropos of what) used the unforgettable phrase ‘skull-fuck in the brain-hole’ [And this from a man with a doctorate in quantum physics]. Being emotionally aged about twelve, I promptly dissolved into helpless giggles. And then I solemnly paced around the magnificent cathedral, looking composedly at the stained-glass window commemorating Edward Elgar, admiring the painted ceilings, inhaling the chill, musty gloom of ages in the Norman Crypt, and I did not snigger at all, no I absolutely did not, even though my inner adolescent kept leaping up to shriek ‘skull-fuck in the brain-hole! Tee hee hee!’ at me. And I damn near burst a blood-vessel repressing it. So).

Helen and Olly have written a book, so I went along to the gigantenormous Waterstones on Gower Street (eheu, I knew it when it was still Dillons. I am old. And my knees creak when I squat). They’d set up a table for signings next to the cook-books, and a large clump of youngish persons were milling about therein, so having bought my copy of said book, I amused myself by reading the backs of all the new Christmas celebrity how-to-Yule photographic extravaganzas. Alas, this also meant that some of us were trapped out of sight behind the bloody shelves when the authors turned up, but as Olly said, it was just like listening to a pod-cast, only from behind a shelf in Waterstones rather than in the comfort of our own living-rooms.

The amusing duo read out a selection from the book – it’s very much a ‘book to keep by the loo and dip into’ sort of book – and we all chortled appreciatively (muffled behind Nigella’s Festive Tits, sorry, Tips. I hope they could hear us[The tits or Helen and Olly?]). And then Waterstones’ jolly Christmas Helpers corralled us into a neat queue, and we all got to exchange a few words with the fantastically polite and cheerful pod-lebrities as they signed our books. After which I shuffled off into the damp November murk, thinking, variously,

1. Yes, I still have a teeny-tiny girl-crush on Helen.
2. I think I smiled too widely. [Yes. As I told you at the time, any wider, and the jolly Christmas Helper is going to get urgent on her radio mike and then the entire security team of the shop will be sitting on your head shouting 'medic!'. And trust me, there's no dignified way back from that.]
3. The book is a collection of best bits from the pod-casts, with added jokes, diagrams, and pie-charts. And a very, very good John Cage joke, which I particularly appreciated because I catalogued John Cage’s book only last week. [Obscurantist Reed, you are being annoying now].
4. I asked for my copy to be inscribed for S, who could not be there despite being the household Fan-In-Chief, and whose birthday is next week, and I have been recorded in perpetuity on the fly-leaf of said book as being ‘lovely’. So there. [*eyeroll*].
5. I must tell more people to listen to the podcast. I mean, obviously, now I am aglow with vicarious book-signing ‘seen in person’ enthusiasm, but tomorrow I also think I that shall think that I ought to tell more people to listen to the podcast [No goods, payment or personal services were received in exchange for this unseemly display of gushing. I hope.]

1. Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition. 1998 pages, indeed. Several months in, we’ve got to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He isn’t nearly as funny as Byron.
2. The Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt. I’m only about a third of the way through this, but so far it’s all rather lovely and jewel-like. The description of the V&A and the garden party are splendid bits of descriptive work.
3. The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning. This is progressing slowly, because there’s only so much blank verse I can take in one week, and for that matter, only so much Robert Browning being arch. Good Lord, but he is arch, isn’t he? But he does have a good sense of humour, so we shall cheerfully soldier on.
4. The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. This one’s a classic of the history of science, and it’s very much about jolly time I read it. Philosophy, religious theory, Galileo, and the rewriting of the centre of the Universe. And some higher geometry, in case your brain was feeling under-revved.
5. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell. These come bound together in the one volume. I am still reading Johnson’s measured, elegant, phlegmatic discussion of his trip, and haven’t yet reached Boswell’s recounting of it, but I am very much looking forward to Boswell. Johnson being a tad too measured and elegant, despite his dry humour. I could do with some gossip.
6. Dr Whortle’s School by Anthony Trollope. Not one of his better known novels, this, but as the entire town is about to find out that the school matron is actually an inadvertant bigamist, it is definitely becoming riveting. Trollope is rather more of a liberal than one would expect from his highly Victorian beard. I’m rather fond of Trollope, as the bishop said to the actress.

On the side, as light relief, I am also working my way through the complete novels of Ngaio Marsh, and Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. Unseen Academicals is proving rather dark and wistful in places, but Pratchett is Like That, and I admire him hugely for it. Otherwise it’d all be Wodehouse with wizards, and we only need one Wodehouse.

50. Michael Moorcock (Ah. Well, I have read every single thing of Moorcock’s except that Dancers at the End of Time book everyone else thinks it cool to like.)

49. Rosemary Sutcliff (Yep. Read Eagle of the Ninth. And so should you. Even if it is out of print.)

48. Benjamin Zephaniah (Deeply cool etc., but not really my type of poetry. I got bored. My bad.)

47. Alice Oswald (Errr…)

46. Bruce Chatwin (Have – oh shaming – read him in handfuls while sitting on my mother’s loo, for she keeps The Songlines next to Schott’s Miscellany. )

45. Colin Thubron (At a guess, I could tell you he’s a writer.)

44. Julian Barnes (What the hell is he doing all the way down here?)

43. Philip Pullman (And what in Christ is he doing below Rowling?)

42. J. K. Rowling (Yes, yes, yes, I have read all seven.)

41. Isaiah Berlin (Haven’t touched him since I was an undergrad.)

40. A. J. P. Taylor (At 40? Am I the only one who used to read his books for the sheer pleasure of annoying my History A-Level teachers by quoting him? [Good God yes, you lunatic].)

39. George Mackay Brown (I’m sure I’ve read some of his poetry. Possibly.)

38. Iain Banks (Now, his SF is at least as twice as good as his ‘mainstream’ stuff, so if Iain Banks is here, Iain M. Banks ought to be rather further up. Have read and indeed own a great deal of Banks.)

37. Hanif Kureshi (Yes, tick, done some, good.)

36. Godfrey Hill (even Amazon hasn’t heard of him. Poor bastard.)

35. Ian McEwan (Yes, done, tick, was merely whelmed.)

34. A. S. Byatt (I know she’s not to everyone’s taste, but she’s in my top ten and has been for years, chiefly for Possession, which is wonderful)

33. Anita Brookner (I’ve read Hotel du Lac. I remember very little about it.)

32. Kazuo Ishiguro (Only 32? Yes, well, he’s uneven, but The Remains of the Day really is that good.)

31. Derek Walcott (On my list of People To Read. And. Err. Has been for years.)

30. John Fowles (The Magus, appalling. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, brilliant.)

29. Alasdair Gray (Ah. See Derek Walcott.)

28. Alan Garner (Nod, shrug, indeed, have read, did like.)

27. J. G. Ballard (Well. Too good to rubbish, to unlikeable to re-read.)

26. Beryl Bainbridge (Have only read An Awfully Big Adventure, awfully jolly good.)

25. Barbara Pym (Philip Larkin was a fan. That’s all I know. Very bad.)

24. Philippa Pearce (Have somehow avoided reading any. Very mysterious. There’s even a copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden on the shelf over there.)

23. Penelope Fitzgerald (Read The Blue Flower. Wept. Loved it. Haven’t read anything else, possibly in case it isn’t The Blue Flower.)

22. John le Carré (Yes, done; no, wait, saw on telly. That doesn’t count, does it?)

21. Alan Sillitoe (I haven’t read a single word.)

20. Anthony Powell (Now, I have tried to read Powell.)

19. Martin Amis (Pisses me off.)

18. Mervyn Peake (Duly Gormentghasted. Incidentally, have you seen his illustrations to the Ancient Mariner? Blood so thicked with cold it’d be footling to call them anything short of awe-inspiring. )

17. Anthony Burgess (On my list of ‘Things To Avoid Because People Keep Ordering Me To Read It (or be sneered at thereafter).)

16. Roald Dahl (I think I’ve read most of his children’s books. Very excellent good subversive fun. But why all the way up here?)

15. Jan Morris (On list of people to read properly, damn it, and preferably before the end of the century.)

14. Ian Fleming ([What the fuck?] Yes, have read, and therefore, even louder and more vehemently than the Editor, what the fuck? Who compiled this cockamamy list anyway?)

13. Salman Rushdie (Loved Midnight’s Children. Was mildly impressed, mildly diverted by, and eventually mildly bored by the redux rest. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, utterly fantastic and much adored. Also, is he, technically, British, or are The Times being patronising colonialist bastards?)

12. Iris Murdoch (Always manages to leave me feeling flustered and dissatisfied, and haunted by the characters for weeks afterwards.)

11. C. S. Lewis (While I’d put him very high on my own personal list, it wouldn’t necessarily be because I think he’s that good. He’s, well, that special, like a irascible, ranting uncle who is wonderful with children but who one wouldn’t want to let loose on the dinner guests.)

10. Angela Carter (Fantabulous.)

9. Kingsley Amis (Oh for… No. Look, sorry, jolly good fun and all that, and I’m sure made a deep impression on the sort of clever young man of the 50′s who Wasn’t Getting Any, but no.)

8. Muriel Spark (Have not read, can not say.)

7. V. S. Naipaul (Not my sort of thing. Possibly because everyone keeps telling me how bloody marvelous he is all the time.)

6. J. R. R. Tolkien (I cannot possibly talk about Tolkien, I lack the cool distance from which to judge clearly much in the same way a trout lacks the ability to spot hooks and fishing-lines.)

5. Doris Lessing (Have not read. Keep buying, in order to read. Agh. )

4. Ted Hughes (Ah, now, there’s a man who can write the most intense, living poetry, and also disappear up his own arse on the next page. Must eventually discuss this at more length [if not necessarily depth].)

3. William Golding (Lord of the Flies made me sick to the marrow, anxious, ashamed somehow of being so disturbed by a ‘mere book’, and then I had bad dreams. Somehow inextricably linked in my mind with The Island of Doctor Moreau. Who the hell was letting me read this stuff at the age of eleven? Sadistic bastard.)

2. George Orwell (Fair enough. Very fond of Orwell.)

1. Philip Larkin (What the? Really? Why? I mean, I personally like his poetry very much indeed, but it rather sours it if so does everyone else. I preferred feeling slightly perverse.)

And now I am completely exhausted, and I have to get up at six tomorrow if I want a shower before I set off to work (and yes, I do want a shower, I’m very civilized that way), as I am working, or, rather, hanging about in everyone’s way, ‘on placement’, as they say, and the Placement Place likes to have everyone in, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a good hour before they open to the panting hordes that thirst at the door for the fountain of knowledge. Me, I always was a devout adherent of Nothing Good Comes of Early Rising.

[Good God, what's wrong with me?]

Now, this is not in any way in any order of preference, and not in any way a literary exploration of the matter. I am being highly personal and subjective and, dare I say it, facile. (I only run to facile these days. Busy. Tired. Sorry). Also, I am only listing stories I have known and loved for a long time. I was tempted, because I am a perfectionist snob like that, but in the end I accidentally decided (by running out of time) against genning up on all the best in Horror, cutting edge or classical.

One major feature of my list, it would seem, is an almost total lack of gore, guts, maggots and dismemberment. Certainly, these things are implied in one or two places, and the first Lovecraft entry is decidedly ooky, but by and large I have always found innards less than enthralling. If I am feeling sick, I am rather too preoccupied to feel thrilled. But I seem to remember having posted about this before, many moons ago.

Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, by M.R. James, who is the Daddy, the Daddy, I tell you, of cozy Edwardian creepiness. Not only is this a fantastically unpleasant story, but the film of it made by Jonathan Miller is even scarier. And it is very rare that I would ever admit such a thing to be possible.

Berenice, by Edgar Allan Poe. I read this first in Italian, when I was twelve. Teeth freak me the hell out. I could not say if this phobia pre-dates reading ‘Berenice’ or is a result of it, but, in the end, I say Marathon Man can kiss Poe’s drawers.

The Colour Out of Space, by H.P. Lovecraft. Wonderful painfully slow build-up, and the matter-of-fact tone, somewhat unexpected in the author of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, is very effective. When Nahum’s face caved in, I was upset. Oh, yes.

Negotium Perambulans and And No Bird Sings, by E.F. Benson. These go together because they both concern the same mysterious evil ‘elemental’. Again, like ‘Berenice’, I find these peculiarly horrible because the main demonic evil is the embodiment of one of my worst phobias. Slugs. I don’t think I’m coming across as particularly sane here, but really. Ugh. Though the the desecration of the church in ‘Negotium’, and the silent woods in ‘And No Bird Sings’ are both good bits of creepy mystification even if you don’t have a problem with giant vampire invertebrates.

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. Now, one of my favourite ‘motifs’ in horror and/or ghost stories is in fact when you cannot be sure whether the Thing is real or a product of the characters’ imaginations. The delicate, allusive, elusive Henry James has of course built an entire literary giant-hood on atmospheric circumspection and circumlocution. In this story, worrying that the Governess is out of her tree is just as satisfying as worrying that the ghosts are going to ‘get’ the children. Worrying about both together is delicious.

Snow, Glass, Apples, by Neil Gaiman. This bleak, black, twisted version of Snow White has a truly horrible ending. Also, vampires. I’m quite keen on vampires. (Collected in Smoke and Mirrors, which I would recommend whole-heartedly).

Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu. My absolute favourite vampire story of all time, and damn me but isn’t it sexy? The fact I find it sexy does worry me a little, because it is the very quality of langourous Sapphic eroticism which makes it so chilling.

By the River, Fontainebleau, by Stephen Gallagher. I actually heard this quite recently, dramatised on BBC7 as part of their repeat of the ‘Fear on Four’ series. I hadn’t read it for years and years – I think it was part of an anthology of horror stories which I now can’t be arsed to look up. It scared me bloody witless all over again – not a story of the supernatural, but of the utter depths to which a mind can stoop. The twist at the end is particularly subtle and impressive, and makes you look at all the preceeding events in a decidly more unpleasant light. Which is quite a shock, considering how exceedingly unpleasant preceeding events have been.

Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, by M.R. James – James again. I told you he was The Daddy. This one actually made me jump right up out of my chair and drop the book at a certain point. Rather a victory of cozy Edwardiana over gore-fest, don’t you think?

The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft. This is rather a seminal piece of Lovecraftiana, and when ‘they’ start battering at the narrator’s bedroom door in the middle of the night… well. Good stuff. But I am sorry to say I also love this story because it inspired Neil Gaiman to write ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’ (also collected in Smoke and Mirrors), a story that made me laugh so hard I got a double seat all to myself on a very crowded bus.

I ought to warn the Gentle Reader that I am but most totally going to fill this with spoilers. Should you wish to go away and read The Horla, please do… full text provided. If you can’t be bothered, well, please don’t be bothered. I’m sure Guy de Maupassant can survive my little attacks on his narrative suspense.

I have always been more frightened by (and therefore, I suppose, more pleased by) horror stories in which the ghosts and demons are like as not figments of the imagination. Insanity is up there in my top three completely horrible things (along with slugs and cramped little dank underground places) [Oh, don't ask. She might stop and tell you]. The Horla is in this respect highly satisfactory. Let me explain:

At the very beginning of the story, a white Brazilian ship sails past the narrator’s house. The narrator says: ‘I saluted it, I hardly know why, except that the sight of the vessel gave me great pleasure.’ Months later, he reads an article about strange happenings in Rio de Janeiro:

‘Ah! Ah! I remember now that fine Brazilian three-master which passed in front of my windows as it was going up the Seine, on the 8th of last May! I thought it looked so pretty, so white and bright! That Being was on board of her, coming from there, where its race sprang from. And it saw me! It saw my house which was also white, and he sprang from the ship onto the land. Oh! Good heavens!’.

What a wonderful back-formation of portents. I am very glad the author refused to allow him a standard shiver of cold fear at the sight. A mysterious thrill of pleasure is so ever so much more interesting.

Alas, a strange presence (no more than a presence, invisible, inaudible) is now haunting him. There are no other corroborrative witnesses – helpfully, the story is in diary form, so even if the narrator were to claim he had a witness, we could cheerfully carry on doubting him. Something is disturbing his sleep, and he finds something has drunk the water out of his bottle in the night. He tries to lay traps to see if he himself is doing this in his sleep, but it would seem not. Something really (really?) is living under his roof.

The narrator flees these unsettling events for Paris. He meets his cousin there – and sees her being hypnotised at a dinner party, inventing all sorts of excuses for her odd behaviour, and on being unhypnotised, denying she ever did anything of the kind. The narrator is exceedingly upset by this incident. His cousin was completely unaware that she was being controlled by someone else, and yet the narrator is morbidly aware, now, when he reaches home again, that the mysterious water-drinker is controlling his actions. See? It could all so easily, so very easily, be in his own mind. It is in his own mind, of course, but what, exactly, is in his mind? Mad as a basket of drunken frogs. Or, afflicted with a Brazilian vampire. Or – whyever the hell not? – both.

And of course, it all goes horribly badly, like all good horror-stories should.

I have successfully endured the second week of term, and the first week of lectures. I think I can now reliably get my self from the main library to any given lecture theatre I am time-tabled to be in. I can also reliably name at least six classmates, most of my tutors, and most of the buildings; I can catalogue most anonymously authored books according to the British Museum Rules (which are stark staring bonkers), I feel that one day very soon I will know the difference between cataloguing and classifying, and I have memorized my computer services user ID. On the other hand, I have yet to cry in public or go to the pub with my new classmates, and I can’t for the life of me work out why Management lectures are so astonishingly boring. On balance, however, I think we can safely say the docking process is complete and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

[As she is in a sunny and optimistic mood this weekend, she probably won't mention just how frazzled she was by Friday afternoon, and how she had a little tantrum about what with full-time degree and part-time work, she had no time to study during the week and she wanted her weekends back already, thank you. As she has since found the time to mess about online and then write this, I have no sympathy whatsoever - Ed]

[Also, she is writing this on her lap-top, in bed, at 5pm, with tea brought to her bedside by kindly elves. And she wanted sympathy for her stressy life. I hate her.]

The Literate Kitten is holding an exceedingly cool Horror Short Story Short Challenge this month. She has listed her top ten horror stories; we, the volunteers, are each reading one we like the look of, and for added bonus points, we can always list our own top ten, and thereby create a general, LK’s readers’, top ten horror stories of all time. I am reading The Horla, by Guy de Maupassant. I am also covering the bedside table with ghost-story collections so as to post my top ten by the middle of October, and feeling agreeably nervous of the dark.

[And the Inner Goth is demanding we dye her hair black].

Anything else? Oh yes. I am making myself a sweater, as you do when large quantities of discounted yarn swim into your ken. I was working away at it on the bus on Friday, as knitting on buses is a surprisingly good way to make sure nobody sits down next to you if they can possibly help it, and also it soothes the general desire to stick something sharp into the ear of the extremely noisy person shrieking into his mobile phone like a man trying to spread inanity to Cardiff by unaided lung-power. [The cute irony being that you are actually and for once holding an appropriately-sized sharp object]. A lady got on the bus with a large bunch of heavily-perfumed lilies and sat across the aisle from me, and I remember being vaguely aware she was watching me. By all means, public, please do watch me knit. I am very good at it [Just don't shout 'Oy darling! Make us a scarf then!' if you want to live to see the next stop].

As I got off the bus, the Lily Lady caught up with me and asked if she could ask me a random question. I said yes, slowly, in a ‘what? Why?’ voice.

‘Are you going home or going out now?’

‘I’m going home,’ I said, still somewhat bewildered, and I hope not actively frowning or raising my eyebrows sternly (my face gets away from me when I am startled).

And she gave me the lilies.

It was her last day at work, and the lilies were a present, and she can’t bear the smell (much as S can’t bear the piña colada smell of Broom in flower). As they were a present, she couldn’t bear to throw them away either. Someone going home, who liked lilies, could have them for the taking, and I happened to catch her eye, because I was knitting. So she asked me. And I do like lilies.

There was a time Serendipity was one of my favourite words, until I found out it was everyone else’s too.

Thank you, Lily Lady. They are blooming on the dining-room table now, and are inexpressibly lovely.

Second, apologies to anyone who was wondering where I’d got to. I was off being educated, of course. And not only in The Ways of The Keepers of The Wisdom of Mankind, but also in the new, post-surgical state of my innards. This last a bizarre mixture of the fascinating, the relieving, and the depressing, complete with photographic tour of the high-lights (eh heh heh heh) (gosh, but my liver is cute). And so, surgery has done what it can to restore a certain normality to my inner configurations (complete normality apparantly being beyond me), and anything I still can’t cope with is my own problem.

Bah.

Third, apologies for doing a meme instead of posting something long and/or insightful about University life/ a good book I might have read/ politics/ humour. I have been fly-papered with hand-outs and reading-lists, and it seems to be taking longer than necessary to un-stick the writery bit. S found this meme at The Pickards and showed it to me, and I thought, oh, whyever the hell not. And then I got S to count the books.

The Booky Meme

Total Number of Books Owned - S gave up when it came to the large card-board boxes of doom holding up the plaster-work in the study, and estimated somewhere a little over 700. Not counting Library books, the management of which, now that I belong to four libraries, is the main calibrator of the net worth of my bank account.

Last Book Bought – Actually three books, as they were really rather cheap, only £3 each. Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair, The Power of Darkness – Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (somewhat unexpected of her, isn’t it?), and Children of the Night – Classic Vampire Stories which includes Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and ‘Varney the Vampire’, and so is an Essential Item. I have started reading the Nesbit book, and juxtaposing ‘Man-Size in Marble’ with The Railway Children gives one a queer and sinking sensation of the stomach, and also increased respect for the author, who rocks just a little bit.

Last Book Read – This is clearly a question formulated by the not-hysterically-bookish, isn’t it? Are they seriously expecting a one-book answer? I couldn’t read one book at a time, and finish book A before I started B, unless I was locked in a cell. The last book I finished reading was Science of the Discworld II: The Globe [For the third time, I might add - Ed]. The last book I did some reading in was The Jewel of the Seven Stars, by Bram Stoker, which, by the way, is painfully tiresome after Dracula, and, despite a good gory start, about as heart-chilling as The Archers. [Notice a common thread yet? She tends to find her Inner Goth in Autumn. Who is rotten company, by the way]. I am also reading the E. Nesbit stories mentioned above, a rather good little book on knitting written before I was born, and Essential Cataloguing. Oh, and Stardust by Neil Gaiman. And Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett. And Does Anything Eat Wasps (actually, S is reading that to me. Still. He reads out a question, I pontificate at length on the answer, S kindly does not laugh at me). Oh, and The Dyer’s Hand, and a book of C.S. Lewis essays, and [Stop this madness right now].

Five books that mean a lot to me - This one is almost impossible. There are at least a hundred books that mean a lot to me, and which book means most depends on time of year, mood, state of health, and which other books I have read recently. Oh, dammit, it’ll have to be the first five meaningful books that pop into my head. The which selection may well make me look like a fruit-loop.

1. The Lord of the Rings. I read this at exactly the right [or, possibly, wrong] age. I was a solitary, highly imaginative child, I tended not so much to read books as to fall into them, and tales of lonely desperate bravery by small frail creatures adrift in a huge and ancient world they barely understood? Hook line and sinker. I have never recovered. In a Silmarillion memorising, can write in Dwarvish Runes kind of way. Sad, isn’t it?
2. The Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology. A huge, beautifully illustrated object, this, now very sadly utterly out of print. I loved it with a passion, especially the Robert Graves-authored section on Greek Myth. My mother has a distinct memory of me getting it off the shelf and poring through it at the age of six, though I daresay I was admiring the pictures of Hera bathing naked rather than actually reading it.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Again, given to me at just the time when I was most liable to be blown away by it. Like Tolkien, she has a gift for making an entire world spread infinitely away all around the story. Also, the bit with the gebbeth and the Terrenon in Osskil scared the bejayzus out of me. It was the first book for children I had read in which the stakes were that high. Technically, one ought to have felt it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan dies, which I read at about the same time, but despite the pity I felt for Lucy and Susan’s grief, I never really believed that something permanently dreadful had happened. Le Guin made me feel like the floor was sliding out from under me.
4. Othello, by Shakespeare and Oscar Zarate. Now this was a graphic novel version that someone saw fit to give a child as it was clearly only a comic book. And Shakespeare! So educational. It was full-text, which meant a lot of the speech bubbles were very large and filled with teeny-tiny writing, and took quite some reading. The pictures were very sombre, angular, and of course everything went terribly wrong and it was so gut-wrenchingly unfair and I have been a Shakespeare addict ever since.
5. Book five is rather an amalgam of the complete works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, both of which I discovered in my teens. I was at the time completely surrounded by people who thought SF&F was a genre for very sad men with no girl-friends, and certainly no concept they could be satirical and funny [The sad men or the SF&F?And yes, you too can live in a Pratchett-Adams-free universe. Spend your life either up an Italian mountain in the bosom of your insane family, or at a boarding school populated by boy-mad sexually repressed daughters of the Army]. These were by necessity very private, deeply personal discoveries. And oh, crikey, how I laughed. Mine! All mine! Bwahahahahah.

(I am rather concerned that I don’t seem to have read any meaningful books since the age of fifteen).

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

Aphra, Sol, Ærchie, Lilian, you’re it!

(I am very very ashamed to note that this simple little memery post took two days to write. Dear God, what is happening to me?)

The Preface to The Works of P.B. Shelley (now completely out of print), in part at least while waiting for a free lavatory at Canons Ashby House, from whose second-hand book-shop I had just purchased it.

Several very amusing and far-too-short essays from The Single Helix by Steve Jones.

A great many questions and answers from Does Anything Eat Wasps? (Answer, yes, lots of things. It’s not easy, being a wasp). Actually, these were not so much read as read to me, by husband (who is getting very G. H. Lewes, what with the reading aloud, the obsession with natural history, and the beard [It is imperative that one of us should mention that he's a lot better looking than G.H. - Ed]. Alas, all I can do of George Eliot is the headaches and the whining [How true]).

Quite a few ice-cream menus.

No, I’m not impressed either.

Books I actually finished:

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins. Dear old Richard Dawkins, he does harangue a reader so – slightly tiresome if you agreed with him in the first place. And probably even more so if you didn’t. Dawkins’ basic premise is probably best explained in his own preface:

‘My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view towards the opposite conclusion.’ (p. x).

And in fact, Dawkins’ description of the real working of rainbows, of how we each stand in the very centre of our own personal rainbow that no one else can share, indeed, that our left eye and right eye cannot share, constantly renewing itself as we gaze at it, knocks Keats’ whining into a cocked hat. But Keats spent time as a medical student at the beginning of the 19th Century. If Dawkins had had to endure that great pinnacle of science, complete with blood, suffering, and almost inevitable death, he too might feel a little anti-Newton and pro ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.’ Less screaming, you see.

Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge. The sad thing is, I can’t remember much about the contents of this book. This is not David Lodge’s fault, he is a fine and enjoyable writer, and I have a distinct memory of sitting curled up by a window that looked out over a drizzle-cloaked Scottish glen and thinking I was thoroughly enjoying the chapter on Henry James. But what he said about Henry James exactly, I can’t recall, as I have had the attention span of a concussed budgerigar this Easter, and I’ve had to give the book back to the library, and in any case the blasted thing is out of print.

River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. Obviously, being scolded for my perceived inability to grasp the true wonder of science is not so very unpleasant after all. Again, Richard, dear heart, I agree with you. And yes, the thought that the maternal line of every single human being can be traced back to one woman from Africa is mind-expandingly wonderful (only the maternal line, don’t get carried away, and pause to consider how few people actually are in your line of matrilineal descent (half your parents, a quarter of your grandparents, an eighth of your great-grandparents, a sixteenth of your great-great-grandparents…)). Also, did you know bees use gravity as a substitute for sunlight, when dancing food maps for each other? How cool is that?

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susannah Clarke, illustrated by Charles Vess. I read her first novel, the vast and extraordinary Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, several years ago. I adored its combination of genteel, homage-to-Austen comedy of manners and eye-widening depth of fairy strangeness. Probably better spelt ‘faërie’ strangeness, considering just how gothic these very un-winged and un-miniature fairies are. So I have been very much looking forward to any more of the same. The short stories in this collection are inevitably slighter, but Ms Clarke has been more at liberty to exercise her somewhat dry sense of of the ridiculous. The result was thoroughly enjoyable, and the book itself – I own the charming grey and pink illustrated hard-back – is a very pretty thing in and of itself. I am particularly charmed by the picture of Mary Queen of Scots glowering over her needle-work.

Books I got part way through, and am still guddling about in the innards of:

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. I was given this for Christmas, and like the good lapsed Catholic that I sometimes am, I have been Saving It For a Special Occasion (my mother does this with toiletries and chocolates until both have congealed into fuzzy beige slurry that smells of ponds). At the moment I am still slowly reading the introduction. Pathetic.

The Practice of Writing by David Lodge. As you can see, I enjoyed the other book enough to give him another go. And this one practically counts as work, as, after all, I am practicing writing, oh yes [and one day you might actually do some]. So far, I am merely being afflicted with the uneasy feeling that I haven’t read enough Graham Greene.

Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove. Now this I am thoroughly enjoying, huge rambling woolly rhinocerous of a book that it is. Aldiss has earned the right to be gloriously opinionated, but doesn’t let this get in the way of telling the history of Science Fiction as the most rumbunctious adventure. And alas Mount ToBeRead has grown a few more spurs and glaciers. For example, I must read Voyage to Arcturus right now. Which means I will have to buy it, as no library I belong to deigns to stock a copy. Philistinic bastards.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th Edition). When I was an undergraduate, I longed for a copy of this with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But I was poor. I was, in fact, living on textured vegetable protein, ooh, yummy. So I’d stare at it in the bookshop until I’d nearly melted a hole in the cellophane wrap (Yes, it was a campus bookshop. They’re used to students doing their homework next to the Lit Crit shelves). Of course, now there’s a shiny 5th edition, but I got hold of the true desiderata. And do you know what? While I am grateful for the translations of the Anglo-Saxon verse, I would have preferred all the Anglo-Saxon verse as well. Because I am a raving anal-retentive pedant. And I can pronounce Anglo-Saxon. [Understand, not so much]. On the other hand, it has that enviably lovely little thing by the barely-adult AE Houseman: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough.’ Have you seen the parks and gardens in London at the moment? Nice find.

So. That’s what I have been up to. [Very tedious, yes?]