Read the BBC's Big Read 200

A fascinating morality tale of a Dorian Gray, a young man who loses his soul in a painting. He meets a man who gives him some advice that changes his life.

“The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—-”

Taking this to heart, Gray lives his life to his pleasure and does what his mind wants. Always lurking behind him, is a painting of himself that changes with each evil act he commits. As he grows older and more evil, Gray stays young and beautiful while the painting grows old and evil is etched onto its face.

This was more enjoyable to read than I had assumed and I’m glad to have read it. While some passages are slow, it is a generally quick read that is also an interesting character study. One of the better books I’ve read on this list.

I absolutely loved this movie so I was looking forward to reading this. However, I couldn’t get through it. For some reason, it was just not appealing to me. It was hard for me to be enthused by all the nautical descriptions and it felt like it took forever just for them to sail. By that time, I gave up.

Now I will attempt this book at a later date or maybe even another novel in the series. The movie, which was based off several of the novels, was a phenomenal movie that excites me on every viewing, but I don’t feel the same energy and excitement while reading the book.

I couldn’t even find a passage I felt was interesting enough to note on this entry.

I figured I would go to the top of the list and read Pride and Prejudice even though I was not really looking forward to it. I have to say, it wasn’t as bad as I assumed it would be, but I still didn’t enjoy it very much. It felt very drawn out in places and the italics drove me crazy. It seemed that Jane Austen felt that all the characters should emphasize most of their words and I felt like characters were always yelling or talking loudly to each other. It was a good story, although the ending felt very rushed and fit together too conveniently.
I know I’m not really doing the novel justice in this short write up, but I just was not enthused by it. While I may not be its biggest fan, I do recommend reading Pride and Prejudice simply for the experience of meeting the Bennet family and Mr. Darcy.

‘That is very true,’ replied Elizabeth, ‘and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.’
‘Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the works are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’

This was an outstanding book by Sebastian Faulks. It tells the story of a young Englishman who falls madly and passionately in love with a married woman. They leave together and life takes a different turn than he expects. She leaves him and he then joins the army to command a group of miners. Also woven into the narrative is the story of a future relative and her search to uncover her past.
The writing is amazing. He captures the lust and passion of the young lovers with intensity. The plotting advances the way life often does. Unexpected turns happen in their lives. Life does not follow the fairy tale plot and Birdsong emphasizes this. The sections pertaining to the war seem real. The reader is taken into the dangerous tunnels that extend under German lines and experience the violence and carnage alongside the soldiers.

Stephen folded his arms around her and squeezed her. He lay back on the bed with her head resting on his chest. He felt her body go limp as the muscles decontracted into sleep. there was the sound of doves in the garden. He felt his heart beat against her shoulder. The smell of roses came faintly from her scented neck. He settled his hand in the curve of her ribs. His nerves were stilled in the sensuous repletion of the moment that precluded thought. He closed his eyes. He slept, at peace.

They tracked out toward a shellhole, the sun bright, a lark above them. Blue sky, unseen by eyes trained on turned mud. They moved low toward a mine crater where bodies had lain for weeks uncollected. “Try to life him.” No sound of machine guns or snipers, though their ears were braced for noise. “Take his arms.” The incomprehensible order through the gas mouthpiece. The arms came away softly. “Not like that, not take his arms away.” On Weir’s collar a large rat, trailing something red down his back. A crow disturbed, lifting its black body up suddenly, battering the air with its big wings. Coker, Barlow shaking their heads under the assault of risen flies coming up, transforming black skin of corpses into green by their absence. The roaring of Goddard’s vomit made them laugh, snorting private mirth inside their masks. Goddard, releasing his mask, breathed in worse than he had expelled. Weir’s hands in double sandbags stretched out tentatively to a sapper’s uniform, undressing the chest in search of a disc which he removed, bringing skin with it into his tunic pocket. Jack’s recoil, even through course material, to the sponge of flesh. Bright and sleek on liver, a rat emerged from the abdomen; it levered and flopped flatly over the ribs, glutted with pleasure. Bit by bit on to stretchers, what flesh fell left in mud. Not men, but flies and flesh, thought Stephen. Brennan anxiously stripping a torso with no head. He clasped it with both hands, dragged legless up from the crater, his fingers vanishing into buttered green flesh. It was his brother.

An interesting read, but one I struggled through. I have a love/hate relationship with this book. I became fed up with the non-linear storyline, the repeating of phrases between characters and was even bored by a lot of it. However, the characters, namely Yossarian, Milo and the Chaplain, kept me reading. They were goofy and sad and tragic all at once. Trapped by the war, they did what they could to survive.

One passage that stuck out takes place in the Chaplain’s mind as he struggles with himself and his beliefs.

Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain’s lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occupy himself in all the infinite aeons before Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.

Read: 62/200
1.The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
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
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
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
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
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
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
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
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
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
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
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
101. Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
102. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
103. The Beach, Alex Garland
104. Dracula, Bram Stoker
106. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
108. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
109. The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
111. Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
112. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, Sue Townsend
113. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
114. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
115. The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
118. The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
119. Shogun, James Clavell
120. The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
122. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
123. The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
124. House Of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
125. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
126. Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
127. Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
129. Possession, A. S. Byatt
130. The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
133. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
135. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
136. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
138. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
141. All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
142. Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
143. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
146. The Green Mile, Stephen King
147. Papillon, Henri Charriere
148. Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
149. Master And Commander, Patrick O’Brian
152. Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
154. Atonement, Ian McEwan
156. The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
157. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
158. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
159. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
160. Cross Stitch, Diana Gabaldon
161. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
162. River God, Wilbur Smith
163. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
164. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
165. The World According To Garp, John Irving
166. Lorna Doone, R. D. Blackmore
168. The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye
171. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
172. They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
173. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
174. The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
175. Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
178. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
179. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
182. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
183. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
184. Silas Marner, George Eliot
185. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
186. The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
189. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
190. Sons And Lovers, D. H. LawrenceLife of Lawrence
191. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
192. Man And Boy, Tony Parsons
193. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
194. The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells
195. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
196. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
197. Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
198. The Once And Future King, T. H. White
200. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews

I have somehow lived my life without reading Winnie-the-Pooh, or at least I don’t remember ever reading it. What a delightful surprise. I knew who Winnie-the-Pooh was, of course, but I didn’t realize just how fun and imaginative it would be. I love A. A. Milne’s writing and the illustrations in the book. I love the way the text was printed in imaginative ways around the illustrations.

“Is anybody at home?”
There was a sudden scuffling noise from inside the hole, and then silence.
“What I said was, ‘Is anybody at home?’” called out Pooh very loudly.
“No!” said a voice; and then added, “you needn’t shout so loud. I heard you quite well the first time.”
“Bother!” said Pooh. “Isn’t there anybody here at all?”
“Nobody.”

The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech-tree, and the beech-tree was in the middle of the forest, and the Piglet lived in the middle of the house. Next to his house was a piece of broken board which had: “TRESPASSERS W” on it. When Christopher Robin asked the Piglet what it meant, he said it was his grandfather’s name, and had been in the family for a long time. Christopher Robin said you couldn’t be called Trespassers W, and Piglet said yes, you could, because his grandfather was, and it was short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William. And his grandfather had had two names in case he lost one – Trespassers after an uncle, and William after Trespassers.

Pooh rubbed his nose with his paw, and said that the Heffalump might be walking along, humming a little song, and looking up at the sky, wondering if it would rain, and so he wouldn’t see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down, when it would be too late.
Piglet said that this was a very good Trap, but supposing it were raining already?
Pooh rubbed his nose again, and said that he hadn’t thought of that. And then he brightened up, and said that, if it were raining already, the Heffalump would be looking at the sky wondering if it would clear up, and so he wouldn’t see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down. . . . When it would be too late.
Piglet said that, now that this point had been explained, he thought it was a Cunning Trap.

What a book. I had no idea what to expect going in but once I started, I couldn’t put the book down. The book takes place in the Middle Ages and follows a man and his dream to build a cathedral. Sounds boring in itself, but Ken Follet weaves in many storylines that give the novel a massive scope. Kings go to war, monks are caught up in political undertakings, lovers are split apart, villages burned, children are born, people are cursed by a witch, towns and castles are built, journeys to foreign lands are undertaken and that is just a few of the things that happen. At almost 1000 pages, the book seems like a massive read, but the pages go by quickly. Very glad I read this one.

This is another book off the Modern Library Top 100 list. I finished it several weeks ago but forgot to write an entry. This is a fascinating book about philosophy and motorcycle repair and riding. I do not like motorcycles and philosophy is hard for me so it was a challenging read. However, I gained a greater appreciation for the motorcycle but my philosophic understanding is still rather low. There were many passages in the book that I really liked, so I will just share those.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other.In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing y five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts – something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

What a fabulous book. However, I read the Bantam abridged version and now realize I should have read the unabridged. I am definitely going to pick up the unabridged version shortly to find out what I missed. Things were a little confusing throughout some of it and I know the unabridged version will fill out the plot. I loved the casual storytelling style that was able to also portray such tragedy and violence and revenge.

Let us leave Danglars, possessed by the demon of hatred and trying to breathe some evil insinuation against his comrade into the shipowner’s ear, and follow Dantes, who, after having walked the entire length of the Canebiere, turned into the Rue de Noailles, entered a small house on the left side of the Allees de Meilhan, ran up four flights of dark stairs and stopped before a half-open door which revealed the interior of a little room. It was the room in which his father lived.