Moonflower's Athenaeum

The BBC predicts most people have only read 6 out of 100 of these books.

01 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (seen the movie, tv series and read the book)
02 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (of course)
03 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
04 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
05 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
06 The Bible (assorted chapters…)
07 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (read The Golden Compass. didn’t like it)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (maybe, don’t remember)

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (seen the movie)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (seen the tv series)

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (yes, had to for school, but liked it)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (seen the tv series, great)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (saw some of the movie, hated it)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (had to for school, hated it)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (maybe, don’t remember)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (and the movie.)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (and the movie and/or tv series)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (one of my favorites)
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (and the movie.)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (had to for school)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel 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 Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (sort of for school, hated it)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (will read some day)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (liked it, except for one chapter at the beginning and one at the end)

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
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (don’t remember, maybe)
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (and at least one movie.)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (seen the tv series)
80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (probably saw it as a movie)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (had to for school, didn’t like it)
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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (most of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (no, but many others)

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (and the movie)
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I haven’t really listened to any podcasts and very few audiobooks. Generally, I prefer to read – ordinary paper books, and tv series and movies. However, I think I could get into podcasts (or video podcasts), at least a little, if the subject was one that I’m very interested in. Audiobooks on the other hand, they’re probably not for me. Mom likes them and I’ve tried to listen to some of hers, but I never really got into them. One reason is that the translated ones are by necessity read by Swedish actors. They’re reading books that have been written in another language – these days almost exclusively English.

I never read the first book in the series about The Ladies’ Detective Agency, I listened to it on a cd player. The actress reading it could be said to be ideal in most ways – like Mma Ramotswe she’s ‘of traditional build’ and she’s very funny, or at least used to. However, when the topic of lady detectives came up, the British mystery writer Agatha Christie was mentioned and the actress pronounced that with the stress on the second syllable. That was it for me… Funnily enough, I think she got the African names about right. At least as far as I can tell.

The other memorable audiobook I tried was one about Jeeves and Wooster (I’ve forgotten the title). Again, the ‘cast’ – a group of famous comedy actors – should have been ideal, and maybe they would have been, if someone had adapted the entire book to a Swedish setting with Swedish names. As it was, naturally they hadn’t. One member of the ‘cast’ was able to correctly pronounce the UK county Worcestershire (I hope I spelled that right), the others couldn’t. No one could pronounce the more unusual personal names – like Bertie’s friend Barmy Fotheringay-something or other (?) which I think is to be pronounced Fungy- Phipps? In any case, they all botched the names. One of them, who is really famous, and a movie maker/director as well as an actor let one of his characters (he played two) use a southern Swedish accent. Never again, that’s all I can say.

Of course, that’s not really why I don’t like audiobooks, I just – well, don’t. For me, books are about reading, not listening. If I want to listen, I’ll turn on my iPod for some music, or I’ll watch tv/dvd.

Here’s a simple Meme…answer the following questions:

1. What Book Are You Reading Now?
2. Why did you choose it?
3. What’s the best thing about it?
4. What’s the worst thing about it?

Here are my answers:

1. History of Sweden, part 2
2. I’m very interested in history and when a new series of books – there will be eight eventually – I just felt I had to have all of them.
3. It’s a well written book, about a subject I find interesting.
4. This part as well as the first one deals with matters that I find extremely distressing – war, hunting/killing, cannibalism, sacrifices. It seems for greater part of our history – and that goes for World History too – anyone smaller and/or weaker was considered prey, meaning anyone – animal, child, woman, man.

QDPHJ5DMEMN5

Warning: Self-pity

Lately almost all the books I’ve read have been disappointments, at least to some extent. I can’t believe I’ve completely lost my judgment so I can only imagine that somehow the books (or their writers) or I have changed. It’s probably the latter. The me of today has changed too much. I’m sadder and more disillusioned. Maybe if I manage to pull myself together and straighten my life out, I’ll become more enthusiastic about books again. Don’t get me wrong, I still love books, I just don’t seem to feel as happy about them as I did, even three or four years ago.

I feel my life slipping away, slipping through my fingers, like in that awful biblical story I was told about in what the people who ran my daycare had instead of Sunday school (Saturday school?). It’s been haunting me ever since. You probably know it, if you’re familiar with the Bible.

A girl walks across a field. She’s to pick only the best grains, but every time she sees what she believes to be the best, she catches sight of others in the distance, that seem bigger and better. In the end, she’s walked across the field, her basket empty, and.she can’t go back.

What worries me is that even though I’m probably somewhere on the field still, knowing I need to harvest the grains, I can’t do it. There’s always something preventing me and I can’t stand still either, I keep moving ahead, in one sense, yet not moving at all, in another sense. It scares me.

I don’t know what to do and I suppose not liking the few books I can afford, is the least of my problems. It’s just that those books should be brightening my days and instead, they’re not. A waste of money, that could have been put to better use elsewhere. Oh, well. Sorry about all the self-pity.

This afternoon, I went to pick up some books I had ordered. Not that we can afford them, but just this once, we decided it would be alright. When I got to the store – no post offices anymore, which is such a shame, considering that we (Sweden) used to have the oldest postal service in the world, as far as I know – I made a total fool of myself, by not being able to find the text message with the package number. Very embarrassing. Fortunately, the woman behind the counter was familiar with Nokia phones.

On my way back I had a bit of a scare. As I was passing a goldsmith’s shop, I noticed that two young guys were standing around, talking. This is a small town, but it was getting dark and I was on my own, so I was wondering what they were up to. Suddenly they said hi to me with sort of an undertone, that made me wonder. It was like ‘don’t look at us, we’re not up to anything’. I said hi back, thinking maybe they were trying to sell something or had a sort of survey, but apparently that was it. So I began to walk a little faster – I would have anyway, it was pretty chilly – but I couldn’t help glancing over my shoulder, just in case.

Just my luck that the only people passing by, other than these two, were an older woman on her bike heading in a different direction and someone walking with an invalid’s cane – blind and most likely something else – brave person. Then after a while I passed a church and a cemetary (not theirs, an older one, from a cholera epidemic in the 19th century). A gang of younger guys were hanging around there. After that there were a couple of different people. Besides, it didn’t take me more than five-ten minutes to get home.

Before posting this, I debated with myself – should I post this or not? I told myself I was too grown up for this kind of thing. Then I thought wtf? I can be as young as I want. So here it is:

You Are Fantasy / Sci Fi

You have an amazing imagination, and in your mind, all things are possible. You are open minded, and you find the future exciting. You crave novelty and progress. Compared to most people, you are quirky and even a bit eccentric. You have some wacky ideas. And while you may be a bit off the wall, there’s no denying how insightful and creative you are.

Perhaps I should add that while I agree with the conclusion (that I’m a fantasy book) I don’t agree with all the details. I’m not sure I crave novelty and progress, though come to think of it, maybe this quiz knows more about me than – I do?

I have found that many of my interests and hobbies are relatively rare. That is, not everyone shares my obsession with them. In fact, many of them never even heard of some of my favorites in a given area of interest.

It’s kind of like my favorite types of animals. (Though listing my favorite animals will take time and blog post space. It might be easier to list the ones I’m not too keen on, but I digress.)

So, to get to the point, it occurred to me that my two favorite genres of books are a bit like cats and dogs. Let me explain.

Crime novels, in general, are crime novels, though there are of course historic ones, thrillers, puzzles etc. So that is the same as cats. A cat is a cat, regardless of its breed or appearance. (Though to make this a little more complicated, most people haven’t heard of my favorite mystery writers either, so maybe I shouldn’t take this metaphor too far.)

Anyway – With me so far?

Fantasy is more like dogs. What’s a dog? A big tough, impressive one, like a – Eurasian? Yes. A lively, medium sized one, like a Tibetan Terrier? Yes. A small, adorable one, like a Lhasa apso or a Bolognese? Yes. A – you get the picture. My favorite fantasy books do have other followers, but really not that many. If I meet an average fantasy fan (yeah, I wish), I’m betting he or she might not even have heard of my favorites.

So there you have it. When it comes to crime novels, I like many different kinds. Fantasy, particularly my not so well known authors.

I suppose I might mention Anna Jansson too. A few years ago, I read some of her books and thought they were quite ok, but at the time, I was busily devouring other, more interesting books – Barbara Nadel’s mysteries and Eliot Pattison’s among others – so I wasn’t particularly impressed. This summer I got my hands on a few other books by her and either she’s improved or I’m in a different mood right now. Last year one of her mysteries was turned into a tv series, which I quite liked.

Anna Jansson is a nurse who turned to writing mysteries. Her books are set on the island of Gotland. The setting is one reason I find these books so interesting. Gotland is a very special place, with a fascinating history. Her heroine is female cop Maria Wern. She seems quite intelligent, but not particularly tough, not like the tv version, played by Eva Röse, who is an excellent Swedish actress. In a few of the books, there’s a medical theme, which seems appropriate.

Since the (originally) Swedish Wallander mysteries have been successfully exported to the UK, I thought I’d put in my two cents’ on this topic. In an earlier post, I’ve already mentioned that they’re not quite my thing. What I would like to discuss is something else. In the UK reviewers are raving about Kenneth Branagh in Wallander. I haven’t seen the UK version yet, but I will, just to see what they’ve made of it. As far as I’m concerned, things can only get better.

What I’m reacting to is just one thing that keeps being repeated over and over again, in the reviews, in the UK and even in the US. Sweden is gloomy. What? Ok, I’ll admit that the north, far away from Wallander’s Scania, could be described as gloomy, especially during the dark season, which, frankly, lasts almost all the year around. That’s the north, not Scania. If you went to Scania presumably you’d notice that much of Sweden is pretty ordinary. The scenery is beautiful. (I just had to mention that. After all, I live here. I like the scenery.) But let’s get this straight once and for all, Scanians are not gloomy. Not generally. Sure, anyone can get gloomy, especially if you work hard all day tracing killers and dealing with gruesome murders. Are the British sleuths any more cheerful?

This is how the rest of us Swedes (or Goths, as I am – and no, I’m not dressed in black, we’re called goths anyway and there’s a fascinating linguistic or semantic explanation to why there are so many goths worldwide, especially throughout history) view Scania and the Scanians:

They’re jolly, positive people. They love to eat and drink. Kind of, if you allow the metaphor or simile, like hobbits, though not as short and fat, well some might be, but then so can anyone. Scania is usually green and smiling, rather than gloomy, though personally I tend to agree that the area around Ystad might be described as gloomy, especially during the winter.