Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Live from our man in Torridon

I'm sitting by a driftwood fire, miles from the nearest people, thirty feet from the sea, my tent pitched on the dunes behind me. I'm drinking red wine from the bottle (hey, if I can be bothered to carry it...) with two dogs curled up a few feet away (they did 22 miles yesterday, and spent most of today in the sea) and I haven't seen so many stars above me in a decade. The lighthouses on the Hebrides are glowing across the Minch, and, for now, all is well with the world. N.B. The Blackberry does not necessarily enhance one's sense of isolation.

Book lists

From Tabula Rasa, my annual meme.  Based on some list of 100 popular books (or ones that people pretend that they have enjoyed in order to impress the survey-taker), the point is to bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you loved, italicise the ones you intend to read and strike out the ones you have no intention to read (or to read again, if bolded).  However, my blog does not support the deprecated strike-out tags, and I have no intention to mess about with inline css, so I've indicated these with a  "[NO]", instead.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling [NO]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [NO]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [NO]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare(well, including the sonnets but barring several of the more obscure plays: people who say otherwise are lying!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [NO]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens [NO]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [NO] (well, I could read bits again, but I'd rather read three other books!)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [NO]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [NO]
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [NO]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [NO]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [NO]
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 [NO]
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
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
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [NO]
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
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [NO]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [NO]
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt [NO]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [NO]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color 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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [NO] (I'm a little old...)
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
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 [NO]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [NO]

I'm interested by a couple of patterns: I'm pretty widely-read in the "greats", but less so in modern literary works.  Thus, I have read all but six of the first thirty. This is largely because of a deliberate decision to read "the canon".  There are three books on here that I have never heard of (82, 86 and 95).

I dislike Dickens, as will be aparent from all the "[NO]" tags.  I'm also not a huge fan of the wilfully downbeat ending that so delights the ladies, and so The Handmaid’s Tale, Memoirs of a Geisha, Gone With The Wind and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin are all doomed to make one less sale each.  And I had to watch a friend, whose opinion I trust, grind her way through A Suitable Boy, and am not at all convinced, from her description, that it is worth the time out of my life needed to read it.

I was already aware that there are weaknesses in my reading, particularly among Russian and French authors, which I am remedying.  However, I suspect that TR is right to suspect that this is from the BBC's "Big Read", as English-language books are heavily over-represented.

Finally, I wonder if the list has been a little altered in transmission?  Hamlet, for instance, appears at number 98.  This despite the appearance of Shakespeare's complete works 80-odd places higher (laughably enough: even I have not read the lot, and I doubt if 0.5% of people have, even in his native country).  I suspect that an "official" list would agglomerate such entries.

And no, I have not underlined the Bible, despite my religion.  It would be mere duty that made me claim that I enjoyed much of it as a book.  Have you ever read Leviticus, after all?

The Supreme Soviet Demands the Liquidation of the Georgians as a Class!

I despair again at the vapidity and foolishness of the British press and public.  A few people run in circles slightly faster than some other people born elsewhere, and the Russians correctly calculate that they can shell cities without the risk of front-page coverage (not that our medals are for running: we win in nice, expensive sports like yachting and horse-riding where those nasty, third world countries can't compete).

David Milliband, British Foreign Secretary and would-be Prime Minister, has written a surprisingly well-judged piece for today's Times, on the subject of Russia's invasion of Georgia.  Given his position, he has to judge his words carefully, and so he cannot say aloud what the West has just been vividly reminded of: that Russia remains a backwards bandit state, flailing around and attacking its weaker neighbours

One facet that which has intrigued me, is just what constituency the Russians were playing to.  The Ossetians and Abkhazians are irrelevancies to Putin and his President, Medvedev: mere excuses upon which to act.  The key pipeline which runs through Georgia on its way from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, bypassing Russian soil and denying them a monopoly on gas exports from the post-Soviet states, is beyond the reach of the Russian armies in any scenarios short of full occupation (although the Russians have been desperately trying to damage it).  The Georgians, far from being diverted from their pro-NATO course, will be confirmed in it, while NATO itself, far from seeing Georgia and Ukraine (the real prize for Russia) as the unaffordable liabilities the Russians seek to portray them as, will now be convinced of the need to secure their democracies.  And as Milliband states, the non-aligned movement will not be delighted by this rogue semipower.

It is unfortunate that Milliband has been rather less vocal thus far in his dealings with the Russians than his article would suggest.  The main fault there, however, lies with Brown, revealed in foreign affairs as in domestic ones as a vaccilating and weak man, perfectly happy to visit Africa and bounce children on his knee but incapable of associating himself with the tough choices that the British premiership demands of its holder.  His pusillanimosity and near-invisibility amount to nothing more than self-interested cowardice and a desire to lay low and ride out the storm.  Sarkozy may have been duped and embarassed by Russian lies when they agreed to his withdrawal plans, but at least he tried.  The British government is being shown up in international affairs by the moral stance of the French.  It's that bad.

Environmentalists should be delighted: more than ever, as this fresh episode reveals the foolishness of being beholden for fossil fuel energy to a rogue state, prone to erratic violence and unconstrained by the rule of law: ask BP about how the Russians are threatening their staff and stealing their investments, and just what Brown did for them; ask the British police about the Litvinenko polonium murder; ask the Chechens who have been purged; ask the Polish who have been threatened with a Russian nuclear strike for co-operating with the West.  Or ask the Russian state-owned television and press and see how far you get.

I also don't see George Galloway and his coalition of leftists, fascists and other religious extremists organising any marches through London, irregardless of the ethnic cleansing and targetted killings of the Russian state.  I don't see the simple-minded fellow-travellers of suburbia, nor their immature, irresponsible student cohorts, flooding the capital with their banners, despite finally getting to witness a genuine war for oil.  Is it because the Georgians are Christians, or because the Russians simply aren't American?