The Frequent and Vigorous Quarterly, Issue 2

I picked up a copy of this in a coffee shop in Antigonish months ago, stuck it in the front pocket of my laptop bag, and forgot about it until I was rummaging for something to read on the bus the other day.

It's Issue 2 of a creative writing collective endeavour, which is always a good thing to pick up and read.

Inside the front cover, it states 'our title is derived from The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace. Please don't tell and get us into trouble. Instead, read it.'

DFW is all about the importance of ignoring the telly and its malign influence on literature and focusing on earnest self-expression, if I remember The Infinite Jest correctly. I haven't read The Broom of the System, maybe I'll try to find it.

Right so.... earnest self-expression. No telly. Just philosophical thought and literature.

From a group of English students in SFX, by the way.

Switch off your irony button, Queenie, and read on.

I thought some of the stuff was pretty good, actually.

There was a pretty good short story by someone called M Johnston, about a kid in a supermarket who gets one over on the nasty manager. It was funny and well written, which is something Queenie has never managed to pull off.

And there was a poem called The Tibetan Monk which I really liked - interesting theme, really interesting structure, great rhythm. It reminded me of the early poetry of one Gavin Kostick, a heady mix of classical themes and political thought.

Then there was another short story that had its roots in the old Oisin and the land of Tir na nOg myth that I didn't really get, and a transcript of MSN sex talk that we'll just skip over and some very nice photos, particularly one by Philippe Mineau that I really liked, and then I got to Pride of an iPod Generation.

Which I read.

Then I read again.

Then I read again.

And I'm thinking to myself.... if this is David Foster Wallace-inspired then this is not ironic.

And if that is the case, then some gentle teasing of the author is definitely in order.

I hope he doesn't mind.

Yes, of course he was a boy.

But I will start by saying I accept that we were all that young, arrogant in an 'ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek kind of way' soldier at one time.

I'm sure you'll all remember those days boys and girls, fellow passengers on the tail end of GenX....?

Circa 1988 - 94.

Round about the time we saw Public Enemy perform on Trinity College cricket pitch.

Anyways, I thought I'd share iPod man's wisdom with you.

"I come from the generation that, like every other generation, has a vivid history full of grand achievements and terrible horrors. I saw the rise of reality tv. I watched slow but sure acceptance of rap music. I was taken aback by horrid terrorist acts. I was even lucky enough to watch the progression of razor blades from one to the oh-so-necessary six bladed razors that are available today."

Well, correct me if I'm wrong but I think Public Enemy playing on the cricket pitch of a four hundred year old university would be defined as 'acceptance'. And I think it happened the year you started Grade Primary, sweetie.

I'm assuming the author was born in or around 1988, if he's iPod Gen.

I think what you might have witnessed was the commercialisation of rap music, dear.

I will grant you reality tv. You are entitled to that terrible horror. I don't remember reality tv when I was growing up. They just had shows called drama, and documentaries, and current affairs programs, and movies, when I was growing up.

I do remember watching an angry mob of Republicans drag two British soldiers out of a car, beat them to a pulp and then shoot them in the head when they drove their car into a funeral procession live on the news one time. But that doesn't really count as reality tv, as nobody had to audition to be in the car.

Also, to be petty about it, I'm pretty sure that guy from Gillette had four blades in his razor when I was growing up.

But I can't be definite. I'd have to ask a guy. Anyways, I think you were probably being ironic.

I thought you weren't supposed to be ironic...

Am I being too mean? I'm not meaning to be. I'm just feeling old and grouchy these days, trapped as I am between baby boomers and GenY, stuck with a dirty planet, rising air travel costs and no friggin' pension to look forward to when the end times come.

Anyways, back to the text...

"Every generation has their moments, we have plenty of history books to remind us of that, but I feel that we, the media-dubbed iPod generation, have done more than what historians will write down. What do you notice when you compare the people your age to those say, ten years your senior? Twenty years? Thirty years?"

According to an article I found on The Times online, the iPod generation is comprised of people under 26 (today). iPod stands for 'insecure, pressured, overtaxed and debt-ridden'.

That's just about everyone I know, when you think about it.

Perhaps the iPods are the generation that are annoyed about it.

Or more accurately, the iPods are the generation that weren't expecting it to be so.

Bless'em.

Nothing like a decade of recession in your teens to give you that edge on expectations.

Thanks, Mr. Haughey*, you served me well in retrospect.

* Mr. Haughey was an Irish PM who lorded it over us all during a recession in the eighties. Subsequently, we found out that he was using other people's money to live like a king. Irish people got very mad when they found out, but then realised that that was the way to go, and so a good chunk of them got on that bandwagon. Consequently, Ireland is facing another recession right now, but it's okay, the economy is structurally sound, so it won't be like the eighties again.

Anyways, I'm sure you're dying to know what our young author sees when he compares himself to us thirty-somethings and forty-somethings...and fifty-somethings. (anyone older is not worth a comparison, I think, or maybe he was straitened by the word count).

"You may not agree with me, but what I see is nothing short of amazing. I see a generation who almost never looks first at race or gender, who (almost unbeknownst to them) have environmentally friendly routines in their everyday lives, and who are extremely accepting of gay and bisexual communities. There are exceptions and there always will be, but when I compare us to a decade prior (that would be me - Queenie), I feel that we are vastly superior in these areas. Now I cannot speak for our generation globally, this is merely a tiny spot on the planetary spectrum, but does that make it any less significant?

And there you were, wondering why Queenie was picking on some poor, inarticulate little X-er.

Queenie don't pick on no one unless they're askin' for it.

And this kid is ASKIN' FORIT!

Only the fact that I still remember once telling the Queen Dad that my generation was very unlucky because all we had was Thatcher and emigration and war, and his generation got to do the sixties, and him laughing his ass off and saying, I did the sixties in rural Ireland, Queenie, and before that I had to do the fifties there, and me then realising that all generations ARE THE SAME in many ways, is keeping the gloves on.

Soon to be global spokesman for the iPod generation-man should not have used the word superior.

What the word 'superior' says to me is that iPod man may not see colour or gender or sexual orientation when he looks at people, but that's because he's too busy counting the wrinkles on people's faces and judging them thus.

Mr. iPod forgets to mention the Queen Parents generation when he was comparing. I remember the Queen Mum making compost, recycling paper, separating waste, making her own bread, growing vegetables and doing all kinds of other 'green' things way back before there was any mention of green, because it saved money and reduced what went into the bin and was healthy and useful, etc.

How would the iPods compare to that, eh?

Take a pass on the gap year round the globe travel and maybe it'll be a 1-1 draw.

Anyways, back to the text...

"I am an optimist, and like Delta Goodrem* says 'I don't see the point in being anything else'. I firmly believe that we are the most accepting, equal and green generation that the world has ever seen. We have the previous generations (and fantastic programs like Degrassi and Captain Planet of course) to thank for that, but we also have ourselves. I hope that you agree with me and I pray that the next generation will be able to say the same."

*Star of Neighbours, for those of you that don't recognise the name, but today's Neighbours, not the Neighbours we watched in the eighties. A sort of modern-day Kylie if you like. Slight bending of the DFW no-telly rule, too, if you ask me.

Yes well, thanks for the nod to us oldarses for our minor role in the production of the superior generation of which you are a proud member, Mr. iPod. I'm not sure it bolsters your earlier points regarding our malign influence on the world, but that's okay. We take our manna where we can get it.

I truly hope you are the most accepting, equal and green generation that the world has ever seen, cos God knows, you're going to have to be...

I also truly hope that you are an inspired fifth columnist within the community of The Frequent and Vigorous Quarterly, and that the point of your piece is to undermine the David Foster Wallacian theory behind the publication.

Otherwise, I'm a heading 'er for the compound right now. Before you tackle me to the ground and put me on an icefloe with all the other old people.

Edward's asking forgiveness again. Much better than permission.

Somebody called Edward, who has a private profile on Blogger.com (bad Edward) linked my blog to Infomonkey.net - Halifax. Then added a comment to my blog saying that he (is it even a he, we don't know, because his profile is private) had done so and if I minded that I should tell him so he can remove it.

I didn't minded, so I never said nothin'. See, I write a blog. Which is on the Internet. Which is like putting your diary in your front window with the page open to the previous day's entry.

Except the sun won't fade the writing on the blog, the way it would fade the writing in the diary.

So anyways, last night I wrote a (for me) totally boring piece on my camping trip to New Brunswick.

Lo and behold, up pops Edward in the comments box again.

Still private is Edward.

Reminding me that he linked me to infomonkey.net - Halifax and that some of what I write is personal, so if I mind to let him know straight away.

Well, yes, everything published here is personal to Queenie, but obviously none of it is private because it is on the Internet, so no I don't mind that you paid the blog the compliment of linking it to infomonkey.net - Halifax.

In fact, I found some other interesting blogs there.

If you write a blog and people link to it, that's good.

However, when I post, my traffic doesn't go up extra due to the link, that's not good.

I'm a great believer in asking forgiveness rather than permission. But, if you are concerned about people getting mad, asking permission in advance would reduce the number of times you have to mail people for forgiveness??!!

Sorry about the break... summer's getting busy already

As I said in my last post, Columbo arrived on 9th June for two weeks.

Guests are always a busy time. Well, not that there's extra business, just the fact that there is no lying around thinking about what to blog about time when there are actual friends here.

Not to mention blog time.

This time was particularly busy, as Kitty was doing exams at the same time, so there was coaching and prompting and motivating and of course it'll be fine and there-thereing to be done (having Columbo around helped as she shared the load on that). In addition, it's the start of the summer season so colleagues are coming and going and I generally have to be around in work, as I tend to take vacation in the winter. But still, we got a few days to hit the road and see a little bit of the Maritimes.

We headed off in the sunshine and went north into New Brunswick and got three days great weather, beautiful sunshine and enough wind to make it bearable (but not to get rid of the enormous mosquitos) and camped for two nights in French New Brunswick. Christ the mossies were big. Each morning we awoke at 5.30am to the dawn chorus, after which the sun came up and shone on the three million or so mosquitos circling the tent waiting, waiting, just waiting for us to slip up and open the zip.

A few got into the car and ate me alive the second day. Almost two weeks later, I am still covered in angry red bites all around my ankles.

We spent the first night in Kouchebouguac, a provincial park set on a lagoon about half way up the coast of New Brunswick. The warmest sea water north of Virginia apparently ... I thought that was Pictou County...

... well they're both in the lee of PEI, so maybe that's what keeps the water warm.

It was nice. Peaceful and the park people left us pretty much alone. We cooked steaks and drank some wine and listened to the wind die down and the birds go to bed and the fire crackle and then we crawled into bed.

About five minutes later we heard a clang as the top was knocked off our saucepan.

So I'm lying there hoping it's not a bear, but there aren't any bear snuffling noises so I hoped not.

More noises.

Eventually I clambered out of the sleeping bag and shone the torch on the cooler.

Nothing.

Next morning we discovered raccoons had opened the cooler, taken out the bananas, peeled them, eaten them and left the skins for us to dispose of.

And they had rolled all the eggs off the camping table to crack them so they could eat the yolks.

And left the shells along with the banana skins.

Raccoons.

Just like teenagers.

Next day we drove the Acadian peninsula and rolled into Caraquet about five, just in time to catch the Acadian living history village.

Nice place, but $15 each is a bit friggin' steep to watch a lot of local people sit around in old clothes pretending to run a farm.

I took careful note of how to make linen clothes from flax.

For the compound.

So we'll have clothes.

We camped just outside Caraquet and headed into town for dinner at the Chocolaterie, which was very nice and then did the fire thing again.

We got an amazing sunset and an amazing sunrise the next morning, over the Choc Choc Mountains in Quebec. That's where we were headed, but I looked at the map and thought about the drive home and we decided not to do it.

Maybe next time...

Still and all, it was nice to see another province for a change.

No moose but.

I'm never going to see a moose.

Three years today

I came to Canada three years ago today.

As Yoichi would say (well probably not now as he's probably fluent in English at this stage), as Yoichi would have said three years ago, 'WOW!'

That day three years ago, I stayed with Ammonite and the others in Teach Dusetti the night before I left, and Colombo waved me off at the airport. So it is fitting that Colombo flies in tonight, and that Ammonite is coming to visit in August.

Well, it's probably just a coincidence, but I have decided it is fitting.

Three years.... lots of personal growth... lots of fun... lots of adjusting to a new culture (yes, Nova Scotia is a new culture, it is very different to Ireland)... lots of adjusting to a new work culture... oh yeah...

Lots of heartache...

And I still haven't given up smoking.

Aaghggh!!

I AM JUST GOING TO GIVE THE FRIGGIN' THINGS UP.

I am.

This month.

So how do you feel?

The phone rang in work yesterday.

It does ring quite a bit.

I wait to see the number.

Often it is my own. Kitty home from school, bored, wanting to check in. I check in back. We chat a bit. She reconnects then she's happy to wait till quarter past five when one of us is usually home.

Otherwise it's just work usually.

But the phone rang yesterday.

I waited.

Private number.

Ehhhummmmm....

I picked up.

So how do you feel today, Queenie?

It's a woman's voice. It's an older woman. It's a black woman.

Queen.

The other Queenie. Except she's not Queenie. She's just Queen.

Former colleague.

Well, I don't know Queen. How do you feel?

I don't know what to feel, Queenie, that's why I called you.

Well, Queen, I reckon you must be a little bit sad and a little bit excited.

Well, I guess I am. I thought you might know how I feel. How do you feel?

I'm fucking mad, Queen. How in the hell does a smart ass, younger, inexperienced man beat a strong, clever older woman for Presidential candidate, Queen?

I don't know, Queenie.

I guess our time has gone, Queen.

Well, maybe mine anyway, Queenie, you're still young.

But you must be happy, Queen.

I guess I'm excited for the young people, Queenie. I see them all excited and it makes my heart glad.

Yeah, me too.

Shame though...

Yeah...

I'm worried, Queenie, I hear they're going to say something bad about his wife soon.

What?

Something about the church. You know, that's what all those churches are like, Queenie. They all talk like that. It doesn't mean anything. That's how we keep our sanity. You must know. You're from over there.

Over there?

You know what I mean.

Yeah, I know.

I'm worried, Queenie. I'm real worried.

Maybe so, Queen, she looks like a strong woman though.

Maybe.

Sometimes, Queenie, I wonder how strong we've gotta be.

Yeah, I wonder that too.

To die in your own wee, or on your own wii?

I bet Martin McDonagh never thought there'd be a Wii when he wrote that brilliant passage in A Skull in Connemara about dying in a potty of wee.

I brought Kitty and her friend to see it tonight. A small little company. A rickety stage set up in an abandoned shop. Twenty five people in the audience, scrunched up around the stage. Potting compost and fragments of fake bone flying all over us.

Great.

When the wee bit started, I thought the two girls were going to choke they laughed so much.

Me, I was the only person who laughed at the Eamon Andrew jokes. And the Dana jokes. And the bumpy slides in Leisureland in Galway sketch.

But that was alright.

You're in your own little world in the theatre anyway.

Well done to Obstructed View Plays for taking it on with probably tuppence ha'penny worth of funding. They did a great job of it.

Maxime makes the news in Ireland

Canada's foreign minister has resigned after it emerged that he left secret documents at his then girlfriend's house.

Prime minister Stephen Harper said yesterday he had accepted the resignation of Maxime Bernier, who came under fire in recent weeks after it was reported that his ex-girlfriend had previous relationships with Hells Angels members and links to organised crime.

I don't know if the Irish Times printed the picture of DE DRESS.

Which is all that Canada is talking about in this case.

Here it is, in case they didn't.

Naturally, it's all about the dress.

That's why you can't see the kerchief hemming at the bottom.

Apparently, Minister Bernier picked THE DRESS to wear on the day he became a minister.

Hence all the interest in Mdme Cuillard.

Ahaa!! My suspicions were founded!!

From today's Irish Times:

THE LEAVING Cert exam has been significantly "dumbed down" and there is evidence of widespread grade inflation, according to a new study of exam grades.

The study, to be published shortly, is the first to track Leaving Cert grades across 24 subjects over almost two decades.

Its key finding is that the number of students gaining A and B grades in many higher-level subjects has nearly doubled since 1991. But the study finds little evidence to support higher academic standards. "In the most recent European-wide OECD/PISA study, there has been no detectable improvement in mathematics, reading and science in Irish 15-year-olds between 2000 and 2006, and so such an explanation of the increased Leaving Certificate results does not hold up."

...

The study concludes: "That there has been massive grade increase in the Leaving Certificate Examination over the period considered is beyond dispute and even a cursory inspection of the data confirms this . . . There is little evidence of higher academic standards. The increase is simply grade inflation - higher grades being awarded more easily."

The survey shows an astonishing increase in the percentage of students gaining Grade A and B (70-100 per cent) in Leaving Cert higher-level papers since 1991.

...

The study also finds that far fewer students are failing Leaving Cert papers. The new study says the grade inflation is all the more remarkable because the number of students opting for higher level has dramatically increased. It notes how "the lowering of standards in the higher-level subjects has driven this increase".

Queenie has suspected for a long time that the Leaving Cert (Irish exam that is similar to the IB) is for pussies these days. Not like when she were a girl, and there was just the one place in college, and you had to lock yourself in your bedroom and study for six hours a night for ten years to get the place.

IF YOU WERE LUCKY and your questions came up.

Having had several arguments with various people about it, Queenie has come round to the point of view that what's good for the child of the eighties is probably not so good for the child of the nineties.

But it's still effing unfair.

Us survivors of the horror that was the LC in the eighties deserve some respect.

We didn't know there was a lucrative future in VJing ahead of us if we failed.

I get no respect in my house.

I am considered weird because I know so much.

And that's just the stuff I mention.

You can take a girl out of her homeland....

... but she'll eventually get back to planting potatoes.

Pumpkin, schmumpkin .... The pratai are in the ground.

Won't it be lovely to have my own potatoes, grown by my own hand, to eat this winter.

I wonder could I get Himself to dig me out a root cellar! For all the potatoes and carrots and beets I'm going to have?!

I'm being super-confident this year, which is always a bad thing in gardening.

If he wakes up ever again of course.

Himself and Kitty are both asleep. Have been for a while. So I'm just sitting here with dinner all prepared waiting for hunger pangs to stir them. Also, Scheherazade is coming over for some food (for those of you who don't remember, Scheh is the first friend I made in Halifax and she is from Turkey originally).

I don't know why they are so tired. It's not like we were up to much last night.

We went all the way downstairs last night. That was about as out as we could manage.

We were hanging with Ms Maggie Beach and her friend and I realised that I don't talk about her friend much, even though he's my friend too (except when we play washer toss, when he turns into my sworn enemy forever) so we were discussing blog names for him.

Maggie Beach picked her own blogname. I'm all for letting people choose their own name. Her's is her porn name I think (you pick your middle name and the street you grew up on).

Queenie is Lizzie Oxmantown, which is a stupid porn name. My pole dancer name is worse, it's Midgie Neill. I would so be the pole dancer on the Canadien ad if that was my name.

Anyways, so our friend had to pick his blog name. First of all he decided on RaCy (because he's building a F1 car in his garage at the moment - I kid you not). Then Maggie decided it had to be his porn name. Which turned out to be Johnny Pleasant.

So after we all stopped falling around laughing at the aptness of it as his porn name, he decided he didn't want that, so we did the pole dancer's name thingummy and it turned out to be Teddy Grainger.

So Teddy Grainger it is.

Anyways, Queenie and Ms Beach go up to Teddy's house a few times a week now (and Kitty too), because he's got a home gym in his basement. Right next to the F1 car in his garage, although I think the car was being collected this morning, so no more throbbing house when I'm running myself to a standstill.

We do an hour - run on the treadmill and the cycling thing and the crosstrainer, and Queenie does some yoga stretches, and then we go home to eat dinner and have a glass of wine.

Very healthy.

Well, it is when you consider the alternative.

Queenie had to start working out. It is THAT TIME IN HER THIRTIES.

I do find it terribly boring though.

Anyways, Teddy had to pick his top bands for the greatest band on earth ever competition so he picked The Eagles (that's the Johnny Pleasant side of his personality coming through I think).

I am going to have to organise some kind of structured weekend of listening for us to arrive at some consensus on which band will get the title.

And the exciting news is, Mike and Cate our previous next door neighbours are coming to Halifax for a month this summer!

Much washer toss/ camping/ sitting around talking about librarianship/ drinking of beer/ BBQ-ing will ensue.

You better pick your blog names, then!!

The wonders of technology

So, I'm browsing my site meter by referrals, and I come across a google search for a friend of mine, Nadia, who is a teacher in Co. Galway, Ireland.

And what do I find only her teacher ratings!!

Found her the most interesting teacher of the lot. Great communicate with us unlike most. I had her for only one year. to this day and a few years have by since. i still remember her lovely perfume.x

Body Shop White Musk if I remember correctly. Although it might have changed. To this day, if I smell it in a shop or a bus, I whip round, expecting to see her.

11/15/06 lovely person even tho she appears scary in the halls.sucha a nice teacher to have especially for the leaving! bcause of her i really like german and am doing it now in college!

I don't think she appears scary. I think she actually is scary. But you're right, she is a lovely person.

3/29/06 can teach a class and listen to what each student has to say aswell as getting everyone to enjoy class

Wow! When I knew her, back in the day, all she did was talk in class! She must have grown up since.

Hilarious. Spot on. But nothing I didn't already know.
What I don't know is, who got from there to here.
Mysterious....

OKAY!! Am leaving now. Honestly.

Kitty's room

Kitty ate an entire bowl of high fibre cereal without being prompted to before she went to school this morning.

I was in such a state of delighted shock I pretended not to see.

So I didn't see her not put the bowl in the dishwasher.

... Baby steps...

So I washed her white clothes that got make up on them and changed her sheets and made her bed today and *tidied* her room as a thank you for the baby step.

On my day off.

Day off paid work.

Half a bottle of Febreze later... we're all good.

Judging by the smell in the room, a certain familiar Himself in need of a new pair of shoes damp smell, I think she may need a new pair of trainers.

Why, oh why do we have to purchase an entire wardrobe for her every time she comes up here?

Doesn't anyone else ever buy her any clothes??

Silly question.

Forget I asked.

*tidying involves putting everything on the floor into the trunk, less evidence of whatever teenage preening etc activity to see/ despair over when it's done in a scooping motion.

This is the last one - 1001 books you must read before you die 1700s and previous

This is the list that sorts the English Grads out from the boys.

There are 59 books on this list. Queenie has read 19 of them. Mostly because she had to.

OKAY, we're done ruining my blog with lists of books.... onto more useful activities.

Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
The Nun – Denis Diderot
Camilla – Fanny Burney
The Monk – M.G. Lewis
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Justine – Marquis de Sade Q
Vathek – William Beckford
The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
Cecilia – Fanny Burney
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Evelina – Fanny Burney
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett Q
The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne Q
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne Q
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith Q
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
Candide – Voltaire
The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
Amelia – Henry Fielding Q
Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding Q
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett Q
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson Q
Pamela – Samuel Richardson Q
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift Q
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift Q
Roxana – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe Q
Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe Q
A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700

Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Q
The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous Q
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aithiopika – Heliodorus
Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
Metamorphoses – Ovid Q
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus Q

1001 books you must read before you die - 1800s

Here are the books on the 1001 books you should read before you die list, published in the 1800s. Queenie promised she wouldn't do this, and then did it anyways..... I have STUFF TO DO TODAY!!!!!!!!!

There are 157 books on this list. Queenie has been very remiss with her Russian giants of literature it would appear.

Maybe I'm grown up enough to get them now.

Q denotes a book read.


Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross Q
The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin Q
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James Q
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy Q
The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born in Exile – George Gissing
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Q
News from Nowhere – William Morris
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy Q
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde Q
The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy Q
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson Q
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy Q
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson Q
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Germinal – Émile Zola
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain Q
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant Q
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson Q
The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James Q
Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
Nana – Émile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Red Room – August Strindberg
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy Q
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Drunkard – Émile Zola
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot Q
The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Q
The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne Q
In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Erewhon – Samuel Butler
Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
Middlemarch – George Eliot Q
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll Q
King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins Q
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott Q
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope Q
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky (tried. and tried. and tried)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll Q
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens Q
Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley Q
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo Q
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev Q
Silas Marner – George Eliot Q (Yawwn)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens Q
On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot Q
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins Q
The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens Q
Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede – George Eliot Q (YAWN)
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert Q
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell Q
Hard Times – Charles Dickens Q
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens Q
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe Q
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne Q
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville Q
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne Q
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens Q
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë Q
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë Q
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë Q
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë Q
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray Q
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas Q
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas Q
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe Q
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe Q
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens Q
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe Q
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens Q
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens Q
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo Q
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper Q
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg Q
The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott Q
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Q
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen Q
Persuasion – Jane Austen Q
Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen Q
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen Q
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen Q
The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen Q
Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth Q

Oh, go on then, 1001 books to read before you die - 1900s

There are 716 books on this list, and a lot of the debate on the New York Times site is an erudite discussion about how the books of BEFORE are MUCH BETTER.

Of course.

Queenie has a lot of reading to do methinks....

Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee Q
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters Q
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver Q
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker Q
The Hours – Michael Cunningham Q
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy Q
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden Q
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo Q
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey Q
The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Untouchable – John Banville
Silk – Alessandro Baricco Q
Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels QQQQQ
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker Q
Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood Q
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
The Information – Martin Amis
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie Q
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald Q
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry Q
Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Land – Park Kyong-ni
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee QQQQQQ
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami QQQQQQ
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman Q
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres Q
Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor Q
Disappearance – David Dabydeen
The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx QQQQQQ
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh Q
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks Q
Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Complicity – Iain Banks
On Love – Alain de Botton Q
What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth Q
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields Q
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides Q
The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood Q
The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald Q
The Secret History – Donna Tartt Q
Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
A Heart So White – Javier Marias
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Indigo – Marina Warner
The Crow Road – Iain Banks Q
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Jazz – Toni Morrison Q
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje Q
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg Q
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe Q
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
Arcadia – Jim Crace
Wild Swans – Jung Chang Q
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis Q
Mao II – Don DeLillo
Typical – Padgett Powell
Regeneration – Pat Barker Q
Downriver – Iain Sinclair
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard Q
Amongst Women – John McGahern Q
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon Q
Vertigo – W.G. Sebald Q
Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham Q
Like Life – Lorrie Moore
Possession – A.S. Byatt Q
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
A Disaffection – James Kelman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro Q
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago Q
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel Q
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving Q
London Fields – Martin Amis Q
The Book of Evidence – John Banville Q
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood Q
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco Q
The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie Q
The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey Q
Libra – Don DeLillo Q
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams Q
The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble Q
The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind Q
The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe Q
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster Q
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
Beloved – Toni Morrison Q
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis Q
Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro Q
Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez Q
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson Q
The Cider House Rules – John Irving Q
A Maggot – John Fowles
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan Q
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood Q
Perfume – Patrick Süskind Q
Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Queer – William Burroughs
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd Q
Legend – David Gemmell
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard Q
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks Q
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera Q
Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
Neuromancer – William Gibson Q
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes Q
Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
La Brava – Elmore Leonard
Waterland – Graham Swift Q
The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee QQQQQ
The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
The Color Purple – Alice Walker Q
Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro Q
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally Q
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende Q
The Newton Letter – John Banville
On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin Q
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
The Names – Don DeLillo
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike Q
Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
July’s People – Nadine Gordimer Q
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie Q
Rites of Passage – William Golding
Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco Q
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera Q
Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
Shikasta – Doris Lessing
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer Q
The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino Q
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams Q
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving Q
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch Q
The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Yes – Thomas Bernhard
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee Q
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King Q
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison Q
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
The Public Burning – Robert Coover
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez Q
W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
Fateless – Imre Kertész
Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
High Rise – J.G. Ballard
Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow Q
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Correction – Thomas Bernhard
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré Q
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Q
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong Q
A Question of Power – Bessie Head
The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
Crash – J.G. Ballard Q
The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene Q
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon Q
The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
Sula – Toni Morrison Q
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Breast – Philip Roth
The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
G – John Berger
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson Q
Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
Rabbit Redux – John Updike Q
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
The Ogre – Michael Tournier
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou Q
Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
Troubles – J.G. Farrell
Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. QQQQQQQQ
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Green Man – Kingsley Amis Q
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth Q
The Godfather – Mario Puzo Q
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Them – Joyce Carol Oates Q
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch Q
Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Q
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Q
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick Q
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
Chocky – John Wyndham
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe Q
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez Q
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov Q
Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
The Joke – Milan Kundera
No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien Q
A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
Trawl – B.S. Johnson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Magus – John Fowles
The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon Q
Things – Georges Perec
The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
Herzog – Saul Bellow Q
V. – Thomas Pynchon Q
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut Q
The Graduate – Charles Webb
Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré Q
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath Q
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Q
The Collector – John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey Q
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing Q
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges Q
Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller Q
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
How It Is – Samuel Beckett
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien Q
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Q
Rabbit, Run – John Updike Q
Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee Q
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs Q
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass Q
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute Q
The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon Q
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
The End of the Road – John Barth
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Bell – Iris Murdoch Q
Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
Voss – Patrick White
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
Homo Faber – Max Frisch
On the Road – Jack Kerouac Q
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
Justine – Lawrence Durrell Q
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Barth
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien Q
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov Q
A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
The Quiet American – Graham Greene Q
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis Q
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
Lord of the Flies – William Golding Q
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler Q
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis Q
Junkie – William Burroughs
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming Q
The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway Q
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger Q
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Molloy – Samuel Beckett Q
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene Q
The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
The Third Man – Graham Greene Q
The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake Q-ish
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell Q
All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene Q
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Victim – Saul Bellow
Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
The Plague – Albert Camus
Back – Henry Green
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh Q
Animal Farm – George Orwell Q
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck Q
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
Loving – Henry Green
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham Q
Transit – Anna Seghers
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caught – Henry Green
The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
Embers – Sandor Marai
Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
The Outsider – Albert Camus Q (IN DEH FRENCH, DONCHA KNOW)
In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
The Living and the Dead – Patrick White Q
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler Q
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway Q
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene Q
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Party Going – Henry Green
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck Q
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien Q
QComing Up for Air – George Orwell
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood Q
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler Q
After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier Q
Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene Q
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck Q
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien Q
The Years – Virginia Woolf
In Parenthesis – David Jones
The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) Q
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell Q
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell Q
Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
England Made Me – Graham Greene
Burmese Days – George Orwell Q
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers Q
Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller Q - don't tell the Queen Mum
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Day Off – Storm Jameson
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Q
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh Q
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett Q
Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway Q
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett Q
Living – Henry Green
The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner Q
Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Orlando – Virginia Woolf Q
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence Q
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
Quartet – Jean Rhys
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh Q
Quicksand – Nella Larsen
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford Q
Nadja – André Breton
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf Q
Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway Q
Blindness – Henry Green
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf Q
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald Q
The Counterfeiters – André Gide Q
The Trial – Franz Kafka Q
The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster Q
The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Cane – Jean Toomer
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
Amok – Stefan Zweig
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Ulysses – James Joyce Q - ish
The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton Q
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis Q
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence Q
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West Q
The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
Summer – Edith Wharton
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
QUnder Fire – Henri Barbusse
Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford Q
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham Q
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence Q
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan Q
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence Q
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann Q
The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Howards End – E.M. Forster Q
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
Martin Eden – Jack London
Strait is the Gate – André Gide
Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster Q
The Iron Heel – Jack London
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Young Törless – Robert Musil
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster Q
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad Q
Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James Q
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers Q
The Immoralist – André Gide
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James Q
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad Q
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Q
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Kim – Rudyard Kipling Q
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad Q

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

There's an argument going on in the New York Times at the moment about this subject. They are using the Boxall list, which is divided thematically.

Queenie is not going to reprint 1001 book titles as that would ruin her front page, but here for the delectation of readers is the list of sixty nine books on the list that were published in the 2000s.

Queenie has read twenty eight of them, approximately 40 per cent.

How many have you read?

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro Q
Saturday – Ian McEwan Q
On Beauty – Zadie Smith Q
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee Q
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville Q
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín Q - not quite finished
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell Q
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon Q
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry Q
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters Q
The Double – José Saramago Q
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer Q
Unless – Carol Shields Q
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami Q
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor Q
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern Q
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides Q
Youth – J.M. Coetzee Q
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald Q
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan Q
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen Q
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo Q
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill Q
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel Q
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith Q
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth Q
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood Q
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates Q
Pastoralia – George Saunders

Galway Bay rocks Russia

"How a Champions League final commentary has turned into extended musings upon Peig Sayers' life is a mystery to me," writes Rob Cotter. "Never mind Man Utd or Chelsea, nostalgic Toasted Heretic fans are the real winners here tonight."

'Xactly.

Thanks Baz. You write good commentary.

Your sister, Queenie.

And thanks Queen Mum for clearing up the strawberry flower pinching issue.

Families and technology.

They're the greatest.

Fruity goings on today

So Himself always has a project or twenty on the go.

Which I like in a man with whom I am sharing a life.

Himself also has the attention span of a Jack Russell with a big territory to mind.

Which has its benefits. But also its downsides.

By that I mean that he's very organised of course.

I just asked Himself if he minded if I described him as a Jack Russell with a big territory to mind and he said okay, eventually.

Kitty wanted to know whether it was a rabbit.

Kitty is on a canihavearabbitificleanthekitchen kick at the moment.

No.

You cannot have a rabbit, nor a Jack Russell, which is not a rabbit.

Jack Russells don't get the attention they deserve over here. Pity.

Anyways, the sun has come out, which means we have moved into the yard on a semi-permanent basis.

The first project was the canoe.

We bought the canoe and built a platform for it.

And Himself bought the necessary tools to grind the fibreglass off the canoe and redo it.

And the sun shone really brightly one weekend and we had a lovely weekend with Himself grinding the canoe (which was a bit loud) and Queenie starting to clear the vegetable patch.

Then Himself decided that the grinding tool (a palm sander) wasn't up to the job.

So he had to get A REAL GRINDER.

Which we have now.

But then he needed to get the right sandpaper.

And then it rained.

So I have a half-ground canoe and no canoeing done yet this year.

Meanwhile, Queenie read her gardening book and bought seeds and started talking about compost etc. Because Queenie has just the one project in the summer, which is the garden.

This year I am planting elephant garlic, onions, carrots, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, chives, lettuce, and herbs - rosemary, sage, basil, parsley, dill and thyme.

Things I like to eat.

No radishes this year.

I bought corn, but I don't have enough room to grow it I think.

I am also planting pole runner beans, which have red flowers that attract hummingbirds apparently, and some other grass type thingy which has big yellow flowers that attract butterflies.

This year I am not planting the dill next to the carrots.

This year I swear I am going to find marigolds. Shelley downstairs, who is a horticulturist, says it is really hard to get them. I'm sure they have seeds in Ireland.

HINT HINT.

Shelley is going to grow zucchini and squash.

And flowers.

So last weekend we went to the garden centre to get mega earth and compost and lime (having figured out that the garden is acidic).

If your radishes are rockin' and everything else is crap, your soil is acidic.

The Northern Gardener, by Jennifer Bennett (1982), page 121. Yard sale, Halifax, last summer. The best thing I have ever bought at a yard sale.

Ever.

Thank you Jennifer Bennett, whoever you are. You have saved my garden.

Anyways, we were at the garden centre, and Queenie looked at the flowers for a long time, but the world needs food, and she has totally bought into the whole 'grow things to eat not to look at' thing since she was about five, so she compromised and bought herself a fern.

A nice fiddlerhead for the dark corner by the path to the lake.

You can eat them in the spring. Very tasty they are too. They only appear in the supermarket for one week and won't it be cool to have our own.

That's all it took.

Five seconds of Queenie wondering aloud about a companion plant for the fiddlerhead.

I turned round and he had a raspberry cane. And a rhubarb plant.

Fair enough.

I like raspberries.

And I love rhubarb.

But now it's Himself's gardening project of course.

And it's all about fruit.

Last year it was all about tomatoes. Which nearly didn't happen, except for the Queen Mum flew over from Ireland to pinch the flowers off, Queenie and Himself having forgotten about that crucial part of the cycle.

Upon which we had about three hundred tomatoes in the same week.

That was Saturday.

Sunday it rained, so I brought Kitty and her friend to the shopping mall to buy sweatshirts.

When I came back, Himself had been BACK to the garden centre.

Now we had megatonnes of mega earth.

And two blueberry bushes.

And some strawberry plants.

The sun came out on Monday afternoon and because it was Himself's project we dug out the garden PROPERLY and removed an entire rockery of rocks and some bricks (so we were right about the acid) and tore into the poor garden and murdered the poor parsnips that had made it through the winter.

And last night it was still nice out, so Himself dug two big holes in the lawn and planted the blueberry bushes, beside each other so they can pollinate.

Plants having sex in the garden. How nice.

And this evening, we planted the fern and the rhubarb in the corner, and made a little box garden for the raspberry cane, and moved an old tree trunk over to that corner to add some fungal touches.

And we planted the strawberries along the wall of the house.

Himself was wondering whether the Queen Mum would know whether you have to pinch strawberry flowers or not. The people in The Northern Gardener are from the Paddy Egan school of gardening - lots of cabbage and other green stuff - so they don't talk about strawberries at all. So a text on that subject would be most welcome.

And we've turned the soil and put the earth and compost in, and limed the bad part, and put the grass barrier in, and turned it again, and again, and put the sod down on the rock wall, and built a rockery, and cut back the elephant ears, and we're ready to plant.

We ripped up the crappy pallets at the back of the house and Shelley is making a flower bed there.

Everyone in the house chipped in and bought six new garden chairs and Kitty painted the table and the dog house so they look useable again, and all the kindling for the bonfire is in the dog house staying dry and all the wood is stacked neatly against the back fence ready for an excuse to have a bonfire.

Roll on Friday though.

On Friday, Queenie has the day off work and Kitty and Himself don't.

On Friday it will be MY GARDEN again.

Saturday, we'll be back at the canoe if it's not raining.

Of course, the solar lighting project is proving extremely interesting right now.

Where will we place them for maximum nuance.

And the new design for the hammock holder is interesting.

Which needs to be built.

With two by fours.

And the bird house needs to be put up.

And the squirrel feeder.

And we need to find a spot for the wind chimes.

Like I said.

A Jack Russell with a big territory has a lot on the go.

But he gets it all done eventually.

Thankfully it's only May and it's not even warm yet.

We gotta get all this done before the washer toss season starts.

We're having a pig roast on Canada Day by the way.

If you're not doing anything.

Reading is a young person's game

I worked it out recently, if I live to be 75, and I read one book a week until then, then I only have about 1,900 books left (John, if you still read this blog, you might want to check my math on this again!! :)).

So I am trying to up it to three books a fortnight at the moment.

Life just keeps getting in the way.

I used to read on the bus.

Now I have Kitty for company on the bus in the morning, as she is back in the city and going to Citadel High now. Although we are both usually so groggy we don't talk much, just listen to the conversations on the bus and roll our eyes at each other.

Mostly we listen to the teenagers talk about music.

What happens is, two teenagers get on the bus, share an iPod, crank it right up so everyone on the bus can hear it and then discuss the music loudly over the music.

It drives all the oldarses on the bus CRAAAAAZZZZZYYYY.

So in true Nova Scotia fashion, they all just sit there and glare at them.

The other day a particularly bad couple were discussing how they'd replicate the sound, which sounded a bit like Sleator-Kinney but I can't be sure.

The woman sitting in front of me nearly broke her neck swivelling to GLARE.

But of course it wasn't having any effect, as teenagers don't actually register any humans over the age of twenty five.

So, trying to be helpful, I turned round and mouthed 'can you turn the music down' at the guy.

He poked the girl with the iPod.

"WHAT?"

"I JUST GOT YELLED AT FOR HAVING THE MUSIC TOO LOUD"

"I did not yell at you", I said, "I asked you nicely!"

So they turned it up of course.

And everyone on the bus spent the rest of the journey GLARING at me.

Sigh.

Anyways, back to reading..

I just finished Ismail Kadare's The Successor. Kadare is a Man Booker International winner and Albania's greatest living author, apparently.

It was a grim book. A carefully worded atmospheric tale of the death of Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, who was Hoxha's successor, and who 'killed himself' in mysterious circumstances in the later years of Hoxha's reign. I couldn't put it down, it was so circular and layered that at the end you are completely confused about what was going on, in a way that was redolent of living during those times I imagine.

I am definitely going to read more of Kadare.

Before that I read Arturo Perez Reverte's second novel in the Captain Alatriste series, Purity of Blood. Also good in terms of its description of the dying days of the Spanish Empire, but a bit stilted and not Reverte's usual high standard.

I have started going to Chapters because I realised that they have a great sale bin. It's chock full of European and Asian literary fiction, discounted down to as low as $1 a book, because nobody knows who the writers are.

I have quite the collection now, although I have taken to selling my books on these days.

I have enough stuff.

And this way, I can justify three books a fortnight to myself.

The guy in the United Bookstore, to whom I sell my books, enjoys it when I come in I hope. I know I enjoy my trips in. I review each book for him, and we have a right old natter about all things literary - plus he knows some people in the CanLit industry so he always has a little snippet of gossip for me.

It's gratifying to buy a top class European novel for $1, read it, scrape the discount sticker off it, and sell it to him for one third the cover price. Then wait to see how long it is before someone else buys it.

Currently, I'm finally reading The Master. I tend to avoid Colm Toibin until he turns up in the bargain bin: I don't know why, because I always enjoy his books. But I got a hardback 1st American edition for six bucks that I shall probably keep - I am trying to hold onto some of the good ones for the summer visitors to browse.

I am a big Henry James fan, and always wondered how he got his prose so narrow yet evocative, so it is very interesting to read Toibin's theories in this fictionalised biography. Plus it's a ripping good yarn, albeit in a very Jamesian style.

It is interesting that Toibin has set himself up as the Irish James by writing about James. No doubt he was helped by David Lodge trying to do the same thing and failing (according to accepted wisdom, I haven't read his). Lodge is a wonderful writer, but he's more Trollope than James. So that makes Toibin's proposition more biddable.

I have just finished a Colin Thubron I didn't even know existed (oh, the excitement, I was all a-tremble in Schooner Books when I found it). Mirror to Damascus is a history of the city, a homage to its place in history, and a travelogue of the year Thubron spent there researching the book.

It is early Thubron, so it has some of the enthusiasm for place that he has lost a little as he ages. Also, the research he did then must have sent him east across the Silk Road, as I came across a lot of the stuff on little known muslim sects and warrior tribes that come up in his later books. In this book he is just learning about them. In later books, such as Shadow of the Silk Road, he visits their homelands. In Damascus, he visits their imprint on the city.

I have to stop typing now and go pick up kitty's friends so they can hang out in our house this evening....

Life gets in the way...

Hopefully, the presence of friends will mean uninterrupted blogging time, so I will be back presently.

Actually, I have just been told that I have to wait until the friends have sorted out their arrangements.

Like a good chauffeur.

Sigh.

But it's so nice to have a second chance to travel a bit of the way with her that I am prepared to put up with some of the stereotypical behaviour that's back in the house. Having said that, we're all a year older and wiser and it's the summer so the behaviour is not so annoying.

I have made the following promises to myself:

This time I will not see the mess. If I see the mess, then I will just have to clean it up.

This time I will be more patient. With myself, with everyone else, and with the moment.

This time I will not make the rules, that's her father's job, and he knows that girl's heart better than I do.

This time I will not protect my heart from possible unmendable fractures by hiding it behind headless chickenness.

May Bank Holiday weekend...

... or the beginning of summer as they call it here.

It is raining of course.

Himself has gone fishing.

Up at 7.30am this morning, tearing the apartment apart looking for his tackle.

fnar

It was in the car of course. Queenie remembered when the noise brought her to enough to ask what the noise was about.

"I never get to do nuthin! Goddamn, never!"

Queenie and Himself have had a few scheduled events cancelled on us by life recently, hockey games and gigs and weekends off and fishing trips etc., so Himself was convinced this weekend's fishing wouldn't happen.

Queenie was determined that it would. So she forced her brain to wake up enough to find whatever it was that was standing between her man and his day to Himself.

When a man's had a day out on a lake in a canoe with two buddies and a chance to catch some fish he's a whole different kind of man when he gets home.

Which is good for Queenie.

"Why do you never get to do anything, pet? What can't you find?"

Rumble, mutter, growl, sound of the storage closet being rearranged by a maniac was all I got.

"Oh for chrissake, why are you disturbing the whole building at this hour of the morning?"

That worked.

"I can't find my tackle."

I resisted the urge to tell him to look in his underpants. That I was sure I had spotted it there not ten minutes before.

"I think it's in the car, dear."

"I looked in the car."

"It's in the cooler in the car."

"Why the hell did you put it in the cooler?!"

"I didn't put it in the cooler dear."

"Oh."

Stomp, mutter, clunk, clunk down the stairs.

He didn't come back up and Fat Albert is gone from the front yard, so I assume he's gone fishing.

I went for lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in months and we talked about everything, and then saw a movie, The Visitors. Good movie, same director as The Station Agent. Same theme, loneliness in the crowd and finding a new way to have a family. This film dealt with illegal immigrants, rather than physical disability.

Then we went downtown to look at the new lululemon store.

Utter chaos.

There were thirty five people lined up at the checkout to pay for the same pair of yoga pants.

So we gave up and went to worship at the Starbuck's shrine to consumerism instead, then went round the corner to Elsie's consignment store, where Elsie had a fantastic selection of shoes, bags and unique clothes. And I got an Anne Taylor preppy red and blue print skirt and a pair of matching sparkly red ballet pumps for the same price as a tank top in lululemon. And my friend got a Betty (somebody, not Jackson, the one with the stores with the chandeliers) cashmere bolero for not much more.

A nice female city afternoon.

I haven't had a nice female city afternoon since the day I went shopping with Colombo in Dublin last new year's.

Tonight Kitty and I will get a gourmet pizza and chill out and wait for the fisherman to come home with his booty.

Assuming he got some booty with his tackle.

Hopefully the sun will come out tomorrow.

Then we can clean up the debris from last night's welcome to the summer bonfire.

This week's horoscope

I do love Rob Brezny's Free Will Astrology, which appears every week in Halifax' weekly newspaper The Coast. This week it says:

As part of the arrangement your soul entered into before you were born, you were given the mission to accomplish five specific miracles. Three of these you have not yet even guessed the nature of. Why? For one thing, none of your elders or teachers ever named them for you while you were growing up. Secondly, you have been overly timid about imagining what you're capable of. That's the bad news, Cancerian. The good news is that you're very close to the mystery spot where one of those undiscovered dreams has been moldering.


Hmmmm......

Any ideas, folks?

Himself's horoscope is spot on:

The complexity of your current astrological aspects almost overwhelmed me. I couldn't see how to compose a meaningful oracle in the face of such rich and confounding prospects. I was stumped. Then, as my deadline approached, the unthinkable happened: I decided to goof off. Fleeing my office, I wandered down to the beach, where I strolled aimlessly and emptied my mind. At one point I spied a fortune cookie perched absurdly on top of a fence post. The moment I broke it open and read the fortune inside, I knew I'd found the perfect message for you. It said, "If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man. He will find an easier way to do it."

Not that Queenie is insinuating for one second that Himself is a lazy man, ohnosireebob.... it's just that when the shit hits the fan, Queenie's approach is to run around in ever-decreasing circles and Himself's approach is to let the shit slide off the fan.... slowly... and then clean up what's left when the fan stops moving.

A far superior approach.

But hey, I may be a headless chicken, but I'm a miracle-working headless chicken.

SO THERE!!

Where's me sofa?

I see that Habitat has closed its two stores in Ireland, due to serious downturn in business.

Laydeez are calling the radio wondering where their EU3,700 sofas are.

Oh dear.

Apparently, the credit card companies can't give them their money back.

YES I SAID THE CREDIT CARD COMPANY.

What in Jays' name are they doing putting a EU3,700 sofa on a credit card?

Yes, I know I put a house deposit on a credit card one time, but it was only for one day because it was a Sunday and at ten am on Monday I got the money out of the bank.

I'm sure they'll get their sofas at some point. They were never going to be delivered on time anyways, Habitat sofas having a habit of being late. And tat.

Geddit?

We should just give the laydeez their money back, put the sofas in the National Museum and label them the day the tiger died.

Thanks to everyone whose conspicuous consumption made the last thirteen years so much fun that I had to rip my life up and move to a different continent to get away from it.

Maybe we can all grow up and get some brains now.

Maybe, shock horror, people will be able to recycle furniture, cars, clothes, etc. without being made to feel like they're some kind of pre-famine troll.

Maybe it's for the best.

Let's just hope that everyone has a nice soft washable cream velour landing.

Crusher Cowen gets the top job

From The Irish Times:

"This is the biggest day Offaly ever saw.”

Meanwhile, as the crowd at the gates unfolded an endless FF banner, awaiting the drive past of the new Taoiseach, chanting endless choruses of The Offaly Rover, they challenged anyone to say that Offaly is not the cradle of civilisation, citing Millennium Man (“a dashing wing back”), the Taoiseach, and Barack Obama as evidence.

Plus thwarting Kerry’s five in a row in 1982 with a Séamus Darby goal, added Mary Guiney.

When a Kilkenny garda could take it no more and wondered aloud about the precise depth of their hurling skills, they threatened to have him transferred to Craggy Island with their potent local influence.

Then they wrapped a tricolour feather boa around him, danced The Offaly Rover, and banged on the roof of the brand new Taoiseach’s flat, shiny Merc as he drove off to the Áras.

So. No more pure mule, thank you.

A Taoiseach and quite possibly an American President in the same year... who'da thunk!

G'wan the Faithful!!

Lobster got himself a girl

One time, oh maybe bout five years back, it was coming up to Hallowe'en and Lobster was home sitting by moma while she let his costume out again.

Lobster loved his costume. It was a fireman's costume of course. It had a nice dark jacket and gold buttons all down the front. With a big shiny hat. Which he loved to fill up with all the candy he could find on Hallowe'en night.

Lobster didn't go looking for candy of course, that was for kids. He was right sad when pappy told him that. He loved to go collecting candy. But Lobster was nearly a man now. So it had to stop.

But sometimes, if he asked nice, the kids would tip some of their candy pillows into his shiny hat and he'd have himself a right haul.

He loved Gummy Bears the best.

Anyhows, he was home sitting by moma when pappy comes in from baiting trawl and says, Lobster, there's a dance on down the Legion tonight and you should go! It'll be good for you to get out and maybe meet a nice girl.

So down he went, all cleaned up and shaved right, with his costume all snug on his hips and his hat all shined up.

My, but the Legion was full of the weirdest kinda folks that night. You couldn't tell who was who, with all the costumes and the lights flashing from the discotheque.

And there were witches everywhere: witches on the dancefloor boogiein' on down, witches knocking back shots and smoking cigarettes, witches playing pool, witches going in the washroom and coming out, all in gangs of black with big pointy hats.

There were even witches playing on the machines, with witches standing behind them waiting their turn.

My it was some witchy convention that night.

How was Lobster ever going to find a nice girl, what with all the girls cackling and grinning and hiding themselves under their cloaks?

He needed a beer to set himself up to decide. So he went on up to the bar and there she was.

A witch to be sure, but perched up there on her pointy black hat she had the biggest, brightest, shiniest red light he ever saw on a girl. There it was, just as jaunty as could be, winking on and off and justa callin' to him.

What'll your poison be, the witch said.

Her big red light winked at him.

On. And off. And on. And off.

Lobster felt the world spinning around him.

He got himself a beer and went and sat and just watched the bright new light in his life for a while.

Later on, he was coming out of the washroom and there it was, right in front of him, justa winking at him like there was no other fireman on earth knew what it wanted.

He grabbed ahold of his courage with both his hands and said, 'who in the hell are you now, missy, with your big red light, that makes me spin round and round. I do love it so.'

Don't you know me, she said, all shy and quiet.

Well, I wouldn't be asking if I knew, now would I, Lobster replied.

A light came in her eyes right then, like Lobster'd said the right thing, and she leaned in close under his chin and stared into his eyes.

The big red light winked right at him.

On. And off. And on. And off. And on.

Why don't you come into my witch's garage with me, she said, and I'll whisk you away on my broomstick.

Oh my.

Before Lobster knows it, he's in the broom closet with the witch.

There's a couple of other couples in there, justa groanin' anda moanin' in the dark, but the big red light cleared them all out in no time and then they were alone.

Just the two of them.

And the big red light.

On. And off. And on. And off.

Lobster tried to look past the light into her eyes.

Tell me your name, little witch he said, real quiet and nice.

Well, why don't you call me Right Eager, she said.

What kinda name is that, said Lobster.

That's what they call me round here, she said.

Will you fly me through the sky on your broomstick, Lobster asked.

Why yes, she said, all quiet and nice.

Not like a witch should be at all.

And the big red light will show us the way, Lobster thought.

Won't pappy be proud...

First of three

First day off.


Of three.


No irritating schedule interruptions.


Yet.

Apart from my continuous interruptions to my blogging. Which are mostly self-administered.


I have been looking at old photos from Trinity in the late eighties, posted on Facebook. Very nostalgic. Very nice photos too. Would make a great book.

I have done all the chores I needed to today, so all I have to is eat, shower, dress and then go looking for the Roberto Bolano book recommended on Colour of Memory recently.

Then I will attempt to clean the bathroom.

Which is beyond acceptable, having waited patiently for Himself to notice the dirt, which is not happening, due to the fishing season being open and the Stanley Cup in full flow.

It may take a while.

If I find the book.

Life is more important than a clean bathroom.

Until life involves having guests.

Guess I have another month then.

Percy's Depressed becomes Chocolate Court

I've been thinking about this for some time.

It's time to decide to be here.

So I'm here now.

For now.

So why Chocolate Lake?

I don't know.

When I googled it, this is the most relevant hit I got. My neighbour, Ms Maggie Beach (don't ask, she picked the name, it's her porn name apparently) used to work in the Armdale Yacht Club, which is just down the road.

In the 1920's young men like Jack Buckley, Jim Egan, and Walter Piers led the way to the incorporation of the Armdale Yacht Club. First from a location close to Jubillee Road, then from 'Mosey' Stoneman's Armdale Boat House and the Edmonds ground, AYC set itself up on Melville Island.

A 1930's challenge with those who raced on Chocolate Lake brought others to the Arm. The 'Siskin' was an early power boat. During the prohibition era she knew about "rum running". Louis 'Tookie' Murphy (AYC's 2nd Commodore) later became Siskin's proud owner. Jim Egan, AYC's first Commodore, was the owner of the other power boat 'Comber'.

Now that it's all about Chocolate and not about Percy, I shall try to find out why it's called Chocolate Lake. I heard that there used to be a chocolate factory by the lake, where the hotel is now. But I don't know if that's true.

My obsession with Blogger posts continues

I tried to talk about this recently but I was too tired to make any sense.

Because Himself and I are both on gmail and Facebook and share a computer, there's a certain amount of typing in of passwords and user names that goes on when we change over from Kijiji stalking to blogging of an evening.

So regularly I have to go through the Blogger home page or whatever it is.

And it annoys me.

For a number of reasons.

It's a workaday page, so it's really clunky and difficult to get around.

There are posts which are generally too erudite for me to understand about meta stuff etc.

And then, recently, there was a post about some guy called Eric, who left.

And the whole thing was tagged.

And it turned out it was a puff piece for him, his mates, and his new job.

WHICH IS FINE.

I'm all for previous employers giving the good ship entrepreneurship a big push off the wharf.

It's the least they can do for you after you worked your nads off for them for five years.

But why did they make him sound like such a loser?

And why was the photo all about the chick with the hoodie? And not Eric?

I think I may have tracked her down.

Her name is ELLETM (I can't make the TM go up where it should be, because I can't write code).

Why is there a woman called Elle trade marking her name?

ARE YOU STOOPID?

THAT'S NOT COOL.

THAT'S STOOPID.

Okay, I'm going to stop bitching about the landlord now.

Nice Google..... nice...