In my constant quest for interesting news, information and current happenings – especially where books are concerned, I’m forever looking for new websites, publications etc. that might spark an interesting article or written piece. As I’m sure many of you have noticed, media likes to put everything into numbers: Top 20 Countdown, 25 Hottest Celebrities. 5 Things Not To Put On Your Resume. Most recently, Entertainment Weekly’s website, (EW.com) did “100 Worst Oscar Snubs” – in 3 parts. So I did a quick click through of the images and blurbs, it was interesting enough, but nothing that motivated me to write anything.
Continuing my quest, I click over to the London newspaper, Guardian, and what do I see? 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. 1000. In three parts. Broken out by genre. Are you kidding? How lazy are we?! Was the burden of 100 movies so overwhelming for EW that they had to split it into three parts? Talk about milking it. Even the New York Times only gave us the top 10 books of 2008; a whole 10 out of literally hundreds of thousands. I hope they didn’t break a sweat putting that together for us.
The Guardian article even when a step further and broke out a few subgenres, such as: radical reading, imagined worlds, the best gothic novels, the best dystopias, novels that predicted the future and even the best novels about madness. They didn’t just take the easy way out either; they included books such as Don Quixote, published in 1605 all the way to the 21st century. Up to now, I considered myself fairly informed about books. I’ve taken a lot of literature classes, read many of the classics, worked in publishing for 12 years, but there were books on this list that I hadn’t even heard of, much less read; which, surprisingly, included a Charles Dickens novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844).
Even better than the British’s effort to compile these books, is their style of writing the blurbs for them. Here is a sample of one of the comedy novels they’ve suggested, which hooked me instantly and now I have to read it:
Martin Amis: Money (1984)
Money is about a fat dumb bloke who hits Manhattan like a steam train — and Christ, does it hit back. As he drunkenly veers between topless bars, limos, clip joints, fast-food shacks and high-end film execs' meeting rooms, it becomes clear that this is a man, as Amis puts it, addicted to the 20th century: an incarnation of all our greed, lust and stupidity. Yet his story is irresistibly witty and suspenseful; if the plot twists prove too much, you can just lie back and enjoy the gallows humour. Carrie O'Grady