Books etc

Nobody gets a sticker, suckers. Only Madame Boffin, Treespotter and Chosha tried guessing (unless, Jamie, you meant you agreed with *everything* Madame Boffin said, including her guesses) the red herring among my bonus reads.

I admit, it was devilishly cunning of me, the odd one out was in fact This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have indeed read (and own) Kafka and Sophocles, Mark Haddon's mystery sits on my bookshelf alongside Raymond Chandler's own, and Douglas Coupland's post-apocalyptic earth seems preferable to Irvine Welsh's vision of society. Of the Beats, of course nobody familiar with my blog ever doubted I dig both Kerouac and Burroughs. Bonfire of the Vanities was a good last-minute guess by Chosha, but as Roy Walker of Catchphrase might say: it's a good guess, but it's not quite right.

It's true, even though I love The Great Gatsby, I'm not such a fan of Fitzgerald's other works -- and have never read This Side of Paradise. I've never really got into his other novels, Tender is the Night is beautifully written, but the plot just didn't really engage me. I'm sure I have also read -- or tried to read -- The Beautiful and Damned but didn't get into it. It seems Fitzgerald might have ripped off Zelda's work with ...Paradise anyway.

And just to prove a point, that I don't only read the obscure and depressing, I present in my defence my Top 5 favourite books:

1)The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A tale of love, longing, and ultimately loss.
Nobody could ever accuse this book of being obscure -- and no, it's not depressing. Shut up.
My favourite part of the novel is where Gatsby tells Daisy she has a green light on the end of her dock, and the significance of their meeting; "Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."

2)Been Down So Long, It Looks Up To Me, by Richard Fariña
If this is obscure, it shouldn't be -- and if it's depressing it's only because it was the only novel Fariña ever wrote -- due to his untimely demise, shortly after its publication. Friends with Bob Dylan, married to Mimi Baez, Fariña's book should be loved universally.

3)High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
The movie might have been completely different (like most movies made from Hornby's novels are), but the themes of music, love and how music can directly relate to our relationships are universal.

4)On Green Dolphin Street, by Sebastian Faulks
Better known for his graphic war novels (that is they are graphic in their depiction of war, not they are graphic novels about war), surprisingly the only war in this book is the Cold War -- set to the background to a story of infidelity and love.

5)The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chander
Based on the short stories "The Man Who Liked Dogs" and "The Silver Slippers", it's little wonder this book is confusing. The original murder quickly gets forgotten, and by the end of the book there's been so many twists and turns it's hard to remember where you started. But my god, Chandler wrote crime fiction like no other -- and I might be sad, but I still think the movies where Bogart plays Philip Marlowe are the best.