Saturday 26 March 2011

Fifty Book'ths


Scratchwood ever infected by Faffbook has been inspecting woodcuts of his past and stickily precise conquests. He sits and here we are when all good souls are slumped as saggy Saturday allows, set to toil but unlikely in our sighs and filling time then inch by unturned inch. It is and again books that are the cause for his mood. Faffbook has a list and he, he has not many of them to his name. An oaf without letters claims nearly half and a bawd of better humour not far less.
He has it in mind to produce but lazily so, our own list - or his list (but mine). In no especial order nor claims to better nor worst, no more than one per writer and that which first occurs, not perhaps the best or most likely that considered such.
A different list then without in places those usual and bullish suspects. Again and note in no particular order, nor one made as better than another.
Fifty here, yet another fifty when the mood once more takes.
Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving – Martin Millar
American Gods – Neil Gaiman
London – Edward Rutherford
Nine Princes in Amber – Roger Zelazny
Psychoville – Christopher Fowler
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Logan’s World – William F. Nolan
1984 – George Orwell
The Winter King – Bernard Cornwell
The Final Programme – Michael Moorcock
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Stand – Stephen King
Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Back in the USSR – Eugene Byrne, Kim Newman
Thin He Was and Filthy Haired – Robert Llewellyn
Night Watch – Terry Pratchett
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
The Pyramid – William Golding
Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves
The Magus – John Fowles
Swords of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
Porno – Irvine Welsh
Barcelona Plates – Alexei Sayle
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - Alan Garner
Lifeboat – Harry Harrison
The Machine Gunners – Robert Westall
Jack the Bodiless – Julian May
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
Danny Champion of the World – Roald Dahl
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsythe
Cider with Rosie – Laurie Lee
The Code of the Woosters – P. G. Wodehouse
The Fallible Fiend – L. Sprague de Camp
The Fandom of the Operator – Robert Rankin
The Liquidator – John Gardner
Faust – Robert Nye
The Fabulous Riverboat – Philip Jose Farmer
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
The Fog – James Herbert

3 comments:

  1. 21 that I've read. 1 that I own but have not yet read and 4 others on my 'need to buy' list. :)

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  2. My 50:

    The Magus – John Fowles
    American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
    If On A Winter's Night A Traveller – Italo Calvino
    Faust – Robert Nye
    Grendel – John Gardner
    London Fields – Martin Amis
    The Secret History – Donna Tartt
    The Swords of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
    Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
    1982 Janine – Alasdair Gray
    Red Nails – Robert E Howard
    The Drowned World – J G Ballard
    Cities of the Red Night – William Burroughs
    The Final Programme – Michael Moorcock
    The Arabian Nightmare – Robert Irwin
    Logan's Run – William F Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
    Fugue For a Darkening Island – Christopher Priest
    Kite World – Keith Roberts
    Live and Let Die – Ian Fleming
    A Taste For Death – Peter O'Donnell
    Damnation Alley – Roger Zelazny
    The Eyes of the Overworld – Jack Vance
    A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
    The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K Dick
    The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
    High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
    The Broken Sword – Poul Anderson
    The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
    The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
    The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
    Dune – Frank Herbert
    The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
    Delirium's Mistress – Tanith Lee
    Milk, Sulphate & Alby Starvation – Martin Millar
    The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin – David Nobbs
    Bug Jack Barron – Norman Spinrad
    The Shadow of the Torturer – Gene Wolfe
    Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock
    The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - Louis de Bernières
    Imajica – Clive Barker
    The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureshi
    Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
    Slaves of New York – Tama Janowitz
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
    Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
    Madrigal – John Gardner
    Caracole – Edmund White
    Women – Charles Bukowski
    I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

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  3. Twenty three of those I've read. There's that number again.

    I've not read Stieg Larsson purely because the main character is (I've read) a writer. I get for-no-good-reason niggly when the protagonist is such. Stephen King does it a lot. Necessary in Misery, irrelevant in Salem's Lot.

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