The Book of Lists

28 GREAT BEGINNINGS TO NOVELS

10 POETS AND HOW THEY EARNED A LIVING

Trained as an engraver, Blake studied art at the Royal Academy but left to earn a living engraving for booksellers. For a few years he was a partner in a print-selling and engraving business. He then worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and drawing teacher. It became increasingly hard for Blake to earn a living. He had a patron but lived essentially in poverty and obscurity, occasionally receiving an art commission. Blake was later recognised as one of England’s finest engravers and most remarkable poet.

Raised on a farm in Ayrshire, Burns was a full-time labourer on the land at the age of 15. He tried to become a surveyor, but ill health forced him to give up. Next he lived with relatives who ran a flax-dressing business, until their shop burned down. Farming barely paid his bills, so Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 to get money for passage to Jamaica, where he had a job offer as an overseer. The book was so successful that he used the money to visit Edinburgh instead. Returning to the farm, Burns took a job as a tax inspector, trying unsuccessfully to juggle three occupations. He lost the farm, but moved to Dumfries and continued as a tax inspector and poet.

Keats was trained as a surgeon and apothecary in Edmonton, and later moved to London to work as a dresser in a hospital. For a year or so Keats had his own surgeon/apothecary practice, and at the same time began publishing his poetry. His first major work, Poems, appeared in 1817, and that year he gave up medicine for the literary life. Charles Armitage Brown became his patron, providing him with a house in Hampstead, outside London.

Whitman had a chequered career in newspaper work, starting as a printer’s assistant and eventually becoming an editor in New York throughout the 1840s. After ten years he gave up journalism for carpentry and verse. During the Civil War, Whitman moved to Washington, DC, took a job in the paymaster’s office, and spent his spare time nursing the wounded. In 1865 he became a clerk at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, but was soon fired for being the author of the scandalous Leaves of Grass. He then clerked in the attorney general’s office until a paralytic stroke forced him to retire in 1873.

Rimbaud’s lover Paul Verlaine supported him for a while in Paris; after their separation, Rimbaud lived in London, working at various menial jobs until poverty or ill health or both caused his return to France. In 1876 he joined the Dutch colonial army and went to Indonesia, but deserted and again returned to France. From there he joined a circus en route to Scandinavia; went to Cyprus as a labourer and later as a builder’s foreman; and finally gave up his wandering in Harar, Ethiopia. There he worked for a coffee exporter, and later tried (unsuccessfully) to become an independent arms dealer. In 1888 he was managing a trading post, dealing in coffee, ivory, arms and possibly slaves.

After leaving Harvard University without a degree, Stevens was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune for a year. He then attended New York University Law School, passed the bar in 1904, and for the next 12 years practised law in New York. In 1916 he joined the legal department of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut; by 1934 he was vice-president of the company.

Williams earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906, interned at a hospital in New York City, and for a year did postgraduate work in paediatrics at the University of Leipzig in Germany. He established a medical practice in his home town of Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1910, and until the mid-1950s maintained both a medical and a literary career. An appointment to the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress in 1952 was withdrawn because of Williams’s radical politics. He spent his last 10 years lecturing at many American universities.

In recognition of his poetic skills, the Chilean government awarded Neruda with a non-paying position as Chile’s consul in Burma in 1927. Eventually he graduated to a salaried office, serving in Ceylon, the Dutch East Indies, Argentina and Spain. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Neruda, without waiting for orders, declared Chile on the side of the Spanish republic. He was recalled by the Chilean government and later reassigned to Mexico. In 1944 he was elected to the national senate as a member of the Communist Party. He later served as a member of the central committee of the Chilean Communist Party and as a member of the faculty of the University of Chile.

In 1945, while suspended from Columbia University for a year, Ginsberg worked as a dishwasher in a Times Square, New York, restaurant, as a merchant seaman and a reporter for a newspaper in New Jersey. He returned to Columbia and graduated with a BA in literature in 1948. Far more influential was his off-campus friendship with a number of figures in the future Beat movement, including Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. In 1949 Ginsberg was arrested for letting one of the friends, Herbert Huncke, use his apartment to store some stolen property. For his sentence, Ginsberg was committed to a psychiatric hospital for eight months. Upon his release, he went home to Patterson, New Jersey, to live with his father. After a few years, Ginsberg completely changed his lifestyle. He moved to San Francisco and led a life of middle-class respectability. He had a high-paying job in market research, a live-in girlfriend and an upscale apartment. He was also miserable and began seeing a therapist. ‘The doctor kept asking me, “What do you want to do?” Finally I told him — quit. Quit the job, my tie and suit, the apartment on Nob Hill. Quit it and go off and do what I wanted, which was to get a room with Peter [Orlovsky], and devote myself to writing and contemplation, to Blake and smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted.’ Ginsberg wrote a memo to his boss explaining how his position could be eliminated and then he left. In 1955, shortly after devoting himself to poetry, he created a sensation with the first public reading of his poem ‘Howl’, an event considered the birth of the Beat revolution. Ginsberg and his partner, Orlovsky, were able to live off Ginsberg’s royalties, money Ginsberg earned at poetry readings and disability cheques Orlovsky received as a Korean War veteran.

In her youth, Angelou worked as a cook and a waitress, and as the first black female fare-collector with the San Francisco Streetcar Company. In the 1950s she became a nightclub performer, specialising in calypso songs and dances. She also performed in Porgy and Bess on a 22-country tour of Europe and Africa organised by the US State Department in 1954 and 1955. During the 1960s Angelou was northern coordinator of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, associate editor of an English-language newspaper in Cairo, features editor of a paper in Ghana and assistant administrator at the University of Ghana. She acted in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, wrote songs for B. B. King, wrote and produced educational television series, and acted on Broadway (for one night in 1973) and on television — as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in Roots, in 1977. In 1972 she wrote the script for Georgia, Georgia, the first original screenplay by a black woman to be produced. She continues to be a popular lecturer, as well as a university professor.

32 CURIOUS HISTORIES AND ESOTERIC STUDIES FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE PEOPLE’S ALMANAC

One of the least-used dictionaries in the world, this slim 62-page booklet translates Italian into the language of the Greenland Eskimos. Collectors of obscure dictionaries will also appreciate Vladimir Marku’s seminal work Fjalori I Naftës (1995), which translates 25,000 oil industry-related terms from English into Albanian.

An important contribution to the history of fishhooks. Some of the chapter titles: II. ‘The Character of Sturgeon Hooks’; IV. ‘Hooks in Eastern Europe’; and VII. ‘Life Story of Hooks of the Samolov Type’.

Capranica. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1965.

This monograph details the responses of caged bullfrogs to the recorded sound of mating calls of 34 kinds of frogs and toads. The author’s academic career was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

A guide to and from seasickness by the medical director of the New York Intestinal Sanitarium.

At last, a fully illustrated filmography of every movie in which a chicken — living, dead or cooked — appears. Films in which the words ‘chicken’, ‘hen’ or ‘rooster’ are mentioned are also included.

Buchanan, one of Scotland’s greatest scholars and historians, died in poverty in 1582. This publication was part of a series which included Phrenological Studies of the Skull and Endocranial Cast of Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich by Sir Arthur Keith and The Relations of Shoulder Blade Types to Problems of Mental and Physical Adaptability by William Washington Graves.

This 15-page diatribe contends that the Beatles were agents of communism, sent to America to subvert its youth through mass hypnosis ‘The Beatles’ ability to make teenagers take off their clothes and riot is labouratory tested and approved’, states Noebel. He supports his theory with no less than 168 footnotes.

The publication of this study was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor.

An excellent textbook by a master ice sculptor. Weising gives instructions for carving such items as Tablets of the Ten Commandments Delivered by Moses (for bar mitzvahs); Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; and the Travellers Insurance Company Tower in Hartford, CT.

Stockholm: Statens Ethnografiska Museum, 1949.

A survey of cultures in which people commonly rest while standing by placing one foot on or near the knee of the other leg. Contains 15 photographs from Africa, Sri Lanka, Romania, Australia and Bolivia, as well as a fold-out locator map of Africa.

Readers who are drawn to dirty books might also enjoy Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt by Christian Engnensberger (New York: Seabury, 1972); The Kingdom of Dust by J. Gordon Ogden (Chicago: Popular Mechanics, 1912); and All About Mud by Oliver R. Selfrige (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

A detailed and surprisingly readable study by an ornithologist resident in Costa Rica. A 12-page bibliography is included for serious students. Less pacific readers might prefer Birds Fighting by Stuart Smith and Erik Hosking (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), which includes numerous photos of real birds attacking stuffed birds.

A fully illustrated account of the history of jousting tournaments in the United States, with emphasis on modern contests, records, rules and heroes.

A nuts-and-bolts account including advertising tips and postal rules and regulations, as well as discussion of such difficult topics as ‘Should a lady healer employ a gentleman assistant?’

Burton presents the cases of 70 people from New York and Los Angeles who have dreamed about Woody Allen. Fans of books on people who dream about famous people will also want to track down Dreams about H.M. the Queen by Brian Masters (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Mayflower, 1973), a collection of dreams about Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the British royal family; I Dream of Madonna by Kay Turner (San Francisco: Collins, 1993); Dreams of Bill by Judith Anderson-Miller and Bruce Joshua Miller (New York: Citadel Press, 1994), a collection of dreams about Bill Clinton; and Dreaming of Diana: The Dreams Diana, Princess of Wales, Inspired by Rita Frances (London: Robson Books, 1998).

A review of the lives of eight little-known sisters, including Sarianna Browning, Sarah Disraeli and Sophia Thoreau, as well as two known sisters of English writers, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Lamb.

This book, written in 1923, examines the unusual custom of curing the disease of scrofula, a form of tuberculosis, by being touched by the King of France or the King of England. The practice died out after 1825.

A biography that ignores Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln and deals instead, for 234 pages, with his career as an actor, which continued until four weeks before he killed the President of the United States.

A lively account of the birth and growth of the elastic webbing industry in the nineteenth century. In the words of the author, once a man has ‘got the smell of rubber in his nostrils… he either stays with rubber or is thereafter ever homesick to get back into the rubber industry’.

A report of the first three years of the Canadian national egg laying contests, from 1919 to 1922, as well as a preliminary contest held on Prince Edward Island in 1918–19. The work consists almost entirely of charts comparing production and costs by owner, bird and year. In 1921–22 one of the birds belonging to Lewis N. Clark of Port Hope, Ontario, produced 294 eggs.

In his preface, Dr Kidd states, ‘No doubt many of the phenomena here described are intrinsically uninteresting and unimportant.’ However, if you have ever yearned for a book that analyses the direction in which hair grows on lions, oxen, dogs, apes, tapirs, humans, asses, anteaters, sloths, and other animals, you won’t be disappointed.

This pioneering classic makes use of 197 photographs to help answer the question ‘What actually happens when a drop falls and splashes?’ Worthington’s book was considered so valuable to students of physics that it was reissued as recently as 1963.

Thirty-three examples of sentences that include all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. Included are classics such as ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ and ‘Pack my bags with five dozen liquor jugs’, as well as the less well-known ‘The July sun caused a fragment of black pine waxe to ooze on the velvet quilt’ and ‘Very careful and exact knowledge should be emphasized in adjudging a quadrant.’

National Gallery Publications, 1946.

A rare opportunity to view the flip side of 42 famous works of art.

A definitive listing of 401 barbed wire patents filed between the years 1867 and 1897.

One hundred and fifty-six photographs of movie stars in bathtubs. There are also numerous shots of actors, actresses and animals in showers and steambaths.

A complete guidebook to wax museums in the United States, with 678 illustrations, including Brigitte Bardot, Nikita Khrushchev and the Battle of Yorktown.

The autobiography of the world’s first transsexual parents. Chris and Cathy began life as Anne and Eugene. Anne was a social worker who wished she was a man; Eugene was a Kung Fu instructor who wished he was a woman. They fell in love, Anne gave birth to a baby girl, Emma, and then Anne and Eugene switched sexes. Anne, now Chris, became Emma’s father and Eugene, now Cathy, took over the role of mother.

The subtitle says it all: The Complete Guide to Selling Your Organs, Body Fluids, Bodily Functions, and Being a Human Guinea Pig. If you are reasonably healthy, but have no job skills, this is the book for you. Hogshire explains how to earn $100 a day as a subject for drug studies and other scientific experiments, and how to sell your blood, sperm, hair, breast milk and bone marrow.

In exquisite detail, Adler traces the evolution of what Elvis ate from the time he was a baby (corn bread soaked in buttermilk) through his years in the army, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Graceland, and finally the bingeing that weakened his health. Elvis gobbled a dozen honey doughnuts in a cab before a visit to the White House and once ate five chocolate sundaes for breakfast before passing out. Included are recipes for fried squirrel, peanut butter and American cheese sandwich, and Elvis’s last supper, which was actually ice cream and cookies.

Unlike most books that deal with alien abduction, LaVigne’s treatise is a practical guide that helps abductees control their fear and ‘take control’ of the experience. The author smashes various myths such as ‘the ETs have no lips, and do not open their mouths’, ‘all ETs who are called greys are grey’ and ‘the ETs have long tentacle-like fingers covered with suction cups, similar to those found on an octopus’.

The BBB presents the history of pie-throwing as a political act and includes several recipes for easy-to-throw pies. Also included are photographs of such celebrities as Bill Gates and Clare Short being pied.

8 UNLIKELY HOW-TO BOOKS

• How to Be Happy Though Married by ‘A Graduate in the University of Matrimony’. London: J. Fisher Unwin, 1895.

• How to Rob Banks Without Violence by Roderic Knowles. London: Michael Joseph, 1972.

• How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1989.

• How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow. Everett, WA: Apollyon Press, 1992.

• How to Speak With the Dead: A Practical Handbook by ‘Sciens’. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918.

The author is identified as also having written ‘recognised scientific text-books’.

• How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S Strauss. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1984.

• How to Avoid Huge Ships by Captain John W. Trimmer. Seattle, WA: Captain John W. Trimmer, 1983.

• How to be Pretty Though Plain by Mrs Humphry. London: James Bowden, 1899.

THE ORIGINAL TITLES OF 28 FAMOUS BOOKS

• Original title: First Impressions

Final title: Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Author: Jane Austen

• Original title: Mag’s Diversions: also The Copperfield Disclosures, The Copperfield Records, The Copperfield Survey of the World As It Rolled, and Copperfield Complete

Final title: David Copperfield (1849)

Author: Charles Dickens

• Original title: Alice’s Adventures Underground

Final title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Author: Lewis Carroll

• Original title: All’s Well That Ends Well

Final title: War and Peace (1866)

Author: Leo Tolstoy

• Original title: The Sea-Cook

Final title: Treasure Island (1883)

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

• Original title: The Chronic Argonauts

Final title: The Time Machine (1895)

Author: H.G. Wells

• Original title: Paul Morel

Final title: Sons and Lovers (1913)

Author: D.H. Lawrence

• Original title: Stephen Hero

Final title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Author: James Joyce

• Original title: The Romantic Egotist

Final title: This Side of Paradise (1920)

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Original title: The Village Virus

Final title: Main Street (1920)

Author: Sinclair Lewis

• Original title: Incident at West Egg; also Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bounding Lover

Final title: The Great Gatsby (1925)

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Original title: Fiesta; also The Lost Generation, River to the Sea, Two Lie Together and The Old Leaven

Final title: The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Author: Ernest Hemingway

• Original title: Tenderness

Final title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Author: D.H. Lawrence

• Original title: Twilight

Final title: The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Author: William Faulkner

• Original title: Bar-B-Q

Final title: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

Author: James M. Cain

• Original title: Tomorrow Is Another Day; also Tote the Weary Load, Milestones, Jettison, Ba! Ba! Black Sheep, None So Blind, Not in Our Stars and Bugles Sang True

Final title: Gone with the Wind (1936)

Author: Margaret Mitchell

• Original title: The Various Arms; also Return to the Wars

Final title: To Have and Have Not (1937)

Author: Ernest Hemingway

• Original title: Something That Happened

Final title: Of Mice and Men (1937)

Author: John Steinbeck

• Original title: Salinas Valley

Final title: East of Eden (1952)

Author: John Steinbeck

• Original title: Interzone

Final title: Naked Lunch (1959)

Author: William S. Burroughs

• Original title: Catch-18

Final title: Catch-22 (1961)

Author: Joseph Heller

• Original title: The Fox

Final title: The Magus (1966)

Author: John Fowles

• Original title: A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis

Final title: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

Author: Philip Roth

• Original title: The Summer of the Shark; also The Terror of the Monster and The Jaws of the Leviathan

Final title: Jaws (1974)

Author: Peter Benchley

• Original title: Before This Anger

Final title: Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976)

Author: Alex Haley

• Original title: The Shine

Final title: The Shining (1977 — altered when King learned that ‘shine’ was a derogatory term for African Americans, as they are often employed shining shoes; and a black man is a central character in the novel.)

Author: Stephen King

• Original title: Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament

Final title: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)

Author: J.K. Rowling

• Original title: Seven Seas and the Thirteen Rivers

Final title: Brick Lane (2003)

Author: Monica Ali

THE BOOKSELLER’S 9 GREAT MODERN SURPRISE BESTSELLERS

Founded in 1858, The Bookseller is the leading journal of the book industry in the UK.

An icky fable about a seagull’s quest. No one would go for that, advised several people, including the author’s agent (‘they’re not interested in a talking seagull’). The first US printing was 7,500 copies; the book went on to sell millions, in numerous languages.

Forsyth, a foreign correspondent whose previous book had been an account of the war in Biafra, received numerous rejections for his first thriller, perhaps because publishers did not expect readers to be thrilled by a story of which they knew the outcome (assassin fails to kill de Gaulle). It sold millions, was made into a film and established the career of one of the most successful novelists of our time.

Richard Adams’ tale about rabbits first appeared, having been rejected in prototype form by several London publishers, in a print run of just 2,000 copies, from the tiny firm of Rex Collings. In the next 10 years, it sold more than five million copies.

A rediscovered, illustrated diary. It became a staple on the bestseller list for years and was responsible for a fashion, now defunct, for prettily illustrated gift books, often using existing texts — The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford (Century, 1982), for example.

A diet book that sold one million copies. Fibre, which Eyton promoted, is still in vogue; but many other diet trends have supplanted hers. The current bestseller is The Atkins Diet.

It was a book that few people understood. Yet many bought it and it was translated into more than 30 languages. The genius of Hawking’s mind, belonging to a body disabled by motor neurone disease, shone out compellingly; and the title, promising illumination in a nutshell, was another strong selling point.

Former adman Mayle’s book about his move to the French countryside started out with a print run of 3,000 copies. Not only did it become a bestseller, but it spawned a genre and, possibly, a social trend: the television schedules and bookshelves are awash with the stories of people who have embarked on similar adventures.

Numerous publishers rejected Rowling’s first Harry Potter story, because 250-page novels for children were deeply unfashionable. Nor did they warm to the magical and boarding school elements. Whoops.

Autumn 2003 saw publication of autobiographies by David Beckham and by World Cup-winning England rugby captain Martin Johnson, as well as of numerous other blockbusters. They were all outsold by Lynne Truss’s little punctuation guide, which went on to be a number one bestseller in the US as well.

28 BAD REVIEWS OF FAMOUS WORKS

11 INCREDIBLE LIPOGRAMS

A form of verbal gymnastics, lipograms are written works that deliberately omit a certain letter of the alphabet by avoiding all words that include that letter. ‘Lipo’ actually means ‘lacking’ — in this case lacking a letter. An example of a contemporary lipogram is the nursery rhyme, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, rewritten without the letter s:

The French author’s book Voyage Autour du Monde Sans la Lettre A debuted in Paris in 1853. However, 30 years later in another edition, he admitted letting one letter a sneak by him in the book — he had overlooked the word serait.

A contemporary British lipogrammarian, Brandreth specialises in dropping a different letter from each of Shakespeare’s plays. All I’s were excluded from Hamlet, rendering the famous soliloquy: ‘To be or not to be; that’s the query’. He proceeded to rewrite Twelfth Night without the letters l and o, Othello without any o’s, and Macbeth without any a’s or e’s.

Bearing an obsessive dislike for the letter r, Burmann not only wrote 130 poems without using that letter, but he also omitted the letter r from his daily conversation for 17 years. This practice meant the eccentric 18th-century German poet never said his own last name.

Eckler’s speciality is rewriting well-known nursery rhymes such as ‘Little Jack Horner’, excluding certain letters. His masterpiece was ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, which he re-created in several versions, omitting in turn the letters s, a, h, e and t (as in the t-less ‘Mary Had A Pygmy Lamb’).

Summarising the entire Bible in Latin, the sixteenth-century canon of Rheims Cathedral in France omitted a different letter of the alphabet from each of the 23 chapters he produced.

The Greek poet Tryphiodorus wrote his epic poem Odyssey, chronicling the adventures of Ulysses, excluding a different letter of the alphabet from each of the 24 books. Thus, the first book was written without alpha, the second book contained no betas, and so on.

Also known as Spain’s first great dramatist, who reputedly wrote 2,200 plays, this sixteenth-century author wrote five novels that were lipograms. Each book omitted one of the five vowels a, e, i, o and u in turn.

Tying down the e key on his typewriter to make sure one didn’t slip in, Wright, a graduate of MIT, wrote a credible 50,110–word novel, Gadsby (1939), totally excluding the most frequently used letter of the English alphabet. ‘Try to write a single ten-word sentence without an e,’ said the Los Angeles Times, ‘and you will get some idea of the task he set himself.’ Wright’s novel concerned the effort of a middle-age man named John Gadsby to make his home town of Branston Hills more progressive and prosperous by turning over its administration to an Organization of Youth. Wright, a 67–year-old Californian, undertook his e-less novel to prove such a feat could be done. He wrote the book in 165 days. He employed no tricks, such as coining words or substituting apostrophes for e’s. His greatest difficulty, he stated, was in avoiding the use of verbs ending with ed, being forced to use ‘said’ for ‘replied’ or ‘asked’, and in avoiding all pronouns such as ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’. Wright died on the day of his book’s publication — but the $3.00 novel remains his monument. Today it sells at rare-book dealers for more than $1,000 a copy, with a jacket.

Perec (1936–82) was a member of the literary group Oulipo (a French acronym for ‘workshop of potential literature’), the members of which experimented with constrained writing. Perec’s most notable work in this regard is his novel La Disparation (1969), written without the letter e. It was translated into English, also without e’s, by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void. Another Perec novel, Les Revenentes (1972), is a sort of opposite: the letter e is the only vowel used.

Bok, an experimental Canadian poet, wrote Eunoia, a work in which each chapter is missing four of the five vowels. The fourth chapter, for example, does not contain a, e, i or u. A sample of the writing from this chapter is: ‘Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth.’ Eunoia won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 and became one of the best-selling works of Canadian poetry.

Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea (2001) is subtitled ‘A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable’. The story concerns a small country that begins to outlaw the use of various letters. As each letter is banned within the story, it is no longer used in the text of the novel.

MARGARET ATWOOD’S 10 ANNOYING THINGS TO SAY TO WRITERS

a) What to say

b) What writer hears

1. a) I always wait for your books to come in at the library.

b) I wouldn’t pay money for that trash.

2. a) I had to take you in school.

b) Against my will. Or: And I certainly haven’t read any of it since! Or: So why aren’t you dead?

3. a) You don’t look at all like your pictures!

b) Much worse.

4. a) You’re so prolific!

b) You write too much, and are repetitive and sloppy.

5. a) I’m going to write a book too, when I can find the time.

b) What you do is trivial, and can be done by any idiot.

6. a) I only read the classics.

b) And you aren’t one of them.

7. a) Why don’t you write about ______?

b) Unlike the boring stuff you do write about.

8. a) That book by ______ (add name of other writer) is selling like hotcakes!

b) Unlike yours.

9. a) So, do you teach?

b) Because writing isn’t real work, and you can’t possibly be supporting yourself at it.

10. a) The story of MY life — now THAT would make a good novel!

b) Unlike yours.

ROALD DAHL’S 5 BOOKS TO TAKE TO A NEW PLANET

Born in Llandaff, Wales, in 1916, Roald Dahl served as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot during World War II before becoming a hugely successful writer of novels (My Uncle Oswald), short-story collections (Someone Like You and Kiss, Kiss), screenplays (the James Bond film You Only Live Twice) and highly influential juvenile works (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, which both became highly successful films). Although Dahl was much beloved for his children’s books (his preferred form, he said, because ‘adults are much too serious for me’), a dysfunctional marriage to Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal, as well as accusations of anti-Semitism, have made him a controversial figure since his death in 1990. Dahl contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1983.

• Price’s Textbook of the Practice of Medicine (Oxford University Press). Reason: A professional medical textbook covering the description, diagnoses and treatment of virtually every known disease or illness.

• The Greater Oxford Dictionary

• The Pickwick Papers — Charles Dickens

• A book containing all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas

• Johann Sebastian Bach’s B minor Mass

HENRY MILLER’S 10 GREATEST WRITERS OF ALL TIME

One of the most controversial and innovative American writers of the twentieth century, Henry Miller was born in New York City on December 26, 1891. He spent much of the 1930s as an expatriate in Paris, where he met Anaïs Nin and wrote his two most famous novels, Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). The books were banned for many years in English-speaking countries before being published in the UK in 1963 and the US in 1964, after a landmark obscenity trial. His other works included Black Spring, Colossus of Maroussi and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus. Henry Miller died in Pacific Palisades, California, on June 7, 1980. He contributed the following list to The Book of Lists in 1977.

• Lao-Tzu

• François Rabelais

• Friedrich Nietzsche

• Rabindranath Tagore

• Walt Whitman

• Marcel Proust

• Ělie Faure

• Marie Corelli

• Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Isaac Bashevis Singer

Élie Faure (1873–1937) was a French art historian who published a five-volume History of Art between 1909 and 1921. He had studied medicine and brought a scientific approach to his examinations of art history. London-born Marie Corelli (1855–1924), whose real name was Mary Mackay, wrote 28 books, most of them lurid romances, many dealing with psychic or religious events, and all enormously popular. Critics held her in disdain (once, in retaliation, she refused to send them review copies), but Queen Victoria adored her work. Among Corelli’s most widely read books are The Sorrows of Satan and The Murder of Delicia.

IRVING WALLACE’S 9 FAVOURITE AUTHORS

On June 29, 1990 one of the co-authors of The Book of Lists, Irving Wallace, died in Los Angeles at the age of 74. His nearly three dozen books have sold an estimated 200 million copies and have been read by 1 billion people worldwide. He wrote 18 novels, including The Prize, The Man and The Word. Shortly before his death, he compiled a list of his all-time favourite authors.

• W. Somerset Maugham — Of Human Bondage, because of its compelling characterisation, narrative drive, crystal-clear prose; The Summing Up, for clarity, cynicism, philosophy; and The Moon and Sixpence.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender Is the Night.

• Arthur Koestler — Arrival and Departure and Darkness at Noon.

• Arthur Conan Doyle — the Sherlock Holmes books; pure pleasure, nothing more. Also, The Lost World.

• James Hilton — Lost Horizon and Without Armor.

• Raymond Chandler.

• Graham Greene.

• John le Carré — The Little Drummer Girl.

• Nelson De Mille — Word of Honor and By the Rivers of Babylon.

BRIAN ALDISS’S 10 FAVOURITE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS

One of the legendary figures in the science fiction genre, Brian W. Aldiss was born in 1925, served with the signal corps in the British Army, then spent nine years as a bookseller before becoming a full-time writer in 1956. His works include Frankenstein Unbound, Moreau’s Other Island and the groundbreaking Helliconia trilogy (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter). His short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was a long-time dream project for the legendary director Stanley Kubrick, and was eventually filmed after Kubrick’s death as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg in 2001. A prolific writer, Aldiss lives in Oxford, England, and his most recent novel is Super-State, published in 2003.

• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein or, The New Prometheus

• Albert Robida: The Twentieth Century

• H.G. Wells: The Time Machine

• H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds

• Olaf Stapledon: Star-Maker

• Charles Harness: The Paradox Men

• Kurt Vonnegut: Galapagos

• Harry Harrison: Bill the Galactic Hero

• Philip K. Dick: Martian Timeslip

• Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood

WILL SELF’S 9 BOOKS THAT PROVE FACT IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

The story of the Afro-American family who brought crack cocaine to Detroit in the early 1980s. A staggering portrayal of the ineluctable convergence between addiction and capitalism in Reagan’s America. At one point the family ran an entire burnt-out office block in downtown Detroit as a crack house, with different floors assigned to differently priced rocks of crack. Their dealers received MacDonalds-style training.

Crowhurst was the British solo yachtsman who faked his own positions during the 1970 round-the-world yacht race, and then when it became obvious that his subterfuge would be discovered, committed suicide by throwing himself into the sea. In a bizarre echo of the Marie Celeste, Crowhurst’s boat — Teignmouth Electron — was found floating abandoned in the Atlantic, in the cabin was his increasingly disjointed and surrealistic logbook filled with monomaniacal metaphysical speculation.

The tale of a teenage American who walked off into the wilds of Alaska and met his end there. Krakauer links this — surprisingly disturbing — account of a bright young man’s Tolstoyan rejection of bourgeois comfort to a deep and cogent meditation on isolation and the wilderness.

Not strictly speaking facts at all, a theory, but I believe it. Jaynes’s view is that some time between the composition of the Odyssey and the Iliad the human corpus callosum was formed and the mind became uni-rather than bicameral. In other words, up until comparatively recently when God or gods ‘spoke’ to people, they very much heard him, her or them. Developed with startling erudition, this book will make you look at all forms of religious enthusiasm in an altogether new light.

Luria was the pioneering neurosurgeon whose work on the victims of shelling during the Second World War led to startling new insights into the human brain. Because shrapnel wounds tended — where the patient survived at all — to take out localised areas of brain tissue, Luria was able to find an array of individuals with different bits missing. The man of the title had ceased through his injuries to experience the world as a coherent whole. Essential reading for the empiricist, as is Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist.

The story of the Ik, an isolated hill tribe in Kenya, who, when their food supply was destroyed by drought, resolved to starve themselves to death rather than migrate. A compelling depiction of the skull beneath the skin of all human communities and a kind of anthro-pological counterpoint to Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.

By no means the only book on St Kilda, but to my mind the most readable (along with the original account of the islands written by Martin Martin in the seventeenth century — crazy name, crazy guy). St Kilda is the micro-archipelago forty miles to the west of the Outer Hebrides, where a community remained almost completely isolated from the rest of the world for seven hundred years. The St Kildans lived almost entirely on seafowl which they harvested from the towering cliffs of their island fastness. They ate seagulls, exported their feathers, made them into shoes, and smeared fulmar oil on their infants’ umbilici as part of a pagan ritual. During the nineteenth century steamboat cruises were advertised in Liverpool to visit ‘Britain’s Modern Primitives’. The islands were finally evacuated in the 1930s. A remarkable story and one that MacLean tells exceptionally well and with considerable sensitivity.

Ressler is the real life FBI agent that Thomas Harris consulted for the writing of his Hannibal Lecter books, and Ressler’s character undoubtedly informed his portrayal of Jack Crawford, Clarice Starling et al. Ressler was pivotally involved in tracking down most of the serial killers who have preyed on America during the past three decades. His pivotal distinction between ‘organised’ and ‘disorganised’ psychopaths makes for unsettling reading if you have poor impulse control and can’t keep your desk tidy. But on a more serious note, the minute and detailed accounts of scores of disgusting murders, sexual assaults and dismemberments make this the ‘true crime’ book to do away with the rest of them.

Abbott was the murderer who Norman Mailer befriended via correspondence, and who the writer assisted in gaining early release. Tragically Abbott than murdered again, was returned to the ‘belly of the beast’, and in due course died there. Half of this book consists of the Mailer–Abbott correspondence, the other half is an astonishing philosophic disquisition by a self-taught thinker who absorbed quantities of Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche while serving time in the hardest of federal penitentiaries. I’m not saying that Abbott shapes up as a thinker, but there’s no denying the power of his critique or the extraordinary facts of its composition.

BRIAN ENO’S 18 MIND-CHANGING BOOKS

Brian Eno’s career encompasses music, writing, lecturing, teaching and the visual arts. He has released a series of critically acclaimed solo albums and has collaborated with the likes of John Cale, Nico, Robert Fripp, David Bowie and the band James. His award-winning production work spans from Gavin Bryars and Talking Heads to U2 and Laurie Anderson. A pioneer in tape-looping, electronics and other forms of sonic manipulation, with an unusual, strategic approach to music-making, his audio/visual installation work has been shown around the world. Eno has been a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art in London and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Technology from Plymouth University and Honorary Professorship by the Universität der Künste in Berlin; he is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation. His writings on politics, culture and communications have been widely published, and he is the author of A Year with Swollen Appendices published by Faber and Faber in 1996.

The most approachable book about the self-organising nature of complex systems.

Music as philosophy (with lots of Zen wit).

How time changes relationships: a message of hope.

Why we need to think long.

Structural observations about shared resources.

Controversial and exciting new approach to the genesis of complex systems.

The origins and limits of human community.

Why capitalism can’t be planted just anywhere.

The ultimate ‘what if?’ book.

The story of Africa beginning 4½ billion BC.

One of the best ‘beauty of nature’ books, academic jaw-dropper.

A great work of modern pragmatism: the antidote to Derrida.

Superb biography of a giant located somewhere between Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Stalin.

The unexpected richness and lasting importance of slave culture in America.

An extraordinary theory that singing style is indicative of social structure by the pioneer collector of world music.

Even if you think you know what this is about, it’s worth reading. The atheists’ defence.

He guessed at the best of it, warned of the worst of it, and was right on both counts.

Compelling account of the physical factors shaping world history.

SIR CHRISTOPHER BLAND’S 10 BEST REFERENCE BOOKS

Sir Christopher Bland is chairman of British Telecom and former chairman of the BBC (1996–2001). He is also chairman of Canongate Books.

The best reference books are, paradoxically, those you want to read when you don’t need to look anything up. They belong by the bath or the lavatory, and are far better companions than the out-of-date magazines or the short works of unfunny humorists normally encountered in either location. With these by your side you can visit nineteenth-century London, drink Chateau Margaux, watch a test match or go to the movies, all without leaving home. Here are my favourites. The first four are essential in every household; the remainder are optional delights.

Either the 20-volume edition or, if you are feeling cramped for space, the Shorter 2-volume version. A to Zyxt via Dvandra, Mouke, Quemadero and Sequyle.

The oldest and most indispensable reference set. Facts historical, political, literary, cultural, scientific and technological in 32 volumes. Essential for answering children’s questions and preserving parental reputations for omniscience.

Describes the origin of ‘to catch a Tartar’, ‘halcyon days’, ‘to come a cropper’, ‘the tortoise and the hare’.

‘By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote’ — Emerson. This dictionary provides quotations from Abelard to Zola. And the Emerson extract you’ve just read.

This nineteenth-century guide to horse-drawn bus, tram and cab fares was the constant companion of Surtees’ Soapy Sponge, who read nothing else. Sponge could transport himself to London through fancying himself ‘hailing a Turnham Green ’bus… wrangling with a conductor for charging him sixpence when there was a pennant flapping at his nose with the words “all the way for threepence”.’ upon it’ or through reciting ‘Conduit Street, Astley’s Amphitheatre, Bryanston Square, Covent Garden Theatre, Foundling Hospital, Hatton Garden…’. No contemporary use.

The annual bible for cricket anoraks who like to know the score. Who is the only Nobel Prize-winning author to have appeared in Wisden? This book will tell you.

Read about the lineage of the McGillicuddy of the Reeks, Captain Blood who attempted to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, the Knight of Glin and Josephine Bland, Ireland’s first woman aviator, who drank whiskey funnelled through an ear-trumpet to sustain her on her maiden flight.

Intelligent, opinionated, entertaining reviews of the world’s best — and worst — movies, with plots, stars, writers, directors and reliable star ratings. Who directed Casablanca, Brief Encounter, Gone with the Wind or The Beast from 40,000 Fathoms? The answer is here.

If you cannot afford Chateau Lafite or Petrus, try drinking Parker’s adjectives and metaphors. ‘Sexy, open-knit, opulent… nose of cassis, cedar, spice box and minerals’, ‘a seamless personality and full body’, ‘long and lush… notes of roasted espresso, crème de cassis, smoke, new saddle leather, graphite and liquorice’. And you won’t have a hangover.

For the time of high tide at Dover on the 28th of August, the behaviour of tidal streams in the Kyle of Lochalsh, or the best way through the Portland Race.

JOYCE CAROL OATES’S 14 FAVOURITE AMERICAN AUTHORS

Born in 1938, Joyce Carol Oates had her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate (1963), published when she was only 25 years old. At the age of 31, she won the American Book Award for her novel them (1969), becoming one of the youngest writers ever to receive the award. A prolific writer, her other novels include Black Water (1992), Zombie (1995) and Blonde (2000), as well as a series of suspense thrillers under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, along with many works of short fiction, poetry and literary criticism. Oates teaches at Princeton University, and she and her husband Raymond Smith edit the acclaimed literary journal The Ontario Review. Her most recent works include a children’s book, Where Is Little Reynard? (2003), and a short story collection, I Am No One You Know (2004).

• Emily Dickinson

• Walt Whitman

• Herman Melville

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Edgar Allan Poe

• Henry David Thoreau

• Henry James

• William Faulkner

• Ernest Hemingway

• William Carlos Williams

• Mark Twain

• Willa Cather

• Robert Frost

• Flannery O’Connor

Oates notes: This is a purely American list, suggesting, but not fully naming, the wide range and diversity of our native literature. As an American writer with a keen sense of history, I think of myself as having sprung from these nourishing sources, among others. And the list could go on and on…

ELMORE LEONARD’S 11 FAVOURITE NOVELS

Born on October 11, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard began writing novels while working as an advertising executive. His first successes were westerns, including The Bounty Hunters (1953) and Hombre (1961), before he turned to crime fiction with such bestsellers as Stick (1983), Glitz (1985) and Killshot (1989). Leonard’s novels have been the basis for many hit movies, including Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty (1995), Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998). His most recent works include his first children’s book, A Coyote’s in the House, and the thriller Mr Paradise, both published in 2004. Leonard makes his home outside Detroit, Michigan (the locale for many of his novels).

The first book that made me want to write, when I was still in grade school.

A book I studied almost daily when, in 1952, I began to write with a purpose.

The book that showed me the way I should be writing: not taking it so seriously.

The book that showed the difference between honest prose and show-off writing.

Twenty years ago George showed how to get into a scene fast.

An awfully good writer.

Especially moving at the time it was written. I like everything he did, from The Power and the Glory to Our Man in Havana.

Walker, the old pro.

Wonderful prose writer and great poet.

Collected short stories of Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason Have studied and I hope learned from all of them.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS’ 10 FAVOURITE NOVELS

Born in 1914 in St Louis, Missouri, the rebellious William Seward Burroughs II grew up to be the disinherited heir of the Burroughs Adding Machine Corporation, a multimillion-dollar concern. During a drunken party game in Mexico, he accidentally killed his wife Joan as he aimed for a glass atop her head. Norman Mailer once termed Burroughs ‘the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius’. A former private investigator, reporter and exterminator, Burroughs earned a cult following with his novel Naked Lunch (1956), a surrealistic account of his experiences as a heroin addict. He wrote or collaborated on more than 35 books, including Queer and Nova Express. Towards the end of his life, he became a great lover of cats, writing The Cat Inside. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997 at the age of 83. He contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1980.

• The Process by Brion Gysin

• The Satyricon by Petronius

• In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch

• Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

• Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline

• Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet

• The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Process (1969) by Brion Gysin (1916–86) follows the bizarre adventures of a black American professor travelling across the Sahara Desert. English writer Denton Welch (1915–48) explored an English schoolboy’s sexual fears and fantasies in his second novel, In Youth is Pleasure (1945). Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), English pamphleteer and dramatist, anticipated the English adventure novel with The Unfortunate Traveller.

12 LAST LINES OF NOVELS