Big Books Read-

cross posted at HMS_Mercury

Taken 'cause Karen asked me to.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Copy, paste, & repeat.
5) Starred next to the books you're reading/have read some of.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare*
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. I own them now. :D
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding- I hated this book with a firey passion.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - I'm going to start reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran"- does that count?
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I appreciate the movie versions of these books so much. otherwise it just drags on and on and never finishes! HAVE YOUR REVENGE ALREADY, DANTES!
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac*
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker- Epistolatory novels make my day full of rain clouds and the desire to kill the people who write them.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray I got through about half and love the 2004 movie. That was the summer I read War and Peace; I was sick of big books.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- most of them, when i was about twelve and too young to follow what was going on.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery- I hate this book. I had to read it for french TWICE.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Several times. I love Hamlet.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Karen, I see your 32 and raise you 14. 46 books out of 100.

Damn. I must not read much current stuff....

Why I have a Problem with fanfic 100

On-line lately there has been an outpouring of LJ communities who specialize in doling out 100-prompts, little ideas that you, the author, are supposed to execute in 100 words.

I have a problem with these.

Why?

Because that's not a story, that's a snapshot. Heck, that's not even a snapshot; a picture's supposed to be worth a thousand words, ten of these little...woodles, as I call them. I've been noticing on my RSS feed of recently updated C.S. Lewis stories that more and more of these are being done, and I think you should up the word count to at least a thousand. It's not that hard to write 1000 words. Anthony Trollope forced himself to write 3000 every DAY.

I know that in the world of college essays and timed writing, word counts are getting to be more and more of an issue, to make it easier on your professors and graders. But a story has no word limit- God does not say, please live your life in this many years or less, otherwise points will be docked. I tell a story until I am done telling it, or it is done telling me what to write. And in the long run, only writing 100 words leaves you no practice for developing character, sustaining plot, or taking in a whole moment. It narrows your vision, forces you to find the barest of details to set a scene. You shouldn't limit yourselves to a mere 100 words. It's only a tenth of the picture, and your reader wants to see the whole thing.

Keys to Writing A Good Review

Just as a lark the other day, I checked several of my more recent stories to see who on ff.net had me on story alert, a feature that sends you an email message when an author puts up a new chapter.

What surprised me was that there were several people on that list who have never REVIEWED the stories in question, part of that elusive online community we call Lurkers, people who read but don't comment, who favorite but never tell you why.

So I decided to write a note in my next chapter asking these people to review, because I like knowing why or how I've entertained them. And this was one of the replies I got:

"I'm afraid I'm not a very good reveiwer, but I'll do my best."

Not a good reviewer? What sort of polluted world do we live in? All reviews are good reviews; there are just some that are better formulated than others. So with that in mind, I'm going to publish

MERCURY GRAY'S KEYS TO WRITING A GOOD REVIEW

Now this is a really simple format to writing a review, and it comes in three parts, just like Aristotle says stories should be. A Beginning, or Exposition, A Middle, or Body, and an End, or a Conclusion. Yes, Aristotle had to lay that out in his Poetics. I guess the Greeks didn't quite get it.


Start the review off your initial impression after reading. This is normally one word, like "WOW." or "Hrm." Pair this with something that really knocked your socks off, a particular phrase or image they used. If there's several things, list them! Explain why you think this worked particularly well or how it made you think of something else. Writers like to hear that you understood their humor, got their inside jokes, etc.


Then, tell them nicely what you didn't like, or what you thought didn't work well and could be changed. Give a suggestion here, and if you don't have one, apologize that you don't. If you're not going to suggest a solution to their problem, it's not helpful to have you point it out. A Phrase like:

I liked this...but I think you could change it in this way to make it better...

works very well. Be polite at this part; writers don't particularly like criticism if it's not given nicely. But lots of writers will thank you for pointing out errors in spelling, punctuation, and lost capital letters if you phrase it right.


Last, sum the review up with another really strong point. You want to end the story on a positive note. Talk about the tone, the narrative voice they used, or a particularly good ending line and how it really helped with the feeling of the story. Tell them if you're looking forward to their next post or how they really did a nice job with this story, and you're done!


That's not really that hard, is it? It just takes a little time to think about. But, writing these reviews also helps you as a writer- thinking about suggestions for other writers will often jumpstart your own stories, and seeing what does and doesn't work for other writers will help you find what does and doesn't work in your own writing.

The format of this review is to help and encourage writers. I learned this format in a speech class in which everyone was doing something that's really hard to do: get up in front of a large group of people and speak. There are estimates that 80% of the adult population has, at one point in their lives, dreaded making a speech. Writing is much the same way. It's hard to expose something that you've worked really hard on to public criticism, and sometimes you get mean, nasty reviews telling you that your work is crap and that you are a nasty, horrible person. No one wants to hear that.

So please, take these keys seriously and I think that we can make ff.net and other writing sites nicer places to be.

The Monday Update

I've posted a new chapter of A Jewel in the Crown and a new chapter of Outrageous Fortune. I'm too lazy to put links in, so you'll have to use the sidebar.

Page Changes

If you check out the links box, you'll see a new link to my Deviant Art page. There's not a lot of stuff there, but it's all pretty cool.

While you're at deviant art, you should check out the page of my new friend, Mira Dzialynska.
She's from Poland, and she's just done a piece for my PC fanfic of my main character, Aleybis. It's really pretty, and she did a really nice job. So you should all go and tell her this.

follow up to Advice to Young Writers

Okay, so you remember a few posts ago I gave a transcript of a really long review I left some poor soul on fictionpress?

Well, she asked me to beta-read for her. Good, yes?


she hasn't sent me anything yet. That was a week ago. I think I should private message her and tell her the hallmark of a good writer is to write ALL THE TIME.

Assorted items

Item One- I have found a new muse!

Neil Perry, from Dead Poet's society. Which leads me to item two-

Item Two- New DPS fanfic up on FF.net. It's called Outrageous Fortune, and you can read it here. It's all Neil's fault. Really.

Item Three- New chapter of A Jewel in the Crown is also up on FF.net. You can read that HERE

Item Four- I have a new favorite piece of classical music- Beethoven's 9th symphony. Genius!

YES!

Scribe in talks for "Dune" resurrection

By Jay A. Fernandez 1 hour, 13 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter)- We have wormsign.

Rookie scribe Josh Zetumer is in negotiations to write the latest incarnation of "Dune," Frank Herbert's sprawling sci-fi epic, for Paramount Pictures.

The award-winning 1965 novel -- the first in a series of six books about a futuristic struggle for control of a precious spice called Melange on the desert planet Arrakis -- was first adapted by David Lynch into a financially and critically disastrous 1984 film (though Herbert apparently liked it). It also was turned into a more successful Sci Fi Channel miniseries in 2000.

No one involved would comment on Zetumer's take on the "Dune" saga.

Herbert's son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson, who have co-written several additional "Dune" novels, will co-produce. Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights") is attached to direct.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

I LOVE THESE BOOKS!

Wake Up, Little Susie

New PC fic (yeah, I know, another one.) called Wake Up, Little Susie up now on ff.net

HERE

and here's the song featured in it! Yay for the Everly Brothers!

Advice to Young Writers

I just left a killer long review of someone's story, and I feel like this is advice every young writer needs to hear.

Well, you asked me to review, and so I shall. I think the dialogue in this story is your main strength, but the strengths of this story are outweighed and overwhelmed by the things you need to fix, like your spelling and punctuation.

Before you put a story up, it should be a given that you've checked it over to make sure your sentences start with capital letters and you have basic proper punctuation. Normally when I see a story without proper punctuation I stop reading and forget about leaving a review, because if the writer can't take their own story seriously enough to proofread, I'm not sure I want to waste my time.

When someone stops speaking in a sentence and a period is required, you need a comma. "Like right now," the Wordsmith exemplified. But there's a lot of ways to end a sentence, and that comma rule doesn't work all the time. If you know someone who's a really good writer, like an English teacher or an older sibling who's taken a lot of English classes, ask them to explain the rules to you, because frankly, they're really hard to explain over the Internet.

The other major problem I see with this story is that your beginning is a little...amateur. You need a good beginning to hook your readers in, and no real writer begins their story describing the physical attributes of their characters. It's boring! If they're well written, people aren't going to need to know what they look like, only how they act and feel. The way a character looks is only secondary to the story, and doesn't need to be described in detail unless it's somehow related to the plot.

And speaking of plot, I'd like to know where this story is going. You have a nice little summary for it, but it's the end of the first chapter and I wouldn't know what the story is about unless I read that summary. You need to introduce a problem, or a hint of what the problem's going to be, before you can start trying to be funny or describe the daily lives of your characters. What does this gum incident at the end have to do with being pregnant? Is it the gum's fault that the girl is pregnant? I know that sounds like a stupid question, but authors always have to have a reason for putting something in a story, and right now, I'm not seeing what the line of reasoning was.

So I'm sorry for the long and angry review, but I mean it all in the best way. All authors have to go through a phase like this one, and the best thing to do is keep writing, and also keep reading. The reason I'm giving this advice is that I really wish someone had told me all of this stuff when I had started writing.

The best writers, I've been told, are the best readers as well. when you read, you find out what you like, as well as what you don't like, and you can see how real, published authors write, set up plot, and treat characters.

So keep going, and keep reading. You might your next big idea.

I didn't know how long I'd been writing until I realized how good my writing actually was compared to the twelve and thirteen year olds of the world who are just starting. I've come a long way since then.

Crazy psuedo feminist poem

Merc's new crazy pseudo feminist poem (and in the women's right's 60s feminist kind of way, not the way Professor Steve keeps trying to explain that I still, after an entire semester, don't understand) is up now at allpoetry. It's called Don't You Honey-Baby-Sugar-Sweetheart Me.


And you can read it here!

Or here on my fictionpress, if you'd like to leave a comment and you don't have an allpoetry account.

New Story

A new PC fic, That Word Honor, about Peter and Edmund returning to school and a world at war with quite a different tyrant than the ones they're used to fighting, is now up at ff.net.

You can read it here!

It involves a song from my research project on radio propaganda, Edmund ranting on Hitler and the nature of war, and a very surly Peter.

New Chapter

The second chapter of my new Prince Caspian fic (which is looking like it's going to be a LONG haul, by the way) is up and ready for reviewing at ff.net.

HERE