Decided to leave a handprint on some of my favorite literary classics for the wonderful Regal4.1. And might I add that this list was a huge aching pain to fill out since the more I thought of all the wonderful books I've read, the more titles came back to me; reminding me not to forget them. I read around 70 books + a year so this was a truly royal pain in the ass. So thank you very much.
If you were to see my house the multitude of books within is completely breathtaking. Nowadays I use my Kobo to read but to be frank there is nothing like the feeling of your fingers leafing through the pages, eyes dancing across the words absorbing everything in - sipping a tasteful hot cup of cappuccino during winter. Really some of these Canadian snows are the perfect ambiance to just unroll and relax.
In the end the well known titles always kept urging me on, so without further ado here it is! The top three have my input/views, others are self explanatory just by looking at them for the most part. But if you want my opinion just give me a buzz.
1. The One Thousand & One Nights translated by Hanan Al-Shaykh
- While most of you have probably grown up with hearing collections of European Fairytales, I grew up with both influences of European and mainly Eastern Romanticism in me. Exotic and mystical this Arabian book is a classic with tales within tales. Great book. Not one that can be read in one sitting, though. I really like the form of narrative, with a story leading into or encompassing another story. Most of this book is like onion layers. You really do want to have a bookmark handy if you put this one down as you really will feel like you are reading this all through 1001 nights. This was Scheherazade's tactic to keep King Shahryar's attention so that he couldn't have her executed the next morning. He was a very cruel man who hated women to the degree that he would marry a virgin and have her killed the next morning. Fortunately Scheherazade was a very clever woman with a gift for fantastic storytelling. Her plan worked splendidly, as 1001 nights passed and she was still living all the while curing the Kings' tragic heartbreak and fixing him.
Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, there are some instantly recognizable tales (Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves) but also some very enthralling unknown ones. For example, "Abdullah and the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" a tale about Abdullah a fisherman who gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers a city that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, where the citizens live their lives by a primitive sort of communism. Another that creates a world of ass-kicking warrior Amazoness women and their striving in keeping their intricate life after a poor man accidentally stumbles into their civilization.
There is satire with one of my favorite's being 'Ali with the Large Member" a tale that obviously pokes fun at the obsession of having a large well, dick.
Another great Nights tale with crime fiction elements is "The Hunchback's Tale" story cycle which is more of a suspenseful comedy and courtroom drama rather than a murder mystery or detective fiction. The story is set in a fictional China and begins with a hunchback, the emperor's favourite comedian, being invited to dinner by a tailor couple. The hunchback accidentally chokes on his food from laughing too hard and the couple, fearful that the emperor will be furious, take his body to a Jewish doctor's clinic and leave him there. This leads to the next tale in the cycle, the "Tale of the Jewish Doctor", where the doctor accidentally trips over the hunchback's body, falls down the stairs with him, and finds him dead, leading him to believe that the fall had killed him. The doctor then dumps his body down a chimney, and this leads to yet another tale in the cycle, which continues with twelve tales in total, leading to all the people involved in this incident finding themselves in a courtroom, all making different claims over how the hunchback had died.
Hanan's version is a shorter version of the Arabian Nights that I recommend for starters but if you're like me and adore full-length version Barnes and Noble has a great version.
2. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Ate this whole collection in the span of all my highschool, this single volume contains all 4 novels and 56 stories belonging to my father. My favorite novel of course being The Hound of the Baskervilles followed by The Sign of Four. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in a classy classic manner, free flowing and elegant and even if his settings were not familiar to me initially - it was what drew me in completely and engaged me to use the faculty of my brain. I felt like I literally wanted to figure out the cases myself, as if I was right beside Sherlock himself. I appreciated his stories because of the universal messages in them: love of a husband to a wife, a mother to her son, a son to a father, a father to his child, etc; the evil in greed especially when it comes to riches and money; that men can be truly friends without homosexuality getting in-between; that we have to respect the people we work with; always be wary of the people around you; and that, if used in moderation, cocaine and morphine can actually make you sharper. I cringed while typing the last one.
Nonetheless I thank Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for creating such a book that affected me deeply in such a positive way.
3. A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
What I like about Aldous Huxleys' Brave New World is that it centers around the disease of human passivity as it's controlled by the higher-ups in society. With 1984 there is the possibility for consciousness of the inherent evil of the subversive intolerance of the government, and therefore the possibility for revolution.
With Huxley's narrative, however, this consciousness is completely undermined through the fulfillment of the base drives of the majority. There is no reason to rebel, and society can change only through an impossible systematic negation of all the techniques espoused that clamor to fulfill these drives. Anyone who comes to realize the true state of affairs isn't filled with a Herculean wish to revamp it, but can only sigh to himself while secretly saying, "ah, that's just society getting what it wants," and make plans for voluntary exile. This is the cynicism of Huxley given literary flesh. He echoes the Dostoevskian lament through the Grand Inquisitor that human beings want to be taken care of and provided for, not free. Freedom is too hard, it takes work, and to be human is to take the easy way out. A fabulous if not upsetting and horrifying book, where we are all born and designed in a lab. Captivating.
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Odyssey
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8. The True History of the Elephant Man by Michael Howell and Peter Ford
9. Comanche Moon by Catherine Anderson
10. The Strange Case of Dr. Jerkyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
11. The Time Machine by H.G Wells
12. Moby Dick by Hermen Melville
13. Dracula by Bram Stoker
14. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
15. Animal Farm by George Orwell
Special Mention: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Assassinita, Mary Ann or simply Nita for short is your average Canadian lady incognito who loves hockey, traveling and a good laugh. With a playful personality and capricious hobbies, it's not hard to keep this one satisfied. But watch out for the blade, the bloodlust can make even the sweetest go mental...