The Hit List

[Fez]

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to michaelriley.org.uk's literature hit list; a collection of books championed by individuals who believe the novels, poems or short stories they hold dear should be sitting proud on everybody else's bookshelf.

Maybe you found a battered paperback on holiday in one of those graveyards for books where nothing has order and everything is piled high into the rafters, maybe you found a pristine volume in Waterstones that you would sooner keep in an air-tight glass case than allow anyone else to touch - which ever, if the story means something to you and believe other people would benefitt from reading the same stuff, then tell us about it!

Titles, authors, brief summarys about what happens (but for pity's sake don't give all the plot twists away) and why you liked it - that's what this section of the site wants, and together we can construct an indespensible list of our favourite books in the hope they will soon become other people's prized page turners - GET READING! :D

[Fez]

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES - Edgar Allan Poe

The best American writer of gothic horror, there can be no dispute, Edgar Allan Poe was largerly ignored during his own lifetime and yet is now credited with writing some of the most dark, disturbing short stories in the literary canon. There are no vampyres, zombies of silly b-movie monsters here; the horror is physcological, preying on the reader's own fears almost as powerfully on that of his unfortunate characters.

Any decent collection of his work will also boast the Dupin stories; Poe's own French detective genius that would later inspire Arther Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. Substancial books will probably also feature Poe's poetry and critical essays (he was a celebrated editor if not an author in his own right during his lifetime), though these will not have as wide an appeal to most.

Stories in particular to look out for are:

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
The most well known of Poe's work, this is a strange tale about a crumbling house which is visited by an old school friend of the head of household, only for him to find the family is deeply disturbed and on the point of complete collapse. Home owners in Stockport beware!

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
While the aristocrats live a life of reckless abanddon in a sealed castle, a plague stalks the land killing all in its path. The party revellers believe they are safe until a figure in red appears in their midst...

PIT AND THE PENDULUM
My personal favourite about an unnamed man locked in a dungeon slowly going insane as he tries to work out who he is, what is real and when he will die.

MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE
The first and probably best of the Dupin detective stories - you will never guess who did it I can promise that!

Edgar Allan Poe makes Steven King look like an amateur - these stories wont keep you up at night...they wont allow you to sleep at all.

[johnriley1uk]

The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell "Major Ingredients" (NESFA Press, 2000, $29.00, 701pp Hardcover)

This stupendous selection of EFR's wonderful Science Fiction short stories contains most of his best, and if you are not familiar with EFR then you will be in for a treat.

Superficially, we have a collection of 1940s and 1950s pulp SF, but lurking beneath the surface is a keen, incisive mind, with a cruel observant wit and a subtle disdain for beaurocracy of any sort.

These stories are sharp, clever, very entertaining and sometimes excruciatingly funny. When you have sampled them, move on to the sister volume of some of his novels.

Of the novels, I suggest THREE TO CONQUER, WASP and NEXT OF KIN as good starting points.

My only regret is that he didn't write more than he did.

The EFR archive is in Liverpool (he was a Liverpudlian despite his transatlantic style) and one day I'll go and have a look!

[Mike]

I never knew the EFR archive was in Liverpool - do you have any more details? Address etc. . .

The EFR archive is in Liverpool (he was a Liverpudlian despite his transatlantic style) and one day I'll go and have a look!

[johnriley1uk]

It's in a library in the city centre, not far from Rodney Street, but I can't lay my hands on the info just now. A Google search for "Eric Frank Russell Archive" should work, as they are on the web.

[John Knight]

If you have never read The Wasp factory by Iain Banks you are missing out. Very Very odd but quite excellent.


'Two years after I Killed Blyth I murdered my youn brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for My young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.'

[Fez]

A second vote of praise to the Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. I'm a bigger fan of his science-fiction stuff, but when he does straight fiction you can garentee it will be disturbing and darkly original.

If you get the same print edition as mine or one similar, read what the critics wrote about it when it was first published in 1984 - some thought it brilliant, others thought it was perverse, but none of them could claim it was bland. Some of the bits in it are deeply weird and some sections border on the horriffic - the sheep burning comes to mind, not a pleasant episode as you might imagine.

If you want something engrossing and packed with a fair few unseeable surprises, then read this now! Just don't blame me if you have nightmares. Baa!

[mr_e]

Damn, I was expecting some other kind of hit-list. Aaanyways...
The Plague Dogs, Richard Adams. Sod Watership Down, this was the best of the two. I seem to remember the start being hard going, but it's worth it. He really attempts to get inside the mind of the two dogs, and it features Cumbria and proper Cumbrian talk. I have it with me, so it is available for loan.

I've never read The Wasp Factory, but Walking On Glass, one of his more fiction (yet kind of sci-fi) numbers, was most interesting. With one or two surprising plot twists.

[Mike]

I think i also have a copy of Plauge Dogs. I will have to get around to reading it!

[liz.brownlloyd]

I thought Iain Banks wrote science fiction under Iain M Banks, which would make Walking on Glass a straight fiction book (as written as Iain Banks) though it did have a science fiction lilt.

If anyone likes Science Fiction - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is worth reading - though it is a while since I read it and keep meaning to reread it...

Books I have read recently and would recommend include: Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, which is nicely dark, set in lovely French village life and whos lead character is distinctly unlikable at times but wondefully human. The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing, which I found fairly difficult to get through but has moments of pure joy and wonderful insight. About the lives of three women - all of their time but different from their time. How to Be Good by Nick Hornby - holds the humour of High Fidelity's opening chapter through the entire book and made me laugh out loud on public transport rather a lot. The bit where she rings up her husband to ask whether he has a brain tumour (which he hasnt but is a wonderful un pc scene) sticks in my mind.

And am reading Sarah Water's Affinity, which is actually a lot easier to access (I'm not a fan of Dickens and its always being described as pastiche Dickens) and has the overtones of Atwood (think Alias Grace and Surfacing). Very character based, knows what it is (even though even Waters herself talks about it as pastiche) yet still brings something fresh. Though I do so copy cats on the horizon... Hopefully will continue in this fashion until the end of the book...

Have the Doris Lessing book and Affinity when I have finished it for loan...

[Fez]

CATCH-22 / Joseph Heller

At the height of the Second World War there is an American airbase on a tiny Mediterrean island where one man is desperately trying to escape the madness of his comrades and incompetent superiors by convincing them all he's a lunatic. It doesn't work because everyone around him is already deeply in the throes of lunacy from constant killing, absurd airforce rules and the certantly that Catch-22 will stop them from ever leaving with any degree of sanity.

Through often disjointed narrative jumps and some of the weirdest conversations between people you will ever read, follow Yossarian in his bid to escape the war as the world slowly dissolves into the most achingly funny absurd situations imaginable. From beginning to end the characters are riots of twisted genius from the amiable Texan everyone hates to a major whose surname and firstname are already Major owing to his venegful father that set his son down a path of total humiliation for the rest of his life.

This is quite simply the funniest damn book you will ever read detailing personal madness to the wider chaos of the war at large - but don't just take my word for it, a few years ago the BBC journalist John Sergeant promoted it as part of the BIG READ, eventually getting the book nominated as one of the top ten best books of the 20th Century.

One thing is certain - it's fantastically funny and Yossarian Lives!

[Mike]

CATCH-22 / Joseph Heller

Seconded - CATCH-22 is a brilliant book.

[mr_e]

Oh, and read some Noam Chomsky, you capitalist peeg-dogs. God, I need to make time for reading some more. So many classics and so little time.

[Mike]

I have been re-reading these books this week and just wanted to tell everyone how cool they are. The story is fascinating and seems to pull you into a classic tale of good vs evil. As per usual you have the baddies hidden in the 'goodly' organisations of the world, magic and fantasy chases across the world.

I only hope that the final two - three books that Robert Jordan has planned will be finished soon. They are released so far apart that I have to re-read the whole series to remember the nuances of the plot!

As requested by Fez here is the wheel of time comment on the hit list!
The books are:

The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dragon Reborn
The Shadow Rising
The Fires of Heaven
Lord of Chaos
A Crown of Swords
The Path of Daggers
Winter's Heart
Crossroads of Twilight

He has written another book to do with the wheel of time but it is nothing to do with the main story.

[Fez]

I AM LEGEND - Richard Matheson

In a post apocolyptical American suburb of the 1970s, Robert Neville is a man desperately trying to survive in a shattered world surrounded by enemies which stalk the night calling for his blood. By day he makes do with whatever he can salvage from the broken town around him, kept relatively sane by devising ways of defeating the monsters that hold their menacing vidual around his barrackaded house at night, but all the time he is as haunted by the past just as much as he is by the daemons of the present.

Blending gothic horror and science-fiction, Matheson's first novel came out in 1954 and is now recognised as a classic of both genres - my edition is the second book in the hugely popular Sci-fi Masterworks range. By turns depressing and euthoric, the book follows Neville's desperate struggle until he comes to realise humans may no longer have a place in a world infested with vampyres...