In lieu of a poll

[andrewducker]

Over here marrog links to a photo of a tattoo with five books on it and asks

If you were going to have a tattoo of five books (or their titles) somewhere on your body, let's say somewhere where it will be seen from time to time, what five books would you get?

If you know Morag then clearly you should be telling her. If you don't then I'd love to know.

My 5:
The Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy - Robert Anton Wilson
The Invisibles - Grant Morrison
IT - Stephen King
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Excession - Iain Banks

What's interesting is that I didn't read any of those for the first time in the last five years. The only books I can think of that have completely gripped me in that time were We Need To Talk About Kevin (which you have at the moment), the last two books of the Series Of Unfortunate Events and the Lucifer comic series from Vertigo. I've largely migrated across to reading articles online when I want information, and I just haven't bumped into many books that have set me on fire recently. I need more time*, and some decent recommendations, clearly :->

And I wouldn't want them displayed as horizontal titles. I'd want a small image for each one, with the title on it, and something iconic.

*By more time, I mean "not to have a job. Or weekends that last about three weeks." There are about 15 things above "reading more fiction" on my to-do list at the moment, and my current reading-for-fun is "CLR through C#".

Comments

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Malory's Le Morte De Arthur (Beardsley edition)

The History of William the Marshal

Robert E Howard's Conan (better be Fantasy Masterworks Edition)

"Goliath" (Medieval sword fighting manual)

Beowulf

[andrewducker]

It occurs to me that this looks like your kind of thing:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=92159514&blogId=489062175

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Lord of the Rings; The Three Musketeers; Starman Jones; Age of the Vikings by Peter Sawyer; Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee.

[andrewducker]

God, I haven't read Starman Jones since I was a teenager! Does it hold up well?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It does for me, but it was my intro to sf, so I may give it special treatment. Mind you, Andre Norton was who I read next and she doens't work for me now.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Anything but the Invisibles. Incoherent, self indulgent nonsense. Although that could just be because elements of it have been so aped elsewhere the original seems stale...

Or it could be that Morrisson peaked with Animal Man or Arkham Asylum... (Although having not read Doom Patrol I should probably reserve judgement)

[andrewducker]

Well, I'm sorry you didn't understand The Invisibles, but I didn't find it incoherent.

Having him peak in 1990 seems ridiculous, when his run on the X-Men was marvellous, and his DC work on JLA, Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman were all very good (with All Star Superman winning Eisner, Harvey and Eagle awards when it came out).

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I understood the invisibles, that's why I think it lacks coherency... ;)
(It reads as if he was "making it up as he goes along", rather then then him having an actual idea of where the story was going, which in fairness he probably was) and ultimatly I found the whole endeavour boring and unfufiling. But hey thats just one guys opinion faced with legion upon legion of Morrisson fanboys ;)

*retracts rod... ;)

At it's core it's a simple good versus evil tale with pretentions of... well pretentiousness. It's an uneven mish-mash of pseudo-science and mysticism with a heavy leaning towards the mysticism. It's something thats been done better in the past and will be done better in the future. Although granted Morrisson may have been the first to do it in the medium of the graphic novel but thats about it. (The invisibles might have worked better as a novel (and the first two books (maybe even the third) show promise) but then, as a story, it would likely have invited direct(er) comparisons with Jeff Noons Vurt.)

Morrison is at his best when hemmed in by the restrictions of characters and worlds already created. When given a free reign I find him self indulgent. Although I think the New Adventures of Hitler and that Thatcher thing are excellent.

The arts rubbish too...

[andrewducker]

Whereas I found Vurt dull.

And the art varies dramatically between not great and being amazing. Phil Jiminez got his big break on The Invisibles (start of volume 2) and was fantastic on it. The final few issues tried for a strange effect by having different artists doing different chunks, and completely botched it.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Actually looking back the art in the middle couple of books isn't as bad as I remember it being. It's not groundbreaking or anything but not much is in comic books these days (unless it's stylised to the nth degree a la automatika Kafka, Hellboy etc).

The last couple of books probably cloud my judgement. I just get the feeling Morrison ran out of steam and ultimatly betrayed his own vision. I end up reacting more negatively to it then I actually feel/think about the work because I get fed up being told by everyone and their dog that its "one of the best comics evar ohmigod". Worse are implications that its a great work of philosophy or somesuch. To me it's a montage of ideas and it's a montage that hangs together just loosely enough to work but not enough for me to enjoy.

[andrewducker]

So, to answer the original question:
What five books would you choose?

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Honestly? None.

Hypothetically for the purposes of entering into the spirit of the question...

In no particular order:-

1. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
2. Something Happened/ Catch 22 - Josepth Heller
3. Generation X - Douglas Coupland
4. Iain M. Banks - The Use of Weapons
5. Watchmen - Alan Moore

There are several others that could make the cut: One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest, Clockwork Orange, Rant, Chaos, The Motorcycle diaries, the Rum Diaries, Luthur Arkwright, The Blank Slate, Human Universals... I could go on.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Vurt would look good as a tattoo. Maybe Catch-22 as well. Otherwise I'm drawing a blank on the names of books I might want etched on my body.

[andrewducker]

It's _theoretical_. If you _had_ to choose five books to be tattooed on your body, which five would you choose?

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I'm drawing a blank though. What are some books with one word titles? Actually Stpehen Baxter has a lot of these, doesn't he? Let's have Flux, Traces and Evolution. You could probably make decent tattoos out of those.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

In lieu of a poll

:(

[andrewducker]

If I had five entires for "choose a book" for a poll then it would just confuse people. Also, you can't comment on people's choices.

I have a plan though.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that most people are choosing the five books that they personally care most about, or made most impression on them when they read them. Surely better to choose the five books that will most impress people who see your tattoo?

So, for instance, one's direct knowledge of Shakespeare might be limited to being able to hum "I like to be in America" from West Side Story, but one might still desire to make people think you had some connection with the Bard, and choose a tattoo of the First Folio.

This is certainly the approach taken in practice by many tattooees, who get stuff written permanently on their bodies in scripts they can't even transliterate.

[andrewducker]

Surely better to choose the five books that will most impress people who see your tattoo?

For what value of better? I'm interested in displaying who I am, in order to filter out people that don't like that person. What value would I get from impressing people who aren't going to appreciate me?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I was, for the avoidance of doubt, not seriously proposing that people should tattoo themselves with books they've not read (or don't like) for the purpose of impressing others. That seems to me as silly as getting a tattoo in a script you don't understand.

If I were in your hypothetical situation, I would in many ways like to aspire to not being swayed by the impression my choices would have on others, but (a) I'm not a moral superhero, (b) like a lot of people I'm good at rationalising decisions which are actually more swayed by emotive reaction than dispassoinate rationality, and (c) there is some virtue in making efforts to smooth interaction between people and trying to get along despite sharp divergence of views - often over-rated, appropriated, and misused, but nonetheless some virtue.

To answer your question anyway (!) ... if you had to regularly interact with people who have an irrational aversion to some aspect of who you are, you might find some value in not selecting that particular aspect to display publically. That value might, of course, be outweighed by other considerations, but it might not, particularly if those people were in a position of structural power relative to you.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

So,

Finnegan's Wake
Being and Time
Philosophical Investigations
The Art of Computer Programming, Vols I to IV
The Critique of Pure Reason

No mathematics of physics, I know...

[nmg.livejournal.com]

The Art of Computer Programming, Vols I to IV

So, still hoping that we'll see the whole of Vol IV published in Knuth's lifetime?

[andrewducker]

I didn't think you were being entirely serious. Sorry for the sharp reply, I was just having a bit of an ongoing day :->

And yes, sometimes I choose not to portray the more offensive bits of my personality. But with my last CV, for instance, I chose to present as having a sense of humour and a life outside work, so as to rule out being hired by people that don't like that kind of thing. It seems to have worked so far!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Oh, and to be more sporting, I'd have:

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
A History Of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell
The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster & Jules Feiffer
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

I might've gone for Brave New World but didn't since you'd baggsied it. :-) The Women's Room by Marilyn French was another close contender.

These are all books that I read first when less than 25 - possibly even before I was 21, but not sure about the Rushdie.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Oranges is one of mine.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

I have no idea who you are, but The Phantom Tollbooth is straight-up awesome, definitely one of my favourite childhood books and now I want to read it again this minute. High five!

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Catch-22
A Disease Of Language (Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell comic)
Schrodinger's Cat trilogy
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (which from your list above you definitely should read if you haven't)
Feynman Lectures In Physics

[andrewducker]

I read Anathem. I didn't like it as much as I was hoping - I thought that the digressions were more enjoyable than the actual plot, which lost me towards the end. I did like The Baroque Cycle an awful lot though.

And A Disease of Language is fantastic.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

This Time of Darkness - H M Hoover (Starscape edition)
Children of Morrow - H M Hoover (1977 Beaver Hamlyn edition)
The Changeover - Margaret Mahy (Collins Modern Classics edition)
The World of the "Dark Crystal" by Brian Froud
I Am The Blast From Your Past and other poems - Morney Wilson

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

I replied in more detail over at Mo's post (interesting discussion re Vonnegut by the way, I think you're right about him), but since you ask, my current thinking is:

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Le Deuxième Sexe/The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir
Los versos del Capitán/The Captain's Verses - Pablo Neruda
Unto This Last - John Ruskin

(and since I maintain that the one in the photo has six, also the Gormenghast trilogy - Mervyn Peake)

How to put this, when I started thinking about this I sort of thought 'stooopid ideeeea' (partly cos of how horribly executed that one in the photo was, I think), but being a fairly tattooed person already and all, I actually don't think I would regret having any of those somehow represented on me forever. I would probably feel weird about the omission of other Books What Changed My Life though, so I'd end up all inky. I dunno.

[andrewducker]

Good call with The Little Prince!

And I assume you've seen the trailer for Where The Wild Things Are?

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

The Little Prince is a definite! I like all of my tattoos to have multiple layers of meaning/significance (none of which are probably transparent to anyone, except sometimes me) and that book certainly has 4 or 5 reasons behind it. I've actually thought about getting a small detail from one of the illustrations, which I think would maybe be a better way of representing it, at some point... I'd like the last illustration (the landscape where the prince appeared and disappeared), but I'm not sure how I would make that work on my body. So maybe the box with the sheep in it instead :)

Actually, on that note, one of my favourite tattooists has the Cat in the Hat's hat on the inside of his wrist. He did it himself, and explained that it's his equivalent to a heart with 'MUM' written on it, because one of his earliest memories is his mum reading him that book. I thought that was pretty ace (also adorable, obv).

I haven't actually watched the trailer, is it good? I did see that there was one, but sort of thought 'but, but, book... film... no. well maybe, I will be prepared to be pleasantly surprised.'

[andrewducker]

The trailer is well worth taking a look at. It's directed by Spike Jonze - who did Adaptation and Being John Malkovich - as well as lots of very odd music videos. It promises to be unusual, if nothing else - and has captured a lot of the look of the book very nicely.