Classic Edition: Seventeen Books

Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has reposted an old article written in response to a list of “must-read” SF books, in which he sets out to generate his own list. Never one to shy away from excess, he ends up with a nearly complete list of genre novels since about 1890. Steinn points out a few that he missed.

This would be a great point for me to respond with my own list, and rail against the tendency to draw up lists full of books that are historically Important, without considering readability for modern audiences, and all that sort of thing. I’m still being bothered by the “too much typing” twinges in my neck and shoulder, though, and as I have to do a bunch of typing for my tenure statements and syllabi for the upcoming term, I think I’ll save my lengthy typing for actual work.

To make up for it, though, here’s a Classic Edition post from last December, the last time I made a list of books. It’s in “guess the book” format, pulling quotes from seventeen books that I find interesting or important. A little Googling will find you the answers, but that’s cheating. The original post is below the fold.

One of the latest “memes” going through those parts of blogdom that are prone to such things is the “Fifteen things about books” list. I think I saw this most recently from Scalzi. I was tempted to post something in response to his comments on Science Fiction vs. Fantasy, but in the course of trying to avoid writing a grant proposal review, I seem to have said most of what I wanted to say in his comments. Other than this: Damn but Gregory Benford sounds like a pompous ass in the essay that started this off.

Anyway, things about books. I started to do a list of facts about me and books, but that really wasn’t going anywhere interesting, so instead, here are fifteen lines from fifteen books, chosen by the ultra-scientific method of looking over the bookshelves and grabbing thing that I thought highly enough of to want to quote from them. This seems like a reasonable post for a sloppy, icy Friday.

All the source books are fiction, some are better known than others, and they’re ordered alphabetically by author to make it a little easier to identify them.

• 1) The way to a man’s heart is through his chest.
• 2) What the saying meant might have been written down in the grim, dark-covered volume in the Royal Library, Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know, or perhaps, if it were sufficiently horrible, in the dusty, locked tome titled Things That Are Not Good to Know at All.
• 3) All is waves, with nothing waving, across no distance at all.
• 4) The little ship departed the universe in a manner that was picturesque, if ultimately lethal.
• 5) He’s an actor. I guess he can’t be that good, or he wouldn’t be killing people for a living.
• 6) Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicarauguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
• 7) On the day of the dead when the year too dies/ Must the youngest open the oldest hills/ Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.
• 8) Now if thou wilt confess thy sins unto me and accept me as thy Savior, thou wilt be born again of water and of the Spirit and dwell in Paradise, a small town in Utah.
• 9) You know from the first Cinemascope frame/ An endless expanse of Monument Valley/ Elmer Bernstein score thundering, soaring,/ That Achilles and Hector cannot both walk into the sunset alive;/The whole 70 mm screen isn’t big enough for the two of them.
• 10) Unlike the physicists, my workday was over. My department couldn’t pretend it was on the verge of something epochal. When the sun set, we freed our graduate students to scatter to movie theaters, bowling alleys, pizza parlors. What hurry? We were studying local phenomena, recent affairs. The physicists were studying the beginning, so they rushed to describe or bring about the end.
• 11) Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he’s never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn’t know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted.
• 12) “I’ll buy you all kinds of chew toys– a squeaky duck if you want.” “I’m sorry, Tommy, but I can’t turn into a wolf.”
• 13) “Try to think of it as an Experience, like something Winnie the Pooh might get involved in; Floating in Space while Awaiting Rescue. Like that.”
• 14) But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid– that had to mean something.
• 15) “Can you name the six noble gases?” As that could be no poser for an economic geographer, I rattled them off in their proper aristocratic order. “Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and– er– Radon. They were raised to the peerage in the eleventh year of England’s George Fifth, and Neon was awarded the Order of the Seraphim by Gustav the Sixth of Sweden for its compassionate service in guiding to bars and beaneries guys who roll into towns late at night.”
• 16) Sages, seers, and theoretical physicists could only speculate at what, if any, relationship might exist between the Shanghai Police Departmet’s astonishing scope of activities and actual law enforcement.
• 17) “You took fifty G outta the Watergate? That’s no third-rate burglary.”

(Why seventeen? Because seventeen is the mystical number. And if I could remember which book that one came from, I would’ve replaced one of the above…)