Archive for John Steinbeck
about 100’s lists
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags 100 book lists, book list, book reviews, Douglas Adams, Fiodor Dostoïevski, First Dog on the Moon, he Guardian's Best Novels, John Steinbeck, library, mole, Terry Pratchett, The Guardian, The Road, webcomic on June 14, 2026 by xi'an
the best books of the NYT readers
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags 1984, book list, book reviews, Catch, censorship, Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowlings, J.R. Tolkien, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Le Monde, list, Margaret Atwood, Nabokov, novel, The Lord of the Rings, The New York Times, To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morisson on February 9, 2022 by xi'an
Two years after Le Monde reported on the list of the 101 favourite novels of [some of] its readers, which I found most fascinating as a sociological entry on said readers, rather than a meaningful ordering of literary monuments (!), even though it led me to read Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as well as Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s Gagner la Guerre [To the victors go the spoils], The New York Times did something similar to celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary. If on a lesser scale, as it only produces
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- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
- 1984 by George Orwell
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
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as the top five books of the last 125th years, Lee’s, Tolkien’s, and Garcia Márquez’s appearing in both lists, if with a different ranking. (The nomination rules were not exactly the same, though, with only novels for Le Monde and only “recent” books and only one per author for the New York Times.) Here is a longer list of the 25 top contenders, from which NYT readers voted [an opportunity I missed!]:
Hitch’s tricks
Posted in Books, Travel with tags Alfred Hitchcock, Atlantic ocean, Battle of the Atlantic, classics, film noir, John Steinbeck, Lifeboat, shipwreck, steamer, The New Yorker, U-boats, war convoys, WW II on November 27, 2020 by xi'an
As I was watching the first minutes of the 1944 under-rated Lifeboat by Alfred Hitchcock (and John Steinbeck as the script writer!), a series of objects floating by the lifeboat to convey the preliminary mutual sinking of an Allied boat and a Nazi U-boat contained a cover of the New Yorker. Which while being iconic sounds like a weird inclusion, given that this is the very first issue of the magazine, in February 1925, hardly the first thing I would carry across the Atlantic at war time! Maybe being iconic was the reason to keep this issue rather than a more recent one, another mystery about the great Hitch allusions and clues interseeded throughout his films.
the 101 favourite novels of Le Monde readers
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Albert Camus, Alexandre Dumas, André Malraux, Barbey d'Aurevilly, book reviews, Céline, Charlotte Bronte, Cormac McCarthy, Don Quixote, Emile Zola, Faulkner, Fiodor Dostoïevski, Foundation, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, George Pérec, Graham Greene, Harry Potter, Haruki Murakami, Honoré de Balzac, Hyperion, Iain Pears, Jane Austen, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Kafka on the shore, Le Monde, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Yourcenar, Maupassant, Memoirs of Hadrian, Nobel Prize, Spanish Civil War, Stendhal, Stephen Zweig, The Lord of the Rings, The Road, Umberto Eco, Victor Hugo on January 1, 2020 by xi'an
Le Monde called its readers to vote for their five favourite novels, with no major surprise in the results, except maybe Harry Potter coming up top. Before Voyage au bout de la nuit and (the predictable) A la recherche du temps perdu. And a complete unknown, Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as 12th and first science fiction book. Above both the Foundation novels (16th). And Dune (32nd). And Hyperion Cantos (52). But no Jules Verne! In a sense, it reflects upon the French high school curriculum on literature that almost uniquely focus on French 19th and 20th books. (Missing also Abe, Conrad, Chandler, Dickens, Ishiguro, Joyce, Kawabata, Madame de Lafayette, Levi, Morante, Naipaul, Rabelais, Rushdie, Singer, and so many others…) Interestingly (or not), Sartre did not make it to the list, despite his literature 1953 Nobel Prize, maybe because so few read the (appalling) books of his chemins de la liberté trilogy.
I did send my vote in due time but cannot remember for certain all the five titles I chose except for Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (2nd), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (74th) and maybe Fedor Dostoievski’s Brothers Karamazov (24th). Maybe not as I may have included Barbey d’Aurevilly’s L’ensorcelée, Iain Pears’ An instance at the fingerpost, and Graham Greene’s The End of the affair, neither of which made it in the list. Here are some books from the list that would have made it to my own 101 list, although not necessarily as my first choice of titles for authors like Hugo (1793!) or Malraux (l’Espoir). (Warning: Amazon Associate links).
- Harry Potter
- Voyage au bout de la nuit
- One hundred years of solitude
- The Lord of the rings
- L’étranger
- Belle du seigneur
- Les misérables
- Mémoires d’Hadrien
- Pride and prejudices
- The unbearable lightness of being
- Foundation
- Crime and punishment
- Madame Bovary
- Le rouge et le noir
- The Brothers Karamazov
- La peste
- War and peace
- The grapes of wrath
- Les liaisons dangereuses
- Bel-Ami
- Anna Karenina
- The name of the rose
- Germinal
- To kill a mocking bird
- The three musketeers
- Kafka on the shore
- La vie mode d’emploi
- Lolita
- Wuthering heights
- Mort à crédit
- The picture of Dorian Gray
- Life and fate
- Chess story
- La chartreuse de Parme
- L’œuvre au noir
- The idiot
- L’assommoir
- The road
- Le père Goriot
- The trial
- Don Quixote
- Notre-Dame de Paris
- Illusions perdues
- The sound and the fury
- La condition humaine
challenged books
Posted in Books, Kids with tags American Library Association, banned books, Brave New World, censorship, Harry Potter, John Steinbeck, Persepolis, The Handmaid's Tale, Tintin, USA on April 9, 2017 by xi'an
After reading that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the most challenged books in the USA, where challenged means “documented requests to remove materials from school or libraries”, I went to check on the website of the American Library Association for other titles, and found that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nigh-time and the Bible made it to the top 10 in 2015, with Of Mice and Men, Harry Potter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Brave New World, Hunger Games, Slaughterhouse Five, Cal, several of Roald Dahl’s and of Toni Morrisson’s books, Persepolis, and Tintin in America [and numerous others] appearing in the list… (As read in several comments, it is quite a surprise Shakespeare is not part of it!)
What is most frightening about those challenges and calls for censorship is that a growing portion of the reasons given against the books is “diversity“, namely that they propose a different view point, were it religious (or atheist), gender-related, ethnic, political, or disability-related.
