I write better when it’s dark

Not in the dark but when it’s dark. Whether it’s because that’s when I’m at my most lucid, or perhaps because the tiredness helps me overcome my inhibitions, the small hours have often been when I’m at my most productive. In fact, the idea for this very post was sketched at 5am one very idle night, when the neural aurorae kept me from dropping off. The ideas hop and flow and melt into one another like chocolate on a hot stove—and there’s never a pen around when you need it.

I wish so much to be creative

Not in any specific fashion either. Regardless of method, there’s always been something itching inside, scratching the back of my retina, urging me to put the effort and dedication into creating something I can be proud of, whether it be with the pen or the paintbrush, the camera or the chisel. Sadly, there’s a rather stunting lack of any raw talent, which leaves for disappointment every which way I turn. And more pertinently, I’m too much of a lazy sod to ever practice enough at anything to actually hone those blunt and crooked tools in my head to produce something worth being proud of.

I put it all off for later

As the proverb has it:

“Ther is an old proverbe,” quod she, “seith that ‘the goodnesse that thou mayst do this day, do it, and abide nat ne delaye it nat til tomorwe.‘ And therfore I conseille that ye sende youre messages, swiche as been discrete and wise, unto youre adversaries, tellynge hem on youre bihalve that if they wole trete of pees and of accord, that they shape hem withouten delay or tariyng to comen unto us.”

The Tale of Melibee, Geoffrey Chaucer

Sadly, however old this proverb may be, it’s still one to have had the meagrest effect on my genes. Putting it all off for ‘when I have more time’ has virtually become my sport of profession. This very post is testament to the fact, which according to Wordpress was started back in September of the last year. There are always more hours in a day, more days in the week, more weeks in the year, more years in a lifetime, in that concave vortex of my temporal perception.

I never finish what I start

My life and living spaces are littered with the unfinished. Books half-read, films half-watched, stories half-written, designs half-cooked.¹ What starts with good intentions soon ends up unloved, disregarded, unashamedly shunned for something else; if in fact it should ever get started in the first place. It is probably telling that for every book I read, there are two on the shelf; for every moment spent on writing, there are a thousand spent on the waiting-to-be-draughted.

I have a passion for procrastination

When time eventually does land in my lap, like a giant rainbow trout fresh out of water, I find myself less inclined to take the beast by the shanks, to scale it, bone it, fillet it, eat it, nor even to take pity on it, to rescue it, cover it, take it back to water. Instead I watch it flap about and squirm and shake, with gaping mouth and aching gills, its precious moments dying fast, its glassy eyes bright to the last. Don’t ask me where that came from. I’m just wasting time when I should best be getting on with some work.

I put effort in where it is wasted

Perhaps this is entirely linked to procrastinating, however much I don’t like to acknowledge it. Putting effort in to wasted time means that no one can judge you for not trying–and since it is wasted nor will they judge what your efforts produce. All of which doesn’t detract from the fact that all my efforts lie in the wrong place. I write on forums no one visits. I author blog posts no one reads. I soliloquise at length as though there were a fourth wall on my life.² Those portions of my life wreak of effort, which remain unseen, unheard, unused, unwanted. And to the detriment of that public face, which has a degree in every volume of inadequacy.

I was born in the wrong century

Perhaps not technically something I hate about myself, this probably has more to do with my believing the grass is greener on the other side. But looking at my recent forebears, I nevertheless feel I’d have been more at peace with life wielding a pick in my hands as a coal miner, or with a mattock slung over my shoulder as a navvy, than I am in this fast-paced world of gadgets and gizmos. Not that I look back on history through rose-tinted spectacles, but knowing my place in the gutter I abhor the society that doesn’t agree that I belong there.

I have a superficial interest in the world

Just a quick glance at my bookshelf is enough to testify to how scatterbrained I really am. There’s no direction, no taste, no depth, no concentration. Just an eclectic mix of all kinds. Perhaps that’s a good thing, having a desire to sample all of life’s waters. On the other hand it shows how utterly superficial my interest in the world is, and that surface-skating translates itself nattily into real life. No real wonder I never finish what I start, when I barely get started on anything.

I eat too much

Difficult to believe for those who know me, easier to believe for those who know me well, I don’t just restrict myself to food in saying I eat too much. My life sometimes feels like an exercise in waste, a product of the consumer society, for all that I wish it would be otherwise. Food, electricity; water, most especially water. It’s probably already too late to make up for the squandery with an early adieu, but if anything here could or should change, this is the one to work on.

I’m merely waiting for the end

There was sadly no choice about being born, or if there was, I’m sure I ticked the other box. Were we assigned to lead our lives on the basis of previous errors? If so, as in the real world, I must have discarded the manual in favour of just getting to grips with the controls. Yet however much fun that experience can be, I still firmly believe that had I been given a conscious choice, I’d have declined this mortal coil. Whatever impression I give others, I really just spend my days wandering through life, looking for the exit.

I know all this and do nothing

For all those keeping track, yes this is the eleventh sin, but it’s easy to think up more once you start to enumerate them all.³ Perhaps this isn’t really such a thing I hate, as much as an acknowledgement of reality. I can’t change. I won’t change. These flaws and failures are simply part of who I am. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. But that has meant I’ve learned to live with it.

1. Sometimes even dinners half-cooked.
2. But even were I a Shakespearean character, I’d be a Dogberry.
3. I only hope I shan’t make the same mistake as Charles Freck on my taking leave.

So what exactly do I dislike in this state of affairs?

Permanence

Unlike most of the changes that undergo society, tattoos represent something that is essentially permanent and irrefutable. Whilst hairstyles and clothing fashions can be changed and forgotten, tattoos are for the vast majority of people permanent adornments that will be just as visible in a few decades as the day they were made. As society shifts, we move with it, altering the way we dress, the way we speak and interact, and even the way we shape and manage our bodies, but those inklings will remain as testament to the styles of yesteryear. Well, so what? Some things don’t change, why should we regret our past? Quite true, and all power to people who enjoy their body art and are proud of it. But for the rest of us on our journey to the grave, tattoos can and do become the embodiment of regret, a manifestation of our former selves that no longer exists. Countless times I’ve heard people remark that they would never get the name of a loved one tattooed on their bodies, the reason of course being that they realise the greater fidelity of a little ink under the skin than our feelings, and the people in our lives. Which quite belies the fact that our feelings are just as likely to change about a swirly pattern or a favoured quote as the love of our lives.

Very few of us are so singular in purpose that we can lead our lives without change. Although we might fear it, change is a natural part of us, and most of us alter the way we look and the way we live as we tread the stepping stones across life’s babbling brook. Tattoos, however, are not so easily washed off in the splashing waters of life, and can be a life-changing pivot in the future, should they not fit in with the people or the lives we choose to lead.

Conformity

Tattooing is in many instances an example of conformity. As social animals we conform to the pressures around us, whether they stem from our families, our friends or society in general, and tattoos are no different. It only takes a walk down the street on a hot summer’s day to see that. Of course tattoos are limited in how and where they can be manifested, and people are inspired to get them for all kinds of reasons and purposes, but looking at the vast majority of body art on display it’s very clear to see the limits of that inspiration. I often hear how a tattoo is a ‘self-design’ or has a very personal meaning. Yet the person telling me this invariably could not fill a matchbox with artistic skills, and the tattoo itself looks like so many other ‘self-designed’ pieces that actually came off the wall or were created by merging two other designs together. In other cases, the body art fits into one of several other catch-all categories, such as a little butterfly or a flower, a cross or a pretty star, a word written in a language the person can’t speak, or a name in a script they can’t read. And some people even seem to be going about ticking off each cliché as they add it to their collection.

It is terrible easy to ignore the social pressures upon us that shape and mould our lives, and believe that what we are doing is for our own private, personal reasons. Tattooing is no different from any other avenue of life in this regard, and it is easy to see conformity in people, when you’re told that the swirly pattern on someone’s leg that looks exactly like four other swirly patterns you’ve seen that day on various other body parts around town, was personally designed and has a deep, personal significance.

Mistakes

Perhaps it is unfair to criticise tattoos on the basis of badly implemented ones, but given the prevalence of mistakes in tattoo art, I stand by this heading. Having a tattoo that is, shall we say, less than perfect, is almost a category all of its own in terms of the most common forms of body art. Whilst it’s only to be expected that an uneditable piece of work will contain minor blemishes, it is far from surprising to find a tattoo that is altogether wrong at heart. Whether that is a result of a change in circumstances, or miscommunication between artist and client, this most commonly afflicts those stereotypical written tattoos. Poor translations and bad calligraphy can lead to people being inked with inverted letters, incorrect words or ungrammatical statements, and indeed can occasionally lose all meaning whatsoever. And even tattoo fans as big as David Beckham are not completely immune to making such stereotypical mistakes. Yet other forms of tattoo can be just as liable to mistake, and their permanence leaves many of them plenty of opportunity to evolve from their position as a once cherished act of rebellion or devotion, to a sad reminder of times rather forgotten.

Hypocrisy

One thing that particular ires me about many people with tattoos is their attitude to those of us who don’t appreciate them. If they wish to adorn or besmirch their bodies, that is up to them and all power to them, but that they then try to take a higher tone over people who find them detestable is unreasonable. “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” I’ve often been told by people who feel I’m being overly judgemental about their body art. Why are you doodling on it then? Because we’re not machines, we’re complex biological beings that react on a whole host of stimuli. Whether you like it or not, we do judge one another on the basis of something as ethereal as appearance, we always have and probably always will, and only a real casuist would argue that people who get tattoos are never motivated by this fact. The drive to look more individual, more rebellious, more attractive or simply fashionable plays a large part in many people’s decision to get inked, and there should be no surprise that people don’t always interpret things the same way.

Of course this isn’t the only example of hypocrisy when it comes to tattoos. The ubiquitous ‘self-design’ represents another aspect of tattooing that often manifests itself in a form of self-delusion, along with the example of the tattoo which has deep personal meaning, and yet sits on one of those many parts of the body that aren’t visible to the owner without the help of a mirror or some serious anatomical reconfiguration! It’s often said that we don’t realise how much we care for something until it’s gone—yet with a ‘personal’ tattoo in a place that can’t be seen, I often find it hard to imagine that its sudden disappearance would cause any reaction, except from those privileged ones who are allowed to see it.

Eye of the beholder

My most cogent reason for disliking tattoos, however, is simply that I find them unsightly. Much as many people adorn their bodies with ink to appear more attractive, so I consider the opposite to be true. Certainly, there are some pieces of body art in the world that might make me think twice, some that provoke a thought or turn my eye, but then the same is true of virtually every medium. But these are to the majority of tattoos, what a Constable is to wallpaper. And that to my mind is the most important reason I can have for detesting what others find so wonderful. I hate the fact that they are so casually adorned, that people choose to get them for reasons of social integration, and yet defend their decision with flimsy arguments about ‘deep personal meaning’ and ‘self-expression’, I cannot understand why so many choose to go the same route of having a stereotypical emblem dawdled on their anatomy, or have words written in languages they don’t understand emblazened on their bodies. I hate their permanence, and the lack of respect that many have for that permanence (or the cost and pain of undoing such an action), and I hate the blame placed on me for disliking others’ tattoos. But above all, I hate tattoos because I find them just plain ugly!

As for getting through the list, I doubt very much if I’ll even read 1001 books before I die, let alone fiction books, or the particular ones from this list. However, I have ticked off a few titles already, and no doubt as many of them coincide with titles on my reading list I’ll be able to whittle the list down a little further. Titles I’ve read to date are in bold.

Last update: 31st December, 2011

2000s

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Unless – Carol Shields
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
Pastoralia – George Saunders

1900s

Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Untouchable – John Banville
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
The Information – Martin Amis
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Land – Park Kyong-ni
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
Disappearance – David Dabydeen
The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Complicity – Iain Banks
On Love – Alain de Botton
What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
A Heart So White – Javier Marias
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Indigo – Marina Warner
The Crow Road – Iain Banks
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Jazz – Toni Morrison
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
Arcadia – Jim Crace
Wild Swans – Jung Chang
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
Mao II – Don DeLillo
Typical – Padgett Powell
Regeneration – Pat Barker
Downriver – Iain Sinclair
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women – John McGahern
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
Like Life – Lorrie Moore
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
A Disaffection – James Kelman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
London Fields – Martin Amis
The Book of Evidence – John Banville
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
A Maggot – John Fowles
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Queer – William Burroughs
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Legend – David Gemmell
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi
The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
La Brava – Elmore Leonard
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Newton Letter – John Banville
On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
The Names – Don DeLillo
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Rites of Passage – William Golding
Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
Shikasta – Doris Lessing
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Burger’s Daughter – Nadine Gordimer
The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Yes – Thomas Bernhard
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
The Public Burning – Robert Coover
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
W, or the Memory of childhood – Georges Perec
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
Fateless – Imre Kertész
Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
High Rise – J.G. Ballard
Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Correction – Thomas Bernhard
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
A Question of Power – Bessie Head
The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
Crash – J.G. Ballard
The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Breast – Philip Roth
The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
G – John Berger
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
The Ogre – Michael Tournier
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
Troubles – J.G. Farrell
Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Them – Joyce Carol Oates
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
Chocky – John Wyndham
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
The Joke – Milan Kundera
No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
Trawl – B.S. Johnson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Magus – John Fowles
The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Things – Georges Perec
The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
Herzog – Saul Bellow
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate – Charles Webb
Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Collector – John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
How It Is – Samuel Beckett
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
The End of the Road – John Barth
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Bell – Iris Murdoch
Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
Voss – Patrick White
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
Homo Faber – Max Frisch
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Barth
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Junkie – William Burroughs
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Molloy – Samuel Beckett
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Victim – Saul Bellow
Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
The Plague – Albert Camus
Back – Henry Green
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
Loving – Henry Green
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
Transit – Anna Seghers
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caught – Henry Green
The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
Embers – Sandor Marai
Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
The Outsider – Albert Camus
In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Party Going – Henry Green
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Years – Virginia Woolf
In Parenthesis – David Jones
The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
England Made Me – Graham Greene
Burmese Days – George Orwell
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Day Off – Storm Jameson
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Living – Henry Green
The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
Quartet – Jean Rhys
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Quicksand – Nella Larsen
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
Nadja – André Breton
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Blindness – Henry Green
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Counterfeiters – André Gide
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Cane – Jean Toomer
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
Amok – Stefan Zweig
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
Summer – Edith Wharton
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
Martin Eden – Jack London
Strait is the Gate – André Gide
Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Iron Heel – Jack London
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Young Törless – Robert Musil
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Immoralist – André Gide
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

1800s

Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born in Exile – George Gissing
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
News from Nowhere – William Morris
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Germinal – Émile Zola
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
Nana – Émile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Red Room – August Strindberg
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Drunkard – Émile Zola
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Erewhon – Samuel Butler
Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth

1700s

Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
The Nun – Denis Diderot
Camilla – Fanny Burney
The Monk – M.G. Lewis
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Justine – Marquis de Sade
Vathek – William Beckford
The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
Cecilia – Fanny Burney
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Evelina – Fanny Burney
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
Candide – Voltaire
The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
Amelia – Henry Fielding
Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Roxana – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700

Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aithiopika – Heliodorus
Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

If there’s one jargon term that every user new to the Internet soon becomes acquainted with, spam must near the top of the list. Its prevalence and virtual ubiquity through many forms of online communication have generated miniature industries devoted to dealing with it, and the science of spam detection, prevention and treatment almost resembles the tactical skirmishes of biological immune systems.

Spam exists in many forms, from bogus guestbook entries to elaborate instant messaging robots, but the variety which prompted this post was that classic form – unsolicited email. The level of penetration of spam illustrates itself in the number of systems put in place to combat it as standard on the vast majority of websites, including of course authentication emails and the ever evolving captcha. I use a small combination of plugins on this blog to block out most of the spam, and given the extreme sparcity of genuine comments, the potential for inconvenient ‘false positives’ is rather slim. Nevertheless, even the cursory inspection I tend to make over Akismet’s latest haul becomes tiresome for all the size of this blog – spam comments to date outnumber genuine ones by a factor of almost 500 (and that only counts those caught and tallied by Akismet). Quite how larger, more popular blogs deal with searching for false positives, I don’t know, but the task must be fairly time-consuming.

Yet even that abysmal ratio sometimes seems quite congenial next to the level of email spam I receive in its current state. Whilst the common techniques for filtering out spam emails have fairly high success ratios, the constantly evolving battle with the Bayesian filter can never ultimately separate emails, black and white, and sifting through the gray matter can be a painful experience, particularly when searching for unexpected false positives. Indeed with some of my emails going through multiple filters (before finally ending up in a Thunderbird client and getting filtered once more), I begin to wonder how many emails have simply drifted away in that black sea of jetsam.

The problems of course don’t stop there. In recent days I have been reminded of another serious gripe, when my inbox was flooded with bounced messages, evidence that my address was being used by spammers (and many of those were filtered as spam on account of their message contents, despite technically being genuine messages). Since very few strings at the associated domain are actually received by anybody, it stands that the deluge represents merely the tip of the melting iceberg. There are many tips out there to stop spammers from harvesting your email address, but very few to prevent them using it to spoof messages elsewhere (and even to yourself). The most common piece of advice is simply to wait it out – eventually the spammers move on and utilise a new address, and indeed the bounced messages seem to come in waves.

One of the methods used to reduce spam that was highlighted through these bounced messages is Sender Address Verification. As covered by this post, the method requires people sending email to an address for the first time to verify their authenticity by fulfilling a certain task explained in an automated email reply, before the message (and future messages) may be delivered to the recipient. This bears some resemblance to the automated email verification sent out by many online accounts. However, it is not without its weaknesses. After all, spam sent via spoofed, verified emails will still be delivered as genuine messages, and the potential for spammers to find methods to fulfil the authentication tasks is all too clear from the variety of methods already deployed to crack online captchas.

Ultimately I’m reduced to dealing with spam in the usual manner, relying on filters to do the heavy work and leaving me to occasionally label those messages not picked up, whilst occasionally doing my own filtering for false positives (and burying my head in the sand every time my addresses come up for spoofing duties).

How do others combat the spam plague? Are there other methods commonly available that I’m overlooking? And do people consider the possibility of false positives a necessary evil in the war against spam?

Krystyna Janda

On Saturday I went to a meeting with Krystyna Janda presented by The National Creativity Centre Foundation, in the National Gallery in Dublin. The meeting principally took the form of a questions and answers session, conducted by the famous Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, ahead of the Irish première of Krystyna Janda’s monologue adaptation of Vedrana Rudan’s Ear, Throat, Knife.

Whilst the interview was pretty interesting, given Janda’s extremely busy and varied career, the translating at the event was a little under par. The predominance of Polish speakers in the audience meant that the poor translator didn’t always get a say until after a few questions had been asked or answered, and her pretty difficult task of translating her own shorthand wasn’t helped by Mr Zanussi interrupting occasionally to demonstrate his own knowledge of English, and I was frankly embarrassed for the poor translator. Most questions focused dealt with Janda’s career in acting, both on stage and on the silver screen, from her early roles in films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) or working alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, to her more recent work with the Polonia Theatre in Warsaw. Many of the audience’s questions focused on her family life, work in politics and music, and just where she finds the energy to keep it all going. Not sure if she answered that sufficiently, but she did suggest that there would be more going on in her blog in the future.

Nevertheless, Krzysztof Penderecki provides a beautiful score to underline the images, with a smattering of Tchaikovsky and Chopin thrown in during some of the propaganda scenes. As a piece of cinematography the film probably deserves its Oscar nomination, though it is difficult to tell whether it will be remembered more for that or its political implications. That the film does not get caught in a loop of nationalist propagandism is important in light of the tendencies in Moscow and elsewhere. Power is not what comes from the end of a gun but the ability to make people believe ones lies. Certainly disturbing news from Putin’s Russia.

The film’s climax is a rather visceral, and to some extents shocking visual of what the film is after all about. However it does offer an interesting juxtaposition for those taken by the irrationality of mankind—as officer after officer is dispatched in the name of political idealism, these same go to their deaths with a prayer on their lips. Absurd or simply tragic? One thing however is for certain, and that is that my quest for the non-melancholy Polish film continues…

Of course, the supermarkets can hide behind their names, disguising the fact that the economies of scale have destroyed the vagaries of the market and left us with these abominations. There may appear to be some jostling at the top, but the same essential products are on sale in essentially the same way in every one of their stores. Of course, the true competition goes on behind the scenes, out of sight of the consumer, to keep the prices down and keep the margins up. But the other competition goes by on the very shelves, as the supermarkets surreptitiously promote their own brand goods above third party offerings. Who can deny that the sliding scale of quality runs from Tesco “Value”, through Tesco “Finest” to the majority of third party products? Whilst their lower end products capture the price conscious element of the market, the better quality products attempt to undercut the price of the third party products whilst offering at least a competitive level of quality. That’s not to say this is a policy actually pursued by the chains, but it is certainly within their power to do so, and the fact that they can simply stop stocking third party brands makes such a goal all the easier to achieve.

The problem is that whilst the supermarket has altered the way we buy food, it has also destroyed the competition and rivalry which kept food quality up. Whilst the corner shop has evolved and taken on a new role in the marketplace, backed by the big names of Spar or Londis, the butchers, bakers and greengrocers have been confined to those areas the supermarket cannot yet penetrate. Since this very basic competition is now out of the public sphere, it is little surprise that food quality has dropped over the years.

What is needed is a true incarnation of the supermarket. It cannot be denied that the modern day supermarket provides many conveniences that critics often ignore. Convenient parking, bulk purchases, single transactions, a wider selection of food, competitive prices, are all benefits that the modern consumer will not give up for the sake of better produce. A true supermarket could and should, of course, maintain these benefits, by providing exactly the kind of infrastructure found in today’s behemoths. Everything from site maintenance and in-store facilities, to marketing and financing, through to storage and distribution, would all be handled by the overall supermarket organisation. The store itself, however, would comprise market stalls of all varieties, rented or leased to producers and distributors, organised exactly as might be found in a modern supermarket. Of course, such a layout would limit the scope of individual suppliers to sell a wide variety of products, but the consumer’s demands must be catered to if such a system were to compete with the established giants. Similarly, with today’s technology, a system could easily be established to allow all financial transactions to be made by the overarching supermarket edifice, skimming profits from the sales of individual retailers.

Whilst more rural markets could integrate local producers akin to the farmers’ markets, the demands of the city would continue to rely on the methods of today. Yet even in the urban environment, consumers would be free to choose based not only on price, but on what they can physically see, smell, and should they be a regular customer, taste. Of course these rules could not apply to many items stocked in today’s stores, and perhaps these areas would be taken up by the supermarket edifice itself, but the space for competition in fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, baked goods, preserves etc. is overwhelming. Potentially, of course, the supermarket could also serve to change food production patterns, as local producers bring their products to market locally, reducing the need for long distance deliveries and longer term storage, and contributing to a more environmentally friendly outlook. The success of a product such as Bonne Maman preserves to some extent illustrates the subconscious level of desire for high quality, locally produced foods. Their determined efforts to improve quality, and their deliberate marketing image replete with labels printed to resemble handwritten equivalents, and patchwork lid designs, have seen tremendous market gains in recent years.

Ultimately, of course, the supermarket in its present form is here to stay, and having already cornered the food market, giants such as Tesco have already found their only avenues open for continued expansion lie in the non-food section. With food prices seemingly set to rise, after years of underpricing and the effects of the world’s burgeoning population starting to take effect in combination with the backlash against technological and intensive farming, it would appear that the supermarket focus on good value for money will continue to take priority over food quality, a fact we can only learn to accept, with no alternative in sight.

Before I start my rant, let me plainly state that I am great supporter of the principles of public transport. That is not to say that I don’t see the use or take advantage of private transport, merely that I feel the balance in society is generally wrong, particularly in the first world, or whatever the preferred term is these days. These societies should be perfectly capable of providing for the vast majority of man’s annual miles, with our regular combinations of buses, trams, trains etc. and private transport being available to fill in the gaps where required. Being able to pack your bags, grab the kids and hit the road for a weekend away seems like a reasonable thing to do, but where is the logic of moving a ton of metal to work and back five days a week?

For probably the majority of the world’s population, public transport is the only option, certainly the only affordable one. In more privileged societies it seems, that logic is largely turned on its head, with many simple journeys costing as much as would the equivalent travelling via private transport, and indeed being more expensive if the journey is shared. Car pooling saves more money than bus pooling.

Yet some of the key problems afflicting these public transport services, is that having lost even the semblance of being a service (and who can deny that they are nothing more than businesses operating within a service field?), the companies involved only through obfuscation manage to run within the guidelines no doubt prescribed by governments. Planning a trip across the country, one could easily spend hours trying to find the cheapest combination or the quickest route. The privatisation of the industry has not exactly resulted in the competition of service and price that the government suggested, but a proliferation of competing and confusing systems which has resulted in a drop in passenger numbers, as a committee found last year. And the confusion, of course, isn’t restricted to the paying customer. Pensioners in the UK can now enjoy the benefit of free bus fares, but at least according to one relative of mine, this is restricted to the local borough, outside of which a mere discount is available partially due to the competing companies – after all, why should you wish to travel away from the one shoddy town?

Paying customers, of course, have the hardest time of all. Unless you are a genius at figuring the ins and outs of the system, public transport never comes particularly cheap, what with all the advance, economy, super, mumbo, banana and toffee flavoured tickets, not to mention all of the student travel cards, young person cards, old person cards, gay person cards, regular user cards and drug abuser cards which can be used for discounts on most, but certainly not all services, particularly any of the ones you might be tempted to use in conjunction with the first. And of course, as there is rarely any integration in the transport system, you’ll probably need at least two varieties of discount card to cover your journey via bus and (shock horror) train, and these rarely come too cheaply. One begins to wonder who on earth was paid money to design the backend pricing systems to some of these services. I remember one particular journey using First North Western trains, where I was sold a Day Return ticket because it was actually cheaper than the single I required. Go fathom! Just how the train companies can manage to create something as complex as a train timetable, and yet can’t produce a viable pricing plan borders on the criminal.

In fact, it gets to the stage now where I’m becoming suspicious that the baffling arrangements aren’t actually designed to confuse customers and reap the benefits of their lack of patience or lack of knowledge to find the right deals. There is no sense of service here, only pandering to government requirements for companies to create offers for the underprivileged. Take the various varieties of student travel card, and Britain isn’t alone on this account. Or click on the image and take a look at how asking for an earlier train on thetrainline.co.uk can result in a previously unavailable ticket magically appearing. Indeed, the manner in which such offers seem to disappear and reappear lends one to conclude that such websites are designed to hide offers from those who might actually take advantage of them. This screenshot even begs another question, that being of how the Value Advance tickets are still available whilst the Advance Standard C¹ appears to have sold out – would some customers voluntarily pay almost thrice the price of the cheapest ticket for exactly the same service?

Of course, the European dream of integration can’t even get a toehold when national systems aren’t even adequately in place. Experiences like this might leave us feeling embarassed, but why should the consumer have to work so hard to pay the best price for a service that the economy cannot survive without? Public transport is not perceived to be the vital economic keystone it really is, the likes of which education and health care are often fully or partially covered through public funding. Competition in the marketplace is the basic principle behind the diversification of the public transport system, but it doesn’t really take a genius to work out that competition cannot thrive in such a market. Go onto the high street to buy a television, and not only is there a variety of worldwide manufacturers to choose from, but there may be half a dozen shops eager to offer more competitive prices and accompanied services. In theory, the consumer can make an informed choice, and vote with his wallet to get the best deal.

Now try to convert that situation into a public transport ‘market’. Queue for a bus on Manchester’s Oxford Road, pick a bus, and depending on your situation you might find yourself getting a 60p student ticket. Get on the wrong one, and he’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a student ticket, and the fare will be £1.20. So you either wait, and barge past the angry queue of people waiting to get on behind you, or more likely just throw the extra fare in the bin. And of course, just like when Dixons rip you off over that warranty on the television, you are just as able to boycott the train service which caused you to be 2 hours late for an interview, except that they’re the only train operator in the entire region.

I often try to make a distinction between individual and social rights. By this I mean to highlight the difference between what each individual by virtue of his very existence has the right to, and those rights which are bestowed upon him by the society in which he lives. One example of this is the individual and personal right of movement. By his very being, man can relocate himself, using his own body, harnessing the power of the animals around him, and since early periods used his knowledge to craft certain forms of transport from the world around him. This does not, however, stretch to man’s ability to travel by any means possible; no single man built the Volkswagen Touareg, no number of harnessed animals would equal an Airbus A380. My point in this instance is that man has the right to travel, and our rich, modern states and societies should be enabling factors to his movements, not restrictions. In return, man must relinquish his demands for the right to travel how he wishes, for these are privileges empowered by his society. Yet society must also acknowledge that a transport service should not be marketed off in chunks to the highest bidder, since which modern economy could survive without it?

Ideally, one should be able to get a route between two locations, across borders, boundaries or whatever divisions, using whatever forms of transport, for a single, logical price, without having to cross reference various travel cards and special routes. He might even be able to relax in the knowledge that his taxes or his annual, universal travel card has it all covered already. But such a dream is only possible with the enforced integration of the various transport systems, and some realistic and public oriented pricing models. Wouldn’t it be worth paying £500 a year to be able to travel anywhere in the country on any form of public transport at any time? And if that were the case, wouldn’t half of the other 60 million on the island find it equally useful? £15 milliard a year plus public subsidies says it’s not.

1. Slightly cheaper than the Banana and Toffee Mix I mentioned earlier.

Settlers of Catan

Occasionally there’s no better way to spend an evening than sitting down around a table with friends and family, having a few drinks and playing a board game. That stands particularly true when the game is something new. Every player goes into the game trying to learn, meaning everyone is that little bit more focused, that little bit more bewildered, and tactics have to be picked up along the way. Although I wouldn’t call any of us board game connaisseurs, this wasn’t the first time we’d learnt a game from scratch of an evening, nor presumably the last time we’ll be up past midnight trying to play one out!

The Settlers of Catan advertises that it can be picked up in fifteen minutes, and with a bit of concentration there really is nothing too complicated about it. The object of the game is to score 10 victory points, which can be gathered in a number of ways, but the key to all of them stems from the same basic root. The island of Catan is divided into various regions or ‘hexes’, each representing a type of landscape which will produce a certain variety of good. Precisely which of these regions will bear fruit on any one turn is determined by the throw of the dice, adding that little element of luck which thankfully doesn’t marr any feeling of player involvement in this game. Placing your settlements and roads wisely should ensure a decent windfall of the produce from the dice throws, and it isn’t necessary to be in control of the dice in order to profit from a roll. Using various combinations of goods produced, a player can expand his network, building more settlements and roads, and creep towards that victory point tally.

Board and pieces

These elements alone would make for a pretty decent game, as one which would require the triumph of strategy over the fortune of the dice. But designer Klaus Teuber adds an extra couple of aspects which add the icing to the cake. The various options open during the building phase of the game require various combinations of goods to be collected, as a result of which players often find themselves in a situation whereby they are short of one item or another. The game allows for a stage of open bartering between the players, akin to that which you might find used ad hoc in any other game, but which given the prevalence and even necessity for progressing in the game, opens it up to all sorts of swindling and conniving to get what is required. On top of all of that is the shady figure of the robber, activated on the play of a card or the throw of the dice, who not only decimates the supplies of anyone hoarding goods, not only prevents any hex he occupies from producing goods, but also enables players to literally steal cards from one another. No man is an iland, intire of it selfe!

Overall, The Settlers of Catan is an excellent combination of luck, strategy and player interaction, which is neither complicated nor particularly time-consuming (typically the first attempt will no doubt be twice as long normal). It is perhaps unfortunate that one of our previous favourites has been Puerto Rico, a game that also comes highly rated (although not a winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres) and in many ways develops upon the elements involved in Settlers. But where Puerto Rico is a much deeper strategy game, requiring players to focus on their own ‘islands’ and indeed on their own games, Settlers is at once less-involving through its simplicity, and more-involving in its player interaction. Whilst the former removes any real external elements of luck and places the onus on players to make their own, the dice in Settlers could have your strategy in tatters, as the little black figure makes his way over to your end of the island.

The Settlers of Catan is the extrovert’s Puerto Rico. If you prefer to be in control of your destiny and left to ponder your own strategy, then Puerto Rico is definitely the choice, but if you want a simpler, more involving and more vocal game, my suggestion would be that you really can’t go far wrong with The Settlers of Catan.

Feeding the dolphins

There are some pretty banal programmes on television at times, such is the role it plays, but Animal Park – Wild on the West Coast really caught my eye today. It served up the job of a nature programme from California, but it was a real eye opener to some of the ludicrous crap that gets spewed out, and of course funded, in the name of environmentalism. One segment showed how they looked after a sealion with some neurological disease, to the extent of giving the animal an MRI scan, ascertaining it wasn’t going to survive, and then putting it down. If anyone could explain the point of all that to me, I’d be impressed.

Yet the clip which really boiled my noodle was the one which showed how they were exercising bottlenosed dolphins in captivity, in order to measure their heart rates, and ultimately determine how many calories they needed whilst at rest and whilst active. They were then going to use this information to work out how many fish the animals required, and then pass this important information on to the fisheries in the region, essentially intimating that fisheries would be restricted or closed based on the feeding requirements of the dolphins. It really is amazing at times how random ‘research’ can become. It would seem that as long as those cute little dolphins get enough to eat, no one particularly gives a rat’s arse about whether the ecosystem at large is suffering as a result of fishing policies. Plus, you can bet a pretty penny that with all the statistical horse shit they would have to utilise to make any sense out of those pretty useless collections of figures, there will be little correlation between what they would have to tell the fisheries and reality!

…to think
of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys…

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol told us that Christmas was a time for the more fortunate in society to empathise with those below them, not to recognise the financial distinction but see them as fellow human beings. But such recognition can only be superficial. When we look through the eyes of another, we put ourselves in their shoes, as the saying goes. But we cannot hope to look through their eyes. Indeed, can we even imagine looking through eyes that are not our own? Just try to imagine seeing the world with eyes that were not your own; seeing for the first time the different hues and tones, different depth perception, an entirely different focus. Then extrapolate. New experiences, new thought processes, new emotions, new social background, new language, new religion.

As someone bound within the confines of rationality, I find it especially hard to empathise with those more influenced by emotions. When my dog died, my mind offered me a period of grief as it went through its processes. <<Carbon-based lifeform expires; there’ll be another one; the dog was in pain and was better off dead; end of grieving. Conclusion time: 0.384 ms.>> Kinda brief, huh? That isn’t to say I’m emotionless, nor to claim that I am incapable of irrationality. I’m always irrational to a rational degree. As an individual I know how hard it is then to empathise with another human being. That one extreme difference only hides a raft of other minor changes which make viewing life through another’s eyes almost impossible. What hope, then, does society have?

Yet these measures principally concern the prospect of repeat offences. The cases which sparked such legislation being called for in the first place so incensed the public on account of their being committed by known paedophiles. These measures, however, do not offer much in the way of dealing with the prevention of first time sex offences relating to children. Indeed, as others have said, these measures would also have done nothing to prevent Sarah Payne’s murder by a stranger, the very case which provoked calls for a change in the law.

Any attempt to the tackle the issue of paedophilia must of course require some heavy and uncomfortable acknowledgements on society’s part. Paedophilia is contrary to the social and cultural mores of the country, yet in a population of millions it must be accepted that there is a statistical probability for some individuals to have tendencies deemed unacceptable in their community. If this fact is not accepted, the problem can never be dealt with. ‘Voluntary sterilisation’ goes some way to offering a solution for those affected, to get their own issues under control. It was not a million years ago that homosexuality was deemed anti-social and indeed illegal; its suppression did not lead to its eradication, however. Whilst there is no intention for ethical comparison here, the fact is that paedophilia must firstly be given due acknowledgement if it is to be properly understood and neutralised. That is not to suggest there can be a cureall solution. But the focus can be shifted, from preventing reoffenders striking again, to suppressing potential offenders in the first instance.

No smoking

They all roll over. What else can they do in the dictatocracy? Smoking is bad for you. It kills! And according to recent adverts on British television, passive smoking is even worse, since the smoke comes from the ‘bad’ end of the cigarette. Is it any wonder the state becomes nanny when society acts so wimpish?

But society’s seemingly burgeoning fear of death isn’t the issue here, at least not to me. That issue is freedom of choice. The ban on smoking in public places perhaps has a right to be enforced; there is no choice about which train or bus station you use, after all. But when it comes down to banning smoking in all bars, pubs and restaurants, one has to ask why we are no longer allowed to choose. Are we so incapable of rational thought? For a long time now, many restaurants have had exclusive smoking sections, and many bars too have proven capable of sectioning off areas for different clientele. One might question therefore, the need for a blanket ban.

When smoking was banned in public places in California, Eddie Izzard remarked “Yes, no smoking in bars now, and soon there’ll be, no drinking and no talking!”¹ It got laughs. Now, of course, the idea has spread so far as to become part of the accepted wisdom. But does anyone stop to question the accepted wisdom any more? The majority of people I’ve spoken to on the issue support the ban. Why? Because they won’t have to worry any more about getting that smokey smell out of their clothes. They aren’t worried about the health risks, and that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise when statistics appear stating:

Smoking is said to cause 3,000 deaths in NI each year, with one death every fortnight due to second-hand smoke.²

By my reckoning, and you’ll have to check that because I’m not too hot at maths, that’s just under 1% of ‘said’ smoking related deaths caused by second hand smoke. All that from the ‘bad’ end of the cigarette. A fantastic saving for the health service there, assuming of course that these people will then go on to live forever. If governments have decided that smoking is too expensive in terms of potential health service requirements, then they should legislate on that side of the wedge. But of course, denying even heavy smokers access to health care for respiratory or cancer related ailments would infringe upon their human rights, as any court worth its salt would testify. Which leaves the only liable course of action for eradicating this filthy habit that of working from the other end. Tobacco taxes (we’ve seen those), education campaigns (aplenty), support for anti-smoking groups, and now bans to take smoking further outside the public sphere.

However, one swift aside here. We all know that the main beneficiaries of this blanket ban was designed to be those working in public places. Given that the alternative to such a ban could have been to allow premises to choose to operate as a smoking or non-smoking venue, or else section off areas for each type of customer, and staff the premises accordingly, it appears that a much more wide-ranging effect was sought. Which begs the question about what governments next plan to do about those who are most at risk from second hand smoke—young children and infants. An innocent baby brought up in the home of two smokers is at a much greater risk, and a much more unavoidable risk, than any publican employee or casual evening drinker. Is the next step then to legislate in the home?

Until that time, smoking in public places will now be illegal in Northern Ireland. The response there has been like that which occurred over the border when the Republic banned smoking in March, 2004, with special heated outdoor smoking areas being constructed in preparation. Goodness knows how much energy is wasted just to heat up a section of beer garden so clients can go and smoke outdoors in comfort. Of course, this now becomes an area of competition between the venues, as smokers and their friends choose establishments based on the comfort of their smoking areas. Previously, pubs on the border in Northern Ireland had seen a massive upswing in revenues, as pub-goers in the Republic voted with their feet. If ever there was evidence that freedom of choice is in demand, that was it. But they will roll over just the same. They all do.

1. Eddie Izzard, Dressed To Kill, 1999.
2. NI smoking ban comes into force, BBC News, 30 April 2007.

Now I can of course only pretend that this is a real ‘pet hate’—for starters, it is a pretty universal sentiment—since it serves its purpose pretty well. That of protecting innocent people? Oh no, there is no security at the airport per se! If you want to set off a bomb or open a phial of some contagious disease, in an area as crowded as the city centre, feel free. There are even bins provided for your convenience. But to make everyone feel safer about boarding the big bricks with wings, and of course for the protection of those big bricks with wings, passengers must arrive early, hand up their luggage for inspection, and file through security like cattle. Oh, and these days, of course you should throw away anything over 100ml!

Well that’s all well and good, but does any of it actually work? Any small sharp objects taken through security will be quickly confiscated, just in case you are tempted to start trimming your nails in public (heaven forbid!), but they will happily provide with a can of beer or pop which any remotely enterprising villain could readily fashion into a very sharp implement to slash someone’s throat with.¹ Of course, no billiard cues would be allowed on the plane, since we all know what a great swing you could take in the cabin,² but an extension cord or power cable for wrapping around that little girl’s neck and threatening to asphyxiate her unless they let you into the cockpit, well that’s just using your initiative.

And what about that 100ml limit? It’s actually up to a total of litre in most places, which is probably, thank goodness, insufficient to blow a plane up in one go. Of course, those carefully prepared poxy explosives stored in a tube of mascara and a pot of lip gloss should be able to blow a nice hole in the fuselage. Who knows, maybe more if you sat in the right place!

Of course, not everyone would be daring enough to try something so reliant on chemistry, which is where that little arch that goes “bing” might just do you a favour. In Kraków-Balice airport, a woman wearing a tight denim jacket with buttons to the brim unsurprisingly set off the pulse induction metal detector. A quick frisk and she was on her way. But this was in the days after the British airport security scare, so there was a second, more ‘personal’ security checkpoint to go through. Her bag was searched, and her body checked over with a magic wand, which bleeped away merrily as if it had just discovered an android, and off she went on her merry way, with god knows what packed away in all those little buttons.

Let’s face it, a lot of us have probably smuggled things through airport security, knowingly or otherwise, so just imagine someone putting some effort into it! And if all else fails, you could do worse than try it at a regional airport. That hand luggage you pass through a machine is scanned with X-rays to display a multi-coloured picture of the various frequencies of absorption, highlighting metal, inorganic and most importantly organic substances.³ Last week I managed to smuggle a few pounds of Lancashire hot pot through one of the regional airports of the British Isles, without a qualm or a query. Fortunately for them, there was only a flavour explosion at the other end!

1. Albeit only something for the wealthy villain to contemplate.
2. And after all every Hollywood bar room brawl has shown us how much damage one of those can do.
3. Most common explosives are organic substances.

Yet over the years I’ve discovered a couple of things in life that I’d be willing to bear arms for. The British Isles are not renowned for their cuisine, but some things have been honed to an art there. One of these is the pie. Now quite how the humble pie could come to be threatened is quite a stretch of the imagination. If something so base could be in danger of disappearing, then there are probably problems for its basic ingredients, in which case there are much greater issues to be worrying about. Yet the prospect of a pie tax or some other form of rationing has me sharpening blades in preparation for the event, a veritable cataclysm by any standards! But this is nought compared to my second item.

A lovely cuppa

Tea. Of such basic necessity and ubiquity, it was named after a letter of the alphabet. To think of the inordinate amount of pleasure I derive from a cup of tea is to think me more than just a brick short of a load. If you were to tell me that all of the people I know and cared for had been killed in a plane crash, sitting me down by the fire with a cup of tea would make the whole situation seem visibly improved. The prospect of a tariff on tea keeps me awake at night; the scarring memories of the Boston Tea Party still leave me prepared to wage a second War of 1812 in retribution. To secure that supply of tea leaves, I would enrol to invade small countries, reinstitute slavery, perhaps restore the British Empire… but until then I’ll just pour myself another cup. Ahhh!

1. See this link.

Ich werde dort bei meiner wunderschönen Freundin in Freiburg bleiben, so dass dieser Blog Eintrag für einige Zeit der letzte sein wird.

Still, there is something vaguely romantic about being wrapped up indoors, reading by candlelight whilst the ill-designed stove pours smoke into the room, and this by 5pm. And the power did come on by midnight, allowing us to enjoy that beautifully crafted comedy Still Game, and watch £1 million explode over London to herald Ne’erday 2007. Nothing wrong with being reminded every once in a while how utterly reliant we are on electricity for our every day existence.

The history of Latvia is almost inextricable from the history of her powerful neighbours. Sandwiched between Russia and Germany in more recent memory, and looking further back Sweden and Poland-Lithuania in addition, the country’s history is often brushed over as historians try to paint ‘the bigger picture’. The city of Riga features many hints which point to a rather colourful history; from becoming a member of the Hansa in the late thirteenth century, through embracing the Reformation in the sixteenth century, to its position between the vying powers in the Thirty Years’ War, the Russo-Swedish and Great Northern Wars, eventually becoming pride of the Russian Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Much of what is visible in Riga and Latvia today, however, points to her more recent history, under Soviet (i.e. Russian) domination. Whilst the reassertion of her national identity harks back to her shortlived independence between the World Wars, Latvia has assumed a more western-oriented outlook, aiming to ‘rejoin Europe’, and many gains have been made in this direction. Obviously EU accession comes high on the list, and before that acceptance in NATO and the WTO, with the uptake of the Euro planned for 2008-9. Yet there seems to be plenty under the surface in Riga which hints at greater underlying tensions.

What is striking about arriving in Riga is the discrepancy between the visible and theoretical economic position. Apparently basking in one of the highest GDP growth rates in Europe, there appears to be little external activity in the city which is typical of a European growth area. Survey the horizon in Dublin, Figueres or even Krakow (see later), and the first thing that is usually noticeable is the number of cranes in operation. Further investigation usually finds the projects are in large part funded by the EU directive. In Riga this is distinctly lacking, and whilst construction is underway around the city, it feels to be on a much smaller scale.

Certainly the prices in Riga appear to be much more comparable to places in western Europe, at least where they aren’t subsidised. Public transport in Latvia might seem like something out of the past, but it is sturdy, reliable and extremely affordable. Despite this service, evidence of Riga’s wealth (or at least of some of her populace) is manifested in the great density of her high-powered, expensive motorcars. Some streets read more like car showrooms, with many examples of today’s VW Touaregs and Audi Q7s.

A trip on one of Riga’s trams, however, reveals a more interesting Latvian characteristic than the rustic nature of her public transport system. Often attributed to any form of totalitarianist society, inter-personal relations in Latvia are, shall we say, Spartan. You are generally more likely to catch the eye of a passing dog than a stranger; buying a ticket on a tram requires not a word, not a smile, not a single acknowledgement of the conductor’s existence. This kind of behaviour tends to be more prevalent amongst the older generations, suggesting that Latvia’s youth is at least softening, but it nevertheless seems much more evident in Riga than Krakow, for example.

Latvia’s history of recent external domination lies heavy on the hearts of its masters. The capital’s Museum of Occupation (Latvijas Okupācijas Muzejs) enjoys a central location and free admission, and focuses on the invasion of her sovereignty during the Second World War, and her implied subservience thereafter. Yet despite the long history of a multi-ethnic population, and the present proportion of non-Latvian speaking peoples in her borders, Latvian policy has been extremely nationalist (or at least, anti-Russian) in outlook. Riga was founded by German-speaking merchants, and the German language continued to dominate until enforced Russification in the late-nineteenth century. Even today, with the great upheavals of twentieth-century warfare, over 40% of the population speaks a first language other than Latvian, yet this remains the only official language.

Whilst it seems to be perfectly possible to survive in Riga speaking only Russian, with enough people speaking it as their mother tongue, and newspapers and other media available in Russian, the ludicrous lingual bigotry of officialdom prevents Russian appearing on many official signs and notices. Indeed if there were a second official language in Riga it would be English, which appears (occasionally in a rather haphazard form – boiled cancer anyone?) on all manner of menus and signs. This form of lingual persecution only perpetuates the necessity of the nation state and fuels the animosity between them. Whilst this may not prove as dangerous as it happened to be in the past, this policy when taken in context illustrates an almost petty level of nationalist government, with naturalisation laws that despite relaxation leave almost one in five of Latvia’s population as non-nationals.

This hidden policy of de-Russification, perhaps better classed as the more palateable policy of de-Sovietisation, can be seen almost anywhere one chooses to look. The Art Nouveau architecture which perhaps makes Riga so worthy of its place on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list is well marked on the tourist guides, but a rare guide indeed mentions the Stalinist architecture of the Academy of Science (Latvijas Zinātņu Akadēmija). Whilst some landmarks were removed outright, others have been simply brushed over. A trip to the Soviet memorial at Salaspils, built on the site of a German wartime KZ, is symbolic of this break with the past. A quiet aside in a German guidebook mentioned its whereabouts. Whilst the nearest train station was reportedly at Dārziņi, the poor sign posting in the region meant we ended up trying to reach the memorial from Dole, but the difference between the two for ease of access is almost negligible, as the only signposts remaining were old Soviet-era ones. Little wonder then that despite the beautiful weather, and aside from a few people gathering mushrooms, the site was virtually deserted.

This kind of begrudging respect for the past is exhibited in other formerly occupied territories. In Dublin for example, Nelson’s Pillar which symbolised the greatness of Britannia, the pomp and ceremony of the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars, was blown up by the IRA in 1966. Yet the Fusilier’s Arch on Stephen’s Green, a memorial to the casualties of the Boer War, a much more emotive subject in Irish history, remained intact. It is barbaric to destroy a monument to the fallen, but perfectly legitimate to hide its existence.