Top Ten Characters I'd Like to be Best Friends With

10. Ethan Muller from The Genius

Starts out as a spoiled, snobby, ultra-postmodernist jerk until the character developments kicks in. But he's also the owner of a Manhattan art gallery! That's a helluva crowd to run with.

9. The narrator of Last Nights of Paris

He hangs out with the 1920s Parisian underworld. SWEET.

8. Mr. Trąba from A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Because he's just insane.

7. Adrien Fournier & Co. in The Officers' Ward

The whole book is about overcoming tragedy through friendship and camaraderie. And these guys totally rule at it.

6. The narrator of Old School

We can talk literature over coffee. My idea of a fun afternoon.

5. Reitz Steyn and Ben Maritz from To Hell with Cronjé

I liked the bond they formed over a shared love of science and the natural world in the midst of a hopeless war. Very beautiful and very poignant.

4. Anita Blake

I've only read the first book so far and I've heard the series eventually goes waaaay downhill. But for now she's a badass heroine who holds her own against powerful supernatural beings and excels at a traditionally macho career. We can beat up Edward Cullen together!

3. The good guys in Lord of the Rings

I predict LOTR characters will feature prominently in everyone's picks this week, for obvious reasons.

2. Y.T. and Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash

A kickass teen skateboard courier! A hacker with dreads and swords! A lawless cyberpunk dystopia! HOORAY!

1. Dante, as author and protagonist of The Divine Comedy

Not really a fictional character per se (The Divine Comedy is sort of a self-insert mythology/Real Person fanfic) but I loved loved LOVED his grande metaphysical poetry epic! They don't make them like this anymore, folks.

Okay, I just noticed this list only has two female characters . . . or three, actually, since #7 would include Marguerite. Now how the heck does a massive genderfail like this happen? Remembering my childhood favorites definitely would've helped - that would include Cassie from Animorphs, Dairine from High Wizardry, the Baby-Sitters' Club, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne Shirley, and Meg from A Wrinkle in Time.

Damn, that would've helped a lot. WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY READING?

---

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

The Wolves Reading Schedule for 2011

I am just about finished with Vilnius Poker, our reading selection for November which was due last Friday. So while we're awaiting my belated post, I thought now would be a good time to announce the 2011 reading schedule for The Wolves, previously known as the Unstructured Book Group. We're a small group of bloggers who met during a read-along of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 back in 2009 and have been hanging out online ever since. As you can probably tell from the list, we're an eclectic bunch with a special fondness for translated/international literature. Do feel free to join us at any time! "Meetings" are held on the last Friday of each month.

January - The Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (me)
February - Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben (Emily)
March - Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (Richard)
April - The Dodecahedron, or a Frame for Frames by Paul Glennon (Sarah)
May - What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici (Frances)
June - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Claire)
July - Snow by Orhan Pamuk (me)
August - The End of the Story by Lydia Davis (Frances)
September - Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (Richard)
October - House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski (Sarah)
November - The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (Emily)
December - One Man's Bible or Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian (Claire)

Click here for the 2010 schedule.

God of War Style PB&J

It occurs to me that This Book and I Could Be Friends has been a sad place lately, what with the Great Fire of London, that Top 10 Villains list, that omgkillyourself war book, and the upcoming selection for the Unstructured Group Read, which is about a delusional gulag survivor. So I feel like I need to lighten up the mood around here. I saw this little clip (a parody of this video game) at a party recently and it was a huge hit so I decided to share.

I can't figure out if this guy is really awesome or a total loser.

"I'm going to save myself despite the world that persists in going forward laboriously at the speed of a handcar operated by a man with one arm"

Zone
By Mathias Énard
Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell
517 pages
Open Letter Press
December 14, 2010




. . . I thought about Harmen Gerbens the Dutchman and about his apartment, about the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria who came through Spain in 1967, about all those movements in the Zone, ebb, flow, exiles chasing other exiles, according to the victories and defeats, the power of weapons and the outline of frontiers, a bloody dance, an eternal interminable vendetta, always, whether they're Republicans in Spain fascists in France Palestinians in Israel they all dream of the fate of Aeneas the Trojan son of Aphrodite, the conquered with their destroyed cities want to destroy other cities in turn, rewrite their history, change it into victory, in other places, later on, . . .

France's Mathias Énard has lived in the Middle East, as well as in Barcelona as a professor of Arabic. He was awarded the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucault prizes for his debut novel, La perfection du tir, and the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre for his second work, 2008's Zone.

Francis Servain was born to a cultivated Croatian mother in exile and a French engineer haunted by his murky actions during the Algerian War. Influenced by neo-fascist identity politics and his grandfather's own involvement in the Ustaša movement, Servain, at a young age, returned to his ancestral homeland and fought for a free Croatia during the Bosnian Civil War. After finally fleeing the genocide and senseless chaos, he joined French intelligence and began to specialize in underworld networking throughout the "Zone" - that volatile region surrounding the Mediterranean. From Israel and the West Bank, to Libya and Lebanon and Turkey, to Spain and Syria, Servain became intimately acquainted with an ongoing cycle of violence perpetually spawning new violence in a never-ending dance of death dating back to the mythological histories of Greece and Rome. He has left all this behind now and changed his name so they can't find him. He is on a train in Italy heading to Rome with a suitcase full of names, beginning with an old Nazi living in Egypt. He is taking this suitcase to the Vatican, hoping for some kind of absolution.

Zone is bleak. It is a litany of atrocities strongly reminiscent of "The Part About the Crimes" in Bolaño's 2666. It is also a single, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentence, nearly five hundred pages long and interrupted only by two excerpts of a novel-within-a-novel about a female Palestinian in Beirut in 1978, on the eve of its fall to the Israelis. Although it is never stated outright, Servain is clearly plagued by PTSD, as seen in his inability to stop the memory reel no matter how much alcohol he consumes. But The Sentence is more than just a recitation of Servain's knowledge, feelings, and experiences. It is also a textual manifestation of war with no end or perhaps a Matryoshka doll - one individual's gruesome past, uncovered, reveals links to other conflicts in other countries. Zone is ultimately a protest against man's continuing folly. It is not so much that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" as it is simply that history is maybe the only thing left alive. History - collective and personal - inspires the ideologies and other excuses people use. The greatest force of them all is probably vengeance.

It is interesting that Servain at one point finds himself thinking about William Burroughs writing Naked Lunch in Tangiers. The Zone, as Servain knows it, really does recall Burroughs's Interzone in both name and spirit - a total Crapsack World, laid out in breakneck prose and violent to the extreme. But whereas Burroughs sought to satirize the hypocrisies and hidden animosities of mid-century America, Zone is about these underlying prejudices and impulses brought to the fore. Francis Servain's father was a mild-mannered man who enjoyed model trains and had participated in "special interrogations" in Algeria. Servain himself is a sympathetic war criminal, which should be a contradiction in terms. And herein lays the real despair of Énard's work: in this potential that exists in just about everyone, and how our denial of our own darkness leads only to the "othering" and dehumanization of our enemies as monsters who had it coming.

"It says 'Death' on every page," says one critical review of 2666. ". . . The bleakness of Bolaño's vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it." You can make the same charge against Zone as well. Énard's unrelenting focus on war in a single sentence of over 500 pages borders on repetition and nearly becomes exhausting. But maybe that was his intention. Reading about war is trying; try living it. I'm not sure Zone really has a point, at least not a redemptive one. What I did get out of it, though, was a sense of horror not only at what people go through but at what they put themselves through. Zone is closer to a documentary than a work of fiction (Énard's research included journalists, historians, and filmmakers) and I think that's how it should be approached. It's not holiday reading, that's for sure.

---

Review Copy

---

Top Ten Villains, Criminals, Degenerates

10. The writers from Nazi Literature in the Americas

Villainous mainly for their beliefs. Luckily they were all too pathetic to accomplish anything.

9. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights

All-around selfish, dysfunctional jerk who just ruins freaking everything.

8. Popeye from Sanctuary

An impotent creep who kidnaps and rapes a woman with . . . Never mind. How did the 1930s let Faulkner get away with that?

7. The "Ancient Enemy" from Phantoms

Say what you want about Dean Koontz's latest offerings, but this one is a classic of the thriller genre. A shape-shifting Eldritch Abomination, self-styled as Satan, has wiped out an entire town and sees humans as nothing more than playthings to sadistically toy with before devouring. What's not to love?

6. Rupert from Rupert: A Confession

He's what TV Tropes calls a "Villain Protagonist" but that doesn't mean he's sympathetic. The book is entirely from his POV as he defends himself to a jury. What he's being tried for exactly isn't revealed until the end, in the most horrifying detail imaginable.

5. Yutzi from Laundry

This woman literally fits the textbook criteria for a real-life psychopath. Also a rare example of a non-murderous Complete Monster but that doesn't make her any less terrifying. The emotional and physical abuse she inflicts on a helpless little girl is pure High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

4. Håkan from Let the Right One In

Most characters in this book are villainous in one way or another but this piece of work especially stands out. As if being a pedophile harvesting blood for a child vampire wasn't bad enough, Håkan had to go and become the most revolting vampire-zombie-thing in all of modern horror.

3. Sauron from Lord of the Rings

Self-explanatory. One of the greatest and most famous literary villains of all time.

2. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho

I have not read this book. Reading about it was quite enough, thank you.

1. The Cosmic Horrors of H.P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Dagon, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth . . . Not really evil so much as they're completely beyond anything the human mind can conceive of. Villainous mainly for the madness and havoc unleashed once an "unclean mockery of natural law" makes its appearance.

---

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. All we ask is that you link back to The Broke and the Bookish on your own Top Ten Tuesday post AND sign Mister Linky at the bottom to share with us and all those who are participating. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

The Zone by Mathias Énard
Page 67 - . . . Hezbollah was for them hard to penetrate, nothing at all like the divided, greedy Palestinians: the sources on Hezbollah were fragile not very reliable very expensive and always liable to be manipulated from above, of course with Nathan we never spoke about that, he showed me thrice-holy Jerusalem with a real pleasure, in the old city you heard dozens of languages being spoken from Yiddish to Arabic not counting the liturgical languages and the contemporary dialects of tourists or pilgrims from all over the world, the Holy City could duplicate all joys and all conflicts, as well as all the various cuisines smells tastes from the borscht and kreplach of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman basturma and soujouk. . .

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .

Note: The whole thing is one big sentence.

The London Gazette, September 1666

I came across a small collection labeled "fictional English newspapers" donated to us in the 1960s. My initial thought was that they must be satirical publications similar to The Onion, but further investigation revealed that they are apparently reprints done by Head & Meek (of 15 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street) circa the 1870s of real newspapers. I found them very interesting and decided to post a couple of excerpts from the London Gazette's coverage of the Great Fire in 1666.

The ordinary course of this paper having been interuppted by a sad and lamentable accident of Fire lately happened in the City of London : it hath been thought fit for satisfying the minds of so many of His Majesties good Subjects who must needs be concerned for the Issue of so great an accident, to give this short, but true Account of it.

On the second instant, at one of the clock in the Morning, there happened to break out, a sad in deplorable Fire in the Pudding-lane, neer New Fish-street, which falling out at that hour of the night, and in a quarter of the Town so close built with wooden pitched houses spread itself so far before day, and with such distraction to the inhabitants and Neighbours, that care was taken for the timely preventing the further diffusion of it, by pulling down houses, as ought to have been ; so that this lamentable Fire in a short time became so big to be mastred by any Engines or working neer it. It fell most unhappily too, That a violent Easterly wind fomented it, and kept it burning all that day, and the night following spreading itself up to Grace-church-street and downwards from Cannon-street to the Water-side, as far as the Three Cranes in the Vintrey.

The people in all parts about it, distracted by the vastness of it, and their particular care to carry away their Goods, many attempts were made to prevent the spreading of it by pulling down Houses, and making great Intervals, but all in vain, the Fire seizing upon the Timber and Rubbish, and so continuing it set even through those spaces, and raging in a bright flame all Monday and Teusday, notwithstanding His Majesties own, and His Royal Highness's indefatigable and personal pains to apply all possible remedies to prevent it, calling upon and helping the people with their Guards ; and a great number of Nobility and Gentry unwearidly assisting therein, for which they were requited with a thousand blessings from the poor distressed people. By the favour of God the Wind slackened a little on Teusday night & the Flames meeting with brick buildings at the Temple, by little and little it was observed to lose its force on that side, so that on Wednesday morning we began to hope well, and his Royal Highness never despairing or slackening his personal care wrought so well that day assisted in some parts by the Lords of the Council before and behind it that a stop was put to it at the Temple Church, neer Holburn-bridge, Pie-corner, Aldersgate, Cripple-gate, neer the lower end of Coleman-street, at the end of Basin-hall-street and Leadenhall-street, at the Standard in Cornhill at the chuch in Fenchurch street, neer Cloth-workers Hall in Mineing-lane, at the middle of Murk-lane, at the Tower-dock. . .

A FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THIS LAMENTABLE FIRE
This dismal fire broke out at a baker's shop in Pudding-lane, by Fish-street, in the lower part of the city, near Thames-street (among wooden houses ready to take fire & full of combustible goods) in Billinsgate-ward ; which ward in a few hours was laid to ashes. As it began in the dead of night when everybody was asleep, the darkness greatly increased the horror of the calamity ; it rapidly rushed down the hill to the bridge ; crossed Thames-street to St. Magnus church at the foot of the bridge ; but having scaled and captured its fort, shot large volumes of flames into every place about it. The fire drifted back to the city again & roared with such great violence through Thames-street aided with combustible matter deposited there with such a fierce wind at its back as to strike with horror its beholders.

Fire ! Fire ! Fire ! doth resound in every street, some starting out of their sleep & peeping through the windows half-dressed. Some in night dresses rushing wildly about the streets crying piteously & praying to God for assistance, women carrying children in their arms & the men looking quite bewildered. Many cripples were also seen hobbling about not knowing which way to go to get free from the flames which were raging all around them. No man that hand the sence of human miseries could unconcertedly behold the frightful destruction made in one of the noblest Cities in the world.

What a confusion ! the Lord Mayor of the city came with his officers, & London so famous for its wisdom can find neither hands nor brains to prevent its utter ruin. London must fall to the ground in ashes & who can prevent it? The fire raged mastery, & burnt dreadfully; by the fierce Easterly wind it spread quickly in all directions, overturning all so furiously that the whole city is brought into a desolation. That night most of the citizens had taken their last sleep; & when they went to sleep they little thought that when their ears were unlocked that such an enemy had invaded their City, & that they should see him with such fury break through their doors, & enter their rooms with such threatening countenance. . .