The Spiralcat Top 10 Books

The Spiralcat Top 10 Books

Brett: How about I chose five and you chose five?
Babsi: Yeah we can do that.
Brett: OK, what's your favourite book ever, ever?
Babsi: And that would go in 1 wouldn't it?
Brett: Yeah, I'll put yours 1 – 5 and mine 6 – 10.
Babsi: I've got a few. A Hero's Walk is one of them. And Maurice is another one.

- Much discussion later the list is formed -

Brett: So our first choice is Norwegian Wood?
Babsi: Norwegian Wood is a book by Haruki Murakami who is a very famous author.
Brett: Oh yes huge.
Babsi: And his stuff is mad but I like it. His book Kafka on the Beech is good but too mad. Norwegian Wood on the other hand is lovely. It is also a bit crazy, he always has these crazy elements, but still, it's a very, very good book. It's about this guy falling in love with a woman who plays the piano and ends up in a mental institution. It's very, very sad but good. Murakami's special flavour is in the detail. The devil is in the detail and he's got plenty of it. Murakami writes the same way Wong Kar Wai shoots a film. They have a lot of really fascinating similarities. They paint the same pictures in my head, and the pictures are so seductive that I always want to go and do whatever they are doing. They are often sitting around eating a lot of Japanese food and the way he describes it is so sweet that I want to go and eat Japanese food with a friend as well.
Brett: So it's a sad story, but the details are described very sweetly?
Babsi: That's the thing, with Murakami it's probably the wrong thing to try and see the whole picture. As a book, you would think that you have to see the whole picture. But his details are so very sweet and touching.
Brett: The next book on our list is Lucki Live. What's that?
Babsi: Lucki Live is really cool it's by the very good Austrian author, Christine Nöstlinger. A really good author for both kids and adults, who really understands them both. It's a very special book. I think she wrote it in the 70s or something. She's a sort of 60s, 70s writer but she's still around and she still writes heaps and she's pretty much with it. It's a coll story about this girl and her best friend/neighbour/class-mate, and they're very close. They sit together and walk to school together, but then he goes to England for a year as an exchange student. When he gets back he keeps saying, “You should have seen this live!” And he looks like John Lennon, hugely influenced by whatever England was like in the 70s. His friend is a bit bewildered by all this. It's also lovely because they all live in a big building and everybody knows each other. All the neighbours know each other and Lucki Live's mother has a big kitchen where she makes food for all the kids who just hang out there and she doesn't know what to do about Lucki. It's a story about dealing with a massive change in a person.
Brett: Why is he called Lucki Live?
Babsi: Because he keeps saying, “You should have seen it Live!”
Brett: (Laughs) That's cool.
Babsi: It's cool, it's a cool book.
Brett: Now we come to Hero's Walk.
Babsi: Hero's Walk is set in India and it's very, very sad. A tragic family story about a family who have to get to grips with the fact that the daughter moved to Canada and married some dude. They are both in a car accident. They die at the beginning of the book, and it's terrible you thing, “Oh my goodness, oh dear!” They had a kid and the kid has to go over to India. The kid is completely from a different culture to her grandparents.
Brett: So she's a bit like Lucki Live.
Babsi: Yeah, but it's very different. You can't really compare it. It's quite interesting and special, it's about a group of people and how they deal with the kid. The grandmother is really nice to the kid but the grandfather was not on good terms with the daughter and is unhappy, grieving and hurt. The grandmother finds out about all this through a phone call and is very upset, she thinks they should have sorted things out and reconciled with their daughter while she was still alive. But there was such a big divide between the daughter and the grandfather that his reaction is different. The great thing about the book is that it doesn't point fingers and say that he is a really bad person. It doesn't discount what he has to say. It's very sad. It paints beautiful pictures.
Brett: Now let's talk about the next book, Maurice.
Babsi: Maurice is a book I read a long time ago. It's by the fantastic E M Foster who also wrote A Room With a View, which is also very good. Maurice is about a young English guy who has to do all the usual stuff, such as find himself a good job. What he certainly shouldn't do is fall in love with one of his best friends. And it's well written, it really is well written.
Brett: What makes it well written, what do you mean?
Babsi: It's the words he chooses, and the pictures they paint. With me the visuals of a book are very important. I went through a stage where this was my favourite book and I gave it to my favourite people, so quite a few people have a copy of Maurice in their library.
Brett: Jazz is next on our list.
Babsi: Jazz is a fantastic book, again because of the pictures Toni Morrison paints.
Brett: What pictures does she paint?
Babsi: I would describe them as bright, sunny things, dancing and the things the city knows.
Brett: So it's about the city?
Babsi: It's about the city, and the black people living there – their relationships. Toni Morrison has a really good way of using words and making you see a different picture, or why the picture is like that. Prejudice is an important question and she's very good at opening your eyes to it, which is magical.
Brett: Next on the list is America the Beautiful, which I love. You didn't rate it so highly though did you?
Babsi: It was a bit grim.
Brett: In what way?
Babsi: Well there is a grim sex scene.
Brett: Oh yeah, with the boyfriend character who's painted very unsympathetically, he even ditches her by fax.
Babsi: Yeah, yeah I remember that, it's well written, but why did you pick it?
Brett: I thought it was just very honest and autobiographical. It really gave you an insight into that life. And I think the main character is a very witty, interesting and talented person. I just love what she has to say. The character has this father, which is obviously a reflection of Frank Zappa. Next we have State of the Union, which I haven't finished reading yet, but we still put it on our list.
Babsi: This book is fantastic and it's by Douglas Kennedy who's a whole different thing to any of the other authors we chose. It's very difficult even to compare books, it's basically ridiculous and impossible. There can be such differences in the writing style. His writing style isn't flowery like Murakami or quite in your face like Toni Morrison or extremely witty and funny like Christine Nöstlinger, the main thing for him is to get his message across. And he smacks you with his message over your stupid head over and over, and if after that you haven't gotten the message that he's not a huge fan of George W Bush then you really have issues.
Brett: (Laughs) but all the different opinions at the heart of the story are almost all represented within one family. Except perhaps the most extreme ones belonging to this Tobias character and he's sort of outside the family group.
Babsi: His views aren't that extreme, that's the funny thing. He's put characters, such as the main character Hanna for example in the 70s, which weren't that radical in the end. People were just concerned about other peoples welfare, which isn't as fashionable now. Lot's of people were concerned and rebelled in the 70s but Hanna was to conservative, and then later in the part that's set in the present people get it into their heads that she's a radical.
Brett: Yeah, that's interesting that she's the square ion the 60s and the radical in the present.
Babsi: It's quite unbelievable, what the author has put that poor character through.
Brett: Next we have The Redundancy of Courage which I just found on a bookshelf in a holiday apartment. I would never have read it apart from that. It was written by Timothy Mo and it's about a Chinese restaurant owner getting caught up in a civil war. And it's a civil war on a small island, like a Tamil Tigers sort of thing. It's just fascinating because he ends up being an accidental freedom fighter. He totally doesn't want to be involved at all. The leaders of the people he ends up with in the rebellion went to really posh schools with the people in the government and it points out the little interesting things like that. It talks about how important the media is and the fiercest fighting in the book is over a transmitter capable of letting the outside world know about the civil war. It's written really quite humorously. Although many tragic things happen, it's written quite humorously. It's a very good book.
Next we have a book called Amrita.
Babsi: Ah, I love this book. I love the author, Banana Yoshimoto. If I had to chose between Murakami and Yoshimoto, I'd chose Yoshimoto.
Brett: Yes. Yoshimoto wins. This book is written about spiritual subjects, but in a really arty way. It's about a woman who bangs her head and starts to have spiritual experiences, and her young brother who battles a little bit with mental illness, and I think wins but while he is having that battle he has some spiritual experiences. And they go to a place, what island is that, that they go to...?
Babsi: Saipan.
Brett: Apparently in Saipan everyone speaks English, and the way the island is described is just beautiful. But it also talks about how the island saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Second World War and how this has left a very strange and spiritual atmosphere. After reading this book I desperately wanted to go there. The main character meets a woman who sings to ghosts, but she meets that character in a deja vu before she even makes it to the island, excellent book.
Babsi: She also has a sister who is a very interesting character, but dies.
Brett: Yes that's right, the way that character is written is heartbreaking.
Babsi: Lastly we have Trading Up which falls in a strange category. It seems to be a women's cliché which can't be taken seriously but it's actually very well written. It's very poetic, there's poetry in unexpected places.
Brett: I remember this scene where a character is invited away for a weekend, the host is very rich and there's a swimming pool. She goes for a swim in the pool and the host tells her off for not showering first. She is really upset and wonders why, if he thought she was dirty, he invited her to come. I liked those well observed moments, that show something really deep and interesting about both characters involved.
Babsi: Yeah, Trading Up is an incredibly intelligent novel. It's about a journey, a character who wants to be an actress. She has to come to LA from the middle of nowhere and takes a really long bus journey, and you take the journey with her.
Brett: Actually I remember that character, she stays at a Motel and she fits right in there. It's a situation that I think I would find really scary but she fits in because of her background.
Babsi: She writes about shallow stuff in a very deep way. Now that is really quite an art form.
Brett: Because that's all life is, shallow stuff.
Babsi: If you just read the blurb on the back cover you could easily misunderstand what the book is. You could think it's just about movie stars and lots of drinking, but it's so much more. It's so much more intelligent. What is your top 10, please leave a comment.