Lists and Books

I picked up my copy of one of my favourite books the other day, not to read it, but to just carry it around for a few minutes. Those of you who are bibliophiles will understand. Just peeking out from the pages was a piece of paper that had my list of my perfect man, from years ago. The first thing on the list was “I want a man who can tell me a story”. I love that list.

I am a romantic at heart. (not that I would announce that publicly) (Ooops!) You know, when you are sitting around with a bunch of friends, and the conversation lags a little, and someone asks you what are your three top movies of all time? I don’t always tell the truth but one of them is Out of Africa. I love that Meryl Streep could sit around a fire after dinner and tell the most amazing stories with just the first line given to her by someone else. Obviously Karen von Blixen was a master storyteller so her character in the movie had to be as well. I also swoon over the scene where Robert Redford washes Meryl’s hair in the garden – sigh!!

But seriously, I have always been attracted to people who can spin a good yarn – and I don’t just mean the knitters in my life. Thus my crushes on musicians like Paul Kelly and Tom Waits. I lust after Billy Connelly, Hans Christian Anderson and Dr. Seuss. Oh, I must throw Roald Dahl in there too. I love ted.com – my love of the 10 minute story is realized to the max here. If I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep I have a store of books on CDs and I often let Stephen Fry read me back to sleep.

OK – back to my topic. Lists!

So, finding my ‘my perfect man’ list got me to thinking about lists in books. I wondered how many other books I had squirreled away important lists in. I have sometimes been known to write my lists on the blank inside cover of a book. I have used lists as bookmarks - most of them lists of book I would like to read in the future!

There is a Seattle Librarian named Nancy Pearl who writes bestselling (in the USA – not so much here) books about book lists. She calls them “Book Lusts”. She is an incredibly well-read woman and has alphabetized her lists in strange and wonderful ways. A is for Action Heroes, etc. She has written 4 of them now – her latest is Book Lust To Go which is lists of books for travellers, vagabonds and dreamers (Cute!) Nancy also started a movement called ‘If All Seattle Read the Same Book’ which after 10 years or so is still going strong. Look it up! There are other books about book lists – Harold Bloom comes to mind and there are several others.

There are also books about lists and list making – lots of them. There are lists of favourite books all over the www – Amazon has a whole section called ‘Listmania’. There are even websites with lists of lists like listverse and toptenz. There are websites that help you make lists. There are websites for people who like to make lists. There are websites that explain how making lists can help your company make a lot more money. I even found a website that was a help group for people who are obsessed with making lists – you know, those people who have post-it notes all over their desks, houses and cars.

One of my favourite lists about books is the Banned Books List – which is changing all the time. Some of my favourite reads is on that list – Animal Farm, Dr Zhivago, Grapes of Wrath, The Satanic Verses, To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude – they have all been banned somewhere in the world at one time or another.
Other lists I love to read are my favourite writers’ favourite books. For instance Peter Carey’s top two books are Madame Bovary and Tristram Shandy and Annie Proulx’s are The Odyssey and Tom Sawyer. I love this stuff. Actually, most of my favourite authors pick classics as their favourite books. Hmm. Don Quixote, Moby Dick and Emma are up there in a lot of their lists.

OK, that's enough of this silly blog talk, I need to get back to studying Othello (which by the way has a list of characters at the start of the book!) and Architectural Orders. Plus, I have too much to do other than studying, as well. Let’s see. First I need to make a shopping list, and second I have to pay some bills, third – I have to make a to-do list for my Literature essay .......