TOP TEN TOP-UP

Prompted by my earlier posting, the Diva of Deception has listed her Top Ten Reads --- and has included Mary Poppins, which immediately made me ask why she isn't on MY list! She certainly SHOULD be!

True, I didn't read Miss Poppins' exploits until I was in my twenties (some time after seeing the Disney film), but it resulted in a long friendship with the author and took me to Hollywood to write a sequel - albeit never filmed - to that famous movie. Why, I even wrote the 'Afterword' to an edition of the book (above) that is now sitting on a pile of books near the desk, looking accusingly at me and saying - with a Mary Poppins-type sniff - "Ha, Moby-Dick, indeed!"

And now a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh wants to know how come someone who's written one book (and edited two others), a radio play and two documentaries about the Bear of Very Little Brain and his creator chose Animal Farm instead!

Eeyore observes that there is a donkey in Orwell's book, and Piglet adds that it has quite a few pigs, as well; but Pooh maintains that is "Not the point!" And he's probably right...

So, maybe, what I really need is a Top Twenty list...

Or, maybe it just goes to show the true value of all lists!

PS: And now there's Cafrine's top-ten-totally-trippy-uh-books to be considered and she lists, on the one hand, all those Harry Potter and... books, to which I've still got to knuckle down; and, on the other hand, Douglas Adams' TOTALLY WONDERFUL The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which I first fell in love with when it was a BBC radio series back in 1978 and which made me want to write for radio...

PPS: And now, another impressive list of (fifteen choices - with synopses, no less!) has been compiled by Anna and will be found filed under precious pages. Check them out, my precious - even though Gollum didn't manage to squeeze into this list!

PPPS: Must STOP re-writing existing blogs! No more 'PS's!

TOP TEN TOMES

Following my recent rant about Penguin’s list of 100 Greatest Books, Cafrine of the wonky comma commented:

I'd be interested to hear, Brian, what, say, your top ten greatest books of all time would be. We'll even let you pick books from every publisher and not limit you to simply Penguin Books!

As I remarked in reply, any listing by me of 'The Ten Greatest Books of All Time' would be totally meaningless, since I know that there are a very many (very probably GREAT) books that I've still not read - and which, looking at the up-coming schedule of life, I will probably never will get around to reading...


But, yes, I decided, I would submit my personal 'Top Ten Tomes', on the strict understanding that Somebody Out There joins in and puts forward their Top Ten -- and that includes you, Cafrine!

The criteria (for me): books that have seized and held my imagination and - in some cases - changed my life or at least the way I look at it…

So here they are (in alphabetical order):

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C S Lewis

The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien

The Sword in the Stone - T H White

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

And what do you know? They’re all fantasies, fables or fairy-tales!

How revealing is that?!

SPIEL-CHEQUER

I've coined the useful acronym WYTAWYG (What You Type Ain’t What You Get) in an attempt to offer a rational explanation for the root cause of the many zillions of unfortunate or hilarious typos scattered through the publications of countless decades.

Many of these gaffs have been gathered into funny anthologies, such as Denys Parson’s classic ‘Shrdlu’ books of the 1950s, beginning with It Must Be True, a volume about which I have recently written on my Ex Libris blog.

I’ve suffered from a good few ‘misprunts’ in my career, but none more galling than that which appeared in an Edinburgh newspaper's critique of my play about Edward Lear, To Sea in a Sieve. An otherwise glowing review was ruined by a single, simple error when the writer (or possibly an over-zealous sub-editor) revealed a pathetic lack of childhood exposure to such Leary creatures as the Dong with the Luminous Nose ...


“Brian Sibley" ran the notice, "presented many lively nonsense characters on stage including an extremely amusing portrayal of the DOG with a luminous nose…”

Today, in the era of the computer spell-checker, it should all be so much easier. Except, of course, that it isn't! The other day, mine bumped up against the name Tolkien - admittedly mistyped as ‘Tolkine’ - and decided that the word I was really looking for was Tow-line!

Perhaps the best example in my recent experience was while writing the screenplay for an animated film based on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. I confidentally typed the immortal opening line - “Call me Ishmael” - without giving a thought to the consequences.

When the spell-checker (not knowing Melville's novel or the Old Testament) came to do its job, it was hopelessly nonplussed; but - in the spirit of automated helpfulness - felt obligated to make a suggestion...

By way of a not unreasonable alternative to Ishmael, I was offered ---- FISH-MEAL...

As it happens, Ishmael was alone among the crew of the ill-fated ‘Pequod’ in not becoming fish-meal at the end of the book; otherwise it wasn't a bad harpoon stab-in-the-dark - especially since, in Melville’s day, the whale was still believed to be a fish, rather than a mammal.

I think I might now almost be ready to start a collection of spell-check aberrations... So, if anyone wishes to contribute known examples - ‘freel fee’!