Inspired by Tom McCarthy's Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel C (but following on with almost spooky synchronicity from our recent meme on Alphabetical book titles) AbeBooks.co.uk are currently offering for sale a list of books with titles that are nothing more than a single initial letter of the alphabet.
I just recover from answering one meme (the one asking me to list my frequently watched movies) when, knock me down with a feather, along comes another one: this time courtesy of my friend SCB at Where there are Meadowlarks...1. Go through the alphabet, and for each letter, think of a book you've read that starts with that letter (A, An, and The do not count).
2. You must write down the FIRST book you think of for any given letter. This may make for some odd choices, but them's the breaks.
3. You must have actually READ the book. (I thought of lots that started with some letters, but I hadn't read them.)
4. If you think of a more impressive-sounding book for a particular letter, but you've already written your first thought down, you CANNOT change to the more impressive-sounding book. As an example, you have to leave "Fifty Famous Fairy Tales" (the Whitman Publishing pink and white one) on the list, even if you come up with fifty more impressive books afterwards.
5. If you can think of a book for X, you win... my lasting admiration (I can't afford real prizes!)
6. You can then tag as many people as you like. The more the merrier.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Doctor Dolittle – Hugh Lofting
The Exploits of Moominpappa – Tove Jansson
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
The Hobbit – J R R Tolkien
It's Too Late Now – A A Milne
(The autobiography of Pooh's creator)
Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
A Kid for Two Farthings – Wolf Mankowitz
The Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien
Mary Poppins – P L Travers
Noddy in Toyland – Enid Blyton
(Nostromo by Joseph Conrad would have sounded better, but there it is!)
The Once and Future King – T H White
Peter and Wendy – J M Barrie
Quentin Durwood – Sir Walter Scott
Ring of Bright Water – Gavin Maxwell
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Utopia - Thomas More
The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader' – C S Lewis
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
EXterminator! – William S Burroughs (Oh, well, it was worth a try!)
Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories – Dr Seuss
Zen in the Art of Writing – Ray Bradbury
1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.Here then are my five sentences taken from page 123 of Somewhere a Band is Playing by Ray Bradbury:
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Write down the first 4 sentences.
4. Invite 5 friends to do the same.
Somewhere a Band is Playing by Ray Bradbury was first published by Gauntlet Press in 2007.She was a beautiful woman not to one man or two men but to every man who lived in the town of Green River, Illinois in that summer when the sound of the trees at night was like a great green sea moving on an endless shore of warm white sand.
She was the sun who moved among them by day. She was the moon that glided, moving the shadows aside, by night. Her face was snow, her hands snow, her dresses lemon and lilac.
Her hair was soft sun wheat. Her lips said apple, cherry, apricot and rose. Her eye spoke cool iliac in fresh rain. Early mornings you would see trails of footprints on her lawn and knew she had been out early walking somewhere. You hated to see the sun rise and draw off the dew, annihilating the paths forever.The novella Somewhere a Band is Playing is also included (along with Bradbury's Leviathan '99) in the volume Now and Forever, published by William Morrow in 2007
The windows of her house were always up that summer and she sat before one and touched the piano keys with her white hands and the songs she played were songs every man carries in his head all his life...
Some 21 years ago, I was standing in line for 'Mr Toad's Wild Ride' in Disneyland, when a man mistakenly thought I was Francis Ford Coppola.
Of the six people whom I tagged to list Five Goals That Are Relatively Simple and Which Might Make Me Successful If I Kept to Them, four have responded.
Twice in one week! Ridiculous! First I am blog-tagged by Mike Crowl’s Roving Report to list a few Simple Things That Might Make Me Successful If I Kept to Them! Then, a few days later, Ridley Walker at News Sluice tags me to name my Five Goals.
There’s a game of blog-tag going around and I got tagged by Brian Sibley…
The last of my regular readers to to express their likes and loathings is Ridley Walker who, in response to being given the letter 'L' shows himself to be seriously passionate about 'Life', 'Love' and 'Literature' and (for some reason) 'Lava Lamps'!
