Lovely ones, do you remember the meme doing rounds on blogs in 2008, called “The 106 Books of Pretension”? It was a list of the top 106 (why one-hundred-and-six?) books marked “undread” by Librarything users. The “pretension” referred to books considered classics, or modern classics, that were actually unread by many avid readers and literary aficionados.
Out of the 106 books I had perhaps read around 35. I saved the list, and started reading the remaining 70+ books. I told myself, this is a list of books a civilized person should have read during a lifetime. There were books I had managed to skip during high school English classes. Books that had recently been made into movies. Books that many talked about the moment they were published – and the talk never ceased.
I discovered the curious stories of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; and of Cavalier and Clay. I found I loved Dostoyevsky and Neil Gaiman, and that the great Grapes of Wrath bored the wits out of me. But most importantly, I exposed myself to once-revolutionary thoughts; great stories; and incredible minds. Book after book I explored thought-worlds that changed the world we perceive as real. Censored books like Madame Bovary. Slandered books like Lolita. Shocking books like In Cold Blood. Classics like Homer’s Odyssey. And I realized that often we repel insurgent views because we hate to be told by a visionary storyteller. Books much hated have become books much respected. It was not the book that changed, but the collective mind and the world around it.
Only four books I could not finish: the Iliad (an account of who fought whom and how they died); Gravity’s Rainbow (I thought I would love this one! Did not get past 150 pages); The Silmarillion (come on, can you really blame me?); and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (what is wrong with me??).
Finishing off this list of 106 books was part of my Day Zero Project. I can now tick this goal off the list, after 10 years of reading (not with perfect adherence to this goal). The list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” at Librarything has changed surprisingly little: 95 are still on the list today. What a great shame as most of these books really are gems worth the effort.
For your reading pleasure, here is the original list from 2008. Have fun exploring 106 new worlds.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi
- The Name of the Rose
- Don Quixote
- Moby Dick
- Ulysses
- Madame Bovary
- The Odyssey
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Eyre
- The Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
- War and Peace
- Vanity Fair
- The Time Traveler’s Wife
- The Iliad
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin
- The Kite Runner
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Great Expectations
- American Gods
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Atlas Shrugged
- Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Middlesex
- Quicksilver
- Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
- The Canterbury tales
- The Historian : a novel
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Love in the Time of Cholera
- Brave New world
- The Fountainhead
- Foucault’s Pendulum
- Middlemarch
- Frankenstein
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Dracula
- A Clockwork Orange
- Anansi Boys
- The Once and Future King
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
- 1984
- Angels & Demons
- The Inferno
- The Satanic Verses
- Sense and Sensibility
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Mansfield Park
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- To the Lighthouse
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Oliver Twist
- Gulliver’s Travels
- Les Misérables
- The Corrections
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- Dune
- The Prince
- The Sound and the Fury
- Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
- The God of Small Things
- A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
- Cryptonomicon
- Neverwhere
- A Confederacy of Dunces
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Dubliners
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Beloved
- Slaughterhouse-five
- The Scarlet Letter
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves
- The Mists of Avalon
- Oryx and Crake : a novel
- Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
- Cloud Atlas
- The Confusion
- Lolita
- Persuasion
- Northanger Abbey
- The Catcher in the Rye
- On the Road
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
- The Aeneid
- Watership Down
- Gravity’s Rainbow
- The Hobbit
- In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
- Treasure Island
- White teeth
- David Copperfield
- The Three Musketeers
(Brande, Denmark; September 2018)
The Wildlife Channel. Live from Loviisa.
8 am in Vilnius and the last leg of work travel for the summer was soon to be complete. As I write this it is September and I have so many things to show you between now and then.
Once upon a time, a young crown prince went salmon fishing by a whitewater surrounded by scraggly old pines and water-polished rocks. He discovered he could wade between a number of little islets, surrounded by foamy flying currents and leaping salmon. After just a day he and his princess were in love with the rugged place, one that was Nature’s own and nobody else’s. 
Years later, the crown prince returned, now as the Emperor of Russia. He rediscovered his love for the wilderness and said, “let us build a house for us. Let it be a simple, wooden fishing cottage. Let it be a Finnish house on Finnish grand duchy soil, for the Russian emperor to be.”
And so the house was built as were the wishes of the crown prince. It was simple but of skilled making, and out of the best materials. There was a kitchen – and to the horror of the staff, the Empress Maria Feodorovna cooked in the kitchen with her own bare white hands. There were beds upstairs – but whether anybody slept in them overnight is not known, as the Emperor’s fleet was moored right beyond the last bend of the river, by the coast. The Emperor is rumored to have chopped his own firewood – also quite unheard of. But then again, who would hear or care? Such things are what hideaways are for. Even for the greatest of royalty.
(Langinkoski, Kotka, Finland; June 2018)
The long, wooden house stood by itself in an overgrown meadow of high grass and flowers, shyly exhibiting brand new walls painted red, sparkling white corner posts, and a sturdy, new roof. Why shyly? Because its exterior was nearly 300 years younger than its timber construction. It is not with complete comfort that one bears new clothes after loving one’s only outfit for centuries. 
My great-grandfather and great-grand uncle were born in this house. They were not born in this meadow though. Before the house was dressed in new clothes, it was dismantled, every log and plank numbered, carried a few dozen kilometers further, and built up again from scratch. Why? Because someone thought it was a valuable piece of history and should be kept under a watchful eye.
(Pernaja, Finland; June 2018)
Stavanger is surprisingly quaint, and somehow a little whimsical, too. I never thought this town would consist of white, impeccably restored cottages. Pink roses seem to be a popular gardener choice.
(Stavanger, Norway; June 2018)
Standing still and exploring the oceans. Old and new, side by side. The ship, serving as home for any guest for a few weeks at most, is much larger than a four-storey house, serving families for generations. Which one will outlast the other? My vote goes to the already aged house.
(Stavanger, Norway; June 2018)
I love little airports with ingenious designs. Such as 
Dear Cambridge, you’re supposed to look the same every time I visit you. You are one of the oldest university cities in the world. Your colleges, chapels, greens, and squiggly side-streets are supposed to look just like they did 2 years ago – or 200 years ago, no difference.
And why on earth is Ryder & Amies only selling official English university apparel with a huge American college style font, in worst case embossed in a fluffy fabric? It was bad enough that a fudge shop opened on King’s Parade when I lived in Cambridge (the shock was softened by the fact that it was fresh artisan fudge, after all).
Thankfully, lining up for a taxi cab at the train station is still as difficult as ever (I try to ignore that there now is an official Uber pickup spot as well, next to a brand new hotel). I was also delighted to note that the train traffic was as non-functional as possible: instead of 5 services to Cambridge per hour there was 1 (and half an hour late), due to a train company timetable change that needed several months to optimize, causing trains to miss drivers and drivers miss trains. Good old England.
(Cambridge, United Kingdom; May 2018)
This blue marble 