I am overjoyed: I have just discovered two new websites to do with writing, and they’re both excellent.

The first is called Vulpes Libris, which means Bookfox; it’s by a collection of writers, and they review books on a wealth of topics, and also interview authors and so forth. There’s a lot of good writing here, and it’s going to be fun working through it all. I’m particularly looking forward to Thursday’s post, which will be a round-up of some of the best writing websites.

The other site is Revisiting Russia, the personal site of one of the Bookfox writers, who goes by the online moniker of kirstyjane. The focus here is, as one might presume from the blog’s title, Russia. Hence the photo for today’s post, which is a rather torn copy of ‘The Idiot.’ I love Russian literature, but I don’t know much about the culture of the country generally, so hopefully Kirsty will help to educate me a litte in the coming months.

Easwaran’s 8-point plan is a guide to meditation for the novice. It details the various reasons for meditating, stressing a greater control over the mind and the senses, and gives a methodology for getting the most out of meditation.

There were, unsurprisingly, some aspects of Easwaran’s book that I disliked, most notably his sometimes ‘holier than thou’ aspect, and how ascetic and lacking in excitement his suggested lifestyle could be. I am no epicurean, certainly, but I do think that going to the cinema and then closing ones eyes during the ‘tawdry scenes’ is rather missing the point of what life has to offer.

However, there were some aspects that I enjoyed. I can respect Easwaran for his learnedness, and the breadth of his reading. He knows a lot outside of his own speciality, too, having previously been an English teacher and not just a spiritualist.

Given its vintage, ‘Meditation’ is something of a snapshot from a different time, when the spiritual movement in America and Europe was still somewhat in its infancy. Certainly, the movement became well-known in the 60s and 70s alongside drugs culture, but it still had some cachet, which now, sadly one thinks, has dissipated with the trend of books like this now to veer towards self-help and self-improvement, instead of the stated spiritual aim.

Buy Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran from Amazon.

The story of Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned child of an Irish soldier in India, begins with the chance meeting of young Kim, a cheeky, worldly-wise beggar child, and a mysterious, innocently naive lama from the hills. Kim is immediately enamoured of the old man, and becomes his chela, or assistant, on the road, and together they search for the river formed when the Buddha’s arrow pierced the ground. According to legend, the waters of this holy river can cleanse the spirit of all sin and so remove the soul from the wheel of life.

Finding the river, then, is the lama’s destiny; Kim’s destiny, which he knows from various misremembered tales of his early childhood, is as the bringer of news of war, and so early in the novel this destiny comes to pass; however, Kim’s curiosity about war and armies leads him to be captured by a British regiment, and when his Eurasian nature is discovered, he is sent off to school.

Kim’s knowledge of Indian culture and language, and his remarkable penchant for deception and disguise, are seen as the perfect criteria for a career in the ethnographic department – essentially, the British spy service in India. Kim is taken on by an Englishman, Creighton, and a Muslim, Mahbut Ali, and trained in this direction. Kim’s love for ‘The Game’ is clear; so too is his love for ‘The Road’ and his lama master, who he misses terribly during the years of his schooling. Thus are the two great desires of Kim’s life set against one another: the yearning for adventure, and the yearning for spiritual enlightenment.

As the story progresses, we see Kim’s development and growth from street urchin and beggar, to a competent spy in the service of the government. We also witness his metamorphosis, late in the novel, when the true meaning of ‘The Game’ becomes awfully clear to him, and weighs heavily on his soul.

Kipling himself wrote, in ‘The Ballad of East and West’, that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” This novel is, in many ways, testament to that statement. Firstly, the language of the novel is steeped in the various cultures of India, and it is taken for granted that the reader is familiar with all of the sayings and insults and quotes that Kipling uses. The effect is dizzying, and whole passages seem to stream by, with little or no real meaning other than that carried by culture; whilst this effectively takes the reader and immerses him in the India of the time, it can make the book a difficult read.

Secondly, Kim represents the uncertain bridge between East and West. On the one hand, he is of Irish descent, and in a fight late in the book his ‘Irish blood’ causes him to fight more viciously than would perhaps been expected of a typical Indian. On the other hand, Kim can almost effortlessly pass himself off as any of the various tribes or races of India, adopting their speech and their mannerisms.

But what, then, of its import? Kim is never wholly satisfied, tugged as he is in these two directions. He longs to be free and to roam ‘The Road’ with his lama, but he wants adventure and has a thirst for war and power. He believes in charms and the spirit, and he does not, for he slips from Buddhism to Islam to any of the animalistic beliefs with ease, never considering his actions blasphemous. He is a child of the plains, of the streets, of the shadows; his character is a blur of contradictions that never settle, and this lack of resolution makes him the embodiment of Kipling’s sentiments.

Buy Kim, by Rudyard Kipling from Amazon.

It’s been a while since I really looked at my Library Thing page; sure, I add every new book as I read it, and I tag and review what I add for completeness’ sake, but I’ve not spent much time investigating new features or really delving deeper into the social side of the site – a big mistake on my part, as a lot has happened since I first fell in love with the service a year and a half ago.

I joined Library Thing late in 2006, when I was a teacher in Krakow and spent a grand portion of my days updating my various online identities, such as Flickr and my now-defunct Blogger blog. I had previously only kept a list of the books that I’d read in my 05/06 Moleskine diary, a lovely black leather affair, and I still update things there just in case (though really I have nothing to worry about – the main purpose of updating my hand-written books list is the satisfaction of seeing a little more ink cover one of the pages); I spent a good few hours, if not days, going through that list, transfering the information onto the web. Unsurprisingly, I soon found myself investing in Library Thing‘s pro account, which, for $25 for a lifetime membership, is fantastic value.

So, now that I’ve returned, what are the new features worth mentioning? Well, I just found the Series view, which details which books I’ve read belong to what series – it’s a neat little directory listing that aggregates a lot of useful info. What would be nice would be the same view, only one that lists which books I’ve read appear in the various editions of books like ’1001 Books to Read Before You Die.’ That would be great.

The ‘Add Books’ dialog has been streamlined, making it a much more pleasant experience adding books; in the past, one would have to add the book, then go into the book’s page to give it a rating, tag it and review it; now, that can all be done using some AJAX wizardry from the same page.

Visually, LT has gone through some changes recently too, although these changes aren’t site-wide. The main profile page, with the usual personal bumpf on it, isn’t very interesting to look at, but the new Home page is very pretty. It shows what else is going on in the LT world, with a blog feed, recent book additions by other members, and other things of interest. It’s a big improvement, and shows the direction in which LT is going, and how the site will hopefully look in the future.

The ‘milk bars’ you found dotted around Polish city harken back to an early time, a time of Communism and food shortages, a time when the food these little restaurants could offer really did include whatever was handy plus a little milk. Nowadays, the concept is much more flexible; a lot of milk bars have a full menu to choose from, including all the typical Polish dishes one comes to expect: pierogi, those delicious filled dumplings; bigos, the stewed cabbage and sausage meal that does have a terrible tendency to disrupt some people’s digestive systems; placki, or potato pancakes, with a variety of toppings; and nalesniki, pancakes so pancake-y that you’d think you were in England.

Regardless of the details of the menu, however, all milk bars share two things in common (forgetting for a second the usually spartan or even tasteless decor): they’re cheap, and there’s never a waiter service. You either wait for your food at the table where you place your order, or in some cases at the window looking into the kitchen itself, or you place your order, find a seat, and wait until the girl calls out the name of the food you ordered. Listening out for your order, and getting to it before anyone else, is one of the adventures of living in Poland.

Here in Bielsko, I finally found, not too long ago, the perfect, classic milk bar. Unlike modern reinventions, this milk bar is resoundingly old-fashioned. There’s no menu per se, rather just the two meal options for the day hand-written on post-it notes by the window where you place the order. Usually the meal comes with some kind of salad, perhaps stewed cabbage, and there’s always mashed potato. The bulk of the meal is made up of a meat dish: pork cutlet, a piece of chicken in breadcrumbs, perhaps a nice piece of fish, still with a few bones. Regardless of what’s on offer, though, you can be assured of a certain level of quality, which is all the more surprising considering that the full menu is available for only 9,50PLN, a frivolously little amount of money in today’s westernised Poland.

I particularly like this milk bar, because the guy who works there tirelessly, day in, day out, seems to recognise me, and I no longer have to struggle to explain that I want a take-away, rather than to eat in. This is just as well, since my Polish is quite abysmal, and since it would otherwise only have been a matter of time before I poked somebody in the eye with my wild gesticulating, pointing with my thumb back outside to suggest where it is I wanted to take my food.

So now this homely gentleman immediately reaches for the plastic plate, expertly scoops potato and cabbage or beetroot onto one side of it before I’ve had time to place my order, and then fills the other half with whatever it is I then mumble in his direction. Watching him prepare my take-away is like watching a master performance artist. First, when the plate is full, he lets it slide from the palm of his hand onto the nearest work surface. He rips some foil from the roll, knowing through experience and instinct exactly how much is needed. Nothing is wasted. Next follows the most hypnotic aspect of the sequence: using his right hand, but only the edge of his palm, he pushes the foil under the plate, whilst with his left hand, using three fingers only, he tucks the foil in close against the plate so that it stays where it is, and the food is trapped inside with all the heat it needs to get me home. Then, as quickly as all that is done, he spins the plate round with a flick of the wrist to move onto the next couple of inches; within seconds he’s done, and I have my lunch, bagged and with napkins and plastic utensils all ready.

I can assure you that the walk back to the school is a quick one, and that it takes me very little time indeed to polish off what I’ve brought. I also enjoy all the envious looks that my fellow teachers point my way when I turn up carrying a bag of such cheap – or should I say ‘inexpensive’ – goods all ready for the eating.

I am an atheist. I was brought up to question everything, and to apply the scientific method before accepting ideas as facts. I am reasonably certain, however, that there is nothing special about me, and that, had I been brought up differently, my opinions may well have been completely different, too. For example, if I had been brought up in a strictly Protestant family, with strict Protestant parents and grandparents, I would probably be a strict Protestant myself, rather than the atheist I turned out to be.

I have been an atheist for about half of my life; before that time, I was simply agnostic. My father was the same way. He declared himself an agnostic some time ago – long before I was born – and it was only a few years before his death that he finally made the decision to label himself an atheist. He had considered the evidence, and as Richard Dawkins suggests in his book The God Delusion, although we cannot with 100% certainty say that there is no God, we can at least put a rough figure on the probability; like my father before me, I have decided that there is very little to suggest that there is a God.

When The God Delusion first came out, I didn’t immediately rush out to buy it. I had read Dawkins before: I think that The Selfish Gene is one of the classics of popular science, and the views that Dawkins reports in it have had a major effect on my life. By accepting evolution, one can come to a much greater understanding of the world than if, say, one believed that the creationists had it right.

I put off my decision to buy a copy for ages: as important as the book may have been, I had made up my mind about the issue already and didn’t feel the need for further guidance; I had also been pointed in the direction of criticism about the book, which I then wanted to separate myself from so that I could honestly evaluate Dawkins’ ideas. A good example comes from Prospect magazine in their end-of-2006 literature round-up:

[T]he sternest criticism of The God Delusion came from Richard Dawkins’s fellow non-believers.

Andrew Brown was one of the most critical. His article, Dawkins the Dogmatist, is reasonable and well-reasoned, and he is right to say that “belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.” However, he overlooks the natural importance of Dawkins’ book, which is the best aggregation of atheistic ‘beliefs’ that I have come across so far.

Of course, Brown is not the only writer to have reviewed Dawkins’ work. Joan Bakewell, in her article Judgment Day writing for The Guardian, expresses her opinion thus:

In The God Delusion [Dawkins] displays what a formidable adversary he is. It is a spirited and exhilarating read. In the current climate of papal/Islamic stand-off, it is timely too.

My own opinion lies between these two liberal extremes (but far away from the writer of The Dawkins Delusion), but at the same time, I felt the need to distance myself from any opinions and see what came of it.

On Library Thing I wrote a short review of the book, and gave it a score of 5 out of 5. I agree with the critics who have labeled Dawkins’ writing as clunky and sometimes he travels along a tangent that takes him far from the purpose of his original point. I might, in time, come to reconsider my opinion, as I explore the subject further. Now that I have read Dawkins’ views I can argue the points more carefully: about what he says, as well as how.

Five Biafra Pounds, originally uploaded by doubleyou_em.

If anyone had asked me, only a year ago, to place Nigeria on the map, I would have come close but missed. I know this because I used to play the Traveller IQ Challenge game on Facebook all the time, and the only chance one has to score high is to learn about African geography.

So, I know now where Nigeria is. But had you asked me anything about Biafra, including how to pronounce the word, I would have struggled enormously – no, worse than that, I would have been forced to state simply that I had no idea.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Half of a Yellow Moon can be considered, therefore, as a supremely educational piece of literature. It deservingly won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 (ironically, I had only read one other entry that year, Xialou Gou’s The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which I loved and felt was in with a real chance). But Adichie’s work is far more than just educational: it is well-written, and the kind of book that will, one hopes, cause others to read more about the subject.

I will do this myself, eventually – when time allows. I have the emotional need to know what happened, and to understand how the Igbo coup in Nigeria in 1966 turned into a fight for secession. I haven’t spent nearly enough time researching Britain’s colonial past, even though there are reminders everywhere. Sadly, there are so many reminders, that I could quite easily devote years of my life to trying to understand everything that my country once did. Where does one start?

When I finish the tremendous Half of a Yellow Sun, I will have read 325 books since I turned 18. That might not seem like a lot to some, but it represents a good ten years (and a bit) of reading, and more specifically, of reading proper or good books. Before I turned 18, I’d concentrated on Star Trek and Star Wars novels, which were entertaining as far as these things went, but didn’t change my life one way or the other.

When I left school and took a year out of my education to earn some money, I found myself amongst a group of people who actually read, who thought the classics deserved a thorough exploration, and that a lot of genre fiction was, essentially, a waste of time. Now, I don’t agree with that last – it’s better to read genre than to read nothing at all, and one does learn a lot of important reading skills (most importantly, how to sit down and spend a significant amount of time reading), but otherwise I took the point, and began to explore fiction in a way that I had never done before.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine asked me to recommend to her some books – books that would help her get into the classics, to find out about those books nobody had told her about in the past, the books she would otherwise have overlooked or ignored. I’ve spent a little time thinking about what to suggest – which books, of those on my list of 325, that merit attention, and the order (more or less) in which they could be approached. What follows is the result of my deliberations.

It isn’t easy to know where to start. There are a couple of books that immediately sprang to mind, that I would have said straight away: “You must read this.” But would that be any use? After all, as much as I enjoyed reading Tolstoy, would I have managed to work through his epics as quickly – or at all – without first having worked my way up to them? Assuming this to be the case, I’ve separated my list of recommendations into three categories – easy, short works that I think deserve to be read; more challenging works; and what one might term the ‘epics’. There are notable omissions, and at the end I’ve provided a couple of links for further reading, but this is my advice, based on what I’ve read.

Phase One

The books I’ve included here are mostly quite short (relatively speaking), and some of them are modern classics rather than random books from the 19th century. Hopefully, by starting here, the prospective bibliophile will find a gateway into some of the more complex or difficult texts on my list. There’s no order to the recommendations – I sometimes like to think ahead to what I’ll read next, but I always change my mind anyway, so I suppose other people might do so too.

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
The film, of course, is rather excellent, but it pales in comparison to the book, which is a classic. It’s also surprisingly easy to read, and very enjoyable: it’s tragic, but not so tragic as to be one-dimensional.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
I read this in Japan a number of years ago, and it was one of the first novels to really change the way I looked at the world. Kundera is on magnificent form with a tale that titillates and educates in equal measure.

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
This is mostly on the list because I live in Poland at the moment, but it is also one of the finest examples of science fiction writing that I’ve ever come across. It’s also worth reading because Lem himself is so obviously a bibliophile.

1984 and Animal Farm, by George Orwell
What can I say? To have written one of these books would make you a legend, but to have written both…

The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
A personal favourite. Larry Durrell could have lived the easy life in America, as a stockbroker, but his experiences in the First World War as an ambulance driver bring about a spiritual crisis; he drops out of high-class society, and travels the world looking for enlightenment. I absolutely adore this book, as much for what Maugham writes as how he writes it. His narrator is also one of my favourite literary creations.

Generation X, by Douglas Coupland
Remember the days when it was cool to like Coupland? He’s gone off the rails a little in recent years, but this is still a classic of late 20th century fiction.

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham
Another slice of science fiction, certainly, but this is one of those “end of the world apocalypse” stories that taught other apocalypse stories how to do the apocalypse, if that makes any sense.

The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
A lot of Wells’ science fiction is metaphorical, and I think this is also the case here. Anyway, this is an exceptionally imaginative piece of writing, and I don’t think enough people read Wells these days – I’m leading a crusade to change that.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Effectively a lesson in how to write a great story; there isn’t a wasted word anywhere in this book.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
I like everything I’ve read of Steinbeck’s, but this is arguably his most famous piece of writing. It’s short and so, so bitter-sweet; it also provides the perfect introduction to his longer novels.

The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
The ultimate romantic adventure story. Most people are familiar with the plot because of the large number of movie adaptations, but the book deserves to be remembered too.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
I’ve rather fallen in love with Spark’s writing of late. I only discovered her a year ago, when I was working in Krakow and discovered a stockpile of aging Penguin paperbacks – a couple of hers were among the other forgotten relics of the 1960s. This is a great introduction to her style of idiosyncratic writing.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
If you’ve nothing else to do on a rainy day, why not spend it in the company of Wilder’s doomed characters, who fell from a bridge in Peru? It’s incredible just how much impact this slim volume had – I think of it often, and the questions Wilder asks as he tells his magnificent story.

Phase Two

These books are either longer than the first lot, or otherwise require a more careful read. Not that I’m suggesting that one should zip through the rest, but these can cause problems for some – they certainly did for me.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
I actually read this, along with Moby Dick, because of all the lines quoted from it in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Yes, if you didn’t know it before, I am truly a geek! Still, it has some benefits: this is my favourite Dickens.

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
They say that history is a country one can never visit, and that’s certainly true with Swift. A lot of his writing has lost the targeted satire of the period: though he attacks famous politicians, they have since sunk to obscurity, and what remains is his own work, which is magnificent, but can take time to work through.

For Whom The Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
It was inevitable that I would include Hemingway somewhere on this list. However, I’ve had my fingers burnt once already because of him, when I recommended A Farewell to Arms to my mother. She got three pages in, said that nothing had happened, and gave up. One has to be patient with Hemingway: he rarely disappoints.

The Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde
Wilde is wonderfully witty (apologies for the alliteration). I wouldn’t suggest that one attempt him straight away – some of his philosophising can be heavy going, but as a story, this is simply magnificent: hauntingly so.

The Outsider, by Albert Camus
Don’t be fooled by how short this book is, or by how simple Camus’s language is. There’s more to this one than meets the eye, and I’d actually suggest that the committed reader work through this a couple of times to reveal the subtleties that lie hidden in the language.

Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
Another relatively short book, and again there’s a lot to digest. This is on my list of books that I really need to read a second time – but even on a first reading I was seriously impressed.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
One has to be careful when approaching a ‘true’ classic (in other words, a book that is more than a hundred years old). The English language has changed so much that it can be like reading something in a foreign language; therefore, be patient and read slowly until your head can adapt. Be warned, though: read too many books from this time one after the other, and you’ll start speaking like someone from the period.

Catch 22, by Joseph Heller
Heller never wrote anything nearly as good as this for the rest of his career (or so they say). When this point was raised, he had, of course, a suitably witty reply. “You’ll never write anything as good as Catch 22,” they said; “Neither will anyone else,” he said. Catch 22 is the ultimate ‘horrors of war’ novel, about the craziness of fighting and wanting not to.

Phase Three

Okay, these are the serious books, the ones that should definitely be attempted, but perhaps not until one has read a couple of shorter ones to get into them.

The Trial, by Franz Kafka
Kafka changed literature. There are books written about his writing; there are words to describe his style, that then get applied to other writers and writing. However, his work is not to be approached without a certain trepidation. I started with The Castle and I struggled, failing to understand the point of it all. The Trial was much better, but still difficult; in the end, though, it was a greatly rewarding experience.

Don Quixote, by Cervantes
About two years ago, I looked at the list of books that I had been constructing over the past decade, and noticed that of everything I’d read, there were almost no epics. I started with Don Quixote because of the windmills, of course, but it took me ages to get through – maybe as much as ten weeks. When I got used to the style and the antiquated usage, I found the story to be intoxicating, and raced towards the finish. More importantly, reading Don Quixote prepared me for the greatest challenge of my reading career…

War and Peace and Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
When I picked up a cheap copy of War and Peace, my friends thought I was joking. It is a massive book, so massive that the name of the book has become synonymous with the size of things. Yet, it is truly extraordinary. I have never read anything like it, anything that comes close to it, and I doubt I will ever read anything like it again. And when, five weeks later, I had finished it, I allowed the momentum I had built up to carry me forward to Anna Karenina, which then took less than a fortnight to plow through. The common misconception is that there are too many characters and too much happens, and that it’s impossible to keep track of what happens; however, Tolstoy’s writing is so finely-honed that, although it is possible to lose track of some of the names, the characters themselves are easy to follow and stay with. These two books really can be seen as the culmination of years of reading; a milestone not a millstone.

What comes next
There are so many books that I’ve not included. My entire list is kept on Library Thing here, if you’re interested. The Observer has a fine article on The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, most of which I’ve yet to read.

I’d love some comments and feedback, so if you’ve anything to say about my list of recommendations, I’d be delighted to hear from you all.