Catherine, Caffeinated

It’s Friday! So let’s set aside the self-publishing stuff for a second and do something fun.

On Wednesday Nathan Bransford posted his personal list of 100 Favorite Movies and challenged others to do the same. Now as you all know I never met a procrastination activity I didn’t like, and I love movies as much as I love books (well, almost…), so today I’m posting my list.

One hundred movies sounds like a lot, and will seem like a lot when you first start trying to think of all your favorite films. You’ll enlist the help of friends and family, look up Best Picture nominees on Wikipedia and frantically browse your DVD collection. But soon you’ll be saying, “Oh! How could I forget that?” and “But what about—?’ and “I feel like there was something else amazing he was in too…” and then suddenly you’re up to 149, you need to start whittling them down and you’ve Argo in twice because you’ve Ben Affleck on the brain.

Now I’ve cheated ever so slightly with mine because I’ve counted series like Toy Story and the first two Home Alones as one entry, but so what? It’s my list! I’ve also picked my favorite movies, many of which would never have had a shot at Best Picture, so don’t hate me for loving Spacecamp. Or Dirty Dancing. Or 17 Again.

I also know I’ve left some out and will think of them as soon as I click the Publish button on this post…

(Yeah. There’s a chance I’m over-thinking this.)

Okay, so here we go. 1-10 are my all-time favorite movies, but 11-100 are in no particular order.

(Yep. Definitely over-thinking this.)

My 100 favorite movies of all time are (I think!):

1. Jurassic Park
2. Contact
3. Apollo 13
4. American Beauty
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
6. Adaptation
7. The Truman Show
8. Stranger Than Fiction
9. The Departed
10. The Usual Suspects
11. Primal Fear
12. Spacecamp
13. The Silence of the Lambs
14. Wall-E
15. The Lives of Others
16. The Secret in Their Eyes
17. The Shawshank Redemption
18. 17 Again
19. The Terminal
20. The Mist
21. Catch Me If You Can
22. Any Given Sunday
23. Contagion
24. Elf
25. Dirty Dancing
26. The Town
27. Return to Oz
28. Office Space
29. The Cable Guy
30. Midnight in Paris
31. Home Alone & Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
32. Best in Show
33. The Devil’s Advocate
34. Thank You For Smoking
35. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy
36. Seven
37. Jaws
38. Forrest Gump
39. Cast Away
40. Schindler’s List
41. The Toy Stories
42. Independence Day
43. Armageddon
44. The Sixth Sense
45. Fight Club
46. Gladiator
47. The Insider
48. Training Day
49. Amelie
50. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
51. Titantic
52. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
53. Bicentennial Man
54. Mission Impossible
55. Tropic Thunder
56. Misery
57. 1408
58. Inside Man
59. The Game
60. A Perfect Murder
61. Jagged Edge
62. The Life of David Gale
63. Cinema Paradiso
64. Minority Report
65. The River Wild
66. Twister
67. The Informant!
68. Zoolander
69. The Other Guys
70. All The President’s Men
71. The Others
72. Bridesmaids
73. Arlington Road
74. The Vanishing
75. Pretty Woman
76. Argo
77. The Reader
78. The Remains of the Day
79. Quiz Show
80. Jerry Maguire
81. Good Will Hunting
82. Speed
83. Closer
84. Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil
85. Clueless
86. The Wedding Singer
87. The Holiday
88. The TV Set
89. For Your Consideration
90. Senna
91. In The Shadow of the Moon
92. The Hangover
93. Bad Santa
94. Supersize Me
95. The Hoax
96. Grizzly Man
97. Recount
98. Stepbrothers
99. Kiss The Girls
100. I Love You, Philip Morris.

Agree? Disagree? Never going to trust me again because I love Return to Oz? (Guess what? I DON’T CARE. It’s amazing.) Or have you spotted a glaring omission? And don’t say The Godfather II, because even though it’s like the greatest movie ever made, it’s not a favorite of mine, really. Ditto for 2001. And Apocalypse Now? I’d rather Tropic Thunder any day. And I know many people have a scary obsession with The Princess Bride—I like it, yes, but it’s not one of my favorites. Also not a fan of anything Star Warred, Star Trekked or Lord of The Ringed.

Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or read Nathan’s list here.

Have a good weekend!

UPDATE: It’s happened: I remembered others! Here are a few that I didn’t think of when I was compiling the list: A Few Good Men, The September Issue, Easy A, The Cutting Edge, Enchanted, Top Gun (hello? HOW could I’ve forgotten that? I love that movie…), The Social Network and Superbad. Not sure if they’d have squeezed their way into my Top 100 but alas, we’ll never know (because I’m not starting this again!).

For the last twelve months, I have been tracking and rating every book I read through the Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Starting out I set my goal to 100 books (ha, ha, HA!) but quickly changed it to a more manageable 52 books, or one book a week for the year. Which sounds perfectly doable, right? Especially if you tend to read books quickly, usually in no more than two sittings.

But it isn’t really, because as quickly as you read books, you don’t always have the time to read them at all. So I’ll just about make my 52 books, more from reading binges than constant or regular reading and only if I finish all five of the books I’m currently in the middle of. However tracking my books means that when it comes to deciding which ones I liked best, it’s easy to decide (and remember the ones I read in the first place!)…

(NB: These are my favorite books that I read in 2012. Although most of them were published this year too, not all were.)

The nominees for the Novel That Depressed Me The Most Because I Know I’ll Never Write Like That (i.e. “Best Novel”) Award are…

• Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
• The Dinner by Herman Koch
• Ascent by Jed Mercurio
• The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker.

And the winner is…

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter! 

Just a fabulous book that, as another review of this title put it, reminds you why you love to love books. I would never desecrate a book by writing on it but if I did such things to, say, highlight my favorite phrases, descriptions that struck me or just sentences I wanted to remember, my entire copy of Beautiful Ruins would’ve been destroyed. Funny, touching and a page-turner to boot.

It also wins the prize for my favorite book cover of the year (the one pictured above, which is the US hardback that I ordered especially so as to avoid having to look at the horrendous cover of the UK paperback version. Yuck!).

The nominees for the Crime Novel I Loved The Most/I Read So Much Of It, It Needs Its Own Category On Here Award are…

• Criminal by Karin Slaughter
• Broken Harbor by Tana French
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes
• The Black Box by Michael Connelly
• The Treatment by Mo Hayder.

And the winner is…

Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes!

(I know, I didn’t choose Gone Girl, even though I’m a huge Gillian Flynn fan and have been reading her since long before the rest of the world discovered her this year. That’s not to say that Gone Girl isn’t brilliant. It is. But this is even better…)

There’s something about this book that just curls every last nerve ending you have into a fist of tension while you read it. It is easily the most tense and suspenseful book I’ve ever read. All the more impressive because it’s a relatively simplistic plot. “Psychological thriller” is applied to so many books, but this one actually delivers that. So, SO good.

The nominees for the Non-Fiction Book That Made Me Turn To The Nearest Person And Bore Them With New Stuff I’d Learned About The World (i.e. “Most Interesting”) Award are:

• The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of Tour de France: Doping, Cover-Ups and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
• Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio Mendez
• People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo and the Darkness That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry
• Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed
• Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
• Totally Wired: On the Trail of the Great Dotcom Swindle by Andrew Smith
• Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal by Mike Woodford

And the winner is:

A four-way tie: The Secret Race, How I Killed Pluto, People Who Eat Darkness and Wild!

Sorry, but I just can’t pick. Although if we spilt them into categories (Best Sports, Best Science, Best True Crime, Best Memoir), they can all be winners. Hooray!

If I had to pick just one novel and one non-fiction book to recommend to you, I think it’d probably be Beautiful Ruins and The Secret Race. You cannot go wrong with those two.

So what’s the one novel or non-fiction book you’ve read this year that you’d recommend everyone reads? 

It’s that time of year again, and I’m not only dragging out the Stuff I Found While Procrastinating Online Gift Guides, but also replaying some of my most popular “self-printing” posts from the last twelve months for those who might have missed them first time around. Today’s replay probably MY favourite post on Catherine, Caffeinated, this year, because not only is about my favorite book, like, ever, but it also got Freshly Pressed, bring hordes of new Jurassic Park lovers to my little blog! It was originally published back in July, just after my L.A. adventures. I’m off to countdown to JP 3-D in April…

Regular readers of this blog and those who’ve kindly subjected themselves to my books will know that I’m a huge Jurassic Park fan. I love the book, I love the movie and even though I’m a total coward who wouldn’t get on a rollercoaster if I was told there’d be a million dollars waiting for me at the other end of it, I braved Universal Studios Jurassic Park River Ride just to see the JP view from the lazy boat ride bit that came before the 80 foot drop.

The first edition jacket design of Jurassic Park.

I love Jurassic Park because it’s one of the first adult books I ever read and I can clearly remember reading it—or trying to; it was 1993 and I was only 11 —in the little caravan my parents used to have installed by the sea. It’s not Pulitzer Prize-winning literature or anything, but it’s a truly great read and reading it was the first time a book really took me away. I re-read it at least once a year, and still have my totally tattered, dog-eared and barely-held-together-by-Sellotape movie tie-in paperback. And if you are thinking What is she on about? Isn’t that book just about dinosaurs?, then I’m afraid we can’t be friends.

And you’re missing out. Big time.

But anyway, my point is I love Jurassic Park. And because I love Jurassic Park, I got a bit teary-eyed watching this TED video in which designer Chip Kidd talks about working on book jackets for Alfred A. Knopf.

I was watching it because I’d heard it was funny and interesting and it was about book cover designs. But a few minutes in, I suddenly realized who I was watching. This was Chip Kidd! The Chip Kidd who designed one of the most iconic book covers in recent memory—the T-Rex silouhette on the cover of the first edition of Jurassic Park! I was transfixed as he described how he bought a book from the gift shop at the Natural History Museum in New York, found an interesting-looking T-Rex skeleton, put a sheet of tracing paper over it and filled the spaces in with pen. Then he added typography to give the cover an overall look of “public park signage”—which, as soon as you hear this, you instantly see and understand. It could be a “Warning: Dinosaurs Crossing” sign, which is of course the kind of thing you’d find in a park of dinosaur attractions.

(Albeit one where the fences had failed.)

A couple weeks back in L.A., I was floating through Barnes and Noble at The Grove on a fluffy cloud of contented delirium when I gasped at the sight of a special edition of Jurassic Park on a table a foot away (and then quickly looked around to make sure no one had heard me gasp).

It was a thing of beauty. Hardback. That thing where the cover is a soft leather and the imagery is embossed into the surface that I don’t know the technical name for. The original T-Rex. Two books in one, Jurassic Park and its inferior but still really good sequel, The Lost World. Silver-edged pages, and on them the original type that I know so well. A map of Isla Sorna (the island from The Lost World) inside, and a red ribbon to mark my place.

I was in love, and I could bring home that love for only $20. Despite my self-imposed rule of no book buying due to no space in my suitcase, I practically ran to the register to pay for it.

On another trip to that same Barnes and Noble, I came across the edition of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth that was made famous by Oprah’s Book Club.

My edition of Pillars of the Earth, AKA The Fugly One.

It really is a stunning-looking book. My edition of The Pillars of Earth is an offensive eyesore that I can only hope was “designed” (ahem) and printed before Oprah picked it and the eyes of the world turned in its direction, because it really is a horrible, horrible looking book.

The pretty US/Oprah edition, soon to be winging its way to me from Amazon.com. You can’t really appreciate this in 2-D; the physical book is all shiny and embossed and stuff.

The gold/cream edition hadn’t been in Irish bookstores and so now, naturally, I wanted to buy the pretty one, replace the ugly one with it on my shelf (or in the boxes I have in storage as I am currently bookshelves-less) and donate the ugly one to a charity shop or something.

Hearing this, my companion said, “But it doesn’t matter what they look like.”

I swear to the Book Gods, life left my body for a second. My heart felt it like stopped.

It doesn’t matter what they look like?

It doesn’t matter what they look like?!!

Are you ON CRACK?!

But then I realized something: this is why some people can love their Kindles without pining for printed books. Because they don’t love the books themselves, like I do. They’re just after the words. For me, the words are the most important bit, yes, but they’re not the only important bit. For others, the format is irrelevant. We’re two entirely different kinds of readers. And that’s fine. That’s great even, for them, because I’d bet they haven’t cleared out their bank accounts buying multiple editions of the same book because the newer one was prettier.

But don’t tell me that a world without physical books will be a better world. Don’t tell me that I’ll “get used” to e-books. Don’t tell me that literature is going the way of music, because I don’t know about you but I never lovingly stroked a CD case (except for maybe a John Mayer’s Battle Studies but that was for, ahem, different reasons…) or held it in my hands, gazing at it adoringly, while I listened.

You only think that people will one day ditch print books completely because you are not a person who loves printed books. You love reading books, which is a different thing. It’s just one component of what I love. And what I love can never be replaced with some HTML and some plastic.

There are readers, and there are readers who also love books. I think there’s enough of the latter to ensure that while we all might profess love for our Kindles, the printed book is here to stay.

Now kindly all go and read Jurassic Park.

[UPDATE 16.07.12: Woo-hoo—Freshly Pressed! WordPress obviously love JP too. Obviously. I think we should start a book club...]