Top 5 what? you wonder. Well, then I’m glad that you wonder. This Bookchat means to set you wondering, then pondering, then commenting below.
Top 5 of anything you’re curious about: Books, movies, mustards, marsupials—indeed, any ilk that matters or means much to you. Your Top 5 ex-lovers, countries you’ve traveled through (or yearn to), softest pets you’ve known, or meals that smelled too delicious.
Top 3s are too basic, for this Bookchat exercise. In any category you’ve heeded for awhile, you might pick your Top 3 in a moment. Top 10s or 20s require pen and paper, if you’re old-fangled like me, and hours or days to sift and sort all their possibilities. Top 5s are Goldilocks puzzles, sweetly middling, asking for some playful thought, but not enough to hurt. If you’re feeling meticulous, google a few similar lists, so you can scan more of the likely contenders than come instantly to mind.
Please leave a Top 5 of your own in a comment below, or reply to someone else’s Top 5. So many categories to consider. Top books from when you were young, top Russian authors, top series of books, top places and times to read a book; Top film noirs, or rom coms, actors or directors (do you know the only actor to win four Oscars for it, or the only director?); Top rock albums, or jazz, or classical; Top paintings, or sculptures, or buildings; Top cabbages, or kings, or any other things. I’ll go first, second and third. Then it’s your turn.
Welcome to bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Top 5 Science Fiction Films
Blade Runner
Minority Report
The Matrix
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
2001: A Space Odyssey
Each of these movies splashed onto our screens like a window to the future, sleek and gleaming with newness. Like nothing we had seen before, or even imagined. Until so many later movies copied their weird inventions. Perhaps The Matrix most startling of all, with its mind-bending plot, and so much dazzling eye candy. For storytelling, the first Terminator may be better than T2, or at least more radically original and visceral. It was only James Cameron’s second movie, and he made it for $6.4M. It earned back twelve times that much. Cameron’s next movie, Aliens, was a similar bonanza. So when he got to the second Terminator, seven years after the first, he had fifteen times his earlier budget. A master of the spectacular, he know how to get all sorts of bangs for his 100M bucks, with an eerie quicksilver assassinator vs. Schwarzenegger—back as promised, badder and better than ever.
2001 goes beyond SF, it’s practically a genre unto itself. Yet, like each of these films, it also feels somewhat Philip K. Dickian. Especially the first two, which Dick actually wrote the source code for (Source Code is my sixth top SF film). Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Spielberg’s Minority Report take Dick’s source code and level it up, into brave new worlds of their own. That may be the best way to film a book: take care to grok it fully, to grasp its spirit and stay true to that—but then focus on a few strands that spark your creativity, and spin them out into a version of the tale rooted in your own vision and style.
Dick’s Minority Report was but a brief novella, with several differences and only a third of the story the film ended up telling. The script passed through various permutations, and six writers, across ten years. It started from Dick’s novella, but tailored into a sequel to Total Recall. However, when that studio went bankrupt, those joining seams were taken out. Kudos to all those writers, and Spielberg’s shepherding it into a form he was happy with. Somehow, after all that wrangling and tangling, the film was twice as Dickian as Dick’s book.
Spielberg put serious work into creating a finely planned and articulated SF world. He invited fifteen experts from diverse scientific fields to a hotel in Santa Monica for a three-day "think tank". Then he consulted with them to build a plausible "future reality" for the year 2054, as opposed to a more traditional "science fiction" setting. This may be my favorite Spielberg movie, and one of very few SF movies I find completely coherent and convincing. But Ridley Scott exceeds that, with his dark-timeline 2019 Los Angeles, so dirty and dangerous yet dreamlike, between its alleys and its pyramids. So high-res, so alien, so human. Best movie ever, for me.
5 Top Selling Rock Bands
The Beatles
Led Zeppelin
Pink Floyd
Queen
The Rolling Stones
U.S.A. was the maestro of music in general, for the first two thirds of the 20th century. We pretty much invented jazz, blues, country, rock’n’roll and soul. We were pioneers in a land of opportunity, who also knew the hard way all about yearning, suffering and loss. We poured our outsized hearts into song.
Nearly two thirds of the way through the 20th century, the British invaded. The art form we’d invented, they perfected, and sold back to us. U.S.A. birthed the greatest Rock Gods: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix. A fertile land for gigantic individuals. Somehow, though, when it came to the biggest Rock Bands, the U.K. owned the patent. In 1965, just under a sixtieth of earthlings were British. How did all the top selling rock bands come from that little island? What was England’s secret sauce? Worcestershire? I have some ideas, but I’m curious what you all think. The only diversity among those twenty-odd band members is that Freddie Mercury, though British, was born in Zanzibar. His parents were Indians of Persian descent.
Full disclosure: I fudged these rankings slightly, to strengthen my thesis. Definitive sales figures are impossible to find, especially for bands that were selling albums in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and into the ‘80s, when nobody had systematized and centralized the bookkeeping. Albums were shipped around the world; the same album might be pressed by different companies in many countries; the rock business has always been adjacent to organized crime, and many companies fudged their figures on purpose (up and down, like Trump does, to suit their needs of the moment). Any list of Top Selling Rock Bands, or Albums, even the closest to reliable, will be compiled from different sources, with some educated guesswork involved. The list I’m using comes from Wikipedia. I know this list well, I’ve been using it as reference for more than a decade. A year ago, and for ten years previously, the Top 5 list above were how Wikipedia ranked them. But in the last year or so, they’ve changed it up a little.
Today, Wikipedia have moved Queen up to second place, and two non-British bands have overtaken the Rolling Stones. So my thesis is almost as strong as it was. If Wikipedia are accurate, then the 4 Top Selling Rock Bands in history are all still English. Their places 5 and 6 are now held by the Eagles and AC/DC. But I’ll be damned before I throw the Rolling Stones off my treasured list, to make room for the Eagles. They’re good enough, I own all six of their ‘70s albums, and Hotel California is a masterpiece. Still, I own more than thirty Stones albums, and the five with Mick Taylor are at least as good as all my Eagles albums. Moving on, bands 8-10 are U2, Aerosmith and ABBA. Except, though magnificent, ABBA are no rock band—so, Metallica are 10.
My Top 5 Favorite Writers
William Shakespeare
George Eliot
Raymond Chandler
Ursula Le Guin
Kazuo Ishiguro
Clearly my most subjective Top 5. Also my most changeable. Shakespeare is always number one, he is my paragon (for writing, psychology and humanism). A mind stuffed with so many seasons, each shining its particular light. My other favorites fluctuate from year to year. So, here is this year’s list.
Shakespeare was a master of dramatic form, who broke every rule to create new possibilities. I adore his supreme instincts, and his confidence in them. Shakespeare had such a sure sense for storytelling, and love of language, that he simply leapt towards heaven and let the winds of inspiration carry him to new realms.
George Eliot might be the yin to Jane Austen’s yang. She took a man’s name because women novelists weren’t taken seriously; then her books proved more grounded, thoughtful, socially and psychologically aware than any man’s (except Tolstoy’s). Eliot has been called the greatest auto-didact of the 19th century. She was raised in provincial Warwickshire, then set about learning all the news, knowledge and culture of Europe. She was born with a hungry heart and mind, her life’s work was to expand and elevate them, and her canvas for doing so was the English novel (and one set in renaissance Florence). You don’t get to Middlemarch by accident.
Raymond Chandler was a pioneer of hard-boiled mystery. Dashiell Hammett wrote in a similar vein, a few years earlier; but Chandler had a few advantages on his forebear. One was that he’d read Hammett’s work, and could improve on that foundation. He also, improbably, had gone to an English boarding school, worked at the Admiralty, then been a London journalist, and later a businessman in California. So he had literary chops, hidden beneath his pulpy surface. Glimpses of poetry and soul sparkle through his prose. Chandler wrote a brilliant essay, explaining his method and motives, The Simple Art of Murder. In it, he gives Hammett props, which apply equally to his own books:
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more.
Ursula Le Guin amazes me. She had a vast and subtle heart and mind, was a couple of generations more progressive than her time, and she continued to grow and learn always. I love so many fantasy writers, and I’ve yet to find one who is better as a pure writer than she was. The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed are each brave and brilliant, and very different. But her Earthsea books, especially A Wizard of Earthsea, dwell in the core of my heart. I read it at just the right time, for me (around age nine). Both Ged and his world grabbed and enchanted me more intimately than Tolkien or Lewis could. This felt like my adventure, like the magic I most needed to know. Le Guin deserved a Nobel prize.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a little like Le Guin, in that he blends realism and humanism, through his own almost alien imagination. Unlike Le Guin, he did win a Nobel, and the Swedish Academy said that Ishiguro "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". I find him starker than Le Guin. They both are very wise, but she has such warm empathy, extending even to strangers and enemies. However, Ishiguro has a quiet contemplation about his work, and perhaps I need to steep in him for longer to fully discern the lineaments of his love.
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Thank You for reading this Bookchat. Now it’s your turn. What are your Top 5?