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The team at BBC Culture asked 82 book critics to name their favorite British fiction books. All of the participants who were polled do not reside in the United Kingdom; they come from the United States, continental Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Here’s more from the BBC: “Each who participated submitted a list of 10 British novels, with their pick for the greatest novel receiving 10 points. The points were added up to produce the final list.”

Altogether, this international group of bibliophiles selected a total of 228 books. Below, we’ve listed the top 10 titles; click on the links to download free eBooks. Did any of your favorites make the cut?

01. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1874)
02. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
03. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
04. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
05. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
06. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
07. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
08. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
09. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
10. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

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In her short 53 years, Mary Shelley wrote novels, plays, short stories, essays, biographies, and travel books, but it's not surprising that she is best known for her novel Frankenstein. It's hard to separate the idea of Frankenstein's monster from the popular icon he's become, but everyone should read the original novel. Shelley's gothic masterpiece, [...]

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As I pack away my Christmas tree for another year, I took stock today of my Christmas haul of books. I’m planning on reading more classics in 2015 and was fortunate enough to receive a few beautiful clothbound editions for Christmas. I hope you too were lucky enough to receive a book or two at Christmas time, […]

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Sean Bean, an actor who has appeared in multiple book adaptations such as Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring movie and the Game of Thrones HBO series, will star in a new six-part crime show called The Frankenstein Chronicles.

Bean (pictured, via) will play the main protagonist, Inspector John Marlott. Production is set to take place in Northern Ireland starting in January. The story was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Follow this link to download a free digital copy of the book.

Here’s more from Deadline: “Set in 1827 London, the drama begins when Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel recruits Marlott after a successful operation by Thames River Police to apprehend a gang of opium smugglers. As Marlott stands on the water’s edge contemplating the arrests, he makes a shocking discovery: A corpse washed up on the shore is not what it seems at first glance. Instead, it’s a crude assembly of body parts arranged in a grotesque parody of a human form. The mutilated child-like body leaves an indelible impression on Marlott who is tasked by Peel with tracking the perpetrator of this heinous crime.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The British Library is hosting a display focused on gothic storytelling called “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination.” It will run until January 20, 2015.

The United Kingdom’s “biggest ever Gothic exhibition” features 200 rare objects; some of these pieces shine the spotlight on works by writers Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Clive Barker. Visitors will see ”posters, books, film and even a vampire-slaying kit.”

We’ve embedded a video about this exhibit—what do you think? Click here to learn more about it. Follow this link to read an essay by Neil Gaiman entitled “My hero: Mary Shelley.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Who are the strays in Emily Bitto’s literary novel, The Strays (Affirm Press)? The new Melbourne Modern Art Group tries to set up a bohemian utopia paralleling Sunday and John Reed’s Heide group, or Norman Lindsay’s enclave, on affluent Evan and Helena Trentham’s property during the Depression. Patrick is a stalwart and Ugo, Maria and […]

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Pemberley Digital has partnered with PBS Digital Studios to adapt Mary Shelley’s beloved horror novel, Frankenstein, into a web series called “Frankenstein M.D.”

According to the PBS Digital Studios press release, the story follows ”Victoria Frankenstein is a Ph.D./MD student focused on a career as a research scientist. With her colleague Iggy DeLacey (based on the iconic character ‘Igor‘) and mentor, Dr. Waldman, the ambitious, daring genius is flipping the script and creating a new (self-titled) YouTube science show, explaining complex biological and medical concepts to a general audience. As Frankenstein pursues her boldest line of research yet, she makes a shocking series of discoveries that could potentially endanger not only her career, but her life and the lives of her friends.”

The cast includes Anne Lore playing Victoria, Steve Zaragoza playing Iggy, Brendan Bradley playing Eli, Sarah Fletcher playing Rory, and Kevin Rock playing Dr. Waldman. The team plans to shoot twenty four episodes that will run between five to eight minutes long. The first three installments will be available for public viewing on the PBS Digital Studios YouTube channel starting August 19th. The finale will air on Halloween later this year.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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It's a wild and thundery night. Inside a ramshackle old manor house, a beautiful young girl lies asleep in bed. At the window, a figure watches — a hideous creature with long fingernails and eyes that shine like polished tin. The girl wakes up, but is too terrified to flee as the vampire breaks the [...]

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The Martian
Andy Weir
Science Fiction - Adult

Pop quiz:
1) Do you ever stare at the night sky wondering if there is life out there?
2) Ever tried to levitate something with your mind?
3) Have you ever secretly (or not so secretly) watch Star Trek?

Houston, we have lift off. You like science fiction!

Science fiction has been fascinating readers from the moment Mary Shelley brought Frankenstein's monster to life. And writers of science fiction have been working to keep their edge ever since that first breath of life into their genre. Today, they're getting a little help from actual, real life physicists. Science fiction has become your basic rocket science.

How can this be? Some brilliant people at Tor had the great idea to pair up science fiction writers with NASA scientists. The result is a new list of science fiction titles, headed up by Andy Weir's, The Martian.

Basic premise: Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

More details: Mark Watney, a member of the Ares 3 Mars crew, accidentally gets left on Mars during the middle of a sandstorm. He has a habitat. He has oxygen and water. He has some food. But he doesn't have enough to last until the next Ares mission arrives. Cue creativity. How will Mark survive? Will NASA be able to help?

Weir's characters are wonderfully diverse and wickedly smart without being so smart they become inaccessible. The plot is scary believable. Accidents can happen, especially on a mission to a place as far away and foreign as Mars. The scientific does not way down the story, but rather, enhance it. Admittedly, there were moments when I did zone a little. Then again, that could have been the elliptical machine getting the better of me. I have books I "save" for work outs only. This was one. But I found myself sneaking more of The Martian whenever I could, like a secret stash of chocolate. And more than once that I had to remind myself this is NOT REAL. It's "just" a story (so stop crying!).

Tor has more books in the line up. One is about an elevator from earth to the international space station. Finally, a true fix for my science fiction addiction. I can't wait to see what they imagine up next. And...um...if it's not too much to ask, does anyone know how to get in the super secret society of writers who get to work with these amazing scientists?

For more April fling reads, check out Barrie Summy's website!

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By Mark Philp

Do people at the end of the eighteenth century celebrate their birthdays? More precisely, what did William Godwin (1756-1836) — philosopher, novelist, husband of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and father of Mary Shelly (1797-1851) — do on his birthday, which falls on 3 March?

Godwin was a man of some exactitude. As a major contributor to the development of utilitarianism, the weighing of competing concerns and interests and the rigorous exercise of private judgment on the basis of rational reflection is a central theme in his philosophy. But his concern with detail is also reflected in the diary that he kept for the last 48 years of his long life. He used the diary to note things very precisely, if often cryptically — such as the entry in 1825: ‘void a large worm’; or in his twice daily recording of the interior temperature of the house for the last ten years of his life.

But he did not note birthdays. He mentions the birthday of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in 1788 because there is a party for Gibbon hosted by the bookseller Thomas Cadell. In 1825 he mentions that of Mary Lamb, sister of the essayist Charles Lamb, when she was 61, possibly also because there was some event. The only other appearance of the phrase in the Diary is in relation to a play which he identifies as Birth Day (probably by the German dramatist Kotzebue), which he sees (in whole or part) on five occasions. Moreover, he makes nothing of his own birthday — 3 March — whether it be his 40th, 50th, 60th, or 80th. The diary entries for his birthdays are wholly undifferentiated from other days. Moreover, there is no evidence that he celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthday, nor those of any of his children.

In contrast, he noted over three hundred deaths in the diary — including ‘Execution of Louis’ on 21 January 1793, Edmund Burke on 8 July 1797, the assassination of the Prime Minister Spencer Percival on 11 May 1812, the death (also by assassination) of the German dramatist Kotzebue on 23 March 1819, but also a host of more quotidian occasions involving friends and acquaintances. Interestingly, these dates are all exact – other than Burke, who we now believe to have died the following day! But the exactitude of the others is striking because it means that Godwin was going back to his diary to fill in details as he became aware of them – the news of Louis’ execution took some 36 hours to reach Britain, and Kotzebue’s death would have travelled more slowly. This suggests that he took at least one of life’s major events very seriously, and noted the occasion with retrospective precision.

Is Godwin unusual? That he notes very occasional birthdays of others suggests both that he was, and, because he notes so few, that he was not. Or he was not unusual in the circles in which he moved — the literary and cultural circles of London in the last decades of the eighteenth and first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he came from a family of dissenting ministers and was himself a minister in the years following his education, before turning in the 1780s to history and philosophy and an increasing agnosticism, punctuated by periods of atheism. In that tradition — nurtured on such texts as James Janeway’s, A Token for Children being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children (1671) — the manner of one’s life and death has infinitely more significance than the mere fact of birth.

This contrast is also evident in Godwin main philosophical work – Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) — is clear that there is little sacred in mere life. It is what a person does with his or her life — above all what they do for others and for the general good of the community that counts in our evaluation of them. While Godwin speculated that the lot of humanity would involve increasing subordination of the physical to the intellectual, with a concomitant shift to increasing longevity and eventual immortality, it is also clear that he took the measure of his fellow men and women in terms of how they lived their lives — hence his almost obsessive recording of the deaths of his contemporaries, both famous and obscure. The ending of life marks the point for its final reckoning. In Godwin’s philosophy that evaluation is to be made in terms of the person’s contribution to the good of one’s fellow human beings — above all, one’s contribution to their intellectual development and the expansion of the powers of mind and human knowledge. And, on that account, maybe we should commemorate Godwin’s death day instead — 7 April 1836.

Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on eighteenth century political thought and social movements and on contemporary political theory, including Reforming Ideas in Britain (2013), Thomas Paine (2007), and Political Conduct (2007). He directed the Leverhulme funded digitization and editing project on the diary of William Godwin. He co-directs the research project ‘Re-Imagining Democracy 1750-1850’ which has published Re-imagining democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain and Ireland (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: Page from William Godwin’s journal. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post William Godwin’s birthday appeared first on OUPblog.

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50 Book Pledge | Book #51: Sutton by J.R. Moehringer

I’m ecstatic to report that as of Monday, October 8, 2012, I turned the final page on my 50 Book Pledge. For those doing the math, that’s nine months, seven days, eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes.

I still can’t believe I did it because when I first set out I wasn’t entirely convinced I could. I considered fifty books in fifty-two weeks a tall order, especially since I’ve never read that many books in a single year before. My greatest fear could be summed up in a single word: Time.

What a fool I was. Time wasn’t a factor at all. In fact, my biggest dilemma ended up being what to read next. But, obviously, that didn’t last very long.

By the Numbers

3     # of non-fiction books I read

4     # of classics I read

2     # of series I started

3     # of poetry books I read

1     # of books I stopped reading

15   # of books I read by HarperCollins Canada

43   # of authors I read for the first time

The amazing part about participating in the pledge was how it turned me into a literary monster. With every book I finished, I found that my hunger for reading grew exponentially. I couldn’t get enough! In the words of George R.R. Martin the reader in me wanted to live “a thousand lives.” (Now I’ve only got 950 to go.) And that’s precisely why I’m going to continue reading and why I’ll be taking the pledge again next year.

Looking back it’s hard to pick a favourite because I read some truly phenomenal books. Instead, here’s just a small sampling of books that knocked my socks off:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Now that I had finished, the beauty of my dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart …

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

Dignity begins when an animal feels that she is the chief instrument of change in her life.

100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings

i like my body when it is with your body.

It is so quite new a thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.

It wants the truth.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

A huge thank you to The Savvy Reader for making 2012 the best reading year of my life!

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Dave Zeltserman, author of the newly published Monster: A Novel of Frankenstein, as well as A Killer's Essence and The Caretaker of Lorne Field, talks to The Winged Elephant: What originally drew you to the Frankenstein story? When I was a kid I grew up thinking that the Frankenstein novel was the same as the Boris Karloff movie. When I was in high school I heard that the novel is very

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If you write fiction, should you write light copy or dark? Is the choice like that of light or dark turkey at Thanksgiving? Does your preference reflect your inner workings or your reading preference? And does it matter?

Authors like Stephen King write both. A reader doesn’t normally think of the author of “Carrie,” and “The Green Mile,” as writing “Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.” In case you’re wondering, he also wrote another book on baseball, too.

Poets explore both paths to find explanations and impressions of the world’s workings and their own. Finding the humanity in dark literature isn’t new. It has a long tradition.

Mary Shelley created Frankenstein as more than a dark novel. The story roams through the reader’s mind as a look into a sinner’s guilt and requisite redemption, a romance set within the framework of a nightmare, and a glimpse of the terror-ridden existence of a life that should never have arisen. Like King, Shelley rolled human fears and motivations into a neat bundle and served it up as dark meat for the reader.

But Shelley was hardly the first to venture into the realm of shadows, sin, and the seamier side of life. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave the world dark tragedy with attitude. Their plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, certainly weren’t meant for the faint of heart.

These stage ventures also contained romance, sin and redemption themes, Gods—vengeful and otherwise–and human frailty. These ancient writers set more than the Greek stage. They put civilization on the road of writing works that drew the viewer into another’s tragedy, or comedy, and sent the mind spinning off into realms of distraction from the viewer’s everyday experience.

Comedy such as the wildly satirical work of Aristophanes allowed the audience to laugh instead of cry at the doings of man. The playwright used the play’s chorus to deliver scathing humor at the expense of the drama.  This playwright, 2000 years later, continues to rank as a master of dark comedy with a twist.

Today’s writers strive for the same effect. Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series follows Shelley’s trademark theme. Vampires, too, seem to be created by others with agendas to keep.

Writers have a choice of how they present their ideas about the world and the players in it. Romance makes way for tragedy, while comedy lands on its feet next to the potential absurdity of fantasy, as that genre tries to remake history with personal ideals and mythical creat

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50 Book Pledge | Book #7: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll
 

For your reading pleasure, I present HarperCollins Canada‘s This Dark Endeavour by Kenneth Oppel.

Let me begin by saying that I was skeptical about reading This Dark Endeavour. Here’s why: I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein first and I was in awe of her masterpiece. I couldn’t see how Kenneth Oppel, or any writer, could do justice to the most well-known work of horror fiction in literature. However, the truth is, that This Dark Endeavour: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein was phenomenal.

For me, Oppel’s greatest achievement is the foundation he builds for Shelley’s Frankenstein. The stepping stones he lays are not only believable but also insightful. There’s nothing that’s straightforward about young Victor Frankenstein. In fact, he’s a complicated mess. He doesn’t quite know what it is that drives him. Thus, his personal struggle is absolutely engrossing. Readers of all ages will undoubtedly relish every gripping page of Oppel’s masterful prequel.

This Dark Endeavour is the definition of must-read.

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Astronomers released a new report this past week. http://news.yahoo.com/under-frankenstein-moon-astronomer-sleuths-solve-mary-shelley-201601341.html/

Rumor has it that these researchers play with scientific private investigation in their spare time. They snag one literary allusion at a time, hoping to find the possible authentic astronomical event to which it refers.

“A group of astronomers used some crafty celestial sleuthing to put to rest a 19th Century mystery surrounding the events that inspired Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of the classic novel “Frankenstein,” to pen her tragic tale of the infamous monster.

Astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos delved into Shelley‘s own description of what moved her to write the legendary story, in hopes of solving a long-standing controversy over whether the account is true, or if the author took some liberties in her re-telling of what happened.”

This new investigation report deals with Mary Shelley’s assertion that she witnessed the full moon from her bedroom window and “…had a waking dream” in which the story of Frankenstein came to her fully realized. Consider for the moment how minor that singular statement really is. It’s peculiar that such a controversy would surround it for two centuries, but it has.

If these researchers spend their spare time investigating such allusions throughout literature to find the truth of them, how long does it take to get all the evidence Yay or Nay on a given investigation? When one thinks of the sheer numbers of such literary statements used over the years, it’s easy to understand that these intrepid scientists will never go without a project that fascinates them.

What does an investigator look for? The creative non-fiction world of writing alone is a treasure chest filled with bits and pieces of factoid information. Getting hold of someone else’s account of the event(s) written about would help to verify or negate said event. Journals and diaries work for this type of search.

Of course, the investigator would have to first identify those who would have witnessed the event. That could take years; depending on what year the event took place. Only after that could the scientist take the field, so to speak, to do the calculations necessary to validate whether the event might have happened during a specific or approximate date in time. Without that verification, the reader has no way to trust the story’s 2 Comments on Literature’s Scientific Investigators, last added: 10/4/2011