Showing posts with label Laura Hird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Laura Hird. Show all posts

Monday, September 27, 2010

100 Best Scottish Books

Following on from these two recent fiascos, I've finally found a book poll on the net where my reading count reaches double figures. It's sourced from The List, which is , I guess, Scotland's equivalent of Time Out and the article dates from 2005.

Twenty-one out of a hundred is not a bad reading haul, and there's another twelve or thirteen books on the list that I'd like to read at some point.

I thought it was a nice touch from the list compilers that they did not insist that the authors had to be Scottish by birth; just that the book listed had to have a strong Scottish connection. Hence, for example, the inclusion of Orwell's 1984 in the hundred, which was written on the Isle of Jura. (And, if you've ever read Orwell's collected essays and letters, his strong dislike of Scottish people is very apparent.)

Each listed entry in the linked article has a wee synopsis and well worth further investigation, but I have posted below links to some of the more interesting entries. (Well interesting to me.)

  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark (1961)
  • Tunes of Glory - James Kennaway (1956)
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan (1915)
  • Under the Skin - Michel Faber (2000)
  • Buddha Da - Anne Donovan (2003)
  • Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas De Quincey (1822)
  • King James Bible: Authorised Version - Various (1611)
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)
  • The Divided Self - RD Laing (1960)
  • The Gowk Storm - Nancy Brysson Morrison (1933)
  • The Cone-Gatherers - Robin Jenkins (1955)
  • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
  • Sunset Song - Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932)
  • Born Free - Laura Hird (1999)
  • The Silver Darlings - Neil M Gunn (1941)
  • The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell (1791)
  • Annals of the Parish - John Galt (1821)
  • Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (1902)
  • The House with the Green Shutters - George Douglas Brown (1901)
  • Lanark - Alasdair Gray (1981)
  • Paradise - AL Kennedy (2004)
  • The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg (1824)
  • Trumpet - Jackie Kay (1998)
  • Morvern Callar - Alan Warner (1995)
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)
  • Swing Hammer Swing! - Jeff Torrington (1992)
  • Hotel World - Ali Smith (2001)
  • Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh (1993)
  • The Trick is to Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway (1989)
  • Jericho Sleep Alone - Chaim Bermant (1964)
  • The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)
  • Lilith - George MacDonald (1895)
  • Imagined Corners - Willa Muir (1931)
  • Living Nowhere - John Burnside (2003)
  • Jelly Roll - Luke Sutherland (1998)
  • The White Bird Passes - Jessie Kesson (1958)
  • Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi (1954)
  • Rob Roy - Walter Scott (1818)
  • The Sea Road - Margaret Elphinstone (2000)
  • The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith (1776)
  • The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism - Tom Nairn (1977)
  • Consider the Lilies - Iain Crichton Smith (1968)
  • No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums - Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long (1935)
  • To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling (1997)
  • Madame Doubtfire - Anne Fine (1987)
  • Me and Ma Gal - Des Dillon (1995)
  • The Highland Clearances - John Prebble (1969)
  • A Concussed History of Scotland - Frank Kuppner (1990)
  • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume (1748)
  • A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay (1920)
  • The Golden Bough - James Frazer (1890)
  • Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty (1997)
  • The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh (2002)
  • The Quarry Wood - Nan Shepherd (1928)
  • The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (1984)
  • Brond - Frederic Lindsay (1984)
  • A Day at the Office - Robert Alan Jamieson (1991)
  • Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Kate Atkinson (1995)
  • The Dear Green Place - Archie Hind (1966)
  • Miss Marjoribanks - Margaret Oliphant (1866)
  • The Sound of My Voice - Ron Butlin (1987)
  • Flemington - Violet Jacob (1911)
  • Greenvoe - George Mackay Brown (1972)
  • The New Road - Neil Munro (1914)
  • Psychoraag - Suhayl Saadi (2004)
  • The Bull Calves - Naomi Mitchison (1947)
  • The Coral Island - R. M. Ballantyne (1858)
  • From Russia, With Love - Ian Fleming (1957)
  • A Disaffection - James Kelman (1989)
  • The Shipbuilders - George Blake (1935)
  • Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan (1999)
  • A Sense of Freedom - Jimmy Boyle (1977)
  • A Twelvemonth and a Day - Christopher Rush (1985)
  • The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst (1999)
  • Adam Blair - John Gibson Lockhart (1822)
  • But n Ben A-Go-Go - Matthew Fitt (2000)
  • The Siege of Trencher's Farm - Gordon Williams (1969)
  • The New Testament in Scots - trans. William Laughton Lorimer (1983)
  • The Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett (1961)
  • Open the Door! - Catherine Carswell (1920)
  • The Lantern Bearers - Ronald Frame (1999)
  • An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn - Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul (2003)
  • Children of the Dead End - Patrick MacGill (1914)
  • One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night - Christopher Brookmyre (1999)
  • The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (1908)
  • Garnethill - Denise Mina (1998)
  • Joseph Knight - James Robertson (2003)
  • The Magic Flute - Alan Spence (1990)
  • Electric Brae - Andrew Greig (1997)
  • The Guns of Navarone - Alistair MacLean (1957)
  • The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith (1998)
  • Mr Alfred, M.A. - George Friel (1972)
  • Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle (1836)
  • Black and Blue - Ian Rankin (1997)
  • Scar Culture - Toni Davidson (1999)
  • Whisky Galore - Compton Mackenzie (1947)
  • The Citadel - AJ Cronin (1937)
  • For the Love of Willie - Agnes Owens (1998)
  • Docherty - William McIlvanney (1975)
  • Thursday, September 10, 2009

    Children of Albion Rovers edited by Kevin Williamson (Rebel Inc. 1996)


    Gillian stepped back, put her feet together and described an area of the pavement with her hands. It was here, she said, that Carlyle saved himself from despair. He'd become a man with an emptiness where his spirit used to be. He'd lost faith in God, and belief in the Devil. He'd lost faith in love. He saw no rewards in heaven or punishments in hell. His sense of right and wrong seemed like rubbish left behind by illusions of God. It seemed that people just lived afraid of pain, and wanting pleasure. He could imagine people finding a reason for living in their work, but he had no work to show for his time on earth, He was 28 years old. Something inside him was angry but it didn't seem to have anything to do with the boredom of the universe he was stuck in. He hardly noticed other people, they were like parts in a machine to him. The world was the machine, and it didn't do him the favour of wanting him to suffer. No, because it ground him down automatically. He would have killed himself, but there was a small bit of religious teaching stuck in his brain, and anyway, he couldn't be bothered. And all the while he felt frightened. He didn't know what he was afraid of. Until he came here, to Leith Walk, and one moment he didn't know and the next moment he knew. He was frightened of death, nothing more or less, because in the end that was all there was to be afraid of. And when he knew it, he looked at death, and said: Come on, then. I'll meet you and I'll take you on. He stood there, a man still young, miserable with the grey world and his being lost in it, and he reached out over forty years ahead and shouted at death that he could see it hiding there and it might as well come out because he could look at it and still live on as a free man until the final reckoning came. And he felt so strongly and angry after that, burning up with hatred for death, and so he was alive.

    John was quiet for a bit. Then he said: Let's call our first child Leith.

    My surname's Walker.

    Well. mine's Keith.

    Come on, finish your bridie and go back to work.

    John got up and stood closer to Gillian. Your hair's just like the adverts, he said. It smells like turkish delight.
    (From 'The Brown Pint of Courage' by James Meek)

    Tuesday, July 29, 2008

    The Hope That Kills Us edited by Adrian Searle (Polygon 2003)


    I mind seein him playin for the Huns in a European match on Sky wan night. Some bunch ae German basturts that were far tae guid for the Huns, eh. 4-3 doon on aggregate, and Tam gets the ba aff their star midfielder like sweeties aff a bairn and gans doon the inside right channel. And I'm stannin in this pub in Ferrytoon, and I'm shoutin at Laudrup, 'Make the run! Make the fuckin run!' Cause I can see where Tam wants tae play it, I can see it openin up.

    So Laudrup makes the run, but the sweeper's right oan tae him, ken, Laudrup's left it tae late. So the ba goes out and the camera pans ontae Tam's pus, and he's got this expression, like, Ah cannae dae anythin wi this cunt. Ah wis pishin masel laughin in this pub. Me and Brian Laudrup! Neither of us guid enough for Tam!
    [From Andrew C Ferguson's 'Nae Cunt Said Anythin']