Top Ten Tuesday Freebie: Fictional Readers

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

• 20th December: Books I Hope Santa Brings This Year
• 27th December: Most Recent Additions to My Book Collection
• 3rd January: Favourite Books of 2022
• 10th January: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2023
• 17th January: Bookish Goals for 2023

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This week is a freebie week and I am in the midst of listening to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, her first novel and written around 1798, albeit not published until after her death. It is part of my half-formed intention – a vague idea and inclination perhaps – to try to re-read Austen, returning to an author that I did not gel with as a teenager at university. Certainly, it is much funnier and more wry than I remembered Austen to be. Which bodes well.

Anyway, the point of this preamble is that I love the way Catherine Morland becomes obsessed with The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe – to the extent that she would prefer to curl up at home with the novel than venture out into Bath’s social scene, has limited conversation save for her love of the novel, and is desperate for her life to emulate the thrills and passions of the novel. So I thought I’d use this as a springboard to explore bookworms in fiction.

And for this one, I am going to try to limit myself to readers of real-world novels, the books you and I can pick up and read too!

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Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

I’m not convinced about the cover here – there is too much red, too much crimson…

That aside, Jane’s recourse to books is a small and understated part of the novel, especially in the opening chapters: neglected and abused by her aunt and odious cousins, how does Jane find peace and freedom? In the pages of Bewick’s History of British Birds where she seeks images of distant lands and foreign climes rather than ornithology.

And after the trauma of the Red Room, where does our heroine seek comfort? In Gulliver’s Travels

I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library.  This book I had again and again perused with delight.  I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface

It is testament to the extent of her trauma that neither this, her favourite book, nor a delicious tart are enough to calm her.

Matilda Laimo, Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones

There is such a celebration of the power of literature in this novel – its power to spark imagination and curiosity, its power to protect your identity and your soul in horrific times. I do feel a little uncomforatble and the children of Bougainville are shown as being dependent on both a white man’s teaching and a white writer’s writing, even if it is Dickens….

Matilda Wormwood, Matilda, Roald Dahl

The absolute classic – and I am continually trying to persuade my daughter to read or watch it! What is the quickest way to depict an horrific and neglectful family for this delicate reader’s soul? Show that they have no books and disdain reading…

And the joy Matilda felt when she discovered the library and books is extraordinary

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Her Majesty the Queen, The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

This was an extraordinarily gentle and sweet book – never dipping into saccharine or cloying or sentimental – with just the right level of satire and humanity. And with Her Majesty’s recent death even more poignant.

And who can fail to sympathise with Her Majesty discovering that

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Thursday Next, The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

What an absolute riot this series is. Utterly and unashamedly bonkers, but wonderful with dodos, neanderthals, an ongoing Crimean War, riots over Shakespeare – and characters slipping into and out of the pages of books. And of all the novels to slip into, would you choose Jane Eyre, at the moment that we first meet Rochester?

Christopher John Francis Boone, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon

It has been a long time since I read this and I recall enjoying it, but I am nervous about revisiting it as a parent to an autistic child…

But the novel was replete with references to Holmes novels. Obviously the title is from Silver Blaze and Christopher sees himself in Hoilmes:

I also like The Hound of the Baskervilles because I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mystery and he says

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

But he notices them, like I do. Also it says in the book

Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will.

And this is like me, too, because if I get really interested in something, like practicing maths, or reading a book about the Apollo missions or great white sharks, I don’t notice anything else…

Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death, Anthony Horowitz

These are a twisty and fun series of books and with the author starring in his own novels is strange enough, and I loved the little snippets of a writing life – Horowitz’ interrupted meeting with Steven Spielberg as he tries to bring Tintin to the screen was wonderful. This, the second book was heavily influenced by Holmes – and of course Horowitz has written some new Holmes stories – and Horowitz laments that

I should have been the one to know all this, not Hawthorne. I was the one who had written about Sherlock Holmes. His shadow had been there the whole time. I’d even spent a whole evening talking about the books. But maybe because they were written more than a century ago, I hadn’t seen their relevance to the case we were pursuing.

Simon Serrailler and Cat Deerborn, the Simon Serrailler series, Susan Hill

This is a strangely compelling series that hovers between the traditions of a police procedural and something that is almost a soap opera and we are alternately charmed and appalled by the Serrailler family.

Because Susan Hill takes seriously the idea that a writer should torment her characters and the Serrailler family have had a terrible time: the family includes catastrophic disability, and characters who are overbearing, murderous, murdered, rapist, abused, and terminally ill; there are deaths due to age, grief, violence and cancer. And Simon Serrailler, for all that he is an absolute shit to almost every woman in his life – except perhaps his beloved sister, Cat – does have one redeeming factor: he is a reader, even if it is usually referenced when he is unable to sit and read because he is wound up! Cat is more likely to actually be seen reading!

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Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes

January 31: Freebie
February 7: 2023 Debut Books I’m Excited About
February 14: Love/Valentine’s Day Freebie
February 21: Favorite Heroines
February 28: Genre Freebie (Pick a genre and build a list around it. It could a list of favorites, a to-read list, recommendations for people interested in reading books in that genre, “if you like this, try this”, etc.)