batman – A Boy Named Stew

My 10 favourite books

My good friend Lisa (the one who looked so delighted at throwing ice water over me) challenged me to do the 10 favourite books list.

Now, my life is run almost entirely by lists. I have a list of things to do today, of which writing this is on it. It almost certainly wouldn’t get done if it wasn’t on the list.

I can also get quite obsessive about lists as well. Coming up with my 10 favourite movies took the best part of a couple of months. You’ve got to get these things right. Well, I do.

“Books, records, films… these things matter.”

It’s seriously the sort of things that will bug me if I get it wrong, so you may well see this list edited at some point in the near future.

So, I would like to thank Lisa for challenging me and taking up a large part of my weekend as she knows I’m crap at backing down from a challenge. However, as it has been spent thinking about something that I love, it’s really not all bad.

I’ve been reading since as long as I can remember. One of my first memories is attempting to read the Narnia books and having to stop frequently to go to ask my parents what a certain word meant. I never did make it all the way through the whole series.

I really enjoy being able to hide away in my own little world with a book. Or rather, to hide away in someone else’s little world which we are sharing for however many pages the book covers.

I am perhaps far too excited about the fact that my new job means commuting for 2 hours a day which I will be able to dedicate to reading.

Reading is important to me. When I was in Porto recently, I went to a very pretty bookshop called Livraria Lello. (The picture here is someone else’s as you can only take photos for 1 hour a day). I chose this over more traditional tourist attractions – although admittedly Porto is slightly lacking in them as the train station is number 6 on Trip Advisor’s list – because there is a certain beauty about books and visiting a pretty bookshop is something that appeals to me.

This is even though I’ve only bought one or two physical books in the last two years. The year that Amazon went really heavy on their promotion of the Kindle, I was suckered into buying myself one for Christmas.

I thought I would hate it as books are really pretty and smell nice. I was wrong. I absolutely adore it and it is one of the best purchases I have made. Not only for the fact you can get lots of classics for free or close to it, but for the fact you can carry around with you hundreds of books effortlessly. It has a built in dictionary so I look up more words (even the effort of picking up my phone to search the internet for a word’s meaning is enough to disrupt my flow when reading a book). It is really lightweight and much easier to hold than a weighty tome. If I want a new book, I can get it in seconds. The main downside is being unable to share books with people, but I’m sure I can cope with that.

I am currently reading a proper book (A Child of the Jago, since you asked) and it is nice to do so occasionally, but I feel that by the time I retire they will be almost obsolete.

Anyway, in alphabetical order (because attempting to put them in order of preference would take another week), here are my 10 favourite books:

Bill Bryson – Notes From A Small Island

Bryson’s writing helped ignite a love of travel in me. This book in particular made me realise that there are awesome things around me and is possibly part of what prompted me to go driving around England last year.

Douglas Coupland – Girlfriend In A Coma

Chosing a Coupland book is hard because the older stuff is in my opinion superior to his recent output and I read it all quite a while ago now. I picked this one simply because it is what inspired my screen name monkeyinacoma.

Roald Dahl – George’s Marvellous Medicine

Dahl is one of my favourite authors and it is difficult to narrow it down to one book, however this is the one that I read over and over as a child, so much so that it fell apart.

Nick Hornby – High Fidelity

Sometimes, a book will become a favourite due to the time of your life when you read it. I think this is one of those books. It made me feel like I was actually coping quite well with my life in comparison whilst at the same time wanting to be Rob Flemming.

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

This was a toss up between Brave New World and 1984. I read them both for my A-Level English and was amazed at how much better they were than anything we had been made to read in English previously. I really enjoyed the dystopian themes in both novels which appealed to the moody teenage version of myself. I think these two books are what made me fall in love with reading again after spending many of my teenage years focussed on computer games. I prefer Orwell’s writing overall but Brave New World is in my opinion a more attractive piece of writing.

Rachel Joyce – The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

An old man writes a letter to a former colleague. On the way to the postbox, he decides to hand deliver it and begins a journey from Devon to Berwick-Upon-Tweed. I found this book so instantly likeable and there are themes of reconciliation and rejuvenation and finding a sense of purpose running through it that just seemed to resonate with me.

Andrew Kauffman – All My Friends Are Superheroes

Kauffman has a very definite voice and it is one I am envious of. His brain is also full of brilliant ideas that I wish I had. This is an exceptionally cute story where all the characters have a superpower (of sorts) and I was hooked from pretty much the first few sentences.

Frank Miller – The Dark Knight Returns

Batman is far and away my favourite superhero. He has been since I was 8. I’m not sure exactly what it is that attracts me to the character other than that I really want to be him. This was the first Batman graphic novel I read which was – to my shame – only a few years ago. I have since read a large number although none compare to this one. There are almost Shakespearian themes running through it with Batman and the Joker’s stories seeming to mirror each other in some way. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Chuck Palahniuk – Choke

I tend to binge on things. Last year, I read through Palahniuk’s back catalogue having previously only read Fight Club and Choke. Sometimes he can be a bit hit and miss (Pygmy being especially hard to make it all the way through). He has his thing of repetition and this can sometimes be awesome and sometimes a bit too predictable. I like author’s who have their own distinctive style and Chuck usually manages that. I picked Choke as it’s the only one of his books that I have read twice so far and there must be a reason for that.

Kurt Vonnegut – Welcome to the Monkey House

I only read this last month but it has made such an impression on me that it makes the list. It’s the first Vonnegut I’ve read and is actually a collection of short stories but even after reading the introduction, I knew I would enjoy it. The way Vonnegut talks about himself in that introduction made me warm to him instantly and the wit and charm in that introduction pervades through his writing which still seems fresh and original around 50 years later.

5 bad things I think would happen if Superman really existed

I dislike Superman. It’s partly because he’s a cheat, it’s partly because he’s a bit smarmy but mostly – and this is extremely important – it’s because he’s not Batman.

Now, I know that’s probably not the most logically thought out argument for why Superman sucks, so I’ve come up with some extremely practical implications that I believe would arise from his existence.

1. People would take more risks knowing that they’d be saved

People take risks when they think they’re safe. Bungee jumping – no-one would do that if there wasn’t a giant piece of elastic strapped to their legs; sky diving – people wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have a parachute. People will start to take more risks such as standing up to ruthless evil villains knowing that Superman would fly in and save the day. And other such things. Superman is the safety net for idiotic actions. Which brings me to point 2.

2. Superman would have to open a complaints line for anyone he didn’t help

People would start to think they had a right for Superman to save them when they were in danger and would take it personally when he didn’t help them. Because Superman has saved Lois Lane on numerous occasions, the rest of Metropolis would be angry if he didn’t ave them. Superman would get treated as public property and would essentially be another emergency service, only one that you didn’t have to phone as he could use his supersonic hearing to detect your danger.

In this respect, Superman is a bit God-like. One argument for God’s non-existence is that he cannot be all loving, all powerful and all knowing because he doesn’t help out those in need.

Superman is essentially all knowing due to his heightened senses. He is all powerful because he is from Krypton. So if he doesn’t save everyone in danger, then he will be deemed to be a bad person for not doing so. Hence, he’d need an 800 complaints line and a dedicated workforce to deal with the fallout.

3. There would be less state funding for the police force

The government would look at Metropolis and see that it had additional assistance in policing the city (Superman isn’t vilified in the way that Batman is) and decide that this meant they could reduce the funding to the police force.

This would have the effect that all the low level jobs such as parking tickets, jaywalking and littering would be either neglected and chaos would ensue. Chaos, I tells ya!

4. The world’s strongest man contest would be a farce.

I have checked records dating back to 1977 and there have been no extra-terrestrial entrants in the tournament. There is also no ruling that says that you have to be born on Earth to enter the tournament.

So Superman would either enter – I reckon he would as he’s a bit of a show-off – and turn the tournament into a farce by beating all of the other contestants by a ridiculous margin, or not enter and turn it into a farce because everyone would know that he’s actually a billion times stronger than whoever wins the tournament, making it a hollow victory.

5. The space race would start up again

If the world leaders knew that there was life in space as evidenced by Superman, then they would want to go out and explore it. Whether or not they would battle it out as they did during the Cold War, who could say. What would happen though, is that funding for the space program would go up substantially.

NASA’s budget is currently around 0.5% of the Federal budget according to Wikipedia. At the height of the Cold War, in 1966, the budget was 4.41% of the Federal total. It would definitely go up to close to this, if not beyond and would mean that there is a reduction in the basic services needed such as education, health and literally keeping the streets clean which would make life on Earth worse whilst they search for further life in space.

I will not grow up

It is my birthday next week. I am going to be old. But I will not be grown up.

Earlier this year, I got my dad to dig out some old bits and pieces that I could use for my brother’s best man speech. He found this little gem that was in our local newspaper, which I have scanned and uploaded.

Essentially, it says: My name is Stewart, I am 8. I like football and Batman.

My name is Stewart, I am about to turn 33. I like football and Batman.

Sometimes it amazes me how little I have changed. Okay, so if you read the excerpt from the newspaper in full, it also says that I support Liverpool which as I have discussed on Unbelievable Jeff is no longer the case.

It also says that I like swimming which whilst true, is something that I have managed to forget how to do. It’s not like riding a bike. I have over the course of the last 3 years or so tried to learn again but I get the feeling that if I really wanted to, I would have done so. Partly my lack of progress is down to Dan Johnson trying to teach me and being mean and making me put my head under the water all the time. Anyway, I digress. I’m talking about growing up.

There are times in my life when I’ve been keen to grow up. When I was about to leave primary school and when I wanted to get a job where I had to wear a suit are two that predominantly stick in my mind. What I have found is that once I have grown up, I slowly become more and more child-like again. Which personally, I think is wonderful. I wrote last month about how I thought that this was influenced largely by Roald Dahl and his general kids vs. grown ups philosophy and how I am glad that I can still class myself on the kids side of the fight.

Dahl writes in Danny, the Champion of the World: “Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets.” And I think this is true. Grown ups often feel that there’s things they can’t tell children because they wouldn’t understand. I think that grown ups underestimate the power of children to assimilate anything into their world whether t be fact or fiction.

The thing about being a grown up is that you have lots more responsibilities, lots more stress, lots more worries and lots of social dilemmas. Children have none of this. They don’t think more than a couple of hours ahead and any arguments and problems are quickly resolved. We could probably learn a lot by being more child-like in our approach to the world.

Grown ups are often world weary, whereas children will see things with a sense of wonder all the time. One of my favourite things to do when I go on holiday is stare out of the taxi window on the way from the airport to the hotel. Not only does this make me feel like I’m in a movie but I am always interested in looking at the little things that make that place different from any others.

The places that I enjoy going on holiday are those which are quirky and unusual and different and exciting. I can’t stand going to the same place over and over or having the same beach holiday just in a different location.

I am proud that the things I like now are the things I liked when I was a kid. It makes me feel that even though I’m getting older that I’m still not one of the dreaded Grown Ups.