30 Books Before 30

I've decided to amend my previous list to keep things along the lines of the '30' theme. The 30 selections I have made are a rather eclectic bunch. The only defining criteria was that I do truly want to read all of the books on this list, and more than that I can actually stomach reading them.

It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.

I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!

1. The Illiad
2. The Odyssey
3. The Analects | Confucius
   
4. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
5. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained | John Milton
6. The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine
   
7. Moll Flanders | Daniel Defoe
8. Emma | Jane Austen
9. Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte
10. Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte
11. Middlemarch | George Eliot
12. Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
13. Madame Bovary | Gustav Flaubert
14. Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain
15. War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
16. The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky
17. The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins
18. Walden and Civil Disobedience | David Henry Thoreau
19. Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville
    
20. On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin
21. The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle
22. Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man | James Joyce
23. Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov
24. Catch-22 | Joseph Heller
25. 100 Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
26. The Trial and Metamorphoses | Franz Kafka
27. Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry
28. Murphy, Malloy, Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett
29. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | John Le Carre
    
30. The Book of the New Sun | Gene Wolfe
    

List correct as at 23 March 2011. Subject to change. Suggestions welcome

30 Movies Before 30

I had earlier created a list of fifty movies to see as part of a thirty before thirty list. After a conversation with my sister who is creating a similar list (albeit with much more time to spare), I have decided to trim the list to thirty, in keeping with the general theme of 'thirty' before 30.

The new list is largely based on the previous one, with some simple rules: obviously only movies which I have not already seen will be added to the list. Additionally, there can only be a single film from a particular director represented on the list (this made for some very difficult choices).

Finally and this turned out to be a very important rule, the list is a mixture of aspiration and personal pleasure. In other words, this list in part represents films that are definitive, critically acclaimed, and otherwise essential works which I feel is vital to my film 'education', but tempered by the simple rule that I have to want to watch them. We often feel compelled to watch or read things which are recommended by critics, on the supposition that they are supposed to be good because some superior authority has decided it to be so. Part of turning 30 is the realization that life is too short to slavishly follow critical opinion and must see lists. Trust informed judgment but in the end, watch what you really want to. It is in this spirit that the following selections were made.

The list (with short explanations where appropriate) can be found below, followed by a section detailing some discarded choices and the rationale behind them:

1. 81/2
   
2. 400 Blows
   
3. Apu Trilogy, The
   
4. Apocalypse Now
   
5. Bicycle Thief, The
6. Big Sleep, The
7. Blade Runner
8. Blue Velvet
   
9. Bonnie and Clyde
10. Brazil
11. Breathless
12. Brief Encounter
13. Chinatown
14. Chunking Express
    
15. Clockwork Orange, A
16. Donnie Darko
17. Fight Club
18. Great Dictator, The
19. On the Waterfront
20. Roman Holiday
    
21. Rules of the Game
22. Seventh Samurai, The
23. Seventh Seal, The
24. Shoah
    
25. Taxi Driver
    
26. Touch of Evil
27. Tokyo Story
28. Umbrellas of Cherbourg
29. Unforgiven
    
30. Vertigo
    

Near misses: A lot near misses were made necessary by the one director rule. How to choose just one movie from the oeuvre of Fellini and Bergman (whose work I have yet to even sample), or Kurosawa (I have only seen Ran, and that on television many years ago), yet alone Chaplin (try choosing between Modern Times, City Lights, Gold Rush). In such circumstances, I often plumped for the most famous film, knowing fully well that it may not necessarily be the best (my friend Yogesh has written an excellent blog post on 30 films by notable directors which are better than their most famous works). So I shall leave it at that.

More interesting are some very well known films that I have chosen not to include because they fail my acid test rule (I just don't feel like watching it):

First, All About Eve. Screwball comedies or even intelligent comedies have just never been my thing, besides which I find I am much more attuned to British as opposed to American humour. Besides, Wilder, despite being famous as a comedic director, also made Double Indemnity, which I consider to be one of the greatest of film noirs, and of course Sunset Blvd. another noir masterpiece whose cynicism I can relate to far more than his later comedic works.

Some Like It Hot is probably considered to be the greatest American comedic film of all time. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are supposed to be one of the greatest comedic duos on film. It has Marilyn Monroe in one of her strongest performances, where she transcends her dumb blonde persona. Sadly it just doesn't appeal.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a huge academy favourite. It did the grand slam of big five Oscars (only It Happened One Night and Silence of the Lambs can match that feat), it has Jack, well being Jack. A good friend, Jake, who knows more about movies than most people I know, loathed it, saying it was completely over the top (then again Jake also disliked Shawshank for being fake, and sentimental). Still, based on what I saw of Amadeus, I could see how this criticism of Milos Forman might be accurate. Also, I already have Jack in Chinatown. If anything, I would be more curious to see another Forman film - the adaptation of the notorious 70s musical Hair featuring hippies, LSD, marijuana and unusual sex practices.

American Graffiti is a cult movie. It shows a different side of George Lucas before he went megabucks. But do you really want to be watching a coming of age in 60s America movie when you're going to be turning 30? Forget the post WWII boomer generation optimism. You're supposed to be far too close to a mid-life crisis to be watching stuff like this. If you feel nostalgic you could at least put on a re-run of Grease. And realise that John Travolta is now fifty. And Olivia Newton John has sagging breasts.

Easy Rider - yet another cult movie movie involving Jack. Two men riding around on motorcycles going against the establishment. You know what they say about mid life crisis - you know you are having one when you buy a Harley, and a motorcycle jacket to go with it. Do I really want to see a movie about two men riding on motorbikes exploring "freedom"? On the one hand it is cliched; on the other, it might just cause me to wonder what the hell I am doing with my life and quit my job and move to Tijuana. Better not push my luck.

E.T: The Extra Terrestrial - I know this is supposed to be brilliant. But I just could not bear a film that was liable to be far too sentimental (an early Spielberg trait). The thought of watching a little alien that looks like a shriveled prune riding in a bicycle basket is vomit inducing enough, worse is me remembering that when I was five and on a visit to Universal Studios, I was chosen to stand in for Elliot in showing how the shot was created (the magic of cinema!). Ergh, no.

The Exorcist: probably the greatest horror movie ever made. Problem is, I have never seen a point to horror movies, period. Except campy Zombie ones. Go George Romero.

Early silent classics: The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, early works of Luis Bunuel. Sound is an essential part of the cinematic experience. That is why movies have been shot in sound since The Jazz Singer. I've made one exception - a Charlie Chaplin film, given the man's endlessly acclaimed genius, and out of sheer curiousity. Besides, physical humour I can see transcending the need for speech or sound (there is a reason why one of the most popular comedies of recent times is Mr Bean).

World Quizzing Championships 2010

As my friends will know, I am a huge fan of all things trivia and quiz related, so one of the highlights of my year is the World Quizzing Championships. This year marked the second time that I officially took part in the competition - I had previously been a competitor in 2006 while studying in England, deciding to make the trip to Cardiff (where it was held) despite the fact that my final PPE exam was just two days later. That experience, as well as trying out the 2008 and 2009 sets of questions underlined that the World Quizzing Championships provides high quality but extremely challenging questions.

I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.

A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.

What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.

I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.

Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.

In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.

As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.

Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.

This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!