Top 10 scenes from books

[Colyngbourne]

This is not a definitive top 10 - indeed it may not even be an actual 'top' 10 but it is ten scenes from books that are cherished or remembered for themselves. Some are what I would call 'the greatest moments' in the book, and others have more of a personal appeal. Please append your own scenes that strike you when you think of certain (possibly favourite) books:

Ten top scenes in books:

1. Enduring Love – the opening chapter with that balloon. Awful beyond telling.

2. The Vampire Lestat – Lestat meets Louis (after many year’s estrangement) who has come to the Sonoma compound to be with him on the night of The Vampire Lestat’s big concert.

3. The Cloister and the Hearth – Gerard (destined for the priesthood) cuts two straws from the fields for Margaret and her father to drink their soup, en route to Rotterdam, and shares his with Margaret with an exchange reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. Margaret keeps the straw till her dying day.

4. Dance on My Grave – Barry brings Hal home after the boating accident and Hal enjoys a luxurious bath in a luxurious bathroom, followed by Mrs Gorman’s best soup at the kitchen table. Everything that matters is left unsaid. (Though Hal gives us the lowdown in the next scene.)

5. Emma – Emma insults Miss Bates at Box Hill. It still sends shudders down my spine.

6. An Episode of Cathedral History (MR James) – in this chilling short story the altar tomb is unearthed and something is moving inside it. The dean (I think) puts his eye to the crack at the corner of the tomb....Sleep with the lights on, please. (The same for “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”)

7. The Ghost Garden (Hila Feil) – Jessica is persuaded to join in the ‘calling of spirits’ and use up her precious gold dust, casting it into the air. The two girls whirl about and it falls shimmering to the carpet and – nothing happens. Heartbreak, and the loss of an irreplaceable part of childhood.

8. The Subtle Knife - Spoiler herein Lee Scoresby and Hester’s last stand at Alamo Gulch. As moving as you get.

9. The Otterbury Incident (C. Day Lewis) – The scene when Ted is accused of stealing the money everyone has raised for mending the window is awful/terrible – he leaves the meeting alone, running the gauntlet of everyone’s silent accusation. But the scene I love/remember most is the first ‘war’, planting sticky bombs on the enemy’s ‘tank’ (converted pram) as it rolls down the street past the Incident. Boys of a certain age playing fabulous larrikin games, and reminds me of my dad who did exactly this.

10. Middlemarch – the scene when Casaubon realises that he will never finish his Key to All Mythologies and that Dorothea is not working with him in the way he imagined. I feel ill with his pedantic despair and sadness.

[Stewart]

10. Middlemarch – the scene when Casaubon realises that he will never finish his Key to All Mythologies

Interesting. This adds further meaning to Foucault's Pendulum that I was previously unaware of.

[gil]

That's a really miserable list, Col. Now, my top 10, in no particular order, are mostly from Science Fiction. Some of which may appear to be concepts, but it's the moment where you "get" the concept that's the magical moment:

1. The discovery, in Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, of what his game was all about.

2. William Gibson's visualisation of the internet in Neuromancer which pre-dates the REAL internet by nearly a decade.

3. Arthur C Clarke's orbital elevator in The Fountains of Paradise (must re-read).

4. In Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks, the moment at which you realise that the action is taking place in a castle of immense proportions.

5. Another Iain Banks moment. In Use of Weapons, when you discover what the chair is about.

6. Neal Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age.

7. Terry Pratchett's imp-powered camera. I forget which book.

8. Alfred Bester's Tiger, Tiger. The burning man appears, and the concept of "jaunting".

9. Iain Banks again. His vast spaceships with clever names (http://www.saunalahti.fi/~mjhuur1/projects/banks/ships.html)in The Culture series of books.

10. The Footage, from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

[m.]

That's a really miserable list, Col. Now, my top 10, in no particular order, are mostly from Science Fiction. Some of which may appear to be concepts, but it's the moment where you "get" the concept that's the magical moment:

1. The discovery, in Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, [edit edit edit]


Hey gil it's an epitomy of SPOILER! :lol: Well it's quite a well known fact about the book, and it's worth reading anyway, but still. I've read a lot of Card, have mixed feelings about it now, should post about it some day...

[gil]

Hey gil it's an epitomy of SPOILER!
What do you call Col's then?

However, you make a good point. I'll edit mine immediately, but you'll have to erase part of your post too.

[m.]

Done!
Except for Emma, I haven't read Col's choices, so can't say what caliber are her spoilers. :-D

[Colyngbourne]

That's a really miserable list, Col.

Hey, I never said they had to be thrilling or exciting scenes - whatever floats your boat for this one. Mine are a pretty good mix of tragic, thrilling, poignancy, great exhilaration and fun, romance, luxury, despair, horror. If I sit and think of scenes that have meant something to me, and stirred me in some way, involving all the above emotions, that list is the first ten I would come up with. They're still what you term 'magical moments' but not necessarily of revelation or insight into a mystery. Moments of great emotional drama or character development can be 'top scenes' too, you know.

Re spoilers, I think the only one that is a serious spoiler is the Philip Pullman one, which I'll amend.

[amner]

Great list Col, and I agree about the Pullman one.

But Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, my Lad! Yes! That moment! Absolutely. As chilling and awful - in the proper sense of the word - as any scene before or since.

[gil]

Hey, I never said they had to be thrilling or exciting scenes Oh, I didn't mean to diss your choices, Col, it's just that most of them are very sad or poignant or chilling. I was concentrating on moments in books that sort of uplifted me.

[Colyngbourne]

Four of my choices are uplifting ones - Otterbury, Dance..., Cloister... and Lestat (I could add a fifth and make a bad pun ...) - but I did get your point (and didn't think you were dissing my choices) ;-) I like a cool dose of melancholy and chill along with good cheer 8)

[John Self]

Just now I had entered nine choice scenes and put my feet up to consider number ten, and in so doing pulled the lead out of my computer. Hey ho. Here are the five best. All grim.

1. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving. The scene where Owen takes Johnny to his dad's workshop and helps him avoid military service. Ouch.

2. Dr Haggard's Disease, Patrick McGrath. The closing scene, which we then discover has been foreshadowed through the book right from page one ("but oh dear boy not pain like yours - just wait now and we'll make it all - go - away -"), as we discover to whom Haggard has been telling his story: and where. And then "the fresh sweet wetness of the living tongue within..." Shudder.

3. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh. The scene where Brenda gets her Johns mixed up. Holy shit!

4. Something Happened, Joseph Heller. The something which finally does happen right at the end. An apt end for a suffocatingly brilliant book. "Nobody knows what I've done. Everyone seems pleased with the way I've taken command."

5. Northern Lights, Philip Pullman. The scene where they encounter Tony Makarios, hugging a piece of dead fish to his chest as a substitute for his daemon. Weep? Me?

PS: gil: ah, so that's what Feersum Endjinn was about!

[MsBint]

1. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving. The scene where Owen takes Johnny to his dad's workshop and helps him avoid military service. Ouch. Ooh, something else to look forward to. :-D

Um, hope it isn't too painful. :-|

[CassieZoe]

Some shocking, some seductive, some uplifting moments:
Hackenfeller's Ape - Brigid Brophy - the birth of Edwina's baby.
The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing - Ben kills the dog.
The Statement - Brian Moore - the moment the old man understands he is being hunted.
Ulverton - Adam Thorpe - mad Clergyman caught in a snow storm.
Horse Heaven - Jane Smiley - JustaBob is rescued!
Disgrace - J M Coetzee - the ending.
Sure I will think of more.

[John Self]

The Statement - Brian Moore - the moment the old man understands he is being hunted

Indeed! It all happens so quickly I had to re-read it. Dramatic stuff.

[timeoutofmind]

9. The Otterbury Incident (C. Day Lewis) – The scene when Ted is accused of stealing the money everyone has raised for mending the window is awful/terrible – he leaves the meeting alone, running the gauntlet of everyone’s silent accusation. But the scene I love/remember most is the first ‘war’, planting sticky bombs on the enemy’s ‘tank’ (converted pram) as it rolls down the street past the Incident.

Woah... massive 'THAT was the book!' moment. i read and loved that book in primary school so long ago. The opening battle scene, with the football on the string... If i can find it on amazon, ill buy it now. I think a slightly tearful thanks is in order.


Elsewhere... here’s my top ten:

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Hell, the whole book and its sequel really – but perhaps obviously: the mad tea party. In all card games since, it’s always pre-agreed that playing a 4 means ‘CHANGE PLACES’. Classic.

2. The Bridge Iain Banks
The nightmare of the rotating bridge of rust. I think I noticed that someone here is reading it now, so I won’t go on about it – but I’m looking forward to hearing someone else’s thoughts on it.

3. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
“Because we are too meny”. Oh… The gravity of my feelings can only be adequately expressed with an emoticon L

4. The Amber Spyglass Philip Pullman
I noticed choices from the other two – but the ending… with the people… and the… and oh the tears…..

5. Narziss and Goldmund Herman Hesse
The whole chapter walking through the plague lands. I forget (… I never knew) which translation I have, but never has a bleaker mood been created in writing.

6. The Mountain Michael Moorcock
Just a very short short story – but the ending on the mountain.

7. Dragons of Spring Dawning Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Hell, its not cool, but I like it. They’re chasing the Everman into the caves when… the first moment in writing to make me cry.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The floating away of Remedios the Beauty one day. Or the complete shock of the courtyard slaughter. The problem with this book was that it had too many great moments, which didn’t go anywhere. But still.

9. The Bone People Keri Hulme
Joe meets the dying elder in the forest, as Simon wanders broken and lost. I even felt bruised after long periods reading this book.

10. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Douglas Adams
Hairdressers and Management Consultants land on a pre-historic planet, *grin*

[Colyngbourne]

[
Woah... massive 'THAT was the book!' moment. i read and loved that book in primary school so long ago. The opening battle scene, with the football on the string... If i can find it on amazon, ill buy it now. I think a slightly tearful thanks is in order.[/COLOR]


Hi, timeoutofmind. It's nice to have things 'remembered' for you - someone did the same thing for me last week with the card game 'Pit' (after nearly thirty years of forgetting it).
Amazon should have lots of copies - they are (amazingly) often in second-hand shops too, but you should end up with one with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone (sp?). Hope you enjoy it just as much as then :-)

[amner]

You have a Top 10 scene coming up, Col, if you're set to read The Girl in a Swing anytime soon...can't say any more than that...

[Colyngbourne]

Well, The Girl in a Swing is waiting in the queue, only just behind the Tash Aw, which is the next read after Apex. (It doesn't help that I'm too tired to read much other than YA-type stuff at the mo; not that The White Darkness was typically YA: it deserves a review, esp. in the light of Bruce Parry's Antarctic series)

[amner]

I'm kind of eager, after all these years, to have a whole other person to discuss it with.

I'll crash through it next, preparatory to a heated debate.

[OmS]

To Kill A Mockingbird The part where Jem has just been rescued by Boo Radley, and Scout goes to sit on his (Boo's) verandah and looks down the street, visualising everything in the way Boo must have seen it. In just a few words, Harper Lee shows how Scout's world view has totally changed - she realises that Boo, rather than being a monster, is as human as she is.

Birdsong Just before the soldiers go "over the top", they write letters home - some of them full of bravado, some of them showing their fear. I read this with tears flowing freely onto the pages. How does Faulkes write like that?

The Crucible I know its a play, but I read it, and it moved me, so its included. The part right at the end where Proctor gives in. Again, pages wet with tears.

The English Patient The part (I think its on the second page), where an Eastern mystic brings lots of vials and bottles to the burned patient. The description of this man, with this wooden frame over his shoulders, is sheer poetry.

A Hundred Years of Solitude The part where a chap is killed in the bath, and his blood flows down the stairs, goes around a rug so as not to stain it, leaves through the front door, down the street, turns right at a junction, and flows into the house of his mother, so that she knows he is dead - wow! (I think it was in this book, but might have been in another "magical realism" book - I read a whole load of them in my teens).

[timeoutofmind]

all great scenes and books.

"i saw Goody OmS with the devil"

[OmS]

"i saw Goody OmS with the devil"

"Timeoutofmind is murder. She must be ripped out of the world.";-)

[lurgee]

We may have had something like this before. If so, please point me towards it, oh wise and managerious ones.

By literary moments I mean those scenes that you never forget, that seem to be invested with immense significance and which you think about immediately whenever someone mentions a particular tome. The most exciting, emotional, stunning or surprising pages in your reading experience.

WARNING: Contains spoilers for Watership Down, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Hound Of The Baskervilles.



Bigwig vs General Woundwort. Any list of great literary moments without a fight scene in it is a pale and shallow list, and the battle between Bigwig and General Woundwort in Watership Down is the mother and father of all battles. That it takes place between rabbits is neither here nor there. It's as epic as Hector against Achilles. And it ends, astonishingly, with the best moment of all, as the battered, bloody Bigwig pursues Woundwort and, when Woundwort tries to wheedle him into switching sides, rejects the offer by acknowledging Hazel as his Chief Rabbit, resolving the 400 pages of tension between the two characters as to whom should lead the warren. I'm not being ironic or facetious here. It really is the best.
Boo Radley comes out. it's masterful. The climax of to Kill A Mockingbird is so brilliantly executed that by the time you've survived Robert Ewell's frenzied assault on the Finch children, and suffered with Atticus's over Jem's supposed involvement in Ewell's death, you've completely forgotten about Boo Radley. And then he's there. Spine tingling.
The appearance of the hound of the Baskervilles. Absolutely terrified me as a youngster. Probably the greatest entrance by any character in the history of literature, even if it is a brief cameo. Just for a moment, when you realise there really is a hound, and it looks like it has just blasted out through the gates of Hell, you're with Watson and Lestrade, not sure if you are unraveling a diabolically clever plot, or confronting something purely diabolic.
"It comes from the sea." Lord of the Flies contains more great moments than any book should reasonable be allowed, but for me the most greatest is whent he older children try to allay the fears of the small fry, by reasoning how there can't be a beast on the island. Only, as it always seems to, reason fails against fear and irrationality, and the willingness to place faith in totems and fetishes triumphs. Oh, and it scares the heebie-jeebies out of me as well, because deep down I'm not sure there isn't a beast that comes from the sea at night.


More will be added as they come to me.

[Beth]

ooh, great food for thought, lurgee...


Thanks chrisphillips for mentioning Money. Otello! I shall retire on that one.

[chrisphillips]

Ooh, great thread. I haven't got ten, though I could think up more if I tried hard, but in no order of any kind:

The tennis match in Amis' Money.

Woland and his feline sidekick appear on stage in Moscow in The Master And Margarita. That might just be my favourite scene ever.

Jim Dixon sets fire to his bedding in Lucky Jim.

Lowell Lake haplessly pays a bribe in A Meaningful Life.

Yossarian goes on parade naked in Catch 22.

The excrutiating visit of the Vietnam veterans to the Chinese restaurant in Roth's The Human Stain.

The prologue to The Bonfire of the Vanities.

A death in a short story in The World According To Garp whereby a man descends an escalator stood on his hands and is strangled when his tie disappears with the steps at the bottom.