Sunday, January 08, 2012

Ten of the best clocks in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best clocks in literature.

One entry on the list:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

"It was when I stood before her … that I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine". So too the great clock on the outside of the house. Time is frozen chez Miss Havisham – all the clocks stopped at the moment she learned of her fiancĂ©'s betrayal.
Read about another novel on the list.

Great Expectations appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best appropriate deaths in literature, ten of the best castles in literature, ten of the best Hamlets, ten of the best card games in literature, and ten best list of fights in fiction. It also made Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and numbers among Kurt Anderson's five most essential books. The novel is #1 on Melissa Katsoulis' list of "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact."

--Marshal Zeringue