The Seven Basic Plots of Literature

Rating:
Summary: "an extraordinary book" - first responses
Review:
Seven Basic Plots
"This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. It always seemed to me that `the story' was God's way of giving meaning to crude creation. Booker now interprets the mind of God, and analyses not just the novel - which will never to me be quite the same again - but puts the narrative of contemporary human affairs into a new perspective. If it took its author a lifetime to write, one can only feel gratitude that he did it.
Fay Weldon, novelist

"An enormous piece of work, not really one book at all but at least three ...
nothing less than the story of all stories.And an extraordinary tale it is .. . Booker ranges over vast tracts of literature, drawing together the plots of everything from Beowulf to Bond, from Sophocles to soap opera, from Homer to Homer Simpson, to show the underlying parallels in stories from what appear to be the most disparate sources. If stories are about "what happens next", this book sets out to show that the answer is always "the same things", then to explain why. I found it absolutely fascinating."
Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye
"This is literally an incomparable book, because there is nothing to compare it with. It goes to the heart of man's cultural evolution through the stories we have told since storytelling began. It illuminates our nature, our beliefs and our collective emotions by shining a bright light on them from a completely new angle. Original, profound, fascinating - and on top of it all, a really good read".
Sir Antony Jay, co-author of `Yes, Minister'

"I am overwhelmed by the immensity of this intellectual, literary, cultural and psychological achievement, enormous in its scope and compass, profound in its penetration of the archetypal roots of human consciousness and imagination. It is one of the most important books to have appeared in my lifetime".
Dr Anthony Stevens, leading Jungian analyst
and author

"I have been quite bowled over by this new book. It is so well planned with an excellent beginning and the contrasts and comparisons throughout are highly entertaining as well as informative, and most original ... a magnificent book".
Professor John Bayley

"Booker's knowledge and understanding of imaginative literature is unrivalled; his essays on the great authors both illuminating and stimulating. This is a truly important book, an accolade often bestowed and rarely deserved in our modern age".Dame Beryl Bainbridge.


Rating:
Summary: Tis excellent the author enjoys his own work
Review: And excellent also that he has some endorsements to quote from the jacket.
A balanced, reflective review in the Times Literary Supplement (19 January 2005) by Carolyne Larrington, however, persuades me not to leap with my hard-earned cash.
I may peruse it in a brick-n-mortar store, but will not order based on the author's recommendations.
Until then, several stars deducted to balance the author's 5.

Rating:
Summary: Author shamelessly quotes his own bookjacket
Review: To counter somewhat the author's attempt to hawk his own book in a section reserved (or ought to be) for customer reviews, I quote from Carolyne Larrington's review in The Times Literary Supplement:

"How did this book gain its celebrity endorsements? Can John Bayley really agree with Christopher Booker's castigation of Chekhov? Does Fay Weldon concur with the exclusion or condemnation of every woman writer in literary history except for Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot? These, alas, may be the most provoking questions which The Seven Basic Plots raises."

Personally I would like to know what the seven basic plots are, but I think I might try to find out through another source.