FilmChik

etting Free the Bears, by John Irving It is the 1960s, and Hannes and Siggy, fellow idealists and dropouts, set out on a picaresque tour of Austria on a 700cc Royal Enfield motorcycle. Siggy is killed in a motorcycle accident, but we get to read his journal, detailing his father's involvement with a Wehrmacht motorcycle unit. And Hannes meets a gorgeous girl who wants to climb on to the back of his bike.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig Philosophical disquisition or autobiographical novel? However you define this once-cult classic, no literary motorbiking column could omit it. The narrator introduces you to the main schools of western philosophy via metaphors from motorcycle mechanics, while travelling across the US with his son on the back of his bike.

"On the Move", by Thom Gunn "Man, you gotta go." Gunn's poetic meditation on the California bikers he encountered in the 60s finds them exciting in a male way – "the distance throws them forth, their hum / Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh" – but existentially weird.

The Owl Service, by Alan Garner In the odd acoustic bowl of the remote north Wales valley where they are spending their summer holiday, step-siblings Roger and Alison sometimes hear the noise of a motorbike in the distance. It seems incidental at first, but is an echo from the past. We begin to sense the truth about a fatal accident that happened many years earlier.

"A Motorbike", by Ted Hughes Men back from the war are bored and listless, with "England dwindled to the size of a dog-track". But one of them acquires a motorbike, and life begins again down the open road. "A week later, astride it, before dawn, / A misty frosty morning, / He escaped // Into a telegraph pole / On the long straight west of Swinton."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, by JK Rowling The first chapter of the Potter oeuvre features the entrance of Hagrid at Privet Drive on a flying motorbike (with sidecar). In this vehicle (which belongs to Sirius Black) he rescues Harry from Voldemort. In the last book of the sequence Hagrid crashes and destroys the magical motorbike.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières A motorbike can be romantic. So it is for benign occupier Captain Antonio Corelli, who squires the beautiful Pelagia around the island of Cephalonia on a motorcycle (when not playing the mandolin). Years later, the elderly Corelli returns to woo her – on a motorbike.

The History Boys, by Alan Bennett There was undoubtedly a frisson when Richard Griffiths (as schoolmaster Hector) roared on to the stage of the National Theatre on his trusty motorbike. His fondness for the machine is a sign of his bloody-minded individualism and his sexual proclivities: he is prone to offer his (male) students a lift home that includes a pillion fondle. He is destined to perish on his bike.

"Our Motorbike", by Elfriede Jelinek The poem starts as a weird celebration of the joys of biking – "a leek's fat body / the red motorbike / our night fire / ravishment of chrome / steel" – but (as is Jelinek's way) things seem to turn nasty: "the red night squats / pressed against our motorbike // we ride hunting little girls / in the wooden sky".

Turbulence, by Giles Foden Young meteorologist Henry Meadows, who has to find out how to forecast the weather for D-day, is sent up to the west of Scotland to enlist the help of a reclusive mathematical genius. He is given a motorbike, though he has never ridden one before, and for the first half of the novel he zooms round the hills and lochs, getting nowhere much with his researches but developing his skills. JM

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[Source: Online PhD]

I fell in love with her after watching "Orlando," based off Virginia Woolf's book of the same name.

Graphic novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. Photograph: Evert Elzinga/AP

The Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam has launched a graphic novel version of the teenage Jewish diarist's biography, hoping to bring her story and death in a Nazi concentration camp to a wider audience.

Spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker said the publication was aimed at teenagers who might not otherwise pick up Anne Frank's diary, the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.

"Not everyone will read the diary," she said. "The one doesn't exclude the other."

Using the style of comic books to illustrate serious historical topics, even genocide, is not new. Maus, Art Spiegelman's graphic biography of his father, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, won a special Pulitzer prize in 1992.

The Anne Frank biography, authorised by the museum, is a collaboration between American author Sid Jacobson and artist Ernie Colón, the creative team behind the bestselling graphic novel of the 9/11 Commission report.

Publisher Hill & Wang will launch the illustrated book in the US later this month; Macmillan is publishing it in Britain in the autumn. Translations in German, French and Italian are planned.

Pretty scary

Mark Twain's autobiography will be published this November, 100 years after his death, per Twain's own dying wishes.

The book contains some shocking opinions which would have been extremely controversial in Twain's day, including a criticism of Christianity -- "Ours is a terrible religion" -- and of Teddy Roosevelt. It also reveals Twain's insights into his own writing process, such as a description of how he overcame writer's block while writing "Tom Sawyer."

The autobiography will be published in three volumes, the first of which will hit the shelves in November.

WATCH:

Stanley Kubrick & Giant Penis* on the set of A Clockwork Orange (1971, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Marvel's Super Heroes battle Victor von Doom. Photograph: Guardian

Lightning does strike twice. Barely a day after Ken Livingstone announced plans to reclaim London from Tory clutches, six more cartoon superheroes have been seen defending the capital from the forces of evil.

Well, sort of: Madame Tussauds's newest attraction, a nine-minute film that opened today, features everyone's favourite comic characters trashing their way through the Big Smoke in not just two, not three, but – yup - four dimensions.

Four dimensions? Again, sort of: Marvel Super Heroes 4D, which shows Spidey and chums saving London landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and, er, Madame Tussauds from a nasty baddy called Victor von Doom, sees audience members sprayed with water-jets fitted to the seat in front, buffeted by air-streams contained within head-rests, and vibrated by a mechanical floor. So Spidey shouts, and you get a blast of cool air in your ear. Wolverine slices with his spikes, and your seat gives a jolt. The Hulk sneezes, and you're lightly peppered with water. Or is it bogeys? Who knows.

An illustration from artist Josh Cooley's Golden Book parody "Movies R Fun" (part of the Lil' Inappropriate Book line) which will be available at Comic-Con this year. You can see a few more examples from The Professional and The Godfather: Part II at the link.

1. The Odyssey by Homer

Written in an era when the world believed in magic, and that the unmapped seas contained both marvels and monsters, The Odyssey is the greatest seafaring epic of all. Homer's storytelling skills are so deft that readers tend to overlook the shortcomings of his hero on the seamanship front: not only does it take Odysseus 20 years to cover the relatively short distance between Troy and his beloved island of Ithaca, but during that time, he also manages to lose his entire fleet of 12 ships. When he finally arrives home, not a single one of his crew remains alive. Hardly a great role-model for would-be captains.

2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Melville's masterpiece tells the tale of Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest for a whale whose terrifying whiteness comes to embody evil itself. I doubt that any contemporary publisher would take on such a vast, eccentric, anarchic work if it crossed their desk today. Reading it, you realise what a free and wide-ranging genre the novel once was, and how much has been wrecked by a book industry catering to the most conventional taste. Not only does Melville forget all about his main character, Ishmael, for hundreds of pages, but he also allows himself to indulge in endless speculations about the nature of whales, before reaching the conclusion that they're not mammals, but fish. What to do in the presence of such artistic nerve, but salute?

3. The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe

This is the only novel Poe wrote, and what a strange piece of work it is: a seafaring adventure by a writer who specialised in claustrophobia. Here, Poe explores its opposite: his protagonist, approaching the South Pole, encounters a vast world of menace and shrouded monsters. The story's abrupt end, complete with unsolved mysteries, sucks you in like a maelstrom. But where better to be stuck than inside one of western literature's most fertile and weird imaginations?

4. The Shadowline by Joseph Conrad

The Polish-born Conrad stepped into world literature more or less from nowhere; despite English not being his native tongue, his writing is the most sophisticated I've ever come across. Of his many extraordinary novels, this classic rite-of-passage story remains my favourite. When the ship of a young, untested captain is becalmed, he is faced with his first big challenge – and despite the odds, rises to it. For, Conrad the deck was a microcosm of the wider world. His novels are all about ethics and honour. Those were the days.

5. A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson

This short journalistic report, which Stevenson wrote during his final stay in Samoa, provides great insight into Samoan culture – along with a wonderfully ironic dissection of the follies of imperialism. Three colonial powers – Great Britain, the US and Germany – prepare to pitch into battle over the spoils of Samoa when a hurricane strikes and wrecks their men-of-war. Stevenson could have called it The Revenge of the South Seas.

6. The South Sea Tales by Jack London

When I read the novel Ulf Larsen as a boy I didn't understand the Nietzschean rantings of London's tyrannical captain, but his South Sea Tales still left a lasting impression on me. His depictions of the brutal life of the Pacific are forthright and disillusioned, especially when the representatives of higher civilisation show up.

7. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

The story takes place on the island of Guernsey, but its drama is definitely more French than British, concentrating as it does on the fickleness of women's love and the futility of men's heroism. There's a great underwater scene in which a man fights a giant octopus armed with only a knife. And all this happened before Freud, so the sea could carry all the freight of the subconscious without waving symbolism in anyone's face.

8. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen

The Little Mermaid isn't strictly a seafaring story, but it does involve a lot of swimming. And fish-tails, too. Readers outside Scandinavia tend to think of Andersen as a precursor of Disney, but read The Little Mermaid in its original version, and you'll discover he was anything but. The prince and the mermaid don't end up in each other's arms, and love doesn't prevail: it brings pain and doom. The Denmark of Andersen's era was not as idyllic as we'd like to believe. It was a narrow-minded, intolerant and deeply divided society. Andersen, who came from the bottom rung of the social ladder, was never allowed to forget his humble origins. But he cunningly used his fairytales to tell his tormentors harsh truths in a seemingly inoffensive way.

9. August by Knut Hamsun

Despite being a bestseller in Germany, the Norwegian Nobel laureate never had the popularity he craved in Britain. Some claim this is what drove him into the arms of the Nazis. But a better explanation lies in his loathing of modernity, coupled with his passion for the tough, untamed, tradition-loving Nordland region north of the Polar Circle that was his native landscape. This makes Hamsun's choice of August as the novel's eponymous hero a surprising one, since August represents the rootless cosmopolitanism and "Americanisation of life" that the author so loathed. But August is unquestionably a sympathetic character, and an endless source of fun, inventiveness, tall tales and generosity. In sidelining his own prejudices Hamsun shows an awareness that the requirements of art supersede those of politics, and herein lies his greatness. Hamsun's sprawling, entertaining novel with its vivid portrait of a small town on the shore of a big ocean remains immensely readable to this day.

10. The Fishermen by Hans Kirk

In spite of Denmark´s history as a seafaring nation, surprisingly few of its novels describe life at sea. Hans Kirk´s 1928 masterpiece is the understated, tightly-crafted story of a deeply religious fishing community which decides to uproot from the harsh shores of the North Sea and seek a more comfortable existence on the banks of an inland fjord. But the fishermen fail to adapt to their new surroundings. Increasingly isolating themselves to safeguard their puritan belief in a punishing God, the community gradually falls apart. Although almost a century has passed since it was written, The Fishermen still provides a striking psychological insight into the workings of the fundamentalist mind.