Top Ten Tuesday: Criminals, Villains and other Degenerates!

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish - http://www.brokeandbookish.blogspot.com/

Everyone is welcome to join - just you link back to The Broke and the Bookish on your own Top Ten Tuesday post and sign the mister linky on the B&B blog.

This Tuesday are dedicated to Top Ten Villains! We all know that sometimes it is the villain that makes a story so here is a post celebrating those baddies and nastiest in literature!

10. Mr. Wickham from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". Because he is a nasty golddigger with no shame what-so-ever. He really deserves getting married to Lydia, talk about a match made in hell...

9. Zenia from Margaret Atwood's "The Robber Bride". In Denmark there is a saying that goes "Women are woman's worst enemy" and that is exactly Zenia. She enters the lives of three women and wreaks havoc. What a b-tch!

8. Humbert Humbert from "Lolita" by Nabokov. Because he is outright creepy and disgusting!

7.Captain Hook from "Peter Pan" by J. M. Barrie. The man wants to kill children. Honestly. He may not seem bad in the Disney movie but he is a nasty piece of work.

6. Marquise de Merteuil from "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Again a woman who will stop at nothing to get her will, you definitely do not want to cross her...

5. The three witches from Neil Gaiman's "Stardust" who are plotting to kill an innocent, young fallen star and cut out her heart to recapture youth and beauty.

4.William Hamleigh from "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett. This guy will do anything to destroy his personal enemies and he sure knows how to hold a grudge. The characteristics of his personality seem to be brutish, violent and evil.

3. The totalitarian regime in "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margeret Atwood. I can't describe the horror of this regime that has turned women into caste-divided creatures that only live to serve men. The scariest book ever.

2. Voldemort fra the Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling, don't think I have to mention that...). Need I say more? Voldemort is evil, really evil.

1. Milady de Winther from "The Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas. I have always been really scared by Milady de Winther - she is a chilling character. Evil to the bone but able to conceal it behind a mask that alernates between worldly beauty, damsel in distress and pious scapegoat. She is a villain if there ever was one!

Do you want more villains? Then check out this link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3560987/50-greatest-villains-in-literature.html

Who are your fave villains?

"Lolita" - The Age of Innocence Lost

Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" had been on my TBR list for years and finally it landed on my doorstep the other day, thanks postman :-) Last week I was traveling with work so had to spend lots of time on a plane and in airports - which means lots of time to read! Lovely. I brought Lolita with me and from the very first sentence I was pulled into the grotesque, distorted world of Humbert Humbert, the infamous key character in "Lolita".
The story is well-know, so well-know that the name Lolita has come to signify girls who have sexual power over men much much older than themselves. At least I thought that I knew the story but really I just had a vague idea about it. So here is a short summary for those of you who know the story as little as I did.
Humbert Humbert grew up in Europe and ends up living with a widower and her teenage daughter. He is attrached to and becomes enthralled by the girl .
o the teenage girl Dolores - whom he nicknames Lolita - and in a desperate attempt to stay near her, he marries her mother. When his wife dies, Lolita has no other adult in the world to trust and so Humbert gets a power over her that she can hardly escape.
Humbert Humbert is attracted to children - girls from the age of nine whom he classifies as nymphets in an unconscious try to glorify his obsession with them. No no he is no villain, he is only interested in girls who encourage it themselves... This is a villain who does his utmost to conceal the hideousness of his mind, the awful crimes he commits towards a orphaned girl. Sometimes he does this so well that as a reader it is easy to identify with him - he reflects so very little on the impact his selfish behaviour has on Lolita. Lolita has grown up wild, going her own way and acting very much like a spoiled teenager who believes herself an adult - and then every now and then her facade breaks and we get a glimpse at a little girl.
It is a heartbreaking book in many ways about a man who forces adulthood on a teenage girl who doesn't know herself and her own boudaries and who are more or less dependent on him. At the same time it is the story of a child who gets an immense power over an adult and who in the ends brings about his downfall.
"Lolita" in some ways reminds me of "The Sopranos" by Alan Warner - both books tell the tale of the difficulty of growing up and of girls being forced to face their own sexuality.
It is a beautiful book and touching and if you haven't read it, please put it on your TBR list.