This should really be my "to-read" list. Thanks.Quoting Benny Profane (view post)
This should really be my "to-read" list. Thanks.
First Love is about 25 pages; you could read it in an hour or so. And it's one of his finest pieces.
2666, while long, is divided into five separate novellas, which are themselves fairly breezy (except the fourth part), so it's not quite as long as its bulk suggests.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
I recently thought this over actually (and I see I am not very original around here)...
1. KING LEAR, William Shakespeare (1603-1607)
2. LOLITA, Vladimir Nabakov (1955)
3. SOUND AND THE FURY, THE, William Faulkner (1929)
4. SILENT CRY, THE, Kenzaburo Oe (1967)
5. HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad (1902)
6. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, Gabriel Garcia Marquz (1985)
7. NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)
8. PERSONAL MATTER, A, Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
9. 2666, Roberto Bolano (2004)
10. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, Thomas Pynchon (1973)
11. DOCTOR FAUSTUS (A Text), Christopher Marlowe (1604)
12. BLOOD MERIDIAN, Cormac McCarthy (1985)
13. BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, THE, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
14. MYSTERIES, Knut Hamsun (1892)
15. ROUSE UP O YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE!, Kenzaburo Oe (1983)
16. AS I LAY DYING, William Faulkner (1930)
17. TWELFTH NIGHT, William Shakespeare (1601)
18. DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH, THE, Leo Tolstoy (1866)
19. LORD OF THE FLIES, THE, William Golding (1954)
20. NIP THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS, Kenzaburo Oe (1958)
I really don't know why the best author of the twentieth century almost never gets mentioned. Perhaps four in my top twenty is a little overstating it, but of the six books I have read by him, he's simply superb.
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First Love sounds spectacularly awesome. I've added 2666 too, since everybody seems to love it.
I'd never heard of Oe before. I'll buy The Silent Cry.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
An updated top 10 I can live with...
1. Einstein's Dreams - Lightman (I don't really know if this is my favorite book of all time, but it is the book I've read the most - once per year)
2. Days of Life and Death and a Trip to the Moon - William Saroyan
3. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick
4. The Stars My Destination - Bester
5. The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard - Ballard
6. More than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
7. The Dark Tower series - King
8. Sirius - Olaf Stapledon
9. The Seven Storey Mountain - Thomas Merton
10. The Ninth Configuration - William Peter Blatty
This is a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, secular and religious, speculative, horror, and science fiction.
^ Nerd.
I'm a lit gangster, hanging out in the ghettos where the real excitement is.^ Nerd.
I'm sort of against lists. They only remind me of how finite my existence really is.
But if I were to make a list here are a few more books that would be on it:
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights (READ this if you haven't)
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman (masterpiece)
Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience (championed by Joyce, an influence on Ulysses, criminally under-read)
David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Foster Wallace - Oblivion
Don Delillo - Ratner's Star (you'd be interested in this given your background)
Ivan Goncharov - Oblomov
Franz Kafka - everything
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
I've read Wuthering Heights and didn't think much of it. I liked how completely dedicated it was to its characters, to the point where the whole world collapses into their states of mind, but I found the narrative dull, the melodramatic phrases ridiculous ("I am Heathcliff!"—blech), and the happy ending incongruous.
I loved the first half or so of At Swim-Two-Birds, while all the stories-within-stories reflected on the character of their writer, but thought it became bland metafictional playfulness once it abandoned that foundation and the interactions between the stories took over from the story. However, it showed enough promise for me to add The Third Policeman to my to-read list.
I've wanted to read Zeno's Conscience and Oblomov for years. I'll put them on my to-read list.
I've never heard of Oblivion or Ratner's Star. I'll look them up.
Kafka rocks.
EDIT: skipped over Wittgenstein's Mistress. Never heard of that one either.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
That's a nice sequence.
I don't think I could rank my favorite books (any more than I could rank my favorite movies), but these are top 10 material for sure.
I take refuge in finitude. List in preparation.
List of my favorites thus far:
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
Catch-22 - Heller
The Zero - Walter
Confederacy of Dunces - Toole
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
East of Eden - Steinbeck
Lolita - Nabokov
High Fidelity - Hornby
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
The Quiet American - Greene
The Road - McCarthy
Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut
In Cold Blood - Capote
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Marquez
The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy
Me Talk Pretty One Day - Sedaris
Straight Man - Russo
I'm a little embarrassed by my list. Some of the choices are a little English Lit 101, or maybe even Middle School English, and a few sci-fi books that every nerd read by the time they were fourteen. I've only been reading "seriously" since after I finished college, and I just can't seem to read fast enough to fill out the list enough to make it respectably distinct from all others. I love my number one, though. I'm kinda sad that I'll probably never read one that I like as much.
1. Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg)
2. Frankenstein (Shelly)
3. The Stranger (Camus)
4. The Catcher the Rye (Salinger)
5. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
6. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
7. Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell)
8. Dead Souls (Gogol)
9. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (Oe)
10. Things Fall Apart (Achebe)
11. Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
12. Say You're One Of Them (Akpan)
13. The God of Small Things (Roy)
14. Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
15. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
16. Brave New World (Huxley)
17. Black Boy (Wright)
18. Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
19. A Long Way Gone (Beah)
20. The Time Machine (Wells)
Forgot about these:
So Long, See You Tomorrow - Maxwell
Things Fall Apart - Achebe
Dunno if this list has ever been posted: the top 100 books of all time, as voted by 100 notable contemporary authors:
[]
Pretty good source of recommendations. I've read 64 (plus parts of a few others) and loved a little under half of them.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
I'm sure I'm forgetting something. I didn't include plays or poems, and tried not to include any sort of anthology, but I couldn't omit Jhumpa Lahiri. I also tried to keep the list short story-free, which is unbelievably difficult for me. (Maybe that will be a different list.) I included a couple of novellas, though. Also, I restricted this list to one work per author. The oeuvre of Julian Barnes could have taken up much of my top twenty. Love him.
Atonement Ian McEwan
Bartleby, the Scrivener Herman Melville
Don’t Lets Go To the Dogs Tonight Alexandra Fuller
Ethan Frome Edith Wharton
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer
Gargantua and Pantagruel François Rabelais
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
High Fidelity Nick Hornby
Life of Pi Yann Martel
Mystic River Dennis Lehane
Shame Salman Rushdie
Talking It Over Julian Barnes
The Buddha of Suburbia Hanif Kureishi
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand
The Heptameron Marguerite de Navarre
The Hippopotamus Stephen Fry
The Interpreter of Maladies Jhumpa Lahiri
The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst
The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka
The Plague Albert Camus
White Teeth Zadie Smith
Is there a link to this list that I can bookmark?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002...ooks.booksnews
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
I don't know, I never saw the ending as being too happy. I thought the whole book was almost unbearably sad. The melodramatic language sort of bespeaks Emily Brontë's mindset: young, and deeply familiar with the mood of the literature of her contemporaries. It borders on the parodic. I also appreciated the fractal-like quality of the narrative and how it's mirrored in the self-similar, borderline incestuous lineage of the two families. The book is so systematically wrought it's hard to believe it came from the pen of someone so young. I think it's one of the finest novels of the 19th century.
I haven't read too much of At Swim-Two-Birds, but I know that The Third Policeman is far less metafictional, and far more metaphysical. It's also completely hilarious to boot. You might have read about this already, but O'Brien wrote it right after At Swim and was unable to get it published because it was so 'out there.' He was discouraged enough to lock it in his desk, where it remained until he died in the 60s. Of course, it's his masterpiece.
Glad you liked First Love. I recently saw a theatrical production of it, although 'production' is a bit much: it was done as a single 90 minute monologue by one guy (this guy). It was awesome. He also does a three-hour, one-man production of the Trilogy. Guy's a badass.
It's worth noting also that I read First Love, Wuthering Heights, and The Third Policeman all for one class last fall (along with Lolita) from probably the best professor I've ever had. So I'm a bit biased I guess!
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
I thought the sudden marriage announcement was pretty definitely a happy ending--the ending of that absolutely inward-looking, borderline-incestuous world of misery into which Heathcliff and Catherine had dragged everything around them. It's not happy for those two central characters of course, but they were long since done for.
For 19th-century prose bordering on parodic, I'll go with Melville (though he makes it genuinely ambiguous). I have nothing against melodramatic prose; I like melodrama. But Wuthering Heights makes it ridiculous, stepping into metaphysical statements that are nonsensical.
Fractal what now? That sounds intriguing.
She didn't seem inordinately young. She was 29 when she published Wuthering Heights, right? Faulkner was only 32 when he published Sound and the Fury; Hamsun, 31 when he published Hunger; Pushkin, 26 when he started publishing Eugene Onegin; Dostoevksy, 24 when he published The Double. (I'm sure there are better examples. These are just selected from my favorites.)
Sounds awesome. As does the Beckett production/monologue.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
I read the sudden announcement of marriage as being, first and foremost, deeply ironic. It should be a happy ending, given the conventions of the kind of literature the book is drawing from, but coming as suddenly as it does right on the heels of Heathcliff's protracted death scene, during which pain and pleasure are intermixed so deeply, (not to mention after the whole book, the tone of which is not exactly bright and gay) I can't see their prospective marriage as being anything but doomed, or at least rather tainted by their respective family's history. Lockwood's abandoning the whole farce and leaving the house immediately after hearing about it, too, suggests a sort of ominous, pre-determined fate.
Never a bad idea, going with Melville. But they're very different writers. What metaphysical statements in WH do you find nonsensical?
I'm sort of lazily grafting that word onto it, but I mean the way in which characters names are repeated ad infinitum, to the point that the uninitiated reader will have a lot of trouble simply figuring out who's who, when really it's because it's essentially the same story repeated indefinitely. This is hinted at in the very beginning when Lockwood observes "a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date '1500,' and the name 'Hareton Earnshaw'". Then later in his bedroom when he sees Catherine's name inscribed on the windowsill with various surnames, falls asleep and sees "the air swarmed with Catherines," all suggest this self-similarity I'm talking about. That Catherine and Hareton announce their marriage at the end only confirms that this borderline-incestuous tale has no foreseeable end.
True enough. Maybe it's because she died at 30 that she just seems so young to me. Or maybe it's because 29 (or however much younger she was when she actually wrote it) seems so young for someone, particularly a girl with so little in the way of real life experience, to produce a book of such incredible sophistication. Her sister's books positively pale in comparison. In my opinion, anyway.
By the way, if you want an interesting take on WH, you should read Bataille's essay on Emily Brontë. It's available here.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
Good post. I haven't read the book in about eight years, so my memory of it may be way off, and I can't guarantee I was paying attention when I read it (narrative-heavy 19th-century British novels tend to bore me). I've wanted to read it again, but due to romantic issues, doing so would likely induce epic self-hatred.
That totally did not occur to me.
I'd have to skim over some quotes, but the one I pointed to previously stands out: "My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." This seems a nonsensical overreach, in which an existential state of love, in which one's Being takes its foundation in that of the Other, is exaggerated into a conflation of Beings--not just a conflation (which would have been nicely ambiguous), but an identification. If "I am Heathcliff!" were removed, it would be a terrific line; with that exclamation, it becomes absurd. Mind you, it's a character talking here, so I could be misremembering things by ascribing that tone to the novel as a whole.
I'll definitely read that. I started reading Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality a few weeks ago, but was distracted by other books.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
Ha. You and me, we're more alike than you know. I read the book at the same time as I was coming to grips with the fact that I am a total masochist when it comes to my desire towards women. I subsequently wrote a paper where I (somewhat hyperbolically) called it 'the most beautiful argument against masochism that has ever been written.'
Aye, I can see what you mean. That's a line that's packed with signification, though, and is in some ways is the climax of their relationship. That it's so over the top is fairly appropriate, I'd say.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
If only I had Heathcliff's effectualness and Gothic appeal to go along with his brooding, malice, and obsession...
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
Add The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe to my list. Wow.
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