Favorite Books

Nathan: I remember Wallant being mentioned briefly in Palm Sunday, Vonnegut said he was a very talented writer but it’s a shame he wrote relatively little. What was The Children at the Gate like?

I’ve only read The Children at the Gate, and it’s strange, but completely wonderful. It involves a mental hospital – I won’t any any more. But, it’s out of print right now, and has been for some time. One of my professors turned me on to it and loaned me her personal copy. Later I found it for a dollar at a used book store.

Nathan: Ah, the perils of OOP. Children does sound good though. Speaking of used books, do you ever feel that it’s interesting having an older copy of a book you’re interested in just ‘cause it’s older? :D

Sound and the Fury – Faulker
Dharma Bums – Kerouac
Franny and Zooey – Salinger
Leaves of Grass – Whitman
Pale Fire – Nabokov
Song of Solomon – Morrison

Reading Lolita at the moment. Also, been getting into Philip Roth as of late. Just finished Goodbye, Columbus and picked up American Pastoral to start after Lolita.

Beauty and Visual Thinking

Hamilton: Roth is becoming one of my favorites. I’ve only read a couple of the Zuckerman books so far but how did you like Goodbye, Columbus?

. Venus In Furs . Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

. Pale Fire . Vladimir Nabokov

. Finnegans Wake . James Joyce

. On The Road . Jack Kerouac

. Swan’s Way . Marcel Proust

Beckett’s Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
Stuff, but profound. And rich. And good fun.

The Bible
Brothers Karamazov
Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander)
Kokoro (Natsume Soseki)
Catcher in the Rye
Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)

I’ll stick with 20th century only, otherwise this list might get a little out of control:

“The Trial”, “The Castle”, “America”, “The Metamorphoses”, “In The Penal Colony” – Franz Kafka
“Beware of Pity” – Stefan Zweig
“The Maimed” – Hermann Ungar
“Jacob Von Gunten” – Robert Walser
“The Radetzky March” – Joseph Roth
“Berlin Alexanderplatz” – Alfred Doblin
“Hunger” – Knut Hamsun
“Brave Soldier Shweik” – Yaroslav Hashek
“Ferdidurke” – Witold Gombrowicz
“Red Cavalry”, “Odessa Tales” – Isaac Babel
“Chevengur”, “Foundation Pit” – Andrei Platonov
“Master and Margarita”, “Heart of a Dog” – Mikhail Bulgakov
“Moscow Circles” – Venedict Yerofeev
“The Twelve Chairs”, “The Golden Calf” – Ilya Ilf & Yevgeniy Petrov
“As I Lay Dying”, “The Sound And The Fury” – William Faulkner
“Winesburg, Ohio” – Sherwood Anderson
“Heart of Darkness” – Joseph Conrad
“McTeague” – Frank Norris
“The Great Gatsby” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Clockwork Orange” – Anthony Burgess
“The Day Of The Locust” – Nathanael West
“A High Wind In Jamaica” – Richard Hughes
“Blood Meridian” – Cormac McCarthy
“Yoshe Kalb” – Israel Joshua Singer
“The Stranger” – Albert Camus
“100 Years Of Solitude” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

+ some selected stuff by Karel Capek, Daniil Kharms, Ryhosuke Akutagawa, Leo Perutz, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Tommaso Landolfi, Vladimir Nabokov, Arkadiy & Boris Strugatski, Amos Tutuola, Philip K. Dick, Henry Miller, Fedor Sologub, Mark Ageyev, Georgiy Vladimov, Felipe Alfau

i know you are never heard of but “Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu” Peyami Safa

As much as I read I have a rather small troupe of authors and their books tagging along.

“Fahrenheit 451” encompasses much of what I find great about storytelling. Ray Bradbury’s work in general leaves a fever and a joy in me like no other author. He weaves a simple, yet poetic and vivid thread of words. Other stories of his worth noting:
“The Lake”
“Fever Dream”
“And the Rock Cried Out”
“Farewell Summer”
“The Martian Chronicles”
“Somewhere a Band is Playing”

Miranda July’s shot story collection, " No One Belongs Here More Than You"

Roberto Bolano’s short story collection, “Last Evenings on Earth”

Bukowski. Charles Bukowski. Anything by him…

Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”.

Lolita Vladimir Nabukov
The Woman Destroyed Simone de Beauvoir
Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Marquez
Of Love and Other Demons Gabriel García Marquez
The Lesbian Lover Jose Luis Sampedro
The Lover Marguerite Duras
The Perfume Patrick Suskind
Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Diary of Frida Kahlo

and my favorite book of all times…

A few of mine, in no particular order….

Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Ngugi wa Thiong’o – A Grain of Wheat
Graham Greene – A Burnt-Out Case
J.M. Coetzee – Elizabeth Costello
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
Alisdair Gray – Lanark
W.G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn
Franz Kafka – The Trial
James Kelman – A Disaffection
Ernest Hemmingway – The Sun Also Rises
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
Aldus Huxley – Brave New World
Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
Walker Percy – The Moviegoer
Junichiro Tanizaki – The Diary of a Mad Old Man

new woman’s broken hearts club by andrea dworkin
catcher in the rye
satori in Paris
David Thomson’s book on orson welles

the iliad-homer
catcher in the rye-salinger
paper bullets-fulbeck
walden/civil disobedience-thoreau
nature-emerson
the fountainhead/atlas struggled-rand
common sense-paine
outliers-gladwell
paradise lost-leonard
calvin and hobbes-watterson
obasan-kogawa

..and the list goes on

What Daniella said, complete with a beautiful cover to emphasis her choice. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is one book I could never, ever part with. Je l’aime.

Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, Speak Memory – Nabokov
Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake – Joyce
Heart of Darkness, Nostromo – Conrad
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
Naked Lunch – Burroughs
Kafka on the Shore – Murakami
Ubik, Valis, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly – PK Dick
Memoirs of a Revolutionary – Victor Serge
Crash, Memories of the Space Age, High Rise, The Drowned World – JG Ballard
American Psyco – Ellis
A Day No Pigs Would Die – Robert Newton Pack
Cows – Matthew Stokoe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosiński
House of Incest, Delta of Venus, A Spy in the House of Love – Anais Nin

Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevsky

Die Rättin- Günter Grass
Die Verwandlung- Franz Kafka
Cien Años de Soledad- Gabriel García Márquez
La Condition humaine- André Malraux
Sorstalanság-Imre Kertész
Winter of Our Discontent- John Steinbeck

Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
Contact – Carl Sagan

i just finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.and damn that is great ! so great that i decide to quickly find a copy of wind-up bird chronicle. He has the potential to become my favorite author of all time,

fante-ask to dust,bukowski-factotum,chuck palahniuk-choke and a turkish writer murat menteş’s “dublörün dilemması” and “korkma ben varım”,his style is kinda reflection of tarantino to literature

My all time favorite book changes. Currently it’s The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

If you are looking for a recently published page turner, you can’t go wrong with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Hmm, currently I’m rather fond of Apocalypse by D.H. Lawrence. I hadn’t read it since primary school, so it was a welcome “re-visitation”.

Vurt by Jeff Noon
A reasonably unknown modern classic

Of Human Bondage – Maugham
The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky
Catcher In The Rye – Salinger
Beyond Good & Evil – Nietzsche
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – Murakami
Heartbreak Tango – Puig
Jennie Gerhardt – Dreiser
The Fall – Camus
Revolutionary Road – Yates
The Red And The Black – Stendhal
The Fountainhead – Rand
The Trial – Kafka
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy

Johnny Got His Gun- Dalton Trumbo
Perfume- Patrick Suskind
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets- Stephen Crane
Winter of Our Discontent- John Steinbeck
Cat’s Cradle & Slaughter-House Five- Kurt Vonnegut Jr
A Confedracy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
Hunger- Knut Hamson
Ender’s Game- Orson Scott Card
Autumn Dead- Ed Gorman
Pigeon- Suskind
Song of Kali- Dan Simmons
Walden Two- BF Skinner
Child Buyer- John Hersey

Miguel de Unamuno- La Niebla
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry- Le Petit Prince
Nikolay Vasilyeviç Gogol-Mertvye Dushi

I’d say my copy of Barnes and Noble’s collection of Chekhov stories is my most precious book, as “The Lady With the Pet Dog” is the piece of literature closest to my heart after English 208 in freshman year. My other absolute favorites are:

-2666
-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-Gravity’s Rainbow (still at odds with it, but one of my favorite in my collection)
-Ulysses (same case as with Gravity’s Rainbow)
-Heart of Darkness
-The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
-On the Road