GREAT MUBI CULTURAL POLL: FAVOURITE BOOKS

For Whom the Bell Tolls (E. Hemingway)
Crime and Punishment (F. Dostoeyevsky)
The Stranger (A. Camus)
Kiss Me, Judas (W.C. Baer)
The Contortionist Handbook (C. Clevenger)
The Sirens of Titan (K. Vonnegut)
Kafka on the Shore (H. Murakami)
Singing from the Well (R. Arenas)
Homeboy (S. Morgan)
Fay (L. Brown)
Light in August (W. Faulkner)
A Feast of Snake (H. Crews)
In the Miso Soup (R. Murakami)
Lolita (V. Nabokov)
Waiting for Godot (S. Beckett)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
The Tin Drum (Gunter Grass)
Middlesex (Jeffery Eugenides)
East of Eden (J. Steinbeck)
The Savage Detectives (R. Bolano)
Hamlet (W. Shakespeare)
The Double (J. Saramago)
As She Climbed Across the Table (J. Lethem)
The Futurological Congress (S. Lem)
Fahrenheit 451 (R. Bradbury)

One per author

Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
The Stranger (The Outsider) – Albert Camus
Selected Poems – Fernando Pessoa
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell – Aldous Huxley

Howl – Allen Ginsberg
The Soft Machine – William S. Burroughs
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness – Charles Bukowski
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Lyrics : 1961-2001 – Bob Dylan

Confessions of a Mask – Yukio Mishima
The Book of Five Rings – Miyamoto Musashi
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
The Woman in the Dunes – Kobo Abe

Epic of Gilgamesh
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol)
Poesias Eroticas, Burlescas e Satyricas – Manuel Bocage
A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake

The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Collected Stories – Katherine Mansfield
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Collected Stories – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Collected Poems – Federico Garcia Lorca

Wow, i’ve got reading cut out for me for 10 years- films would need to take second place.

I was interested to see A Winter’s Tale included- i had to do an essay on it once but with no great enthusiasm, or memories of it now!

A decade or so back there was a poll of Welsh people’s favourite books- the winner was Dubliners, more specifically The Dead.

Before this poll, i was expecteing Dostoevsky to feature strongly, and Joyce too, and US authors among US voters. But the exciting thing is the less known new discoveries on offer. I haven’t even read Return of the Native which has had votes here. I went off novels for years (preferring poems and factual books, and maybe uni ended up turned me off; i ripped up lots of my course books in a huff)- it was Life of Pi that got me back into reading novels more! But still, compared with many great readers here, i feel like a literary nincompoop sometimes.

Chronological order
One per writer
I also cut out all romanian books (made it just a bit easier to shrink it all down to 25 and anyway I’m not sure how many of it have been translated)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 1994 Haruki Murakami
Perfume 1985 Patrick Süskind
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 1974 John Le Carré
The Mimic Men 1967 V. S. Naipaul
The Bell Jar 1963 Sylvia Plath
The Catcher In The Rye 1951 J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 George Orwell
The Love of the Last Tycoon 1941 F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sound And The Fury 1929 William Faulkner
Steppenwolf 1927 Hermann Hesse
The Sun Also Rises 1926 Ernest Hemingway
The Age Of Innocence 1920 Edith Wharton
Un Uomo Finito 1913 Giovanni Papini
Sons And Lovers 1913 D. H. Lawrence
Quo Vadis 1895 Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hunger 1890 Knut Hamsun
Anna Karenina 1877 Leo Tolstoy
Crime And Punishment 1866 Feodor Dostoevsky
Les Miserables 1862 Victor Hugo
Fathers And Sons 1862 Ivan Turgenev
Great Expectations 1861 Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre 1847 Charlotte Bronte
Pride And Prejudice 1813 Jane Austen
The Sorrows Of Young Werther 1774 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Don Quixote 1605 Miguel De Cervantes

Maybe i should have picked collected poems by Lorca, Keats, Li Po, Tennyson, R S Thomas, but i’m saving for the poetry poll to come.

In the 80s once i’d bought a video player i got addicted to film watching, novels set aside. But so many trashy Hollywood films seen- access to world cinema was very limited compared to now, i even had to buy great films unseen, not even mail rental available. So many great novels still to read…i could do with Oliveira’s longevity. I think of the 15000-16000 films Barry Norman the film critic has seen- so much more trash he’ll have had to sit through.

Yay, Chambord’s list proves that I ain’t a complete odd ball.

oh god i can’t believe i forgot rabelais! and so many others…blanchot ♥♥♥ böll, frisch, musil, pessoa, sebald ♥ queneau, perec, pirandello, gaddis, thomas mann…and others not mentioned yet…pavese, iain sinclair, bs johnson, slawomir mrozek, peters esterhazy & nadas, danilo kis, sigizmund krzhizhanovsky, peter weiss, alasdair gray, claudes ollier & simon, sarraute, vian, viktor shklovsky, brigid brophy, donald barthelme, jp donleavy, sigurd hoel, hugo claus, tarjei vesaas, andrei platonov, octavio paz, jens bjorneboe, halldor laxness, cees nooteboom, harry mathews, mesa selimovic, jarry, voltaire, montaigne, erasmus, chekhov etc etc etc….and no one dares to say dante?

i guess we’ll have to wait on apursansar to rescue south america….

and kenji, i’m surprised you’ve not read any john cowper powys (how about arthur machen for wales then?)……though they’re all so intimidatingly big i’ve yet to commit myself, though i am curious….and dammit, i’ve got musil’s man which qualifies as a doorstop which i really should get round to reading too….

i love these lists! though….i wish there was a separate one for non-fiction, and drama/plays….it’s too much….

i’m very curious about yourcenar….any comments oxymoron? and argh…..that perutz….i bought it once, and then when i finally decided i would read it, i couldn’t find it….i was hoping it was dreadful…..

Hmmm…not sure I’ve read 25 novels (I’m more of a non-fiction reader), at least not since high school. I’ll have to pad this with plays.

Santino, he said you can list non-fiction.

^but the non-fiction I read is film related!

see, I always get the short end of the stick.

I guess plays count too eh? In that case here is my list. I don’t read books nearly as much as I watch films, but I’ll still play. I usually like almost everything I read. I think I have a good idea before I read a book if I will find it good or not. But here are my 25:

And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
The Caretaker – Harold Pinter
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming – Stephen Laberge
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
Forty Stories – Donald Barthelme
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series – Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again – J. R. R. Tolkien
Johnny Got His Gun – Dalton Trumbo
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Mere Christianity – C S Lewis
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Orthodoxy – G K Chesterton
The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster
Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship – Lesslie Newbigin
Ragamuffin Gospel – Brennan Manning
The Reason for God – Timothy Keller
The Screwtape Letters – C. S. Lewis
Sphere – Michael Crichton
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

Nice with Flannery O’Conner, Brentos. I thought of her but didn’t put any since they are more short stories. Not to say that I’m not glad you thought otherwise.

EDIT: Oh he does say you can use short stories above. Oh well, I’m not going to rethink my list.

If I did though I’d find a place to slip in The Devil and Daniel Webster.

I just realized I’ve never read Oliver Twist even though I’ve seen several film and play versions and love them all. The same with A Christmas Carol. I’ve got to read me some Dickens.

I’m gonna add:

Molloy – Beckett
Death on Credit/Death on the Installment Plan – Céline
The Essays – Montaigne
McTeague – Norris

Putting me at 24. You can change Joyce’s The Dead to Dubliners if you need to. I don’t know how you’d count them up. Keep it if you can.

@TwoDeadMagpies: Martinus has been encouraging me to read John Cowper Powys; previously i wasn’t sure what to think, cos of his Derbyshire birth and the Anglicised spelling of Owain Glyndwr as Owen Glendower, and others’ mixed reactions to him, and length…. I should read more Welsh novels (much more easily found in Wales than English bookshops where Welsh writers seem largely overlooked, as they are in the English media and awards). The not many i’ve read weren’t great masterpieces, but the medieval Mabinogi(on) is a classic.

Yeah, restricting one’s self to 25 is just brutal if one is a bibliophile – just like restricting oneself to 25 films for all of us here. I’m glad so many titles I had to leave off have been added by others. For example, glad to see the love for Hesse, Nabakov, Hamsun’s Hunger. You can add anything on Twodeadmagpies lists to any of my own – even though there are several I need to catch up with myself. It’s great to see each list and add to my own. I’m now doing a bigger list of possibilities and other books I love based on these lists, so please keep them coming.

Twodeadmagpies: I strongly recommend to you anything by Yourcenar. She is a great stylist and subtle thinker, so this should appeal to you. Don’t hold it against her that she was the first and then only woman voted into the conservative L’Académie française. Her style may be very classical and controlled, but there is fire in her writings underneath the surface gloss.

Kenji: As for Powys, another craggy stylist. I worked my way through A Glastonbury Romance, but it was a tough (if worthwhile) slog.

Kenji, because I was restricting myself to 20th Century writers (my major area of exploration), I omitted writers like Dostoevsky, even though he was my first love and introduced me to world literature when in my early teens – too young to really properly understand him. Glad that some older writers like Rabelais and Montaigne have been mentioned, too.

Here’s some addenda to my own list, which seeing the above lists, some of you may want to try:

Aiken – Ushant
D. Barnes – Nightwood
J. Barth – Giles Goat Boy
Brautigan – Trout Fishing in America
Coetzee – Waiting for the Barbarians
Coover – Public Burnings
J.P. Donleavy – The Ginger Man
Duras – The Lovers
Fowles – The Magus
Fuentes – Death of Artemis Cruz
Gadda – Acquainted with Grief
Gaddis – The Recognitions
Gass – Omensetter’s Luck
Giono – Joy of Man’s Desiring
Golding – Lord of the Flies
Handke – Slow Homecoming
Hawkes – The Second Skin
Hoban – Riddley Walker
Kavan – Sleep Has His House
Kundera – Unbearable Lightness of Being
P. Levi – Periodic Table
Patchen – Journal of Albion Moonlight
Walker Percy – The Moviegoer
Puig – Kiss of the Spider Woman
D. Richardson – Pilgrimage
Sarraute – Portrait of a Man Unknown
Simon – The Grass
Christina Stead – The Man Who Loved Children
Stein – Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Svevo – Confessions of Zeno
Marguerite Young – Miss Macintosh, My Darling
Zinoviev – Yawning Heights

Note: I’ll stick with my first list for the official poll. Sorry to be clogging up this thread. I’ll stop now!

http://archive.org/stream/onehundredbestb00powygoog#page/n42/mode/2up

1. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
2. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
3. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
4. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
5. The Odyssey – Homer (trans. E.V. Rieu)
6. The History of Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
7. Candide – Voltaire (trans. John Butt)
8. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy – Laurence Sterne
9. Tess of the D’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy
10. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
12. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathaniel West
13. The Yearling – Majorie Kinnan Rawlings
14. Monkey: A Journey to the West – Wu Cheng’en (trans. Arthur Waley)
15. The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers
16. The Young Lions – Irwin Shaw
17. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
18. The Magician of Lublin – I.B. Singer
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)
20. True Grit – Charles Portis
21. Seabiscuit: An American Legand – Laura Hillenbrand
22. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer – James L. Swanson
23. From Here to Eternity – James Jones
24. Every Secret Thing a.k.a. Patty Hearst: My Story – Patricia Campbell Hearst with Alvin Moscow
25. Don Quixote – Cervantes (trans. J.M. Cohen)

No particular order, and yeah, only 25 is tough. So instead of perusing the shelves of my little library,
I worked from memory, thinking that would be a “truer” list. Perhaps not. I think I chose Bleak House over David Copperfield merely because it was the most recent Dickens I have read. Looking forward to the poetry poll.

A Couple of Quick Ones S.J. Perelman
The Moviegoer Walker Percy
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Yukio Mishima
My Antonia Willa Cather
Washington Square Henry James
The Lame Shall Enter First Flannery O’Connor
Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut
Richard III WS
Bleak House Charles Dickens
The Dunwich Horror H.P. Lovecraft
The Lottery and Other Stories Shirley Jackson (this collection functions as a thematic body)
The Other Thomas Tryon
A Passage to India E.M. Forster
Persuasion Jane Austen
The Great God Pan Arthur Machen
The Last Lion (Alone) William Manchester
Spring Bulletin Woody Allen
Deadline At Dawn Cornell Woolrich
No Trumpet Before Him Nelia Gardener White
Into the Wood Robert Aikman
Farewell My Lovely Raymond Chandler
Endgame, 1945 David Stafford
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro
Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh

1, How to Go to the Movies (Quentin Crisp)
2. New Essays on Human Understanding (GW Leibniz)
3. the new woman’s broken heart (Andrea Dworkin)
4. Candide (Voltaire)
5. mercy (Andrea Dworkin)
6. Satori in Paris (Jack Kerouac)
7. Wetlands (C Roche)
8. Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes (David Thompson)
9. Franny and Zoey (JD Salinger)
10. Faith in Time (David Ritz)
11. Vineland (Thomas Pynchon)

In Search of Lost Time (Proust)
Ulysses (Joyce)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
Underworld (DeLillo)
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
The Ambassadors (Henry James)
Light in August (Faulkner)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Joyce Carol Oates)
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)
Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)
The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)
The Good Soldier Svejk (Hasek)
Zazie in the Metro (Queneau)
Catch 22 (Heller)
Notes From Underground (Fydor Dostoevsky)
Oblomov (Goncharov)
Where I’m Calling From (Raymond Carver)
Cloudsplitter (Russell Banks)

1. Nightwood (Djuna Barnes)
2. Oblivion (David Foster Wallace)
3. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick)
4. J. (Kenzaburo Oe)
5. Memories of My Father Watching TV (Curtis White)
6. Collected Stories (Franz Kafka)
7. Descent into Hell (Charles Williams)
8. That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis)
9. The Man Who Was Thursday (G.K. Chesterton)
10. Valis (Philip K. Dick)
11. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe)
12. Crime & Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
13. Bartleby, the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
14. Hannibal Lecter, My Father (Kathy Acker)
15. Spillway and Other Stories (Djuna Barnes)
16. The Beast in the Jungle (Henry James)
17. Quake (Rudolph Wurlitzer)
18. Actress in the House (Joseph McElroy)
19. Blood Oranges (John Hawkes)
20. Book of Acts
21. Wise Blood (Flannery O’Conner)
22. Wingstroke (Vladimir Nabokov)
23. Lion Country (Frederick Buechner)
24. Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
25. Patriotism (Yukio Mishima)

Loving this thread. I am so glad. Flannery O’Conner is getting lots of votes. I just couldn’t pick only one of her stories. That’s why I didn’t list any shorts actually. Started reading Ulysses yesterday because of this list. I couldn’t get into The Dubliners, but I’m loving Ulysses so far.

Oxymoron: great to see a list mentioning Jean Giono, Russell Hoban en Anna Kavan. I read ‘Turtle Diary’ and ‘Ice’ and I just bought Giono’s ‘Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Curious about ‘Giles Goat Boy’, ‘Acquainted with Grief’, ‘The Recognitions’, ’Omensetter’s Luck’,…

But reducing John Cowper Powys to just “another craggy stylist”? He’s like no other writer. You mention Conrad Aiken. He was among the earliest to recognize the brilliance of Wolf Solent.
Henry Miller on reading A Glastonbury Romance: “My head began bursting as I read [it]. No, I said to myself, it is impossible that any man can put all this—so much—down on paper. It is super-human.” But who am I to defend a giant like Powys?

“I really need to checkout a good world literature forum – if one exists. Spent way too much time on Mubi.”

Maybe Librarything is something for you?: http://www.librarything.com/

Again, avoiding the so-called ‘classics’, a rather personal list of my 25 favourite books (including poetry, plays, short stories, non-fiction, comics)

…und glauben, es wäre die Liebe (Friedrich Torberg, 1932)
Aufzeichnungen aus einem Irrenhaus (Christine Lavant, 1946/2001)
Die gestundete Zeit (Ingeborg Bachmann, 1953)
Germania Tod in Berlin (Heiner Müller, 1956/1971)
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac, 1962)
Il sogno di una cosa (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath, 1963)
Die Wand (Marlen Haushofer, 1963)
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Joanne Greenberg, 1964)
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (Charles Bukowski, 1969)
Vom Gehen im Eis (Werner Herzog, 1974)
Die Tante Jolesch oder der Untergang des Abendlands in Anekdoten (Friedrich Torberg, 1975)
Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer (Brigitte Schwaiger, 1977)
Die Hamletmaschine (Heiner Müller, 1977)
Der Mann im Jasmin (Unica Zürn, 1977)
Gehen (Thomas Bernhard, 1978)
Die Ausgesperrten (Elfriede Jelinek, 1980)
Weaveworld (Clive Barker, 1987)
The Sandman (Neil Gaiman, 1989-1996)
Miira ni naru made (Shimada Masahiko, 1990)
Rose Madder (Stephen King, 1995)
4.48 Psychosis (Sarah Kane, 1999)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Aron Ralston, 2004)
Fallen lassen (Brigitte Schwaiger, 2006)
So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! (Christoph Schlingensief, 2009)

Right, Martinus – I meant no disrespect to Powys. It’s been a long time since I tried him, but he has a unique style however you describe it. I just found it personally a bit difficult to get into at the time. But I am always willing to re-evaluate. Try any of those other writers you are curious about reading. Thanks for the lit. forum recommendation. I’ll check it out.

I have always been attracted to writers who value the power of words and descriptions – great stylists. For me, style is substance. I think so many of the lists indicate that there are many like me who value the same in literature.

I am curious how many have seen the films made from their book selections. For me, some of these adaptations work, for others not. For example, Huston (a director I much admire) attempted to put Moby Dick and Under the Volcano on film. For me, both adaptations tell the story but miss too much of the underlying nuances and depths. It was ambitious of him to even attempt these complex and intricate works, but perhaps these books are still best read, as any filmed version is bound to leave too much out. Same with the filmed version of Ulysses. Huston’s The Dead, on the other hand, I found a brilliant adaptation that perfectly captured the atmosphere of the original – especially at the nuanced end. Perhaps short forms or more straight-forward narratives work best rather than dense literary works steeped in symbol and allegory.

The film version of Catch-22 I thought OK, as it did capture some of the satire of the original. Another film I thought in tune with the original was Unbearable Lightness of Being. The film captures the essence of the story and expands on the shifting relationships in a complex way. Kundera is very much a philosophical stylist, with an aphoristic, allusive bent that is hard to capture on film. Still, this film is a fitting tribute to the power of his story-telling art.

I know this deserves a separate topic, but just some food for thought. I really don’t want to interrupt these great lists from appearing.

Btw – for those who haven’t tried Under the Volcano but admire Joyce’s Ulysses, please try Lowry’s work. As in Ulysses, the story takes place on one day, the Mexican Day of the Dead. It was Lowry’s tribute to Joyce. Aiken was a friend of Lowry’s and talks much about him in Ushant for those wanting to explore more.

Nice to see a Barker mention

I have other things to do, but I can’t resist.

In random order:

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Light in August – William Faulkner
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevesky
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton
A Theology of Hope – Jurgen Moltmann
An American Childhood – Annie Dillard
Silence – Shusaku Endo
The Children at the Gate – Edward Lewis Wallant
The Grapes of Wrath – John Stienbeck
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut
Entertaining Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman
I Loved a Girl: A Private Correspondence – Walter Trobisch
The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
The Gospel According to Matthew
The Shining – Stephen King
Macbeth – Shakespeare
Crossing to Safety – Wallace Stegner
Searching for John Ford – Joseph McBride
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
J.B. – Archibald MacLeish

more…?

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE by Halldór Laxness is a very good novel.

Ulysses-Joyce
A la recherche du temps perdu-Proust
The Third Policeman-Flann O’Brien
Austerlitz-Sebald
Cold Comfort Farm-Stella Gibbons
King Lear-Shakespeare
Moby Dick-Melville
Poems-Seamus Heaney
Poems Patrick Kavanagh
Poems-Derek Mahon
Poems-Tomas Tranströmer
Independent People-Halldór Laxness
The Untouchable-John Banville
Our Mutual Friend-Dickens
Les Célibataires-Montherlant
The Secret Agent-Conrad
The Slaves of Solitude-Hamilton
Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton
Back-Henry Green
The Broken Estate-James Wood
The Films of Mike Leigh-Ray Carney

There are more readers out there, right?