TheAuteurs List of the Week 4/26/09: Your 10 Favorite Books
Just some favorites. And I know I repeated Salinger, but if I was being honest the list would have included everything he ever wrote.
The Sound and the Fury
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
Last Exit to Brooklyn
The Sirens of Titan
Outer Dark
A Clockwork Orange
The Master and Margarita
A Confederacy of Dunces
Franny and Zooey
The Big Friendly Giant
I loved Narcissus and Goldmund, second only to The Glass Bead Game. Same deal, I read it over a few days on a beach in Greece when I just left film school, and it had a serious impact. Misty eyed romantic youth. I’d probably hate it now.
hey .Dax — I’ve said this many times on this site… re: Finnegans Wake. I used to run a bookshop in Brighton, England, and after a time, Joyce was the only writer left that I hadn’t opened, at least on a quick glance basis. It’s more of a challenge than a novel, a fight to the death with brains swung like war hammers, bruising constantly. Took two years to read, I still have no idea what it was about, but my life is richer for making the attempt to scale the mountain. But if you’re friend is into Joyce, I’d advise s/he read The White Goddess by Robert Graves. It really helped frame the more complex mythological aspects in Finnegans. 2cents.
er….um….er… um… drat! I was going to go to bed and I now I have to go scurrying off to Goodreads to check my “reads” so I can post to this thread. Thanks, theauteurs, for contributing to insomniac behaviour!
In order:
1) Borges: Collected Fictions — I never go anywhere without this.
2) The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
3) Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan
4) The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism of Graham Greene – so so so so good.
5) The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
6) For Esme With Love & Squalor by JD Salinger
7) Rhinoceros and Other Plays by Eugene Ionesco
8) Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes
9) Amber series by Roger Zelazny – is this cheating?
10) New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
I feel rather guilty that no “classics” made it into the top 10 and yet two sci-fi “novels” and a children’s fantasy book did, but there you have it.
New York Trilogy was on my list, too, but it got bumped. Auster is great—- have you read Travels in the Scriptorium?
re: children’s books… I was completely absorbed by Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife —-Borges for kids.
Green Eggs & Ham – Dr. Seuss
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Real Frank Zappa Book – Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A lot of people here seem to love Borges… he’s been on my to-read list for some time, I may have to hit up my library tomorrow.
Since when did Borges’ fiction become not a “classic?”
Right now I’m reading “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” by William J. Mann. It’s an excellent book and I got it at a Borders in Honolulu while I was there visiting friends a few months ago. It’s a hardcover and I only paid $5.99, as it was on a discount table.
There’s more, but here are just a few off the top of my head…
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thomas
Anything Vonnegut’s written, though I must single out “Happy Birthday, Wanda June”. They actually had that play in our middle school library, which I thought was rather interesting to say the least. It was part of a collection of short stories.
Most of J.D. Salinger’s work
I enjoy Chuck Palahniuk’s novels, though I’ve not read them all.
I just recently read “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Hell I’ll just list the first ten books that come to mind, why not. I love lists.
Vineland — Thomas Pynchon
House of Leaves — Mark Z. Danielewsky
The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley (a side note: severely dislike the movie. Or, really, all the movies.)
Dracula — Bram Stoker (same deal. Both horror books are stunningly crafted in engaging ways, the movies just don’t do it for me)
Numbers in the Dark — Italo Calvino
Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — Susanna Clark
Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
Actually, these are really just my favorite books I’ve read over the past coupla years. In the case of Frankenstein and Dracula, re-read. In the case of Confederacy of Dunces, revisited.
—PolarisDiB
Ha! Good to see Ionesco’s Rhinoceros here- i was once the guy who changes into a rhino.
Kim, i like the sound of The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse. Of course this brings to mind our love of the short film White Mane
The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse would be good material for a short film, too. It’s a wonderful short story about two Armenian-American adolescents growing up in a farm community and their transgression is handled intelligently by a nurturing adult.
No Gods No Masters
The Stranger
Notes From Underground
The Revolution Of Everyday Life
Stavrogin’s Confession (a chapter in The Possessed)
Valis (But one can’t have only Valis. These other two are necessary to complete the tale: The Divine Invasion & The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer)
The Atrocity Exhibition
Blood Meridian
Gravity’s Rainbow
Red Harvest
The Sound And The Fury
Light In August
Hunger
This has already come up, so I’ll say that if anyone has good ideas for list topics, just send me a message, I do take suggestions and will be happy to post interesting topics.
Good too to see Polarisdib pick Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which just missed my list and is set in my (usually neglected) neck of the woods, in sleepy Shropshire near the England-Wales border.
Thanks, T, I’ll let him know. I’m sure he’ll apprecaite it. Of course, it will only bring me into yet another conversation about how amazing Ulysses is, which gets tiresome after months and months of just the mention of anything related to Joyce bringing this same conversation up, but nontheless.
By the way, when did it become Notes from Undergournd? I’ve always known it with a the in the middle.
Depends on the translation. The editions put out by W.W. Norton and Penguin title it Notes from Underground
OUP titles it Notes from the Underground
I’ve always found Notes from Underground to be the preferred English translation of the title.
It’s great to see Dostoyevsky on so many lists. Great novels.
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishmnt – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Antigone – Sophocles
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
Night – Elie Weisel
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Making Movies – Sidney Lumet
Rebel Without a Crew, or How a Twenty-Three year old with 7000 Dollars Became a Hollywood Player – Robert Rodriguez
The Great Movies vol. 1 & 2 – Roger Ebert
That list is in no order. Sadly, I feel as though there iss o much great literature that I have no read, mainly Chekov, Tolstoy (although I never want to read War and Peace for my own reasons), Dickens (who I’ve never read anything by), and Kafka.
Also, I very much so need to read Ubik by Philip K. Dick. I own the novel, but I haven’t sat down to read it yet; I am usually too busy trying to re-read The Man in the High Castle (which I’ve also never finished).
Savvy
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (primarily book 1-3 & 7)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Herzog on Herzog
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Thief of Always by Clive Barker
V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Adam, I tried desperately to read The Road, but I couldn’t get past page seventeen, or something like that. I’m not sure whether I can get into McCarthy’s writing, especially ith his intense use of run-ons and sentence fragments. I mean, I could understand it in something like The Sound and The Fury, since one of the narrators is mentally challenged, but in something like The Road? Could it just be that the characters just don’t care?
Also, I think McCarthy is a bit pretentious (though I don’t tend to think of that as a bad thing), in his lack of using quotations. Even the Europeans have a way to signify that there is dialogue, but McCarthy could start a normal sentence and end it with “he said,” and that would be dialogue. That bothers me quite a bit.
Then again, though, it is a critcally hailed book, and everything, probably for its themes, and its something that I own, so I hopefully will read it one day…
Savvy
You can read Ubik in a day. Pick a good day, it’s worth it.
Also Time Out of Joint is &$%#@! fabulous.
Delta of Venus.
Under the Volcano.
The Atrocity Exhibition.
The View from Pompey’s Head.
Call it Sleep.
Lolita.
Ulysses
Never come Morning.
Men without Women.
Point of No Return.
Tender is The Night.
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
Dubliners – James Joyce
Women – Charles Bukowski
Musashi – Eiji Yoshikawa
Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Watership Down – Richard Adams
The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper – Scott Frost
A History of Narrative Film – David Cook
Godel, Escher Bach – Douglass Hofstader
Not saying these are the best, of course, just my favorites.
Oh, gosh. I started reading Time Out of Joint a few years ago, but then I had to mave, and so I had to return it to the Library. Sucks, because it was so good. For some reason, I never got around to finishing it. Overall, from what I’d read, though, it was really good.
Savvy
A History of Narrative Film is a magnificent book- the breadth and depth of Cook’s knowledge seems ever more amazing. Strange that he doesn’t seem to get much attention otherwise or have i been missing something?
I would go batshit crazy if I were to give this too much thought. First five to pop into my head in each category . . .
Fiction:
The Plague – Albert Camus
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Non-fiction:
The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language – Greg Dening
A Savage War of Peace – Alistair Horne
Culture and Imperialism – Edward Said
Rites of Spring – Modris Eksteins
The Joke
The Sun Also Rises
Love in the Time of Cholera
Crime and Punishment
The Seagull
King Lear
American Tabloid
The Dubliners
A Cinema of Loneliness
The Lady in the Lake
10. V. (Pynchon, 1963)
9. Mason and Dixon (Pynchon, 1997)
8. Billy Budd (Melville, 1924)
7. TO the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1925)
6. The Waves (Woolf, 1931)
5. Waste Land (Eliot, 1917)
4. Labyrinths (Borges, 1964)
3. Ulysses (Joyce, 1922)
2. Pale Fire (Nabokov, 1962)
1. Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon, 1974)
sorry for the hugeness
Mr. King
Kenji, I’ve been wondering if I should read Narcissus and Goldmund again myself. I also read it in my youth and it left quite an impression, but perhaps my memories of it are best left as they are?