Paul Auster: Moon Palace
Don DeLillo: White Noise, Libra
Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch, Cronopios & Famas, Blow Up & Other Stories, All Fires The Fire (Blow Up was adapted into the film of the same name; the story ‘The Southern Thruway’ in ‘All Fires The Fire’ was allegedly the inspiration for Godard’s ‘Weekend’)
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths
Vladimir Nabokov: Speak Memory, Pale Fire
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served The King Of England
Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse
Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics
Junichiro Tanizaki: Seven Japanese Tales
Pu Songling: Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio (King Hu’s ‘A Touch Of Zen’ adapts and interweaves several of these stories)
Han Shaogong: A Dictionary Of Maqiao
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude, The General In His Labyrinth
Books:
Catch-22
Candide
The Maltese Falcon
The Long Goodbye
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
The Martian Chronicles
Authors:
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Carver
Elmore Leonard
Currently reading Stuart Woods, but I am looking for someone else to start reading from. I’m relying on whatever’s on the best-sellers lists or what Amazon recommends me.
Haruki Murakami helps me live.
I’m a huge fan of just about anything dystopian.
Lord Of The Flies, Brave New World, 1984, We, The Handmaid’s Tale, A Clockwork Orange, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Catch-22, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Bonfire Of The Vanities, Lolita, Gulliver’s Travels, Heart Of Darkness, The God Delusion, The End Of Faith, Infidel, Running With Scissors, Walden, The World According To Garp
Shakespeare, Poe, Bradbury, Wells, Orwell, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Kafka, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Thomas Harris, Amanda Filipacchi, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs
lately, i’ve been reading galeano’s days and nights of love and war as well as marie mies’ patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale
My favorites (no order):
Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Costume of the Country, Etham From, The Reef, The Age of Innocence, The Glimpses of the Moon, The Children, The Buccaneers, A Son at the Front, etc.
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, The American, The Europeans, Washington Square, The Other House, Daisy Miller, In the Cage, etc.
D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, etc.
Willa Cather: O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy,
The Brontë Sisters: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villete, The Professor, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Jane Austen: All her books.
Wilkie Collins: No Name, The Moonstone, Man and Wife, etc.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karénina, War and Peace, The Kreutzer Sonata, Resurrection.
Jack London: Martin Eden, The Sea Wolf, etc.
Dostoievsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, etc.
E.M. Forster: Maurice, A Passage to India, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End, The Longest Journey.
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables.
Others: Joseph Conrad, Steinbeck, Dorothy Parker, Iris Murdoch, Carson McCullers, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato, Kafka, Salman Rushdie, Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, etc.
Theater by Chéjov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tennessee Williams… and new plays.
And, of course, Shakesperare. The inmortal!
Rimbaud
What a great topic for auteurs – here we can rave about our favorite books with the same enthusiasm as our favorite films. Here is my short list:
Correction – Bernhard – Highly recommended to all lovers of the obscure and unusual. It is about the “sifting and sorting” of the detritus of a life, after a suicide, with the story modelled loosely on Wittgenstein’s life. Do NOT read if you are a compulsive melancholic.
Ulysses & Finnegans Wake – Joyce – Yes, conventional choices, but these works are like a well-read bible to me. Ulysses was the greatest book written in the 20th century and Finnegans Wake the greatest of the 21st (my quote). Finnegans Wake, with its use of multiple language puns (over 45 different languages),. its universal myth structure, its grounding in the particular of everyday reality, all tranposed brilliantly by Joyce’s verbal juxtaposition will probably not be equalled in this century – hence, though published in 1939, it will be the greatest “21st century” book. That’s how far ahead it was of its own time – most reviewers dismissed it at the time as meaningless drivel. What filmmakers do you think were or are ahead of their time, too?
Cantos – Pound – Like the Joyce works, Pound threw everything into this work, including his own bile. A tour de force from this brilliant and tortured mind. Again, it incorporates many languages and histories, from a retelling of the Ulysses myth, to large chunks on the Borgia era Italian renaissance, to John Adams/Jefferson era US, to Confucian era China – and much, much more. It requires, as does Fiinegans Wake, a gloss to help you along all the obscure bits. It’s like what you need to approach the more difficult filmmakers, such as Antonioni or Tarkovsky, who can seem opaque otherwise.
Everything by Kafka, especially The Castle and The Trial. These are allegories about the complexity and amiguity of life itself. Also recommended, Letters to Felice. In this book, Kafka seems to have gotten inside my own (perhaps a bit warped) head. It affects me on such a deep personal level, that it is painful for me to read. I have never finished it, as a result. Welles filmed the Trial, Maximilian Schell filmed The Castle, and Jeremy Irons starred in Kafka. All are attempts on film to convey the reality we now call “Kafkaesque.”
Death of Virgil – H. Broch – The most poetic and visionary book about the metaphysics and wonder of death itself. Profound and endlessly compelling prose. It takes you on a magical, metaphysical journey, like the ending part of 2001.
Rings of Saturn – Sebald – All of Sebald’s work are similar. They are an extended meditation on life and like snippets of a never-ending autobiography. Unfortunately, Sebald’s life was cut short in a tragic car accident – much like the ironic observations of individual fate so carefully crafted in his books. He is like a documentary film maker of the revealing minutia of life – look carefully at the pictures in his books.
Under the Volcano – Lowry – Read the book, do not be taken in by the shoddy, superficial treatment it received from John Houston on film. It is a book that exists on many layers of meaning. It details the microcosm of a life, caught in a single day – the Day of the Dead, in Mexico.
Labyrinths – Borges – He is the quintessential writer of magic realism, or reality as a convoluted knot of multiple meanings. Others here have discovered him, too. Discover him for yourself, if you haven’t read him. He turns conventional narrative logic on its head, much like a good Godard film.
The authors I frequent….
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Everything he’s written, ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater’ is a true gem.
Hunter S. Thompson – Mainly his political centered works, i.e., ‘Better Than Sex’.
Charles Bukowski – ‘Tales of Ordinary Madness,’ etc. (poetry or short stories for the most part)
Philip K. Dick – I’ve just started reading his novels in the past year or so.
David Sedaris – Can’t get enough of his memoirs….‘Me Talk Pretty One Day.’
Ethan Coen – Yes, THAT Coen….‘Gates of Eden’ is amazing…..that is, if you enjoy layered short stories.
I like Ryu Murakami books, in addition to the great stuff that’s been listed here already. I’ve read ‘In The Miso Soup’ (sick) and ‘Coin Locker Babies’. Recommended.
My all-time favorite novel: “A Confedercy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.
A few other (fiction) books I love: Middlesex; Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Sportswriter/Independence Day/Lay of the Land; The Ambassadors; Bad Dirt (Wyoming Stories); American Pastoral; the Hours; USA Trilogy; Martin Dressler; House of Sand and Fog; I Know this Much Is True; A Farewell to Arms; Tropic of Cancer; The Poisonwood Bible; The Gravediggers Daughter; Great Expectations; Europe Central; Catch-22; The Line of Beauty; We Were the Mulvaneys; The Echo Maker; The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; The Plot Against America; The Tortilla Curtain;Fahrenheit 451; The Blind Assassin; Tales of the City…..many others.
Question…how much do you think today’s screenwriters read?
Kinda depends I guess. The guy who wrote “Stranger Than Fiction” really knew his literary theory, I thought.
Kurt Vonnegut
Charles Dickens
F Scott Fitzgerald
Alister Crowley
Henry David Thoreau
Ray Bradbury
Noam Chomsky
J. Sheridan LeFanu
Lovecraft
Truman Capote
Mark Twain
Shakespeare
What I’m currently working on:
Novelists
Raymond Chandler (4 out of 7)
Don DeLillo (6/15)
William Faulkner (5/19)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (3/5)
Ernest Hemingway (2/10)
Cormac McCarthy (10/13)
Thomas Pynchon (1/6)
Playwrights
Samuel Beckett (23/33)
Anton Chekhov (3/11)
David Mamet (17/28)
Eugene O’Neill (13/39)
Harold Pinter (37/46)
Screenwriters
Coen Brothers (8/13)
David Mamet (3/18)
Preston Sturges (6/12)
I’m an English major, but I’ll keep this short.
Faulkner, Eliot (George, not T.S.), Salinger, Shakespeare, Jelinek, Auster, Ishiguro, Fitzgerald, Highsmith, Nabokov (specifically, Pale Fire), Ellis.
I plan to tackle Alexander Theroux and Borges during winter break.
^
Borges is quite an experience; I find Labyrinths to be infinitely interesting, year after year. There’s a decent bio (written by James Woodall), and a collection of interviews (with Richard Burgin) which are available, and highly recommended to anyone with an interest.
The latest one on the front of my mind is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The Coen Brothers are signed on to make this, and I am incredibly excited for it. The book is stylized and pulpy, i.e. a great playground for Joel and Ethan. Now that we see how masterfully they can make an adaptation, I can’t wait to see what they do.
Kudos to all the DeLillo fans.
I feel as if you are family.
I like books.
JD Salinger, Chuck Palahniuk, Jean-Paul Sartre (favorite Philosopher but novel is also amazing.), and obviously Jack Kerouac. Also Steven Hall and Allen Ginsberg.
Particularly like Dystopian and Absurdist literature. Recently read Michael Chabon’s ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ which was extraordinary in its scope and characterisation. Fan of the following authors- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Dan Fante, Cormac McCarthy, Carson McCullers and JG Ballard.
Hopefully soon i can start on Thomas Pynchon, Kafka, DeLillo, Steinbeck, David Sedaris and Saul Bellow.
Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
The Pornographer’s Poem by Michael Turner
The Magus by John Fowles
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy
Not Wanted On the Voyage by Timothy Findley
Self by Yann Martel
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
Anthony Burges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick
There does seem to be a pattern to the certain authors we all read. Anyway, when I’m not watching films or reading about them I like to read Buskowski, Fante, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus, William Gibson, Vonnegut, Celine, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, Asimov, Ballard, Huxley and I’m a huge fan of the Icelandic Saga’s too, especially Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga.
I’m currently reading Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne. I’m also reading Story by Robert McKee for the heck of it. It’s taking me awhile because I have other books I’m reading for fun.
So I realized I don’t read enough, and I plan on going through this thread later at work, but I’m hoping I can get a few recommendations while I’m gone. Who I like?
Vonnegut, Orwell, Palahniuk, Ayn Rand, Vincent Bugliosi, Richard Preston, early Stephen King
Some recent reads I highly recommend:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – Susannah Clarke
It’s like Harry Potter written by Charles Dickens – with some of the most imaginative ideas on magic I’ve come across.
Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
Mind-boggling nonfiction account of a serial killer during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, it’s really a must-read
The Alienist – Caleb Carr
A great mix of Sherlock Holmes, Silence of the Lambs, and Jack the Ripper.
I’ve recently discovered some great sci-fi stuff by John Wyndham, an underrated British author who wrote in the 50s and 60s. His stuff is somewhere between “sci-fi fantasy” and “thinking-man’s sci-fi,” kind of like “average Joe sci-fi.” I recommend The Chrysalids, Day of the Triffids, and The Midwich Cuckoos.
Kerouac, of course. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, William Blake, Camus, Bukowski, Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Kafka… Oh god, I could do this for hours.
I’m currently hunting down Salvador Dali’s autobiographies, as well as what I can find by Martin Amis.
Right now- the Idiot.
Previous- Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad.
Before- The Double & The Gambler by Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment, Complete Shorter Fiction by Herman Melville (still working on that, no doubt), 1984 by Orwell, Player Piano by K. Vonnegut, Animal Farm by Orwell(reread, no doubt), Schulz and Peanuts by David Michealis.
Next- Demons
I have a thing for Everyman’s Library and by the looks of it same with alot of others here.
Plus I read Comic Books- (I’m American). Fantagraphics (Rocky by Martin Kellerman for example) are cool and all but c’mon fuck being elitist, I read Spider-man when John Romita Jr. illustrates. Also all Punisher titles (Howard Chaykin-art). And the Hulk w/ Art Adams. Although these comics only take about 5 minutes to read, so they might not count.
scorpiocta
I’m a sucker for Haruki Murakami’s stuff. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood happen to be two of my all-time faves.
Milan Kundera’s earlier output used to be so much good, especially The Joke and Unbearable Lightness…
Nick Hornby… all his books are awesome.
Ah, Mikhail Bulgakov. How can i forget The Master and Margarita.
Junichiro Tanizaki is another genius. The Makioka Sisters and The Key.
As someone said… Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series is amazing as well.