Some books I Love:
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet
Jean Genet, Un Captif amoureux
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Aesthetics Reader
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Edgar Allen Poe, The Dupin Tales
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
Emile Zola, Therese Raquin
The book of Disquiet-Pessoa,Story of an Eye-Bataille, Maladoror-Lautremont,Venus in Furs-Sacher-Masoch,The Tin Drum-Gunter Grass,Jude the Obscure-Thomas Hardy,Journal of Albion Moonlight- Kenneth Patchen,The Stranger-Albert CamusSilence-John Cage,The Little Prince,Anais Nin Journals,Henry Miller,Jean Genet,Knut Hamsun,Arthur Rimbaud,Djuna Barnes,Witold Gombrowicz,Francois Rabelais,Milan Kundera,Franz Kafka,George Orwell,Hunter S. Thompson,Marcel Proust,Hermann Hesse,Andre Gide,L. Frank Baum,Blaise Pascal,Pierre Louys,Oscar Wilde,Rainer Maria Rilke,Jerzy Kosinski,Marguerite Duras,Anne Sexton,Unica Zurn,Nikolai Gogol,Andre Breton,Dorthea Tanning.
NOVELS
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions – Abbot, Edwin A.
A Clockwork Orange – Burgess, Anthony
In Watermelon Sugar – Brautigan, Richard
World of Wonders – Davies, Robertson
American Gods – Gaiman, Neil
The Glass Bees – Jünger, Ernst
Motherless Brooklyn – Lethem, Jonathan
Lolita – Nabokov, Vladimir
Cannery Row – Steinbeck, John
Sweet Thursday – Steinbeck, John
Tortilla Flat – Steinbeck, John
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! – Vonnegut, Kurt
GRAPHIC NOVELS
Ghost World – Clowes, Daniel
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron – Clowes, Daniel
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea – Delisle, Guy
Palomar: A Love & Rockets Book – Hernandez, Gilbert
Locas: A Love & Rockets Book – Hernandez, Jaime
Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip – Jansson, Tove
Persepolis – Satrapi, Marjane
The Frank Book – Woodring, Jim
SHORT STORIES
Rashomon: And Other Stories – Akutagawa, Ryunosuke
Fancies and Goodnights – Collier, John
POETRY & PLAYS
100 Selected Poems – Cummings, e.e.
Cronopios and Famas – Cortázar, Julio
Portable Altamont – Davis, Brian Joseph
Rhinoceros and Other Plays – Ionesco, Eugène
NON-FICTION
The Periodic Table – Levi, Primo
Me Talk Pretty One Day – Sedaris, David
Raymond Carver first and foremost, Chekov, Breece D’j Pancake, W.H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa, Proust (Finally finished Remembrance of Things Past, and boy was it worth it), Lorca, Kant, Henry Miller, Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett (His novels, specifically), Gerard de Nerval (Aurelia is a linguistic masterpiece), Richard Brautigan, Thomas Carlyle, Paul Bowles (Let It Come Down nearly killed me), and Kafka…
Just a few favorites.
I’ve been meandering through Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a couple of months now. I love to read Faulkner; at his best, he’s as gripping as any movie. I like Beckett, Kafka, Kleist — Kleist was an amazing natural storyteller. Byron. Shakespeare. And Slavoj Zizek — he’s a lot of fun.
Chuck Palahniuk
Martin Amis
Vladimir Nabokov
Hubert Selby Jr.
Frank Herbert
Hermann Hesse
Dennis Lehane
Stanislaw Lem
Recent and ongoing:
Anna Kavan
Nicholas Royle
David Peace
Thomas Ligotti
M. John Harrison
J.G. Ballard
Dennis Etchison
Joel Lane
William Burroughs
D.T. Suzuki
Micheal Shermer – The Science of Good and Evil, The Mind of the Market
Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Selfish Gene
Franz Kafka – The Trial and The Metamorphosis
Alan More – Watchmen
Christopher Hitchens – God is Not Great and Why Orwell Matters
P. J. O’Rourk – On the Wealth of Nations (because I will never actually finish Adam Smiths actual body of work)
Herman Melville – Moby Dick
I read everything. To make a list would be too hard, but one recommendation The Image by Kenneth Boulding.
100 years of solitude – gabriel garcia marquez ( i just started love in the time of cholera, same author )
l’étranger – albert camus
on the road – jack kerouac
1984 / animal farm – george orwell
do androids dream of electric sheep? or anything else by – philip k. dick
les misérables – victor hugo (currently half-way through)
lord of flies, catcher in the rye, fahrenheit 451, hitchhiker’s guide, etc…
Not wishing to repeat any book already mentioned, I can only add one novel to this thread. It’s one of the very few books I’ve read twice. I think it could be adapted and made into an awesome film. For the greater part, it’s highly realistic in its contemporary narrative that takes place in a hospital in upstate New York. The final 40 or 50 pages, though, spiral into a metaphysical horror show deep inside a train tunnel.
It’s by renowned essayist, Susan Sontag. It’s entitled “Death Kit”.
I start to read the palys of Martin Mcdonagh, who mande his ferst movie this year, In Bruges.
I read from him, The Pillowman, is perfect.
Fiction/Poetry:
Atwood, Aeschylus, Balzac, Baudelaire, Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Celine, Coetzee, Cummings, Duras, Euripides, Flaubert, Genet, Hoelderlin, Joyce, Kafka, Kundera, Lawrence, Leopardi, Lautreamont, Melville, Mirbeau, Moliere, Nabokov, Poe, Proust, Rabelais, Rimbaud, Rushdie, Sade, Sebald, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stendhal, Wilde, Woolf, Yeats…
Philosophy/Theory: Aristotle, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Cixous, Copjec, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Heidegger, Irigaray, Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Metz, Nancy, Nietzsche, Plato…
Hubert Selby Jr.
Albert Camus: The Stranger (the las two pages of so…..ohhhhh soooo gooood)
Upton Sinclair: OIL OIL OIL!
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish
Nabokov:
Paul Hornschemeier
I suppose that is really it.
Great list Matthew R., with many of my own favourites. You have everything from the classic Greek writers to the moderns. Do you write on any of these? For Poets: where are Eliot & Pound? For philosophers, where is my man Sartre? Is he now passe? Also, Wittgenstein? (Sorry – I like to think in terms of ‘completeness’ – you’ve got the rest covered). Don’t mind me, as there are several you have covered here I haven’t gotten around to yet, too. Thanks for the posting. So many great writers and thinkers out there…
Ah, I knew I was forgetting some (yes, Eliot and Pound can be included in my list…sometimes I miss books as I stare at my wall of them), but I am not a big Sartre fan. Perhaps its because I think he misreads Heidegger (and I was, for a moment in time, groomed to be a Heidegger scholar) or perhaps its the seminar I took on his work that turned into a seminar on the professors bike hobby and appreciation for the band Yes, but I just never really got too invested in Sartre…
as far as writing on any of these, I sure do! I also teach them. Recently I taught a course on Greek tragedy, but now I am taking Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and following it in connection with literature. I call the course a ’Literary History of Sexuality" and we are reading Rabelais, Sade, Stendhal, Wilde, and Lawrence.
Mario Puzo
Patrica Highsmith
Agatha Christine
Raymond Chandler
Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle
Edgar Allan Poe
Neil Gaiman
J.R. R.Tolkien
Arthur C. Clarke
C.S. Lewis
Mark Twain
Truman Capote
Micheal Chabon
John Steinbeck
Angela Carter
Cormac McCarthy
Raymond Chandler
John Cheever
George Orwell
Carson McCullers
Albert Camus
Henry Miller
Philip K. Dick
Harper Lee
Dashiel Hammet
Michael Chabon
Ken Kesey
Studs Turkel
Phillip Roth
Don Delillo
Mark Twain
Joseph Conrad
Margaret Atwood
Flannery O’Connor
Vladimir Nabokov
and so on and so forth
what in the world did i do? sorry if it posts my list multiple times. eek.
Mark Twain
Robert Lewis Stevenson
Jorge Luis Borges
Raymond Chandler
William Faulkner
T.C. Boyle
Philip K. Dick
George P. Pelacanos
Michael Connelly
Ian Rankin
George Simenon
Richard Price
Haruki Murakmi
Cormac McCarthy
Vladimir Nabokov
Don Winslow
Ross MacDonald
John D. MacDonald
Jack Kerouac
Dan Simmons
Graham Greene and many others
Vellaem: I’m very fond of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ as well. I’ve bought three copies of it, as I keep lending it out to people who never return it, nor read it. :(
It’s interesting, the works that keep appearing in these lists. I would read something in to it, but I really should be doing math right now.
Anyway, a short, incomplete list of some of my favorites:
‘Wuthering Heights’ – Emily Bronte
‘Lolita’, ‘Ada or Ardor’ – Vladimir Nabokov
The short stories and plays of Anton Chekhov
The plays of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Wilde, Sophocles
‘Notre Dame de Paris’ – Victor Hugo
‘Anna Karenina’ – Leo Tolstoy
‘Oscar and Lucinda’ – Peter Carey
‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ – James Joyce
‘The Sound and the Fury’ – William Faulkner
‘Of Human Bondage’ – W. Somerset Maugham
‘Vile Bodies’ – Evelyn Waugh
The poetry of John Donne
I know I’m leaving out many (and I’ve listed an inordinate amount of modern works), but I’m sure I’m becoming tedious, so I’ll stop here.
Edit: Ok, I said I would stop, but I noticed that the person above me wrote Graham Greene, so I had to add ‘The End of the Affair’. Done!
Some of my favorite reads.
The Atrocity Exhibition. Under the Volcano. Lunar Caustic. Venus in Furs. The View from Pompey’s Head. A Separate Peace. Call it Sleep. This Side of Paradise. Lolita. Babylon Revisited. On Heroes and Tombs. Never come Morning. Winesburg, Ohio. Bertolucci’s Dream Loom. Hey Rube. Dancer from the Dance. The Big Sleep. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. Town and the City. Junky. Appointment in Samarra. The Lost Weekend. Men without Women. Light in August. Solomon’s Vineyard. Night and the City. The Trail. Point of No Return. Super-Cannes. Delta of Venus. Tender is The Night.
Mathew: I just read ‘Light in August’ recently. I agree, it is a fantastic novel.
@Shelley
If you haven’t already I think you would enjoy “A Death in the Family” by James Agee and or “The Sound and the Fury”
Faulkner is extraordinary.
I have read ‘The Sound and the Fury’, and it is one of my favorites (it’s actually on my list right above yours, lol, but mine is so long and tedious that I could understand skipping it). I have heard of ‘A Death in the Family’, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. I guess I’ll have to add it to my (ridiculously long) list of books to read.
@Shelley
really sorry to have overlooked that being on your list ha. I don’t know how I missed that, anyway… A Death in the Family is worth checking out, but I understand what you mean in regards to adding it to your “ridiculously long list of book.” I have a list myself which is almost laughable in length, but it gives one something to look forward to.
Matthew-Nice slipping a Jonathan Latimer in there. Pretty much forgotten nowadays.
@Steve
I wish I knew more or at least read more of his works… Solomon’s Vineyard is the only work of his I"ve been able to find.
Do you have a favorite Latimer?
Solomon’s Vineyard is usually considered his best novel I’ve read several others but it’s been long ago and i hate to make judgements on a book after 40 years. Solomon’s Vineyard is the only one I’ve read fairly recently-about 5 years ago. It reminded me a lot of Dashiell Hammett especially Red Harvest.
rsarao
CineSnag – just grabbed 2666 myself (both hard cover and the three-volume paperback editions — I’m a bit obsessed by books). Really looking forward to sinking my teeth into it, my first Bolano read.