Stan and Jan Berenstain.
A few of my favorite books:
Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
The Shining- Stephen King
The Stand- Stephen King
Pet Semetary- Stephen King
Misery- Stephen King
A Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess
Choke- Chuck Palahniuk
Congo- Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park/ The Lost World- Michael Crichton
Digital Fortress- Dan Brown
Deception Point- Dan Brown
Angels & Demons- Dan Brown
Velocity- Dean Koontz
East of Eden- John Steinbeck (I am in the middle right now but I already know it will be one of my favorites)
I am dieing to read Lolita because Kubrick has very good taste in books and for other reasons.
Drew: Do read ‘Lolita’, as soon as possible! It is incredible; I don’t believe I have read any other work that has so tickled me, disturbed me, and awed me with its sheer beauty.
“Lolita” is one of the funniest books I have ever read. “The Annotated Lolita” is highly recommended, solely because Nabokov occasionally makes rather obscure references (and I am restless until I figure out an oblique reference). It is witty, and darkly absurd. A hapless European introvert is henpecked by a wild 11 year old, and then haunted by his crime. The book is much funnier, and less perverse than its reputation, and the 1997 film, lead one to believe.
I haven’t watched Kubrick’s “Lolita” mostly because I doubt it would resemble the book. My idea of something produced in 1962 that would approximate the book would be 20 minutes long, involve long shots of a badge certifying the film as not damaging to public morals by the MPPA, motels, and lots of trains going into tunnels.
Lolita, of course. Going and backing to another Nabokov, Pale Fire.
Budapeste by Chico Buarque. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. Animal Farm, George Orwell. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoievsky. Christiane F, Kai Herrmann and Horst Rieck. The Alienist, Machado de Assis. L´amant, Marguerite Duras. On Photography, Susan Sontag. Most Lygia Fagundes Telles, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf. Some Woody Allen´s.
Finishing to read Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley.
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
on a pale horse- Piers Anthony
any Arthur C. Clarke
The Allen House, or Twenty Years Ago and Now- TS Arthur
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad- Stephen Ambrose
My latest reads:
The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
American Tabloid, James Ellroy
Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima
Two from trilogies, one from a tetralogy.
Before i attempt to read Ulysses, can someone offer anything about it, how difficult is it? (i don’t mean big words) Every description I’ve read says its about everything….? What about everything? Should I read Odessey first?
Jeff,
It’s not terrible difficult if you have some experience with closely reading literature. Primary, what gets the novel it reputation as “difficult” is its use of stream-of-consciousness. Other than that, it’s mostly just the thoughts of a guy moving around Dublin one day. It wouldn’t hurt to read The Odyssey so that you get the allusions, but it’s not an absolute necessity.
Jeff: Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses is an excellent introductory guide and there are a huge number of critical works. But the best thing, after some familiarity with the Odyssey, is to plunge straight in, reading as much as you can at a stretch. I am sure you will find it an entertaining read, as Joyce was a great Irish wit, as well as a scholar. I started to read it as a teenager – not sure of your age, Jeff – and became a life-long Joyce enthusiast. Happy reading!
groovy guys.
i’m 19, so yay! haha.
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
House of the Spirits (Allende)
The Little Prince (St Exupéry)
Tom Jones (Fielding)
The Wind up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
Nature Diary (Whiteley)
The Pillow Book (Sei Shonagon)
Cutting it Short (Hrabal)
Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot)
I am a Cat (Soseki)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Snow Country (Kawabata)
Poems (Li Po)
The Alchemist (Coelho)
Life of Pi (Martel)
Evening Clouds (Shono)
Manon Lescaut (Prevost)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
Poems (Keats)
1984 (Orwell)
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Clarke)
Tales (Miyazawa)
The Hungry Tide (Ghosh)
The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges)
Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
Kafka on the Shore (Murakami)
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
Under Milk Wood/ A Child’s Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas)
My library is extensive but this is what I’m reading now: East of Eden and Storm of Swords. And I’m happy to be only in the middle of two at the moment. It’s a pleasant curse.
Hermann Hesse
Camus
Kafka
Hemingway
Fernando Pessoa
William Blake
Isak Dinesen
Yukio Mishima
Kobo Abe
Junichiro Tanizaki
Sei Shonagon
Murasaki Shikibu
Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor are my current favourites. Poe was who inspired me to read and write more, as I’m sure he was for most of us.
L’etranger – Albert Camus
City of Glass- Paul Auster
Letters from Earth – Mark Twain
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Cormac McCarthy, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Thompson, William Faulkner, Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Herman Melville, Robert Anton Wilson
great going people, I read shit these days reminds me to make some time for books…
Discovered Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor recently as I’m interested in early 20th Century period.
“Sword of Honour”, “Brideshead Revisited” by the former/“Time of Gifts” and the follow-up to it, christ, the title escapes me now “Beyond the Wood and the Water” or something along those lines; in any case, very recommended along with “Ill Met at Moonlight” by Leigh Fermor’s fellow officer in Crete whose name I also can’t bloody remember.
Peter Kent also: “Mine Were of Trouble”, “No Colour or Crest”—not very well known and hard to get except with Interlibrary Loan.
Returned to Orwell with “Down and Out…” and “Homage to Catalonia”.
I just finished re-reading the Wheel of Time series, and I maintain that Robert Jordan was the only person to match Tolkien in the ability to create a believable fantastical world. I’m currently working through all of Neil Gaiman’s work; I think He, along with Alan Moore, is one of the best writers to transition so freely between the different written mediums.
Wole Soyinka, Paul Theroux, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Ben Okri, V.S. Naipaul, J.M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Zora Neale Hurston, Naguib Mahfouz, Buchi Emechetta, Helen Oyeyemi, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Irvin Yalom, Toyin Falola, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flaubert, Alice Walker, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Dillibe Onyeama, Vladimir Nabokov, Caryl Phillips, Moses Isegawa, D.O Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola…..
Anton Chekhov, George Orwell, F Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Love them all so much.
Anything by Ian McEwan, particularly The Comfort of Strangers, Amsterdam, Saturday, and Enduring Love
Richard Russo’s Empire Falls
Andre Dubus’ House of Sand and Fog
Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a new favorite)
DeLillo’s Libra
Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
McCarthy’s The Road
King’s The Shining
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter
Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex
Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross
Tom Perrotta’s Little Children
Just finished "Wise Blood (O’Connor). Next up: Melville’s “Moby Dick”.
My favourite books maybe…….
On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
Ulises (James Joyce)
The Rum Diary (Hunter S. Thompson)
A Season in Hell (Arthur Rimbaud)
The Old Man And The Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
Well, hell, I can’t list everyone, but here’s the current ones:
“After Dark” by Haruki Murikami
“Monsignor Quixote” by Graham Greene
“The Use of Pleasure” Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
and always lots of plays, but right now Holly Hughes, Don Nigro and Charles Mee
Any poem by Sabines, Rimbaud, or Keats!
Latin-American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Benedetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc.
Artemis Fowl!
Tolkien, Orwell, Gaarder, and a never ending list of names.
The Glass Bead Game (Hesse)
The Trial and all stories by Kafka
Animal Liberation (Peter Singer)
Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
Return to Tsugaru (Osamu Dazai)
Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
The Idiot (Dostoevsky)
Confessions of a Mask (Yukio Mishima)
Wait Until Spring, Bandini (John Fante)
Most stuff by Noam Chomsky
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schultz)
Aura (Carlos Fuentes)
Cormac McCarthy (more people should read Child of God, I never hear/see it mentioned), Arthur C. Clarke (all I’ve read is 2001 and some short stories, but 2001 was honestly life changing at the point I read it. For a time after reading it, in feeling how important the book was, the film just seemed a shallow exercise in image, but eventually i remembered that there was more to it), Dave Eggers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hopelessly Addicted
Moby Dick – Melville
Consciousness Explained – Dennett
Cat’s Eye – Atwood
Collected Poems – Atwood
A Roadside Attraction – Robbins
The Trial – Kafka
Contact – Sagan
Flight of the Icarus – Queneau
Open Secrets – Munroe
Tropic of Cancer – Miller
Mason & Dixon – Pynchon
Chaos – Gleick
Childhood’s End – Clarke
Selected Poems – Rilke
The Captain’s Verses – Neruda
Neuromancer – Gibson
Calvin and Hobbes – Watterson
How to Discuss Books That One Hasn’t Read – Bayard