Your 50 favourite books

[Ramblingsid]

I dont wish to seem cynical but does that obnoxious australian (now american for tax purposes I believe) own any publishers?

It is by no means unknown for one part of his empire to puff the output of another part

[beelzebubbles]

On Twilight.

Originally Posted by Bjorn

I've read a couple of chapters. And this summary. I may actually read the whole first book at some point, just for laughs - I try to read one utterly crap book every year. But I think I'm leaning towards Left Behind for this year, so we'll see.

My girlfriend has read both the Left Behind series and the Twilight series. I'll ask her which one she likes better. I know this is just the kind of first hand information you are looking for in order to make your decision.


I saw Twilight the movie due to my boyfreind's love of drive ins. I slept through most of it, but I awoke during the prom sequence. I was dazzled by the sparkling fairy lights.

[miercuri]

Originally Posted by Bjorn

And this summary.

This is hilarious!

HI THERE CREEPY AUTHOR WANTING TO BONE YOUR PROPHET.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one under that impression!

[Daniel del Real]

Originally Posted by beelzebubbles

On Twilight.



My girlfriend has read both the Left Behind series and the Twilight series. I'll ask her which one she likes better. I know this is just the kind of first hand information you are looking for in order to make your decision.


I saw Twilight the movie due to my boyfreind's love of drive ins. I slept through most of it, but I awoke during the prom sequence. I was dazzled by the sparkling fairy lights.

Oh those girlfriends, how do the make us suffer sometimes, don't they? My girlfriend is also a huge Twilight fan, she read all the four books in english and spanish, more than once some of them. I also had to watch the movie, and damn! the theater was full of emo teenagers who yelled everytime the main male role appeared. An awful experience I wouldn't wish to anyone.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Daniel del Real

Do you really want to read it M? I hope you are being sarcastic.

No, no, I already started it. I will also start to read a novel by Sandra Brown this week, which came up on another board. I have no idea which one I own so, hey, surprise.

When I find the time I will definitely read Left Behind. It sounds so yummy.

[miercuri]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

When I find the time I will definitely read Left Behind. It sounds so yummy.

I had no idea what Left Behind was before reading this thread but now I am glad I found out. Judging from the 'plot introduction' on wiki it seems quite unbelievable. We should start a thread for craptastic books!

[Refus de Sejour]

Hi all,

Here's my list - novels for the most part. I also read a lot of poetry, but often find that individual poems work better than the books they are collected in. I have also taken the liberty of collapsing the work of two of my favorite children's authors into single entries.

In no particular order:

The Famished Road – Ben Okri
Millroy the Magician – Paul Theroux
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Maqroll; Three Novellas – Álvaro Mutis
The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
The Flounder – Gunter Grass
Cat and Mouse – Gunter Grass
The Ice Shirt – William T. Vollman
The Pillars of Eternity – Barrington J. Bayley
The Paradox Men – Charles L. Harness
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children– Salman Rushdie
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
The White Hotel – D.M. Thomas
An Elemental Thing – Eliot Weinberger
The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Italy – Dino Buzzati
The Conversations – Harry Mathews
The Devil is Dead – R.A. Lafferty
The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Collected Poems – Vasko Popa
Collected Poems – Ted Hughes
The Storyteller – Mario Vargas Llosa
The Island of the Day Before – Umberto Eco
Glass, Irony, and God – Anne Carson
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Amos Tutuola
the Moomin books – Tove Jannson
Ten Nights of Dream – Natsuke Soseki
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea – Yukio Mishima
Tattoo – Earl Thompson
The Star Diaries – Stanlisaw Lem
Ararat – D.M. Thomas
Eating Pavalova – D.M. Thomas
China Men – Maxine Hong Kingston
My Secret History – Paul Theroux
The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
The Viceroy of Ouidah – Bruce Chatwin
Austerlich – W.G. Sebald
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
the Uncle books – J. P. Martin
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
Son of Man – Augusto Roa Bastos
Before Night Falls – Renaldo Arenas
Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
Greybeard – Brian Aldiss

[Liam]

Um, do you like ANYONE from before 1925?


L.

[Refus de Sejour]

Heh, I was expecting someone to pick up on the dearth of female authors - but you're right. Most of my reading is 20th Century - I have read earlier (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Dickens, Gogol, Swift, Aloysius Bertrand, Comte de Lautréamont, de Sade, Conrad) - but none of them quite make my top 50. Now if it were a top 100. . .

[Stevie B]

[QUOTE=Refus de Sejour;59476]Hi all,


Tattoo – Earl Thompson

I've recently seen a couple of positive comments about Thompson's earlier novel - A Garden of Sand. I was thinking of ordering a copy of that book, but before I do, I'd be curious to hear what you liked about Tattoo. Maybe I'll change my mind and order that novel instead.

[Refus de Sejour]

Stevie - interesting question. I first read Tattoo in my early teens, and I confess that the original attraction was the many extremely explicit and lengthy sex scenes scattered throughout it. In later years I reread the book and realised there was much more to it than that; Thompson is a vivid storyteller, skilled at creatiing convincing characters through dialogue, and the way the protagonist matures throughout the book is very moving. The writing isn't flashly, but it's beautifully solid and workmanlike.

I haven't read any of his other works though, so can't compare. I do believe that "Garden of Sand" is the precursor to "Tattoo," so maybe you're right in ordering that first.

[Stevie B]

Originally Posted by Refus de Sejour

Stevie - interesting question. I first read Tattoo in my early teens, and I confess that the original attraction was the many extremely explicit and lengthy sex scenes scattered throughout it. In later years I reread the book and realised there was much more to it than that; Thompson is a vivid storyteller, skilled at creatiing convincing characters through dialogue, and the way the protagonist matures throughout the book is very moving. The writing isn't flashly, but it's beautifully solid and workmanlike.

I haven't read any of his other works though, so can't compare. I do believe that "Garden of Sand" is the precursor to "Tattoo," so maybe you're right in ordering that first.

I like finding good writers who, for some reason or other, never really caught on with the reading public. Thomas Savage is one author I've been reading lately who falls into this category. I think I'll give Thompson a go in the future and I'll let you know what I think. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Tattoo.

[waxwing]

Sleeping Beauty - Ross MacDonald
Pierre, or the Ambiguities - Herman Melville
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
The Secret History - Donna Tarrt
The Little Drummer Girl - John Le Carre

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann von Goethe
Endless Love - Scott Spencer
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
V. by Thomas Pynchon
That Awful Mess on the Via Merlana - Carlo Emilio Gadda (my avatar)
Alien Hearts - Guy de Maupassant

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Burr - Gore Vidal
2666 - Roberto Bolano
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Death Comes For The Archbishop - Willa Cather
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Eighth Day - Thornton Wilder

Rabbit Redux - John Updike
The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever
Letting Go by Philip Roth
A Flag For Sunrise - Robert Stone
A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
Guerillas - V.S. Naipul
The White Hotel - D. M. Thomas
Deliverance - James Dickey
At Play in the Fields of the Lord - Peter Matthiesson
Asylum - Patrick McGrath

The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow
The End of the Road - John Barth
Something Happened - Joseph Heller
The Ginger Man - J.P.Donleavy
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

[Sif]

I have a hard time making lists, but here's my attempt. It's in no particular order and I made sure not to pick more that 2 books by one author just to give other authors a place on the list:

Confederacy of Dunces ~ John Kennedy Toole
A Prayer For Owen Meany ~ John Irving
Infinite Jest ~ David Foster Wallace
Farewell Waltz ~ Milan Kundera
The Joke ~ Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel García Márquez
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ~ Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul ~ Douglas Adams
Neverwhere ~ Neil Gaiman
Good Omens ~ Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Mort ~ Terry Pratchett
The Last Continent ~ Terry Pratchett
Forsyte Saga ~ John Galsworthy
Of Human Bondage ~ W. Somerset Maugham
The Silmarillion ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
He Knew He Was Right ~ Anthony Trollope
Phineas Redux ~ Anthony Trollope
Handful of Dust ~ Evelyn Waugh
The Rat ~ Günter Grass
The Tin Drum ~ Günter Grass
Magic Mountain ~ Thomas Mann
As Man Grows Older ~ Italo Svevo
The Possessed ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Generations of Winter ~ Vassily Aksyonov
Life and Fate ~ Vassily Grossman
Oblomov ~ Ivan Goncharov
And Quiet Flows the Don ~ Mikhail Sholokhov
Cancer Ward ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
War and Peace ~ Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons ~ Ivan Turgenev
On The Eve ~ Ivan Turgenev
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin ~ Vladimir Voinovich
Monumental Propaganda ~ Vladimir Voinovich
Master and Margarita ~ Mikhail Bulgakov
The White Guard ~ Mikhail Bulgakov
The Case of Comrade Tulayev ~ Victor Serge
We ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin
Independent People ~ Halldór Laxness
World Light ~ Halldór Laxness
Njal's Saga
Volsunga Saga
Song of the Red Ruby ~ Agnar Mykle
Giants in the Earth ~ O. E. Rølvaag
The Dwarf ~ Pär Lagerkvist
Jerusalem ~ Selma Lagerlöf
Gösta Berling's Saga ~ Selma Lagerlöf
Lewi's Journey ~ Per Olov Enquist
Doctor Glass ~ Hjalmer Söderberg
Darkness at Noon ~ Arthur Koestler

[Refus de Sejour]

Originally Posted by waxwing

The White Hotel - D. M. Thomas

Someone should start a D. M. Thomas thread (can't find one using the search function, though I'm not sure how reliable that is)! I'll do it later on today if I get a chance.

Waxwing, Sif; I find reading these lists a bittersweet experience; it's good to see familiar titles appearing, but it also reminds me how limited my own reading is. . .

[Amoxcalli]

I haven't nearly read enough to make a list of 50 favourite books (50 is a lot, in my book ), but that won't stop me from making a nice list of my favourite books, does it? I just won't reach 50.

One of my favourite authors is Naguib Mahfouz and his Arabian Nights and Days is the best novel I've read, with Wedding Song coming a close second. I read Respected Sir as well, but while it is very good, it wasn't as enjoyable.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of my favourite, if not my favourite novel. Maybe I read it at just the right moment in my life, maybe it just is exceptionally good, but this novel hit me like a sledgehammer. Somewhat painful, but at least it made itself noticed, did it not?

Belcampo's Verhalen (Stories)is very good as well. None of the short stories in this collection leaves as deep an imprint on the mind as, say, the novel mentioned above, but most of them had me chuckling and I generally like their fable-like structure.

Philip en de anderen (Philip and the others), a 1954 short novel by Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom is quite simply a beautiful story. Although not nearly my favourite work of fiction, it was worth the read.

I've read two works by the notorious critic, poet, playwright and novelist (in that order) Gerrit Komrij and I must crown him my favourite Dutch writer with quite a distance. Verwoest Arcadië (Arcadia Destroyed) and Het Chemisch Huwelijk (The Chemical Marriage) are excellent works. The first is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, while the second is a play based on one of Goethe's novels. Basically, the skill showed by Lionel Messi with a ball at his feet ("How the hell did he do that?!") is more or less the skill Gerrit Komrij shows with the metaphorical pen (I assume he has a computer. He must have. He blogs). He's a word magician.

One can't miss Shakespeare of course, and his plays The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth are my favourites. I've read a few others by him, but wasn't particularly enthralled by them. Hamlet was somewhat of a disappointment.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde on the other hand, is simply magnificent. I'm sure that if Wilde wrote a dictionary, I'd still read it from cover to cover within a week. Lord Henry Wotton is simply hilarious and, as we all know, more often than not quote-worthy. I bought his Complete Works a couple of days ago, so his plays won't be left unread for too long either. And then there is his poetry. Oh goody.

I read The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence a very long time ago, but I remember it being rather good. Same goes for Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, George Orwell's Nineteen eighty-four, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Golding's Lord of the Flies, Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, although I remember it not being quite as good as I'd hoped. I also read The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, which I thought was quite fantastic. I found it quite unique in its pace, which could be considered very slow, but when I think about it, I feel it's actually a more true-to-life pace. It's a novel you've got to take your time for.

Life of Pi by Canadian Yann Martel is my standard answer when asks me for a book suggestion. It's not the height of literature, but it's very difficult to dislike and rather easy to fall in love with.

I've read Une saison en Enfer (A season in Hell) and Illuminations (Illuminations) by Arthur Rimbaud and don't believe I have anything to say about either. Just trust me when I say that you've really got to read them.

Le Mur (The Wall) is another French work I particularly like. The two stories about marriage confused me, but maybe I'm just not old enough to understand either. The other three stories, especially the eponymous one, are simply very good. I know some people hate him, but I happen to think Sartre is a good writer. Not the best out there, but very good nonetheless.

Franz Kafka is my hero. I've read all his fiction and loved it all. Some more than others, but I loved them all. For the completeness of this list's sake: The Trial, Amerika, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Stoker, The Judgment,A Hunger Artist and Other Stories and Unpublished Stories.

In a completely different area of literature: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Much better than Decameron, The Canterbury Tales or other, similar works of the time. I've yet to see how it compares to Milton's Paradise Lost, since I haven't read that yet.

And last but not least, my favourite short story: The trail of your blood in the snow by Gabriel García Márquez. Pick it up. If you love it, you won't regret it, if you don't love it (which is considerably less likely), you'll only have wasted an hour of your time at most, which is a lose that can be coped with, is it not?

So, how far did I get?

34, not bad.

[JTolle]

Thought most plays were too short so there's no Williams, Shakespeare, or Godot

The Trial--Franz Kafka
The Tunnel--William H. Gass
The Western Canon--Harold Bloom
The Theatre and Its Double--Antonin Artaud
Angels in America--Tony Kushner
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
The Corrections--Jonathan Franzen
One Hundred Years of Solitude--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Vineland--Thomas Pynchon
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me--Richard Farina

Collected Poems--James Merrill
Collected Poems--W.H. Auden
Three Poems--John Ashbery
War and Peace--Leo Tolstoy
Invisible Man--Ralph Ellison
Doctor Zhivago--Boris Pasternak
At the Mountains of Madness--H.P. Lovecraft
The Orchards of Syon--Geoffrey Hill
Lost in the Funhouse--John Barth
Native Son--Richard Wright

The Moviegoer--Walker Percy
Frankenstein--Mary Shelley
Don Quixote--Miguel de Cervantes
The Waste Land--T.S. Eliot
Light in August--William Faulkner
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001--Czeslaw Milosz
The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
East of Eden--John Steinbeck
2666--Roberto Bolano

The Art of the Novel--Milan Kundera
The Duino Elegies--Rainer Maria Rilke
Winesburg, Ohio--Sherwood Anderson
The Lover--Marguerite Duras
The Stranger--Albert Camus
A Farewell to Arms--Ernest Hemingway
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius--Dave Eggers
Leaves of Grass--Walt Whitman
Swann's Way--Marcel Proust
Hunger--Knut Hamsun

Catch-22--Joseph Heller
Orlando--Virgina Woolf
Pale Fire--Vladimir Nabokov
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter--Carson McCullers
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems--Tomas Transtromer
A Clockwork Orange--Anthony Burgess
The Red Badge of Courage--Stephen Crane
The Magus--John Fowles
Autobiography of Red--Anne Carson
The Eighth Day--Thornton Wilder