Your 50 favourite books

[nnyhav]

another 50:
some good fantasy the m john harrison blog

[cuchulain]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

another 50:
some good fantasy the m john harrison blog

Interesting list. But it's odd that he has Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance there. It's primarily a scholarly study of the roots of Arthurian lore, adding more steps from Frazer's foundation of mytho-anthropology. T.S. Eliot said it informed his Waste Land. Was a major key, etc.

Great book. It could also be on one of those "neglected classics" lists . . .

[Heteronym]

He isn't making a list of fantasy literature. He has the movie Nosferatu there too.

I loved the first comment. As soon as I saw Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, I thought, why not The Third Policeman. The first poster asks just the same.

[cuchulain]

Originally Posted by Heteronym

He isn't making a list of fantasy literature. He has the movie Nosferatu there too.

Never said it was a fantasy literature list. Nosferatu is a fictional work, set to film. The Weston book is a scholarly work, primarily about the Fisher King and the Grail legend, its roots, etc.

Originally Posted by Heteronym

I loved the first comment. As soon as I saw Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, I thought, why not The Third Policeman. The first poster asks just the same.

The Third Policeman might fit the list even better. Much darker than At Swim-Two-Birds. More fantastic, really.

[Ramblingsid]

Well it has taken me some time but here they are as best as I can say. Only one rule - one title per author only - and the second rule is that they must have grabbed hold of me at some time or another in the last 40 (oh God!) years or so. Make of them what you will .......

Peter Ackroyd – Milton in America
Sherwood Anderson – Winesburg, Ohio
Julian Barnes – Arthur and George
Samuel Becket – Waiting for Godot
Bertolt Brecht – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
Albert Camus – The Outsider
Wilkie Collins – The Moonstone
Edmund Cooper - Kronk
Bob Copper – A Song for every Season
Robertson Davies – What’s Bred in the Bone
Charles Dickens – The Pickwick Papers
Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum
T S Eliot – The Waste Land
Gavin Ewart – Or Where a Young Penguin Lies Screaming
J G Farrell – The Siege of Krishnapur
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
Jasper fforde – The Eyre Affair
Dario Fo – Accidental Death of an Anarchist
John Fowles – The Magus
Myles na gCopaleen – The Best of Myles
William Gibson – The Neuromancer
Gunter Grass – The Tin Drum
Trevor Griffiths - Comedians
Christopher Hampton (Ed) – The Radical Reader
Aleksandar Hemon – The Lazarus Project
Seamus Heaney – North
Christopher Hill – The World Turned Upside Down
Reginald Hill – On Beulah Height
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
Jerome K Jerome – Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Ben Jonson – Volpone
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis and other stories
John Keats – Collected Poems
Philip Larkin – The Whitsun Weddings
A L Lloyd – Folk Song in England
Christopher Marlowe – The Tragical History of Dr Faustus
Thomas Middleton – Women Beware Women
George Orwell – The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters Vols 1-4
Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Dumas Club
Jean Paul Sartre – Huis Clos
W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn
William Shakespeare - King Lear
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicron
Tom Stoppard - Jumpers
J R R Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
Edward Thomas – The Poems of Edward Thomas
Barry Unsworth – Sacred Hunger
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
P G Wodehouse – Carry on, Jeeves

Yes I blame that idealistic young English teacher at our school who handed out a suggestion list for reading novels and literature when I was 15 and I haven't stopped since as far as I can tell.

If I'd spent the time earning money I'd be so much richer and a lot more bored and shallow and dull and ........ than I am even now.

[Daniel del Real]

Excelent selection
I've seen that many of you have Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day in their lists. Now I have the curiosity to see how good is it

[Liam]

Ramblingsid:

Truly, a great list...

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury

YES!

John Fowles – The Magus
Miles na gCopaleen – The Best of Miles

Love the first one with a passion; SO glad you've put the second one up. I hope most people will realize who this guy really is...

William Shakespeare - King Lear

My favorite, from Bill.

J R R Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings

Oh my GOD!!! Finally, finally, finally. Ramblingsid, I think I'm in love with you, .


This reminds me, I should probably put up my own Top 50 list sometime.


Cheers,
L.

[Ramblingsid]

Oh, and there's more.....


51. Alasdair Gray - Lanark


Couldn't leave that one out......

[Ramblingsid]

and as an afterthought and a by the way.....

some kind person has put up the BBC production of Trevor Griffiths' Comedians on You Tube in ten little chunks - with Jonathan Pryce and Bill Fraser if I remember correctly.

Ah the glory days when the BBC still had balls. Long gone sadly.

[Omo]

In no particular order, and with the strong feeling I forgot something important:

The Gift / Nabokov
& all other Russian works
Dubliners / Joyce
Amerika / Kafka
& everything else

Derwish and Death / Selimovic
The Death of Empedokles / Hölderlin
& everything else
Antigone / Sophokles
Michael Kohlhaas / Kleist

& many other stuff
The Black Mill /Brezan
& many other stuff
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich / Kis
Indian Summer / Stifter

& many other stuff
Eugen Onegin / Pushkin
Sonnetts / Michelangelo
Leila and Madshnun / Nizami
The Robber / Walser

& everything else
The Robbers/ Schiller
Life is a Dream / Calderon
& some other plays
Memoirs of Hadrian / Yourcenar

The Clouds / Aristophanes
Poetry / Gryphius
The Yawning Heights/ Zinovyev
The Physicists / Dürrenmatt
& much more

Adventures of Kornel Esti / Kosztolanyi
Leonce and Lena / Büchner
Paradise Lost / Milton
Poetry / Yesenin
Iphigenia in Tauris / Goethe

and the Faust
and the Divan
Ilias / Homeros
Oblomov / Gontcharov
and the Precipice

Paradiso / Lezama Lima
Satyricon / Petronius
Fairy Tales / Brothers Grimm
Dshamilja / Aitmatov
Poetry / Sappho

[titania7]

Omo,
Kudos to you on a magnificent and admirable list of favorites! I must say,
I am ectastic to have discovered another Oblomov fan!! Which translation
did you read?

Also, I'm delighted to see Amerika on your list as it is my favorite work of
Kafka's.

And, ironically enough, I'm reading Life is a Dream at the moment .

~Titania

PS To everyone at the WLF: I'm finally back, at long last. I ended up having to purchase a new computer, after all. Needless to say, I have missed all of you immensely!!!

not nearly 50 books, some are mere stories, and in no particular odure:

the Voyeur Robbe Grillet
Soft Machine WS Burroughs
Heart of Darkness Conrad
Ice Shirt Wm Vollmann
Age of Iron Coetzee
Gerrminal Zola
Sanctuary Faulkner -arguably not his best, but very represetative and one of the creepiest villans in literature
Nausea JP Sartre
Our Lady of the Flowers Genet
Dream of a Ridculous Man Dostoyevski
Detour Michael Brodsky
Child Of God Cormac McCarthy

[Ramblingsid]

How now proud Titania! Not nearly as much as we missed you I can assure you.

I was hoping you would pass comment on my list but it must have been while you were away. Or just not interesting enough

[Omo]

Originally Posted by titania7

I am ectastic to have discovered another Oblomov fan!!

Oblomov is a well-known classic, so one shouldn't find it surprising to see others loving it. By the way, his descriptions of Japanese bureaucracy in Frigate Pallada are quite kafkaesque, aren't they?

Also, I'm delighted to see Amerika on your list as it is my favorite work of Kafka's.

From the novels, that's my favourite as well. But I also love many of the smaller works, especially Das Urteil.

And, ironically enough, I'm reading Life is a Dream at the moment

Hopefully not your last Calderón!

[duchess.diana]

Okay. Liam asked me, via private message, if I'd post on the 50 Favorite Books thread. The situation is, I'm not all that eager to put tons of time into compiling a list of my 50 favorite books. I'd like to be able to think about my choices. . .and this means it's not something I can do spontaneously, really. At the same time, in order to let Liam and everyone else here know a little more about me (Liam says one of the best ways to get to know someone is finding out what their favorite books are), I've decided to start this thread.

For those who have shared my feeling of being overwhelmed in regard to making a list of 50 (!!!) books that are their most highly cherished, I suggest that you seize this opportunity to post your top 15 favorites--or, at least, 15 books that you can think of quickly and almost effortlessy that have meant a lot to you.

I'm going first, obviously, since I stared this thread. It helps that I'm a bold and daring woman!

Emma--Jane Austen
War and Peace--Leo Tolstoy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles--Thomas Hardy
Dorothy Parker, the complete short fiction
The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone--Tennessee Williams
The Cocktail Party--T.S. Eliot
Of Human Bondage--W. Somerset Maugham
Les Miserables--Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black--Henri-Beyle Stendhal
East of Eden--John Steinbeck
Wise Blood--Flannery O'Connor
The Black Prince--Iris Murdoch
The Pickwick Papers--Charles Dickens
A Room of One's Own--Virginia Woolf
Emily Dickinson--the complete poems

Hmm. That ended up being 16 books instead of 15. . .but who's counting that closely, right?

Liam, you're next, sweetie. Go for it!

--Diana

[Colette Jones]

Sybarite started this thread. Are you pretending to be Sybarite? Or are you Titania7? The similarity is uncanny.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by Colette Jones

Sybarite started this thread. Are you pretending to be Sybarite? Or are you Titania7? The similarity is uncanny.

The thing is, Diana started another thread, called Top 15 Favorite Books, and was the first one to post, but for some reason Stewart merged her thread with this one, perhaps seeing no reason why we should have another (smaller, ) "Favorite Books" thread.

Hope this clears it up...


P.S. And Sybarite has been away for SO long I wish somebody WOULD come, every once in a while, and pretend to "be her," LOL. I miss her sharp and incisive contributions...

Cheers,
L

[duchess.diana]

Originally Posted by Colette Jones

Sybarite started this thread. Are you pretending to be Sybarite? Or are you Titania7? The similarity is uncanny.

No, I'm Diana. You must not have looked at the way I signed my post or at my profile. I don't really think I'm very much like Titania at all. . .but then, I know her in person and you don't.

Stewart: Did I engage in unacceptable behavior starting a Top 15 Favorite Books thread? I thought I was making some of the WLF members who feel overwhelmed at the idea of posting their 50 favorite books feel more at ease. Sorry if I upset anyone, most especially you.

--Diana (my real name, guys and dolls)

PS I don't know Sybarite. Is she someone important? She sounds quite famous, actually.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Colette Jones

Or are you Titania7? The similarity is uncanny.

Isn't it just.

I don't encourage many rules here, other than the eleven you get a pointer to when first signing up. Number one is "One account per member. Anyone found with a secondary account will have it removed and may be banned."

Originally Posted by tita...duchess.diana

Did I engage in unacceptable behavior starting a Top 15 Favorite Books thread? I thought I was making some of the WLF members who feel overwhelmed at the idea of posting their 50 favorite books feel more at ease. Sorry if I upset anyone, most especially you.

Does it matter if it's fifteen or fifty? It's still favourite books no matter the number. ferns_dad, earlier in the thread, had no problem with posting twelve.

[titania7]

Originally Posted by Stewart

I don't encourage many rules here, other than the eleven you get a pointer to when first signing up. Number one is "One account per member. Anyone found with a secondary account will have it removed and may be banned."

I am not Diana. I wish you people would believe me, for heaven's sake.

~Titania