Your 50 favourite books

[Daniel del Real]

Like your list nightwood. I think it's a good introduction to yourself here in the forum. Don't listen to Liam, you might think of him as Merlin with his long beard, hat, tunic and his old slippers. He still supports the heliocentric theory of the universe.
If you take a look to my list (which I have to update by the way) you'll see a strong tendencey for XX century too.

[Liam]

Liam... still supports the heliocentric theory of the universe.

He also has a chastity belt tucked away somewhere: for the lucky boy willing to be his bride. (Still hoping Jake will reconsider and say YES).

[nightwood]

Thank You Daniel Yes I feel more comfortable with your tastes in Literature (Saramago, Bolano, Camus,...) simply because it seems to be a little more similar to my own then with Liams but I am sure he is a good boy at heart and a real cutie pie.. just a little rough around the edges
Anyway, its just a list If I would write it today or tomorrow it would most likely look at least a little different, just sooo many writers to discover yet and other books to read I haven´t come around to by now from authors who are dear to my heart. It´s a neverending task but I love it.

[Liam]

I am sure he is a good boy at heart and a real cutie pie

You have NO idea.

[nightwood]

Are you only pretending to be a nice guy Mr. Merlin?
But as long as you don´t hit me with your dusty old volumes I don´t mind

[Svidrigailov]

50 is too much and for a long time. Write as long as I can remember now. I will write as happens - I'd rather point out the authors, than a specific book (too lazy to sit and think only about each book).
________________________________

01. Cervantes - Don Quixote De La Mancha.
________________________________

the rest (without any ranking - as far as I remember).

02. Dostoevsky - Idiot.
03. Gogol - Dead souls.
04. Tolstoy - The Death Of Ivan Ilyich.
05. Pushkin - Eugene Onegin.
06. Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness.
07. A. Camus - The Stranger
08. Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment.
09. Omar Khayyam - Poetry.
10. Chingiz Aitmatov - Novels, stories.
11. Graham Greene - The Comedians, Our Man in Havana, etc.
12. Turgenev - A Sportsman's Sketches, A Nest of the Gentry, etc.
13. Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front, etc.
14. Tolstoy - Anna Karenina.
15. Goethe - Poetry.
16. Goncharov - Oblomov.
17. Walt Whitman - Poetry.
18. Hafiz - Poetry.
19. S. Lem - Solaris, etc.
20. Burns - Poetry.
21. Tove Jansson - Moomins
22. Fazil Iskander - Novels, stories.
23. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
24. A. Chekhov - Plays and Stories.
25. A. Kuprin - Stories.
26. Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise.
27. Mark Twain - Publicistic.
28. R. Tagore - Poetry.
29. Kurt Vonnegut - Novels.
30. Lermontov - Poetry.

Okay, I think this is enough

[John]

I miss authors like Pontoppidan or Jacobsen.
I will post my complete list of favourites soon

[Uemarasan]

50 or so. I just kept on going until I felt there were around 50.

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Carl Barks - Tralla La
Matsuo Basho - Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior)
Homi K. Bhabha - The Location of Culture
Nicole Brenez - Cinemas d'avant-garde (Avant Garde Cinemas)
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
Aime Cesaire - Soleil cou-coupe (Solar Throat Slashed)
Eileen Chang - The Rouge of the North
Anton Chekhov - Selected Stories
Agatha Christie - Dead Man's Folly
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz - Poems, Protest, and a Dream
Dhammapada
Assia Djebar - L'Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)
Du Fu - Selected Poems
Fumiko Enchi - Onna men (Masks)
Forugh Farrokhzad - Sin
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Janet Frame - Owls Do Cry
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Clifford Geertz - The Interpretation of Cultures
Moto Hagio - Marginal
Shigehiko Hasumi - Eiga junrei (Film Pilgrimage)
Bessie Head - When Rain Clouds Gather
Herge - The Blue Lotus
Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
Clarice Lispector - The Hour of the Star
Gabriel Marcel - Le Mystère de l'être (The Mystery of Being)
Mirabai - The Devotional Poems
Toni Morrison - Paradise
Chikamatsu Monzaemon - Shinjuten no Amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima)
Sylvia Plath - Ariel
William Shakespeare - King Lear
Sidney Sheldon - The Other Side of Midnight
Murasaki Shikibu - Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji)
Masamune Shiro - Kokaku kidotai (Ghost in the Shell)
Sei Shonagon - Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book)
Sophocles - Oedipus rex
Stephen Sondheim - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Christina Stead - House of All Nations
Junichiro Tanizaki - Sasame yuki (The Makioka Sisters)
Osamu Tezuka - Ayako
Ngugi wa Thiongo - Wizard of the Crow
Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian)
Marie Vieux-Chauvet - Amour, Colère, Folie (Love, Anger, and Madness)
Simone Weil - L'Enracinement (The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind)
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Wu Cheng'en - Journey to the West
Cao Xueqin - Dream of the Red Chamber
Ai Yazawa - Paradise Kiss
Cao Yu - Sunrise

[Daniel del Real]

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

That one sounds mouthwatering.

[Anja]

Everyone here seems to like only the best literature that's been written.
So here's my short list of the books I've found great and can remember them at the moment:
Sophie Kinsella: Shopaholic Series (Chick literature I know )
Dan Brown: Deception Point, Digital Fortress
Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Vladimir Bartol: Alamut
Andrei Makine: The French Testament
J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (I've found this book hilarious, but people told me it wasn't funny at all (?) )
Fran Levstik: Martin Karpan (noone will know this one I'm sure )

[Eric]

Tell us a bit more about this Levstik, Anja.

[Liam]

That one sounds mouthwatering.

You've never heard of Hannah Arendt, Dan? The "banality of evil" is only one of the most famous phrases of the 20th century; I'm surprised. We read her in one of my undergraduate seminars.

[Daniel del Real]

Nope, sorry for my ignorance. First time I heard her name was a couple of weeks ago, in a conference about Sartre, at the moment Heidegger was mentioned. After that, I saw the post of this book and looked for it in Amazon.

[AmieJane]

Wow getting some great ideas for some new books to pick up. I'm gonig to try and put mine together but I love so many it's hard to work out what order.

[Uemarasan]

I believe she's only famous in certain quarters of the world. We have a very American-oriented university education where I live. Anyway, I've always thought she was the greater thinker between her and Heidegger.

[Cleanthess]

At that excellent literary bloggers aggregate site, Bigother.com, they recently held a '50 literary pillars' tribute to celebrate William H. Gass 88th. birthday. The site's very literate and knowledgeable bloggers listed their 50 favorite books, in one way or another. Finally the site did the numbers to see what the general consensus was on aggregate based on the number of times some writer's work was listed:

20 mentions: 1)Samuel Beckett
19 mentions: 2)James Joyce, 3)Virginia Woolf
18 mentions: 4)Vladimir Nabokov
15 mentions: 5)William Faulkner
14 mentions: 6)William H. Gass.

As you can see other than the birthday boy himself, the top dogs of 20th. Century English fiction came on top, as usual. After that, names started regularly tying. Next came the two greatest writers ever with 13 works listed each.

13 mentions: 7)Jorge Luis Borges, 8)William Shakespeare.

The only surprise among the double digit-ed writers was Ben Marcus, a sort of Bigother favorite, but the metafictionists, fabulists and post-modernists (actual or precursors) are well represented, as well as prose stylists McCartHy and Stein.

12 mentions: 9)Cormac McCarthy, 10)Gertrude Stein, 11)Italo Calvino
11 mentions: 12)Denis Johnson, 13)Donald Barthelme, 14)Don DeLillo, 15)Flannery O’Connor, 16)Herman Melville, 17)Robert Coover
10 mentions: 18)Ben Marcus, 19)Franz Kafka.

Up to 8 mentions, the list is virtually spotless, great, reputable writers all around; after 7 mentions it gets a bit more random, but still listing excellent writers (with the single exception of Mr. Delany). I myself look forward to exploring the following writers introduced to me by this list:
Ben Marcus, Mary Caponegro, Carole Maso, Brian Evenson, Barry Hannah, Mary Gaitskill, Gary Lutz, but above all Rock Star Poet Eileen Myles, at the end I'll share some of her wonderful work.

9 mentions: 20)David Markson, 21)Gabriel García Márquez, 22)Toni Morrison
8 mentions: 23)Alice Munro, 24)David Foster Wallace, 25)Emily Dickinson, 26)Wallace Stevens
7 mentions: 28)Barry Hannah, 29)Brian Evenson, 30)Charles Dickens, 31)Ernest Hemingway, 32)Guy Davenport, 33)Jacques Derrida, 34)Samuel R. Delany, 35)Thomas Pynchon
6 mentions: 36)Carole Maso, 37)Djuna Barnes, 38)Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gary Lutz, 39)J. G. Ballard, 40)Laurence Sterne, 41)Leo Tolstoy, 42)Lewis Carroll, 43)Marcel Proust, 44)Philip Roth
5 mentions: 45)Emily Brontë, 46)Friedrich Nietzsche, 47)George Orwell, 48)Henry Miller, 49)John Barth, 50)John Crowley, 51)Kathy Acker, 52)Margaret Atwood, 53)Mary Gaitskill, 54)Eileen Myles, 55)Ray Bradbury, 56)Raymond Carver, 57)Thomas Mann, 58)Walter Benjamin, 59)William Carlos Williams, 60)William Gaddis.

And now the promised selection from Eileen Myles' work:

Leo Said

by Eileen Myles

you've gotta
write clearer
so you can
be read
when you're
dead

From a letter to a high school girl:

You'll meet people all over the world in person and through your work who will make it abundantly clear that what sails through your mind delights them, and the adventure of that encounter will bring you love and friendship and even some success but mostly it will bring you this crazy smiling part of yourself that will look back at you at thirteen or fifteen and even twelve (Hi!) and say honestly, You will be blown away by who you will grow up into.

Don’t be afraid of making a fool of yourself, do what you want. All those things you are good at: drawing and painting, writing funny shit that everyone in school likes you to read out loud in class, those songs you write for the girl band, the plays you write so you won't flunk history. That is art. It's the work you will be doing for the rest of your life so be proud of these things that are easy for you. If something is easy for you, it means that big parts of you are being used and you should begin to do that thing with your eyes open and do it until it gets hard. Move something around and it will get easy again. You should look for other kids who are into what you are into and stick with them. The kids who are mean to you are a waste of time. If you just walk away from them and remain the mystery you are, the mystery will draw other kinds of people to you. Some you already know, some you will meet in a few years.

The world is open to you, unbelievably. You are great, funny, beautiful, and completely wild. And you are already big enough and strong enough and wise enough to make a go in it and become part of its story. So start talking now. Meet yourself. Meet the people. And if they can't listen to you and can't hold your attention, then go talk to someone else. And someone else again. You'll find the right ones. We of the future are waiting for you to make us laugh at the secrets you've been holding inside for so long.

From her comments about Ginsberg's Howl:

What is this dream?

who lit cigarettes in boxcars, boxcars,
boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night

I keep wondering about that grandfather night. The "lonesome farms," of course, are a case of attributing how you feel sitting in the car to the farms, and they're out there. But "grandfather night" seems very old. Older than America. I wondered if this poem's train isn't speeding through a night in which people are being yanked out of the beds, never to be seen again. Are on the train being carried to an unspecifIed destination. America? A country of incarcerated black men and smiling blond women

It's Allen's identification bringing all those lives in close that works, and it also occurs to me (and Allen I think said this often) that it works a little bit like it did for Christopher Smart, Ginsberg's other great literary predecessor, besides Blake (and Williams), and I'm thinking of the Smart of "Rejoyce in the Lamb," which begins

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry . . .

[Cleanthess]

Since I'm a troublemaker and I only play by my own rules (I wish), let me list my cincuenta (not counting) favorites:

Chuang Tzu, The book of Chuang Tzu
Lichtenberg, Scrapbooks
Schopenhauer, The world as will and as idea/Parerga und paralipomena
The Greek Anthology
Latin Poetry : Horace, Martial, Virgil.
Chinese Tang and Song Poetry: Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Yu Ji, Su Dong Po.
Chinese Tang Fantastic Tales.
Kabir, Poetry
Japanese Haiku Poetry: Basho, Buson, Issha.
Leopardi, Poetry
Romantic German Poetry: Heine, Holderlin
Verlaine, Poetry
Tagore, Poetry
Modern Greek Poetry: Cavafy, Ritsos, Seferis
Modern German Poetry: Rilke, Brecht, Huchel
Modern Latin American Poetry: Vallejo, Paz, Neruda
Modern Portuguese Poetry: Pessoa, Mario Cesariny, Miguel Torga, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Adelia Prado.
Auden, Poetry
Montale, Poetry
Modern Polish Poetry: Zbigniew Herbert, Szymborska.
Vladimir Holan, Poetry
Ana Blandiana, Poetry
Apuleius, Golden Ass
Petronius, Satyricon
Merlin Coccajo, Baldus
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes/El diablo cojuelo.
Pu Song Ling, Stories
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone
Richardson, Clarissa
De Sade, Juliette
Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr/Stories
Honore de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin/Cousin Bette
Gogol, Stories
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment/Brothers Karamasov
Melville, Confidence Man/Pierre/Stories
Machado de Asis, Quincas Borba/Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas/Dom Casmurro
Eca de Queiros, O Primo Basilio/The Relic
Kipling, Stories/Kim
Andreiev, Diary of Satan/Stories
Bulgakov, Master and Margarita
Kafka, Stories
Hesse, Demian/Steppenwolf/Knulp
Brecht, The business affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar
Grass, The Flounder
Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke/Cosmos
Mrozek, Stories/Plays
Faulkner, As I lay dying/Absalom, Absalom/The Hamlet/Light in August
Kathy Acker, Blood and guts in high school
Coover, Spanking the Maid/ Pinocchio in Venice /Stories
Borges, Stories/Assorted Prose
Sabato, Sobre Heroes y Tumbas/Abbadon el Exterminador
Puig, The Buenos Aires Affair/La traicion de Rita Hayworth
Buzzati, Il deserto dei tartari/Stories
Gracq, Rivage des Syrtes
Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs/Miracle de la rose/Querelle de Brest
Beckett, Molloy/ Malone Meurt/ L'Innommable
Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being/Slowness/Inmortality
Vergilio Ferreira, Manha submersa
Antunes, Exortacao aos Crocodilos/Death Trilogy/Auto dos Danados
Saramago, Memorial do Convento/Ricardo Reis

[Stevie B]

Since I'm a troublemaker and I only play by my own rules (I wish), let me list my cincuenta (not counting) favorites:

Chuang Tzu, The book of Chuang Tzu
Lichtenberg, Scrapbooks
Schopenhauer, The world as will and as idea/Parerga und paralipomena
The Greek Anthology
Latin Poetry : Horace, Martial, Virgil.
Chinese Tang and Song Poetry: Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Yu Ji, Su Dong Po.
Chinese Tang Fantastic Tales.
Kabir, Poetry
Japanese Haiku Poetry: Basho, Buson, Issha.
Leopardi, Poetry
Romantic German Poetry: Heine, Holderlin
Verlaine, Poetry
Tagore, Poetry
Modern Greek Poetry: Cavafy, Ritsos, Seferis
Modern German Poetry: Rilke, Brecht, Huchel
Modern Latin American Poetry: Vallejo, Paz, Neruda
Modern Portuguese Poetry: Pessoa, Mario Cesariny, Miguel Torga, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Adelia Prado.
Auden, Poetry
Pessoa, Poetry
Montale, Poetry
Modern Polish Poetry: Zbigniew Herbert, Szymborska.
Vladimir Holan, Poetry
Ana Blandiana, Poetry
Apuleius, Golden Ass
Petronius, Satyricon
Merlin Coccajo, Baldus
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes/El diablo cojuelo.
Pu Song Ling, Stories
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone
Richardson, Clarissa
De Sade, Juliette
Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr/Stories
Honore de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin/Cousin Bette
Gogol, Stories
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment/Brothers Karamasov
Melville, Confidence Man/Pierre/Stories
Machado de Asis, Quincas Borba/Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas/Dom Casmurro
Eca de Queiros, O Primo Basilio/The Relic
Kipling, Stories/Kim
Andreiev, Diary of Satan/Stories
Bulgakov, Master and Margarita
Kafka, Stories
Hesse, Demian/Steppenwolf/Knulp
Brecht, The business affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar
Grass, The Flounder
Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke/Cosmos
Mrozek, Stories/Plays
Faulkner, As I lay dying/Absalom, Absalom/The Hamlet/Light in August
Kathy Acker, Blood and guts in high school
Coover, Spanking the Maid/ Pinocchio in Venice /Stories
Borges, Stories/Assorted Prose
Sabato, Sobre Heroes y Tumbas/Abbadon el Exterminador
Puig, The Buenos Aires Affair/La traicion de Rita Hayworth
Buzzati, Il deserto dei tartari/Stories
Gracq, Rivage des Syrtes
Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs/Miracle de la rose/Querelle de Brest
Beckett, Molloy/ Malone Meurt/ L'Innommable
Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being/Slowness/Inmortality
Vergilio Ferreira, Manha submersa
Antunes, Exortacao aos Crocodilos/Death Trilogy/Auto dos Danados
Saramago, Memorial do Convento/Ricardo Reis

Great list, Cleanthess. Coincidentally, I just started two books yesterday by authors on your list - Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke) and Mrozek (The Elephant and Other Stories). I also hope to get to Coover in the near future. I have a copy of The Origin of the Brunists. Have you read that one?

By the way, your inclusion of Kathy Acker on your list is interesting. I've never read her, but she seems to be a polarizing author. Any idea why?

[Cleanthess]

Great list, Cleanthess. Coincidentally, I just started two books yesterday by authors on your list - Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke) and Mrozek (The Elephant and Other Stories). I also hope to get to Coover in the near future. I have a copy of The Origin of the Brunists. Have you read that one?

By the way, your inclusion of Kathy Acker on your list is interesting. I've never read her, but she seems to be a polarizing author. Any idea why?

Thank you, StevieB.

Nope, I haven't read The Origin of the Brunists, that is Coover's one book in a realistic style. I'd much rather recommend Spanking the Maid (the great American Novella) or Ghost Town (Pedro Paramo on the American side of the border, a parody of Cormac McCarthy that is better than the original), or even his short story 'Charlie in the house of Rue' from A Night at the Movies. All three of those works are short, stunning and, better yet, like nothing else in recent American fiction.

As a matter of fact, Kathy Acker was the last author included (she tipped the list into 61 items, from the 60 I originally intended to have); she also prevented me from including the likes of Rumi, Shakespeare, Flaubert and Cortazar.

A couple of quotes from her work to justify my choice:

From Blood and Guts:
In Ancient Egypt, the land of gold, giant alligators lived in tall weeds. The King of Alligators is Power. The soul, that flying bird, has freedom to wander at will, all over the earth, over the alligators, (...) to the end of the world.
At night the wolves snap at the flying bird; the alligators lie in wait to jump him up. And huge snakes wait. The alligators are the biggest.
A Human is a being halfway between an alligator and a bird who wants to be a bird.

The ancient books say there are ways human beings can become something else. The most important book on human transformation is hidden with the corpse of Catullus in the Saba Pacha Cemetery in Alexandria. Because all books were written by dead people.

From Obsession:
"Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men and women who were living to, also, be dead. Whether or not you admire this sort of thing. Doves, owls, weasels, snakes, lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of cows, goats, women are the associates of witches. Behind milk lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.

Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room. I passed through a series of rooms.

According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic. During such losses of human consciousness, visions can appear.

I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs' first step.

A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.

I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.

In China, the name for amanita muscaria is 'toad mushroom'.
Both toads and witches are crippled. In the fourteenth century, Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a potion out of its shit.

I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase, descending. After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit into, all around the spiralling stairs.

Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red somewhere. This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was the library of the witch. I felt scared. I was at the bottom. A dog sat on and ripped his own ankle while his purple, huge tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with bloody slaver."

So, if you like Pascal Quignard, Michaux, Genet, De Sade, you'll like Kathy Acker, she's their feminist American daughter.

[redheadshadz]

Wow, I can barely make a list of my top 10 favorite books, forget 50. But I'll see how far I get.

In no order:
Hermann Hesse-Siddartha
Hermann Hesse-The Glass Bead Game
Don DeLillo-White Noise
Gunter Grass-The Tin Drum
Patrick White-Voss
JM Coetzee-Disgrace
Cormac McCarthy-The Road
Hemingway-Short Stories
Faulkner-The Sound and the Fury
Yukio Mishima-Spring Snow
Natsume Soseki-Botchan
Junot Diaz-The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Julian Barnes-Flaubert's Parrot
Samuel Beckett-The Trilogy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez-One Hundred Years of Solitude
Saul Bellow-The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow-Henderson the Rain King
Jose Saramago-Blindness
Michael Chabon-The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Michael Chabon-Wonder Boys
Michael Chabon-The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Kobo Abe-Beyond the Curve
Raymond Carver-What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Haruki Murakami-South of the Border, West of the Sun
Haruki Murakami-Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Philip K. Dick-A Scanner Darkly
Thomas Pynchon-The Crying of Lot 49
Philip Roth-The Ghost Writer

So that's...28 if I counted correctly. Not too bad for someone who thought they couldn't make 10!