Your 50 favourite books

[Sybarite]

Inspired by Eric's comment that lists that would be interesting would be subjective, personal ones, and for a bit of fun, what are your 50 favourite books?

To get things going, mine are:

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Story of O by Dominique Aury
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Attwood
Blind Assassin by Margaret Attwood
According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
The Book of Evidence by John Banville
The Plague by Albert Camus
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carr?
Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Tin Drum by G?nter Grass
Crabwalk by G?nter Grass
The Call of the Toad by G?nter Grass
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Fabien by Erich K?stner
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez
Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer
The Year of the Hare Arto Paasilinna
Felidae by Akif Pirin?ci
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
Jingo by Terry Pratchett
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville West
Justine by the Marquis de Sade
Riotous Assembly by Tom Sharpe
Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe
A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute
My friend Maigret by Georges Simenon (as representative of all the Maigret stories I've read, since I haven't read a bad one yet)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Perfume by Patrick S?skind
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells
The War of the World by HG Wells
The Picture of Dorien Gray by Oscar Wilde
Life at Blandings by PG Wodehouse
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Kill by ?mile Zola

 

[Mirabell]

Evil, evil. I can't resost making lists and this is such an impossible list. Can we at least make it a 50 best novels list or something?

 

[Sybarite]

Whatever you want? I hadn't really thought of any 'rules'. But yes, I guess 50 pieces of fiction.

 

[Mirabell]

Ok, for starters a (very tentative) novel list. 20th century. 1 novel per author.

Native Son / Richard Wright
The Wings of the Dove / Henry James
Ulysses / James Joyce
My Holocaust / Tova Reich
Surfacing / Margaret Atwood
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften / Robert Musil
Recherche / Marcel Proust
Herzog / Saul Bellow
Der Process / Franz Kafka
Journal du Voleur / Jean Genet
Trobadora Beatriz / Irmtraud Morgner
Shame / Salman Rushdie
The Gulag Archipelago / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad
Zeno's Conscience / Italo Svevo
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys
Golden Notebook / Doris Lessing
The Recognitions / William Gaddis
The Making of Americans / Gertrude Stein
If This Is a Man / Primo Levi
Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov
Le Voyeur / Alain Robbe-Grillet
Gravity's Rainbow / Thomas Pynchon
Hunger / Knut Hamsun
The Good Soldier / Ford Madox Ford
The Name of the Rose / Umberto Eco
Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo
The waves / Virginia Woolf
Kaff auch Mare Crisium / Arno Schmidt
St. Petersburg / Andrei Bely
Jugend ohne Gott / ?d?n von Horvath
Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh
Blechtrommel / G?nter Grass
Nachdenken ?ber Christa T. / Christa Wolf
Sound and Fury / William Faulkner
Ausl?schung / Thomas Bernhard
Molloy / Beckett
White Noise / Don Delillo
To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee
In Cold Blood / Truman Capote
A House and its Head / Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Book and the Brotherhood / Iris Murdoch
The Sun also rises / Ernest Hemingway
Age of Innocence / Edith Wharton
Berlin Alexanderplatz / Alfred D?blin
Master and Margarita / Michail Bulgakow
Catch-22 / Joseph Heller
Flu? ohne Ufer / Hans Henny Jahnn
Voyage au bout de la nuit / Louis-Ferdinand C?line
Spring Snow / Yukio Mishima
Under the Volcano / Malcolm Lowry

 

[Heteronym]

Ok, I'll play too; my favorite 50 books this week:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Blindness, Jos? Saramago
Seeing, Jos? Saramago
Death at Intervals, Jos? Saramago
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo
A Plan for Escape, Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Penguin Island, Anatole France
Arabian Nights and Days, Naguib Mahfouz
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
I Married a Communist, Philip Roth
Operation Shylock, Philip Roth
Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth
1984, George Orwell
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bront?
The Seven Madmen, Roberto Artl
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
Dracula, Bram Stoker
The Europeans, Henry James
The Nothing Man, Jill Thompson
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
L?cio's Confession, M?rio de S?-Carneiro
The Haunting of Toby Jugg, Dennis Wheatley
Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K. Jerome
The Jungle Books, Rudyard Kipling
The Relic, E?a de Queiroz
Of Human Bondage, William Sommerset Maughan
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Cat and Mouse, G?nter Grass
Misty Morning, Verg?lio Ferreira
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevksy
The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
Moon Palace, Paul Auster
The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster
Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Bless me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Heinrich B?ll
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

 

[Sybarite]

This is great reading people's lists.

Cheers people.

 

[fausto]

One per author (needless to say, a few books on here are not as good as a few second, third and fourth book of some of the listed authors), totally inaccurate and made on the fly:

Antonio Tabucchi - Pereira declares
Arno Schmidt - Leviathan
Bret Easton Ellis - The Rules of attraction
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Danilo Kis - A tomb for Boris Davidovich
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest
Denis Johnson - Already Dead
Don Delillo - White Noise
Donald Barthelme - The King
Enrique Vila-Matas - El viaje vertical
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a death foretold
George Orwell - 1984
Gustave Flaubert - L'?ducation sentimentale
Hubert Selby Jr. - The Demon
James Flint - Habitus
John Barth - Chimera
John Dos Passos - U.S.A.
Julio Cort?zar - Los premios
Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Lawrence Norfolk - Lempriere's Dictionary
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Louis-Ferdinand C?line - Voyage au bout de la nuit
Mario Vargas Llosa - La fiesta del chivo
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Z. Danielewski - House of leaves
Martin Amis - London Fields
Miguel de Cervant?s Saavedra - Don Quijote de la Mancha
Norman Mailer - The deer park
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Reinhard Jirgl - Les Inachev?s
Richard Brautigan - Dreamin of babylon
Richard Powers - The Echo Maker
Robert Coover - Public Burning
Roberto Bola?o - 2666
Ry? Murakami - Coin locker babies
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children
Saneh Sangsuk - Une histoire vieille comme la pluie
Saul Bellow - The adventures of Augie March
Steve Erickson - Zeroville
Thomas Bernhard - Frost
Thomas Pynchon - V.
Viktor Pelevin - The clay machine-gun
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
William Faulkner - The sound and the fury
William Gaddis - The Recognitions
William H. Gass - The Tunnel
William T. Vollmann - Europe Central
Yukio Mishima - The sailor who fell from grace with the sea

 

[Irene Wilde]

I took some liberties. I threw in some poetry, some plays, some diaries. I also left five empty spaces at the bottom because this was off the cuff and I know by tomorrow I'll be thinking "How could you forget XXX you idiot!" So this gives my aging brain a chance to work.

Ulysses by James Joyce
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Henry and June by Anais Nin
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Locos by Felipe Alfau
Pale Fire by Vladamir Nabokov
Brokeback Mountain by Anne Proulx
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Sometimes You Get So Alone That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski
V. by Thomas Pynchon
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas
A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge
The History of Mr. Polly by HG Wells
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hamett
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Fire by Anais Nin
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

A thought that came to mind compiling this list -- do we have a Beryl Bainbridge thread yet? We should.

Update: I decided to give four slots to short fiction:

Haircut by Ring Lardner
The Rocking Horse Winner by DH Lawrence
A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

That gives me one slot left for that obvious blunder.

 

[saliotthomas]

Impressive!!!!!! all of you
It's been a while i was wandering if the old Demon of selby would reapaer,i loved it.
Gustave Flaubert -L'?ducation sentimentale much better than bovary

 

[Sybarite]

It's fascinating seeing which authors crop up most regularly in people's lists.

I thought about including Lolita ? it's the only Nabokov I've read thus far ? but although I loved the prose, I felt deeply uncomfortable with the story itself and just felt that (illogically, I'm sure) I couldn't include it for that reason.

 

[saliotthomas]

Same here Sybarite ,i never was easy with it.Still i though about it would add it.There good this when one come after is that he can inspire himself with the other list.

In a cold blood-Truman Capote
The demon-Hubert Selby
Leo the african-Amin Maalouf
Requiem for the east-Andrei Makine
Embers-Sandor Marai
They where counted-Miklos Bamffy
The leopard-Lampedusa
Voyage au bout de la nuit-Celine
Remets to slip, gondolier-san antonio
The battle-Patrick Rambaud
100 years of solitude-Garcia Marquez
War and peace-Leo tolstoy
Lotita-Nabokov
The damned-Fyodor Dostoevksy
Sinoue l'egiptien-Waltari
l'education sentimentale-Flaubert
l'immoraliste-andr? Gide
My dog stupid-john Fante
Too loud a solitude-Hrabal
Orlando-virginia Woolf
South american trilogie-louis de Berni?res
Don quichote-Cervantes
The naked and the dead -Norman Mailer
The ax-Donald Westlake
Roots of heaven-Romain Gary
The 1000 night
I spit on your graves-Boris Vian
Water music-TC Boyles
Mr vertigo-Paul Auster
Stranger on a train-Highsmith
The first circle-Solzhenitsy
La recherche-Proust
Black star safari-Paul Theroux
The lion of al Rassan-Guy gavriel Kay
The golden ass-Apuleus
The blue wolf-Inou?
le maitre et margeritte-Bulgakow
Une vie-Maupassant
A room with a view-Forster
Kim -Kipling
The prude and the prodijial-Barbara Cartland
The Road- Cormac McCarthy
Labyrinths -Jorge Luis Borges
Quiet days in clichy-Miller
In patagonia-Bruce Chatwin
Memoire d'hadrien-Yourcenar(currently reading..but already captured)

I spared you most of the shiite i love.One can't be completly naked before bare acquaintance's

 

[Sybarite]

... I spared you most of the shiite i love.One can't be completly naked before bare acquaintance's

~~LOL~~

A taste of junk culture is as acceptable a part of a cultural diet, Thomas, as a Pot Noodle is an occasional part of one's food diet. (That's a real confession for you )

 

[nnyhav]

I'll have to interpret the task my own way, and go with the thick and/or dense (like me!) that well reward the time spent reading or rereading them (novels, no more than one per author, not necessarily their 'best' ):

classix
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Nikolay Gogol, Dead Souls
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard & Pecuchet
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
moderns
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil
Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven
Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
Raymond Queneau, The Blue Flowers
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
James Joyce, Ulysses
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew
Flann O'Brien, At-Swim-Two-Birds
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master & Margarita
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun
Yury Dombrovsky, The Faculty of Worthless Knowledge
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Italo Calvino, if on a winter's night a traveller
Jose Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Halldor Laxness, Independent People
Ernesto Sabato, On Heroes and Tombs
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers
Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme
Malcolm Bradbury, To the Hermitage
Patrick White, Voss
Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (at least til 2666 is Englished)
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi/The Glass Bead Game
Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March

cf a list of lists

 

[Howard]

Well, this is an enjoyable parlour game, so I can't help joining in. Here's my list (all fiction apart from two works of autiobgraphy), with the proviso that some of the books I read an enormously long time ago and should re-read to see if they are still worthy of inclusion:

(alphabetical order)
The Girl in a Swing, Richard Adams
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Outsider, Albert Camus
The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Short Stories (any decent anthology), Anton Chekhov
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Absalom Absalom, William Faulkner
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Magus, John Fowles
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The First Forty-Nine Stories, Ernest Hemingway
A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
This Sweet Sickness, Patricia Highsmith
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James
The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
No Other Life, Brian Moore
Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Edgar Allan Poe
? la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust
A Judgment in Stone, Ruth Rendell
Flicker, Theodor Roszak
A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
Light Years, James Salter
Burning the Days, James Salter
Games with Love and Death (a long out-of-print collection of stories), Arthur
Schnitzler
Les Volets Verts, Georges Simenon
Lettre ? mon Juge, Georges Simenon
Le Temps d’Ana?s, Georges Simenon
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Easter Parade, Richard Yates
Germinal, ?mile Zola

 

[Bjorn]

Right, here's an attempt at 50 books I love - alphabetical order, one book per author, and obviously very subjective and bound to change the second I hit "Post Quick Reply."

Douglas Adams - The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist - The Queen's Diadem
Karen Armstrong - The Battle for God
Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
Majgull Axelsson - Den jag aldrig var
Wolfgang Borchert - Draussen vor der T?r
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Michail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics
Tage Danielsson - Grallimatik
Don DeLillo - Underworld
Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
Erik Fosnes Hansen - Tales of Protection vol 1
Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game
Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud A Solitude
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved
Eyvind Johnson - Return to Ithaca
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis
Stephen King - The Stand
Jonathan Lethem - Fortress of Solitude
Torgny Lindgren - Hash
Clarice Lispector - The Stream of Life
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Ian McEwan - Atonement
Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Peter Nilson - Stj?rnv?gar/Rymdljus/Solvindar
Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde
George Orwell - Animal Farm
Georges Perec - A Void
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus
Sara Stridsberg - Dr?mfakulteten
Hjalmar S?derberg - Doctor Glas
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Leonid Tsypkin - Summer in Baden-Baden
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Virginia Woolf - Orlando

 

[obooki]

Here's my 50 favourites, which just demonstrates as always how little I've actually read. I've tried to stick with my original experience of reading them (some, if I read them now, I feel I'd like a lot less). One per author of course, otherwise it'd be dominated by Zola:

Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
John Barth, Chimera
Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Marguerita
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo
Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes
Karel Capek, War with the Newts
Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral
A book by Colette (it doesn't really matter which)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Miguel Delibes, The Prince Dethroned
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double
George Eliot, Siles Marner
William Faulker, The Mansion
F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller
Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine
Henry Green, Party-Going
Knut Hamsun, Mysteries
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk
Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind
Henry James, The Ambassadors
James Joyce, Ulysses
Halldor Laxness, The Fish Can Sing
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
Wyndham Lewis, Tarr
Andrei Makine, Le Testament Francais
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Guy de Maupassant, A Woman's Life
Herman Melville, Pierre
Eduardo Mendoza, The Truth about the Savolta Case
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man
Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
Georges Perec, Things
Abbe Prevost, Manon Lescaut
Eca de Queiroz, Cousin Basilio
Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Tarjei Vesaas, The Boat in the Evening
Edith Warton, The House of Mirth
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Emile Zola, Germinal

 

[PinaFreud]

Mikhail Bulgakov, Il maestro e Margherita
Nikolaj Gogol, Le anime morte
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at noon
Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp
Chaim Potok The chosen
Chaim Potok, In the beginning
Beppe Fenoglio, Il partigiano Johnny
Luigi Meneghello, I piccoli maestri
Luigi Meneghello, Libera nos a Malo
Primo Levi,La tregua
Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico
Natalia Ginzburg Lessico familiare
I.B. Singer The family Moskat
Amos Oz, To know a woman
Amos Oz, A tale of love and darkness
Sholem Aleichem Tornando dal mercato
John Irving, Setting free the bears
Philip Roth, I married a communist
Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint
Philip Roth, Shabbath's theatre
Omero, Odissea
Omero, Iliade
Mordecai Richler Barney's Version
Margaret Atwood The blind assassin
Alba de Cespedes Quaderno proibito
Henry Roth Call it sleep
Meir Shalev The blue mountain
Italo Calvino Ultimo viene il corvo
Italo Calvino Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in citt?
Italo Calvino La giornata di uno scrutatore
Alberto Moravia Gli indifferenti
Alberto Moravia Racconti romani
Apuleio L'asino d'oro
Heinrich Boll Diario d'Irlanda
Jonathan Coe The house of sleep
Jonathan Coe What a carve up!
Doris Lessing The diary of a good neighbour
Doris Lessing The habit of loving
Doris Lessing African stories
Doris Lessing To my mother
Albert Cohen Belle du seigneur

My God I'm too tired to go on...

 

[rabbitfast]

Ok...here they are, in no particular order.

Ulysses-- James Joyce
The Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man-- James Joyce
Daniel Deronda-- George Eliot
Middlemarch-- George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss-- George Eliot
Silas Marner-- George Eliot
Mrs. Dalloway-- Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse-- Virginia Woolf
Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
The House of the Spirits -- Isabel Allende
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall-- Anne Bronte
Pride and Prejudice-- Jane Austen
Emma-- Jane Austen
Persuasion-- Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment-- F. M. Dostoyevsky
The Idiot-- F. M. Dostoyevsky
The Magic Skin-- Honore de Balzac
Eugenie Grandet-- Honore de Balzac
Madame Bovary-- Gustave Flaubert
The Count of Monte Cristo-- Alexandre Dumas
The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker-- Tobias Smollett
News From Nowhere-- William Morris
1984-- George Orwell
Brave New World-- Aldous Huxley
New Grub Street-- George Gissing
The General in His Labyrinth-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Heidi-- Johanna Spyri
To Kill a Mockingbird-- Harper Lee
Cry, the Beloved Country-- Alan Paton
Vanity Fair-- W. M. Thackeray
A Tale of Two Cities-- Chales Dickens
The Spoils of Poynton-- Henry James
The Europeans-- Henry James
The Picture of Dorian Gray-- Oscar Wilde
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-- Jules Verne
Lord of the Flies-- William Golding
The Hours-- Michael Cunningham
Medicine River-- Thomas King
All the Pretty Horses-- Cormac McCarthy
Native Son-- Richard Wright
The Arch of Triumph-- Erich Maria Remarque
The Feast of the Goat-- Mario Vargas Llosa
The Outsider-- Albert Camus
The Trial-- Franz Kafka
The Master-- Colm Toibin
The Commitments-- Roddy Doyle
Murphy-- Samuel Beckett
At Swim-Two-Birds-- Flann O'Brien
S.: A Novel About the Balkans-- Slavenka Drakulic
The President-- Miguel Angel Asturias
I, the Supreme--Augusto Roa Bastos

 

[spooooool]

After the Ford Madox Ford these in no particular order, i'll have forgotten so many books too, but

Beckett's Trilogy
Complete Short Prose
How It Is
Watt
Murphy
Krapp's Last Tape - so to my name
Not I

Tristram Shandy

i'd love to choose all of Faulkner but will stick with
Absalom, Absalom, the Wild Palms and Light in August

Kleist's stories
Kafka's short stories and diaries
The brother's Karamazov
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Chekhov's short stories
Marguerite Yourcenar's "memoirs of Hadrian"
Jean Rhys, the Wide Sargasso Sea
Genet's the thief's journal
Zeno's conscience, Italo Svevo
Thomas Bernhard's memoir "Gathering Evidence" is my favourite of the several that i've read
Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea..also The Philosopher's Pupil
Melville's shorter works along with the whale book -i've still to read Poe
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Goytisolo's Marks of Identity, also Forbidden Territories

Virgil's georgics as well as the Aeneid, Dante's Purgatorio, so to a couple of favourite scholarly volumes, Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" and John Frecerro's Dante: the poetics of conversion. I love too much philosophy to include much here, so i'll stick with the presocratics, Duns Scotus and Merleau-Ponty, John Caputo's book on Heidegger, Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. A couple of good volumes on the presocratics by Gregory Vlastos, and more recently Jonathan Barnes

Also Christopher Rick's "Beckett's Dying Words" and Adam Piette's book on acoustic memory in Joyce, Proust, Mallarme and Beckett "remembering and the sound of words" these together with Badiou's incredibly energetic commitment to Beckett have seen me through thick and thin Likewise David C Lindberg and Richard S Westphall for the history of science

Celan, Hopkins, Clare, Eliot as i've already mentioned

undisciplined but disciplined and probably many more than fifty, but that's a start anyway, i just want to be reading all the time

 

[spooooool]

And see i forgot Musil, (about whom i can never decide, so i i end up reading it over and over anyway) Celine, Chandler, Flaubert, Perec, Sebald. Still to most of Nabokov, all of Arno Schmidt