Your 50 favourite books

DB Cooper

DB Cooper

Reader
I know. You are the shadowy presence at WLF waiting in the wings to strike down those who speak ill of medieval literature. I picture you at home, which is some sort of dungeon or cave, illuminated only by the glow of your computer monitor, which you begrudgingly own for the sole purpose of spreading the doctrine of ancient texts.

Im thinking of picking up a book by a young upstart named Knut Hamsen. Do you have an opinion of his work?
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
DB Cooper said:
...strike down those who speak ill of medieval literature.
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Well, nobody's been quite foolish enough to do so outright. I mean, who here wants to die? ;)
DB Cooper said:
...spreading the doctrine of ancient texts...
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Yeah, when I'm not spreading somethin' else, you mean, :p. Medieval texts are a lot more postmodern than you think. Chaucer's a multi-voiced, polyvalent, gender/genre-bending bastard.
DB Cooper said:
...Im thinking of picking up a book by a young upstart named Knut Hamsen. Do you have an opinion of his work?
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Hamsun is cool. However, you're talking to somebody who thought that The Growth of the Soil was great. I mean all those descriptions of trees, trees, trees--I find them delicious rather than boring, really. And from his early years I've only read Hunger, although plenty of people have recommended Pan to me, as well.
 
E

e joseph

Reader
DB -
Classy list! I've read only eight of the books on your list (and am in the midst of a ninth), but you've got a few of my favorites in there: the McCarthys, 2666, Moby-Dick, Borges. Lots of other stuff on there as well that I'm psyched to get around to sooner or later. Vollmann's getting attempted at some point this year methinks.
 
Heratix

Heratix

Reader
wow top 50 books? I dont even know if i read a total of 50 books! My top books though would be the shannara series by Terry Brooks and the lord of the rings series. As far as misc books go I liked the Bridge to terebithia as well as Craig Ferguson's auto biography.
 
errequatro

errequatro

Reader
ok, I left poetry apart, otherwise it would have been more than fifty. Anyway, poetry is a different category.

where we are:

Journey to the End of the Night- Celine
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Blindness – Saramago
Baltazar and Blimunda – Saramago
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – Saramago
Pedro Paramo – Juan Rulfo
El Llano en Llamas – Juan Rulfo
One hundred years of solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Disgrace – J.M Coetzee
Life and Times of Michael K. – J.M Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M Coetzee
New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
Complete Plays – Beckett
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
The Perfume – Patrick Suskind
Os Maias – Eca de Queiroz
Confissao de Lucio – Mario de Sa Carneiro
Bartelby y C. – Enrique Vila-Matas
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Complete Plays – Sarah Kane
Complete Plays – Harold Pinter
1984 – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Sailor Who Fell From The Grace of The Sea - Yukio Mishima
Kyoto – Kawabata
The snow country – Kawabata
Lolita – Nabokov
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Hamlet – Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice- Shakespeare
Fiesta – The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway
Farewell to Arms – Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament – Kay Redfield Jamison
An Unquiet Mind – Kay Redfield Jamison
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Madness and Civilization – Michel Foucault
Big Sur – Jack Kerouac
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Bartelby – Herman Melville
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
The fish can sing – Halldor Laxness
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
(This list will change constantly.)
 
lionel

lionel

Reader
errequatro said:
(This list will change constantly.)
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As do all things: for instance, I made out two lists of 50 way back on this thread - one being English working-class novels, and the other English and French language (almost eclusively) novels. Second list here: http://www.worldliteratureforum.com...431-Your-50-favourite-books?p=16654#post16654. I didn't even think about poetry or drama. Hamlet? Let me set this on record: I've read it 14 times. Is it my favorite work of Bill's? Well, let's just say I've not read anything like any other books 14 times.

Nice list, by the way. Yeah, I forgot Henry David Thoreau, and I've been in love with the guy's mind for a very long time: Walden should have been on my list. Having just come back from driving around Massachusetts literary sites, it was a joy to visit Concud (as they pronounce it) and see the site of the cabin by the pond, the reconstruction near the visitor center, and of course the pond itself. I wouldn't recommend going there during the height of season, though, as even at 10:00 early May the visitors were starting to arrive in droves.

BLOG
 
DB Cooper

DB Cooper

Reader
e joseph said:
DB -
Classy list! I've read only eight of the books on your list (and am in the midst of a ninth), but you've got a few of my favorites in there: the McCarthys, 2666, Moby-Dick, Borges. Lots of other stuff on there as well that I'm psyched to get around to sooner or later. Vollmann's getting attempted at some point this year methinks.
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Thanks! Though looking at that post again I think I already have about five revisions. Perhaps Ill follow it up with a blockbuster sequel post.
 
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nightwood

Guest
It might or it might be not the best start for an introduction but devil may care. Here it is: my list of my 50 favourite books or better said my 50 favourite writers :p


1) Albert Camus – The Plague
2) Antonio Tabucchi – Pereira Declares
3) Christoph Ransmayr – The Dog King
4) Cormac McCarthy – The Border Trilogy
5) David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest
6) Djuna Barnes – Nightwood
7) Don DeLillo – Underworld
8) Elfriede Jelinek – The Piano Teacher
9) Fernando Pessoa – The Book Of Disquiet
10) Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
11) Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years Of Solitude
12) Gao Xingjian – Soul Mountain
13) George Perec – Life: A User´s Manual
14) Gyorgy Konrad – The City Builder
15) Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum
16) Hermann Broch – The Sleepwalkers
17) Ingeborg Bachmann – Malina
18) Italo Calvino – If On A Winter´s Night A Traveller
19) Ivan Angelo – The Celebration
20) J.M.G. Le Clezio – Onitsha
21) Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
22) Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
23) Jose Saramago – The Gospel According To Jesus Christ
24) Julio Cortazar – Hopscotch
25) Jurek Becker – Jacob The Liar
26) Leo Tolstoy – War And Peace
27) Mario Vargas Llosa – The Feast Of The Goat
28) Michel Butor – Degrees
29) Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
30) Orhan Pamuk – My Name Is Red
31) Patrick Ourednik – Europeana
32) Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
33) Primo Levi – The Periodic Table
34) Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
35) Robert Schneider – Brother Of Sleep
36) Roberto Bolano – 2666
37) Salman Rushdie – Midnight´s Children
38) Saul Bellow – Herzog
39) Siegfried Lenz – German Lessons
40) Stefan Zweig – Chess
41) Tadeusz Konwicki – The Polish Complex
42) Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain
43) Thomas Pynchon – Mason And Dixon
44) Toni Morrison - Beloved
45) Umberto Eco – The Name Of The Rose
46) V.S. Naipaul – A Bend In The River
47) Vikram Chandra - Red Earth And Pouring Rain
48) Virginia Woolf – Orlando
49) Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
50) Wolfgang Koeppen – Pigeons On The Grass

i need to cheat: 51) Thomas Bernhard - Corrections

Hard work to decide which novels should be included but I guess for the time being it is the way it is but this list will surely change for good or for worse :)

oh, Hello WLF - here I am :)
 
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Liam

Liam

Administrator
Hello, Nightwood, and welcome, :).

Nice list you've got there; however, with the exception of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, ALL of your chosen authors are from the 20th century; and there's nothing beyond the 19th, :eek:!!! I take it you don't consider Don Quixote to be one of the greatest novels ever written?
 
N

nightwood

Guest
Sure its a nice list because its mine :p but there are so many novels out there in this world which need to be read and too less time... its more a list of the last two or three years of my reading habits so its surely not finite :)

But you are quite right of course, the 20th Century just happends to be my Century with which I am familiar as I was born and bred in it but I thought its maybe a nice start to learn what I like (if you are interessted and if not thats fine with me too) :p

So, you have nothing to worry: I wont take your medieval books away from you but even if I am not interessted in Don Quixote I wont deny the book its place in the Hall Of Fame of Literature :p
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
Don't worry, I do this to everybody here.

Obviously, I only think that my OWN list is perfect.
 
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nightwood

Guest
Liam said:
Don't worry, I do this to everybody here.
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I would have worried only if you would nothave done this to me - whatever it was you did :p

Liam said:
Obviously, I only think that my OWN list is perfect.
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took me a little while to find your perfect list... not in a lifetime I will read it, too much dust on the covers :p
 
Stevie B

Stevie B

Current Member
I've yet to assemble my list, but perhaps I'll skip 20th century fiction altogether and focus exclusively on 21st century works. That should bring Liam to his knees.
 
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