What are your all-time favorite novels??

A Dance to the Music of Time - Powell
Austerlitz - Sebald
Hangover Square - Hamilton
The Trial - Kafka
Moby-Dick - Melville
Middlemarch - Eliot
Hav - Morris
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Conan-Doyle
Five Red Herrings - Sayers
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
The Good Soldier Švejk - Hašek

Books I keep coming back to:

Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Wharton, The House of Mirth
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy
Delany, Dhalgren
Gibson, Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition/Spook Country/Zero History)
Hammett, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse

I love a lot of 18th century prose: Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Gibbon. Jane Austen feels closer to 18th than 19th for me, English in that era feels looser and more fluid and just more fun tbh

an easy squeezy threesy:

Kolyma Tales by Shalamov

Moby Dick

Cat's Cradle

i am trying to think but i forget a lot of books that i read. i was going to read war and peace this summer because i liked anna karenina.

― harbl, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:16 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

two guesses :(

Austen is what happens when the 18th century FIGURES ITSELF OUT imo. I get why people like Fielding and Sterne, but they’re not for me.

Give me a Victorian doorstop any day. I need to read Our Mutual Friend.

I love Our Mutual Friend but hate the ending, which is what kept it off my list.

Oscar and Lucinda
Midnight’s Children
Glamorama
Vanity Fair
Kindred

and my forever favourite

Lolita

i do love a good Dickens too but i think of him as having his 18th century roots showing, especially early on, especially Fielding

19th century stuff that could've should've made my list would include

Bleak House
Wuthering Heights
Mary Barton maybe?
À rebours

love Glamorama and yeah Lolita of course

surprised The Trial seems the universal Kafka pick, I've always rated The Castle higher (however unfinished)

anyway this is impossible...Moby Dick and The Quixote are my two "favorite" books but almost seems like they shouldn't count, they're looming up there like a couple of stone tablets

ten (almost) pre-war:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
J.K. Huysmans, À rebours
F.R. Wolf, Hadrian VII
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Henry Green, Party Going
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Albert Camus, The Stranger

xps to NV we need to talk Glamorama sometime, maybe tomorrow?

NV <3 Against Nature is sublime, I don't know how many times I've read that book or just picked it up and read thirty pp in the middle

xp yeah!

not xp also yeah! i think about monochrome feasts a lot

erm that's Rolfe (Baron Corvo), above

ten post-war

Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Nabokov, Lolita
Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes
Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works
Robert Coover, Universal Baseball Association...
Harry Mathews, Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Marguerite Dumas, The Lover
Peter Handke, Goalie's Anxiety at The Penalty Kick
Don Delillo, The Names

A Fan's Notes is a good pick, tho i've only read it once partly because it touches too close to home and i'm thinking i might've lost my copy

Masters of Atlantis - Charles Portis
Warlock - Oakley Hall
Cogan's Trade - George V. Higgins
Jesus' Son; Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
Fat City - Leonard Gardner
Housekeeping; Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
Moby-Dick - Melville
The Long Goodbye - Chandler

yeah xp that can be dicey if you aren't in a good place

Exley evokes that state of mind and the bar-life state of mind so well

oh i found it phew

a real flash of brilliance and then a real booze induced fall-off...the one after this made me kinda sad

ten faves form the past twenty+ years

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers
Vladimir Makanin, The Baize Covered Table With Decanter
W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn
Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eat Creeps
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Jim Crace, Being Dead
Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

Oh man! I'll just go with ones that I think have not been mentioned (but I'm not going to search on the titles to make sure, because I want to mention them anyway:
I was forced to read 1984 in Ninth Grade, but immediately and all through there was a lot more vs. Cold War Adult World than Communism Does Not Pay---also in high school, Nabokov's The Defense, about dorky chess prodigy, v. relatable to to non-chess prodigy me, who also dug The Crying of Lot 49, with paranoid pleasures x the fab Mrs. Maas, which spoke to the 60s for sure, ditto though set a little earlier, V., incl. things I hoped to get up to, yo-yo-ing etc., plus more scary funky Mid-Century wreckage and piecework palaces in the twilight.
in 70s-early 80s: Bramner's The Gay Place, Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers (esp. struck by way women have to make their ways through these male preoccupations and stumblefests).
More recently:
The Way We Live Now
The Idiot
2666 (was mentioned)
Swann's Way
My Brilliant Friend
Two more in the Gilead sequence:
Home and Lila

And The Professor's House!

great weird book w/ that left turn into the desert

Cather rules.

that is my favorite Cather, and yes, she is great. she was sort of terrible? but her writing is beautiful.

Hard to resist A Lost Lady too.

*Brammer's* The Gay Place)(three stories, interlocking around a gas giant, unseen, always felt, who has been auto-compared to LBJ but I go w those who say he seems more like Earl Long, the hardest workin' playin' man in tightrope political show biz)

Member of the Wedding and The Moviegoer too.

xps yes Cather for me is one who has several that could make a list...same for me w/ Bernhard and Nabokov, on a given day any one of four or five novels from either might be a favorite

Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God both blew me away, in diff directions.

at a certain point mine would have been

richard powers, the gold bug variations
bruce duffy, the world as i found it
mark helprin, a soldier of the great war

but the latter i read before i knew helprin was a fascist : /

For sure faves:

To The Lighthouse
Moby-Dick
Frankenstein
Crime & Punishment
Ragtime
Black Swan Green

Stuff I would have repped for once upon a time but not sure now/would have to revisit:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Cat's Cradle

Five favourites that haven't been mentioned:

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (or Queer, or Cities of the Red Night)
Thomas McGuane, The Bushwhacked Piano
Hubert Selby, The Room

I think The Room is the only Selby novel I've never read. I love The Demon.

The Demon starts off great, at a lower pitch of intensity than most of his work, but when the Pope comes into it it goes overboard for me. Selby doesn't have the wider range, but his focus is very sharp. There's more to him than just Last Exit to Brooklyn.

I see I already listed mine way upthread. Since then I've only added one for sure, and that's Against the Day.

But, to put another spin on it, here are the 10 books I've probably reread the most:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Cat’s Eye
Lord of the Rings
Breaking and Entering (Williams)
Northanger Abbey
Nine Tailors (Sayers)
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Comedians (Greene)
Rubicon Beach
The Last Gentleman