What are your all-time favorite novels??

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and believe I've narrowed mine down to a top five:

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet

I am pretty sure that once people start posting theirs I'll want to revise mine.

Anyway . . . what are your top 5?

i love our lady of the flowers!

A Murder Is Announced by agatha christie

i've been meaning to read Our Lady Of The Flowers! we have it here

OLotF is great. You should definitely read it!

harbl <3

Moby Dick
Gravity's Rainbow
The Trial
Portnoy's Complaint
Journey to the End of the Night

I was tempted to put The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace to look cool, but I'm not sure how much I enjoyed them, tho I do admire them very much, esp W&P.

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.

x-post See, if I had done top 10 then The Trial, Gravity's Rainbow and quite possibly Portnoy's Complaint would have made it in.

oh

madame bovary
old goriot

i've read the first 4 on your list enbb, i love hardy but jude is maybe just a little too ott tragic, even for hardy

old goriot is great

i want to read it again

germinal

what's the best Hardy? i LOVED the woodlanders but have read nothing else yet.

gah all the books i like are super-old french books. i never read anything new. but it's ok!

i've hit the point where i can barely remember anything about the books i read 20 years ago, except whether i liked them or not : \

Jude is incredibly tragic but still beautiful.

See this is another reason this thread is great. I haven't read either of Harbl's so I now have two more on my "to read" list.

My favorite novels today:

The Portrait of a Lady
Women in Love
Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
The Mayor of Casterbridge

mayor of casterbridge, far from the madding crowd
xposts

i liked wuthering heights more than i thought i would

what's the best Hardy? i LOVED the woodlanders but have read nothing else yet

The Woodlanders is one of his very best, yeah. I love the scene in which Winterbourne hides in the trees while his lover calls his name.

OK, yeah The Mayor of Casterbridge would also have made my top ten as would Tender is the Night which I preferred to the Great Gatsby.

Midnight's Children is one i forgot.

im gonna check out far from the madding crowd since im pretty sure i read mayor of casterbridge in high school....

And all of a sudden my top 5 has become a top 9 possibly 10. lol.

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"
Fante "Ask The Dust"
Doctorow "Billy Bathgate"
Dick "Martian Time Slip"
Cain "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

no order, first five that came to mind as being candidates for "favorite."

this thread is perfect timing because i just recently decided to pick up my novel reading to counteract dissertation ennui...was gonna make a second go at Against the Day, which I never finished.

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"

Yes! I thought of this one too.

The Maltese Falcon - Hammett

i can't boil it down to five, but i will always rep for
Pierre, or The Ambiguities
McTeague

I'm not sure abt my inclusion of Ask The Dust, because it's definitely sort of... ridiculous, but as far as explorations of juvenile obsessions go...

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
6. The Trial - Kafka
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
8. Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
9. The Maltese Falcon - Hammett

ok - top 9 not committing to a top 10 . . . yet

was also thinking of maybe the Collector by John Fowles.

oh yeah, Under the Volcano is another one

I'm going to go look at my bookshelf and see if I can't identify at least one fav book by a woman.

brb

there was another genet i never finished that i thought would be my all time favorite and i can't remember which one it was :-/

oh! the miracle of the rose

i don't read women much. i really enjoyed most of the "Portable" Dorothy Parker though.

i have kind of the same problem, i mostly read books by dudes. i need to work on that. i remember really liking "a tree grows in brooklyn" when i was like 14 or 15 though. that might be an all-time favorite.

The Waves
The Man Who Loved Children
The Ghost Writer
The Folded Leaf
Lincoln

back and nope - I got nothing on the female tip - sad

I do however have a #10!

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
6. The Trial - Kafka
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
8. Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
9. The Maltese Falcon - Hammett
10. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

Now that my list is finalized I'm probably going to get a tattoo of all these stacked on top of one another somewhere on my person.

Wise Blood
The Optimist's Daughter
Persuasion

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is great. I do like some stuff by women writers but just not enough for it to make the top 10.

What's wrong with you people?! What about George Eliot? If Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda were the only two novels in existence, literature would still thrive.

ha "women writers"

oh yeah i don't think it's top 5. i have a hard time ranking things though.

Me too! I've actually been thinking about this for days.

george eliot is a girl?!?!?!?

lol jk

as I lay dying and wise blood are both awesome.

harry crews "car"

Alfred I know this is a challop but my entire senior seminar was on George Elliot and I was not the biggest of fans. I would like to re-read now though because I expect that my opinion of her may well have changed.

Lucky Jim
Atonement
Austerlitz

Alfred I know this is a challop but my entire senior seminar was on George Elliot and I was not the biggest of fans. I would like to re-read now though because I expect that my opinion of her may well have changed.

Cool! I'd love to read it. I reread Middlemarch a few years ago and was sooooo impressed by the...architecture of the thing: these discordant elements in perfect harmony, along with its considerable visceral pluses (her delight in character, the depiction of small town England, etc).

My bookshelf is several thousand miles away but off the top of my head I am sure Daniel Deronda would make the list. Also, Great Expectations; maybe Murphy.

I've always wanted to read Far From the Madding Crowd because the title is so great; have only read Jude the Obscure, which I wasn't too high on.

i think blood meridian might have to be on there, despite the slog that is its first hundred pages.

i will try to report back with a full ten after a few beers.

the ones that occur to me off the top of my head (and after scanning the thread):

the brothers karamazov -- dostoyevsky
the plague -- camus
song of solomon -- morrison
wuthering heights -- bronte
brideshead revisited -- waugh
heart of darkness -- conrad
pride and prejudice -- austen
the dead father -- barthelme
if on a winter's night a traveler -- calvino
waiting for the barbarians -- coetzee
100 years of solitude -- ggm

(mostly conventional stuff, i know. karamazov and the plague stand above the rest for me, as books that i think really directly influenced my moral view of the world.)

xpost: oh yeah, blood meridian too, for sure. i don't remember any slog. i was pretty taken in by about page 20.

if on a winter's night a traveler -- calvino

Is def up there for me.

i need to re-read Blood Meridian, but my copy got destroyed when I lent it to a friend and he took it to the beach :(

i really don't go for much literature pre-20th century, and i don't quite know why that is.

Not sure I would say these are my five favorites ever, but this is what popped in my head:

Invisible Cities - Calvino
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
In The Castle Of My Skin - George Lamming
The Lost Scrapbook - Evan Dara

Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday
Joyce - Ulysses
Kluge - Biggest Elvis
Vidal - Lincoln
Stephenson - Snowcrash

Oh god I forgot about how great Invisible Cities is. #11

Yay, Jaq! I always recommend Lincoln and Burr to people who think of Gore Vidal just as a wit and essayist.

oh hell, lolita should definitely be on mine too. pale fire would go on the runner-up list.

invisible cities is probably third fave calvino, with winter's night after that. second is the wildly underrated "Marcovaldo."

Speaking of Vidal, his Calvino essay is marvelous.

I probably should have put Absalom, Absalom! on my original list too. Man, this is tough.

Other thread could be favorite quotes from novels but again . . . tough!

i wanna read a book now

harbl war and peace is a traet!

harbl, read the white people by arthur machen.

harbl read this, harbl read that, harbl do my book report for me.

As I Lay Dying
Infinite Jest
JR
Absalom, Absalom
Drop City

this is tough. . .

I would say Moby Dick, too, but I just reread it, and parts of it were as amazing as I remembered, but I dunno. . .

Vidal is such a master of dialogue, also perfect pitch for cattiness.

If I were going for 10: Lolita, definitely, and also Moby Dick. Possibly Bleak House too. Possibly Auster's New York Trilogy but maybe not.

ok "the white people" sounds right up my alley

i wanna read JR. even though i know on other threads i've poured the haterade on gaddis. xp to que

haha actually the white people sounds like something i would not like at all but i am willing to try. i thought white people meant like...white people.

ahhaha.

i am going to go drink now.

Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. (Trilogies = maximizing the "desert island" list, though Powell's Dance to the Music of Time would really spike it.) Oh wait! Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God

I spent most of summer '07 reading Dance to the Music of Time -- entertaining, but a disappointment, esp. the volumes dealing with the war.

Proust is lovely so far but I just started the third book

1. B.S. Johnson - The Unfortunates
2. James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
3. B.S. Johnson - House Mother Normal
4. Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
5. Georges Perec - A Void
6. B.S. Johnson - Albert Angelo
7. B.S. Johnson - See the Old Lady Decently
8. B.S. Johnson - Christie Malry's Own Double Entry
9. B.S. Johnson - Trawl
10. James Joyce - Ulysses

I really like B.S. Johnson!

JR is an amazing book. Gaddis is emotionally exhausting but totally worth it.

...
waiting for the barbarians -- coetzee
...

This would be one of mine too, tipsy mothra.

Others on the list would probably be The Recognitions (which I love marginally more than JR), Owls Do Cry, The Man With the Golden Arm, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge...

Oh shit, I forgot Travelling People. Swap that with Trawl, maybe.

xpost

Harriet the Spy - Fitzhugh
The Lake - Kawabata
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler - Konigsberg

Maybes:

Wiseblood - O'Connor
My Romance - Lish
Zuleika Dobson - Beerbohm

I have to think about more.

Maybe I don't become attached to things.

Yes! Harriet the Spy might be my favorite novel -- the one that showed me what fiction can do.

i prefer V. to Gravity's Rainbow
also read Burr ages ago, didn't think much of it at the time

why would anyone rep for moby dick its just some dudes on a boat

Good troll.

it's an earnest question, sip dis dick

ilb is jealous right now.

And I am sipping yr dick with a bendy straw.

(that sound when there's just ice and almost no drink left)

you could read this, harbl. short stories, though.

i prefer V. to Gravity's Rainbow

The scene in V. where he envisions machine gunning people from behind the salad bar may be my favorite Pynchon moment.

I hated Moby Dick. In fact, I had a professor who basically told us it was ok to skip all the technical whaling parts because even he thought they were boring.

i actually really dug moby-dick. took a while, but i got into it enough that i thought all the whaling stuff was cool. it doesn't make my top tier just because it didn't grab me or shake me or otherwise compel me the way my real favorites did. but i understand its classic-ness.

i loved the technical whaling parts!

I just couldn't do it. I have this unfortunate thing where if a book doesn't really grab me within a couple days of reading then I'm likely to abandon it. I can't force myself to read something that I'm just not enjoying. That happened to me with M Dick.

I didn't finish The Confidence Man, but it was weird feeling all of these undercurrents of Melville's symbolism coming to life, instead of just being something you write a hackneyed term paper about. It's sort of like seeing a ghost.

winter's tale, mark helprin -- here's one that is on my all-time list because of how much i loved it as a teenager, but when i reread it some years later all of its overblown romantic flaws were much more evident. still, some great stuff in it. (my appreciation for it has been further dimmed by helprin's increasingly vocal right-wing curmudgeonliness over the years.)

and in the i guess you'd say non-literary realm, the original four books in gene wolfe's book of the new sun series, and the original three earthsea books are probably at the top. (ok, along with LOTR and watership down, if we're counting their impact on a 12-year-old.)

That happened to me with M Dick

it was one that i started twice. the first time i stalled out around page 60. i came back about 6 months later and for whatever reason it clicked.

narrowing to five is tough.

OK one of my other favorite books is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker which is basically about sex with a little math thrown in.

x-post

That's why I've ended up with 10 or maybe even 11 now!

my glib take on moby dick is that it's a boy book because of the whole boys and boats thing, and it kind of is, especially in the sense that melville novels are the some of the gayest books i've ever read, but it wasn't really a boy book in the way i thought it was going to be.

yeah you might be on to something. I was just so bored reading it.

it's a crazy book. i would never call it a favorite but i took a reading course where we basically read everything melville ever wrote and i kind of have to love him forever now. he was such a nut.

OTM, it's gay and butch at the same time. xposts

huh

Finley Wren - Philip Wylie
Pale Fire - Nabakov
Infinite Jest - DFW
Sula - Toni Morrison
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater - Vonnegut

maybe

I started this thread to jump start my interest in reading fiction again. After reading so much non-fiction for school I sort of abandoned novels and realized recently that I really miss reading for fun so I thought remembering my favorites might be a good way of rekindling my interest and it has!

Also seeing everyone else's posts I keep thinking of others that I could easily have placed on my list. It's also fascinating to see what overlaps between posters.

People really seem to love some Pale Fire and with good reason!

OK one of my other favorite books is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker which is basically about sex with a little math thrown in.

i've read that and vox -- was a little shamefaced to check both of them out of the library -- but my favorite n.baker is the mezzanine.

I also read Vox which I enjoyed but not as much as The Fermata. I will check out The Mezzanine.

it's more about shoelaces and automatic hand-dryers than sex, but still good.

btw - I was pretty young/naive when I read The Fermata and pretty much looked like this the whole time I was reading it O_O.

Dance to the Music of Time -- entertaining, but a disappointment, esp. the volumes dealing with the war

Agreed - I read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy soon after DttMoT, and it blew Powell out of the water. A different war of course, but she captured it so much more personally.

Halldor Laxman's Independent People goes on my list, possibly bumping off Snowcrash

One thing that really got me about Moby Dick - I didn't expect it to be so funny, and the first chapters had some genuinely funny stuff which drew me right in.

Hang on a second - Halldor Laxman's Independent People - That's the Icelandic one about . . . sheep! Right?? I could hardly get through any of it. I know it's supposed to be excellent but I just felt like nothing happened.

laxness! i am working on that. but i got stopped. i think it's really great, i don't know why i can't finish books anymore. probably internet.

Maybe I didn't give it enough time. It was just very . . . slow. Also, long.

Well, there's sheep in it, but mostly it's about a very very stubborn guy who alienates his children (his wives all die from his pig-headed cruelty) and falls victim to his own pride when he decides to build a concrete house.

i can't finish books lately either. i will also blame the internet.

it's my excuse too.

powers, the gold bug variations
dfw, infinite jest
camus, the plague

it is super slow but in parts i was just like...wow. i think i was about halfway. xp

yeah i've tried independent people twice and failed, but i suck at reading these days

gold bug variations is a great book! every time i think about rereading it i get sad, though.

powers, the gold bug variations

This one stalled me out and is staring at me accusatorily from the shelf over my right shoulder as I type.

i am reading 3 books now :(
last time i read any of independent people was in april.
i can't finish a book unless i can do it in under 2 weeks, basically

hah Jaq, that actually happened to me the first time i tried to read it, too.

xpost

ok, five:

Ulysses - James Joyce
War and peace - Leo Tolstoy
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne

while reading each of the above i thought "this is the greatest novel i ever read".

In a top ten, I would include Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa), and either All the Names (Saramago), Huckleberry Finn, or Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is another I couldn't finish tbh.

this is a question i can never answer + it makes me anxious to contemplate but the truest response would probably be any five austen novels that aren't sense and sensibility, i.e. the answer i would have given when i was sixteen. :-/

i can finish a book if it's good

if i can't, it's a Bad Book and i will hurl it at the floor w/disgust

xp i was about to mention don quixote (BAD BOOK)

don qui-so-gay

Don Quixote is another I couldn't finish tbh.

a little trick: you don't need to.

x-posts LOL

Yeah, I get so frustrated when I can't finish them. I feel guilty like it's my fault or something because they're supposedly good books. From now on I'm with you, it's the bad books' fault - not mine.

a book like quixote i think is esp ok to sample liberally... it's a big, unwieldy and not-all-that-tightly-structured thing...not at all a standard novel format.

i don't have much patience for a book that bores me. it's why i never made it past the rivendell section of lord of the rings.

i pick books in the bookstore by the first paragraph. if that grabs me, i'm in. otherwise, nah.

Sometimes if I know that I'm not in for long haul SERIOUS novel reading I turn to things like this:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/wp-content/uploads/mewritebook.jpg

Which btw is great.

Two books I enjoyed the hell out of and would put on my list but haven't finished (but will)

Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy

Reading and enjoying reading is about routine and partly about a little enforced isolation.

Plus I think it is easier to learn what is true from fiction.

And I think what is boring in a book changes and diminishes as you work those reading muscles.

And the above two I mentioned are not chores to read (certainly not DQ, as some have suggested).

its kind of tempting here to right a lot 2 justify my love but i will just right a list instead

01 nabokov lolita
02 davies deptford trilogy
03 price clockers
04 bolano savage detectives
05 aciman call me by your name
06 mahfouz cairo trilogy
07 mccullers heart is a lonely hunter
08 nabokov speak, memory
09 solzhenitsyn cancer ward
10 le guin earthsea

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Jacqueline Susann: Valley of the Dolls
Andy Warhol: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
Ahmadou Kourouma: Monnew
Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo

OTM, it's gay and butch at the same time. xposts

― collardio gelatinous,

Wha???

Pride and Prejudice
Confederacy of Dunces Toole
100 Years of Solitude Marquez
Justine Durrell
Gatsby or Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald

okay a full fucking ten after a few drinks:

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"
Fante "Ask The Dust"
Doctorow "Billy Bathgate"
Dick "Martian Time Slip"
Cain "The Postman Always Rings Twice"
Fowles "The Collector"
Crews "Car"
Fielding "Tom Jones"
McCarthy "Blood Meridian"
Jelinek "The Piano Teacher"

Fowles "The Collector"

this book made a big impression on teenage me but i was never really able to get over my loathing for clegg which i felt kind of guilty over

the end of the collector is maybe the most sad & accurate thing i've read abt mental illness in the context of a (very) psychological novel.

that is to say.. the capacity for the psyche to delude the self seems almost limitless, sometimes.

yeah the way he ends it w/ clegg's thoughts is really despairing. its funny - i remember i totally h8ed the magus and was really prepared to dislike the collector for its cruelty but it wears u out. its a tough book to read but "rewarding" i think? idk

it's definitely a lot more focused than the magus, anyway. it is very tough to read, but that's also what makes it so compelling--the reader's empathy with Miranada against his or her empathy with Clegg's totally fucked outlook on life. But his outlook dominates the narrative, to the extent where the reader almost has to feel disgusted with himself for sympathizing.

btw drunk.

O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
Gatsby
McMurtry - The Last Picture Show
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

i think the collector works better because it engages the reader in self-examination but in a non-gimmicky non-"whos the real sadist" way that i kind of remember the magus working.

with empathy - miranada kind of sucks shes spoiled and foolish and contemptuous and i think the book plays that against the reader she can be hard to empathize w/ because shes so relatable. and clegg is so obv reprehensible i always felt guiltly about loathing him like it was a smallness of spirit or something? but then, the end.

hmm.

DFW, Infinite Jest
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy
Ian McEwan, The Child in Time
Fanny Howe, Radical Love
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Chu T'Ien-Wen, Notes of a Desolate Man
Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

I read a lot more poetry...but these are my favorites. I admire personal style in fiction more than I appreciate story-craft, or whatever.

Think 2666 would be on here, but I have a few hundred pages left.

i should read the collector. i liked the magus and a maggot, but felt sort of let down by the ending of each.

Not personal style.

Distinct writing voice, or non-voice.

There is nothing wrong with reviling Clegg--he's an absolutely pathetic, sad example of a control freak somehow given the means to put his fixation into action.

ian -- based on this thread i printed out and read "the white people." i liked it. now i have to go and read some things to puzzle it out.

(the first section, the discussion of sin and evil, is sort of dostoyevskian. then obv. it goes in a whole other direction...)

machen's "the great god pan" works some similar themes..

anna karenina - tolstoy
remembrance of things past - tolstoy
the loser - bernhard
confessions of zeno - svevo
rabbit is rich - updike
past continues - shabtai
berlin,alexanderplatz - doblin
the history -morante
the trial - kafka
sound and the fury - faulkner

thats the top ten,more or less

oh man, not sure where to start... first ones to come to mind are the cliched classics
catcher in the rye
the great gatsby
the bell jar

and then
the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers
independence day - richard ford
the raw shark texts - steven hall
the vintner's luck - elizabeth knox

i guess these aren't my 'top 7', just the first 7 great books to come to mind

the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers

: D

i should have just put 'anything by mccullers'. can u believe she wrote that at like, 21 or something ridiculous?????

as in the sciences, writers often peak young :(

ulysses - joyce
microserfs - coupland
rings of saturn - sebald
wind in the willows - grahame
the code of the woosters - wodehouse

lolita, bell jar and camera lucida.

The Red and the Black - Stendhal

I so much want to read this. But I've been too tired to read any "good" books. :-( I continue to read but most of it is junk, really, like the Sookie Stackhouse books I'm zipping through. I kinda feel I've lost it, but fuck it I love Sookie (and other popcorn)

The last serious book I read was probably half a year ago? The Master and Margarita. Fantastic!

as in the sciences, writers often peak young :(

-- ian, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:18 AM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

What? Whenever they put out a list of "best young writers" the writers are usually in their thirties. And lots of writers just keep getting better as they get older.

Schklovsky, for one. Dude did his best work in his eighties, I think.

Some of them just seem to do laps around their readers as they get older, like Joyce and Beckett.

Melville was kind of like the Duchamp of writing. Gave it up and then when he's old, bam, HEY GUYS, DID YOU FORGET THAT I'M A GENIUS?

Robert Musil never gave up.

Gordon Lish - bad-ass old man.

Shakespeare died pretty young, but he was doing bad-ass work in the later part of his career.

Jacque the Fatalist came in the last part of Diderot's career.

Philip Dick did a lot of his best work at the end of his career.

Some writers just give up the hackery game as they get older. Michael Bishop did this, for instance.

Could go on.

the long goodbye -- raymond chandler
red harvest -- dashiell hammett
sun also rises -- hemingway
jesus son -- denis johnson
girl in landscape -- jonathan lethem

OK, let's get this out of the way: Ulysses, Crime & Punishment/The Bros K, Moby Dick

Lolita - Nabokov
The Name of the Rose - Eco
The Erasers - Robbe-Grillet
The Big Sleep - Chandler
The Moonstone - W. Collins
The Castle - Kafka
Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - RL Stevenson
The Intuitionist - C. Whitehead

more..

probably the 10 worst or most odious novels I can remember reading - some repeat offenders:

Carter, Wise Children
Lawrence, Women In Love
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Amis, Yellow Dog
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Amis, London Fields
Banville, The Book of Evidence
Banville, Ghosts
Banville, Athena

^ guess which is in my top ten

if only that list had room for White Teeth

Pynchon's pile of crap is in most people's top 10 it seems

come to think of it, the 2200 pages of Proust I've read deserve to be down in that bad company also

Mine would be total cliche, Joyce, Nabokov, Pynchon's pile of crap, I might throw Andre Breton's Nadja in there with the caveat that it's not a novel. Ooh, and Tom Jones. I think I need to read that again this summer. Shit, Gulliver's Travels isn't really a novel either but it wants in this list with Tale of a Tub to keep it company.

i rep for banville

Hey pinefox is there a post where you explain your lovably random prejudices? Mean the lovable bit seriously but Pynchon aside Banville seems such an unlikely hate figure unless it's his sheer technicianship that drives you off?

it's not about technique at all -- though the writing in that trilogy is utterly unbelievably second-hand mid-period Beckett, too much a pastiche not to be embarrassing.

what a disaster for pynchon

Banville does urbane way too well to be a Beckett clone.

in general: odious books: vulgarity, ridiculous sexism, thuggish, egotistical attitudes, disgusting sexual content, usually reflecting middle-aged male fantasies

this combines with what feel like deep literary flaws -- Amis's inability to write characters or plots would be an example

I don't have time to explain further, and my views are not popular anyway

Carter, btw: less repellent as a persona, but often a dreadfully clumsy writer of fiction, though she was an important figure in other ways.

1. Lolita - Nabokov (just for the language, really)
2. Mason & Dixon - Pynchon (much more heartfelt/human book than Gravity's Rainbow)
3. American Tabloid - Ellroy (one of the few books you come away from reading feeling dirty)
4. 1982, Janine - Alasdair Gray (mum saw this on my bookshelf and asked if she could borrow it(!))
5. The Outsider - Camus (not sure if girth-wise it counts but hey ho).

At the moment:

Ursula Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness
Kafka - The Trial
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids

JG Ballard and HP Lovecraft are my two absolute favourite writers, but I think they are better represented by their short stories (Lovecraft only wrote one "novel" I believe).

a light in august
moveable feast
savage detectives
borgel
portrait of the artist

xxxxpost

It's the unpopularity of yr views that makes them interesting tho. For example I agree with your assessment of Amis's flaws but I think you'd have to hold a very limited view of what a novel is to say that they sink what Amis does when he does it well.

Also I'm not sure that sexism and thuggishness can be attributed with certainty to authors that "enjoy" writing about a certain kind of character. By "disgusting sexual content" are you specifically thinking of Gravity's Rainbow? Ulysses could certainly be accused of the same and I think both writers transcend the potential porno aspects of their material.

my top five are unbelievably canonical, it's depressing - maybe i just don't read enough novels

"old goriot" - balzac (despite its maudlin aspects)
"the brothers karamazov" - dostoyevsky (despite its mystical aspects)
"anna karenin" - tolstoy (despite its moralizing)
"the sot-weed factor" - john barth (despite its bonkersness)
"independence day" - robert ford (despite nothing)

i agree that a thread about the worst novels you've ever finished might be more interesting

JG Ballard and HP Lovecraft are my two absolute favourite writers, but I think they are better represented by their short stories

Same here w/ Lovecraft. Also: Poe & Roald Dahl (though I would totally include Dahl's childrens' novels on my list).

Pillbox, your taste so closely resembles mine! YAY.

vladimir nabakov - lolita
vs naipaul - a house for mr biswas
kingsley amis - lucky jim
martin amis - money
saul bellow - the adventures of augie march
gustave flaubert - madame bovary
julian barnes - flaubert's parrot
stendahl - the red & the black
margaret drabble - the ice age
dawn powell - the wicked pavilion
graham greene - end of the affair
john kennedy toole - confederacy of dunces
john dos passos - USA trilogy

you really like the USA trilogy?? i kind of... respect it, but man - it was hard goin. i tried to finish 1919 a number of times and failed miserably.

Pillbox, your taste so closely resembles mine! YAY.

― I GOTTA BRAKE FREEEEE (stevienixed), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 5:53 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol "Va-ri-ety & Qu(Co)-al-ity"

sn, you wouldn't also happen to be a cat-owning, bicycle-riding, former-English major by any chance?

the idea that Ulysses contains something like "disgusting sexual content", or even explicit sexual intercourse, is something of a canard. All the sexual intercourse in it happens off stage or in memory. Molly's memories of sex with Boylan at the end are about as close as it gets. 'Circe' is wild and sexual, true, but still contains no real sexual contact between characters (and it's possibly my least favourite chapter).

this is not to deny that gender and sexuality are thematically important, or part of the general background of characters' thoughts.

'what Amis does when he does it well' - yes. But how often does he do it well? Money is the great exception: it seems to contain a lot of the things I mentioned, but is too magnificent a piece of writing not to compel admiration. His other novels are often train wrecks, to my eyes.

Hand, you mean RICHARD Ford. But your reading is impressive !!

i do in fact mean richard ford. it's one of those plain names that i'm always getting wrong.

pf i fear that my reading is actually not very impressive at all! the number of truly perceptive and momentous works of fiction that i will fail to even fleetingly consider reading fills me with the most tightening feeling of anxiety.

you really like the USA trilogy?? i kind of... respect it, but man - it was hard goin.

that's how i feel about pynchon/gravity's rainbow. also i LOVE mid-20th century US realism like dreiser, sinclair lewis and john o'hara. almost nobody reads them anymore.

those plain ordinary names ARE hard - I always mix Tracer Hand up with Trouble Hand, Table Hand, Tuesday Hand and the like

Five's quite difficult, but more or less off the top of my head -

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis
The Image of a Drawn Sword - Jocelyn Brooke
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Nabokov
Venusberg - Anthony Powell
Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb

"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Nabokov"

I am fairly sure I rea dit but for the life of me can't remember if it was any good.:-( I just like Lolita I guess.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
John Banville, Copernicus
Iain Sinclair, Radon Daughters
The Lord of the Rings <-- yeah, what of it?

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.

Anything else can go suck it.

Dalton Trumbo - Johnny Got His Gun
Robert Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tim O'Brien - Going After Cacciato
Neil Stephenson - The Diamond Age
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Stephen King - The Stand

Anthony Powell Dance to the Music of Time sequence
WG Sebald Austerlitz (but take your pick of his finished novels really)
Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day
George Eliot Middlemarch
John Kennedy Toole A Confedreacy of Dunces
JG Farrell The Singapore Grip
Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles
Evelyn Waugh Sword of Honour trilogy
Patrick Hamilton Hangover Square
Paul Auster Leviathan

List subject to change on a daily basis (apart from Powell), and I'm bound to kick myself later when I remember ones that should be there.

Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
Andre Gide - The Vatican Cellars
Stendhal - The Red & the Black
Alain-Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes
Dostoyevsky - Crime & Punishment
Knut Hamsun - Mysteries
Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses

Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(slaps forehead) about due for re-read #4 or 5

Tim O'Brien - Going After Cacciato

the BEST vietnam war novel (or non-fic book for that matter)

Alain-Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes

ooh, had forgotten all about that. read it two or three times as a youth.

DeLillo's Underworld is my stock answer to this question, though I should point out that I've never actually reread it in the past 10 years, except to open up the book to random pages and marvel at the language.

JG Ballard and HP Lovecraft are my two absolute favourite writers, but I think they are better represented by their short stories

in a different vein, this is how i feel about richard ford. rock springs is one of my favorite short story collections, but i got too bored with the sportswriter to finish it. nothing wrong with the writing, i just didn't want to spend that much time with that protagonist.

Exile Trilogy
LOTR
Neuromancer
Colour Of Magic

ah, I forgot Small Gods

We should do a one hundred greatest novels poll, i think the last one only got as far as the nominations.

DeLillo's Underworld

I thought about 75 procent was just perfection, the middle sagged a bit. But what do you expect from a book with so many pages. Great book, I do agree.

the idea that Ulysses contains something like "disgusting sexual content", or even explicit sexual intercourse, is something of a canard. All the sexual intercourse in it happens off stage or in memory.

you've never masturbated before, have you?

the leopard
the restraint of beasts
the end of the affair
lolita
the great gatsby
waterland
wuthering heights
billy liar

hahaha

xp

Joseph Heller, Catch 22

i am confused how disgusting sexual content and vulgarity are necessarily bad in books. unless there's no point or it's just for shock value but otherwise ???

i h8 books

for an english lit graduate my knowledge of books is not good

*english lit graduate and wannabe novelist, for shame

OTM, it's gay and butch at the same time. xposts

― collardio gelatinous,

Wha???

― Kevin John Bozelka, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Combine all-male cast, whaling "how-to" instructional interludes, Ahab's obsession to conquer the whale and its mysteries on the one hand with Queequeg slipping into the bunkbed with Ishmael, scenes with sailors ecstatically squeezing whale sperm through their hands on the other...

i saw a great staged version of this last year, and the spermaceti-squeezing scene was dead-on-hilarious.

All my friends tell me I'd love Moby Dick

too easy

lol oh shit

lj moby dick is rad

oh, i forgot The Iron Man

apparently it starts as a novel and then launches into some bizarre poem/play/whaling manual midsection before deciding to become a novel again

i.e. sounds rad

i h8 books

― rip dom passantino 3/5/09 never forget (max)

ah you just need a little more distance from college reading lists

Combine all-male cast...

Right ok. But "gay" and "butch" are paired together in the universe waaaaaaaay more than just in Moby Dick. So why said pairing is special there is a bit perplexing to me.

Ten off the top of my head:

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
Jim Thompson - A Hell of a Woman
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom
Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
JG Ballard - High Rise
Camus - The Plague
James Cain - Mildred Pierce
Oscar Wilder - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian

the sound and the fury: faulkner
ulysses: joyce

I like everything else I like about equally.

Neil Stephenson - The Diamond Age
nice to see someone pick this, this is the only book of his I really really like, I think (Snow Crash is not very well written and the later books are just too much)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/477637650_a4024bddf0.jpg?v=0

Everything else on my list has been mentioned. Jude the Obscure and Lolita are my two picks for favourite. Also Moby Dick, Brighton Rock, A Kestral For a Knave, A Scanner Darkly.

I smashed the bed-spring against his cheek

Love chandler but dunno what I'd pick as a fave, Long Goodbye prob.

A few that haven't been mentioned yet:

Conrad, Nostromo
James, The Ambassadors
Murakami, either Wind-up Bird Chronicles or Hard Boiled Wonderland

Right ok. But "gay" and "butch" are paired together in the universe waaaaaaaay more than just in Moby Dick. So why said pairing is special there is a bit perplexing to me.

Who's saying it's special?

for an english lit graduate my knowledge of books is not good

― gosh I actually dig this shit (country matters), Wednesday, 24 June 2009 14:52 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

I know how you feel but really it has to be something you take a lifetime to read. I know lots about books and have lists of things I'd like to read but having only been reading properly for about 7 years, I haven't got very far.

That said, I have the afternoon free and am going to see if I can read Lolita cover to cover. Unemployment does have its benefits.

Oh man don't rush at Lolita you gotta sip that shit like champagne

Ok, some chapters and then some Football Manager. Either way, it's gonna be a good afternoon.

glad to see a few more mentions of the plague on here. that's one i really took my time with, i found i couldn't rush it. maybe 10-20 pages a day some days -- not because it's hard going exactly, more because it sort of demanded careful attention. i'd read a bit and then put it down and think about it. camus is one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite thinkers.

The Fall is my fave Camus and also belongs on this list.

yeah the fall is great too.

The Plague was fucking excellent, way better than The Stranger IMO.

One day I will add Lolita and Pale Fire to Pnin. Seeing as Pnin, my only Nabokov, is in my all-time top 3, I feel I may well enjoy them. Quite a lot.

Rest of all-time top 3:

Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Charles Maturin - Melmoth The Wanderer

The Stranger's good and all but yeah it definitely feels like an illustrative parable compared to his other novels.

yeah. i like the stranger and i think it's good it was the first camus i read. i understand why it's the term-paper favorite. but his other novels i love more.

xp to LJ Always wondered about Melmoth- good is it?

i love the plague and i can't believe i forgot: richard wright, native son

oh shit, hrbl OTM re Native Son

also: Ellison's Invisible Man

someone snuck "speak, memory" (nabokov's memoir) into their list here, and i gotta say, i thought it was fantastic.

xp i'm really glad to read these posts about camus, because i read "the stranger" in my teens, loved it, but never got around to his other stuff. now i have some camus to look forward to.

x-post Invisible Man!!

I've got a copy of Invisible Man I keep meaning to read but my books are mostly being stored at a friend's house at the mo.

Moby Dick
The Sot-weed Factor (so happy this got mentioned!)
The Brothers Karamazov

I can't think of two more I really, really love, and I feel like I'm forgetting shorter beautiful books I've read. I actually remember some of the young adult books I read over and over and over better than most of the books I've read in the last few years. Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle and Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery were totally my favorites.

Can I put "the first half of Smilla's Sense of Snow? Or does a novel have to be considered as a whole?

Maria - there are no rules here. You can put whatever you want!

the first half of smilla's really is great. then it turns all robert ludlum. second half is compulsively readable, but totally loses the mystery and vibe of the copenhagen section.

I enjoyed Red Harvest a good deal more than Maltese Falcon, but I think that's largely due to the fact that the Continental Op is a better protagonist than Sam Spade.

For Chandler, Farewell My Lovely may be his best IMO but Long Goodbye is very close to it

my favorite parts of smilla were when she would go sit alone in her apartment and cry, passages like that from the copenhagen section. then when it turned into an action adventure novel i was really upset!

Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Lolita - Nabokov
Old Goriot - Balzac (after reading it I told myself I'd go on and read all of Balzac's novels ... kind of failed, stopped after four or five even though I really enjoyed them all)
Life: a user's manual - Pérec
Journey to the end of the night - Céline
Tender is the night - Fitzgerald

(xpost ps - i actually picked up another peter hoeg book that was action adventure all the way through just to get that crushingly sad beautiful atmosphere. it worked, i was stuck in this sad wistful quiet mood for days, even though the book wasn't very good.)

Neil S it is giant and wondrous and yeah pretty anti-Catholic and even at one point fairly crude in its understanding of Hindu ritual; its overall argument against persecution in the name of religion was incredibly forward-thinking for its time, and that's before I start on the insane multi-layered story structure, the awesome narrative, and the unceasing post-Gothic tension. Truly the Gerard Manley Hopkins of novelists, a story with a moral and with the conviction of a religious man whose religion above all represented the fortitude of humanity rather than unquestioning faith in a higher agency to put things in their place.

Besides, the figure of Melmoth himself, flitting in and out of the story, a human agent tainted with a Satanic curse he cannot quite control, is one of the great novelistic characterisations. Impervious to everything except his own doom, irresistible to everything except those he must pass the curse onto...

It's just a fabulously exciting and imaginative bit of writing.

Plus, his grandson, John Melmoth, makes for a cracking detective hero, all getting into scrapes with the Inquisition, surviving by the skin of his teeth, and slowly piecing together the vast and implacable truth: nobody will succumb to Melmoth. In fact, as Melmoth preys upon the increasingly desperate, it is never outright spoken, but it is sung of. By the last third MTW is practically a prose-poem.

relative dearth of hemingway on this thread is interesting. for whom the bell tolls is probably in my 2nd or 3rd tier of favorites -- probably 3rd tier, all the macho mythmaking is a bit much. but i bet the demographic equivalent of ilxors 20 or 30 years ago would have had a lot more hemingway love.

Who's saying it's special?

― collardio gelatinous,

You.

american tabloid - james ellroy
the dead school - pat mccabe
the buddha of suburbia - hanif kureshi
tender is the night - f. scott fitzgerald
one flew over the cuckoos nest - ken kesey

xp to LJ okay that sounds pretty amazing, I will look out a copy!

I think I'd add Andre Maurois' Fattypuffs and Thinifers to this list plus the 2 Alice books.

Will add Three Men In A Boat to my own list because it is funnier than any other book

and if I have to choose a PG Wodehouse (staple, unsurprisingly, of my youth), let it be either The Code Of The Woosters or Hot Water

joy in the morning for wodehouse.

I need to read some Wodehouse, a lot of my fave writers were Nazis.

Wodehouse has a fascist character he regularly lampoons - he is not Nazi

Oh wait I forgot...100 Years of Solitude duhhhh, read it at 13 and it exploded my little brain

And I also forgot Tristram Shandy!!! Shit!!! That's top 5 for sure.

FUCK how could I forget Shandy

xxpost

Except when he was doing propaganda broadcasts for the Germans?

Roderick Spode is a great character, and a very precise skewering of Oswald Moseley.

Despite what Wodehouse may have gone on to do.

Reading the transcripts of the broadcasts now and I can see there might've been another side to it but really, unless he was doing them at gunpoint, it was ill-advised. Anyway like I said this has nothing to do with his merits as a writer.

You.

― Kevin John Bozelka, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sigh. [saying something is] not equal to [saying it's special].

My favourite poet had a bit of a problem with the old "not doing propaganda broadcasts for fascist regimes" thing too.

John Hegley?

The fact that I have to include every book B.S. Johnson ever wrote over and above almost everything else kind of forced me to exclude some of the other books which I will love forever - both Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote would be in there, along with Pale Fire and Ben Marcus' Notable American Women (I prefer The Age of Wire and String but it's sometimes marketed as short stories - it is better taken as a novel, I think).

xp I think he means me.

Who the heckers is Ezra Hash?

Oh I think Possession might be one of my fave novels ever too.

Ezra Octothorpe

lol on american keyboards, the pound stirling sign on the 3 key comes out as a hash when shift-pressed

Wtf, you guys call it a hash?

Yeah. And we call muffins snuggle-dumplings.

wait isn't that what we call "the pound sign?" makes sense that you'd have to call it something else in england!

Britain makes a hash of it again amirite

I think Diary of a Nobody by Grossmith deserves an honourable mention of all novels not yet listed.

Thing is that Three Men In A Boat completely pwns Diary Of A Nobody in the whole Victorian lulz stakes, without remorse or mercy

Haven't read it though.

(Have just ordered on amazon.)

Wait, Americans, we are talking about this sign: #, right? The slanty noughts and crosses board? You don't call that a pound sign do you?

Mr. Hoy, let me know when you stop lolling. I predict some point mid-2010.

Noodle: yes, we do

Oh wow. Mind blown.

ok, now i get the confusion. for a minute i thought britain had converted to an all-hash economy.

lol that'd be the day eh

(also i think twitter is going to cement 'hash' for # in the american vernacular.)

this is like my bafflement at the number of British posters on the "TACOS vs HOT DOGS" thread who were like "uh what's a taco"

Srsly? There's no excuse for that other than wilful ignorance.

oh hang on was it pinefox?

can deal with tacos, not so corndogs, i look at a corndog and i want to drink tea and watch cricket until i've forgotten it ever invaded my consciousness

Corndogs are aight, I don't ever crave one tho.

Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo
Alfred Bester - the Stars My Destination
GGM - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited

hoos cheated - i would have immediately put jesus' son by denis johnson too, but it's really a short story collection, not a novel

i also forgot
factotum by bukowski
behind the scenes at the museum - kate atkinson
wide sargasso sea - jean rhys
hey, nostradamus - douglas coupland

oh hang on was it pinefox?

hahaha no, it wasn't pinefox! (actually it was only one person who said it twice but still)

But we have Chiquito's and everything! Tell you the truth I'm not sure if they do tacos but taco shells are freely available from most supermarkets.

I wouldn't vote on that poll anyway because all Britishes hotdogs are without exception terrible.

As is all Britishes Tex-Mex food I imagine.

Not Mrs Vague's cornbread tho. That's pretty good.

I ate at this place near Covent Garden that was actually pretty tasty! They had like a billion different tequilas and was a lot of fun.

(mexican food, I should clarify; their fajitas were v.v. good)

i love how even a thread on books can turn into a thread on tacos

xpost

Yeah I'm sure London's got some dece places. Hull not so much.

if salinger's franny & zooey and seymour:an introduction/raise high the roofbeam, carpenters then i'll add both those to my list, as well

*count as novels

yeah those count

to the poster who mentioned the loved rock springs but didn't enjoy sportswriter - independence day is DEFINITELY the best of ford's trilogy. i couldn't get thru sportswriter or lay of the land - both felt like such a slog.

i liked lay of the land but it's a good thing you didn't read the ending. shockingly wtf.

i might enjoy it more the next time i go back to it - i was really stressed and busy and had a lot of shit going on in my life when i first tried reading it. rock springs really is great, though.

well, maybe i'll try independence day sometime. i love ford's writing, and there were parts of the sportswriter i would have liked as short stories. but i just wasn't into it at novel length. (also saw ford read once, and he's a very entertaining reader.)

* Victoria - Knut Hamsun
* The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata
* I Served The King of England - Bohumil Hrabal
* Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
* Moominland in Midwinter - Tove Jansson
* Dance, Dance, Dance - Huraki Murakami
* George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody

invisible cities is probably third fave calvino, with winter's night after that. second is the wildly underrated "Marcovaldo."

― ian, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:47 PM (16 hours ago) Bookmark

ian is OTM a lot lately

I don't think I've ever read it. Must change.

I think my #1 Calvino is Cosmicomics, but getting into Calvino gets us drifting onto the line between the "novels" and "short stories" categories

isnt marcovaldo like "technically" "a bunch of short stories"

* Moominland in Midwinter - Tove Jansson

^^^^^

i will always rep for moomins.

yes, definitely, although they're all about the same character and all about "the seasons in the city," so it's like plenty of other Calvino -- you know, one coherent thing that seems made out of snapshots or permutations or anecdotes or whatever

If On a Winter's Night should have been on my list

some other o_O outliers no one has mentioned yet

How The Dead Live - Self
Marabou Stork Nightmares - Welsh
The Westing Game - Ellen Raskin
Doctor Rat - William Kotzwinkle
Gun, With Occasional Music - Lethem

or maybe sub Motherless Brooklyn, i could go either way

My Will Self pick would be Great Apes without hesitation but How the Dead Live's pretty fine too.

i have Great Apes on the shelf but haven't gotten to it yet

DO IT DO IT it's fantastic altho don't know how well some of the Britishes interest gags will translate.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Q3D0TTNHL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
thse look like contenders for best/worst. has anyone here read them?

if salinger's franny & zooey and seymour:an introduction/raise high the roofbeam, carpenters then i'll add both those to my list, as well

― where we turn sweet dreams into remarkable realities (just1n3), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:53 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Yeah, if they count, I add them too.

I would for Raise Hight the Roofbeams except Seymour an introduction is a pile of ass.

this is a dumb point to raise, but there's something characteristic of list-building - moreso with films, i think - whereby the only criterion i can use to assemble them is how much i liked them straight upon impact, without thought for their longevity or reverberation. if someone asks about favourite films, the ones that come to mind are those that i finished watching and thought that was my favourite film ever, a godard and a few documentaries, a lot of recent stuff. and then there is the fear of my earlier judgements, all the trash that i thought was good 5+ years ago because it had enough excitement to keep me excited, rather than enough maudlin shit to fuel and sate melancholia. anyway, i say all this because so many of the ones that are popping up - like particularly white noise, which always comes to mind despite a feeling that i enjoyed with some kind of detachment (the opposite of above, a feeling of it being good without a feeling of it being the best) (and enjoyed less than americana), it totally skews my perception.

seymour is probably salinger's writing at its most enjoyable, i think - like there are occasions when it's almost too much (the part when SG thinks the top-hatted man might reach for his hand while walking down the street jumps to mind), comic in a way that the story arcs and wider breadth of the other stories didn't allow, satisfying in the same way as shorts like the heart of a broken story that allowed for some indulgence. it's maybe his exile on main street, not full of hits but the most entertaining, minute-to-minute.

you mean Roofbeams, right, not Seymour

yeah top hatted man, drinking Tom Collins=Roof Beams

xp uh no wth?

I thought seymour was the one where this toddler is a reincarnated spirit warrior who can pre-cog his own death on a cruise ship?

I'm really terrible at listing my favourite of any sort of thing but some favourites include:

La Ciudad y los perros (translated to English under the name "The Time of the Hero" ) by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gab Garc Marq.
The Fall by Albert Camus.
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño.

what do you denis johnson ppl think of angels?

I'm not sure abt my inclusion of Ask The Dust, because it's definitely sort of... ridiculous, but as far as explorations of juvenile obsessions go...

― ian, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 8:24 PM (21 hours ago) Bookmark

This is def in my top 5 too

I would for Raise Hight the Roofbeams except Seymour an introduction is a pile of ass.

― ❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉Plaxico❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉ (I know, right?), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 2:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

You can bite the piles on my ass. It's the best thing he published.

xpost. I loved Ask the Dust a lot and empathised with Arturo Bandini at the time - i think i was still a teenager when i read it. Have sort of consigned it into the dustbin of books better forgotten because i associate it with Bukowski who I've pretty much rejected as slightly shameful youthful taste but I think I should give it another shot.

nunez: seymour cruisin' is teddy outta nine stories. but not seymour. just some other precocious child.

and oops!, yeah, i guess i meant roofbeams. will have to look up seymour now. then come back and stand up for it.

i like dan for being the only one to have the TRUCK NUTZ to put stephen king on his list. the rest of u camus readin niggas siccen me.....

i've only counted one camus readin nigga

tbf

That's weird because there are at least seven.

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durr

if you want to read a book by a women read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

actually, it only took one woman to write Gilead afaik

i associate it with Bukowski who I've pretty much rejected as slightly shameful youthful taste

this makes me sad. bukowski has so much depth and humour in his work.

if you want to read a book, buy a women

i associate it with Bukowski who I've pretty much rejected as slightly shameful youthful taste

this makes me sad. bukowski has so much depth and humour in his work.

bukowski's one of those things that gets misrepresented when he gets claimed as some group's own spokesman. like the big lebowski = a stoner film. it's great. bukowski's poetry especially's beautiful.

I generally think of Bukowski as a comedy writer. This is not at all a slight. Dude was fucking hilarious.

there's also of lot of really intense emotion too - the scene in post office (? maybe it's factotum, i sometimes confuse the 2) when jan is in the hospital dying of alcohol poisoning and he washes her and combs her hair - the way it's related to the reader is just so incredibly poignant.

The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
The Crying of Lot 49 - Pynchon
The Summer Book - Jansson (could be Moominland Midwinter too)
Cruddy - Lynda Barry
The Circus of Dr. Lao - Charles G. Finney
The Good Soldier - Ford
The Plague - Camus
Journey to the End of the Night - Celine
The Third Policeman - O'Brien
Kim - Kipling

Props to deej for listing Borgel. Lizard Music would probably be my Pinkwater pick.

Alice books, Carroll
Lolita, Nabokov
Rainbow Stories, Vollmann
Sword of Honour, Waugh
JR, Gaddis
The Portrait of a Lady, James
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon
Great Expectations, Dickens
1982, Janine, Gray
Something by Bernhard

Had completely forgotten about one my favorite books until someone mentioned it to me this morning:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/West_lonelyhearts.JPG

So good. Am going to have to read again soon.

Also, I really love that cover which is apparently from the first UK edition in 1949.

otm

God I want to read this right now and figure out a way to get a poster sized print of that cover for my living room.

this thread needs more pinefox

In no order:

Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
André Gide - The Immoralist
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Hermann Broch - The Sleepwalkers
Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience
Elias Canetti - Auto-da-fe
James Joyce - Ulysses
Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Journey to the End of the Night

I stepped across this as I wanted to read a few opinions on George Eliot.

Would never really do anything like this but I guess the poster above is (scarily) close to my tastes in terms of the Germanic-Franco tradition: so yes to Musil, Proust, Celine and Broch. These would permanently have a place although I prefer Celine's Death on Credit and perhaps would go for The Death of Virgil over Sleepwalkers.

I'd need to have at least a Russian in there: Andrei Platonov or Shamalov (whose short stories add up to something else). Fave American would be Hubert Selby Jr.

Dislike the Gide and could never quite get on with Svevo: probably switch to Conversation in Sicily by Elio Vittorini or Genet's cycle of novels from the 40s (who all count as one thing, to me). Probably like Henry Green more than Joyce these days, as an English writer writing in the same period. All even before the 19th century.

But there are so many non-novel thingies that would be 'all time favourites'. Tales of Boccaccio, Pessoa's fragments as collected in The Book of disquiet, Sciascia's novellas...

Aargh, and the South Americans and Japanese novels! No Mishima no cred!

I hate lists...

shocked that nobody, including me (ha), included Sentimental Education!

i was just reading it and got too bored halfway through :(

Oh and arrgh again Joyce is Irish, meant writer writing in English..

xp. ridiculous awesome shit that harbl dislikes

i wanted to like it, but it's no madame bovary. i guess i should just pick it up again.

list of old sentimental favorites and stuff im feeling at the moment

as for me and my house -- sinclair ross
heartbreaks along the road - roch carrier
the atlas -- william t vollmann
a jest of god -- margaret laurence
a dictionary of maqiao - han shaogong
outlaws of the marsh -- shi naian or whoever the fuck wrote it (i like the sidney shapiro translation)
dragons of autumn twilight - margaret weis and tracy hickman
the fermata -- nicholson baker
rabbit is rich -- john updike
abandoned capital -- jia pingwa (one of the greatest still-yet-untranslated-into-english novels of all time)
notes of a desolate man - zhu tianwen (trans howard goldblatt is the most prolific chinese-engl trans and i have my problems with him but this is an okay translation of a fucking great book)

this is one of my favorite threads. people talking about stuff they love, and cankles.

Is that an exclusive "and"?

i didn't put enough effort into writing that

my favourite novel is the complete works of william shakespeare

jk

Anyway, somehow never saw this thread before so thanks for the revive.

I don't really have favorite novels in quite the way I did when I was younger. Too much water under the bridge by now. But I'm willing to name some that I wouldn't hesitate to reread or recommend.

The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
The Master & Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
Egil's Saga - Anonymous, but possibly written by the great Snorri Sturluson
Tristam Shandy - Laurence Sterne
Three Men In a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog - Jerome K. Jerome
First Love - Ivan Turgenev
Psmith, Journalist - P.G. Wodehouse
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man - James Joyce
Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood
At least a few of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian

love this thread but it nags

prob add crying of lot 49 and at swim-two-birds now but man I need to read more

We
Roadside Picnic
The Obscene Bird of Night
Memoirs Found in A Bathtub
Galactic Pot-Healer
Fire On The Mountain
Satyricon
The Scholars

Adam Thorpe - Ulverton
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen - Freedom
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
Ian McEwan - The Child in Time
John Fowles - The Magus

forgot Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Looking back at my post I wouldn't get Broch anywhere near the top 10. Amazingly all of the rest of my 'what a list would look like, which is not something I could ever do' pretty much stays the same.

Five novels by writers that haven't been mentioned and could be in a list of this sort:

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance (based on the 1st vol., the rest hasn't been translated into English)
Cesare Pavese - The Moon and the Bonfires
Helen Dewitt - The Last Samurai
Rabelais - (but only the Thomas Urquhart translation)
Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo

I gave up on The Last Samurai halfway through. Something about the tone irked me

people who love it seem to really love it though

the rings of saturn, w.g. sebald
austerlitz, w.g. sebald
mason & dixon, thomas pynchon
death comes for the archbishop, willa cather
stoner, john williams
moby-dick, herman melville
água viva, clarice lispector
the recognitions, william gaddis
play it as it lays, joan didion
zazen, vanessa veselka

The Recognitions - William Gaddis
JR - William Gaddis
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Lolita - Nabokov
Women in Love - DH Lawrence
Underworld - Don Delillo

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

I gave up on The Last Samurai halfway through. Something about the tone irked me

people who love it seem to really love it though

― Number None, Sunday, March 1, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She has a voice. Very few people have that.

I am not really good at making these kinds of lists, but I appreciate it when others do. I really like at least three on Aimless's list and have been meaning to read a few others that I own.

Based on number of rereadings,

The Ambassadors - Henry James
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Ulysses - James Joyce
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami

and a whole lot of genre novels: Hammett, Chandler, Cain, le Carré, Furst, Dick, Ballard, King, etc.

here they are today:

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady
Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
Henry Green – Concluding
Dawn Powell – A Time to Be Born
Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
William Maxwell – The Folded Leaf
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March
J.M. Coetzee – Disgrace
Andre Breton – Nadja
Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat
D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love
Evelyn Waugh – The Loved Ones
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Christopher Isherwood – A Single Man
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
George Eliot – Middlemarch
Philip Roth – Sabbath’s Theater
Alejo Carpentier – The Kingdom of the World
Peter Handke – Short Letter, Long Farewell
Gore Vidal – Lincoln
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Anthony Trollope – The Way We Live Now

Inspired by this thread, I wrote about my favorite novel.

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

it was hard to pick one so i picked the first i read

member of the wedding - carson mccullers
therese raquin - zola
foundation trilogy - asimov
the europeans - henry james
a summer bird-cage - margaret drabble
claudine at school - colette
madame bovary - flaubert
remains of the day - kazuo ishiguro
gatsby - fitzgerald
pale fire - nabokov
sputnik sweetheart - murakami
no longer human - osamu dazai
miss lonelyhearts/day of the locust - west
bonjour tristesse - francoise sagan
the wind in the willows - kenneth grahame

xpost Thanks, Alfred! I see that my library also has Nobody's Family Is Going To Change---how's that one?

I haven't read it.

This was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't cut any more. At the moment:

The Brothers Karamazov
The Savage Detectives
The Plague
Pride and Prejudice
Infinite Jest
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Mason & Dixon
Chronic City
A Wild Sheep Chase
Cat's Eye
Jitterbug Perfume
Brighton Rock

Love Agua Viva, read a few books by Lispector this year, she's great.

it was hard to pick one so i picked the first i read

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, 1 March 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I actually think she has never written any better than this - also its hard to reconcile as a novel.

Off the top of my head...

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay
David Foster Wallace - The Pale King
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake
Alasdair Gray - 1982 Janine
R.L. Stevenson - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

er.... That's only nine... uh... I must have read more than 9 novels...

I want to say that Ulysses is my favourite, but I've only read it once and I don't feel that I know it well. "Favourite" seems to me to suggest that you've made the book your own, which I definitely can't say for Ulysses. But it looms in my mind as the most interesting novel I've read.

don't think i've ever answered this before

1. Robertson Davies - Deptford Trilogy
2. Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
3. Isaac Asimov - Foundation Trilogy
4. Philip Roth - American Pastoral
5. Thomas Pynchon - V.

i kinda miss reading novels. it has been a while.

I didn't know where to place these favorites from the 19th century, so here will do.

wonder if my list would be really basic lol

dhalgren
the rings of saturn
the magic mountain
the dispossessed
moby-dick
o pioneers!
água viva
stoner
madame bovary
the last samurai

reread The Magic Mountain last April.

oh i posted a list five years ago! but i have read several of my favorite books of all time since then thank goodness

Moby Dick and The Last Samurai would be on my list, and I really liked The Dispossessed (and Zazen! I missed that she published another novel last year!). I have the feeling I wouldn’t be into Stoner but I should probably give it a shot sometime.

I'm done with the idea of favorite novels, unless the concept is stretched so thin as to encompass many hundreds of novels I have derived a large measure of enjoyment from. Making a shorter list is just an exercise in forgetfulness and self-deception.

Kim - Kipling
The Plague - Camus
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
The Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope
Three Novels - Karel Capek
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Lantern Bearers - Rosemary Sutcliff

Addendum for favorite mystery novels:

Gaudy Night - Dorothy Sayers
The Fire Engine That Disappeared - Sjowall and Wahloo
Brat Farrar - Josephine Tey

i read moby dick a few years ago and as soon as i got into it was like 'oh obviously this is one of the greatest things ever made'

yeah i’m more or less with aimless, except for moby-dick

Villette, and then others

Been a long time since I read Moby Dick. But have been making my way through the Moby Dick Energy podcast which is fun.

Really not sure I could do a top 5 of books or cds that was accurate beyond the moment.
I also don't seem to have been reading fiction much recently or at least not in that form. Seem to have been reading non whenever I have actually got around to reading anything.

i read Hunger a few years ago and was horrified/compelled by it. great book

yeah finally got around to reading it a couple of years ago myself and have picked up a couple since.
I think it had turned up in something like 3 or 4 decades ago, is it mentioned in the Outsider by Colin Wilson or Biba Kopf's Hardcore essay from the NME in 1984? possibly both.
So it had been something i had wanted to read for ages.

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje
Salem's Lot - Stephen King
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Another Country - James Baldwin
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor
Invitation to the Waltz - Rosamund Lehmann
A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr

I can already see gaps. Impossible.

Just because I've recently entered all my reading from 2008 on (and what I can remember before that) into goodreads:

Middlemarch - George Eliot
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Tehanu - Ursula Le Guin
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Outline - Rachel Cusk
Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson
The American - Henry James

It's kinda sad that I can't imagine rereading enough to have an all-time faves list. Fave authors, sure.

Jane Eyre
Our Mutual Friend
The Catcher in the Rye
Crime and Punishment
The Brother's Karamazov
Ulysses
Infinite Jest
The Grapes of Wrath
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Lord of the Rings

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
2666 - Roberto Bolaño
Absolom, Absolom - William Faulkner
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Neuromancer - William Gibson (lol)

I could probably sub As I Lay Dying for Absolom Absolom nearly any day; likewise The Savage Detectives for 2666 on certain days. Infinite Jest and The Brothers Karamazov would have been on the list at one point, but I have last my connection to those novels over the years.

last = lost

Always on my mind:

The Dream of the Red Chamber (or A Dream of Red Mansions or The Story of the Stone)
Ulysses
I Claudius/Claudius the God
Invisible Man
Middlemarch
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver's Travels
Nadja

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor

Come sit beside me.

Always on my mind:

good standard

xps to NV I was thinking of reading Story of the Stone! Should I?

your writing has kind of a Swift-y vibe, NV

Can I recommend a great little novel? Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is a perfect one...it rewards an immediate second read and is v short so that’s doable.

gyac - I'd say yes, definitely. nb it's looong and I read the modern Penguin translation, the older public domain translations I've seen add layers of florid English to the difficulty. It's a really moving family epic of loss and transience with extra Buddhism and magic sprinkled into the mix, and it's a really absorbing world.

horseshoe aw shucks thank you I admit I shamelessly steal Swift's rhetorical moves all the time, he still makes me laugh and he invented that kind of dry sometimes meanness that I fall well short of but can't help aping

Also I'm bookmarking Ghachar Ghochar

Also I love the horrified recognition in Swift's long books or "novels" when he realises he's ultimately satirising himself

In Search of Lost Time
The Brothers Karamazov
Middlemarch
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Jeeves novels
Pride & Prejudice
The Book of the New Sun
Le Grand Meaulnes
Washington Square
Moby-Dick

I said Ulysses earlier itt, but feel like I was fooling myself in retrospect. I need to give it a lot more time at least.

Hooray!

Yes I always think of myself of disliking 18th century lit, but I forget Swift; he is great!

off the top of my head

catch-22
lord of the rings
cat's cradle
coming through slaughter
master & margarita
ragtime
siddhartha

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