What are your all-time favorite novels??

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 !!