What are your all-time favorite novels??

'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.