What are your all-time favorite novels??

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