What are your all-time favorite novels??

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