What are your all-time favorite novels??

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?