What are your all-time favorite novels??

oh hang on was it pinefox?

hahaha no, it wasn't pinefox! (actually it was only one person who said it twice but still)

But we have Chiquito's and everything! Tell you the truth I'm not sure if they do tacos but taco shells are freely available from most supermarkets.

I wouldn't vote on that poll anyway because all Britishes hotdogs are without exception terrible.

As is all Britishes Tex-Mex food I imagine.

Not Mrs Vague's cornbread tho. That's pretty good.

I ate at this place near Covent Garden that was actually pretty tasty! They had like a billion different tequilas and was a lot of fun.

(mexican food, I should clarify; their fajitas were v.v. good)

i love how even a thread on books can turn into a thread on tacos

xpost

Yeah I'm sure London's got some dece places. Hull not so much.

if salinger's franny & zooey and seymour:an introduction/raise high the roofbeam, carpenters then i'll add both those to my list, as well

*count as novels

yeah those count

to the poster who mentioned the loved rock springs but didn't enjoy sportswriter - independence day is DEFINITELY the best of ford's trilogy. i couldn't get thru sportswriter or lay of the land - both felt like such a slog.

i liked lay of the land but it's a good thing you didn't read the ending. shockingly wtf.

i might enjoy it more the next time i go back to it - i was really stressed and busy and had a lot of shit going on in my life when i first tried reading it. rock springs really is great, though.

well, maybe i'll try independence day sometime. i love ford's writing, and there were parts of the sportswriter i would have liked as short stories. but i just wasn't into it at novel length. (also saw ford read once, and he's a very entertaining reader.)

* Victoria - Knut Hamsun
* The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata
* I Served The King of England - Bohumil Hrabal
* Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
* Moominland in Midwinter - Tove Jansson
* Dance, Dance, Dance - Huraki Murakami
* George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody

invisible cities is probably third fave calvino, with winter's night after that. second is the wildly underrated "Marcovaldo."

― ian, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:47 PM (16 hours ago) Bookmark

ian is OTM a lot lately

I don't think I've ever read it. Must change.

I think my #1 Calvino is Cosmicomics, but getting into Calvino gets us drifting onto the line between the "novels" and "short stories" categories

isnt marcovaldo like "technically" "a bunch of short stories"

* Moominland in Midwinter - Tove Jansson

^^^^^

i will always rep for moomins.

yes, definitely, although they're all about the same character and all about "the seasons in the city," so it's like plenty of other Calvino -- you know, one coherent thing that seems made out of snapshots or permutations or anecdotes or whatever

If On a Winter's Night should have been on my list

some other o_O outliers no one has mentioned yet

How The Dead Live - Self
Marabou Stork Nightmares - Welsh
The Westing Game - Ellen Raskin
Doctor Rat - William Kotzwinkle
Gun, With Occasional Music - Lethem

or maybe sub Motherless Brooklyn, i could go either way

My Will Self pick would be Great Apes without hesitation but How the Dead Live's pretty fine too.

i have Great Apes on the shelf but haven't gotten to it yet

DO IT DO IT it's fantastic altho don't know how well some of the Britishes interest gags will translate.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Q3D0TTNHL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
thse look like contenders for best/worst. has anyone here read them?

if salinger's franny & zooey and seymour:an introduction/raise high the roofbeam, carpenters then i'll add both those to my list, as well

― where we turn sweet dreams into remarkable realities (just1n3), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:53 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Yeah, if they count, I add them too.

I would for Raise Hight the Roofbeams except Seymour an introduction is a pile of ass.

this is a dumb point to raise, but there's something characteristic of list-building - moreso with films, i think - whereby the only criterion i can use to assemble them is how much i liked them straight upon impact, without thought for their longevity or reverberation. if someone asks about favourite films, the ones that come to mind are those that i finished watching and thought that was my favourite film ever, a godard and a few documentaries, a lot of recent stuff. and then there is the fear of my earlier judgements, all the trash that i thought was good 5+ years ago because it had enough excitement to keep me excited, rather than enough maudlin shit to fuel and sate melancholia. anyway, i say all this because so many of the ones that are popping up - like particularly white noise, which always comes to mind despite a feeling that i enjoyed with some kind of detachment (the opposite of above, a feeling of it being good without a feeling of it being the best) (and enjoyed less than americana), it totally skews my perception.

seymour is probably salinger's writing at its most enjoyable, i think - like there are occasions when it's almost too much (the part when SG thinks the top-hatted man might reach for his hand while walking down the street jumps to mind), comic in a way that the story arcs and wider breadth of the other stories didn't allow, satisfying in the same way as shorts like the heart of a broken story that allowed for some indulgence. it's maybe his exile on main street, not full of hits but the most entertaining, minute-to-minute.

you mean Roofbeams, right, not Seymour

yeah top hatted man, drinking Tom Collins=Roof Beams

xp uh no wth?

I thought seymour was the one where this toddler is a reincarnated spirit warrior who can pre-cog his own death on a cruise ship?

I'm really terrible at listing my favourite of any sort of thing but some favourites include:

La Ciudad y los perros (translated to English under the name "The Time of the Hero" ) by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gab Garc Marq.
The Fall by Albert Camus.
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño.

what do you denis johnson ppl think of angels?

I'm not sure abt my inclusion of Ask The Dust, because it's definitely sort of... ridiculous, but as far as explorations of juvenile obsessions go...

― ian, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 8:24 PM (21 hours ago) Bookmark

This is def in my top 5 too

I would for Raise Hight the Roofbeams except Seymour an introduction is a pile of ass.

― ❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉Plaxico❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉ (I know, right?), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 2:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

You can bite the piles on my ass. It's the best thing he published.

xpost. I loved Ask the Dust a lot and empathised with Arturo Bandini at the time - i think i was still a teenager when i read it. Have sort of consigned it into the dustbin of books better forgotten because i associate it with Bukowski who I've pretty much rejected as slightly shameful youthful taste but I think I should give it another shot.

nunez: seymour cruisin' is teddy outta nine stories. but not seymour. just some other precocious child.

and oops!, yeah, i guess i meant roofbeams. will have to look up seymour now. then come back and stand up for it.

i like dan for being the only one to have the TRUCK NUTZ to put stephen king on his list. the rest of u camus readin niggas siccen me.....

i've only counted one camus readin nigga

tbf

That's weird because there are at least seven.

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durr

if you want to read a book by a women read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

actually, it only took one woman to write Gilead afaik

i associate it with Bukowski who I've pretty much rejected as slightly shameful youthful taste

this makes me sad. bukowski has so much depth and humour in his work.