What are your all-time favorite novels??

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.

if you want to read a book, buy a women

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.

bukowski's one of those things that gets misrepresented when he gets claimed as some group's own spokesman. like the big lebowski = a stoner film. it's great. bukowski's poetry especially's beautiful.

I generally think of Bukowski as a comedy writer. This is not at all a slight. Dude was fucking hilarious.

there's also of lot of really intense emotion too - the scene in post office (? maybe it's factotum, i sometimes confuse the 2) when jan is in the hospital dying of alcohol poisoning and he washes her and combs her hair - the way it's related to the reader is just so incredibly poignant.

The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
The Crying of Lot 49 - Pynchon
The Summer Book - Jansson (could be Moominland Midwinter too)
Cruddy - Lynda Barry
The Circus of Dr. Lao - Charles G. Finney
The Good Soldier - Ford
The Plague - Camus
Journey to the End of the Night - Celine
The Third Policeman - O'Brien
Kim - Kipling

Props to deej for listing Borgel. Lizard Music would probably be my Pinkwater pick.

Alice books, Carroll
Lolita, Nabokov
Rainbow Stories, Vollmann
Sword of Honour, Waugh
JR, Gaddis
The Portrait of a Lady, James
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon
Great Expectations, Dickens
1982, Janine, Gray
Something by Bernhard

Had completely forgotten about one my favorite books until someone mentioned it to me this morning:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/West_lonelyhearts.JPG

So good. Am going to have to read again soon.

Also, I really love that cover which is apparently from the first UK edition in 1949.

otm

God I want to read this right now and figure out a way to get a poster sized print of that cover for my living room.

this thread needs more pinefox

In no order:

Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
André Gide - The Immoralist
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Hermann Broch - The Sleepwalkers
Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience
Elias Canetti - Auto-da-fe
James Joyce - Ulysses
Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Journey to the End of the Night

I stepped across this as I wanted to read a few opinions on George Eliot.

Would never really do anything like this but I guess the poster above is (scarily) close to my tastes in terms of the Germanic-Franco tradition: so yes to Musil, Proust, Celine and Broch. These would permanently have a place although I prefer Celine's Death on Credit and perhaps would go for The Death of Virgil over Sleepwalkers.

I'd need to have at least a Russian in there: Andrei Platonov or Shamalov (whose short stories add up to something else). Fave American would be Hubert Selby Jr.

Dislike the Gide and could never quite get on with Svevo: probably switch to Conversation in Sicily by Elio Vittorini or Genet's cycle of novels from the 40s (who all count as one thing, to me). Probably like Henry Green more than Joyce these days, as an English writer writing in the same period. All even before the 19th century.

But there are so many non-novel thingies that would be 'all time favourites'. Tales of Boccaccio, Pessoa's fragments as collected in The Book of disquiet, Sciascia's novellas...

Aargh, and the South Americans and Japanese novels! No Mishima no cred!

I hate lists...

shocked that nobody, including me (ha), included Sentimental Education!

i was just reading it and got too bored halfway through :(

Oh and arrgh again Joyce is Irish, meant writer writing in English..

xp. ridiculous awesome shit that harbl dislikes

i wanted to like it, but it's no madame bovary. i guess i should just pick it up again.

list of old sentimental favorites and stuff im feeling at the moment

as for me and my house -- sinclair ross
heartbreaks along the road - roch carrier
the atlas -- william t vollmann
a jest of god -- margaret laurence
a dictionary of maqiao - han shaogong
outlaws of the marsh -- shi naian or whoever the fuck wrote it (i like the sidney shapiro translation)
dragons of autumn twilight - margaret weis and tracy hickman
the fermata -- nicholson baker
rabbit is rich -- john updike
abandoned capital -- jia pingwa (one of the greatest still-yet-untranslated-into-english novels of all time)
notes of a desolate man - zhu tianwen (trans howard goldblatt is the most prolific chinese-engl trans and i have my problems with him but this is an okay translation of a fucking great book)

this is one of my favorite threads. people talking about stuff they love, and cankles.

Is that an exclusive "and"?