Literary treats - recommend great reads

Ground rules:

1. treats and gems only itt
(yes you may like Crime & Punishment but it's canonized to the point where it's ridiculous to recommend it, also this thread is about treats, not "books you feel like you/others should read")

2. quality > quantity
(no long lists of cool books needed, just recommend one good book and change the/my world)

3. not a thread for difficult reads
(disqualifies If on a winter's night a traveler and other "fun" experimental books, they can go into their seperate experimental treats thread)

4. max 300 pages
(because a brick is not a treat, or if they are they may go in a brick treats thread)

5. only books available in english translation
(because this is a functional recommendation thread, a separate untranslated gems thread might be interesting for the multilingual)

I'll start out by recommending the total treat Whereabouts (2018) by Jhumpa Lahiri
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Dove_mi_trovo_%28Jhumpa_Lahiri%29.png

Sexing the Cherry

Flaubert's Parrot

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Out Stealing Horses (2003) by Per Petterson

I love Angela Saini's work thought its non fiction so not sure if you're specifying fiction. Both Superior on why Race Science is so inherently flawed and Inferior which is similar but about Gender Imbalance.

Also Kehinde Andrews various books, Ibram X Kendi same.
JUst discovering Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison.

Reading a stack of books at the same time so this could continue . BUt trying to keep it short.
I bougt East West Street by Philippe Sands after hearing the podcast series tied in with it. But haven't started reading it yet

Of the discoveries I've made in all the Favourite Novels polls (not many but it's an ongoing thing) the most fun is The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, if you fancy some early weird fiction and the following extract piques your interest then strap in for a wild ride:

The crowd flew apart, all eyes drawn to the foot to which the hand of the screaming man was pointing. On this foot sat the spider, black and huge, glowering balefully, maliciously all around. The blood froze in their veins, the breath in their breasts, and the sight in their eyes, while the spider calmly, maliciously peered about, and then the man’s foot turned black, and in his body it felt as if fire were hissingly, furiously doing battle with water; fear burst the bonds of horror, and the crowds scattered.

Crowd flew apart, then scattered, even!

zazen by vanessa veselka: crisply-written children of men-esque alternate-present/slight future, but set among the culture of white new age vegans and conveys that world only in the most sardonic tones. protagonist is an activist who is trapped in this realm and is having a huge nervous breakdown about it. idk maybe i’m not selling it but it’s one of my favorite books i’ve ever read

Anything by Eve Babitz, but let's go with Sex and Rage: Advice for Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time. Just the most delightful book, a blithe breeze through early 70s LA, like Joan Didion's much more fun younger sister.

I second Zazen.

A couple others: Unclay, by T.F. Powys, a hard-to-classify novel about Death visiting a small village in human form and learning all the weird, perverse little secrets of the townsfolk. Deeply odd, funny, a bit unsettling.

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb, about a Hungarian man on his honeymoon who has a chance encounter with an old friend, becomes obsessed with what has become of his weird goth friends from his teenage years, and abandons his wife to go track them down. His wife then sets off to have her own adventures. I found it totally delightful. (320 pages but they go by quickly.)

Never heard of Vanessa Velka before, but now I am intrigued. Her mother is Linda Ellerbee! And she won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize!

I thought The Card of the Gambler by Benedict Kiely was a great retelling of the Death on the tree myth. Think its a story that is repeated across a few nation's mythology. Death put out of commission by being stuck somewhere so nobody dying for a while. I remember i being delicious prose but I read it like 29 years ago when i was first in Dublin. Must get around to reading more of him at some point.

I'm going to stick to the rools and go with one: A Month in the Country by JL Carr (practically ILX canon, tbh). Swells beyond its 135 pages into timelessness.

One non-fiction too: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall. Colonial-gentleman-cum-Devonian-Quixote sets out to complete the solo round the world yacht race and rather than admit defeat, spirals into deception, isolation and madness.

Ugh, didn't mean to misspell the name. Vanessa Veselka, sorry.

I think this essay of hers is very much worth reading as well: https://magazine.atavist.com/the-fort-of-young-saplings/

There’s another essay about her narrow escape from the Truck Stop Killer as a teenage runaway but it basically ruined my day when I read it.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard. Really good personal essays.

Seconding A Month in the Country and also Eve Babitz, but the Babitz I like best is Slow Days, Fast Company.

War With the Newts by Karel Capek. 1936 Czech satire in which people discover and enslave a species of giant intelligent newt and the global economy becomes entirely dependent on them, leading eventually to global Newt revolution and a disastrous rise in sea levels.

oh shit, yeah, the boys of my youth is the best. really influential for me. i also love beard's novel in zanesville though it could be construed as ya

Dog of the South - Charles Portis

Very much appreciating all these recommendations! I had fiction in mind but not opposed to non-fiction at all as long as we're talking real treats, such as well written, perhaps even gripping journalism or narrative essays. Poetry also welcome. Most important is that it be a kind of rewarding read that is not too demanding, an archetype of the treat I'm thinking of could be The Old Man and the Sea or Babette's Feast (although I'm more interested in novels than novellas).

The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson - The best of her adult novels I've read, female children's author who writes stories about harmless little bunnies rubs up against independent, hard edged woman in small village. Ideal Winter read, a good one to gift people as they usually don't have it.

You may already be familiar with The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington but that seems well-suited here.

Also second the Charles Portis recommendation -- any of his novels, really, especially Masters of Atlantis.

_The True Deceiver_, Tove Jansson - The best of her adult novels I've read, female children's author who writes stories about harmless little bunnies rubs up against independent, hard edged woman in small village. Ideal Winter read, a good one to gift people as they usually don't have it.

War With the Newts by Karel Capek. 1936 Czech satire in which people discover and enslave a species of giant intelligent newt and the global economy becomes entirely dependent on them, leading eventually to global Newt revolution and a disastrous rise in sea levels.
― Lily Dale

Ah cool, so is Capek worth reading in general, then? Obv famed for popularising 'robot', but I've never been sure if he's worth digging into in his own right.

You may already be familiar with The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington but that seems well-suited here.
― Chris L

Seconded!

The 'no experimentalism' thing is throwing me a bit, bah. Especially as I feel like IOAWNAT isn't even close to a difficult read! Also I'm guessing that the treat element means nothing too cynical or depressing, right?

I'm going to stick to the rools and go with one: A Month in the Country by JL Carr (practically ILX canon, tbh). Swells beyond its 135 pages into timelessness.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 16 November 2021 21:06 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

need to read this; his FA Cup book is absolutely amazing and does similar

xp I like experimentalism as much as the next person but it just doesn't really fit my idea of a treat

then again rules are meant to be broken and if you know an experimental short novel that's the equivalent of a bounty bar, well... I'd be interested!

some depressing/cynical stuff leaves the reader elated (like Thomas Bernhard) and in that case it's fine by my

*me

also The Hearing Trumpet is one of the best books ever as far as I'm concerned btw, 100% concur, get on it, etc

I think it's less that I want to recommend pure experimental lit and more that sometimes I don't know what people would consider overly experimental - to me something like The Third Policeman is a real treat, but would its quirks rule it out? But if experimental stuff is not completely banned, just not preferred, then that feels easier.

I recently got around to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares and that felt quite treat-like. The central character is overly obsessive about a woman he never speaks to, which may be off-putting, but I didn't feel pushed into empathising with that emotion but rather found myself chuckling at its extent. Mileage might vary, I guess.

books like The Third Policeman manage to be both treats and the best books ever written tbf, this thread absolutely needs its ilk

A Happy man by Hansjorg Schertenleib is a book that's prob a treat, just a guy walking around with a happy (or well-adjusted) life and every sentence it seems like he's going to die, a very strange tension that I haven't really seen very much

Edmund White's Forgetting Elena is... [pause to consider] quite acceptable here. Don't you think?

various things by John Einarson though I noticed a few years ago that his name keeps getting mispelt on different books or possibly listiongs. He has done some really good music bios including ghost writing/compiling Arthur Lee's memoir. His Mr Tambourine Man on Gene Clark was really good too.

I really enjoyed Behind The Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel by Love drummer Michael Stewart Ware. It was one of the first insider memoirs from the band· I haven't reread it in a while and it has had 2 different updates which I also haven't caught up with.
just looking around my room and seeing love posters on teh wall so being reminded by that.

Simon Reynolds various books on post-punk including Rip It Up And Start Again.

Mark Mordue's book on the young Nick Cave Boy On Fire
Clinton Walker's Stranded on Australian punk and its aftermath

Natasha Ginzburg - Sagittarius
Joy Williams - The Quick and the Dead
Elizabeth Taylor - A Wreath of Roses

based on these selections, one would do well to read any given new york review classic

I've run into a few duds in NYRB Classics, but overall it has an excellent hit rate. If I see one shelved in a used bookshop I always investigate it and usually buy it, read it and enjoy it.

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze is another really good NYRB book - a forgotten classic of noir that I can't begin to describe but that made me put the book down and stare at a wall several times while I was reading it.

That may not sound like much of a treat but I meant it in a good way.

Loved reading Eva Baltasar's Permafrost earlier this year. Maybe too caustic for a treat? But the prose is really packed, maybe reads a bit like what it is -- European fiction in translation -- but it was as vital to read as anything I've read in a long time.

They hired me on a Monday, three months after my first article. For the first time, I felt colorless — a dreadful muddle of various hues, an unthinkably grim and grayish green. My skin was like a mollusk shell, my body parched, my muscles fibrous like esparto grass — and inside I smelled of a parking lot.

I enjoyed the two above-mentioned Babitz books too.

loved 'black wings has my angel'

That one’s on my list/pvmic

- The Beginning of Spring (Fitzgerald), my favourite book by my favourite author, the perfect midpoint between her early and late styles
- At Freddie’s (Fitzgerald), the funniest one
- The Beiderbecke Affair (Plater), the best ever novelisation of a TV show (not counting Steven Moffat’s The Day or the Doctor, which is probably too niche for this list)
- Harriet the Spy, one of the few books everyone should read

I really love The Long Secret, the sequel to Harriet the Spy.

I’m just about to start reading that!

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze is another really good NYRB book - a forgotten classic of noir that I can't begin to describe but that made me put the book down and stare at a wall several times while I was reading it.

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter has a similar effect as this, and goes in a couple of directions you wouldn't necessarily expect from this genre.

May as well start rounding out the list of NYRB Treats. The classic Western Warlock by Oakley Hall was one of my most captivating reads of the last few years. You can see the seeds of Deadwood being planted as you're reading it.

Warlock rules, can confirm

gah i started it last year and had trouble getting into it. i will try again.

lol i basically tried every nyrb classic that the library had five years ago but couldn't get into any of them. the hearing trumpet and the tove jansson book look promising though.

I borrowed my brother's copy of Warlock, didn't read it, and accidentally dropped it through the library return slot because I mistook it for another NYRB book. This is a good reminder that I should get around to ordering him another copy.

Think you'll find Joyce used it first in Finnegans Wake.

Okay, will do. This seems to be another short one.

So you think the affair in the last chapter is pure fiction?

Well, probably inspired by something real. But yeah, seems pretty made up to me. I don't know though!

Makes for a great read

Based on interviews I’ve read I assume most of it is basically true. One interview she went as far as to say something to the effect that you’d be surprised at which parts are true and which parts are invented. She gave as an example of something she had to invent her mother’s trip home when the war ended.

On to the next one I guess until I run out of steam, either MITZ or maybe FOR ROUENNA.

i'd recommend "deadwood" by pete dexter, especially if you've watched the show - it has a lot of the same characters/historical figures but they are characterized and emphasized very differently. it is over 300 pages but not by much (about 350 iirc) and funny and grimy and sad.

i can't believe i read Paris Trout by Pete Dexter in 1988! it doesn't seem that long ago. that's a great book. God's Pocket is really good too. I read Paris Trout after reading about Pete and Tex Cobb almost getting beaten to death in South Philly. it's a scary story! i was living in Philly at the time. one of the scariest moments in my Philly life was walking around a corner and almost running right into Tex Cobb. he scared the shit out of me. his face was so frightening.

Dexter began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in the Devil's Pocket, neighborhood in South Philadelphia, in which a mob of locals armed with baseball bats beat him severely. The perpetrators were upset by Dexter's recent column about a murder involving a drug deal-gone-wrong, published on December 9, 1981, in the Philadelphia Daily News.

"A couple of weeks ago, a kid named Buddy Lego was found dead in Cobbs Creek," wrote Dexter. "It was a Sunday afternoon. He was from the neighborhood, a good athlete, a nice kid. Stoned all the time. The kind of kid you think you could have saved."

The kid's mother called Dexter, nearly hysterical. How, she cried, could he write that her dead son was a drug user? Lego's brother, Tommy, the night bartender at Dougherty's, was also on the phone, screaming at the then-38-year-old columnist, demanding a retraction.

Dexter went to Dougherty's bar to talk to Tommy Lego, having told Lego he would not be publishing a retraction. In the bar, Dexter was blindsided by two blows to the jaw, splintering and breaking teeth. Later, Dexter returned with a friend, heavyweight prizefighter Randall "Tex" Cobb. In the ensuing fight outside the bar in the street, Cobb's arm was broken and Dexter was hospitalized with several injuries, including a broken back, pelvis, brain damage and dental devastation. Cobb's injuries cost him a shot at WBA heavyweight champion Mike Weaver.

Tex Cobb! that's crazy you saw him just walkin around.

holy hell how have I not read Annie Proulx till now

“the Half Skinned Steer” fwiw

are her novels this intense??

will check out "deadwood" and pete dexter, thanks!

xp james: do MITZ!

‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’ by William Maxwell

Heard about it on Backlisted & finally read it this week. Just finished (its quite short) and am uncharacteristically considering an immediate re-read

I don’t know if I’ve every read anything that is this, idk, almost-perfect? He’s so succinct but the emotional weight of everything he writes about in this story is so immense.

10/10 somehow feels too cliched lol

anyway recommend without hesitation to all & sundry

Tremendous book. Agree with everything you said.

Can also recommend *Time Will Darken It*, which has the same sense of economy and control. What a writer. Blows my mind that he only wrote one other novel in the 32 years between *Time Will Darken It* and *So Long, See You Tomorrow*.

Also, more people need the middle name 'Keepers'.

i am def going to try seek out more from him, for sure - my library has his short story collection, i will try to find Time Will Darken It also

I read Sara Mesa's "Un Amor" last week and it satisfies all five of the thread's Treat Criteria.

this was enjoyable if quite dark and somewhat frustrating

will check out ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’ by William Maxwell

Great thread idea!

I have to say that my reading life has been immensely enriched by the existence of I Love Books and all its contributors. Finding good books used to be much more hit-and-miss, but now my 'hit' rate is over 90% and I have a long list of titles and authors to explore. Thanks, y'all.

the Backlisted podcast has vastly enriched my reading — i see references to it here & there a bit on ilx search - wondering if a dedicated thread might be good?

I'd contribute. I have a mixed relationship with Backlisted but I've got so many amazing books from it.

Andy Miller's book is a lot of fun, an atypically good example of the "I did a weird thing for six months and here's what happened" genre. Sometimes I wish he'd stop interrupting his guests (or his co-host) quite so much. But I've heard worse, and he's generally quite funny, so he gets a pass. I enjoy his tormented, self-aware relationship with his own inescapable blokiness, although I think I may have developed a somewhat parasocial relationship with them during the lockdowns.

I don’t know if I’ve every read anything that is this, idk, almost-perfect?

"A Month in the Country" by JL Carr is another perfect, very short novel with a Backlisted podcast (as are, off the top of my head, "Excellent Women" and "Human Voices").

Lie With Me (2017) by Philippe Besson

In Praise of Shadows - Junichirō Tanizaki

I loved A Month in the Country mentioned above. I will read it again someday.

I definitely recommend that Daniel Woodrell book of stories I just read. The Outlaw Album. Not for the squeamish. But the violence is delivered artfully a la Faulkner. I just started another one by him.

It's a bit longer than 300 pages, but Tove Ditlesen's Copenhagen Trilogy is a great, compelling read. Early autofiction, and for me, unputdownable.

Palestinian walks : forays into a vanishing landscape Raja Shehadeh,
A Palestinian revisits some places he knew years earlier and reminisces and ruminates on related subjects. I found the book pretty touching.
I've been reading quite a lot of Palestine related material recently and thought this particularly good.

I started "In Praise of Shadows" -- good so far!

Patrick Hamilton - "Hangover Square"

An absolute waking nightmare of a book, kind of a cross between The Secret Agent and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.. but told in such a direct, sympathetic way, you feel he's speaking directly to you in a language that's been made just for you. Can't remember the last time I just gulped a book down in such great big draughts

xp glad to hear you like it! It's a short thing but beautifully written and conceived

I enjoyed "Slaves of Solitude", sounds like I need to dig deeper into Hamilton. xp

Has everyone here read Desperate Characters? I feel like I bring it up a lot. I just brought it up on ILE. It's over the top but very memorable! It has definitely stuck with me. The movie version has too.

Poor George Harvey Bone.

Indeed

I kept picturing it as a black comedy like Nightie Night, or Peep Show, with George played by David Mitchell and Peter with his reprehensible moustache as Ray Purchase from Toast

https://hi-ya.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Ray-Purchase.png

Hangover Square is one of my favourite novels, a masterpiece. Part of the small sub-genre of Brighton Noir too!

Hahaha. Black comedy is the only real way to cope with the tragedy of it. Slays two. Found gassed. Thinks of cat. has to be comedy, right?

I used to go to awful marketing conferences at Earl's Court. I'd drift out into the evening and walk among those beautiful Second Empire buildings and think of Bone. What a book.

Talking of literary treats and (vaguely) Brighton Noir: *Fullalove* by Gordon Burn is magnificent.

Hangover Square is superb. Only recently realised the title is a pun! #onethread

Desperate Characters
Keep thinking I've read that, but I'm always just mixing it up with _Two Serious Ladies_ by Jane Bowles.
I'm slightly put off by Franzen's enthusiasm for _Desperate Characters_, which is just nonsense on my part.

_Two Serious Ladies_ may well be an appropriate novel for this thread.

I think DFW was a desperate characters booster as well

2 serious ladies is great as is that one play she wrote

Just heard recently that the reason Franzen got into it was because Sigrid Nunez lent him her copy while they were at a writer's conference.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/t-magazine/sigrid-nunez-paula-fox-desperate-characters.html
Guess she just recommended, didn't actually lend a copy.

I'm another Desperate Characters lover. I've also recommended it to many people. one of the interesting things is the picture of early Brooklyn gentrification. another possible hook, the author is Courtney Love's grandmother. I haven't read any of her other books though I started Western Coast and somehow lost the thread

Yeah my attempts to read other Paula Fox books fell flat. Kinda like me and Christina Stead books that aren't The Man Who Loved Children (also a Franzen pick or was that Moody? Anyway, i love that book.) And also any Penelope Fitzgerald book that isn't The Bookshop.

also, if anyone hasn't read it yet, please do read The Bookshop. so great.

it is but I also liked offshore, maybe not quite as much, and the blue flower probably more. the golden child was not good though. I'll get round to the rest sooner or later.

Penelope Fitzgerald uniformly good except for maybe the first one which is think is The Golden Child. I had a similar Paula Fox problem but now I remember that I did like Poor George.

best bk i read recently = "sonny liston was a friend of mine" by thom jones

Re-reading The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, as I often do at times like this.