What are your all-time favorite novels??

i prefer V. to Gravity's Rainbow

The scene in V. where he envisions machine gunning people from behind the salad bar may be my favorite Pynchon moment.

I hated Moby Dick. In fact, I had a professor who basically told us it was ok to skip all the technical whaling parts because even he thought they were boring.

i actually really dug moby-dick. took a while, but i got into it enough that i thought all the whaling stuff was cool. it doesn't make my top tier just because it didn't grab me or shake me or otherwise compel me the way my real favorites did. but i understand its classic-ness.

i loved the technical whaling parts!

I just couldn't do it. I have this unfortunate thing where if a book doesn't really grab me within a couple days of reading then I'm likely to abandon it. I can't force myself to read something that I'm just not enjoying. That happened to me with M Dick.

I didn't finish The Confidence Man, but it was weird feeling all of these undercurrents of Melville's symbolism coming to life, instead of just being something you write a hackneyed term paper about. It's sort of like seeing a ghost.

winter's tale, mark helprin -- here's one that is on my all-time list because of how much i loved it as a teenager, but when i reread it some years later all of its overblown romantic flaws were much more evident. still, some great stuff in it. (my appreciation for it has been further dimmed by helprin's increasingly vocal right-wing curmudgeonliness over the years.)

and in the i guess you'd say non-literary realm, the original four books in gene wolfe's book of the new sun series, and the original three earthsea books are probably at the top. (ok, along with LOTR and watership down, if we're counting their impact on a 12-year-old.)

That happened to me with M Dick

it was one that i started twice. the first time i stalled out around page 60. i came back about 6 months later and for whatever reason it clicked.

narrowing to five is tough.

OK one of my other favorite books is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker which is basically about sex with a little math thrown in.

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That's why I've ended up with 10 or maybe even 11 now!

my glib take on moby dick is that it's a boy book because of the whole boys and boats thing, and it kind of is, especially in the sense that melville novels are the some of the gayest books i've ever read, but it wasn't really a boy book in the way i thought it was going to be.

yeah you might be on to something. I was just so bored reading it.

it's a crazy book. i would never call it a favorite but i took a reading course where we basically read everything melville ever wrote and i kind of have to love him forever now. he was such a nut.

OTM, it's gay and butch at the same time. xposts

huh

Finley Wren - Philip Wylie
Pale Fire - Nabakov
Infinite Jest - DFW
Sula - Toni Morrison
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater - Vonnegut

maybe

I started this thread to jump start my interest in reading fiction again. After reading so much non-fiction for school I sort of abandoned novels and realized recently that I really miss reading for fun so I thought remembering my favorites might be a good way of rekindling my interest and it has!

Also seeing everyone else's posts I keep thinking of others that I could easily have placed on my list. It's also fascinating to see what overlaps between posters.

People really seem to love some Pale Fire and with good reason!

OK one of my other favorite books is The Fermata by Nicholson Baker which is basically about sex with a little math thrown in.

i've read that and vox -- was a little shamefaced to check both of them out of the library -- but my favorite n.baker is the mezzanine.

I also read Vox which I enjoyed but not as much as The Fermata. I will check out The Mezzanine.

it's more about shoelaces and automatic hand-dryers than sex, but still good.

btw - I was pretty young/naive when I read The Fermata and pretty much looked like this the whole time I was reading it O_O.

Dance to the Music of Time -- entertaining, but a disappointment, esp. the volumes dealing with the war

Agreed - I read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy soon after DttMoT, and it blew Powell out of the water. A different war of course, but she captured it so much more personally.

Halldor Laxman's Independent People goes on my list, possibly bumping off Snowcrash

One thing that really got me about Moby Dick - I didn't expect it to be so funny, and the first chapters had some genuinely funny stuff which drew me right in.

Hang on a second - Halldor Laxman's Independent People - That's the Icelandic one about . . . sheep! Right?? I could hardly get through any of it. I know it's supposed to be excellent but I just felt like nothing happened.

laxness! i am working on that. but i got stopped. i think it's really great, i don't know why i can't finish books anymore. probably internet.

Maybe I didn't give it enough time. It was just very . . . slow. Also, long.

Well, there's sheep in it, but mostly it's about a very very stubborn guy who alienates his children (his wives all die from his pig-headed cruelty) and falls victim to his own pride when he decides to build a concrete house.

i can't finish books lately either. i will also blame the internet.

it's my excuse too.

powers, the gold bug variations
dfw, infinite jest
camus, the plague

it is super slow but in parts i was just like...wow. i think i was about halfway. xp

yeah i've tried independent people twice and failed, but i suck at reading these days

gold bug variations is a great book! every time i think about rereading it i get sad, though.

powers, the gold bug variations

This one stalled me out and is staring at me accusatorily from the shelf over my right shoulder as I type.

i am reading 3 books now :(
last time i read any of independent people was in april.
i can't finish a book unless i can do it in under 2 weeks, basically

hah Jaq, that actually happened to me the first time i tried to read it, too.

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ok, five:

Ulysses - James Joyce
War and peace - Leo Tolstoy
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne

while reading each of the above i thought "this is the greatest novel i ever read".

In a top ten, I would include Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa), and either All the Names (Saramago), Huckleberry Finn, or Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is another I couldn't finish tbh.

this is a question i can never answer + it makes me anxious to contemplate but the truest response would probably be any five austen novels that aren't sense and sensibility, i.e. the answer i would have given when i was sixteen. :-/

i can finish a book if it's good

if i can't, it's a Bad Book and i will hurl it at the floor w/disgust

xp i was about to mention don quixote (BAD BOOK)

don qui-so-gay

Don Quixote is another I couldn't finish tbh.

a little trick: you don't need to.

x-posts LOL

Yeah, I get so frustrated when I can't finish them. I feel guilty like it's my fault or something because they're supposedly good books. From now on I'm with you, it's the bad books' fault - not mine.

a book like quixote i think is esp ok to sample liberally... it's a big, unwieldy and not-all-that-tightly-structured thing...not at all a standard novel format.

i don't have much patience for a book that bores me. it's why i never made it past the rivendell section of lord of the rings.

i pick books in the bookstore by the first paragraph. if that grabs me, i'm in. otherwise, nah.

Sometimes if I know that I'm not in for long haul SERIOUS novel reading I turn to things like this:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/wp-content/uploads/mewritebook.jpg

Which btw is great.

Two books I enjoyed the hell out of and would put on my list but haven't finished (but will)

Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy

Reading and enjoying reading is about routine and partly about a little enforced isolation.

Plus I think it is easier to learn what is true from fiction.

And I think what is boring in a book changes and diminishes as you work those reading muscles.

And the above two I mentioned are not chores to read (certainly not DQ, as some have suggested).

its kind of tempting here to right a lot 2 justify my love but i will just right a list instead

01 nabokov lolita
02 davies deptford trilogy
03 price clockers
04 bolano savage detectives
05 aciman call me by your name
06 mahfouz cairo trilogy
07 mccullers heart is a lonely hunter
08 nabokov speak, memory
09 solzhenitsyn cancer ward
10 le guin earthsea