What are your all-time favorite novels??

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.

xpost

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

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Jacqueline Susann: Valley of the Dolls
Andy Warhol: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
Ahmadou Kourouma: Monnew
Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo

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

― collardio gelatinous,

Wha???

Pride and Prejudice
Confederacy of Dunces Toole
100 Years of Solitude Marquez
Justine Durrell
Gatsby or Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald

okay a full fucking ten after a few drinks:

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"
Fante "Ask The Dust"
Doctorow "Billy Bathgate"
Dick "Martian Time Slip"
Cain "The Postman Always Rings Twice"
Fowles "The Collector"
Crews "Car"
Fielding "Tom Jones"
McCarthy "Blood Meridian"
Jelinek "The Piano Teacher"

Fowles "The Collector"

this book made a big impression on teenage me but i was never really able to get over my loathing for clegg which i felt kind of guilty over

the end of the collector is maybe the most sad & accurate thing i've read abt mental illness in the context of a (very) psychological novel.

that is to say.. the capacity for the psyche to delude the self seems almost limitless, sometimes.

yeah the way he ends it w/ clegg's thoughts is really despairing. its funny - i remember i totally h8ed the magus and was really prepared to dislike the collector for its cruelty but it wears u out. its a tough book to read but "rewarding" i think? idk

it's definitely a lot more focused than the magus, anyway. it is very tough to read, but that's also what makes it so compelling--the reader's empathy with Miranada against his or her empathy with Clegg's totally fucked outlook on life. But his outlook dominates the narrative, to the extent where the reader almost has to feel disgusted with himself for sympathizing.

btw drunk.

O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
Gatsby
McMurtry - The Last Picture Show
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

i think the collector works better because it engages the reader in self-examination but in a non-gimmicky non-"whos the real sadist" way that i kind of remember the magus working.

with empathy - miranada kind of sucks shes spoiled and foolish and contemptuous and i think the book plays that against the reader she can be hard to empathize w/ because shes so relatable. and clegg is so obv reprehensible i always felt guiltly about loathing him like it was a smallness of spirit or something? but then, the end.

hmm.

DFW, Infinite Jest
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy
Ian McEwan, The Child in Time
Fanny Howe, Radical Love
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Chu T'Ien-Wen, Notes of a Desolate Man
Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

I read a lot more poetry...but these are my favorites. I admire personal style in fiction more than I appreciate story-craft, or whatever.

Think 2666 would be on here, but I have a few hundred pages left.

i should read the collector. i liked the magus and a maggot, but felt sort of let down by the ending of each.

Not personal style.

Distinct writing voice, or non-voice.

There is nothing wrong with reviling Clegg--he's an absolutely pathetic, sad example of a control freak somehow given the means to put his fixation into action.