What are your all-time favorite novels??

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.

ian -- based on this thread i printed out and read "the white people." i liked it. now i have to go and read some things to puzzle it out.

(the first section, the discussion of sin and evil, is sort of dostoyevskian. then obv. it goes in a whole other direction...)

machen's "the great god pan" works some similar themes..

anna karenina - tolstoy
remembrance of things past - tolstoy
the loser - bernhard
confessions of zeno - svevo
rabbit is rich - updike
past continues - shabtai
berlin,alexanderplatz - doblin
the history -morante
the trial - kafka
sound and the fury - faulkner

thats the top ten,more or less

oh man, not sure where to start... first ones to come to mind are the cliched classics
catcher in the rye
the great gatsby
the bell jar

and then
the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers
independence day - richard ford
the raw shark texts - steven hall
the vintner's luck - elizabeth knox

i guess these aren't my 'top 7', just the first 7 great books to come to mind

the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers

: D

i should have just put 'anything by mccullers'. can u believe she wrote that at like, 21 or something ridiculous?????

as in the sciences, writers often peak young :(

ulysses - joyce
microserfs - coupland
rings of saturn - sebald
wind in the willows - grahame
the code of the woosters - wodehouse

lolita, bell jar and camera lucida.

The Red and the Black - Stendhal

I so much want to read this. But I've been too tired to read any "good" books. :-( I continue to read but most of it is junk, really, like the Sookie Stackhouse books I'm zipping through. I kinda feel I've lost it, but fuck it I love Sookie (and other popcorn)

The last serious book I read was probably half a year ago? The Master and Margarita. Fantastic!

as in the sciences, writers often peak young :(

-- ian, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:18 AM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

What? Whenever they put out a list of "best young writers" the writers are usually in their thirties. And lots of writers just keep getting better as they get older.

Schklovsky, for one. Dude did his best work in his eighties, I think.

Some of them just seem to do laps around their readers as they get older, like Joyce and Beckett.

Melville was kind of like the Duchamp of writing. Gave it up and then when he's old, bam, HEY GUYS, DID YOU FORGET THAT I'M A GENIUS?

Robert Musil never gave up.

Gordon Lish - bad-ass old man.

Shakespeare died pretty young, but he was doing bad-ass work in the later part of his career.

Jacque the Fatalist came in the last part of Diderot's career.

Philip Dick did a lot of his best work at the end of his career.

Some writers just give up the hackery game as they get older. Michael Bishop did this, for instance.

Could go on.

the long goodbye -- raymond chandler
red harvest -- dashiell hammett
sun also rises -- hemingway
jesus son -- denis johnson
girl in landscape -- jonathan lethem

OK, let's get this out of the way: Ulysses, Crime & Punishment/The Bros K, Moby Dick

Lolita - Nabokov
The Name of the Rose - Eco
The Erasers - Robbe-Grillet
The Big Sleep - Chandler
The Moonstone - W. Collins
The Castle - Kafka
Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - RL Stevenson
The Intuitionist - C. Whitehead

more..

probably the 10 worst or most odious novels I can remember reading - some repeat offenders:

Carter, Wise Children
Lawrence, Women In Love
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Amis, Yellow Dog
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Amis, London Fields
Banville, The Book of Evidence
Banville, Ghosts
Banville, Athena

^ guess which is in my top ten

if only that list had room for White Teeth

Pynchon's pile of crap is in most people's top 10 it seems

come to think of it, the 2200 pages of Proust I've read deserve to be down in that bad company also

Mine would be total cliche, Joyce, Nabokov, Pynchon's pile of crap, I might throw Andre Breton's Nadja in there with the caveat that it's not a novel. Ooh, and Tom Jones. I think I need to read that again this summer. Shit, Gulliver's Travels isn't really a novel either but it wants in this list with Tale of a Tub to keep it company.

i rep for banville

Hey pinefox is there a post where you explain your lovably random prejudices? Mean the lovable bit seriously but Pynchon aside Banville seems such an unlikely hate figure unless it's his sheer technicianship that drives you off?

it's not about technique at all -- though the writing in that trilogy is utterly unbelievably second-hand mid-period Beckett, too much a pastiche not to be embarrassing.