What are your all-time favorite novels??

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and believe I've narrowed mine down to a top five:

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet

I am pretty sure that once people start posting theirs I'll want to revise mine.

Anyway . . . what are your top 5?

i love our lady of the flowers!

A Murder Is Announced by agatha christie

i've been meaning to read Our Lady Of The Flowers! we have it here

OLotF is great. You should definitely read it!

harbl <3

Moby Dick
Gravity's Rainbow
The Trial
Portnoy's Complaint
Journey to the End of the Night

I was tempted to put The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace to look cool, but I'm not sure how much I enjoyed them, tho I do admire them very much, esp W&P.

i am trying to think but i forget a lot of books that i read. i was going to read war and peace this summer because i liked anna karenina.

x-post See, if I had done top 10 then The Trial, Gravity's Rainbow and quite possibly Portnoy's Complaint would have made it in.

oh

madame bovary
old goriot

i've read the first 4 on your list enbb, i love hardy but jude is maybe just a little too ott tragic, even for hardy

old goriot is great

i want to read it again

germinal

what's the best Hardy? i LOVED the woodlanders but have read nothing else yet.

gah all the books i like are super-old french books. i never read anything new. but it's ok!

i've hit the point where i can barely remember anything about the books i read 20 years ago, except whether i liked them or not : \

Jude is incredibly tragic but still beautiful.

See this is another reason this thread is great. I haven't read either of Harbl's so I now have two more on my "to read" list.

My favorite novels today:

The Portrait of a Lady
Women in Love
Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
The Mayor of Casterbridge

mayor of casterbridge, far from the madding crowd
xposts

i liked wuthering heights more than i thought i would

what's the best Hardy? i LOVED the woodlanders but have read nothing else yet

The Woodlanders is one of his very best, yeah. I love the scene in which Winterbourne hides in the trees while his lover calls his name.

OK, yeah The Mayor of Casterbridge would also have made my top ten as would Tender is the Night which I preferred to the Great Gatsby.

Midnight's Children is one i forgot.

im gonna check out far from the madding crowd since im pretty sure i read mayor of casterbridge in high school....

And all of a sudden my top 5 has become a top 9 possibly 10. lol.

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"
Fante "Ask The Dust"
Doctorow "Billy Bathgate"
Dick "Martian Time Slip"
Cain "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

no order, first five that came to mind as being candidates for "favorite."

this thread is perfect timing because i just recently decided to pick up my novel reading to counteract dissertation ennui...was gonna make a second go at Against the Day, which I never finished.

Calvino "The Baron In The Trees"

Yes! I thought of this one too.

The Maltese Falcon - Hammett

i can't boil it down to five, but i will always rep for
Pierre, or The Ambiguities
McTeague

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...

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
6. The Trial - Kafka
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
8. Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
9. The Maltese Falcon - Hammett

ok - top 9 not committing to a top 10 . . . yet

was also thinking of maybe the Collector by John Fowles.

oh yeah, Under the Volcano is another one

I'm going to go look at my bookshelf and see if I can't identify at least one fav book by a woman.

brb

there was another genet i never finished that i thought would be my all time favorite and i can't remember which one it was :-/

oh! the miracle of the rose

i don't read women much. i really enjoyed most of the "Portable" Dorothy Parker though.

i have kind of the same problem, i mostly read books by dudes. i need to work on that. i remember really liking "a tree grows in brooklyn" when i was like 14 or 15 though. that might be an all-time favorite.

The Waves
The Man Who Loved Children
The Ghost Writer
The Folded Leaf
Lincoln

back and nope - I got nothing on the female tip - sad

I do however have a #10!

1. Pale Fire - Nabokov
2. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
3. White Noise - DeLillo
4. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
5. Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
6. The Trial - Kafka
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
8. Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
9. The Maltese Falcon - Hammett
10. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

Now that my list is finalized I'm probably going to get a tattoo of all these stacked on top of one another somewhere on my person.

Wise Blood
The Optimist's Daughter
Persuasion

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is great. I do like some stuff by women writers but just not enough for it to make the top 10.

What's wrong with you people?! What about George Eliot? If Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda were the only two novels in existence, literature would still thrive.

ha "women writers"

oh yeah i don't think it's top 5. i have a hard time ranking things though.

Me too! I've actually been thinking about this for days.

george eliot is a girl?!?!?!?

lol jk

as I lay dying and wise blood are both awesome.

harry crews "car"

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor

Come sit beside me.

Always on my mind:

good standard

xps to NV I was thinking of reading Story of the Stone! Should I?

your writing has kind of a Swift-y vibe, NV

Can I recommend a great little novel? Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is a perfect one...it rewards an immediate second read and is v short so that’s doable.

gyac - I'd say yes, definitely. nb it's looong and I read the modern Penguin translation, the older public domain translations I've seen add layers of florid English to the difficulty. It's a really moving family epic of loss and transience with extra Buddhism and magic sprinkled into the mix, and it's a really absorbing world.

horseshoe aw shucks thank you I admit I shamelessly steal Swift's rhetorical moves all the time, he still makes me laugh and he invented that kind of dry sometimes meanness that I fall well short of but can't help aping

Also I'm bookmarking Ghachar Ghochar

Also I love the horrified recognition in Swift's long books or "novels" when he realises he's ultimately satirising himself

In Search of Lost Time
The Brothers Karamazov
Middlemarch
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Jeeves novels
Pride & Prejudice
The Book of the New Sun
Le Grand Meaulnes
Washington Square
Moby-Dick

I said Ulysses earlier itt, but feel like I was fooling myself in retrospect. I need to give it a lot more time at least.

Hooray!

Yes I always think of myself of disliking 18th century lit, but I forget Swift; he is great!

off the top of my head

catch-22
lord of the rings
cat's cradle
coming through slaughter
master & margarita
ragtime
siddhartha

A Dance to the Music of Time - Powell
Austerlitz - Sebald
Hangover Square - Hamilton
The Trial - Kafka
Moby-Dick - Melville
Middlemarch - Eliot
Hav - Morris
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Conan-Doyle
Five Red Herrings - Sayers
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
The Good Soldier Švejk - Hašek

Books I keep coming back to:

Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Wharton, The House of Mirth
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy
Delany, Dhalgren
Gibson, Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition/Spook Country/Zero History)
Hammett, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse

I love a lot of 18th century prose: Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Gibbon. Jane Austen feels closer to 18th than 19th for me, English in that era feels looser and more fluid and just more fun tbh

an easy squeezy threesy:

Kolyma Tales by Shalamov

Moby Dick

Cat's Cradle

i am trying to think but i forget a lot of books that i read. i was going to read war and peace this summer because i liked anna karenina.

― harbl, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:16 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

two guesses :(

Austen is what happens when the 18th century FIGURES ITSELF OUT imo. I get why people like Fielding and Sterne, but they’re not for me.

Give me a Victorian doorstop any day. I need to read Our Mutual Friend.

I love Our Mutual Friend but hate the ending, which is what kept it off my list.

Oscar and Lucinda
Midnight’s Children
Glamorama
Vanity Fair
Kindred

and my forever favourite

Lolita

i do love a good Dickens too but i think of him as having his 18th century roots showing, especially early on, especially Fielding

19th century stuff that could've should've made my list would include

Bleak House
Wuthering Heights
Mary Barton maybe?
À rebours

love Glamorama and yeah Lolita of course

surprised The Trial seems the universal Kafka pick, I've always rated The Castle higher (however unfinished)

anyway this is impossible...Moby Dick and The Quixote are my two "favorite" books but almost seems like they shouldn't count, they're looming up there like a couple of stone tablets

ten (almost) pre-war:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
J.K. Huysmans, À rebours
F.R. Wolf, Hadrian VII
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Henry Green, Party Going
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Albert Camus, The Stranger

xps to NV we need to talk Glamorama sometime, maybe tomorrow?

NV <3 Against Nature is sublime, I don't know how many times I've read that book or just picked it up and read thirty pp in the middle

xp yeah!

not xp also yeah! i think about monochrome feasts a lot

erm that's Rolfe (Baron Corvo), above

ten post-war

Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Nabokov, Lolita
Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes
Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works
Robert Coover, Universal Baseball Association...
Harry Mathews, Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Marguerite Dumas, The Lover
Peter Handke, Goalie's Anxiety at The Penalty Kick
Don Delillo, The Names

A Fan's Notes is a good pick, tho i've only read it once partly because it touches too close to home and i'm thinking i might've lost my copy

Masters of Atlantis - Charles Portis
Warlock - Oakley Hall
Cogan's Trade - George V. Higgins
Jesus' Son; Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
Fat City - Leonard Gardner
Housekeeping; Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
Moby-Dick - Melville
The Long Goodbye - Chandler

yeah xp that can be dicey if you aren't in a good place

Exley evokes that state of mind and the bar-life state of mind so well

oh i found it phew

a real flash of brilliance and then a real booze induced fall-off...the one after this made me kinda sad

ten faves form the past twenty+ years

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers
Vladimir Makanin, The Baize Covered Table With Decanter
W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn
Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eat Creeps
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Jim Crace, Being Dead
Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

Oh man! I'll just go with ones that I think have not been mentioned (but I'm not going to search on the titles to make sure, because I want to mention them anyway:
I was forced to read 1984 in Ninth Grade, but immediately and all through there was a lot more vs. Cold War Adult World than Communism Does Not Pay---also in high school, Nabokov's The Defense, about dorky chess prodigy, v. relatable to to non-chess prodigy me, who also dug The Crying of Lot 49, with paranoid pleasures x the fab Mrs. Maas, which spoke to the 60s for sure, ditto though set a little earlier, V., incl. things I hoped to get up to, yo-yo-ing etc., plus more scary funky Mid-Century wreckage and piecework palaces in the twilight.
in 70s-early 80s: Bramner's The Gay Place, Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers (esp. struck by way women have to make their ways through these male preoccupations and stumblefests).
More recently:
The Way We Live Now
The Idiot
2666 (was mentioned)
Swann's Way
My Brilliant Friend
Two more in the Gilead sequence:
Home and Lila

And The Professor's House!

great weird book w/ that left turn into the desert

Cather rules.

that is my favorite Cather, and yes, she is great. she was sort of terrible? but her writing is beautiful.

Hard to resist A Lost Lady too.

*Brammer's* The Gay Place)(three stories, interlocking around a gas giant, unseen, always felt, who has been auto-compared to LBJ but I go w those who say he seems more like Earl Long, the hardest workin' playin' man in tightrope political show biz)

Member of the Wedding and The Moviegoer too.

xps yes Cather for me is one who has several that could make a list...same for me w/ Bernhard and Nabokov, on a given day any one of four or five novels from either might be a favorite

Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God both blew me away, in diff directions.

at a certain point mine would have been

richard powers, the gold bug variations
bruce duffy, the world as i found it
mark helprin, a soldier of the great war

but the latter i read before i knew helprin was a fascist : /

For sure faves:

To The Lighthouse
Moby-Dick
Frankenstein
Crime & Punishment
Ragtime
Black Swan Green

Stuff I would have repped for once upon a time but not sure now/would have to revisit:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Cat's Cradle

Five favourites that haven't been mentioned:

Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (or Queer, or Cities of the Red Night)
Thomas McGuane, The Bushwhacked Piano
Hubert Selby, The Room

I think The Room is the only Selby novel I've never read. I love The Demon.

The Demon starts off great, at a lower pitch of intensity than most of his work, but when the Pope comes into it it goes overboard for me. Selby doesn't have the wider range, but his focus is very sharp. There's more to him than just Last Exit to Brooklyn.

I see I already listed mine way upthread. Since then I've only added one for sure, and that's Against the Day.

But, to put another spin on it, here are the 10 books I've probably reread the most:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Cat’s Eye
Lord of the Rings
Breaking and Entering (Williams)
Northanger Abbey
Nine Tailors (Sayers)
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Comedians (Greene)
Rubicon Beach
The Last Gentleman