Wayne C. Booth! This reminds me when I was still in the habit of reading the readings my sister got assigned for her lit classes. She always had the better teachers.
― youn, Monday, 5 May 2008 01:23 (sixteen years ago) link
15 -- almost all read just-post-college in my early/mid 20s. was this list drawn in the early 80s?
Henderson The Rain King - Bellow 28. The Coup - John Updike
these are weird, atypical, really perverse choices from these guys. and both these books would be decried as racist if they were published today.
― m coleman, Monday, 5 May 2008 01:30 (sixteen years ago) link
"Abe's 'Woman in the Dunes' is, frankly, pretty daft, but quite a lot of fun anyway."
i didn't think it was fun! i thought it was scary! (i liked it a bunch too)
i'm a big bellow fan and henderson is easily my least favorite novel.
― scott seward, Monday, 5 May 2008 02:46 (sixteen years ago) link
I have read only six, and parts of two others. Love the look of this list, though. It gives me things to look for during my next library/bookstore visit that I'd never have thought of before (Sexual Perversity in Chicago...and some mischievous part of me wants to read the Collected Stories of John Cheever, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor concurrently).
― Z S, Monday, 5 May 2008 04:41 (sixteen years ago) link
"Fun" I guess I meant in the sense that it's an intriguing idea well done--just that it's also quite daft when you step back and think about it. But I really did like it. I've got Abe's 'Face of Another' which I haven't yet read. The blurb makes it sound as though the story was nicked for that Mel Gibson movie about (Man Without a Face or something like that), but with added Frankensteinisms.
― James Morrison, Tuesday, 6 May 2008 01:01 (sixteen years ago) link
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2015/09/borgess-picks-an-eclectic-library-for-you-a-list-of-74-must-reads/
1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini23. The Three Impostors24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert35. Travels by Marco Polo36. Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herodotus45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling47. Vathek by William Beckford48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna52. The Thousand and One Nights53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz62. Complete Poetry by William Blake63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe66. The Aeneid by Virgil67. Stories by Voltaire68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson73. The Book of the Dead74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn
― scott seward, Friday, 11 September 2015 19:12 (eight years ago) link
now i'm trying to remember if i already posted this list somewhere else a million years ago...oh well...
― scott seward, Friday, 11 September 2015 19:19 (eight years ago) link
Heh timely revive, just the other day I was thinking to myself I wonder if there's any footage of Dapper Don extant, and discovered this on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjokr7W1ixk
― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Friday, 11 September 2015 19:19 (eight years ago) link
I was amazed by how unTexan Don B sounds.
― Stevie T, Friday, 11 September 2015 19:23 (eight years ago) link
Borges' fav movie was west side story
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, 11 September 2015 19:38 (eight years ago) link
great choice!
― scott seward, Friday, 11 September 2015 19:42 (eight years ago) link
i wonder if he was a fan of The Warriors.
― scott seward, Friday, 11 September 2015 19:43 (eight years ago) link
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
Love what Borges says in his Paris Review interview: "I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James"
― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Friday, 11 September 2015 20:02 (eight years ago) link
I think I saw that list, or a very similar list, somewhere before, and along with it came someone's mention that there were zero women on the list, and that comment sparked a series of other comments that demonstrated that Borges didn't respect women at all. Probably common knowledge to most, but it was news to me, knocking him down from godlike genius to genius with terrible flaws.
― 1996 ball boy (Karl Malone), Saturday, 12 September 2015 02:21 (eight years ago) link
He was a big promoter of his friend Silvina Ocampo, but perhaps she was the only one he liked? Or the fact they knew each other meant he couldnt ignore her.
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Sunday, 13 September 2015 11:16 (eight years ago) link
Googling "Borges Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz" doesn't bring anything unfortunately - would've thought Borges was into her poetry (they are similarly voracious readers/live in libraries etc)
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 13 September 2015 11:36 (eight years ago) link
are there any syllabi of exclusively women's writing? can prob crowdsource one here, I guess wd contain at least 1 of didion, jean rhys, moore, spark, jansson, elizabeth bowen, highsmith, ferrante, le guin, munro, elizabeth bishop, mccullers, woolf, comyns, murdoch, o'connor, adler
― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Sunday, 13 September 2015 12:20 (eight years ago) link
i should read some woolf someday. probably. i should, right? i probably should.
― scott seward, Sunday, 13 September 2015 17:02 (eight years ago) link
i think i did read a room of one's own.
― scott seward, Sunday, 13 September 2015 17:04 (eight years ago) link
when all is said and done, i'm a pretty trad dad. katherine mansfield 4 lyfe.
― scott seward, Sunday, 13 September 2015 17:05 (eight years ago) link
btw scott, do I remember you like Thea Astley? If so, you might well like Elizabeth Harrower and Jessica Anderson, two other Australian writers of similar sensibility and style and sporadic bad-temperedness
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Monday, 14 September 2015 01:39 (eight years ago) link
are there any syllabi of exclusively women's writing?
yeah, i think i remembered where i first saw borges' list, which prompted this:
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/74-books-curated-by-female-creatives.html
― 1996 ball boy (Karl Malone), Monday, 14 September 2015 02:12 (eight years ago) link
Reminder that in The Name of the Rose Eco made the blind venerable Jorge of Burgos the villain
― Toploader on the road, unite and take over (Bananaman Begins), Wednesday, 14 June 2023 12:41 (ten months ago) link