Albums, Fucks, Songs, and now... novels

[BruceSter]

Hi there,

as I said, another pointless favorites thing... name your favorite five novels.

5 - Thomas Block, Orbit
4 - Douglas Kennedy, The Big Picture
3 - Harry Bingham, Sweet talking money
2 - Nelson DeMille, Up Country
1 - Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons


Bruce

 

[hippyscum]

5. George Orwell - Down And Out In Paris And London
4. Bruce Campbell - If Chins Could Kill: Confessions Of A B-Movie Actor
3. Hunter S Thomson - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
2. Terry Pratchett - Sourcery
1. George Orwell - Animal Farm

My mind seems to be somewhat against reading un-pop-culture related books.

 

[jakeatolla]

Ahh Jeeze, here we go again.
Well why not,

in no particular order,

Red Dragon ( U know, the guy who wrote silence of the lambs)
And of course , Silence of the Lambs
Only Begotten Daughter James Morrow
The Dune Series frank Herbert
Ring World
Anything by Frederick Pohl , Namely The Comming of the Quantum Cats

 

[absinthium]

No particular order here...

Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (yeah, it's technically a novella, but I still love it, so eat my ass in a coat closet.)
...and
Anthem by Ayn Rand, because it was the first book I ever loved.

 

[ashlar]

5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
4. Violin - Anne Rice
3. The Private memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
2. The Witching Hour Series by Anne Rice
1. American Gods by Neil Gaiman

 

[steve319]

My list fluctuates and changes more than my dean's moods. Plus it's very subjective and dependent on where I was/am in life when I read it and how it resonates with me.

But, as of 9:29 PM EST on Friday, June 3rd, 2005, (off the top of my head) my list is:

5> Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey
4> Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
3> Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2> Beloved by Toni Morrison
1> A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

If this topic hangs around long enough, I might end up coming in to amend the list.

(Hey, absinthium, I read Perfume a long, long time ago and remember loving it. Is it a recent read or one that has stayed with you? And Ashlar, what did you love most about American Gods? I've not read it but have considered it.)

 

[naughty]

HI,

After just speaking to Steve I can now very easily give a list of Favorites this is by no means conclusive but I will randomly pick some of my favorites.

Washington Square by Henry James
Cane River by Latita Tademy
Slammerkin by Emma Donohoe
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Bailey's Cafe by Gloria Naylor

I hate being limited to five! So I am going to cheat
My five runners up! LOL!

Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice
Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough
Fox's Earth by Anne River's Siddons
The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

I too thought Perfume was wonderful as well, Absinthium!.

 

[zzorus]

Here are 5 favourites with a common locale: India

Paul Scott, Staying On
Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
J.G.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
Susan Kurosawa, Coronation Talkies

The first three have had excellent movie/televison adaptions. The fourth was a Booker prize winner. The fifth was published in 2004.

zzorus

 

[SpeedoGuy]

Stranger to the Ground by Richard Bach
Papillon by Henri Charriere
Chesapeake by James Michener
Catch - 22 by Joseph Heller
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

best supporting novels:

Moby Dick by Herman Mellville
Noble House by James Clavell
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

 

[headbang8]

This is novels, right? Not memoir, biography, collections, non-fiction, etc...

1. George Eliot, Middlemarch
2. Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
3. Philip Roth, The Great American Novel
4. Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
5. William Wharton, A Midnight Clear

Runners up...

6. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
7. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
8. Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
9. Mario Varga Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
10. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Idiot

There's a whole gay novel schtick we might save for another time...

 

[cypher13]

Herman Melville - Moby Dick - the best American novel, I think. By turns funny, tragic and always illustrative of the human condition. Here is where Ilearned the lesson "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury . Would you believe, Oprah's Book of the Month for July...after As I Lay Dying and before Light in August....these'll shake up some cobwebs in millions of skulls! It might get people reading Faulkner.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment - Did anyone else ever peer deeper into the human soul - or lack of one? It is almost like the reptile collection at the Bronx Zoo....repulsive, yes...but you just HAVE to look and in so looking, you often see much of yourself.

Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep - Chandler was a slumming angel, wandering the boulevards of Los Angeles when Los Angeles was a corrupt town, perched between its wild west/wildcatting/tinseltown origins and the last vestiges of the Jazz Age and gangersterism while on the cusp of newfound riches from the war mixed in with much racial tension. Read his earlier stuff first.

Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me - about ten-fifteen years ago, pulpy noir novels were rediscovered (mainly to pad publishers' lists) just as hard boiled fiction was rediscovered about twenty years before that, for the same reason. Literature either stands or falls on it own merits; doesn't matter who wrote it or its genre. As with hard boiled fiction, noir was, in anything, over-appreciated for awhile there, but this one....this one is very good. Dialogue is wooden, characters predictable and you can tell he was getting paid by the word...no matter...when Lou Ford kills the kid he is holding in the cell, you truly peer into the heart of darkness.....

Finally.....that bane of English students everywhere.....

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake - it looks impenetrable and it is...but when you get into it....when you don't try to understand it, but you just sit back and dig it, it is perhaps the funniest and most profound book ever written. It's all a big riddle, like Pynchon, but unlike Pynchon, when you solve it, you feel it was worth the effort.

 

[ashlar]

Originally posted by steve319@Jun 3 2005, 08:34 PM
... Ashlar, what did you love most about American Gods? I've not read it but have considered it.)

[post=317703]Quoted post[/post]​

Well, I absolutely ADORE Neil Gaimen to begin with. Had I not been restricted to novels, his graphic novels "The Sandman" and "Death" would have been first on my list. American Gods was the first novel of his I chose to read due to a reccomendation by a close friend with excellent taste in all sorts of literature.

The story line and plot I found to be quite intteresting, and I love the personalities that Neil gives the Various gods and goddess' as he writes about them. The ideas he presents on the lives of gods and goddess' and their existance paralells my own on many levels. The god Thoth is represented with a sense of humor that kills me and Anubis is written as a very mellow character instead of violent. I'm not sure how to explaine it ... all i can say is it struck me as believeable and somehow ... right.

 

[steve319]

LOVED Catch-22! I want to amend my list already!

And thanks, Naughty, for posting your list. Now I won't have to remember the names of the books you recommended--I can just cut and paste from your post!

It's true that Naughty and I talked on the phone for hours again last night. But rest assured that we didn't spend it talking about all of you guys behind your backs....

(some of you maybe, but not all )

Great to talk with you, Kim, as always. You're a very engaging and charming person.

Ashlar, I read The Doll's House graphic novel years ago as part of a post-modern fiction class, believe it or not. Very textured approach he has. And some of those images have stayed with me to this day *shiver*! And I remember reading something that he and Terry Pratchett did together (maybe?) that I enjoyed at the time but hasn't stuck with me.

From your recommendation, it sounds like this one is great too.

*adding it to the shopping list*

 

[ashlar]

Originally posted by steve319@Jun 5 2005, 12:38 AM
Ashlar, I read The Doll's House graphic novel years ago as part of a post-modern fiction class, believe it or not. Very textured approach he has. And some of those images have stayed with me to this day *shiver*! And I remember reading something that he and Terry Pratchett did together (maybe?) that I enjoyed at the time but hasn't stuck with me.

From your recommendation, it sounds like this one is great too.

*adding it to the shopping list*

[post=317963]Quoted post[/post]​

The Doll's House was a good one but not my favorite in the series. My fav. in the series was "Brief Lives" and "The Kindly Ones" .. "A Game of You" was also quite good .. HELL they were all bloody brilliant! God love The Sandman and Death graphic novels.

He did do a book with Pratchett titled "Good Omens." I've not read it yet, nor have I heard much about it.

 

[headbang8]

Originally posted by steve319@Jun 5 2005, 02:38 PM
LOVED Catch-22! I want to amend my list already!

[post=317963]Quoted post[/post]​

I loved the second two-thirds of Catch 22. He begins with the Texan and the Soldier in White, the two dullest characters (especially the Soldier in White for obvious reasons&#33 It was Heller's first novel--indeed--first writing of any kind--and it took him a few chapters to get into it.


Ashlar, sad to share that I read Good Omens and hated it. Some interesting ideas, but Pratchet's prose style is too twee for my taste. But don't let me influence you. My fag hag loved it, and I read it only because she insisted, so I may not have been receptive.

hb8

 

[steve319]

Originally posted by cypher13@Jun 4 2005, 01:35 PM
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury . Would you believe, Oprah's Book of the Month for July...after As I Lay Dying and before Light in August....these'll shake up some cobwebs in millions of skulls! It might get people reading Faulkner.

Love Faulkner too! Those sentences are like a journey (through an altered state). Now I want to add Light In August to my favorites list too.

Good thing Oprah didn't pick Faulkner's Sanctuary for the summer series. *brrrrrr* That has to be one of the most bleak and sad things I've ever read. (Great, though&#33