A Question for "older" readers

[AuntShecky]

Here's a question for those who fall into two overlapping
categories, dismayingly referred to as "Baby Boomers"
and (soon-to-be)"Senior Citizens." If you've read hundreds of tomes, from your beginnings way, way back
at school, what three books do you remember the most and why?

[motherhubbard]

I am sooooo happy that I don't fall into this category, and tickled that my husband does! :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Virgil]

I am sooooo happy that I don't fall into this category, and tickled that my husband does! :lol: :lol: :lol:

Well I unfortunately do. :lol: :lol: There are too many great books I've read to single out three. I've always said that Dante's Divine Comedy is the most perfect work ever written. Of course most of Shakespeare's plays are fabulous. I'm currently reading Don Quixote and find it outststanding. There's three there for you, but i could and will change my mind in five minutes.

[stlukesguild]

Ack! Virgil! I'm not quite at the senior citizen level (a few decades to go) but we seem to have some rather similar reading preferences here. The Divine Comedy is certainly one of the (if not THE) most perfect works ever written and it only gets better with each reading. I also concur on Shakespeare's plays (a single favorite? Impossible! Hamlet? King Lear? MacBeth? I also agree with you on Don Quixote. Perhaps the first and greatest novel ever. One of the greatest tales of friendship and bibliophilia (among so much else) in literature. After these? The Bible, certainly. A virtual encyclopedia of poetry, visionary prose, and brilliantly told narrative. Milton's Paradise Lost... perhaps the most marvelous poetic achievement in the English language. Among the 20th century writers I would probably lean toward J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino and Kafka as the most memorable (in spite of my love of Faulkner, Yeats, Joyce, Rilke, Montale, etc...) I think Kafka, even more than Joyce, epitomized the absurdity of modernist existence. Calvino is simply one of the most magical and immediately accessible of great writers in ages for all his modernist and post-modernist mannerisms... and Borges? Certainly Borges tore apart and broadened incredibly every notion I had about what writing... fiction entailed to a degree not matched by any other writer (with the possible exception of Lawrence Sterne)... besides which, it is a known fact that no bibliophile can read Borges without becoming a Borghesian.:)

[Pendragon]

Couldn't possibly chose just three. If it were three I abhor, yes, I could do that! Almost anything by Twain, Doyle, or H. Rider Haggard. Then there's Stephenson, Vernem H,G, Wells, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Don Quixote, Heriot, Asimov, Del Rey, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Forsyth, Ian Fleming, Rex Stout, Dashiell Halmet, Erzra Pound, Odgen Nash, Lewis Caroll, Wordsworth, Burns, Oscar Wilde, O. Henry, pulp magazine writers from the 1930's-1950's, Edgar Rice Burroughs, I couldn't decide, see?

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