Recommendations.

[sixsmith]

Hi all,


I've something of an annual tradition whereby, having saved some money throughout the previous year (or not having saved any), i head to the city and purchase 20-30 books at once. Given that i've moved to a dark corner of the provinces, it has become a crucial event on my cultural calendar. Friday is the day.

Anyway, i tend to be a bit homogenous in my reading. Looking at my book shelf now i see a lot of contemporary American fiction (post war), a decent amount of contemporary and post-colonial British fiction a fair smattering of classics (i'm covered for the Russians, 19th century Britain) and a number of volumes of criticism. There's a lot more there but these would be the main groups. I was hoping i might solicit some recommendations? It can be anything at all that people have enjoyed and anything people think may expand and benefit my reading (non-fiction included). I'd really appreciate people's thoughts.

Many thanks.

(Poetry is also very welcome although any suggestions to this end should be mindful of the fact that i am true a poetry novice)

[March Hare]

Sounds like you're covered on the Americans, Russians and Brits. How about the French? Stendhal, Balzac, Zola to name a few. Or the Boom authors of Latin America, e.g. Garcia Marquez.

Neat tradition, by the way.

[My name is red]

One hundred years of solitude-Garcia Marquez
A confederacy of dunces-John Kennedy Toole
The white castle-Orhan Pamuk
Candid-Voltaire
The Fur coated Madonna-Sabahattin Ali
Stranger-Albert Camus
The fountainhead-Ayn Rand
Hello Sadness-François Sagan

Of course depends on who you are and what you like but the blurbs could help

[billl]

I'll just throw this out there: Thucydides' History of the Pelopennesian War
It sounds like you don't have a lot of 'Ancient' Classics, so here'd be a cool non-fiction one. I recommend it simply because I had such a great time reading it in a history course at the university. So, I have to admit that, if you DID get this book, it might be kind of overwhelming without also having a look at the Wikipedia page for this war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War) for the big picture. But there are some GREAT speeches in it, and timeless lessons about potential pitfalls of democracy (pandering, short-sightedness) and overextending resources, and a whole host of international diplomacy stuff, and interesting (real-life) characters, everything. And it's just amazing that someone did such a great job of history so many years ago, and that we still see the same stuff happening again and again after all these years. A lot of it is like watching a war documentary maybe (amassing forces, tactics, alliances, strategy, etc.), but it's also kind of like a Bob Woodward take on things, at times, compelling reading.
So, to sum up this recommendation:
reason for caution: I might not have enjoyed it if I hadn't been in the class. I think I would have, but who knows. I certainly wouldn't have tried it if it weren't for the class, I'm pretty sure of that, though. Also, your library seems focussed on more recent stuff, we don't know each other, why the heck would I come up with this?
reason to consider it: well, it maybe starts off and ends a bit slow, but, on the whole, it is amazingly easy to read, and is pretty compelling non-fiction. I found it pretty cool to read something from ancient Greece that sort of resembled modern history. And, if you haven't read any stuff like this, it could be a great change of pace. And you could go around and tell people that you're reading Thucydides! Really, to be honest, some parts I sort of skimmed, I think some parts I never even read at all, I just relied on the professor to cover that stuff ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War#Outline_of_the_wo rk could help you get through some of the early stuff, for example)--but there are other parts that I read again and again. This is definitely a risky recommendation, despite all the passion behind it. I later read some Herodotus, but couldn't get into it as much, although some people prefer that to Thucydides.

I also recommened Egil's Saga (an Icelandic Saga, sort of pseudo non-fiction about Vikings who were a little too wild for the Vikings back in Norway). I read it in a BIG collection of Icelandic Sagas, and some of the other sagas are really good, too, but I don't want to recommend more than one.

Emerson's essays are my favorite essays, and a collection might be a good book to spend 10 to 20 pages with at a time. (His English, especially punctuation and sentence structure, took me a little getting used to.)

For late twentieth century fiction, I'll promote these (but you might have them already):

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine
Martin Amis's London Fields

Well, those are some things that I tend to evangelize about. In fact, you might want to stay away from them, now that I've over-hyped them--there's probably no way you could be satisfied with them at this point. I don't know, it's a delicate balancing act, that's for sure.

[kelby_lake]

Lolita, I reckons

[PortugalWillie]

I agree with 'My name is Red'

Albert Camus - The Stranger

[Adderhead]

Whenever I go book shopping, I just go all out and find as many classics as I can. I recomend Atlus Shrugged.

[Pecksie]

What about some wonderful Latin American writing? Here are a few recommendations:

FICTION:

1. Anything by Jorge L. Borges (Argentine)
2. The short stories of Julio Cortázar (idem)
3. Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo (Mexican)
4. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian)
5. The Truce, by Mario Benedetti (Uruguayan)
6. Any novel by Juan Carlos Onetti (idem)
7. The Death of Honorio, by Miguel Otero Silva (Venezuelan)

POETRY:

1. Anything by Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentine)
2. Anything by Olga Orozco (idem)
3. Anything by Borges (idem)
4. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda (Chilean)
5. Anything by Líber Falco (Uruguay)

Don't be discouraged if some of these are difficult to find in English translation. It may take some time, but eventually you'll find them.

Good luck with your purchases!

[stlukesguild]

J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions or Labyrinths
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
Franz Kafka- Collected Stories
Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game
Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Jose Saramago- Blindness
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera
Camus- The Stranger
Flaubert- Madame Bovary
Firdowsi- The Shahnameh
anon.-The Arabian Night's Entertainments
S.Y Agnon- Selected Stories
Isaac Babel- Collected Stories

Just some quality suggestions to add a bit of a mix to your reading (although I kept the focus upon 19th and 20th century writers). I've also noticed that you mention nothing of poetry or other genre beyond the novel. I would suggest something in that area... perhaps Baudelaire, Verlaine, William Blake, Keats, Holderlin, Rilke, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Federigo Garcia-Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, T.S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, Rafael Alberti, W.B. Yeats, etc...

[stlukesguild]

The fountainhead-Ayn Rand

I recomend Atlus Shrugged.

Yep! Both make for a great way to start the Barbecue.:thumbs_up

[mortalterror]

My top shelf:
1.Moby Dick
2.Madame Bovary
3.Huckleberry Finn
4.The Great Gatsby
5.1984
6.Lolita
7.On the Road
8.For Whom the Bell Tolls
9.A Moveable Feast
10.The Old Man and the Sea
11.Catch-22
12.The Catcher in the Rye
13.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
14.Ovid's Metamorphosis
15.Dante's Inferno
16.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
17.Flowers of Evil
18.The Wasteland
19.The Oresteia
20.Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle
21.The Complete Aristophanes
22.Seneca's Tragedies
23.The Complete Shakespeare
24.Racine's Tragedies
25.Eight Dramas by Calderon
26.Waiting For Godot
27.Plato's Republic
28.Montaigne's Essays

and throw in Leopardi's Poems, Buchner's Plays, and Satyricon for good measure.

[Barbarous]

The fountainhead-Ayn Rand

I recomend Atlus Shrugged.

Yep! Both make for a great way to start the Barbecue.:thumbs_up

I tried to restrain myself from saying something of this sort, that is in case any Ayn Rand Institutional graduates are lurking these forums and could/would send the secret Randian police after me. I mean, she tried to take Kant down, why not a user like myself?!

and I suggest Petersberg by Andrei Bely and The Good Solider Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek


What about some wonderful Latin American writing? Here are a few recommendations:

FICTION:

1. Anything by Jorge L. Borges (Argentine)
2. The short stories of Julio Cortázar (idem)
3. Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo (Mexican)
4. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian)
5. The Truce, by Mario Benedetti (Uruguayan)
6. Any novel by Juan Carlos Onetti (idem)
7. The Death of Honorio, by Miguel Otero Silva (Venezuelan)

POETRY:

1. Anything by Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentine)
2. Anything by Olga Orozco (idem)
3. Anything by Borges (idem)
4. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda (Chilean)
5. Anything by Líber Falco (Uruguay)

Don't be discouraged if some of these are difficult to find in English translation. It may take some time, but eventually you'll find them.

Good luck with your purchases!

Wonderful list, Borges is one of my favorite writers. Check out his other short story collections like The Book of Sand & Shakespeare's Memory which are candles well lit next to the titanic short story collection like Ficciones.

[sixsmith]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts. Now it turns out that i hit a particular 2nd hand book store at a propitious moment and was able to pick up a number of very smart 1st editions (and a couple of others i just couldn't resist). Alas, these entirely comprised of contemporary American and British novels, so funds for the rest of the day (and capacity for growth) were diminished. Nevertheless i considered the exercise a success.

Here's what i got:

Something Happened - Joseph Heller (1st)
Omensetter's Luck - William Gass (1st)
Montaigne: Essays - Michel De Montaigne
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner
Fictions - Borges
Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
Zuckerman unbound - Philip Roth (1st)
Number9Dream - David Mitchell
A House for Mr Biswas - VS Naipul
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Camus: A romance - Elizabeth Hawes ( i too shared a platonic love for all things Camus so had to check this out)
Operation Shylock - Philip Roth
Sabbath's Theatre (1st) - Philip Roth
Success - Martin Amis
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
The Yiddish Policeman's Union - Michael Chabon
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
Teach us to outgrow our madness - Kenzaburo Oe

Didn't snare any poetry so its back to the trusty Norton Anthology plus my small but much loved group of favourites: Yeats, Auden, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Lowell and Dylan Thomas. Need to read more poetry!!!

[billl]

I'm looking forward to hearing how you like all of those, especially the Solzenhitsyn (I've been thinking of checking that out) and The Yiddish Policeman's Union (I liked the Kavalier and Klay one pretty good). Of course, the Mezzanine, as well (and Amis's Success, which I never read).

That was pretty fun of you to give us the chance to think about stuff we liked, and maybe help you with that tradition.

[mono]

Nice choices, sixsmith! In my opinion, I think you will never regret these especially:

Here's what i got:
. . .
Montaigne: Essays - Michel De Montaigne
. . .
Fictions - Borges
. . .
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn
Happy reading! :)

[Brasil]

Literature in spanish:

Octavio Paz (Mexico)
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
Julio Cortázar (Argentina)
Pablo Neruda (Chile)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
José Donoso (Chile)

Literature in portuguese:

José de Alencar (Brazil)
Machado de Assis (Brazil)
Monteiro Lobato (Brazil)
Guimarães Rosa (Brazil)
Manuel Bandeira (Brazil)
Euclides da Cunha (Brazil)

Search for translations to english. There are several opptions.

[Etienne]

Well if you want to focus on say, french, I'll give you a list here:
Balzac - Old Goriot
Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Céline - Travel to the End of the Night
Camus - The Stranger
St-Exupery - Sand, Wind and Stars
Romain Gary - The Roots of Heaven
Stendhal - The Red and the Black
Proust - Swann's Way
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gide - The Counterfeiters
Diderot - Jacques and his Master
Voltaire - Candide
Hugo - Les Miserables
Huysman - À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature for the translation)
Maupassant - Tales (he has plenty of them)
Zola - Germinal
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - Sardonic Tales
Perec - Life: A user's Manual
Aragon (whatever's been translated I guess...)

Poetry
Apolinnaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Valéry, Aragon, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Eluard, St-John Perse, Villon

This should give you a good overview and good clues for further exploration, focusing mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries.