whatt is your literary mind mapping

[heaven'sdoors]

Hi all
one day, an idea came to my mind, indeed I asked myself waht are the novels which had mostly influenced me and intoxicated may soul. I tried not to think a lot in order not to bias my choices. I did a kind of mind mapping. the following are the novels which are gotten in:

- Journey to the End of Night , Louis Ferdinand Céline
- Death on credit, Louis Ferdinand Céline

- In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

- The Pastoral Symphony, André Gide

- The underground, Dostoïevski
- lThe Brothers Karamazov, Dostoïevski
- lThe Possessed, Dostoïevski

-Confessions of a Mask, Yukio mishima

- Point counter point, Aldous huxley
- lEyeless in gaza, Aldous huxley
- Time must have a stop, Aldous huxley
- Chrome yellow, Aldous huxley

- The lady Chatterly's lover, D.H Lawrence

- The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe

-Sheeper, Irving Rosenthal

- The man without qualities, Robert Musil

- The prophet, Gibran Khalil Gibran

I'd like in return to know what is your literary mind mapping, carrying on as in above. Comment on my choices are also welcome.
best regards

[Alexander III]

Im not sure what you are asking, are you asking for our favorite novels ? We already have many lists of those. Are you asking those which had the strongest emotional impact ? That is often the same as our favorite. Also why limit it to novels, most if not all members here read more than novels, I mean poetry and Drama compose about 2/3 of literature, with novels composing only 1/3, so why limit it to novels when most of our favorite works undboutedly are not novels. Or are you looking to find more novels to read, and thus your main interests lies in hearing the favorite novels of others, that would make sense.

Either way after typing all of that, it would be unkind if I did not participate, so il give you my favorite novels.

-Les Miserables
-Sorrows of Young Werther
-The Picture Of Dorian Gray
-The Child Of Pleasure ( also translated as just Pleasure)
-Sentimental Education
-Eugene Onegin

[stlukesguild]

I must agree with Alex... in that the books which have had the biggest impact upon me are probably also those that I would deem as my favorites. Their impact may have much to do with my having read them at the right place and time... and had I not read a particular book then, it may not have had as much resonance. The value of such a book might also owe much to its continual presence in my mind... to return readings... to its obvious presence in other works I've read. I'll refuse to limit my choices to the novel for the simple reason that the novel is far from being the genre that has impacted me the most. Anyway... for better or worse, my list would include (in no particular order):

anon.- The Bible (King James Translation)
Charles Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du mal
William Blake- Collected Poetry and Prose
Dante- The Divine Comedy
Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game, Steppenwolf
J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions, Selected Poems
Franz Kafka- Collected Stories, Tales, Aphorisms, The Trial, The Castle
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
anon.- The Arabian Nights
Lawrence Sterne- Tristam Shandy
Shakespeare- Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, A Midsummer's' Night Dream, etc...
Rousseau- Confessions
Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
Boris Pasternak- My Sister- Life
Ranier Maria Rilke- New Poems, The Book of Images, Duino Elegies, Uncollected Poems
Spenser- The Amoretti (sonnets) and Epithalimion
Goethe- The Sorrows of Young Werther
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland
Aeschylus- The Oresteia
Sophocles- Oedipus Rex
Coleridge- Kublai Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel
John Keats- Collected Poems (Especially Ode on a Grecian Urn)
William Butler Yeats- Collected Poems
Robert Herrick- Hesperides
Paul Verlaine- Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes
Michael Drayton- Nymphidia
Lewis Carroll- Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Ferdowsi- The Shah Nameh
Shelley- Ozymandias, Adonais
Montale- Cuttlefish Bones
Emerson- Essays
Montaigne- Essays
Gibbons- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Swift- Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal
Tolstoy- War and Peace
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Dickens- A tale of Two Cities
Melville- Moby Dick
Hawthorne- Short Stories
Edgar A. Poe- Short Stories
Gautier- Short Stories
Walter Pater- The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray, plays
Samuel Beckett- Endgame
Thomas de Quincy- Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Henrick Ibsen- An Enemy of the People
Rimbaud- A Season in Hell, Illuminations
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- Collected Poems
Tennyson- Ulysses, In Memoriam, etc...
Flaubert- Mme. Bovary
Faulkner- As I Lay Dying

and far too many others to name...

[Ghuyuran]

I wouldn't say Notes from Underground is one of my favorites. I would however say that it did impact me a lot. Probably its timing in my life is responsible for the effect it produced on me.

Othello did it on a cultural and emotional level for me. I went to see it as a play and as an opera. Having read King Lear I was far more impressed by Othello. I have not read Macbeth or Hamlet yet, however. Let's say compared to many here, I have not had a great exposure to great literature, for I have begun to read those only late in my teens. I'm beginning my degree in Literature and I'm discovering gems everyday.

Death of a Salesman, I found very powerful and appealing.

Candide by Voltaire makes me laugh sometimes when I talk with someone who is overly optimistic.

The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway made me see the tip of the icerberg that literature is.

Above all of those, there stands Demian by Hermann Hesse. I don't why. There is strength to every line. It feels like reading a painting. One of those books that produce epiphanies within you.