What Should I Read Next?

[E.A Rumfield]

It might be a good idea to make a recommendation thread and sticky it at the top.

Some authors I enjoy in no particular order...

John Dos Passos
Aldous Huxley
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Henry Miller
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Charles Bukowski
Joseph Conrad
John Fante
Anton Chekhov

I'm looking for that one novel that you have to read. I am often disappointed but that is subjective. What is the most important book you've read?

[Scheherazade]

Just some of my favourites:

Lolita

Master and Margarita

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Collector

American Gods

[Emil Miller]

Anything but Harry Potter. God help us.

[Scheherazade]

Anything but Harry Potter. God help us.Oh, come on, Emil. Been there, done that. Beaten that dead horse to dealth again and again. And again.

Why not be a good sport and suggest a book or two?

[E.A Rumfield]

I am looking for a book that really says something if that makes sense. There are plenty of writers in love with words and themselves but not enough human beings that choose to write. In the words of Henry Miller it would be refreshing, for once, to read something written by a man or woman who took up the pen as a last resort; with their back against a wall. It would be nice to read something truly motivated, by a person who has suffered who has struggled instead of all these dry lifeless supremely educated machines typing away from the comfort of their privileged life. Bukowski is the only author who has consistently spoken to me. He understands more than anyone the pain of waking up everyday to a world indifferent to your existence but still he walks with a swagger. His novels may not the most complicated but they are among the most human I've read. I can sit down and read a book of his poetry in one night and be moved to tears at least a dozen times and made to laugh as many times and made to cringe. I just finished Tropic of Cancer and I felt Miller lacked something essential as well. His fastball just doesn't quite have that power. Where are all the desperate people? They are so few and far between. And they either fade quickly or cannot keep up the desperate energy for long periods of time.

I don't know what Harry Potter has to do with this subject.

[OrphanPip]

Maybe you would like Al Purdy's poetry, Bukowski was a friend and admirer of his.

[E.A Rumfield]

Maybe you would like Al Purdy's poetry, Bukowski was a friend and admirer of his.

Do you know if the novel he wrote was any good?

[OrphanPip]

Do you know if the novel he wrote was any good?

I haven't read it, or really heard much about it. He wrote it only a couple years before he died.

[MorpheusSandman]

Where are all the desperate people?Have you checked out the Confessional Poets? Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath seem to be similar to what you're looking for. As for various books:

Lowell - Life Studies and For the Union Dead
Berryman - Dream Songs
Ginsberg - Howl & Other Poems
Plath - Ariel

[Emil Miller]

Oh, come on, Emil. Been there, done that. Beaten that dead horse to dealth again and again. And again.

Why not be a good sport and suggest a book or two?

:lol: I know, but the bloody thing won't lie down.

Unfortunately I don't think that an aficionado of Bukowski would be interested in anything I might suggest.

[JuniperWoolf]

You should read Paradise Lost, it's beautiful. It's apparently "dense," but you get into a rhythm and start to enjoy it more and more as you go on. It qualifies as something that you "have to read," if you haven't.

[mal4mac]

I am looking for a book that really says something if that makes sense. There are plenty of writers in love with words and themselves but not enough human beings that choose to write. In the words of Henry Miller it would be refreshing, for once, to read something written by a man or woman who took up the pen as a last resort; with their back against a wall. It would be nice to read something truly motivated, by a person who has suffered who has struggled...

Did Huxley struggle? Maybe with drug addiction :) His novels are very much novels of ideas that put "the human" in the background, which is why he has never been rated a top-class novelist, and seems to be against the grain of what you say you like. Where do you find the struggle, humanity and lack of complications in his novels?

Dickens fits the bill, his parents fell on hard times and he ended up a child labourer in Victorian London. Most of his world-class novels are informed by this experience.

Tolstoy, although an aristocrat, made his life tough... gambling his house away, volunteering for tough military service, slaving & identifying with the serfs during the reign of bullying Tsar...

Maybe start with "War & Peace" and "David Copperfield"?

[E.A Rumfield]

Did Huxley struggle? Maybe with drug addiction :) His novels are very much novels of ideas that put "the human" in the background, which is why he has never been rated a top-class novelist, and seems to be against the grain of what you say you like. Where do you find the struggle, humanity and lack of complications in his novels?

Dickens fits the bill, his parents fell on hard times and he ended up a child labourer in Victorian London. Most of his world-class novels are informed by this experience.

Tolstoy, although an aristocrat, made his life tough... gambling his house away, volunteering for tough military service, slaving & identifying with the serfs during the reign of bullying Tsar...

Maybe start with "War & Peace" and "David Copperfield"?

Huxley was never addicted to drugs and his experiments with LSD and mescaline came later in his life. I think Huxley often hit the nail on the head.


You should read Paradise Lost, it's beautiful. It's apparently "dense," but you get into a rhythm and start to enjoy it more and more as you go on. It qualifies as something that you "have to read," if you haven't.

I recently read King Lear. Shakespeare has recorded some beautiful lines but on a whole I believe his plays are truly boring. I think I should wait before I read such works because right now I can't appreciate Dante or Shakespeare or Milton or Goethe. It doesn't register.

[Scheherazade]

:lol: I know, but the bloody thing won't lie down.

Unfortunately I don't think that an aficionado of Bukowski would be interested in anything I might suggest.Oh, come on now! This is fun.

Rumfield asked us to share the "important" books we have read so that we can be told why they do not count!

What can be more fun than this???

Uhm...

Next I will suggest The Trial and Thee Men in a Boat.

[E.A Rumfield]

Oh, come on now! This is fun.

Rumfield asked us to share the "important" books we have read so that we can be told why they do not count!

What can be more fun than this???

Uhm...

Next I will suggest The Trial and Thee Men in a Boat.

I didn't attend to come off like that. I'm just looking for something very specific. I think I am going to read Hunger by Knut Hamsun next. I think that is right up my alley. And Kafka is a good suggestion I've heard good things about him.

[Emil Miller]

Oh, come on now! This is fun.

Rumfield asked us to share the "important" books we have read so that we can be told why they do not count!

What can be more fun than this???

Uhm...

Next I will suggest The Trial and Thee Men in a Boat.

Well it was an absolute cert that Jerome K. Jerome wouldn't fit in with Bukowski, Miller, Celine and Fante, and now another suffering soul in the shape of Hamsum just about completes the picture. Methinks it's time for a round of Wodehouse, the perfect antidote to introspection.

[MorpheusSandman]

I recently read King Lear. Shakespeare has recorded some beautiful lines but on a whole I believe his plays are truly boring. Shakespeare is better seen/listened to than read. You get so much more sense of the drama when those lines are bandied back-and-forth by great actors. Try McKellen's Lear (available for free online here (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/king-lear/watch-the-play/487/)), or even the recent Fiennes' Coriolanus for a very non-boring Shakespeare adaptation.

[DanteExplorer]

Brideshead Revisted by Evelyn Waugh.

[Lykren]

Have you tried Camus?

[E.A Rumfield]

I read his short story the guest which I thought was great.

[Lykren]

The Stranger is rebellious in a sort of peaceful, tranced-out way. Recommended.

[Alexander III]

Most pointless thread evar.

[Paulclem]

What about some Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London,or The Road to Wigan Pier.

Hamson is good - Hunger is intense and Mysteries is very good. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The House of the Dead are excellent.

[Volya]

Jean Paul Sartre is pretty cool.

[Desolation]

Samuel Beckett
Friedrich Nietzsche
Djuna Barnes
Vladimir Nabokov

[Mason Pringle]

Anything by Saul Bellow. Generally the Nobel Prize of Literature list is a pretty good reading list (that being said, i still resent that Flannery O'Connor did not win the prize, neither did McCullers. Sometimes life is unfair)

[kelby_lake]

Chekhov and Bukowski? That's quite a contrast.

If you like Chekhov, you might like Hardy. Lots of struggle there.