And why?
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And why?
Not much of a thread...
I have 5 million 7 hundred thousand 2 hundred and 49 favorite books...
How would you like me to describe them? Alphabetical order?
Then I'll start with the English dictionary - an all time favorite for potted descriptions and definitions of various words and how they came into to being. It's excellent to flip through when you don't feel like anything particularly heavy, and any random page jump produces riches.
Good also for ensuring you know the meaning of words that you may not use but read frequently.
Did you know that 'apricot' and 'precocious' have the same etymology - apricot being a precocious (early ripening) fruit?
Incredible, exasperating, thrilling, discombobulating - all these words and many others may be found within its mysterious covers
My recommendation would be to start with the latest Oxford Concise edition,
and sometimes you may be lucky to find a dusty old illustrated one (they're like mini encyclopaedias bursting at the seams with knowledge, and remind me of Borge's Book Of Sand - though not infinite as far as I know)
My favorite novel is Dickens' Pickwick Papers because it's the funniest book I've ever read.
Amusing.
This question becomes more difficult the more one has read. My knee-jerk response would be Dante's Divine Comedy which I find has a greater wealth of characters and narratives, a blend of tragedy, comedy, satire, history, biography, philosophy and poetry, a variety of poetic styles, a brilliance of formal innovation and perfection of structure that is not equalled by any other single book.
Then again, I might make equally strong arguments for the Bible, the Shanameh, the Odyssey, Don Quixote, War and Peace, the 1001 Arabian Nights, Hamlet, MacBeth, Paradise Lost, In Search of Lost Time... and any number of others.
My favourite book? It varies with my mood. Sometimes it's Middlemarch, sometimes Crime and Punishment, sometimesTo The Lighthouse. They are just some of the many books that I realised changed me. I was just not the same person after I had read them. But one does not always live in that state of heightened consciousness.
I was remembering the other evening, don't know what prompted it, about 2 books I read in the fifties which gave me such pleasure then and still make me smile at the recollection. They were by Leo Rosten The Education of Hyman Kaplan and The Return of Hyman Kaplan both based on Rosten's recollections of being a teacher of English in New York to a very mixed group of learners whose goal was sufficient proficiency in the language to qualify them for American citizenship.
Someone reading it 50 years after I did, and,with a raised consciousness of ethnic stereotyping, might think that Hyman Kaplan and his classmates were caricatures rather than people. But the humour was gentle and affectionate. I smiled all the way through them and I still do.:):)
Brothers Karamazov. I just could not put this book down and was gutted when I finished it. Dostoyevsky uses his characters to represent ideals and ideas, but they do not suffer for it. Ivan is dark and moody. His chapter on the devil is a work of art in its own right. Dmitri is wild and reckless but engaging. I could go through them all really. Father Ferapont is fantastic (UK TV viewers, Ferapont would scare seven shades out of Father Jack!)
Dostoyevsky has an unbelievable breadth of vision. This novel in particular just opens up more and more, without ever losing its acutely observed, heartfelt, moving depiction. He takes me to 19th C Russia but also shapes how I perceive my own 21st C surroundings. The prose itself is enough to pull me in like quicksand and ok, I read a translation, but the way he delves into the hearts of men is unparalleled in other novels I have read.
Dostoyevsky's portrayal of human nature, in this novel especially, will always be as relevant as it was at the time of writing. I found it an immensely enjoyable book.
From what I've heard, his original prose was considered to be pretty bad.Quote:
Originally Posted by Buddha Frog
I'm not sure what you mean by original prose. Do you mean an original version of BK, or his earliest novels? If it's the latter then I would agree there is a difference in quality between some of the earlier stuff and his greatest works. The Double, for example, still has its charms (it seems to spawn from Gogol's The Overcoat in some ways), but it could not compare well with Devils.
Having said that, I would encourage you to discover for yourself rather than going on the opinion of others - particularly if those opinions have led you to believe that Dosty was rubbish!
I was talking about his prose that was orginally written in russian. Thats the biggest criticism I've heard from him. I'm actually own a copy of the brothers karamazov but haven't gotten around to reading it. Don't get me wrong, Doestoesky sounds interesting to me. I don't think a writer that is still remembered after over 100 years would be rubbish.
Who made the criticism of Dostoevsky's prose style in Russian? I suspect it was Nabokov, who was quite critical of his work in general. Of course they were polar opposites as artists. Dostoevsky wrote with social and even spiritual aspirations (the artist as prophet) in a broad sprawling manner (not unlike Cervantes), where Nabokov was ever the formalist artist... the maker of perfect objects... producing the most consciously polished writing. Personally, I like them both and might have placed the Brothers Karamazov at the top of my list of great books many years ago.
Ooo, this is tough.
I can't possibly answer that. I'll have to think about it and get back to you here maybe tomorrow.
Original question, lol. We've never seen that on a book forum before (!)
But to be fair, you might be talking about 'book' in an abstract sense, instead of another word for 'novel'. In that case, I forgive you :)
Blood and Gold. The main character's personality is so prestigious, and the whole story-line is wonderful. It takes place starting during ancient Roman times all the way to modern times.
I had to think of an answer to this a few weeks ago, and I managed to boil it down to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Why? Sydney Carton. The story itself is good, though to be honest it gets a little tiring in the middle, but what makes it my favorite is Syndey, hands down. I'll save the details in the interest of spoilers, but the ending, if you've read it.
Part of me wants to say 1984, because I think that's the only book that's actually terrified me, but I can't really say "I loved it" or "It's my favorite" because it did scare the pants off me. It's hard to put that one in a ranking... I do tell people to read it all the time, but it's really hard to say "It's a good book" on the end of that. It's well written...
For the last few years it's pretty consistently been Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing else is so intricate, dense, absurd, and stylistically perfect in my humble opinion.
Other times though I prefer things like Hemingway. All depends on the mood.
I have to go with Les Miserables, Victor Hugo created the novel/poem genre which would become what was expected of novelists of the future.
That is a great book. Definitely in my top 10 (though I'm a junkie for horror).Quote:
Originally Posted by sithkittie
Has to be the first book I read recreationally
1984
Because it made me want to read more
I have to go with, albeit rather childish, all the Calvin & Hobbes comic books by Bill Watterson.
I couldn't get into it. I liked the story, but the writing just dragged on and on. Maybe it would have been better to read in installments (isn't that how it was written?). I really wanted to love that book, because the story is really good. Wish the movie did it any justice. I really liked Javert, and Gavroche (and I probably spelled that wrong, my French is non-existent).Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
It's definitely up there for me, but it still just gives me the creeps. A few months after I read it, I had an orientation for a company that I was going abroad with. I seriously had second thoughts after meeting the guy in charge. O'Brien to the T, holy cow. Probably should have listened, cause that company was messed up like nobody's business. Creepy. Really freaking good book though.Quote:
Originally Posted by faithosaurus
George Elliot's "The Mill on the Floss." The ending made me fall apart, weep, etc. and I am no teary-eyed type. George Elliot is genius incarnate.
At the moment, probably John Gardner's Grendel.
Anne Rice's book? Really? I thought her earlier VC stuff was much better written.Quote:
Originally Posted by faithosaurus
My current favorite right now is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, due to the overwhelmingly crazy attention-to-detail throughout each passage, its fully fleshed-out characters, its vivid and graphic detail of the battle sequences described, and most definitely the fact that each character (especially the character of Prince Andrey) is fully fleshed out and detailed. Unlike other novels, I feel that there is almost NO boring point that I encountered during my reading. Though dense and lengthy, I feel it's also emotionally and hugely rewarding.
Heh. This was a really funny post!Quote:
Originally Posted by MystyrMystyry
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wilde woman
It's probably because I'm a MAJOR Marius fan. I love Lestat too, but there's just something about Marius..
This is a pretty lame/cliche choice, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas really changed my life.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sithkittie
haha my favorite thing about the novel is Hugo's prose, I loved it as it was not prose, it was not a novel, it was something new and beautiful, taking the stagnating epic form and re-adapting it to the new times. I got drunk of his prose!
Oh and, the novel was not written in installments, it was published as one big book. Though at the time opinions of the book were very different. Baudelaire said it was great in public, but in private he confessed he did not think much of it. His publishers hated it and considered it a weak work compared to his others. Flaubert said of it that he could find in it neither "neither truth nor greatness". However it was a very popular book amongst the confederate soldiers in the civil war, interestingly enough. Also Rimbaud thought it was the greatest poem he had read, though he despised Hugo's earlier works.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I love revenge stories and this happens to be the best I've read.
I quite enjoyed Les Miserables myself. I read it in a period right before starting college in which I was obsessively reading lots of big, epic novels: Les Miserables, War and Peace, Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, Doctor Faustus (Mann), The Glass-bead Game, David Copperfield, etc... While the novel had endless digressions, as with Byron's Don Juan, I found those digressions imminently interesting (although with Byron the digressions are often far more interesting than the story itself... to the point that the greatest character in Don Juan is the narrator).
X is the best book ever.
This is difficult because I've only read a handful of books that I would consider great. For me, it's a toss up between Brave New World and Naked Lunch. The influence of both of these works is undeniable. Not to mention, they're two of the most distinctly imaginative works I've ever read.
and put it in the trash can where it can have a suitable repose. What a selection for best book: better than Cervantes, Dickens, Fielding, Elliot, et al? I shouldn't have read this post. the worst and best books threads are generally answered by those who don't qualify as legitimate readers. I don't mean to be disrespectful or querelous, but really, William S. Burroughs is the best you've read? How ignominious.
I agree that what you shouldn't confuse your favorite writer with the best one but the writer you enjoy the most should be the most valuable to you. The canon must be respected but you shouldn't have to conform the tastes of your enjoyment to what the scholars say.Quote:
Originally Posted by dfloyd
My favorite books... ones I've read over and over.
The entire Harry Potter series
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
One Hundred Years of Solitude
These are the ones that are coming to me off the top of my head. I'd say Portrait of the Artist and Harry Potter are the two (if you count all of Harry Potter as one unit) I'd take to a desert island.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hyacinthine
:smilielol5:
Well, yes, you could say my two favorites seem odd together. They fulfill two very different needs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Bean
The reigning champion (at least until something better comes along) is Until I Find You by John Irving. He really makes your work for it in part I but part II is a stunning work of literature all on its own.
Probably one of my collections of short stories by Guy De Maupassant :)
This was one of those writers who do not simply write, but create an entire universe to fill their mental world. And although im sure 19th century France was not like he describes, much like 19th century Russia is not what Dostoevsky saw, again i am very much amazed by the depth of his vision, and the vividness of the image he presented of it.
I like Maupassant, and he's like a French Chekov [although earlier of course] but if you like Maupassant you've absolutely got to read Balzac. His humor, knowledge and breadth, as well his creation of his own little world is the definition of literary genius.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyriakos