books every home library should have

[JBI]

I don't recall if I've ever read The Miser, and it's been nearly ten years since I read The Misanthrope. But more recently, when I read The Imaginary Invalid and Don Juan I was underwhelmed once again. As you know, you and I don't exactly see eye to eye when it comes to humor. You find Jane Austen a stitch and I think The Taming of the Shrew is side slapping hilarious.

Maybe, there's a place we could both meet in the middle.

Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

I doubt my library has a copy, and quite honestly, I can't see myself forking over $7.77

Seriously though, comedy seems very relative to society, whereas I think tragedy has something stronger in it, because we all have to live with the fact that we will die, and that somehow connects us.

Though that being said, there are moments in something like Racine's Phedra, where I cannot help but laugh out loud. Something like a Ibsen ending I also cannot help but laughing at - especially Ghosts - and I didn't get that depressed desolate feel others got from Kafka's Metamorphosis, rather I think I found it quite comical too (and to this day, I think it intended as a comedy).

In that regard, perhaps tragedy and comedy are not so separate. Surely post-modern genre bending has made the tragic comical, and the comical tragic. Rousseau himself saw the Misanthrope as a tragedy, and took issue with the fact that society could laugh at such a sincere person.

I will say though, you should really read Robert Kroetsch's Studhorse Man. I think that's right up your alley.

[promtbr]

The 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time as "Selected by 100 authors from 54 countries in a poll organized by the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes received more votes than any other book"

Catch-22 does not appear on the list...

BTW..I did not like Moliere's Don Juan either. Loved Racine's Phaedre (JBI laughed?) my reading of them is from an amatuers eyes and ears (had no 'template' of highly trained criticial expectations the works had to meet for me to either appreciate or be indifferent to them)

You guys prolly know the latin phrase: "il Desputo somethin somthin.."
No accounting for tastes...

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[mortalterror]

You guys prolly know the latin phrase: "il Desputo somethin somthin.."
No accounting for tastes...

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Just because something is not definitively knowable does not mean we should cease in the pursuit of understanding it better.

[beroq]

I would strongly suggest Knowledge and the Sacred by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, published in the USA. This book is a comprehensive study on the transcendental unity of knowledge and sacred on the level of Divine.

[sixsmith]

Testify Mortal Terror! Don Quixote is a lumbering prototype that is largely disagreeable to the sane reader. Good for a couple of laughs but god what a slog. The following from Martin Amis about says it.

"While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one serious flaw- that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauty, charm and sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull. Looming like one of the Don's chimerical adversaries, it is a giant 'with legs like lofty steeples, and arms resembling the masts of vast and warlike ships; while each eye, as large as a millwheel, beams and burns like a glass furnace'. But the giant has a giant weight problem, and is elderly, and soft brained. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over and the old boy checks out (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. you made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do".

[beroq]

Testify Mortal Terror! Don Quixote is a lumbering prototype that is largely disagreeable to the sane reader. Good for a couple of laughs but god what a slog. The following from Martin Amis about says it.

"While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one serious flaw- that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauty, charm and sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull. Looming like one of the Don's chimerical adversaries, it is a giant 'with legs like lofty steeples, and arms resembling the masts of vast and warlike ships; while each eye, as large as a millwheel, beams and burns like a glass furnace'. But the giant has a giant weight problem, and is elderly, and soft brained. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over and the old boy checks out (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. you made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do".

Agreed 100%. Don Quixote is totally unreadable to the contemporary reader. The second book, it might be said, is better crafted than the first one and, if masterfully abridged and updated, could be a fun for children to read.

[crystalmoonshin]

LOL! I tried reading Don Quixote, too but it's so boring for me. I ended up reading the super abridged version and I enjoyed it.

[Taliesin]

I would add some plays by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and The Poetic Edda, but that is just personal taste, can't claim them to be central or anything since I haven't studied literature.

[promtbr]

Martin Amis? = opposite opinion is probably true

u guys *shakes head*

Don Quixote is totally unreadable to the contemporary reader.

Interesting. That's just what was said when Tristram Shandy, Ulysses and Waiting For Godot first came out...

I have a strong suspicion that your 'contemporary readers' also would find Shakespeare, Dante, Sterne, Dickens etc 'unreadable'. They definitely should stick to twitter and blu ray for enlightment...they will be dust motes sitting on those dudes one zillionth reprinted editions in next millenia...(IF there be even be books then )


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[stlukesguild]

Martin Amis? = opposite opinion is probably true

Indeed. His comments strike me a bit as symptomatic of the usual artist's inferiority complex. I have to wonder how many of Mr. Amis' works will still be read 400 years from today... let alone stand as one of the towering works of fiction beloved (and a major source of inspiration) to writers far greater than he (ie. Lawrence Sterne, Flaubert, Kafka, J.L. Borges...). Need one even mention the influence and inspiration the work has had on artists outside the field of literature? Artists including Gustave Dore, Honore Daumier, and Picasso... composers including Manuel de Falla, Richard Strauss, and Maurice Ravel... Not bad for an unreadable author.

Personally, I find Don Quixote to be a magnificent, if flawed book. Certainly there are dull passages. Undoubtedly Cervantes' poetry is bad... not dull or mediocre... but BAD. But nearly every great masterwork has its flaws. They are simply overwhelmed by the wealth of brilliance. In spite of the passages of blandness or poetic insipidness there are multiple passages of marvelous fantasy, visionary splendor, unrivaled narrative invention, and depth... there are passages of absurd comic with... and passages that greatly move.

Don Quixote is often put forth as the first Western novel... and in many ways it stands as a precursor to the Post-Modern novel: a novel which deconstructs and plays with the very tradition that is establishes. Indeed, it plays with the very nature of the reader and reading. In this it is a direct precursor to Tristam Shandy and Madame Bovary... and later on... to Borges.

Criticism is often made of the fact that the Don's absurd adventures and his continual failings and sometimes brutal beatings amount to nothing more than an outdated for of humor... a 17th century Three Stooges in which the audience laughs at the imbecile, the retarded, the madman, or the dwarf. In this manner he is compared to his artistic peer, Velasquez portraits of court dwarfs and fools.





In part the criticism is correct... but only in the manner in which Cervantes, like Velasquez, has the ability to see the nobility in these "outsiders" and "outcasts" and bring that forth. The is an endless array of epic poem and romances that put forth god-like heroes who achieve marvelously in deed after superhuman deed. Don Quixote fails absurdly time after time... and yet in the end becomes the greatest... or perhaps the most believable "hero". His "madness" is nothing less (as Unamuno suggests) than "an atonement for our drabness, our ungenerous dearth of imagination"... in other words it is a refusal to be bound by the drabness of everyday "reality"... an insistence upon the existence of magic and enchantment. His persistence mirrors the struggle of all mankind in (to quote Unamuno again) "the inextinguishable longing to survive" and the dream of "eternal name and fame."

Within the whole of Western literature I can think of almost no characters (even in Shakespeare) developed as largely as the Don and Sancho. Indeed, this pair stands at the very core of the novel as perhaps the greatest literary friendship in the whole of literature. Only Huck and Jim and Tristam's father and Uncle Toby seem an apt rival... and certainly both Sterne and Twain are deeply marked by Cervantes.

For a book that is unreadable today it is one of but a slight few that I have read repeatedly... and that have rewarded repeated readings.

[Jane's Nemesis]

50 Great Curries of India- a fabulous guide to good Indian food.

Any good recipe book for cakes as well. Plus a variety of cook books for various international cuisines.

It's hard to know what else to recommend- depends on your interests, as well as whether you subscribe to ideas about "canonical works" (because there are stacks of good books that of course don't belong to a canon of "must-reads").

If I were to merely suggest to you books I really enjoyed, I would say:
The Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger
Equus- Peter Schaffer
A Doll's House, or any other plays by Henrik Ibsen
Tom Jones- Henry Fielding
Disgrace- J.M. Coetzee
Where We Once Belonged- Sia Figiel
The Time Machine- H.G. Wells
Tipping the Velvet- Sarah Waters
The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath
The works of the Bronte Sisters (all three very different in style, but good in their own ways)
A Brief History of Misogyny- Jack Holland
The works of Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice are my favourites)
The Awakening-Kate Chopin
Women Who Did- collected short fiction of 1880-1914
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde- R.L. Stevenson
Alias Grace- Margaret Atwood
Anything by P.G. Wodehouse

[Jane's Nemesis]

Martin Amis? = opposite opinion is probably true

u guys *shakes head*




Interesting. That's just what was said when Tristram Shandy, Ulysses and Waiting For Godot first came out...

I have a strong suspicion that your 'contemporary readers' also would find Shakespeare, Dante, Sterne, Dickens etc 'unreadable'. They definitely should stick to twitter and blu ray for enlightment...they will be dust motes sitting on those dudes one zillionth reprinted editions in next millenia...(IF there be even be books then )


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Isn't that intellectual snobbery?

[beroq]

Don Quixote, no matter what speciality is attributed to it, is but a book that satires chivalry. As these books are hardly read by anyone but experts and even a hero like King Arthur is unable to inspire younger generations, anyone reading Cervantes might think that the author is whipping an already dead mule. But in the 16th century, this kind of books were very popular. Among them was Ariosto's Orlando Furiose, published in 1532.

From the most serious point of view, Don Quixote might be regarded a philosophical inquiry into the quality of reality and imagination. That we are still talking about a book written more than five hundred years ago makes it a great work of art but still Don Quixote is no longer a readable book by common people like me.

[Scheherazade]

Isn't that intellectual snobbery?

Welcome to the Forum!

[sixsmith]

Martin Amis? = opposite opinion is probably true

Indeed. His comments strike me a bit as symptomatic of the usual artist's inferiority complex. I have to wonder how many of Mr. Amis' works will still be read 400 years from today... let alone stand as one of the towering works of fiction beloved (and a major source of inspiration) to writers far greater than he (ie. Lawrence Sterne, Flaubert, Kafka, J.L. Borges...). Need one even mention the influence and inspiration the work has had on artists outside the field of literature? Artists including Gustave Dore, Honore Daumier, and Picasso... composers including Manuel de Falla, Richard Strauss, and Maurice Ravel... Not bad for an unreadable author.

.

I don't really think the longevity of Amis' work is relevant and nor do i deny that Don Quixote has had great influence on many artists over several centuries.

Martin Amis? = opposite opinion is probably true

u guys *shakes head*


Quote:
Originally Posted by beroq
Don Quixote is totally unreadable to the contemporary reader.
Interesting. That's just what was said when Tristram Shandy, Ulysses and Waiting For Godot first came out...

I have a strong suspicion that your 'contemporary readers' also would find Shakespeare, Dante, Sterne, Dickens etc 'unreadable'. They definitely should stick to twitter and blu ray for enlightment...they will be dust motes sitting on those dudes one zillionth reprinted editions in next millenia...(IF there be even be books then )

Even for the contemporary reader who enjoys challenging and difficult works, Don Q might be a bridge too far. Despite its strengths, its static 'narrative', its interminable digressions and its absurd length make it pretty exclusionary IMO. While this is not a bad thing in itself, the fact that the book is so rooted to its own time means that many people will not want,or be able, to break through that barrier. Obviously some will. Stlukes, Prombtr, Borges and the like Of course it's possible i could be a slack jawed philistine in denial.