And why?
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.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
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.
Last edited by Seasider; 12-11-2010 at 04:59 PM.
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.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.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
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 drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking."
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...
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