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).Originally Posted by sithkittie
"I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking."
Has to be the first book I read recreationally
1984
Because it made me want to read more
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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).
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.
Last edited by sithkittie; 12-15-2010 at 08:45 AM. Reason: avoid double posting?
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.
Ecce quam bonum et jocundum, habitares libros in unum!
~Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
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.
"We look at the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry." -- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
Heh. This was a really funny post!
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
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It's probably because I'm a MAJOR Marius fan. I love Lestat too, but there's just something about Marius..
"I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking."
This is a pretty lame/cliche choice, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas really changed my life.
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).
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
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