Your Top Ten Favorite Books

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Snarfyguy
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Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby Snarfyguy » 05 Feb 2006, 09:08

It looks like list / favorite season is here again, so I'll start this one. I'm not going to keep score or anything, but if you like, please list yours, and say why.

You don't have to say why, of course.

Mine are, off the top of my head:

Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
A wonderful meditation on diverse, yet essentially related, boring-sounding topics, it’s both funny and challenging. No pithy blurb will do this one justice. Some of the math is a bit brain-bending (for me), but understanding the thing isn’t premised on understanding each element of it.

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
What’s it about? I don’t know, what isn’t it about? I can’t claim a full understanding of it, but there’s a lot to chew on here, and it’s about as fucking chewy as literature gets.

London Fields – Martin Amis
Severely flawed in its post-modern conceit of introducing the author as a character (or in this case, perhaps a very transparent stand-in) in his own book, a mistake Amis has made more than once, and one (the conceit, not the mistake) Kurt Vonnegut already did 20 years before, it’s rescued by Amis’s Dickensian skill in characterization and dialogue. On second thought, I withdraw this and nominate Amis’s next book, The Information.

The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
A phantasmagorical, allegorical, and very funny meditation on human and divine nature. Lame blurb, yeah, but it’s a riot.

The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
My father gave me this when I was 11 or 12 and I was transported into a new understanding of what books can do. Perhaps not all that great in retrospect, but massively important in my own development as a reader.

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Gimmicky, I’ll grant you, but massive in so many ways. Wallace is a great story teller with a great imagination, and this is his sprawling, epic, massive masterpiece. A book I never wanted to end.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Another one perhaps not so well served by time, and Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation was so appalling it made me doubt the quality of the original work. A re-reading re-assured me it’s untouchable. It’s laugh out loud funny – and not because of the Dean-Martin-for-the-stoner-generation humor, but because the writing itself, the way Thompson turned a phrase, is breathtakingly original and utterly delightful.

Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
I hardly know what to say about this novel, but few things I’ve ever read have been as uncompromisingly yet hallucinogenically real. I started on Lowry’s biography once, but it was so disturbingly similar to his novel that I put down unfinished.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung – Lester Bangs
A brat, perhaps, and one who unleashed a thousand annoying imitators, but his voice was so fresh and honest, even (especially?) when he was lying through his teeth, that I just can’t help but love it. His passion gushes off the pages.

Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
As inquiries (or perhaps inquisitions) into our obsessions with historical secrets, intrigue and conspiracy paranoia go, The DaVinci Code is surely the retarded child to this dizzyingly gifted examination. A must for Jimbo.

I regret I couldn’t include writers I admire such as Philip K. Dick, Elmore Leonard, George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Hubert Selby, Italo Calvino, Borges, Thackeray and Dickens on here, as their work seems to me not to have a single, stand-out, best-of example.
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Postby Velvis » 05 Feb 2006, 09:35

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Stand by Stephen King

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

The Riverside Shakespeare

A Thousand and One Nights by various, translated and with notes by Richard Burton

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Bible

The Essential Ellison by Harlan Ellison

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
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Re: Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby James R » 05 Feb 2006, 10:45

Snarfyguy wrote:Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
A wonderful meditation on diverse, yet essentially related, boring-sounding topics, it’s both funny and challenging. No pithy blurb will do this one justice. Some of the math is a bit brain-bending (for me), but understanding the thing isn’t premised on understanding each element of it.


Read this years ago but could never finish it. Not because I didn't understand it all—which, to be honest, I didn't—but because I found it so irritatingly smug and superior. That Hofstadter is an exceptionally intelligent man, probably much more so than me, is not in doubt, the book is sufficient evidence of that. But I loathed the way in which (at least so it seemed to me) he kept reminding me of that fact; seemed like on every page he was pointing to himself and saying "look how smart I am". Fuck off, Douglas.

Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
I hardly know what to say about this novel, but few things I’ve ever read have been as uncompromisingly yet hallucinogenically real. I started on Lowry’s biography once, but it was so disturbingly similar to his novel that I put down unfinished.


This is the only one on your list that I've both read and finished (probably started but never finished four or five more). I recall liking this quite a lot, though it wasn't easy going. You might also want to try his earlier novel Ultramarine, which I think may have been the only other book he published while he was alive; he actually has several titles to his credit, but I think most were posthumously published.

I can't really do a list of ten favourite books, so I'll give you ten favourite authors instead (not necessarily definitive and not in order):

H.P. Lovecraft
Clark Ashton Smith
Wm. Shakespeare
Friedrich Nietzsche
Raymond Chandler
Terry Pratchett
Gore Vidal
Alfred Bester
A.N. Wilson
Neil Gaiman

It must be noted, however, that despite my best efforts I am nowhere even approximately near as au fait with literature as I am with film. It's just too big of a field to be able to get to grips with it adequately.
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Postby & » 05 Feb 2006, 12:47

Summer Moonshine - P.G.Wodehouse

Leave It To Psmith - P.G.Wodehouse

Changing Places - David Lodge

You Can't Do Both - Kingsley Amis

Our Game - John LeCarre

Black Mischief - Evelyn Waugh

Metroland - Julian Barnes

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

Birds, Beasts and Relatives - Gerald Durrell

Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett

Bungo the Mungo

Postby Bungo the Mungo » 05 Feb 2006, 13:23

The Ginger Man - J.P. Donleavy
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman (I love pretty much anything by him)

they´re my three favourites - lots of humour, sadness, and the thoughts of the central characters really hit home

Post Office - Bukowski
Angela´s Ashes - O´
The Third Policeman - Flann O´Brien
Portnoy´s Complaint - Philip Roth
The Kenneth Williams Diaries
Burroughs´ collected letters (mainly to Ginsberg)
Mick Middles´ Fall/MES biog
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test - Wolfe
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton

can´t forget Chandler, Jim Thompson, Hemingway, and the short stories of Raymond Carver, Ring Lardner (those two are amazing) and other 20th C. American giants - they´ve all (Malamud, Southern, Parker, Fitzgerald...) got something to offer.

Bungo the Mungo

Re: Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby Bungo the Mungo » 05 Feb 2006, 13:29

Snarfyguy wrote:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Another one perhaps not so well served by time, and Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation was so appalling it made me doubt the quality of the original work. A re-reading re-assured me it’s untouchable. It’s laugh out loud funny – and not because of the Dean-Martin-for-the-stoner-generation humor, but because the writing itself, the way Thompson turned a phrase, is breathtakingly original and utterly delightful.


Shit, I forgot this as well. Another firm favourite.

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Postby frimleygreener » 05 Feb 2006, 18:51

in (roughly) chronological order..
"coral island"
"moonfleet"......
"lord of the flies"...
"brave new world"..
"one flew over the cuckoos nest".
"the great shark hunt"..
"get shorty"..
"double whammy"
"black dahlia"
"at swim two birds/the third policeman/the dalkey archives/best of myles..saved the best till last:).(imho)

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Re: Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby Madrugada » 05 Feb 2006, 19:07

James R wrote:
Snarfyguy wrote:Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
A wonderful meditation on diverse, yet essentially related, boring-sounding topics, it’s both funny and challenging. No pithy blurb will do this one justice. Some of the math is a bit brain-bending (for me), but understanding the thing isn’t premised on understanding each element of it.


I feel this way about Stephen Fry. If they're so damned smart, how come they write novels they want to sell that are difficult to read for even intelligent readers with a good vocabulary.

I'm too dozy at the moment, need a nap, to put together a top 10 just now, but as i've said before, Cider with Rosie's my favourite, Laurie Lee.
Last edited by Madrugada on 05 Feb 2006, 19:42, edited 2 times in total.

Bungo the Mungo

Postby Bungo the Mungo » 05 Feb 2006, 19:15

the great god pan - arthur machen
the three imposters - arthur machen
diary of a drug fiend - aleister crowley
picture of dorian gray - oscar wilde
the arabian nightmare - robert irwin
the master and the margarita - mikhail bulgakov
the arabian nights - hussain haddawy translation
against nature - joris-karl husymans
wind in the willows - kenneth grahame
the complete john silence stories - algernon blackwood

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Re: Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby Snarfyguy » 05 Feb 2006, 19:29

James R wrote:
Snarfyguy wrote:Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
A wonderful meditation on diverse, yet essentially related, boring-sounding topics, it’s both funny and challenging. No pithy blurb will do this one justice. Some of the math is a bit brain-bending (for me), but understanding the thing isn’t premised on understanding each element of it.


Read this years ago but could never finish it. Not because I didn't understand it all—which, to be honest, I didn't—but because I found it so irritatingly smug and superior. That Hofstadter is an exceptionally intelligent man, probably much more so than me, is not in doubt, the book is sufficient evidence of that. But I loathed the way in which (at least so it seemed to me) he kept reminding me of that fact; seemed like on every page he was pointing to himself and saying "look how smart I am". Fuck off, Douglas.


I arrived at the same conclusion about him, but only a few books later. He had one about the difficulties of translating literature and poetry where in one sequence he was berating a children's sports coach for referring to his co-ed charges as "guys," but really going on about it about and dragging the coach over the coals about how she wasn't using the literal meaning of the word.

He just came off as a pedantic scold and I stopped reading there.

Still, I think GEB is a wonderful book.
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Postby Carl's Son » 05 Feb 2006, 21:02

Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte
Sexing The Cherry-Jeanette Winterson
The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy-Douglas Adams
Portnoy's Complaint-Phillip Roth
Catch 22-Joseph Heller
Join Me-Danny Wallace


That'll do for now.
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Re: Your Top Ten Favorite Books

Postby K » 05 Feb 2006, 21:11

Snarfyguy wrote:
Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
A wonderful meditation on diverse, yet essentially related, boring-sounding topics, it’s both funny and challenging. No pithy blurb will do this one justice. Some of the math is a bit brain-bending (for me), but understanding the thing isn’t premised on understanding each element of it.

Speaking as a musical mathematician who loves Escher's work.. I really need to get round to reading this some day.

Phil T

Postby Phil T » 05 Feb 2006, 21:12

Chris Chopping wrote:Join Me-Danny Wallace


Is that worth splashing out for?

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Postby The Write Profile » 05 Feb 2006, 21:22

Good thread, especially that I can now get back into reading without having to worry when my next 3,000 words are due this week. Seeing that the operative word here is "favo(u)rite," I'll try not to be too canonical.

Graham Greene- The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory

Catholics and how they got that way. The End of the Affair is perhaps Greene's most obvious cry from the heart, not so much straddling the line between autobiography and fiction so much as trampling all over it until they're one and the same. In Bendrix, we have his most aggreived protagonist as he spills out his "diary of hate."

But there's beauty too, even if it's forever conflicted by the knowledge of the affair ends. The Power & the Glory, was of course, proscribed by the Vatican (and I've seen Greene's letter to them and it's hilarious), but despite the somewhat sacriligeous portrayal of the "Whisky Priest," there is real faith that bristles through, betwixt the stirrup and the ground.

Also recommended: Norman Sherry's brilliant bio on Greene.


William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

Perhaps the most devestating out of all his novels, if only because it starts with faint promise and eventually deterioates within the space of a generation, and the one child who could've got the family out of that rut eventually "gives up." Essentially it's all in the tortured, colloquial poetry.

Pauline Kael I Lost it At the Movies and Raising Kane

Both essential tracts from the grandmother of modern film criticism. What impresses me most is her ability to cut through the pretention of her contemporaries (her point-by-point dismantaling of Sarris' auteur essay is astounding in its arrogance and logic). The quintessential New Yorker.

Later, her writing became freer but more indulgent, particularly after her sabbitical but the sense of fight of her early years is really palpable. Raising Kane is worth owning for the best piece of writing on Citizen Kane ever published (one that gets to the heart of its entertainment) and her very astute essay "Trash, Art & the Movies"

Vladimir Nabokov Lolita

What can be said about this book that hasn't been said two dozen times before? At once a dark comedy and an ode to rapture, with the sense of unease (due to the still taboo subject matter) pulling the novel in different directions.

Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye

The last of Chandler's "Marlowe novels," this one gets the vote for me due its rambling, seemingly loose sense of narrative and logic and the clear digs Chandler inserts at his own personality, not least through Roger Wade, the alcholic writer of potboilers. A wonderfully seedy delight, Chandler was the master. And of course the connections don't really stand up, but that's not the point, is it?

Don Delillo White Noise

Superb tale of television, the nuclear family and the odd pervasiveness of death, Hitler and Elvis. A pop culture gambit that anticipates Douglas Coupland by a good ten years- and does it better, too.

James Ellroy American Tabloid

His masterpiece, and absolute kick in the gut. No superfluous sentences, no concessions to those who can't up with the plot, it's a heady, violent, ludicrously addictive labyrinth that pulls the rug from under Kennedy administration and then strangles them with it. Please make this into a film, and get Robert Downey Jr to star as Kemper Boyd.

Lester Bangs Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

Changed music criticism for good and evil in much the same way Kael did for film writing, but often the originals do it the best. Dogmatism taken to absolute extremes, his singled-minded vision of What Rock Should Be still entertains and enthralls long after the imitators stop writing. You can blame him for Pitchfork, unfortunately.

Jane Austen Emma

The prime ironist of the English language, even after all these years. It inpsired "Clueless," so respect must be due. But in all seriousness, the controlled focus of Austen's prose undercuts the unfailingly conventional storyline and characters, and it's stil bristingly funny.


More to come in due course, this is part one!
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Postby Carl's Son » 05 Feb 2006, 22:25

Sutekh wrote:
Chris Chopping wrote:Join Me-Danny Wallace


Is that worth splashing out for?


I think so, very funny and Wallace is a charming, endearing writer.
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Postby Snarfyguy » 05 Feb 2006, 23:11

Great post, Profile.

Let me just say, though, that I hated Emma, despite really liking Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. In fact, we were just talking about this last night at the Mr. Maps Jolly Up.

The formula I devised in college was Austen novels with one word titles = shit; those with the word "and" = great.

And I hated White Noise so much I threw it out the window. I've written about it before here, so I won't bother with a tirade. Post-modern claptrap.

Of course this in no way means I disrespect your opinions, Profile.
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Postby The Write Profile » 05 Feb 2006, 23:21

Snarfyguy wrote:Great post, Profile.

Let me just say, though, that I hated Emma, despite really liking Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. In fact, we were just talking about this last night at the Mr. Maps Jolly Up.

The formula I devised in college was Austen novels with one word titles = shit; those with the word "and" = great.

And I hated White Noise so much I threw it out the window. I've written about it before here, so I won't bother with a tirade. Post-modern claptrap.

Of course this in no way means I disrespect your opinions, Profile.


:lol:

No offence taken. I really loved it at the time, though I haven't read in three or four years. I expect I'd see it for being horribly facile were I to read it again. I'll admit that his obsession with Malls is fairly galling even for a fan of the book. (I hate Malls with a passion) And yes, Pride & Prejudice is objectively speaking, Austen's masterpiece.

For the record, it's the Greene and Faulkner novels which really changed the way I looked at writing, as obvious as those choices were.

Anyone else prefer Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail to ...Las Vegas?

I certainly did, despite being more unwieldy the whole book seems to capture something about the nastiness of the whole business of electioneering, and, especially in regards to Bush/Kerry, a lot of it still stands up. Plus, some of his anecdotes are pungently hilarious. It reads like a novel, and one with a genuine king hell villian, too.
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Postby Velvis » 05 Feb 2006, 23:23

I want to add Pale Fire and Lolita to my list. You guys made me realize I had forgotten Nabokov.
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Postby Stirling Moss » 05 Feb 2006, 23:24

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriela Garcia Marquez
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
London Fields - Martin Amis
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
1984 - George Orwell
The Great Shark Hunt - Hunter S Thompson
Nations Favourite Poetry - BBC compilation

Stirling Moss

Postby Stirling Moss » 05 Feb 2006, 23:28

The Right Summery Profile wrote:Anyone else prefer Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail to ...Las Vegas?




Yes. I bought the original US paperback on my honeymoon in 2004. It has far more photographs and pictures than the UK version I had bought years ago - and is altogether a more valuable read.

The sketches on Mad Sam Yorty and The Hube are brutally, killingly funny.
And the Ed 'Man from Maine' Muskie / Sunshine Special incident had me howling with laughter.


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