Winesburgohio: 20 Favourite Novels, anyone?

Winesburgohio 03.30.23	fuck, so many apologies! too many to list but at some juncture i will anyway. pls contribute should u wish
Sharenge 03.30.23	2666
JohnnyoftheWell 03.30.23	THERE ARE TOO MANY NOVELS i have just woken up how DARE you ask for 20 uhhhhfjjj you shall have SIX you menace :]]] Kafka on the Shore (Murakami) Orlando (Woolf) Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon) Mortal Engines (Reeve, best kids book) Zeno's Conscience (Svevo) Pale Fire (Nabokov)
Winesburgohio 03.30.23	i'll wring 14 more out of you so help me
Trifolium 03.30.23	Probably: Les Misérables (Hugo) The Lord Of The Rings (Tolkien) The Count Of Monte-Christo (Dumas) Het Lied Van Ooievaar En Dromedaris (Daanje, in Dutch, not translated yet) War & Peace (Tolstoy) Voor Alles Een Dame (Dorrestein, in Dutch, not translated yet) Don Quixote (Cervantes) Catch 22 (Heller) North & South (Gaskell) Nooit Meer Slapen (Hermans, in Dutch, translated as Beyond Sleep) Frankenstein (Shelley) The Tale Of Genji (Shikibu) Jane Eyre (Brontë, C) The Drawing Of The Three (King) Schijnbewegingen (Zwigtman, in Dutch, not translated yet) Butcher's Crossing (Williams) 1q84 (Murakami) Narcissus and Goldmund (Hesse) De Ontdekking Van De Hemel (Mulisch, in Dutch, translated as The Discovery Of Heaven) Kristin Lavransdatter (Undset)
Parallels 03.30.23	Everyone's gonna have a different Murakami favorite, calling it now
MiloRuggles 03.30.23	holy dicks great list i am subscribing now and thinking about this and posting later just finished The Recognitions recently—please give me your quick take if you can be assed. i loved it and regret nothing and will probably reread some day, but i thought the start and the end were far superior to the middle (admittedly my theology needs brushing up on)
Parallels 03.30.23	Norwegian wood (murakami) Jurassic park (crichton) Sons and lovers (lawrence) Of mice and men (steinbeck) The redbreast (nesbo) 2666 (bolaño) Blindness (saramago) Boy parts (clark) Even cowgirls get the blues (robbins) Lullaby (palahniuk) Count of monte Cristo (dumas) Misery (king) Portnoy's complaint (roth) Less than zero (ellis) The outsiders (hinton) Ethan frome (wharton) Blood meridian (mccarthy) To kill a mockingbird (lee) The memory police (ogawa) Of human bondage (maugham) The way of all flesh (butler)
Trifolium 03.30.23	Saramago and MISERY nice!!!!! Misery vs Drawing of the Three was a struggle for me, and was also thinking about adding The Double to my list.
Zac124 03.30.23	i can’t read
Cimnele 03.30.23	cool list! but, god, I never read the classics or the big Murakami/whoever must-reads, i just read grotty environmentalist/social sci-fi, I love Philip K Dick and JG Ballard and Ursula K Leguin. also Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and John Shirley. and Iain M Banks. or like the obvious Pratchett and Adams. and a bunch of 2000ad or pseudo-indie/alt/underground comics. stunted gamer taste
zakalwe 03.30.23	Iain M Banks >
Trifolium 03.30.23	Ursula K Leguin!!!
Parallels 03.30.23	@zak Nobody tells me nothin. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxFbpMjW0AERefT.jpg
Mort. 03.30.23	according to my goodreads ratings, in no particular order 1. The children of men by PD James 2. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (the whole trilogy is a 5/5 but if i had to choose one novel its this one, the middle one) 3. Wilt by Tom Sharpe 4. Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd 5. 1984 by George Orwell 6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 7. The sirens of titan by Kurt Vonnegut 8. The bell by Iris Murdoch 9. The gods will have blood by Anatole France 10. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 11. For whom the bell tolls by Ernest Hemingway 12. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis 13. The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin 14. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 15. The Trial by Franz Kafka 16. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks 17. Island by Aldous Huxley 18. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 19. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky 20. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Mort. 03.30.23	bit surprised i have We as a 5 because i dont remember too much about it. would say Ishiguro or Vonnegut are my favourite authors
zakalwe 03.30.23	@Parallels. Ha! I tell you what it’s a good choice he has there, that is an amazing book as well.
Egarran 03.30.23	Here are 20 random books OTTOMH that I like a lot: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (Pratchett, Gaiman) The Gardener's Year (Čapek) The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Chesterton) The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Shea, Wilson) Discovering Scarfolk (Littler) Annihilation (VanderMeer) Surface Detail (Banks) You know it Zak The Mind Parasites (Wilson) The Count Of Monte-Christo (Dumas) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke) Dune (Herbert) Foucault's Pendulum (Eco) Northern Lights (Pullman) The Collected Short Stories of (Roald Dahl) The Mysterious Stranger (Twain) The Rabbi's Cat (Sfar) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams) Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) Snow Crash (Stevenson) Hyperion (Simmons)
Mort. 03.30.23	i should read more banks huh
Egarran 03.30.23	I blame the patriarchy for only having men on my list.
Cimnele 03.30.23	god, yeah, Vonnegut and Butler, I love them too Illuminatus Trilogy is totally copied into my head as well and I forgot China Mieville and Vona McIntyre and Samuel R. Delany and George Turner but I can't make a top 20 at all, impossible. maybe it'd go 1. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner? or maybe that's wrong too lol
Trifolium 03.30.23	The Count is here on three different lists already 🥳💕
Egarran 03.30.23	Yeah Cimnele I see now you namedropped like half of my list. stunted gamer taste ON WEED what Delany novel do you recommend?
Cimnele 03.30.23	:D I was big into Dhalgren imo, just based on a single readthrough years ago
zakalwe 03.30.23	Loved Surface detail, love it all. Excession Use of Weapons Look to Windward Consider Phlebas Hydrogen Sonata Player of Games Surface Detail Matter Inversions Although not culture I think Feersum Endjinn may actually be number 1.
fogza 03.30.23	I put the books that people will rightly scoff at at the end; I was a fantasy nerd teenager The Lord of the Flies - William Golding The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner Catch 22 - Joseph Heller The spy who came in from the cold - John le Carré The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen July's People - Nadine Gordimer Ernest Hemingway - The Garden of Eden The Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - J.D. Salinger Web - John Wyndham The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper Microserfs - Douglas Coupland Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Høeg Rule of the Bone - Russell Banks IT - Stephen King Kringe in 'n bos - Dalene Matthee Dragons of Winter Night - Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman The Illearth War - Stephen Donaldson
robertsona 03.30.23	I’m a dummy I haven’t read a novel in so long... This is really like 19 year old me talking lol here’s 10 I like legit feel like I started stretching around #12. Kill me Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) Clotel (Brown) Passages (Quin) Tristram Shandy (Sterne) The Road (McCarthy) Swann’s Way (Proust) The Street (Petry) Beloved (Morrison) Moby-Dick (Melville) Don Quixote (Cervantes)
Egarran 03.30.23	>Web - John Wyndham Ooh I love Wyndham but haven't read that.
fogza 03.30.23	Yeah I think it's not one of the most loved in his canon but I found it fucking terrifying because I'm scared of spiders
Mort. 03.30.23	wyndham is great. love day of the triffids and the chrysalids
AlexKzillion 03.30.23	hmm idk if i can reach 20 cause i read mostly non-fiction but to kill a mockingbird (lee) [fuck you i love this book] 1984 (orwell) [less pointed fuck you] a clockwork orange (burgess) the sailor who fell from grace to the sea (mishima) the stranger (camus) jane eyre (bronte) inferno (dante) okay lmfao that is quite literally all the fiction in my goodreads
DocSportello 03.30.23	nice list! fuckin love bolaño this is a knee-jerk attempt but Austen - Emma Baldwin - another country Barth - the sot weed factor bolaño - the savage detectives Cervantes - don quixote chandler - the big sleep Dostoyevsky - notes from underground Ellison - Invisible man Fowles - the magus Ishiguro - remains of the day Joyce - ulysses lee - to kill a mockingbird McCarthy - child of god Nabokov - pale fire Flann o'brien - at swim-two-birds Tim o'brien - in the lake of the woods Pynchon - mason & Dixon salinger - franny & Zooey sterne - tristram shandy Woolf - mrs dalloway
Trifolium 03.30.23	Day of the Triffids yeesssss!! EMMA yessss! That one probably should have made it to my top 20 too actually.
zakalwe 03.30.23	Credit to Eg as well. Don’t know how it translates to Danish but Banks Sci-fi is hard to get your head around.
Egarran 03.30.23	Don't know if he's translated, I only read the ogs. But yeah I wouldn't envy any translator. I love how you're such a dedicated Banks fan. Also recommend Espedair Street because it's about music and drugs and those things are important to sputnikkers
CugnoBrasso 03.30.23	I'll probably list them tomorrow or in the week end
porcupinetheater 03.30.23	Couple standouts in the order that I think of them: Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway Nabokov - Pale Fire & Pnin Morrison - The Bluest Eye Heller - Catch-22 & Something Happened Bolaño - By Night in Chile Barnes - Nightwood Ellison - The Invisible Man Also shouts to many of the stories of Cheever and Munro, both have some of my favorite stuff in fiction but can’t really put a full collection on the proper list for the inherent unevenness (even if slight) in most short story collections
Mort. 03.30.23	lot of people have catch-22 on their lists
Drbebop 03.30.23	The TB12 Method - Tom Brady The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown The Secret - Rhonda Byrne Knitting with Dog Hair - Kendall Crolius/Anne Montgomery Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline Garfield: Livin’ the Sweet Life - Jim Davis In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World - Rachel Dolezal American Pyscho - Brett Easton Ellis The Bible - God Christian Humber Reloaded - Christian Humber Fifty Shades Darker - E.L James Biggles Learns to Fly - W.E Johns Finnegan’s Wake - James Joyce If I Did It - O.J Simpson War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy The Art of the Deal - Donald Trump Pokémon: Go Poplio! - Unknown Kamasutra - Vātsyāyana Everything I Know about Women I Learned from My Tractor! - Roger Welsch Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power: How to Use the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts - Donald Wilson M.D
Mort. 03.30.23	^ absolutely stunning choices
DocSportello 03.30.23	lol'd at god
MiloRuggles 03.30.23	Yesyes I have tryhard whiteboi taste I know, and apologies for numerous author double (and triple) ups Don Quixote - Cervantes Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace Omensetter's Luck - William Gass The Tunnel - William Gass Catch-22 - Joseph Heller Brave New World - Aldous Huxley The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy Suttree - Cormac McCarthy Moby Dick - Herman Melville From Hell - Alan Moore Watchmen - Alan Moore Against The Day - Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon Sophie's Choice - William Styron The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Sharenge 03.30.23	would be interested to read the new McCarthy book(s) but not dropping the money it costs to purchase a brand new book today... plus I kind of look at the release of that book and the whole splitting it into two separate books even though they were released pretty much simultaneously as a scam/money-grab - can't understand much other reason for such a decision, especially considering neither part is particularly long to say the least so instead, grabbed a couple from his back catalogue that I've yet to read from the emporium for like a couple dollars apiece
Trifolium 03.30.23	Yeah Catch 22 seems to be one of the most acclaimed books here. Rightfully so, it's practically alive. And Bolaño comes up a lot too, hadn't heard of them before.
Sunnyvale 03.30.23	In no particular order-weird list and also includes various novellas, series, and short story collections, but oh well... The Lord Of The Rings-Tolkien The Magic Mountain-Mann The Demons-Von Doderer Middlemarch-Eliot Foundation-Asimov Life And Fate-Grossman Harry Potter-Rowling Something Wicked This Way Comes-Bradbury The Master And Margarita-Bulgakov Crime And Punishment-Dostoyevsky To The Lighthouse-Woolf The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress-Heinlein The Woman In White-Collins War And Peace-Tolstoy The Napoleon Of Notting Hill-Chesterton The Heart Of Midlothian-Scott Nostromo-Conrad The Chronicles Of Narnia-Lewis For Whom The Bell Tolls-Hemingway Sherlock Holmes-Doyle
Ryus 03.30.23	hmmmm dunno about 20 but (in no order) satantango - laszlo krasznahorkai the bluest eye - toni morrison [2] crime and punishment - fyodor dostoevsky midnight's children - salman rushdie one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcía márquez omensetter's luck - william h gass [2]
Ryus 03.30.23	not novels but i assume youve read borges in spanish wines. my favorite author ever
MiloRuggles 03.30.23	Sharenge, they're definitely worth your time. I think splitting them was justified—if you read them as intended (with a wee break in between) Stella Maris is a really phenomenal expansion on The Passenger. Certainly no harm in working through his back catalogue either way though Catch 22 is so damn funny/sad, perfect novel. 2666 stuck with me, but much like The Recognitions I'm gonna need to sit with it for a bit longer and revisit at some point I think
DocSportello 03.30.23	"would be interested to read the new McCarthy book(s) but not dropping the money it costs to purchase a brand new book today... plus I kind of look at the release of that book and the whole splitting it into two separate books even though they were released pretty much simultaneously as a scam/money-grab - can't understand much other reason for such a decision, especially considering neither part is particularly long to say the least" having read both of these novels I can assure you it is not a scam and that there are legitimate narrative/stylistic risks McCarthy takes that work to validate/elevate the 'experience' of the brother-sister structure. incredible stuff, challenging stuff, tempts me to say hyperbolic things but if you like McCarthy already you'd be doing yourself a disservice to sit this one out it's got a fire in it
Jasdevi087 03.30.23	i've only just gotten back into reading over the last couple of years, so i can't give you a 20 that I would stand by in, like, even a few months time. but i can give you about 10 or so. asylum piece - anna kavan annihilation - jeff vandermeer animal farm - george orwell pounamu pounamu - witi ihimaera sleep has his house - anna kavan the love songs of w.e.b. dubois - honoree fanone jeffers my dark vanessa - kate elizabeth russell a grain of wheat - ngugi wa thiongo the boats of the glenn carrig - william hope hodgson when we cease to understand the world - benjamin labatut rings of saturn - w.g. sebald the bell jar - sylvia plath moby dick - herman melville that's 10 right?
Jasdevi087 03.30.23	""would be interested to read the new McCarthy book(s) but not dropping the money it costs to purchase a brand new book today... " the passenger is $50 nzd and Stella Maris is $40 nzd, books are fucked thesedays
DocSportello 03.30.23	I pirated them and then found em used but in great condition for p cheap in a used bookstore. Sucks but I don't blame McCarthy for the economy lol
Ryus 03.30.23	i needa get crackin with moby dick like yesterday. picked it up used for like 3 bucks a few months ago but ive been neglecting it in lieu of other books
DocSportello 03.30.23	Moby dick fucks, we were given 2 weeks to read it in a seminar at the end of a semester while we were writing our end-semester papers on novels that we'd already read (so not Moby dick) so did I read it? yes. did I skim swaths of it? also yes. I owe it a major reread once life slows down. some of the finest American prose imo
Jasdevi087 03.30.23	Moby Dick will turn you into willem dafoe's character in the lighthouse
Egarran 03.30.23	Woah pretty sure Drbebop won this list.
Sharenge 03.30.23	should reread Moby Dick some day I guess - read it as a kid in middle school and really was just forcing myself through the entire thing - guess it was just completely lost on me at that age 'cus it did absolutely nothing for me - now that many years have passed, maybe I would get something out of it now and be able to appreciate it if I went back honestly could probably about say the same exact thing about the LOTR trilogy, but before I revisit those, need to get myself a copy of The Hobbit which is the one I actually remember thoroughly enjoying when I read it as a kid, much more so than the trilogy, but alas it was a library read so don't have my own copy of that one
Egarran 03.30.23	I was a Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas kid. I read that book all the time.
Sharenge 03.30.23	lol that probably would have been a better choice for me back in the day
Winesburgohio 03.30.23	i have seen enough of my honourable mentions pop up here to die happily. compiling soon! surprised / happy / vindicated to see omensetter's luck and moby dick pop up with such frequency. this won't mean anything to someone who's not intimately familiar with nz but i picked up my copy of moby dick in kaikoura. "lol". the prose of the thing! nothing like the smell of sperm in the morning!
Winesburgohio 03.30.23	How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?
MiloRuggles 03.30.23	[i]Whalewatch, Kaikoura[/i]. Yes boy. Have you read The Tunnel wines? Tis fucking wild
DadKungFu 03.30.23	Winesburgohio, how you not have Winesburg, Ohio?
ToSmokMuzyki 03.31.23	1. Captain Underpants by Dave Pickle 2. Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by J.K. Rowling 3. 101 HOT Positions by Your Mom 4. Animorphs by Sum Furry Bitch 5. Jane's Hairs ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) by Charmander Brontosaurus 6. The Qur'an by God 7. The Bible also by God 8. The Book of Mormon by God? 9. The Kama Sutra by Vaginasatan ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 10. The Pokédex by Professor oak 11. Mine Cunt by Adult Tittles 12. Atlas Ejaculated by Anal Rain 13. 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee Automobile Manual by Jeep 14. Naruto #16 by Masashi Kishimoto 15. Ohio Parking Laws by Ohio 16. How to Get Rich by Donald Trump 17. The Script to Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock 18. JohnnyoftheWell's Diary by Egarran 19. The Burger King Menu by Jose Cil 20. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
ToSmokMuzyki 03.31.23	damn it someone beat me to it mines better tho
ToSmokMuzyki 03.31.23	>Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power: How to Use the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts - Donald Wilson M.D jesus christ thats real adds to cart
Winesburgohio 03.31.23	Winesburg, Ohio regrettably omitted due to arbitrary rules i imposed to make life easier on myself (no short stories or YA, for example). Otherwise that would be here, as would Borges' Ficciones, which is so so brilliant and endlessly satisfying. Others that nearly made the cut: Moby Dick, Suttree, Naked Lunch, Beat of the Pendulum, Buddha of Suburbia, The Emigrants, 11 / 22 / 63, 10:04
Winesburgohio 03.31.23	@Milo I love the Recognitions - the middle section is tough but a re-read yields certain threads and kind of recurring jokes throughout. I feel like his prose is very singular, ornate and erudite but with a wry sense of humour and occasional moments of mischief and fun wordplay, but his characters always feel real despite the cynicism; and a quest for authenticity and belonging amidst infinite possibilities of fakeness and enticing sirens does take time. something spiritually beautiful about it, lovely end section
Winesburgohio 03.31.23	Nice to see that not only does everyone have their own Murakami's, but to a certain extent their own Steinbeck's as well. Love him! So humane!
Trifolium 03.31.23	Stranded in The Red and The Black, maybe he isn't for me. Or maybe should give him another go sometime. Oh sorry, that was Stendhal, never mind!
Sinternet 03.31.23	ooh boy great idea, wish i read as much as i used to, but (mostly) unordered, one book per author norwegian wood (murakami (h)) piercing (murakami (r)) the handmaid's tale (atwood) never let me go (ishiguro) the bell jar (plath) the children of hurin (tolkien) the outsider (camus) when i do read im way more into graphic novels than i am regular books, or memoirs/music-related stuff - crying in h-mart is breaking my heart and making me hungry at the moment
dedex 03.31.23	some include: Kafka on the Shore (Murakami) Crime and Punishment (Dostoievski) La gloire de mon pere (Pagnol) Second Foundation (Asimov) The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) La Horde du Contrevent (Damasio) The Plague (Camus)
Get Low 03.31.23	Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Looking For Alaska - John Green The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway Ulysses - James Joyce Taipei - Tao Lin Life of Pi - Yann Martel Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov This is a distinct and definite top 10 for me in alphabetical order by last name. I couldn't do 20 bacause there are too many other novels that I love fairly equally.
Get Low 03.31.23	@Winesburg I'm interested to know, if you hadn't imposed a no YA rule on yourself, what YA novels if any you would have included.
Winesburgohio 03.31.23	Looking for Alaska, Angus Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, Tomorrow When the War Began, Series of Unfortunate Events would have been up for consideration
DadKungFu 03.31.23	Kafka On The Shore Kafka Sweeping Sand Off His Car Seat
Mort. 03.31.23	murakami seems very popular
WeepingBanana 03.31.23	Man, I really wanted to like Drive Your Plow… but I just couldn’t. It has all the elements of shit that I love, but something about it just was not connecting with me
Trifolium 03.31.23	Tomorrow When The War Began omg yeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!
MoM 03.31.23	Haven’t done much reading lately, been mostly into short stories when i do read -2666 -Infinite Jest -House of Leaves -Comedy in a Minor Key (Hans Keilson) -Johnny Got His Gun (Trumbo) -Invisible Cities (Calvino) -Contact (Sagan) -Illuminatus! Trilogy (love seeing it mentioned here so much) -Trainspotting -Open Water (Caleb Azumah Nelson) -The Devil Wears Prada (my wife and i wanted to read something light and fun together and love the movie, so this turned out to be a very good time that i think of fondly) -Harry Potter 1-7 (nostalgia aside, i still have a great time reading these) Short stories -Feeling Very Strange -The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade -The Weird -The New Weird -The Uncanny Reader -The New Wave Fabulist -The New Uncanny -Labyrinths (Borges) -The Complete Stories (Kafka)
Get Low 03.31.23	Looking for Alaska the goat
Sinternet 03.31.23	"murakami seems very popular" he's almsot ubiquitous these days, if i were to hazard a guess as to why, a lot of his work always straddles the lines between realism and light science fiction elements in intense first-person character studies that feel very raw and relatable, add in the element for western readers of slight exoticism for foreign cultures and it's endlessly consumable but depper than light fiction. my favourite author and probably the only one of whom i've read every book of theirs (although i wish he knew how to write women)
fogza 03.31.23	Nice pick on Contact MoM
Zig 03.31.23	just to name a few: 〻 Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis 〻 Água Viva, by Clarice Lispector 〻 The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa 〻 Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol 〻 Húmus, by Raul Brandão
MoM 03.31.23	@Fogza It’s so good. Ending had me in my car going “naaah… yoooo!” “ 〻 The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa” Have had this in my Kindle app for so long, waiting to be read. Might be time soon 🧐
Winesburgohio 04.01.23	I can understand not resonating with Drive your Plow, but in terms of literature changing lives i offer a tangible example: it turned me pescatarian : O The Tomorrow Series is what got me into reading and is responsible for All This. Utterly seminal!
Sharenge 04.01.23	hopefully third time will be the charm my next attempt at completing House of Leaves
MoM 04.01.23	@Sharenge The way i look at it, some people just aren’t gonna click with it. I love everything but most of the Johnny Truant bits (the shit with his mom’s letters spooks me, though). His pornographic nonsense can fuck off The book’s weird layout shit and the misdirections/dead ends in the footnotes make sense to me in that the book is about labyrinths while also trying to be one. I don’t know if it’ll help with the enjoyment or anything, but it’s also a really personal book to me, so i go on a bit. I hope you enjoy, but if you don’t, i think that’s okay too
CugnoBrasso 04.01.23	Borges - Fictions Bufalino - The Plague-spreader's Tale Buzzati - The Tartar Steppe Calvino - The Cloven Viscount Camus - The Stranger Cartarescu - Solenoid DeLillo - White Noise Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underworld Frisch - Survey (Fragebogen) Gospodinov - Time Shelter Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being Lem - Solaris Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude Orelli - The Year of the Avalanche Paasilinna - A Charming Mass Suicide Pavese - The Moon and the Bonfires Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet Rushdie - The Midnight Children Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
CugnoBrasso 04.01.23	"Although I wish Murakami knew how to write women" Agreed hard
Egarran 04.01.23	>The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa Was just made aware of this bc of a yt-video. The clickbait title worked on me: https://youtu.be/6qU1sDBU9Cs >Illuminatus! Trilogy (love seeing it mentioned here so much) So happy I read this in my formative years. RAW may be my favorite American.
CugnoBrasso 04.01.23	Wow, the Book of Disquiet looks like my kind of shit
Drbebop 04.01.23	Was reading the Mobile Suit Gundam novels and it ends with someone getting shot in the dick so hard they get blown in half. Kino writing from the master Tomino
TalonsOfFire 04.01.23	I have more on my to-read list, but this is from what I’ve read so far and can remember. Some of my favorite novellas are the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, The Metamorphosis by Kafka, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula le Guin, The Stranger by Camus, and Animal Farm by Orwell. Not counting young adult/children’s books, biographies, non-fiction, epic poems, novellas, or classics, my top 20 in no order, just sorted alphabetically by author’s last name: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Peril at End House by Agatha Christie And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (probably in my top 5) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro The Long Walk by Stephen King (pen name Richard Bachman) Pet Sematary by Stephen King Misery by Stephen King Carrie by Stephen King Mystic River by Dennis Lehane A Song of Ice and Fire 1-5 by George R.R. Martin (Storm of Swords in my top 5) The Road by Cormac McCarthy (in my top 5) 1984 by George Orwell (probably the most soul-crushing book I’ve read haha) Name of the Wind/Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (latter in my top 5) Harry Potter 1-7 by J.K. Rowling The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (favorite trilogy) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Guess I love fantasy, thrillers, and dystopia a lot haha
Mort. 04.01.23	surprising amounts of harry potter on these lists i loved them as a kid/young teen but havent revisited them as an adult
TalonsOfFire 04.01.23	Like half my list is from memory as a teen 10+ years ago, which includes all the HP books haha. I used to be a more disciplined reader, but have also read other kinds of books in my 20s too. Gotta get on more novels tho, trying to read more cerebral stuff like Mrs. Dalloway, Catch-22, Bell Tolls, Pale Fire, Gravity’s Rainbow, House of Leaves, and In the Lake of the Woods which I’m halfway through. Would accept recs too if I’m missing any essentials.
Sharenge 04.01.23	nothing to do with 'not clicking with it' - just referring to actually completing it
Trifolium 04.01.23	HP is super nice as an adult too. Lovely to see quite a few people choosing King as well!
Mort. 04.01.23	@talonsoffire if you have a goodreads it would be easier to rec you stuff and see what youve already read but if you love dytopia i would reccomend We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
TalonsOfFire 04.01.23	Sure, and feel free to add me as a friend whoever has a Goodreads. I’ll read pretty much anything if it’s a good story. Here’s my profile: goodreads.com/user/show/4302710-benjamin
Mort. 04.01.23	hmm i would reccomend China Mieville, Mervyn Peake (the gormenghast trilogy), Brian Aldiss, Island by Aldous Huxley (this is the utopia to brave new worlds dytopia), john wyndham, iain banks (the wasp factory), the buried giant (you like ishiguro a lot and if you havent read this one already i think youll really like it) and JG Ballard (High Rise)
mindleviticus 04.01.23	Not one person here mentioned A Confederacy of Dunces wow. One of my favorites of all time.
TalonsOfFire 04.01.23	Cool cool. I didn’t know there was a companion novel to Brave New World. Yeah Ishiguro is amazing, I’m actually just about to start his new one Klara and the Sun which I’m very excited for, and might get to Buried Giant after but I thought it got mixed reactions?
Mort. 04.01.23	yeah it got mixed reactions but i dont know why. for me its up there with remains of the day for one of his best novels if youre interested in the concept of utopia, thomas moore's utopia is also a good place to start. Also interesting to note that utopia is a corruption of eutopia (literally meaning good place), such as like euphoria means good feeling or eulogy means good word. The spelling utopia was a joke that means 'no place'. theres also a whole journal on utopioa studies you can read for free through jstor
TalonsOfFire 04.01.23	Interesting. The Buried Giant did win a bunch of awards, and looks like most reviews were positive. I certainly want it to be great, and looks like Guillermo del Toro’s set to make a stop motion animated movie out of it.
CugnoBrasso 04.02.23	Everyone should read The Tartar Steppe, it changed my worldview.
MoM 04.02.23	This list getting bookmarked for future potential readings
budgie 04.02.23	hey fogza are you excited for the new IT production? i liked the book for the world building but it definitely dragged...
fogza 04.02.23	Didn't know there was another adaption coming. I loved how detailed IT was, I don't mind Stephen taking his time on that one. The Stand drags more for me
MoM 04.02.23	“ Didn't know there was another adaption coming. I loved how detailed IT was” [2] The ending was the part where i was like “hurry up, dawg.” But i didn’t like adult Bill and thought the Deadlights shoulda snatched that ass, so that’s probably why
budgie 04.02.23	https://bloody-disgusting.com/tv/3739933/welcome-to-derry-it-prequel-series-still-happening-and-showrunners-have-been-found/ thar yeah MoM, it felt like the story arc had closed nicely but there were still like 250 pages left and then some shit about the cosmic spider light-racing through spacetime oh man all the worldly! lore was fantastic though, and the two feature films and tv series are like 10/10s in my book
RosaParks 04.02.23	book of disquiet nausea Idk what else Lord of the files
TalonsOfFire 04.02.23	Nausea wasn’t really an enjoyable reading experience I thought, but interesting. Same with Lolita.
Colton 04.02.23	Game Of Thrones Game Of Thrones 2 Game Of Thrones 3 Game of Thrones 4 Game Of Thrones 5 Eragon Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House To Kill a Mockingbird Geronimo Stilton 1 Two Against The North Artemis Fowl
budgie 04.02.23	colty u should read the conan stories
Egarran 04.02.23	Argh that lower case o implies that you wrote out the title every time.
MoM 04.02.23	^ it looks like when you have a band’s discog all in jewel cases except one in the middle that’s a digipak
budgie 04.02.23	lmao egg
Winesburgohio 04.02.23	Book of Disquiet invented midwest emo !
MoM 04.02.23	^ that just made me want to read it immediately Expectations currently through the roof 📈
RosaParks 04.03.23	"Nausea wasn’t really an enjoyable reading experience I thought" nausea being a shit book is exactly why i love it
Winesburgohio 05.04.23	sorry to bump this but wish to acknowledge that perhaps ranking novels is a futile enterprise, as i am appalled not to see certain other favourites but wouldn't know what to exclude. and to make manifest my love of V., my preferred Pynchon pick. and to ask if anyone has a Victoria University library card so I can get my hands on The Tunnel. And possibly to summon Havey, whose taste we can all chortle at
Winesburgohio 05.04.23	really loving Fitzcarraldo Editions stuff at the moment, fantastic and reliable imprint who really picked Quite the Shade of Blue
MiloRuggles 05.04.23	Bruh, i can maybe lend you my library card re: The Tunnel. Hutt City Libraries has a copy apropos my suggestion to purchase, hit me on email/discord if you wanna suss something V. Is dope ye
90m80s 05.04.23	The Trial (Kafka) Invisible Man (Ellison) LOTR (Tolkien) Fool the World (Frank/Ganz) Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) Watchmen (Moore) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard) Journey to the West (Cheng'en) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Wolfe) Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) ...
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	Is Gravity’s Rainbow the best place to start with Pynchon? I love mystery and sci-fi btw. Anyone read Antkind by Charlie Kaufman, his first novel? As a big fan of his screenwriting and directing, I’m excited to try that one out. Almost done with In the Lake of the Woods and almost halfway through Klara and the Sun, enjoying it a lot. Added Buried Giant to by to-buy list as well.
90m80s 05.04.23	As much as I love Ishiguro, I couldn't get through Buried Giant.
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	I know it got mixed reactions and is unconventional, but I can’t resist the idea of an Ishiguro Arthurian fantasy book.
90m80s 05.04.23	I'm a big fan of mythology overall. The pacing was incredibly slow and never got to anything I could really sink my teeth into. Perhaps I stopped before it got good......
Trifolium 05.04.23	All of these different Murakami's made me read Kafka on the Shore. Just started, already loving it.
90m80s 05.04.23	I was deep into Murakami for a long time. Wind Up Bird is prob the only one I enjoyed revisiting after time passed. Kafka on the Shore is good though.
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	To you or anyone else who’s read The Buried Giant, maybe a dumb question but is there any neat fantasy stuff or is the setting kinda irrelevant? Like creatures, swordplay, murder, supernatural stuff, court coups, scary villain, any of that? Ursula le Guin had accused him of not writing a real fantasy or something which was disappointing.
90m80s 05.04.23	I only got maybe 80 pages in. I'd lean towards le Guin's review. It had some fantasy structures built in like games and ferries in a psuedoquest environment, but it seemed more like a story about the adventure of real life from the perspective of wonder al la forgetting and remembering love. That was my impression anyway. I tried it twice and both times wasn't feeling it.
90m80s 05.04.23	You mentioned Arthurian fantasy. Tolkien's got a great version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight if you haven't read that classic yet.
YoYoMancuso 05.04.23	Blood Meridian (McCarthy) Mason & Dixon (Pynchon) House of Leaves (Danielewski) Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) The Idiot (Dostoevsky) East of Eden (Steinbeck) White Teeth (Smith) The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas) War and Peace (Tolstoy) Wise Blood (O’Connor)
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	The Buried Giant is an Arthurian fantasy I believe? Yeah medieval fantasy is probably my favorite kind of literature, I’ve read Tolkien’s Gawain translation multiple times. I was fortunate enough to take the rarely offered JRR Tolkien class at my college where we read everything he wrote and translated. The Green Knight was also my favorite movie of the past few years, I think it’s a masterpiece.
90m80s 05.04.23	Maybe it is lol someone who finished it would need to speak up. I saw the Green Knight movie got bad reviews. Hearing a posi view now I may look into it.
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	The Green Knight got great reviews but divisive response from the public. Wikipedia says Buried Giant takes place after King Arthur dies. Gawain shows up apparently. I gotta read this thing cause Arthurian mythology is so interesting and Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors. But man being a fantasy fan is so frustrating cause it’s by far the best type of literature imo but none of these authors today who do multi-book sagas can finish their freaking series. Even Tolkien was notorious for that; never finished any full-length novel, set in Middle-Earth or otherwise, after TLotR which I think drove his publisher crazy, so his son and others do their best to compete them like The Silmarillion. At least he had kind of an excuse unlike modern fantasy writers cause he was a brilliant professor and scholar and did all this other stuff. Maybe if he were alive today tho he’d do stuff like those guys and make deals with Hollywood and go to cons and f&%# around on Twitch streams instead of finish their stories lol
90m80s 05.04.23	Hmm. I didn't know that about the setting. Maybe I'll revisit it again when I have enough patience. Tbh it took me 3 tries to get through The Hobbit. Now Im a huge Tolkien fan. I have bad luck with fantasy. Recently tried Game of Thrones and Malazan... got two books in each and dropped them. I am at a high reading level. A lot of it seems purely escapist without any anchoring principle or value. I get bored of that feeling easily, but I know people who love the crap out of it. Anyway, I feel the same way about HxH manga never moving forward so I def relate.
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	In general I don’t love fantasy more than any other genre I guess, but the best it has to offer I love. TLotR trilogy is my #1 favorite book, and the first three Game of Thrones and the first two books of the Kingkiller Chronicle (Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear) aren’t far behind. But there’s no ending in sight for either Game of Thrones or Kingkiller Chronicle, even tho each series is mostly done but hasn’t had an installment in over a decade…
Flugmorph 05.04.23	just finished "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", thats a new fav. Otherwise my list is pretty old because I just recently started reading recreationally again, before that I didnt really do that since 2015. Tuf Voyaging - Martin, George R.R. Watership Down - Adams, Richard The Martian - Weir, Andy these four are the only ones I ever gave a 5/5
Flugmorph 05.04.23	also recently read All Tomorrows which is pretty fantastic aswell
90m80s 05.04.23	I hear ya. HxH has an English ver of a new volume dropping in October then nothing again for who knows how long. You might enjoy Journey to the West if you want epic and enjoy mythology.
TalonsOfFire 05.04.23	We read Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf which was excellent, would love a great movie adaptation of that instead of the mediocre Angelina Jolie one since there’re perfect versions of TLotR and Green Knight. And The Northman too, my fav movie of last year, which was based on the real life Danish king that Macbeth is based on with some fantasy flourishes. I detect a Beowulf influence on whoever wrote Sir Gawain, tho the latter is more strange and elusive if that makes sense.
90m80s 05.04.23	Oh yea that Beowulf translation is good too. Those old texts have strange origins. Speaking of, I still find the Faust and Dr. Faustus origins curious as the same legend was sourced without any plagiarism.
DocSportello 05.04.23	“Is Gravity’s Rainbow the best place to start with Pynchon” it’d be like first time souls player doing ER with deprived class: very doable, possibly maddening. i would start with inherent vice or the crying of lot 49 personally and then bon voyage : )
TalonsOfFire 05.06.23	I’m not familiar with Faust or Dr. Faustus. Hm good to know, I’ll think about that with which Pynchon to start with.
Winesburgohio 06.15.23	R.I.P. 2 McCarthy, who managed to save some of his best for last!, Stella Maris what a stellar note to end on!
Piglet 06.15.23	Yeah, the prose in In Search of Lost Time is astonishingly beautiful. Almost wanted to learn French, just so I could reread it in it's original form. And the way he describes certain emotions and situations is so visceral. Other favourites of mine would have to be Tao Te Ching, The Brothers Karamazov, Shakespeare's complete works, Don Quixote, Catch 22, The Histories, The Stories of English, I Am That, The Arabian Nights, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Magician and Dune.
MiloRuggles 06.15.23	Massive RIP indeed. I keep picking up Stella Maris and reading bits at random whenever I see it. Sublime bloomin work from a master!
DocSportello 06.16.23	Huge RIP, the passenger/stella maris ruled