Top six books for you

[Thomas]

Originally Posted by MrG

Hey, I included a book by Jimmy Buffett, for cryin' out loud. I don't think it gets much less ivory tower than a Buffett book.

Hang on - I've not yet finished combing though my collection of classic comic books and Playboys.

 

[amnesiac]

Originally Posted by Teger

just portrait. I really enjoyed dubliners. I think portrait is the most whiny, self serving worthless ************* book ever made. watching other annoying self possessed artists masturbate over it is horrifying.

t.s eliot is very good, although my favorite is prufrock

I actually meant to put prufrock before etc. but had to rush to class. I'm actually reading prufrock a lot these days to get a mood for this short story i'm writing for a fiction class. Have you heard the recording of Eliot reading it?

I don't know if Portrait is that much a whiny masturbatory pos, though it's understandable. I guess I treat it in sequence with Ulysses and now Finnegans Wake. If anything, FW comes off as masturbatory, though his mastery and manipulation of language is enough for me to overlook the masturbatory tendencies. Joyce was a very self-conscious writer, and he lets you know it, but especially with FW you see more of how he has a sense of humor about himself, which is also getting off on his own genius, but reveals that he's able to place himself in some perspective despite his egotistical tendencies. Even his treatment of Dedalus in Ulysses lets us know that he's able to move beyond the sophomoric Dedalus and his aspirations of meta Irish nationalist genius. I'd say that even in Portrait you have this with the entire last section. After Stephen has his vision, he produces nothing of merit, which is hilarious. What's also interesting is that the bird-girl scene is ripped straight out of another book, I can't remember which but I remember a professor reading aloud a nearly identical passage from another book.

Also, would people here care to elaborate what they love so much about Gatsby? It's a pretty depressing book, and it's good, and it made an impression on me in high school, and even this past semester reading it again, but still it's pretty bleak. I suppose similar to how L'Etranger is so often appearing on these lists.

 

[dfagdfsh]

I love gatsby because it captures a sense of bleakness that I appreciate in a lot of fiction. its the same note that echoes through pretty much all of eliot, yeats, you find it again in neuromancer, you find it in brett easton ellis, etc. that kind of unhappy acceptance of mans inability to disrupt the machine of the world.

 

[itsstillmatt]

Originally Posted by voxsartoria

I'm saddened to see no Thucydides, but I will assume it is because you are still not finished reading it.


- B

I read it again a few months ago, and loved it. Still, it isn't a book that has really influenced
my life, given that I hated it the first several times. Dickwad.

 

[voxsartoria]

Originally Posted by iammatt

I read it again a few months ago, and loved it. Still, it isn't a book that has really influenced my life, given that I hated it the first several times.

That is an interesting point. I was thinking about my own list, and the quality/influence ratio has been increasing as I've grown older.

...or maybe

An odd book that influential was this one that I read when I was nine:

I went through the appendices, one of which had to do with scientific notation, and that was the first fun exposure that I had to non-elementary mathematics.

Originally Posted by iammatt

Dickwad.

Shithead.


- B

 

[Station]

Who has a top six of anything? Pale Fire by Nabokov Coming Up for Air by Orwell Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki Collected Poems (1988 Edition) by Larkin The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus Metamorphoses by Ovid (the A.D. Melville translation)

 

[Milhouse]

Originally Posted by Station

Who has a top six of anything?

Originally Posted by wmmk

To quote Flaubert, "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."


You'll have to discuss your question with Flaubert.

 

[lawyerdad]

Originally Posted by Milhouse

You'll have to discuss your question with Flaubert.

I think he was banned for starting too many dumb threads.

 

[RJman]

Originally Posted by Tegro

I love gatsby because it captures a sense of bleakness that I appreciate in a lot of fiction. its the same note that echoes through pretty much all of eliot, yeats, you find it again in neuromancer, you find it in brett easton ellis, etc. that kind of unhappy acceptance of mans inability to disrupt the machine of the world.

That's most of early 20th-century naturalism right there. Read some Zola, or Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks...

Hmmm, if we have Teger read Proust, would he leave the forum a while?

 

[Milhouse]

Originally Posted by lawyerdad

I think he was banned for starting too many dumb threads.

 

[milosz]

Originally Posted by Piobaire

I'm surprised at the number of people that have listed L'Etranger.

Aside from being a great work, it's a pretty standard junior/senior read for honors English kids. **** is heavy when you're on the cusp of adulthood.

 

[RJman]

Originally Posted by milosz

Aside from being a great work, it's a pretty standard junior/senior read for honors English kids. **** is heavy when you're on the cusp of adulthood.

No reference to teh Cure? Man I feel old.

 

[milosz]

It's a great song, no doubt. I love that they had to put a "NO REALLY, DON'T KILL AY-RABS" sticker on the cover of their first singles collection.

hmm... literary re-imaginings in song:
Stones, "Sympathy For The Devil" (Master and Margarita)
Cure, "Killing An Arab"

after that, I got nothing.

 

[RJman]

Originally Posted by milosz

It's a great song, no doubt. I love that they had to put a "NO REALLY, DON'T KILL AY-RABS" sticker on the cover of their first singles collection.

hmm... literary re-imaginings in song:
Stones, "Sympathy For The Devil" (Master and Margarita)
Cure, "Killing An Arab"

after that, I got nothing.
Simon and Garfunkel did a version of Richard Cory.

 

[MsMcGillicuddy]

Blindness Saramago
Les Miserables Hugo
Einstein's Dreams Lightman
Lies my Teacher Told Me Loewen
On Liberty Mill
Diaries of Adam and Eve Mark Twain