1)The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
2)Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
3)Joseph And His Brothers by Thomas Mann
4)The Wanderer by Knut Hamsun
5)The Women at the Pump by Knut Hamsun
6) The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
7)The Brothers Karmazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8)The Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9)The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10)Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (My very favorite of the classic dystopian novels, as I feel like it tapped into a unique set of insights about human nature and our profound capacity for distraction that anticipated a lot of issues Americans, in particular, face today)
The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot (I'm not much for poetry, but anyone who knows me knows that I consider T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to be the single greatest poem ever written, a lyrical exploration of male sexual insecurity and generalized anxiety; The Waste Land, Eliot's epic modernist poem and primary claim to fame, is more inconsistent in quality due to its sheer length and experimental nature, but certain sections of it are also quite sublime)
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (one night the stars disappear as a mysterious membrane encloses the Earth and shuts it off from the universe, and the way three childhood friends react to this — from religious fanaticism to rigid scientism — reflects the extremes of human coping as a whole)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (Rand's grandiose prose might generate ridicule from literature professors, but, like Stephen King, she was a gifted storyteller, and I found this novel, about a sociopathic ubermensch's odyssey to realize his vision of architectural perfection against all odds, to be oddly compelling; while written in the tradition of philosophic literature, it avoids the excessive speechifying and overly propagandistic construction of her final novel, Atlas Shrugged.)
Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky, a sort of pathologist of the spirit, possessed a penetrating, almost taboo insight into the strange ways in which a human mind could contort itself, and that insight expressed itself the cynical, alienated voice of "the underground man;" for a work written in the 1800s, the attitudes on display here are often shockingly contemporary)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (and then we have this, probably the Russian maestro's longest, but also most explicitly philosophical, work; the complexity of character interactions on display were fairly unprecedented at the time of publication, but it's truly the monologues and thought-experiments, particularly Ivan's passionate and unforgettable exploration of 'the problem of evil' via the suffering of children, that give this novel its timeless quality)
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (the first collection of this utterly remarkable speculative fiction writer's work; although Stories of Your Life, which was adapted into the acclaimed science-fiction film Arrival, is the headliner, I think my favorite piece is probably Division by Zero, wherein a gifted mathematician experiences an existential and spiritual crisis when she develops a system of logic that proves a fundamental inconsistency within mathematics itself)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. (an impressive collection of short works from Alice Sheldon, one of the luminaries of early feminist science-fiction who published her work under a veil of mystery and a male pseudonym; of her works, my two favorites are The Screwfly Solution, which details the apocalyptic self-destruction of the human race when every male on the planet is seized by a misogynistic and murderous sexual insanity and ends with a subtle but truly amazing twist, and The Girl Who Was Plugged In, a uniquely proto-cyberpunk novella set in a capitalist dystopia where a deeply troubled teen girl is chosen by a corporation to act as a "remote operator" and pilot the body of a beautiful but brainless bio-engineered husk called Delphi via satellite to advertise products)
The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti (one of the most treasured pieces in my library, both for its relative rarity and because, despite its age, it's still easily the best collection of this cult writer's work to date; the standout piece for me was "The Bungalow House," a powerful, deeply nihilistic short story that explores spiritual displacement, obsession, the innate yearning of even the most warped individuals to have their internal lives understood, and the disturbing realization that such a yearning will never fully be satiated)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (an endlessly popular novel about life, suffering, joy, forgiveness, God, and social justice that is perhaps the most all-encompassing vision of the heights and depths of the human experience I've ever been privy to)
Bonus Pick!
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (a gigantic, incomprehensible tome that's written in a dream language, but one I've returned to with bemused fascination over the years; Joyce, a consummate artist, pushed his modernist experimentation as far as it could possibly go and toiled over this piece of art for 17 years, with the result being perhaps the most skilled and layered jibberish ever printed on wood pulp)
Here's a (rather talented) reading of the very beginning of the book. I encourage anyone who has never seen this book to listen to it for a minute, and then to imagine several hundreds of pages of this:
Impossible to choose from the over 600 books I have in my library: I should first consider the different genres, then choosing the best writers and finally their best book. I swear I'll try to do a top ten so maybe in the meantime a new stock of PS5 will be available.
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
American Psycho - Brett Easton Ellis
The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Immoralist - Andre Gide
The Outsider - Albert Camus
Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
1984 - George Orwell
The Dark Tower series (and related books like The Stand and Salem's Lot - bit of a cheat there lol) - Stephen King
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson
Cash - Johnny Cash
In no particular order
I'd probably add Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh an the various Sherlock Holmes short story collections and novellas by Arthur Conan Doyle if I could have more spaces, also at least the first 3 in the da Vinci code series by Dan brown, I haven't read inferno or origin
@JapaneseSonic Please don’t mention Moby Dick.. I still get palpitations thinking about that book! There’s an interesting story in there somewhere that’s hidden beneath far too many chapters on things like whale physiology.
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I’ll have to have a think about my answers though and it’s tricky as I’ve been re-reading a lot of my library recently and books I really enjoyed the first time round I found quite dull the second time. A couple have had the opposite response though!
@JapaneseSonic LOL Yeah, FW isn't really a big you "read" in a conventional sense. The sing-songy language is fun to read aloud, though, and reading Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson's critical analysis and break down of the book's structure, themes, etc. helped me to appreciate it as more than a mere curio.
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Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Emma - Jane Austen
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx 😉
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
@nessisonett I appreciate his use of language, his attacks on tradition/religion, and his willingness to explore bleaker territory than most of his contemporaries were.
On the other hand, he can't write a decent female character to save his life. Not a big deal most of the time, but Tess of the d'Urbervilles aged rather poorly, I think.
I also quite took to The Mayor of Casterbridge. The man was excellent at writing tragedies.
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@Ralizah Yeah, I honestly expected to like Tess but the whole book aged quite badly, I agree. I will say that Bathsheba in Far From The Madding Crowd is a really well written character though, she isn’t perfect but she is entirely self-assured and can fair hold her own. The adaptation by Thomas Vinterberg is really good too, while strange that one of the Dogme 95 directors did an adaptation of a classic novel.
Right then, here we go, in random order and with one book per writer:
De Avonden - Gerard Reve
Look to Windward - Iain M. Banks
Heroes - Joe Abercrombie
Gateway - Frederik Pohl
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C Clarke
Dune - Frank Herbert
De Procedure - Harry Mullisch
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brian
Onder Professoren - Willem Frederik Hermans
Die Verwandlung - Franz Kafka
I am Legend - Richard Matheson
Ten of my favourites (in no particular order)
1 1984 - Orwell
2 Brave New World - Huxley
3 Catch 22 - Heller
4 Sirens of Titan - Vonnegut
5 A Scanner Darkly - Dick
6 Last and First Men - Stapledon
7 Darkness at Noon - Koestler
8 The Machine Stops - Forster
9 Flowers for Algernon - Keyes
10 Anathem - Stephenson
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
@nessisonett
...trying to avoid childish innuendo based on your reply but yeah I could've picked a few of his. Recently read `Time out of Joint` but wouldn't especially recommend it - is a great premise (bit Truman show) but felt it ended weakly.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
@Sorteddan Yeah like all things, there’s good Dick and bad Dick. I probably like Ubik the most out of the ones I’ve read but Do Androids... and A Scanner Darkly are right up there. You just have to try a lot of Dick, get a real feel for what Dick is right for you.
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Topic: Your Top 10 Books of all Time
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