Your all time Top 11 favorite books

[vaticanplum]

Originally Posted by Falls City Beer

Holy Crap! I said Ada by Nabokov without even looking at yer list. Whoa.

Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.

[pedro]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.

I'll field that as I think I'm the only one who mentioned him. Yeah, I can understand not liking his books. I didn't like the last couple ones at all. I'm also not sure that I'd like it as much now as I did when I originally read all those books back in high school. I thought it was hot **** then though and so did pretty much everyone my age who was even vaguely counter culture and read.

[vaticanplum]

Originally Posted by pedro

I'll field that as I think I'm the only one who mentioned him. Yeah, I can understand not liking his books. I didn't like the last couple ones at all. I'm also not sure that I'd like it as much now as I did when I originally read all those books back in high school. I thought it was hot **** then though and so did pretty much everyone my age who was even vaguely counter culture and read.

That's why it upsets me that I don't like him. I feel that way about a lot of beat writers, I guess.

Also, Pedro, thanks for being classy and not pointing out my name issue. I always mix them up

[MrCinatit]

I'm going to cheat, in more ways than one:

2001/2010 - Arthur C. Clarke
Cosmos/Contact/A Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Ball Four - Jim Bouton
Les Miserbales - Victor Hugo
1984/Animal Farm - George Orwell
The complete works of H.G. Wells
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathen Swift
The Beatle's Anthology
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
American Hero - Larry Beinhart
Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Slaughterhouse Five - Kirt Vonnegut

[Falls City Beer]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.

Give Portrait one more shot. Really. What's so disarming about Joyce is that in contrast to his almost overwhelming anti-sentimentalism there exist moments of such heartbreakingly affective directness. In other words, whatever is "felt" is earned, unlike in the works of so many other writers.

And Lolita, while absolutely brilliant in its own right, is no match for Ada. I agree.

[Betterread]

1. Flaubert - Sentimental Education
2. Waugh - Brideshead revisited
3. Joyce - Ulysses
4. Beckett - Molloy
5. Calvino - Invisible cities
6. Dostoyevski - Brothers Karamazov
7. WG Sebald - Emigrants
8. WG Sebald - Rings of Saturn
9. Joan Didion - Play it as it lays
10. Nabakov - Pale fire
11. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
12. Fernando Pessoa - Book of disquiet
13. Andre Breton & Philippe Soupault - the Magnetic fields
14. J.G. Ballard - Crash
15. Raymond Queneau - Witch Grass
16. John Cheever - the Wapshot Chronicle
17. Bocaccio - The Decameron
18. Plutarch's Lives
19. Eliot - Middlemarch
20. Fitzgerald - great gatsby

[pedro]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

That's why it upsets me that I don't like him. I feel that way about a lot of beat writers, I guess.

Also, Pedro, thanks for being classy and not pointing out my name issue. I always mix them up

That's me. Always classy

If I'm going to toss a name in of a famous & popular writer who I just don't enjoy it'd have to be Hemingway.

[Falls City Beer]

Originally Posted by pedro

That's me. Always classy

If I'm going to toss a name in of a famous & popular writer who I just don't enjoy it'd have to be Hemingway.

Hemingway went downhill...fast.

[Betterread]

Originally Posted by nycredsfan

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Chabon
White Noise by DeLillo
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami
New York Trilogy by Auster
Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon
Pastoralia by Saunders
Collected Fictions by Borges (this is probably cheating)
The Loser by Bernhard
Frog by Dixon
Cloud Atlas by Mitchell
Motherless Brooklyn by Lethem

Great list - I forgot about white noise, or it would be on my list and Borges is the best, but I thought I had to restrict myself to novels. Oh well.

[RosieRed]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

I can't either. I've owned a copy for at least 12 years, have picked it up and started it at least 8 times.

There's another classic fiction book, I'm drawing a blank, that I've tried to read a number of times ... it has a ton of footnotes ... man. That's going to drive me crazy. But anyway, I'm not a huge fan of footnotes as it turns out, especially in fiction books.

Some of my favorite non-fiction/memoirs:
The Orchid Thief -- Susan Orlean
Lovely Bones/Lucky: A Memoir -- Alice Sebold (I know the former is "fiction," but close enough, IMO)
South -- Ernest Shackleton
Paula -- Isabel Allende
Stolen Lives -- Malika Oufkir
Guns, Germs & Steel -- Jared Diamond
Into the Wild and Into Thin Air -- Jon Kraukauer
At Home in The World -- Joyce Maynard (not sure why, but I just really liked this book when I read it)
In the Heart of the Sea -- Nathaniel Philbrick

I read so many travel/adventure/disaster books, I could have a favorite list of just that genre.

Some fiction might have made my list had I remembered them earlier:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- Betty Smith
Bastard Out of Carolina -- Dorothy Allison
Summerland -- Michael Chabon (this is probably my favorite of his, actually, I don't know why I spaced on it earlier)

[Gainesville Red]

I'll never be able to narrow it down to eleven. We'll see how it goes.

No particular rank.

-The Right Stuff. Tom Wolfe

- A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway

- Dharma Bums and On the Road. Kerouac

- The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck (Maybe #1)
-Jarhead. Anthony Swofford

- All The President's Men. Bernstein, Woodward

- The Rum Diary. Hunter Thompson

- Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk

- Moneyball. Michael Lewis

- Helter Skelter. Buglliosi

- The Natural. Bernard Malamuc

- Hell's Angels. Hunter Thompson (Another maybe #1)

- Strip Tease. Carl Hiaasen

- All The King's Men. Robert Penn Warren

- Thank You For Smoking. Christopher Buckley

- Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five. Maybe Slapstick. Vonnegut.

- Fear and Loathing either in Las Vegas or on the Campaign Trail '72. Hard to choose

- Hiroshima. John Hersey. (maybe #1)

- Big Sur. Kerouac

- The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe

- Stormy Weather or Tourist Season. Carl Hiaasen.

- The Jordan Rules. Sam Smith

- Game of Shadows. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. It's intresting and they almost went to prison for it.

- The First Third. Neal Cassady

- Clemente by David Maraniss.

- 1984. George Orwell.

- The Boys of Summer. Roger Kahn.

- Either of the Summer of ' books by David Halberstam as well as The Fifties.

- The Jungle. Upton Sinclair.

- How Disney Devours the World. Carl Hiaasen

- Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe. (Maybe #1)

- Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway

-all of the other Carl Hiaasen books. Read anything you can from Carl Hiaasen


I had a felling there would be more than 11. I can't and won't cut it down. If anything there should probably be more of them. I'm sure I've forgotten plenty that I should have ranked.

[zombie-a-go-go]

1. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
2. Weetzie Bat - Francesca Lia Block
3. The Trial - Franz Kafka
4. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
5. The Stand - Stephen King
6. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
7. The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker
8. No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre
9. Neuromancer - William Gibson
10. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
11. Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook v3.5 (it sees the most use, so...)

[MrCinatit]

Originally Posted by Gainesville Red

- The Natural. Bernard Malamuc

Excellent call. I read the book after seeing the movie several times - what amazed me was how the movie was almost exactly like the book, page per page - until the last two pages. While I love the movie, the different endings make them two totally different stories.

[Roy Tucker]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

... and no poetry or plays except for Shakespeare (I can't cut him out).

When I started my list, I automatically started with Shakespeare. Best writer ever, bar none.

But after some semantic soul searching, I couldn't really say his plays are my favorite *books*. So I took them off. To thine own self be true, I supose.

[Sweetstop]

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

I could probably pass with sweetshop's list

I love this thread...it is reminding me of books I've always wanted to read but haven't. Keep em coming.