Top Ten Books

[linebaugh]

Alan Brazil.

i kind of get their annoyance tho. every time i see the brits mention one of their politicians who isn't boris johnson or jeremy corbyn i get slightly angry at the implication that i would know or care who they're talking about.

 

[version]

I don't know if his politics follow suit, but he's the textbook "gammon" in terms of appearance. One of the reddest men on the planet.

 

[linebaugh]

This thread tells me I need to read Gogols Dead Souls

 

[version]

Alan Brazil or The Evening Redness in the West.

 

[version]

7. Roberto Bolano, The third reich

Prefer this to the big novels, it's leaner and has this sense of dread going on for ages and ages, ratcheting up the tension. Lots left up to the imagination of the reader. Like a lot of the others, I consider bolano as one big thing, but if I had to pick one..

I want to read something else of his before writing him off. I was thinking Distant Star, but maybe I'll try this one. I read The Savage Detectives and I may as well have read 500+ blank pages, made next to no impression.

 

[catalog]

I reread it recently on holiday and it's basically a really good holiday book. Partly cos it's set on a holiday. Give it a go when you next go on holiday.

 

[version]

I reread it recently on holiday and it's basically a really good holiday book. Partly cos it's set on a holiday. Give it a go when you next go on holiday.

 

[version]

I'd like to know @william_kent 's top ten.

Also @blockhead and @wild greens .

 

[catalog]

I'd like to know @william_kent 's top ten.

top 100 tunes as well

 

[catalog]

 

[catalog]

Also @blockhead and @wild greens .

let's have @Spanishmanic and @wektor as well on the top 10 books

 

[jenks]

Having thought about this a bit my selection feels pretty English teacher-ish, which maybe I should not be surprised at.

Gatsby
Great Expectations
Madame Bovary (actually all of Flaubert/Stendhal/Balzac/Zola)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Pound's Cantos
Collected John Clare
The new Jonathan Bate edition of Shakespeare
Proust
Bracewell's England is Mine
The Rider by Tim Krabbe
oh... and The Canterbury Tales making 11

Lots I am sure I have missed out.

Looking at mine now, my first thought is there’s not much wrong with the list except I’d have more literature in translation and most of those writers would be women

 

[wektor]

let's have @Spanishmanic and @wektor as well on the top 10 books

Highly doubt I could go as far as 10, maybe 5 tops

 

[wild greens]

There are a definite seven but it gets cloudy after that. I'll have a think

Ernie Hemingway- Fiesta/Sun Also Rises
Ray Carver- Cathedral
Le Thi Diem Thuy- The Gangster We're All Looking For
Denis Johnson- Name of the World
Richard Ford- Wildlife
Harold Brodkey- Stories In An Almost Classical Mode
Georges Simeone- The Blue Room (only really the first half)

 

[subvert47]

from a quick scan of my bookcases...

Dorothy Allison - Skin
Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues
N.K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season
Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed
China Miéville - Perdido Street Station
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Minnie Bruce Pratt - S/he
Joan Slonczewski - A Door Into Ocean
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

 

[woops]

these are the books on the highest shelf of my bookcase,

John Aubrey Brief Lives
Robert Graves Greek Myths
Benvenuto Cellini Autobiography
Mediaeval Bestiary
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels
Max Beerbohm Zuleika Dobson
Proust In Search o' Lost Time
Pages from the Goncourt Journal
Tobias Smollett Roderick Random
Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm

too much pointless work assembling a top ten of all time.

 

[Corpsey]

What I'd like is ten books that I've returned to multiple times because I adore them so much. But these don't exist. I don't devote enough time to reading to read anything more than once. (As I did when I was young.)

 

[craner]

What I'd like is ten books that I've returned to multiple times because I adore them so much. But these don't exist. I don't devote enough time to reading to read anything more than once. (As I did when I was young.)

You devote more time to talking about things you haven't read than actually reading those things.

You need to re-prioritise, Corpse.

 

[Corpsey]

Well, it's easier, isn't it.

 

[Corpsey]

I have this terrible preoccupation nowadays with this question: if you read a book and a week later don't remember most of it, was it worth reading it?