the dreaded and vile red scare bookclub subreddit had a thread where people posted their 25 favorite books. they chose 25 because it was just a little bit beyond what might come to mind easily. they also listed them unordered, so it can be assumed each book was equally liked.
unfortunately i thought this was a pretty cool idea so i’m going to steal it. i’m also going to list them unordered. the only additional rules i’m adding for myself is to limit one book per author and real favs only. no clout chasing!
with that said:
rings of saturn - wg sebald
2666 - roberto bolano
69 - ryu murakami
my struggle - karl ove knausgaard
woodcutters - thomas bernhard
your face tomorrow - javier marias
seiobo there below - lazlo kraznohorkai
heaven - mieko kawakami
the sheltering sky - paul bowles
american tabloid - james ellroy
miguel street - vs naipaul
stream system - gerald murnane
confessions of a mask - yukio mishima
the technological society - jacques ellul
diaries - franz kafka
the box man - kobo abe
confessions - st augustine
selected stories - robert walser
the guest cat - takashi hiraide
god’s fool - julien green
an elemental thing - eliot weinberger
we’re flying - peter stamm
sayings of the desert fathers
first person singular - haruki murakami
jfk and the unspeakable - james douglass
looking over my list, i’m a bit taken back by how homogenous it seems. there’s hardly any women, and with few exceptions it’s mostly white and japanese people. i’ve made conscious and unconscious efforts to read more widely than what i’ve listed, but it felt disingenuous to include other books for the sole purpose of diversifying my list. there are books not on this list that i’ve loved and indeed books that are even better, but “favorite” is a word purposefully loaded with sentimentality and subjectivity. many of these books redefined what i thought literature could do, while others were gateways into deeper and richer paths.
the other thing that stands out (and this is directly related to the point above) is how many of these books were read during a specific time of my life–the impressionable 20’s. there’s a few in there that i’ve read in my 30’s, but the list is weighted.
dont want to venture into inappropriate waters but will say that the section in The Box Man where they describe box people having “relations” is very funny lol
This was harder than I thought… I only got to 21 books and thats not following the one author, one book rule.
Detectives Salvajes - Roberto Bolaño**
Middlemarch - Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot)
White Teeth - Zadie Smith**
V. - Thomas Pynchon
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodr Dostoevsky
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges**
El Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges
Phenomenology of Spirit - G.W.F Hegel
Factotum - Charles Bukowski
Inland - Gerard Murnane
Collection of Short Stories - Herman Melville
En el Pabellón de Oro - Yukio Mishima (clunky but loveable spanish translation)
The Book of Delights - Ross Gay**
Upstream - Mary Oliver**
Woodcutters - Thomas Bernhard
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Sobre Heroes y Tumbas - Ernesto Sabato
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Door - Magda Szabo
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg
Putting this list together reminded me how good of a reading year 2023 was for me. I read about half or more of the books above last year, and 2024 has treated me well so far. In 2023 I decided I would get “back into” reading but felt like reddit recommendation threads were not giving me stuff I was excited about, so I decided to do book riot’s 2023 reading challenge which is explicitly about reading books from a more diverse group of authors. I discovered a lot of amazing books that way, some of which are in this list.
Last year + this year I was also mining this thread for stuff to read which has been great, but also has made me feel like I just recently learned how to read more critically, or that I’m just now developing a taste for things. Instead of saying that its because I’m reading better books now, it’s also that I’ve been more intentional about trying to explain why I like or dislike certain books.
I’ll also say that I found myself including books I haven’t even finished. For example the Hegel book I’ve only read 1/3rd of, but I’ve reread that third several times since college, and I still find myself thinking about it, looking at it on my shelf and thinking yeah i love that book. The way I think about it is, if I keep thinking about a book looong after I’ve first read it, to the point where it becomes part of my personality, it deserves to be on this list. I also haven’t finished all of the stories included in the Melville collection, but I already feel that those will stick with me for a long time.
This is related to my earlier question about a book being worse the second time you read it, because I’ve been thinking about what if I revisit Borges or Zadie Smith now that I’m a bit older…I can’t lie, the feeling of rereading these books that I hold dear to my heart and them no longer hitting as hard is a bit scary, but I understand that’s part of growing older and your tastes changing. That being said, the books on this list that I have reread, have become even more impactful on the second and third reads.
[*] = blunt rotation candidates, might switch out Borges for Melville
Manuscript Found In Saragossa - Jan Potocki (1807)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (1847)
The Confidence-Man - Herman Melville (1858)
Jude, The Obscure - Thomas Hardy (1895)
Trilce - César Vallejo (1922)
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser (1925)
The Close Chaplet - Laura Riding (1926)
7 Madmen + The Flamethrowers - Roberto Arlt (1929)
The Foundation Pit - Andrei Platanov (1930)
The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett (1932)
Light In August - William Faulkner (1932)
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth (1934)
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead (1940)
Nightmare Alley - William Lindsay Gresham (1946)
Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (1947)
Savage Night - Jim Thompson (1952)
Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo (1955)
The Devil To Pay In The Backlands - João Guimarães Rosa (1958)
Los ríos profundos - José María Arguedas (1958)
Bodysnatcher + The Shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti (1960)
Eight Men - Richard Wright (1961)
Dorp Dead - Julia Cunningham (1965)
The Solid Mandala - Patrick White (1966)
New Year’s Eve/1929 - James T. Farrell (1967)
Motorman - David Ohle (1972)
Dahlgren - Samuel R. Delaney (1974)
Reflex and Bone Structure - Clarence Major (1974)
Las muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1977)
The Westing Game - Ellen Raskin (1978)
Love And Rockets - Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (1981 - present)
Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin (1985)
Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford (2011)
idk if I like a list of 25 because it both overruns being concise and being instructive, and then you’re leaving things out that why not put it on there. In effect it’s just kind of a list of books I’ve read (or claim to have read). What can you do if it’s a reddit idea though I’ll be a good sport.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong (1360)
Ash Wednesday Supper - Giordano Bruno (1584)
Parade Lost & Paradise Regained - John Milton (1667, 1671)
Pilgrim’s Progress - John Bunyan (1678)
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne (1767)
Critique of Judgment - Immanuel Kant (1790)
Dream of Red Mansions - Cao Xueqin (1791)
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (1842)
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas (1844)
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (1851)
Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov (1859)
From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne (1865)
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1871)
Le Faute de l’abbe Mouret - Emile Zola (1876)
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust (1913 - 1927)
The Castle - Franz Kafka (1926)
The Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse (1927)
Herman Melville - Lewis Mumford (1929)
Joseph and His Brothers - Thomas Mann (1943)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - Philip K. Dick (1982)
Amrita - Banana Yoshimoto (1997)
Selected Non-Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges (1999)
Kind of agree with yeso, but it was an interesting experiment. I started as far back as I could chronologically, which meant that I lost steam / space once I got to the 20th century. Which is fine, because it still ended up being the most-represented century on the list.
Most of the lists posted so far are full of books I haven’t read / heard of, so that’s exciting.
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
The Devils That Have Come to Stay, Pamela Difranco
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
La vida breve, Juan Carlos Onetti
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Emil Ferris
Harrow the Ninth, Tasmyn Muir
Kirith Kirin, Jim Grimsley
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh
Future Archeology, C. Bain
“Favorites” is a tricky thing. This quickly turned into a list of books I could remember, or books that have taken hold of me in some way, whether I like the book or not. I did try to steer toward things I like, it’s supposed to be a list of favorites after all. At first my list felt highly sentimental, made up of books I read as a teenager. Reflecting on that, I started to think of books that have come to shape my tastes now, which felt more honest and productive.
I think I cheated and included two poetry books and one non-fiction book, rather than all novels. I encourage others to do the same.
all these lists are great so far btw. reading them has me going “really? ” to “yeah great pick” to “wow i should read this.” sometimes for the same book!
25 books that qualify as favorites because I remember them without looking them up and really liked them and I thought of them before other books. Dates are approximate because they are also off the top of my head.
The Lais of Marie de France (orig. 12th c.)
Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer (c. 1380)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the Pearl poet (around the same time)
Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory (1485 for Caxton edition, as much as a couple of decades earlier for the Winchester MS)
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1590; 1596)
The Rover by Aphra Behn (late 17th century?)
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1740s)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (1810s)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1850s)
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1890s?)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1920s?)
Passing by Nella Larsen (1920s?)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1950s)
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950s)
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1950s)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison (2010s)
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin (1960s)
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (2010s)
Allegorical Imagery by Rosemond Tuve (1960s)
The English Romance in Time by Helen Cooper (2004)
I finished The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa yesterday. It’s the first book I borrowed from the library with my brand new library card!
The book is about a novelist living on an island where things/concepts regularly disappear. Shortly after a thing has disappeared it loses all meaning to people and remembering it or holding on to it is a crime. Most people easily forget things when they disappear, cast them away and get on with their lives. But some people seem to not be affected and get taken by the titular memory police, if they’re found out. The story develops as the novelist realizes that her editor is in danger of being taken away too.
The book feels eerily relevant in more ways than one. It is very focussed on how the disappearances and the memory police affect the daily lives of the protagonist and her friends. With themes of decay, an unravelling reality and truth being negotiable, reading and reflecting on the story felt very haunting. The author did a good job with creating a dark and dreary atmosphere. interpsersed with small moments of light, happiness and bonding between characters which made me care about these people.
A couple of scenes were really succesful in surprising me by turning into horror within one or two sentences. But a lot of the horror in the book lies in how most people just accept these disappearances and silently suffer the effects, ignoring the ultimate conclusion of how things are developing.
Because the disappearances also affect our protagonist, who acts as our narrator, the book has a bizarre, dream-like quality, which increases as the story develops.
The ending left me a bit disoriented and with some questions to ponder. This does not feel like a fault of the book though, and very much like an intended effect.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with the book and can recommend it.
I’ve been struggling to find books I really want to read recently, so I’m going to be using these lists as my go-to for selecting books for the next little while.
Green Eggs and Ham It’s the first book I could read, the first book I’d read in Latin was Virent Ova, Viret Perna, plus I’m teaching myself Spanish, beginning with Huevos Verdes Con Jamon
Amerika, Franz Kafka
Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, Damon Young
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness In the West, Cormac McCarthy
Reality + David Chalmers
The Secret History Donna Tart
The Old Man and the Sea Earnest Hemingway
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
Uzumaki, Junji Ito
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Mythos, Stephen Fry
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
” to “yeah great pick” to “wow i should read this.” sometimes for the same book!
favorite authors of the IC forums 
genres 
entries by country 
our favorite eras 