I’d skip both of these dudes. Borges too uptight and Melville seemed like a lot to deal with. Look at those letters he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne he needed to dial it way down
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i love this book so much. the audio version is read by norm and is just sublime.
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You all have some great lists!
I’ll save the caveats because I’m sure you already know them.
Listed roughly in chronological order:
- The Bible
- The Mahabharata
- Homer - The Odyssey
- Plato - Euthyphro
- The Poems of the Masters (tr. and ed. by Red Pine)
- Lady Murasaki - The Tale of Genji
- Shi Nai’An - Outlaws of the Marsh
- Wu Cheng’En - Journey to the West
- Heinrich von Kleist - Michael Kohlhaas
- Cao Xueqin - The Dream of Red Chambers
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
- Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
- William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
- Giuseppe di Lampedusa - The Leopard
- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
- Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems
- Hart Crane - Collected Poems
- Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
- Lorine Niedecker - Collected Works
- Jack Spicer - My Vocabulary Did This To Me
- The New American Poetry (ed. Donald Allen)
- Osamu Tezuka - Buddha
- David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
- David Berman - Actual Air
- Roberto Bolaño - 2666
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is Light In August not the consensus best Faulkner novel? Where is Jojoestar with that video of a Spanish guy berating people for not appreciating it enough @JoJoestar
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this + brothers k + genji almost made mine. also nice for actual air.
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it’s the sound and fury by 1
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That’s okay we’re just listing our favourite books :) Although I’d consider As I Lay Dying in my top ~3 books.
(I have yet to read Light in August or The Sound and the Fury)
Added publication years to help @MoH with the tabulating. But the lack of Canada in the rankings is concerning!! I hope you did not count Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and Norm MacDonald as Americans…!
Hesitated at first with the list since I feel like I’ve gotten back into the book-reading groove in the past year and have read many of my favourites books in that time. So felt a bit like padding the last few entries to get to 25 with some books I can’t remember exactly how much I liked from reading them however many years ago.
Jane Austen - Pride & Prejudice (1813)
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (1930)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Le Petit Prince (1943)
Gabrielle Roy - Bonheur d’occasion (1945)
J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart (1958)
Mordecai Richler - The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
Dino Buzzati - Le K (Il Colombre) (1966)
Michel Tremblay - Les belles soeurs (1968)
Anne Hébert - Kamouraska (1970)
Kobo Abe - The Box Man (1973)
Marian Engel - Bear (1976)
Mariama Bâ - Une si longue lettre (1979)
Gabriel García Márquez - Chronique d’une mort annoncée (1981)
Alice Walker - The Color Purple (1982)
Théâtre de la Vieille 17 - Les murs de nos villages (1983)
Shigeru Mizuki - Showa: A History of Japan (1988)
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day (1989)
Art Spiegelman - Maus (1991)
Haruki Murakami - Men Without Women (2013)
George Saunders - Tenth of December: Stories (2013)
Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen (2015)
Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This (2021)
Kate Beaton - Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)
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nice. also, we have more than a few canadian entries on the list (and more now by the looks of yours), i just listed the top countries. i’ll update the post shortly and share the spreadsheet.
it looks like william faulkner might have the most entries now. i’m not against that but do find it bemusing.
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I like the idea but I’m sure for me it is going to devolve quickly into both recency bias as well as just putting something on because, as @Taliesin_Merlin so succinctly put it, they are books I could remember without looking them up. I read books slowly, which means I both savour them and thus remember the ones I like pretty well, but that also means I don’t read that many overall. That will also mean books I was recommended or learned about in this very thread may be overrepresented–that is fine by me as this is obviously a community with excellent taste.
I am going to commit at least one cardinal sin, though, which is that I’m going to break the “one book per author” rule… well, probably, anyway. When I like an author I tend to read as much of their work as I can, so, there’s probably a few authors on here who I’d probably just list several books in. But, I’ll try to avoid doing it unless my list is going to come up painfully short because of it. @MoH, feel free to only count any duplicate authors I list once on the most beloved author statistic. I think that makes sense.
As always I make no apologies whatsoever for being a basic ass bitch <3
- The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin (1972)
A violent and depressing premise is followed through on with a whipcrack of an anti-colonial banger.
- Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966-1967, serialized)
Funny cat hehe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Pop culture does not prepare you for how compelling the monster and its very existence is in the original story.
- Paying the Land by Joe Sacco (2020)
Recency bias, but, I’m gonna be thinking about this book for a while I think. I think I am gonna tell my nation’s chief to read it.
- Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks (2000)
Somehow not a hard pick for me even among the excellent Culture series novels. I think I just really like how it is mostly just a sequence of interesting conversations between interesting people, with all of the science fiction as a backdrop for fairly grounded sociopolitical and historical examinations.
- El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha and El ingenioso caballero don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1605, 1615)
How is a book this old and this long so funny? Despite having only read it last year or whatever, my surely now lifelong obsession with this book is still stewing and brewing in the back of my mind.
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1865-1867)
I think Anna Karenina is probably strictly a better novel, but War and Peace is the more interesting literary beast.
- Been too long for me to remember anything specific so I’m just gonna do a copout and say the overall canon of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887-1927)
I could probably narrow down a favourite story or collection if I were to read them again, which, because of those damn Great Ace Attorney games I’ve been playing, I might do in the near-ish future.
- Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004)
I sure hope Clarke hasn’t caught the insane anti-woke mind virus and become an insane TERF in the past few years. Probably not, given how her debut novel had a WOKE subplot. Also her second novel Piranesi was also quite good, it just didn’t match Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in grandeur and intrigue.
- The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992, 1993, 1999)
The War and Peace of hard science fiction.
- Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-1955)
I like how it so heavily features masculine platonic love. I’m clout-averting by putting it on here but I did just re-read it… and yeah, I still loved it.
- Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler (1987-1989)
Possesses, in abundance, perhaps the most impressive and rare quality in science fiction, which is that the ideas within are truly novel, even confronting.
It was a this point I cheated and logged into my Goodreads account to remember other books I’d read. Still trying to hold out and not put duplicate authors!
- Things Fall Apart by China Achebe (1958)
Another anti-colonial banger. Has the best dramatic arc of the other of Achebe’s books that I have read, even if A Man of the People would be a better clout-chasing pick.
- Mũrogi wa Kagogo a.k.a. The Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2006)
Wacky and weird and very often funny. I think more insert credit forumgoers would like this one if they gave it a chance. I should read more books by Thiong’o. It’s actually quite reminiscent of…
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
It’s been a while since I read this so I can’t think of much to say about it, beyond that I remember loving it. A lot of books I like are about weird guys doing a bunch of dumb shit.
- Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (1972)
I’m pretty sure I was inspired to read Strugatsky brothers books by the recommendation of the big T.R. (Tim Rogers), and while I read Hard To Be A God first, I think this one was by far my favourite one, on the poignancy of the premise alone. Better than the movie hehe
- Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)
Bunny lore
- Battle Royale by Takami Koushun (1999)
Better than the movie. Okay not really because the movie rules, but it’s about as good as the movie in a very different way.
- Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Godard (2010)
Sold by the premise alone–fantasy murder mystery set in pre-invasion Mexica Empire.
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1986)
Not unlike the above in that it is a murder mystery set in a compelling time and place.
- Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein (2005)
I think the subtitle says it all.
- Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (2000)
I love Miéville’s books even when I don’t like reading them, but I think this is the one I like best just 'cause it has good pacing and it was the first thing I read by him.
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
I thought this book was great just in the sense that reading it feels genuinely disturbing, even when it is obviously meant to be funny, or maybe specifically because it is meant to be funny at times–I like the tonal rollercoaster. Perhaps some Wall Street motherfucker is the only truly scary kind of person!
- Maus by Art Spiegelman (1980-1991)
It’s good in exactly the way you would expect but it is also especially good in how it weaves in the authour’s relationship to the interview subject.
Okay, I am going to cave on my very last entry on the no duplicate author rule, just because I truly don’t think I can think of anything else, at least not without having access to my e-reader, and presently I am at work, and I do want to capture an impulsive kind of approach to this exercise.
As a mild compromise I’ll choose a work by the same author in a different genre than my other choice. She deserves it!!
25. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin (1968)
I like all of those Earthsea books but I think the perspective this one was written in sets it apart in a good way.
- Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones (2017)
A unique horror story written from a richly written first person perspective.
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here’s the list of all entries, including genre and subgenres. i have to admit i got a little lazy with the sub-genres toward the end and they could be a lot better.
if you have a google account, you can use this link to open the document in spreadsheet form to search and filter easier.
if people think this is a cool and useful resource, i’m open to making it better and more robust.
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Also I have a confession to make to my good pal @wickedcestus…
I couldn’t stick with Dream of the Red Chamber!! I’m so sorry…
I think the problem was mostly me–when I was trying to read it, I was stressed and didn’t have good sleep hygiene (I mean, I don’t now, but they were worse then). That mainly meant that my normal reading habit of reading a bit before bed meant I was reading for an even shorter time than normal, so, I failed to really get into the swing of it.
I also ran into an issue with the e-reader version I got where the paragraph breaks were all like 3-5 lines for some reason, and it made the whole thing harder to follow for some reason. Dunno what happened there.
I think I will listen to Parts 1 and 2 out of 3 of @wickedcestus’ discussions and analyses of the book again at some point, and give it another try. I didn’t dislike it, I just couldn’t get absorbed into it.
In the meantime, to make up for setting Dream of the Red Chamber aside, I started some books by a different Chinese author, partly in order to stay current with some pop culture trends, but also partly because I had been meaning to read them for a while; The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. It’s a very hard book to describe so far, because, even if this phrase is so trite and even repellant to some, there’s almost no other thing to say about it beyond that the less said about it the better. I’m just kinda letting it all wash over me and it’s great so far.
Most importantly though:
This one is for The Gamers.
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I was waiting for this to show up, and was surprised it took this long. This would probably be the easiest first entry if I were to type up my list.
I’d be even more Basic Bitch and be unable to look past Use of Weapons or Player of Games. I’d probably flip a coin to choose between them.
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Player of Games is great, it’s very pulpy space opera. And, of course, that one? Well …
That one is for The Gamers.
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Well, this is ordered by who popped into my head first, so in that way the ones near the top have greater claim to being my favorites. I just finished Demons a few days ago, so if I were making this list at some point in the past, I’d probably put Notes from the Underground on here instead. If I weren’t observing the one-book-per-author-rule, this list would probably only be six or seven authors – I’ll let you guess who.
- Sōseki - Grass by the wayside
- Wang Xiaobo - 2015
- Dostoevsky - Demons
- Murakami Haruki - The Elephant Vanishes
- Qian Zhongshu - Fortress Besieged
- Lu Xun - Nahan
- Yu Dafu - Sinking
- Mori Ogai - Wild Geese
- Hosaka Kazushi - Plainsong
- Kawakami Mieko - Breasts and Eggs
- Murakami Ryu - Almost Transparent Blue
- Maruya Saiichi - Singular Rebellion
- Tsushima Yūko - Territory of Light
- Dazai Osamu - Setting Sun
- Sarashina Nikki
- Cao Xueqin - Dream of the Red Chamber
- Wu Jingzi - The Scholars
- Shen Fu - Six Records of a Floating Life
- Hashimoto Shinobu - Compound Cinematics
- Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Endō Shūsaku - Foreign Studies
- Bolesław Prus - Lalka
- Tanizaki Junichirō - Naomi
- Ba Jin - Family
- N.I. Low - Chinese Jetsam on a Tropic Shore
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Wait I forgot NK Jemisin and also Mapping the Interior!! will return after sleeping
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@bwood was first to mention frankenstein just for the record!
great list, i am surprised soseki and endo didn’t make mine. this one almost did.
china and japan might be right just behind england now.
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I might need to update my list. So many great titles here I didn’t include.
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Based on this and your love of Don Quixote, you will likely enjoy The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. And maybe Gargantua and Pantagruel too. Both are perhaps a little too long to read all in one go (I took a big break in the middle of Tristram, and never finished Gargantua), but they’re good fun.
I’m currently reading a book called Leg Over Leg by Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, a Lebanese Christian who lived all over Europe and North Africa in the 19th c. It’s a remarkably silly book, in the vein of those above, with a predilection for rare vocabulary. Parts are written in rhymed prose, which the translator does a valiant job trying to reproduce, and there’s this throughline where the author seems to be trying to create something of a dictionary of Arabic words and phrases as well as a semi-autobiographical novel, which is obviously tough to parse super well in translation. Full of digressions, nonsense, dirty jokes, and tirades against the religious and political establishment. Not sure if I’ll end up finishing all four volumes, but it’s an interesting read.
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Based on the leads of the wikipedia entries for these they do sound up my alley!
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