Top Ten Books

J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
What are your top ten books? The ones which have influenced you the most/had the most effect on you?

Mine are (or so it seems to me right now) in no particular order:

The Accursed Share - Georges Bataille
Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima
Media Manifestos - Regis Debray
2666 - Roberto Bolano
Hamletmachine (technically, a play) - Heiner Mueller
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres & Bruno Latour
War and Peace - Tolstoy
The Bible - "God"
The City of Dreadful Night (technically a poem) - James Thomson
Histoire(s) du Cinema (technically a film) - Godard.

These are all books which I've read in the past couple of years... they all become a blur after that. Many dead white men here... but what can I do... I am a dead white man myself.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Proceedings of the International Cardboard Society, 1982 vols. I-X.

Unputdownable.
 
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empty mirror

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
i am sure i did this list thing before

anyway, Crime & Punishment has to be near the top of my list. i am rereading it now (actually my first time reading the excellent Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) after an interval of 13 years and it has so much depth.

also, Ellison's Invisible Man is up there.

Gravity's Rainbow
The Recognitions
Infinite Jest
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
The Myth of Sisyphus
Tender Buttons or Ida by Gertrude Stein

off the dome
 
S

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
Monocle-man.gif
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
In no particular order, these come to mind first:

The Accursed Share - Bataille (seconded)
Group Portrait with Lady - Heinrich Boell
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Being and Time - Heidegger
Margins of Philosophy - Derrida
Journey to the End of Night - Celine
Against Nature - Joris Karl Huysmans
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I really want to read Celine... and Dostoevsky again. I'm quite surprised by Middlemarch. Also Heidegger, what a terrible writer. And you can't select the "Complete Works of Freud" - this is absurd!



I think there are two kinds of books: night books, and day books...
 
C

craner

Beast of Burden
I'm not surprised by Middlemarch, it's an incredible novel. And Djuna Barnes and Celine and Huysmans and Freud, good choices there.

I might have a go at this, half a tic...
 
C

craner

Beast of Burden
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Frank O Hara, Complete Poems
The Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare (a cheat, I guess, as, like all scholars, I really read the Ardens...)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion
J K Huysmans, En Route
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Joseph Heller, Good as Gold

That was hard. Also, I'm surprised by the number of novels I love!
 
P

petergunn

plywood violin
nomadthethird said:
In no particular order, these come to mind first:


Journey to the End of Night - Celine
Click to expand...

thought i'd be picking more of my stuff from other's lists, but this is the only one... also, keeping mine to fiction...

my other 9:

things they carried- tim o'brien
something by mordecai richler, not sure what... prolly Solomon Gursky was here
fat city- leonard gardner
steps- jerzy kosinksi
something by Denis Johnson...
eyeless in gaza- aldous huxley... prolly would hate it now, but i really loved this book for a time...
confederacy of dunces- john kennedy toole... i almost never like FUNNY, but this is funny...
heart is a lonely hunter- carson mccullers
the stand- stephen king (not sure i believe this, but i recently reread it for like the 8th time and it still held my interest... i will stake my rep that it is a MUCH better book than The Road by Cormac McCarthy...)


like everyone else, i read alot of the CLASSICS at school, not sure how much of it really stood w/ me...
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i found celine a bit dull.
i'm sure its my fault.
my list would be quite teenage becasue i suppose i am an eternal teenager.
and i still like what excited me as a teenager.
so
rimbaud-a season in hell
rilke-duino elegies
blake-can i have the complete works?
burroughs-can i have the complete works? no? ok, nova express.
eliot-selected (this is legitimate i feel. i mostly read 4 queartets and wasteland)
pound-cantos (please dont gloat craner)
dostoyevsky-notes from underground (not saying its the best, but its the first one i read and it made an impression)
nietzsche-zarathrusta (bravura!)
yeats-a vision (ive never read this all, but it has to be in my list and i love it to death)
david jones-the anathemata

maybe i don't really mean the last one... give me some time to reconsisder. novels are shit.
i suppose get more pleasure reading me than anyone else though.
 
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