Your All-time 5 Favorite Literary Works

Started by Dry Brett Kavanaugh, June 06, 2022, 09:12:32 AM

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Todd

#20
I read little fiction, and never re-read any, and haven't read a full novel in several years, so the below list includes books where certain aspects of the story, individual scenes, or use of language linger postively in my memory.

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

#21
Quote from: Roasted Swan on June 06, 2022, 11:41:46 AM
the trouble with this thread is it makes me realise how poorly read I am........ sigh.............

How about your wife's or daughter's top five?

DavidW

Quote from: Roasted Swan on June 06, 2022, 11:41:46 AM
the trouble with this thread is it makes me realise how poorly read I am........ sigh.............

That sounds great!  I remember the time when Beethoven's symphonies were fresh and exciting.  I can never have that again.  But with these great works we both can totally dive in and experience them fresh which most readers on this thread can't.  I read Anna Karenina for the first time just a few years ago, and it was a great novel and I don't think I would have appreciated it in the same way if I read it when I was young.

San Antone

I've seen a couple of people say they don't re-read books.  I am just the opposite.  I will re-read favorite books again and again. 

Most of my favorites I've read at least three, often more, times. 

There was a period of my life when each year I would read most of Faulkner's novels, as well as Cormac McCarthy's.  And there was a period when I would read a group of Shakespeare plays (the histories, tragedies, comedies) alternating every year.

Karl Henning

Quote from: San Antone on June 06, 2022, 03:24:45 PM
I've seen a couple of people say they don't re-read books.  I am just the opposite.  I will re-read favorite books again and again. 

Most of my favorites I've read at least three, often more, times.

I'm the same, or was (prior to my stroke) but I'm getting back into the reading swing.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Brian

For a long time I thought rereading was a shame given how many more great books there are out in the world, yet to be read, but in summer 2020 I dedicated a month to a reread of old favorites (as diverse as Middlemarch, Stoner, Bullsh*t Jobs by David Graeber, and Vagn Holmboe's book on music), and it was such a joy to return to works that I love and remember why they are so beloved. It was like meeting old friends again. I'll do it again this summer.

There are so many more books to read...but rereading your favorites really helps you gain new perspective on what reading and literature are all about. And they help you understand how you've changed in between sittings.

Karl Henning

Quote from: Brian on June 06, 2022, 07:22:58 PM
For a long time I thought rereading was a shame given how many more great books there are out in the world, yet to be read, but in summer 2020 I dedicated a month to a reread of old favorites (as diverse as Middlemarch, Stoner, Bullsh*t Jobs by David Graeber, and Vagn Holmboe's book on music), and it was such a joy to return to works that I love and remember why they are so beloved. It was like meeting old friends again. I'll do it again this summer.

There are so many more books to read...but rereading your favorites really helps you gain new perspective on what reading and literature are all about. And they help you understand how you've changed in between sittings.

Absolutely!
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

#27
Same here. I re-read my fav works every 2 or 3 years. They grew and I grew over time, and I found new things every time I re-read them. I am delighted by the new aspects I find while I am touched by the familiar places I always like. Inevitably, a few of my ex-favorite works and I departed away and I don't re-read them any more. They are Tolstoy, Marquez, etc., but I found other works which became my favorites (ie. Mark Twain, Casanova).


It's interesting to see that almost nobody mentioned Shakespeare.  ;D

Holden

Eschewing the classics these are five of my favourites:

The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak

Das Boot - Gunter Buchheim. More than just a war story

The Mystery of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Very relevant nowadays despite being published 60 years ago

A Clockwork Orange - In read the book before seeing the movie.

and my all time favourite series which is five books in itself by Douglas Adams:

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life the Universe and Everything
So Long and Thanks For All the Fish
Mostly Harmless 










Cheers

Holden

Florestan

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Lisztianwagner

Mine could be:

Dostoevsky, Demons
Dickens, Hard Times
Zola, L'Assommoir
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Poetic Edda
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler

Christo

#31
Dante Alighieri, Commedia
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (read and reread it dozens of times as an 11 years old)
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Paustovsky, Story of a Life
Auden, Collected Poems

... music is not only an 'entertainment', nor a mere luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual if not of the physical life, an opening of those magic casements through which we can catch a glimpse of that country where ultimate reality will be found.    RVW, 1948

Florestan

Quote from: Archaic Torso of Apollo on June 06, 2022, 11:45:34 AM
I didn't know he wrote novels. I've only read his autobiography, The Snows of Yesteryear.

There's even a second autobiographical book by Rezzori, The Memoirs of an Antisemite, and it's every bit as good as The Snows of Yesteryear.

Here's another list, all-Latin American

Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Mario Vargas Llosa - Conversation in the Cathedral
Alejo Carpentier - The Rite of Spring
Augusto Roa Bastos - I, the Supreme
Álvaro Mutis - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

And a non-fiction one:

Theodor Mommsen - The Roman History
Cornelius Ryan - A Bridge too Far
Rüdiger Safranski - Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
Paul de Kruif - Microbe Hunters
Berlioz - Memoirs
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

DavidW

Quote from: San Antone on June 06, 2022, 03:24:45 PM
I've seen a couple of people say they don't re-read books.  I am just the opposite.  I will re-read favorite books again and again. 

Most of my favorites I've read at least three, often more, times. 

There was a period of my life when each year I would read most of Faulkner's novels, as well as Cormac McCarthy's.  And there was a period when I would read a group of Shakespeare plays (the histories, tragedies, comedies) alternating every year.

You can't absorb everything in one read through.  And also going back to them at different times of your life will yield fresh perspective.

bhodges

Too many to name! But I think about these often:

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

--Bruce

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Quote from: Brian on June 06, 2022, 07:22:58 PM
There are so many more books to read...but rereading your favorites really helps you gain new perspective on what reading and literature are all about. And they help you understand how you've changed in between sittings.

The whole point of reading high-quality literature is to re-read it. How well would you appreciate a symphony if you were only able to hear it once? Reading tons of books is impressive, but if you only read them once, they will pass in a blur.

Same thing with speed-reading literature. Some people boast about doing so. I don't see the point; it's like speed-eating a gourmet meal.

Writers recognize this. Flaubert said something about how wise you would be if you knew only five or six books (i.e. really knew them). Karl Kraus said "you must read all writers twice, the good as well as the bad. You will recognize the former and unmask the latter."
formerly VELIMIR (before that, Spitvalve)

"Who knows not strict counterpoint, lives and dies an ignoramus" - CPE Bach

Florestan

Quote from: DavidW on June 07, 2022, 07:00:16 AM
You can't absorb everything in one read through.  And also going back to them at different times of your life will yield fresh perspective.

Absolutely. There are some books which can be fully understood and appreciated only after acquiring a certain experience of life and people which a teenager or a young adult objectively lack. I've recently seen on a Romanian TV contest a couple of teenagers (about 14) commended for reading Dostoevsky and Schopenhauer. Well, I have no doubt they can read their works but I am heavily skeptical about their understanding of those works.  ;D
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Florestan

Quote from: Archaic Torso of Apollo on June 07, 2022, 08:05:35 AM
Flaubert said something about how wise you would be if you knew only five or six books (i.e. really knew them).

Well, for centuries that was literally (pun) the case. The Bible, The Illiad, The Odissey, The Eneid, Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata - anyone who really knew those books was an accomplished reader, indeed a thinker. Think about it in terms of music: for centuries the vast majority of librettos for operas and oratorios were inspired by them.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

André

Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers
Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault
Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi
V. Hugo, Les Misérables
J. Steinbeck, East of Eden

Other favourite authors: Hesse, Faulkner, Andric, Maupassant. I'd like to read a novel by a Japanese or Indian author, but I don't know where to start...
::)

Jo498

Schopenhauer seems not the greatest choice because one needs to know some Kant (who is much harder to read, so they could go to secondary literature) and preferably some later German Idealism (such as Hegel, even worse to read) as a background and foil. So I wouldn't recommend this.
But there are "Great Books" one can start as a young teenager, even if one might miss a lot, they will have enough gripping story to work on a level. Les Miserables and some of Dickens would be such candidates.

When I was a kid in the early 1980s I encountered plenty of (usually) abridged and simplified versions of a lot of older literature that could in some way be conceived as adventure stories (along with simpler adventure stories like Treasure Island, Robin Hood, J.F. Cooper, Three musketeers and some of Jules Verne's), often also as movies, comics and cartoons: Don Quixote, Gulliver's travels, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Oliver Twist, even the better known Norse/Germanic and Graecoroman myths got such treatment. Sure, often this is quite a distortion that has little to do with the original text but I still think it is good to have shared if superficial knowledge of such a heritage of stories. Even it trash and middlebrow stuff is happily mixed with Great books ;)
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal