[Up- home] [Map] [Prior] [Robot Wisdom home page]
New: my ongoing log of good reading on the Web
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books Subject: OPINION: My 50 favorite books and authors Summary: (well, maybe not exactly 50) Organization: The Responsible Party Keywords: Joyce, Pynchon, Nabokov, Graves, Murdoch, imho
I've been meaning to pull this together for some time, and I expect to re-post it every so often. There's lots of supposedly-great names omitted-- most of them I've tried to read, but nothing clicked. There are dozens of other great names, too, unlisted, whose best work is as good as these authors' lesser efforts.
What I value most is literature that offers enduring images to think with.. These have withstood the test of time in that regard. What's more, their style achieves a level of gracefulness that makes them pleasant to read.
"Operators and Things" by Barbara O'Brien. Though this is nonfiction-- a story of a woman's stress-induced schizoid break-- it's still the strangest revision of ordinary reality ever depicted.
Robert Stone, "Dog Soldiers". An absolutely harrowing and deep philosophical thriller, about heroin smuggling in early-70s California. Stone's "Outerbridge Reach" is much less painful; see also "GradLevel Lit.", below. [My fanpage]
Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49". A really enjoyable short novel that's also incredibly rich in ideas. "Vineland" is readable but comparatively dull. <a fine Pynchon page>
"Speedboat" by Renata Adler. A delightful stylistic experiment, fiction, easy to read. Her "Pitch Dark" disappointed me, though. <an author (David Shields) who cites this as his favorite book>
Iris Murdoch, "A Word Child" etc. Our greatest psychological novelist's finest novel is a stunning tragi-comedy. Everything else by her is good, too: "The Nice and the Good", "The Black Prince", "Flight from the Enchanter", etc... (30+ all told, I believe) [My fanpage]
Vladimir Nabokov, "Pnin". This is the simplest, most humane work by a fiendishly good writer (see GradLevel). "Transparent Things" is also fairly simple. <a superb Nabokov home page>
Martin Amis, "London Fields". Nabokov with rabies! This title is cruel but delicious, as are "Other People", "Money", and "Success". <a fine Amis page>
Robert Anton Wilson, "The Earth Will Shake" etc. A fine historical-philosophical adventure tale, the start of a hopefully-long series. All his novels are enjoyable, mixing sex and mysticism with good storytelling. (I don't recommend this one to the faint-hearted.) <a site for RAW>
Colin Wilson, "Ritual in the Dark" etc. Like RAW, CW is a fine writer interested in mysticism, philosophy, crime and the occult. His early novels are highclass, the later ones are fun, but semi-junky. <a CW page> [Interview]
Blanche McCrary Boyd, "Mourning the Death of Magic". Good, honest 60s-counterculture coming-of-age fiction. Her others are also good. <DukeU is archiving her papers>
"Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis. Appallingly funny, especially for grad students. His others are a mixed lot, mostly readable. <a too-brief excerpt>
Walker Percy, "Love in the Ruins". A lovely lyrical modern Southern dystopian scifi philosophical romance. "The Moviegoer" and "The Last Gentleman" are similarly enjoyable. <Walker Percy WWWeb site>
Leo Tolstoy, "Anna Karenin". The last century's great psychological novelist. "War and Peace" is also phenomenal and gripping.
Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities". Why do people attack this?!?!? The most accessible sociological novel of the 80s. <A Wolfe WWWeb page>
William Wharton, "Dad". A heartbreaking tale of a grown son's caretaking his dying father. WW's other novels are all enjoyable.
Patrick O'Brian (naval historical c1800). Great fan page
Colin Wilson (occult, scifi, crime) See above.
Peter Dickinson (mysteries, childrens) A great writer.[My fanpage]
George V. Higgins (crime, politics) Avoid "Dreamland"
Elmore Leonard (crime)
Thomas Perry (thrillers)
Scott Turow (legal) A humane guy, for a yuppie.
Ward Just (politics)
Graham Greene (politics, espionage) Not the 'entertainments'
John LeCarre (espionage) A class act, grad-level spy fiction!
LeCarre fanpage: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8907/lecarre.html
James Joyce, "Ulysses". This is really a book to reread, over a lifetime. Its riches are bottomless. Start, at least, with the first six chapters. (After that, they mostly get harder and harder.) You might read "A Portrait of the Artist" first, to get up to speed. "Dubliners" is deceptively simple and dry by comparison. my Ulysses page
Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow". If you liked "Lot 49", this is more of the same, plus a ton of really great prose. Pynchon's "V." is not indispensible, imho, but it's got its pleasures.
Joseph McElroy, "Lookout Cartridge" etc. An amazing stylist, who at his best is on a par with Wallace Stevens. "Ancient History" is another favorite of mine. "Plus" is more difficult. "Women and Men" I haven't gotten thru yet. [My fanpage]
Nabokov, "Lolita", "Pale Fire", etc. These are rough going, but exquisite. Everything he wrote is very fine, subtle, witty, deep.
Robert Stone, "A Flag for Sunrise". The most depressing novel ever written... I hope! Central American inhumanity. His "Hall of Mirrors" and "Children of Light" are interesting failures, imho.
Harold Brodkey, "Collected Stories", "First Love and Other Stories". An amazing stylist, an american Proust. His latest "Runaway Soul" I haven't managed to read, though.
Marcel Proust, "Swann in Love". This excerpt is all I've read of Proust, but it's highly admirable.
Gustave Flaubert, "Madame Bovary". Much better than his "Sentimental Education" (no matter what Woody Allen thinks ;^/
Wallace Stevens, "The Palm at the End of the Mind". This collection of his poems is the one I recommend. I don't 'get' his long works, but his <short ones> are just the best, ever. (I also favor Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Edna Millay...)
Melville, "Moby Dick". Powerful. <Melville site>
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. A crazy hypothesis about early humankind hearing the voices of gods, after the fashion of Giambattista Vico.
"Man's Place in Nature" by C.F. Hockett. A truly original anthropology text, that tries to draw some real generalizations (as opposed to phony pompous ones ;^/
Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene". If you want to speculate about the human predicament, you have to come to terms with sociobiology. <Dawkins bio etc>
Frans de Waal, "Chimpanzee Politics". Observations of a chimp colony lead the zookeeper to speculate whether human politics is fundamentally about sexual dominance...! <De Waal on the Bonobo>
Feynmann's "QED". Who knows what quantum mechanics means? Feynmann, as much as anybody. This book is readable, as hard science should be but rarely is.
Nick Herbert, "Quantum Reality". More QM, lucidly popularized.
Jearl Walker, "The Flying Circus of Physics". A compilation of strange-but-true physical phenomena, with as good explanations as were known at the time.
"James Joyce" by Richard Ellmann. Joyce was a master. His life story is enlightening and inspiring. This book redefined modern biography. my Joyce bio page
Nabokov, "Strong Opinions". VN on literary theory and practice. No bull!
Kate Bush, "Cloudbusting" edited by Ron Hill. A fan's etext compilation of all the published interviews by one of the most insightful artists of our era. <available in html>
"The Unauthorized Version" by Robin Lane Fox. A most credible historical examination of that most incredible book-- the Bible. <i don't know if i approve of this site, but it's certainly impressive on first glance!>
Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, "Hebrew Myths". The book of Genesis compared to other myths of the era. See below for more on Graves-- his historical novels (eg "I, Claudius") are quite readable. <an interesting site for Graves and other prophets>
Elaine Pagels, "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent". Along with her "Gnostic Gospels", a very interesting view of Judeo-Christian origins.
"Social Science as Sorcery" by Stanislav Andreski: how social science fails. my anti-social-science page
Velikovsky's histories. I don't care about his nutty astrophysics-- his re-calibration of Egyptian chronology is fascinating even if it's false. Start with "Oedipus and Akhnaten", probably.
"Who Will Tell the People?" by William Greider. I don't know the field very well, but this book seems unflinching in painting the sordid truths behind US politics.political links
McCluhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy". An unbelievably well-researched argument that the invention of printing transformed our perception of authority. (Cf. Jaynes) This work opened my eyes to Finnegans Wake.
"The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real" by Peter Redgrove, aka "TBG and the Sixth Sense". Building a new sort of bridge between science and mysticism, Redgrove is Graves's literary heir.
Stephen Gaskin, "Haight-Ashbury Flashbacks" etc. Stephen makes less sense to non-drug-users, but the rest of us should appreciate his subtle observations on what 'altered states' reveal about our social predicament. The operative concept is psychic energy. <the Farm home page>
J. Krishnamurti, "Commentaries on Living" etc. A beautiful pure vision of life without denial. <Krishnamurti site>
<"Leaves of Grass"> by Whitman. Another vision of life without denial.
William Blake's prose works-- proverbs, annotations, etc. His short poems are too simple, his long ones too obscure, but his proverbs are nonpareil. my collection of Blake proverbs <The Tyger Page>
Anonymous, The Gospels. The guy did speak with a note of authority...
G. Spencer Brown, "Laws of Form". A psychedelic breakthrough in symbolic logic, opening a whole new way of looking at to symbol systems.
Joyce, "Finnegans Wake". The answer to all the riddles of the universe, if we could only read it! [my FW page]
Phillip Herring, "Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum". If the key to FW is in Ulysses, then the key to Ulysses must be in this transcription of Joyce's surviving notes for that book. notes on the web
Robert Graves, "The White Goddess". Strange, obscure, wonderful. Try his other prose, poetry, and historical fiction, too. <early poems>
Giambattista Vico, "New Science". Strange, obscure, wonderful. An early 18th century approach to social science. <a groovy site with a lot on Vico (and Bruno, etc etc etc)>
j jorn@mcs.com
a very thorough index of websites for Irish and UK writers of every era
Altavista's known links to this page
[Up]
[Map] [No Next]
[Robot Wisdom home page]
(Feedback)