Don-Alexei : Catch-22 ; Harry Potter ; The Three Musketeers ; Les Misérables ; Le Petit Nicolas ; Swann's Way ; War & Peace ; Germinal ; The Count of Monte Cristo ; V.

niiice

james joyce - a portrait of the artist as a young man
albert camus - the stranger
ken kesey -sometimes a great notion
william faulkner - light in august
larry mcmurtry - lonesome dove
philip roth - american pastoral
john updike - rabbit, run
john kennedy toole - a confederacy of dunces

i think

edit : no order

Infinite Jest (Wallace); Ulysses (Joyce); Beckett's trilogy; The Trial (Kafka); The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky); The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald); The Road (McCarthy); Pale Fire (Nabokov); Moby-Dick (Melville); Little, Big (Crowley)


Other than Ulysses, I've only read each of these once. I wish I had enough time to re-read books in addition to reading new ones. Whereas my favorite albums are ones I've listened to over and over and over again.

Yeah, I can sympathize. I plan to start re-reading books more, need to develop the pconnects etc.

1. Bleeding Sun (Samuel Sagan)
2. The Sleeping Father (some guy... real bargain bin book.)
3. Life of Pi(Yann Martel)
4. Entangled(Graham Hancock)
5. some book i guess.

Cool list.

I'm down for this.

i was going to knock everything down one and put "Sleeper! Awaken!" at no. 2 but i need to read all four before i can really make a judgement call... My senses tell me it'd knock Bleeding Sun off there though.

The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner); Ulysses (Joyce); Invisible Man (Ellison); The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald); Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon); Catch-22 (Heller); Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky); The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon); Pale Fire (Nabokov); Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)

I really need to read more new authors, and read more by those I do love. Like in the case of Faulkner, I didn’t know whether to put down A,A or LIA for the tenth spot, so I put down Catcher – which again, I’m not sure if like the most out of Salinger’s work: I might like F&Z more (and I do consider it a novel) but I’d have to read it again to be sure.

Speaking of reading more by authors I love, I really can’t wait to check out Something Happened by Heller. I hear it’s really underrated, and I checked out the first five or so pages on Amazon, and it looks both hilarious and heart-crushingly depressing at the same time.

Give this one a try.........
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

"Sometimes a Great Notion is more rooted in realism than Kesey's previous work, the phenomenally successful One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but is also more experimental. It has been compared to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in both form and content.

The novel uses the somewhat disorienting technique of having multiple characters speak sequentially in the first person, with no announcement that the first-person speaker has changed. A first reading can be confusing, but subsequent readings reveal that Kesey always provides a clue, quickly referring to the previously-presumed first character in the third person. This technique allows Kesey to weave an intricate braid of characters whose motives are understood in depth by the reader, but yet do not communicate well with each other.

Its reputation however has aged well. Charles Bowden calls it "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century. It is widely considered among the masterpieces of Western American literature."


A read well worth the time...........

yes, it's fucking great but that wiki quote is misleading. there is nothing disorientating about the narrative style. it initially integrates sentences of each character but once the novel fleshes out and begins rolling it changes to chapter based and it is blatant who's narrating. the novels scope is incredible and i'm a total sucker for scenic prose and anything to do with old america . it is largely entertaining and if it's your schtick (an acquired taste this one? tried passing it off to a friend who didn't liek it) it's a veritable page turner. any more kesey worth checking out (obvs not cuckoo)?

ClashWho: The Grapes of Wrath; The Count of Monte Cristo; The Stand; A Wizard of Earthsea; The Eagle Has Landed; The Gunslinger; The Hobbit; L.A. Confidential; Moby Dick; The Brotherhood of the Rose; Shannara trilogy

This surprised me a bit.

Clash, if you ever have the time, if you haven't all ready, i think you would like Don quioxte and/or Catch 22; given that you haven't read either all ready.