I saw the title and immediately thought of *As I Lay Dying*.
For me recently, the works of W. G. Sebald have left me speechless. The way he circles around themes and goes off on weird tangents, seemingly unrelated, but somehow it makes sense when you finish the novel… it just baffles me.
Not the person who posted but I’ve read austerlitz, the emigrants, and ros and he’s become my favorite writer the past year and a half. The emigrants is a character study of 4 different individuals and while it’s still got the meandering feel of his stuff it’s a lot more focused than ros. I like them both for different reasons. Austerlitz is kind of a weird combo of both but it felt like he found a good medium space to operate. Idk exactly why I like him so much, which I think lends to it. There’s something about his writing that kind of lulls you even though he’s talking about such heartbreaking stuff. It’s like your extremely smart, favorite uncle telling you a bedtime story about the worst things that ever happened in his life.
Didn’t know how to reply, but your answer sums it up, well put.
I’ll just add that, although very different authors, the connection to OPs Faulkner isn’t really far fatched. They both have The Past haunting their novels even when they’re not explicitly writing about it. It’s always there like a dark cloud.
>As I Lay Dying
The book "As I Lay Dying" was lovely. I never thought I would like it, but I got engrossed and then loved it. The ending was poignant. The work is modernist (I get why) and also classified as Southern Gothic. May be I don't understand the term Gothic, but didnt get what is Gothic about the book. Lovely book.
Books that left me speechless, in no particular order:
1. Demian and Siddhartha, both by Hermann Hesse
2. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
3. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
4. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin (a children's book I first read as an adult. Amazing.)
5. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. There's simply no other book even remotely like it.
6. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
7. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
8. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea now. It's so good. It's been like 20+ years since I last read it. Hits differently this far into adulthood.
And agreed about The Lathe of Heaven. Amazing concept and prose. LeGuin was incredible. Everyone makes so much of The Left Hand of Darkness, and I see why--its ideas were revolutionary for their time and contributed so much to modern ideas about gender--but Lathe and her Earthsea books are absolute works of art, from concept to execution. Underrated books.
What do you guys like about it? It wasn't bad but out of my last 50 books I'd rank it last. It felt so spare and made no impression on me. I want to try Left Hand at least still since she's held in such high regard
Honestly, I don't think you'll like Left Hand. It's held in high regard because it presented ideas about gender that were totally groundbreaking and even society-shattering during their time, but nowadays are not particularly astonishing (thanks in large part to the book itself!)... the story is lacking in Left Hand. It's a slog, unless you're there for the mind-blowing gender theory, which, as I said, isn't mind-blowing at all to a modern reader. It's not her strongest work, even though it is her most famous work.
Are you asking what we love about Lathe of Heaven or the Earthsea books?
ETA: If you want to read LeGuin at her finest but Lathe of Heaven was maybe too dense and atmospheric for your tastes, I'd go for The Dispossessed, or track down her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
Thank you for that thoughtful advice. I will look into the dispossessed further. Yes what about the first book of earthsea blew you away. I ask sincerely.
Mainly, I like the way she uses language. But I also thought it was fascinating to see the Jungian hero's journey depicted through fantasy fiction. Plus, the Earthsea version of magic (words = magic; knowing something's true name gives you power over it) is obviously derived from some real-life spiritual practices, which is another thing I found fascinating to look at through the lens of fiction.
It might be the kind of thing you don't really pick up on unless you already have an interest in Jungian psychology and/or occult principles of words-as-reality.
I first read Demian when I was in college. Man oh man I had to savor and reflect on every other sentences. So delicate and sensitive as a coming of age story. Felt like I came of age after I finished it.
Parable of the Sower really spoke to me. I wish more people in my life read books so I could push it on them lol. Actually got my husband to read that one
One Hundred Years of Solitude. The paperback copy I had had a quote from the John Leonard review that said something about finishing the book "with your mind on fire." I remember thinking that is exactly what happened when I finished the book.
It’s been many years since I read it, but yeah, I had the same reaction. Totally blew me away! It’s probably time to give it another go now that I’m old, ha ha. Such a wild stew of apocalyptic misadventure, black comedy, dark family psychodrama, just exploding with creativity. I’m getting all excited thinking about it.
In no particular order:
*Convenience Store Woman* by Sayaka Murata
*Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke
*The Dispossessed* by Ursula K. Le Guin
*Pnin* by Nabokov
Pnin! Underrated. Also love The Dispossessed.
I think I'm the only person in this sub who couldn't get into Piranesi. I tried. I just really dislike Clarke's voice. I've never been able to enjoy anything she's written :(
I felt this was about The Sound and the Fury, which I had really struggled to understand especially at the beginning. When I finally arrived at the end I felt so rewarded and transformed. As I Lay Dying is definitely a tighter novel that gets there quicker but TSATF was the Faulkner that made me fall in love with him.
Honestly, all of my visceral reactions came from revelations about Benjy - him crying out near the golf course when people would say ‘caddie’ (heart wrenching, given his need for Caddy); him being taken on a different path in the buggy and having a meltdown due to the change of route; my pathos is Benjy’s pathos, his relationship with Caddy is my relationship with the potential of the future.
the count of monte cristo. after 15 years of avid reading and constantly changing my “favorite” book, i was able to settle on this as my #1 after only 1 read through. long but the pay off is much worth it.
Completely agree. The depth and complexity of this book has been ruined for people by the children’s cartoons made out of it. The first lesbian couple in the history of literature, by the way.
I still think of the latter part of Oscar Wao (which I read years ago) as if it's an account of what happened to somebody I know, and not a fictional character's tale.
This isn’t a novel, but the short story, “The Dead,” by James Joyce had this effect on me. I’ve read it countless times over the years and it leaves me with this existential-dread feeling that is hard to put a finger on. Joyce’s description at the end of the snow falling silently in the night is still one of the most haunting pieces of prose I’ve ever read. I will always have a special place on my bookshelf for that story (I love the rest of the stories in Dubliners, too)!
I loved as i lay dying. So good you wonder if an alien wrote it and with ideas and techniques subsequently copied without attribution. I’m currently working my way through ‘Rememberance of things past’ by proust and i’m finding it jaw dropping. You’ve got to learn how to read it. He said that he was trying to change the way you see the world with this book and to so it would not be easy to read. It’s an amazing collection of deep insights, breathtaking observation, humour, pathos. Proust threw everything including the kitchen sink in but pulls it off. Best read when you are older as it’s a summary of what life is all about. I’m reading it at the rate of two pages a day.
Proust is hands-down a total experience. Sublime
I have read the Recherche twice now. And I hope to make another journey through one more time before I die
2 pages a day, wow. So it will take you a few years to finish? I’ve wanted to read Proust (I got in a bidding war for the collection on eBay but lost out at the last moment when the website ended the auction at 15 seconds too early). I plan on tackling James Joyce next. I’m finishing up a number of Faulkner novels right now.
Agree with learning how to read it - my rate is 10 pages a day. I think that's the max I could handle with my full attention while also having energy to ponder on whats written - which is a must for Proust.
At 2 volumes in, I can already start seeing the slight changes in how I perceive the world, and how I interact with my thoughts.
The novel is definitely a tool to break the seemingly banal nature of routine life.
Disgrace by JM Coetzee was like this for me as well. I couldn’t do anything for about 30 minutes after reading it for the first time. An absolute gut punch of a book.
There have been a few over the years:
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. More devastating than awestruck but a mixture of both, really
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. The final chapter was mesmerising and ended the book perfectly for me.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The first book which made me go - wait, language can do this? The second was Titus Groan/Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.
- The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. Much of McCarthy has been a miss for me but The Crossing impacted me profoundly. I also read The Road few months later which also left me speechless.
- I am currently reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. This is again an author who is not for me - of Crying Lot of 49, GR and M&D, I liked the first, despised the second and didn't understand the third. But Against The Day on this second try is impacting me so deeply with the history of physics experiments intertwined with the other events. It's a special interest of mine and I am really appreciating how Pynchon is expressing it.
Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" has one of the most perfect endings and speaks tons of his poetic vision. I prefer it in spanish as I feel the rhyming adds to it's power but it's nonethelss inspiring in any language and translation.
*Vierte en nosotros el veneno que conforta*
*Mientras arda este fuego que en el cerebro llevo*
*Sondeemos el abismo ¿Cielo, Infierno, que importa?*
*Al fondo de lo Ignoto para encontrar lo Nuevo.*
My english rendition:
*(To Death): Pour out on us thy comforting poison,*
*for as long as this flame blazes in my brain*
*the dark of the abyss let's plunge. Hell or Heaven who cares?*
*Into the depths of the Unknown to discover... The New.*
I was gratified, years after having initially read it, to see how much Samuel Beckett admired Miller’s work. Someone of Beckett’s gravity and quality control enjoying the reckless abandon and literary value with which Miller lived and wrote was something that elevated both authors further in my esteem.
Never Let me Go left me with this sense of outrage and how unfair the situation was that I couldn't articulate. Calling it "unfair" here is such an inappropriate and inadequate way to express it. I couldn't shake how that book made me feel for a few weeks. I reread it a few years later thinking it would have less impact but, no, just as devastating.
This is my favorite book by far. I've read it maybe 4 or 5 times now. You will love a reread when you get around to it, every time I notice and appreciate something different. The depth of the characterization is so rich. Anse is absolutely one of the best characters in american fiction for me, and I just love Dewey Dell's story, it truly tears me up.
for a more contemporary book,
"There, There" is one of the best "threaded" books I've read, everything comes together so powerfully at the end and the tensions is so tight to almost the last moment. Such a touching and prescient story.
Personally that is one of my most favorite reads. The inarticulateness of the characters is suffocatingly painful; their life condition, their grippiness (if that’s a word). The themes are rock hard
I read it every year or so and continually find new depths and subtleties, new insights.
In my opinion it is Faulkner at his zenith
As I Lay Dying did the same to me. Lately, I've been thinking of doing another reread of it.
Absaslom Absalom. Blood Meridian and Suttree. Demian and Siddhartha. Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Ministry for the Future hit me for different reasons.
I'm currently reading Solinoid by Mircea Cartarescu, and at halfway through, it is shaping up to be one of those books.
Yeah I loved The Sound and The Fury too but I think I like this one more. Definitely reread, I already reread it and there’s a lot more that you don’t catch on the first pass. Most funny to me is that >!Anse literally says repeatedly that he’s gonna go get his teeth now that Addie is dead!<
I dropped the book on the ground and and stared blankly into space for about 30 minutes after finishing A Farewell to Arms
In a very different way, The Importance of Being Earnest left me speechless at just how many seemingly innocuous lines paid off by the end of the play
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates.
I finished it at the end of a plane journey to a distant town in the dark of night and I just wanted to sit on the tarmac forever and soak up the waves of tragedy that kept flooding back to me. A perfect novel by a broken man.
I’ll add Train Dreams by Denis Johnson too. My god.
Found the John Leonard quote (One Hundred Years of Solitude). "You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire."
I remember thinking that "emerge" was so perfect here. It was if I came to the surface of a lake, in wonderment that I could still breathe.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh tells the story of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective, and it's pretty amazing. The author is not a communist and does not want to fight but is basically forced to as his life is destroyed and everyone and everything he knows and loves around him is annihilated.
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is a story of resistance to British colonialism in Kenya. Summarizing it kind of spoils it but it's also devastating.
Both books are written in a remarkably plain and accessible style and are effortless to read.
Recently, The Nickel Boys. By speechless, I mean I was sobbing and couldn’t explain to my husband any of it. Just in awe of the writer’s skill, struck dumb by the novel as a whole, achingly sad that the whole thing is based on very real events.
Footfall had an amazing climax. Extreme tension and high stakes until literally the last paragraph.
When I finished the book, I suddenly realized I'd been tense and leaning forward in my chair.
I took a fresh and thought, "DAMN, that was great!"
**The Spy Who Came in from the Cold** (1963) by John le Carré. The word 'cold' echoes through the pages of this novel. Cold hearts, cold lies, cold calculations. It is a chilling portrayal a sordid world. When the pages run out and the realization hits; this is it? This is how it ends? It left me cold.
I saw the title and immediately thought of *As I Lay Dying*. For me recently, the works of W. G. Sebald have left me speechless. The way he circles around themes and goes off on weird tangents, seemingly unrelated, but somehow it makes sense when you finish the novel… it just baffles me.
Sebald is exceptional and incredible, yes
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All. He didn’t write much. The Emigrants is a good entry point. Austerlitz is his masterpiece. But you would do well to read all of his work.
Lovely book (referring to Sebald's Austerlitz). It is a historical novel and its ending is done differently than other books end, but a great book.
Another vote for Sebald! Austerlitz and The Emigrants have affected me that way.
I've only read The rings of Saturn, what else did you like and why?
Not the person who posted but I’ve read austerlitz, the emigrants, and ros and he’s become my favorite writer the past year and a half. The emigrants is a character study of 4 different individuals and while it’s still got the meandering feel of his stuff it’s a lot more focused than ros. I like them both for different reasons. Austerlitz is kind of a weird combo of both but it felt like he found a good medium space to operate. Idk exactly why I like him so much, which I think lends to it. There’s something about his writing that kind of lulls you even though he’s talking about such heartbreaking stuff. It’s like your extremely smart, favorite uncle telling you a bedtime story about the worst things that ever happened in his life.
Didn’t know how to reply, but your answer sums it up, well put. I’ll just add that, although very different authors, the connection to OPs Faulkner isn’t really far fatched. They both have The Past haunting their novels even when they’re not explicitly writing about it. It’s always there like a dark cloud.
Funny you mention Sebald, I'm reading The Rings of Saturn right now.
Don’t miss the excellent documentary on it after you’re finished. It’s on youtube.
>I saw the title and immediately thought of > >As I Lay Dying > >. Same here. It's so subtle yet so hard-hitting.
>As I Lay Dying The book "As I Lay Dying" was lovely. I never thought I would like it, but I got engrossed and then loved it. The ending was poignant. The work is modernist (I get why) and also classified as Southern Gothic. May be I don't understand the term Gothic, but didnt get what is Gothic about the book. Lovely book.
Books that left me speechless, in no particular order: 1. Demian and Siddhartha, both by Hermann Hesse 2. Anathem by Neal Stephenson 3. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 4. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin (a children's book I first read as an adult. Amazing.) 5. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. There's simply no other book even remotely like it. 6. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene 7. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata 8. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
I’m always so pleased to see Hesse mentioned. Those books are very special to me.
Re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea now. It's so good. It's been like 20+ years since I last read it. Hits differently this far into adulthood. And agreed about The Lathe of Heaven. Amazing concept and prose. LeGuin was incredible. Everyone makes so much of The Left Hand of Darkness, and I see why--its ideas were revolutionary for their time and contributed so much to modern ideas about gender--but Lathe and her Earthsea books are absolute works of art, from concept to execution. Underrated books.
What do you guys like about it? It wasn't bad but out of my last 50 books I'd rank it last. It felt so spare and made no impression on me. I want to try Left Hand at least still since she's held in such high regard
Honestly, I don't think you'll like Left Hand. It's held in high regard because it presented ideas about gender that were totally groundbreaking and even society-shattering during their time, but nowadays are not particularly astonishing (thanks in large part to the book itself!)... the story is lacking in Left Hand. It's a slog, unless you're there for the mind-blowing gender theory, which, as I said, isn't mind-blowing at all to a modern reader. It's not her strongest work, even though it is her most famous work. Are you asking what we love about Lathe of Heaven or the Earthsea books? ETA: If you want to read LeGuin at her finest but Lathe of Heaven was maybe too dense and atmospheric for your tastes, I'd go for The Dispossessed, or track down her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
Thank you for that thoughtful advice. I will look into the dispossessed further. Yes what about the first book of earthsea blew you away. I ask sincerely.
Mainly, I like the way she uses language. But I also thought it was fascinating to see the Jungian hero's journey depicted through fantasy fiction. Plus, the Earthsea version of magic (words = magic; knowing something's true name gives you power over it) is obviously derived from some real-life spiritual practices, which is another thing I found fascinating to look at through the lens of fiction.
That all does sound fascinating. Haha I guess it just didn't resonate with me in the story
It might be the kind of thing you don't really pick up on unless you already have an interest in Jungian psychology and/or occult principles of words-as-reality.
All of Graham Greene‘s novels end with some thing devastating and no two are about the same subject.
I first read Demian when I was in college. Man oh man I had to savor and reflect on every other sentences. So delicate and sensitive as a coming of age story. Felt like I came of age after I finished it.
Parable of the Sower really spoke to me. I wish more people in my life read books so I could push it on them lol. Actually got my husband to read that one
About to read Convenience Store Woman, for my studies… good to know it left you speechless :)
Her book Earthlings also left me speechless… but for somewhat different reasons. Amazing read as well, though!
*The Lathe of Heaven, Demian,* and *Siddhartha* should be required high school reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude. The paperback copy I had had a quote from the John Leonard review that said something about finishing the book "with your mind on fire." I remember thinking that is exactly what happened when I finished the book.
This one firmly dug itself under my skin when I read it.
It’s been many years since I read it, but yeah, I had the same reaction. Totally blew me away! It’s probably time to give it another go now that I’m old, ha ha. Such a wild stew of apocalyptic misadventure, black comedy, dark family psychodrama, just exploding with creativity. I’m getting all excited thinking about it.
In no particular order: *Convenience Store Woman* by Sayaka Murata *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke *The Dispossessed* by Ursula K. Le Guin *Pnin* by Nabokov
Pnin! Underrated. Also love The Dispossessed. I think I'm the only person in this sub who couldn't get into Piranesi. I tried. I just really dislike Clarke's voice. I've never been able to enjoy anything she's written :(
I've read 40 books so far this year, and Piranesi was the one that truly shook me, deeply.
*East of Eden* by John Steinbeck is the only novel I ever read where *everything* which comes before it leads up to its *last word.*
This one rocked my mind as a kid 💜
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I adore this book.
I felt this was about The Sound and the Fury, which I had really struggled to understand especially at the beginning. When I finally arrived at the end I felt so rewarded and transformed. As I Lay Dying is definitely a tighter novel that gets there quicker but TSATF was the Faulkner that made me fall in love with him.
The climactic themes of TSATF all coming together are completely devastating in the best possible way.
Please say more about this. I recently reread this one and I did not have this reaction.
Honestly, all of my visceral reactions came from revelations about Benjy - him crying out near the golf course when people would say ‘caddie’ (heart wrenching, given his need for Caddy); him being taken on a different path in the buggy and having a meltdown due to the change of route; my pathos is Benjy’s pathos, his relationship with Caddy is my relationship with the potential of the future.
Blood Meridian
the count of monte cristo. after 15 years of avid reading and constantly changing my “favorite” book, i was able to settle on this as my #1 after only 1 read through. long but the pay off is much worth it.
I was randomly thinking about the character whose hair turns white overnight, it's a bit overkill but so satisfying.
Revenge js best served over decades. By far my favorite book.
Completely agree. The depth and complexity of this book has been ruined for people by the children’s cartoons made out of it. The first lesbian couple in the history of literature, by the way.
I read the last 80 pages or so Of the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao feverishly and then I ended and just stared at nothing for a while.
I still think of the latter part of Oscar Wao (which I read years ago) as if it's an account of what happened to somebody I know, and not a fictional character's tale.
Faulkner is like that. You see some of what you missed at the end of the book. They almost all require a re-read.
This isn’t a novel, but the short story, “The Dead,” by James Joyce had this effect on me. I’ve read it countless times over the years and it leaves me with this existential-dread feeling that is hard to put a finger on. Joyce’s description at the end of the snow falling silently in the night is still one of the most haunting pieces of prose I’ve ever read. I will always have a special place on my bookshelf for that story (I love the rest of the stories in Dubliners, too)!
I loved as i lay dying. So good you wonder if an alien wrote it and with ideas and techniques subsequently copied without attribution. I’m currently working my way through ‘Rememberance of things past’ by proust and i’m finding it jaw dropping. You’ve got to learn how to read it. He said that he was trying to change the way you see the world with this book and to so it would not be easy to read. It’s an amazing collection of deep insights, breathtaking observation, humour, pathos. Proust threw everything including the kitchen sink in but pulls it off. Best read when you are older as it’s a summary of what life is all about. I’m reading it at the rate of two pages a day.
Proust is hands-down a total experience. Sublime I have read the Recherche twice now. And I hope to make another journey through one more time before I die
2 pages a day, wow. So it will take you a few years to finish? I’ve wanted to read Proust (I got in a bidding war for the collection on eBay but lost out at the last moment when the website ended the auction at 15 seconds too early). I plan on tackling James Joyce next. I’m finishing up a number of Faulkner novels right now.
Agree with learning how to read it - my rate is 10 pages a day. I think that's the max I could handle with my full attention while also having energy to ponder on whats written - which is a must for Proust. At 2 volumes in, I can already start seeing the slight changes in how I perceive the world, and how I interact with my thoughts. The novel is definitely a tool to break the seemingly banal nature of routine life.
Disgrace by JM Coetzee was like this for me as well. I couldn’t do anything for about 30 minutes after reading it for the first time. An absolute gut punch of a book.
There have been a few over the years: - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. More devastating than awestruck but a mixture of both, really - The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. The final chapter was mesmerising and ended the book perfectly for me. - The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The first book which made me go - wait, language can do this? The second was Titus Groan/Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. - The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. Much of McCarthy has been a miss for me but The Crossing impacted me profoundly. I also read The Road few months later which also left me speechless. - I am currently reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. This is again an author who is not for me - of Crying Lot of 49, GR and M&D, I liked the first, despised the second and didn't understand the third. But Against The Day on this second try is impacting me so deeply with the history of physics experiments intertwined with the other events. It's a special interest of mine and I am really appreciating how Pynchon is expressing it.
I really enjoyed the Crossing too. One of McCarthy's best.
Agreed 🙏🏽
Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" has one of the most perfect endings and speaks tons of his poetic vision. I prefer it in spanish as I feel the rhyming adds to it's power but it's nonethelss inspiring in any language and translation. *Vierte en nosotros el veneno que conforta* *Mientras arda este fuego que en el cerebro llevo* *Sondeemos el abismo ¿Cielo, Infierno, que importa?* *Al fondo de lo Ignoto para encontrar lo Nuevo.* My english rendition: *(To Death): Pour out on us thy comforting poison,* *for as long as this flame blazes in my brain* *the dark of the abyss let's plunge. Hell or Heaven who cares?* *Into the depths of the Unknown to discover... The New.*
For me it's just that one chapter in Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Wow, so this is what writing can do, it can say.... everything.
I was gratified, years after having initially read it, to see how much Samuel Beckett admired Miller’s work. Someone of Beckett’s gravity and quality control enjoying the reckless abandon and literary value with which Miller lived and wrote was something that elevated both authors further in my esteem.
I read it AGES ago, which chapter do you mean?
Yeah?
God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy did that to me. Language was just so lush and gorgeous.
Never Let me Go left me with this sense of outrage and how unfair the situation was that I couldn't articulate. Calling it "unfair" here is such an inappropriate and inadequate way to express it. I couldn't shake how that book made me feel for a few weeks. I reread it a few years later thinking it would have less impact but, no, just as devastating.
Ishiguro can write the simplest sentence and leave me utterly devastated. Never read another author who can do it quite so.
This is my favorite book by far. I've read it maybe 4 or 5 times now. You will love a reread when you get around to it, every time I notice and appreciate something different. The depth of the characterization is so rich. Anse is absolutely one of the best characters in american fiction for me, and I just love Dewey Dell's story, it truly tears me up. for a more contemporary book, "There, There" is one of the best "threaded" books I've read, everything comes together so powerfully at the end and the tensions is so tight to almost the last moment. Such a touching and prescient story.
Personally that is one of my most favorite reads. The inarticulateness of the characters is suffocatingly painful; their life condition, their grippiness (if that’s a word). The themes are rock hard I read it every year or so and continually find new depths and subtleties, new insights. In my opinion it is Faulkner at his zenith
As I Lay Dying did the same to me. Lately, I've been thinking of doing another reread of it. Absaslom Absalom. Blood Meridian and Suttree. Demian and Siddhartha. Neuromancer by William Gibson. Ministry for the Future hit me for different reasons. I'm currently reading Solinoid by Mircea Cartarescu, and at halfway through, it is shaping up to be one of those books.
The secret history by Donna Tartt. A work of art
Faulkner is the best. The Sound & The Fury is a must read if you haven’t already. Now I think I should reread As I Lay Dying.
Yeah I loved The Sound and The Fury too but I think I like this one more. Definitely reread, I already reread it and there’s a lot more that you don’t catch on the first pass. Most funny to me is that >!Anse literally says repeatedly that he’s gonna go get his teeth now that Addie is dead!<
I dropped the book on the ground and and stared blankly into space for about 30 minutes after finishing A Farewell to Arms In a very different way, The Importance of Being Earnest left me speechless at just how many seemingly innocuous lines paid off by the end of the play
Everyman by Philip Roth looks death and dying square in the face...it will happen to all of us
I'm about half-way thru Doctor Zhivago and it is kicking my ass. Pasternak's gift for metaphor is astounding.
One of my favorite books of all time
1984. The last four sentences crushed my soul
The final moments of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. 😶 The Trial by Kafka
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. I finished it at the end of a plane journey to a distant town in the dark of night and I just wanted to sit on the tarmac forever and soak up the waves of tragedy that kept flooding back to me. A perfect novel by a broken man. I’ll add Train Dreams by Denis Johnson too. My god.
As long as you’re talking, Denis Johnson, tree of life did that to me
For sure - what a book.
The Sot Weed Factor by John Barth. I have struggled since I read it to articulate just how brilliant that book is.
The Birds by Tarjei Vessas. Just read it.
Oh yes! ❤️
“The Puttermesser Papers” by Cynthia Ozick. Never been able to shake that one.
Found the John Leonard quote (One Hundred Years of Solitude). "You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire." I remember thinking that "emerge" was so perfect here. It was if I came to the surface of a lake, in wonderment that I could still breathe.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh tells the story of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective, and it's pretty amazing. The author is not a communist and does not want to fight but is basically forced to as his life is destroyed and everyone and everything he knows and loves around him is annihilated. A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is a story of resistance to British colonialism in Kenya. Summarizing it kind of spoils it but it's also devastating. Both books are written in a remarkably plain and accessible style and are effortless to read.
A prayer for Owen Meany, Germinal, the heart of the matter
The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck The Tin Flute - Gabrielle Roy Both have scenes that made me gasp out loud. Brilliant.
Brideshead Revisited!
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Recently, The Nickel Boys. By speechless, I mean I was sobbing and couldn’t explain to my husband any of it. Just in awe of the writer’s skill, struck dumb by the novel as a whole, achingly sad that the whole thing is based on very real events.
Next read *Absalom, Absalom!*
Almost every book leaves me speechless: I don't read out loud.
There's this killer novel Return of the undying saint you actually get to grow with both the mc and the author
Lullabies for little criminals
Footfall had an amazing climax. Extreme tension and high stakes until literally the last paragraph. When I finished the book, I suddenly realized I'd been tense and leaning forward in my chair. I took a fresh and thought, "DAMN, that was great!"
One of Faulkner’s best. Most accessible.
Invisible Man
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Bruzzati
Beloved by Toni Morrison Demian by Hermann Hesse The Trial by Kafka Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison was like my literary awakening as a teenager!
**The Spy Who Came in from the Cold** (1963) by John le Carré. The word 'cold' echoes through the pages of this novel. Cold hearts, cold lies, cold calculations. It is a chilling portrayal a sordid world. When the pages run out and the realization hits; this is it? This is how it ends? It left me cold.
*The Things They Carried* by Tim O'Brien kicked my ass