Posted on 01/31/2012 8:21:59 AM PST by C19fan
"Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work," Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers' success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity's greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—"to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems." Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list—so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I didn’t like Genji because I was reading a lot of Japanese fiction and Lafcadio Hearn at the time and it just didn’t suit me.
Woman of the Dunes is a very good movie as well and the sex scene with all the sand is very hard to watch, lol. The movie version of “Battle Royale” was ruined by Beat Takeshi, and I’m not sure if they have a translated English version.
I’ve never read Shusaku Endo, but I have read a lot of Mishima (including Death). I’m reading a lot of the Murakami’s (Ryu and Haruki), and I love Osaka area humor, so I read a lot of this guy Ramo Nakajima (I wrote his wiki article lol). He is really funny if you are proficient enough in Japanese. Gadara no Buta is a hell of a novel.
No Nancy Drew mysteries or Billy Whiskers stories?
Hearn was interesting though my wife hadn’t even heard of him, I was able to see his home in New Orleans when we were there for a few years.
Your comment on WOTD reminds me of the egg scene in Tampopo - a movie I still find hilarious, but can’t share with my daughters yet - my wife thinks it’s stupid, but then she doesn’t understand the finer points of Monty Python either (something my daughters are now aptly able to quote; mind at the appropriate times).
Nakajima is another I’ll have to try out, I enjoy Japanese humor; but as with most translations so much is lost so I usually have to reserve myself to hiragana versions as my kanji was tainted through earlier chinese exposure and neither are sufficient to my reading habits - I have yet to master the realm of patience which is odd given my proclivity to asian studies....though what patience I’ve earned has definitely helped in my military studies... only fools rush in...
Rereading my post I seem to have been channeling Stephen Crane. Shorter coherent sentences and not just punctuation are your friend, fella, take a breath... think the thought, stop, and then write...
Nothing, as long as you ignore the fact that it is basically incomprehensible. A perfect example of why I don't get it.
But if you're Irish it is possible that your mileage might vary - some of this crazy language and spelling could make some sense I suppose.
Ditto for Flannery O'Connor. When she was writing, criticism finally caught up with fiction. That is to say, critics were identifying symbols and subtexts almost as fast as writers were creating them, so the literary mannerisms that flourished in the 1940s came to seem tired and transparent in subsequent decades. All the symbol-hunting and Christ-figure stuff that was all the rage in the 40s and 50s put the next generations of readers off in a big way.
Of course in English-speaking countries these lists are almost always going to be biased in favor of English-language authors. You may feel good about Broch or Musil, Mahfouz or Hamsun, Agnon or Platonov, but even most critics and teachers haven't read them and won't put them on their list. But it is a slap in the face of Thomas Mann that he doesn't rate and Nabokov, who hated Mann, has two entries.
The 19th century is pretty much what you'd expect, except that Crime and Punishment should be higher and The Brothers Karamazov should also be on the list. Chekhov doesn't fit in that well, though. A great writer to be sure, but it's hard to compare novelists with short-story writers, since they're trying to accomplish very different things.
Moby Dick? The story is another "Boy meets whale, Boy hates whale" thing. It's a great novel because of all that stuff thrown in that gets in the way of the plot. That's my take, anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXQTzx89JZE
This is an old TV show I used to watch with my wife - it’s all Osaka talent (kida tarou/composer, nakajima ramo/writer, tsurube/comedian-rakugo, hamamura jun/jack of all trades, and another guy)
It was really fun to watch, it’s called “Saigo no Bansan” the last supper, and was pretty much the last thing Ramo did before he got arrested for weed, thrown in jail for a year, and then after falling down some stairs and busting his head open, dying.
If Nabokov's writing hasn't dated as much as some other writers, it's because so much of what he wrote wasn't tied to the way of life of a past era. That doesn't quite apply to Lolita.
Satire of the provincialism of the 1950s reads as provincial now. 50 years from now, if we've moved on from Oprah, reality TV, and the rest of what obsesses people now, satirical references to it will be pretty flat to future readers.
Not to mention the fact that the prose is a joy to read. One can't say that about Mann's leaden prose.
Mann wrote in a rich German that's difficult to render in English translation. Our loss.
‘Pale Fire’ is simply sui generis. There's nothing like it and it's been called the greatest novel of the 20th century by more than one informed critic. If it's even a novel. It created its own genre.
Well, it will rate high in a list of works of the genre it created. It's less successful as a novel than Lolita.
Lolita is a good enough novel. It just doesn't deserve to be overpraised.
Ack!! I am discovered! Alright, I confess that I read and was influenced by "Brave New World". It seems incontrovertible that my dystopian future world must also have been illuminated by that distant light.
And of seeing Brave New World’s "vision of the future slowly coming to pass", yes, it is too painfully true. Even my thousand-year reach has not insulated my tale from the same fate.
In regard to the thread and its purpose, I have observed that as a group, readers, writers, and intellectuals in general always produce lists of books that they think they should have read and held in high esteem.
In that regard, it is puzzling that "Lolita" got such high marks. It is exceedingly artfully crafted, but it was foredoomed from its inception to have an unhappy ending. That was a societal requirement for the sin of bending society's rules.
The rest of it? Not enough Science Fiction.
“doesn’t deserve to be overpraised” is a tautology. The humor in Lolita goes well beyond topical jibes at pop culture (a culture which is much more prevalent now than in the Truman-era America he was writing about). It’s sophisticated literary wit: multilingual puns, references to all sorts of other texts. It was written nearly sixty years ago and has not really dated. As popular now as ever. Nabokov is impossible to attach to any literary movements and thus is not dated by them (in way that say D.H. Lawrence is). Pale Fire is one of the most intricate literary works of all time. And like Lolita, sad and hilarious at same time.
I probably shouldn’t have said anything about Wuthering Heights since it has been almost 40 years since I have read it. However, I do believe that realism is a necessity for any book, fiction or non-fiction to be deemed a “classic”. If a novel does not describe accurately the reality of the human condition including evil and its consequences, joy, sadness, struggle, and many other facets of man’s journey through life....if the novel distorts these realities or neglects to mention them, then the discerning reader will toss it aside.
Even fantasy novels can depict this kind of reality. Tolkien’s fantasies are classics. Among other things, they depict the reality of evil and the reality of our struggle against it and they do it very well.
I meant that realism was a technique or movement that hadn’t been around when Miss Emily wrote her great novel. Not that she would have conformed to it if it had. Personally, I find it absolutely mesmerizing.
In researching it a little bit this morning, I found that the original critics of the book agreed with you. They hated it, lol! Charlotte, in the 2nd edition of the book, after her sister’s very Heathcliff death, wrote an defensive introduction to it claiming that Emily was a good Christian woman - not the monster that the critics feared. Total bull and some think that Charlotte may have destroyed an unpublished novel of Emily’s.
About 10 yeas ago, I got lost on the moors walking to Top Withins in Haworth (the Bronte home). Between the desolation and screaming wind, I came to believe WH was a documentary!
WH has its roots in Romantic poetry and Greek Tragedy more than other novels of the time. It’s also a precursor of surrealism.
I meant to write “Heathcliff-like death.”
Don't be juvenile. "The best novel of the 20th century" is excessive praise for Lolita, and the book, in spite of its good qualities doesn't deserve it.
The humor in Lolita goes well beyond topical jibes at pop culture (a culture which is much more prevalent now than in the Truman-era America he was writing about). It’s sophisticated literary wit: multilingual puns, references to all sorts of other texts. It was written nearly sixty years ago and has not really dated. As popular now as ever.
It is possible to have too much of a good thing, assuming it is a good thing. Read enough of Ada and you may not be so enthusiastic about Nabokov's "I am so clever" wordplay.
Nabokov is impossible to attach to any literary movements and thus is not dated by them
Nabokov's fans advocate a particular view of the novel that not everyone shares. In that sense he is attached to a "movement" of sorts.
It may not be the best of the century but the fact that it pops up so often on these lists says something about its evergreen status.
I love Ada. Taken together, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada make up one of the great achievements in 20th century letters. That’s not even counting his two charming pre Lolita Anglophone novels and the two clever post Ada novels.
Hands down my faves. "Sound and the Fury" was far to complicated... or impenetrable....or simply retarded for me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.