Favorite fiction books

[Chris OConnor]

JuniperSo many people have mentioned loving The Catcher in the Rye that I am going to have to read this soon. You'll find a thread in our Fiction Roundtable forum where several people were discussing this book. Ahh here it is.

[hegel1066]

Some of my favorite novelists include (the only reason they're in aphabetical order is because I'm scanning my shelves, which, with the help of my OCD, I keep that way):

Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
Honore Balzac
the Bronte sisters
Truman Capote
Wilkie Collins
Raplh Ellison
Gustav Flaubert
John Fowles
Graham Greene
Thomas Hardy
Henry James
Franz Kafka
Milan Kundera
Vladimir Nabokov
Flannery O'Connor
Marcel Proust
Philip Roth
Leo Tolstoi and
last, but not least, Edmund White.

Favorite novels include (I'll just include the ones read in the last 12 months):

"Diary of a Bad Year" by J. M. Coetzee
"The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston
"The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski
"Beauty and Sadness," "The Master of Go," Snow Country," and "Thousand Cranes" all by Yasunari Kawabata
"Conversation in a Cathedral" by Mario Vargas Llosa
"Barbaras" by Par Lagerkvist

[Ophelia]

Hello John,

Saturday morning,

I am re-reading the posts I made last night and they are hardly coherent, sorry about this. So I'll do a bit of editing now.

Now that I'm gettting to know you better, this is un impressive list.
Have you thought of giving our fiction selection "The Great Indian Novel" a chance?


For Non-fiction, I would love to really see people discuss the book with me, Our Inner Ape, by Frans de Waal and it hasn't happened so far. Would you be interested?
I' ve learnt a lot about primate and humans with this book.

[hegel1066]

Yes, Ophelia, in fact, I looked for the Tharoor the other day at a local bookstore, but they were out of copies. I was especially interested in it when I read that it was a re-telling of Indian mythology in modern-day India. It must be a popular read. I would love to read it with you - fiction and non-fiction. Starting in a couple of weeks, I will be markedly more busy than I am now (the schoolyear will have begun.) But until then, I have free days for the most part.

As a Christian (and I can go in what type of Christian later - please banish the idea of the biggoted "Biblethumper" from your mind), I'm also very interested in "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in God." But I'm just a few posts short of being able to post in a book forum. That's why I've been so darn prolix today.

-John (hegel1066)

[Ophelia]

John, I'm glad I asked you. I was having strong doubts as to whether "the Great Indian Novel" would attract our regular literarure crowd-- we do not really have a group of regular literature posting members. Originally this was a mostly non-fiction forum and Chris and I are trying to turn it into a literature forum too, bu the transformation does not always go smoothly.
Ideally I would love to get new readers from India or the diaspora to discuss this book, Chris thought of asking the author how to get his readers to know about our discussion.

Please get your copy since we only have this small window until the end of your holiday. It's a great book, the humour and the sheer breadth of invention are astonishing. If it's not in the shops (which would surprise me, it was published in 1989) try the net. Let me know when you're ready to start.

[hegel1066]

Ophelia, earlier today I answered a post that asked for information about our current reading lists. To assure that I don't read only fiction, I offer you this selection (which are the ones I'm currently reading right now.) I plan to start "50 Reasons" either tonight or tomorrow, and "The Great Indian Novel" as soon as I can find it. If I can't find it, I promise to look for the next fiction book well ahead of time. This is my first official day of posting, after all.

So! The list:

I'm now reading:

George Steiner's "My Unwritten Books". Steiner was a long time literary critic and writer who wrote some of the most percipient criticism of the last century. I believe he's considering retirement, if he hasn't already retired. "Unwritten Books" is really a crowning gem.

Mikhail Bakhtin's "The Dialogical Imagination". Bakhtin was a Russian Marxist literary critic and semiotician. Much of his work focuses around tropes in literature, and societal forms found in literature, like "carnival" and the "grotesque." His work on the history of laughter, chronotope, heteroglossia, and the dialogic imagination are especially worthy of note.

Michael Taussig's "The Nervous System". Taussig is a brilliant cultural anthropologist who did years worth of research in South America, and now teaches at NYU. This particular text is comprised of nine essays, in which he talks about everything from the way we try to commodify the state to the ways in which we "reify" the state in order to give it our power.Ever the critical Marxist, Taussig focuses on state violence and force to achieve its ends. To quote Benjamin, "To live in a state of emergency is not the exception, but the rule." (How pertinent is this today!)

Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature". I can't say anything that hasn't already been said in praise of this fantastic piece of literary scholarship. It's exactly what it says it is: a history of representations of reality in Western literature. ALL of Western literature - from Petronius and Tacitus to Virginia Woolf. A must-read for any serious fan of comparative literature.

Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night". I bought this late one night while I was browsing through a bookstore. It is an incredible collection of short essays on different books, and the idea of the library, and what they mean to the author. The author, it seems, is a veritable polyhistor, which I greatly appreciate.

George Bataille's "On Nietzsche". Read with caution. Bataille was one of the progenitors of postmodern thought. He has some ... er, interesting, but not unwelcome interpretations of Nietzsche.

[Ophelia]

Hello again John,

I've edited what I wrote yesterday, the non-fiction book I'm trying to promote is "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal.

I am a strange species at Booktalk in that I am not interested in discussing religious belief (or lack thereof) in any way - I think that makes me part of a majority in France, the non-militant atheist.

[hegel1066]

Yes, I saw Franz de Waal on an American television show the other day, and his book seemed vaguely interesting.

I have to admit, though, much like the subject of religion is for you, I find primatology/evolutionary theory material fairly dull. 1) I'm already convinced that evolution is actually a true, occuring and reoccuring process, and 2) I feel that I already know enough that reading an entire book about it would be a waste of time.

That's not to say that once the schoolyear comes, I wouldn't read one. But since I read a book club at school, as well, it would not be a top priority.

-John (hegel1066)

[My books]

These are some of the books I read over and over again...

The end of the affair - Graham Greene
Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen
The bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
The eyes of the dragon - Stephen King
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

[onasunnyday]

It's always difficult to list favorite books because there are so many. But I'll throw some into the mix: Sound and Fury by William Faulkner, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.