posted
In April I'm moving out to China, which will obviously restrict the amount of literature I'll have access to. So I've decided I'm going to read as much as I possibly can before I go. Now I'm aware that I'm not really that well read, and that was made even more obvious looking at the Booker thread yesterday.
What I'm after are 20thC classics (and any 21C classics too) and you can be really obvious with your recommendations.
(although to narrow it down a bit, really obvious stuff I have read include; Catcher in the Rye, Orwell, Heart of Darkness, Catch-22, Graham Greene, The Outsider, and Murakami)
[ 13.03.2008, 12:04: Message edited by: ooh aah ]
Posts: 2266 | From: the bottom of the barrel | Registered: Oct 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Pale Fire and At Swim-Two-Birds would be alongside Catch-22 as my top thre from the twentieth century, I think.
Sunset Song is the finest Scottish novel of last century.
Nostromo or Lord Jim are better / more typical of Conrad than HoD.
Posts: 1606 | From: John McGlynn's bouncy army | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
post-war, you probably don't need to bother with anything that isn't American.
Posts: 1606 | From: John McGlynn's bouncy army | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
Ulysses (but perhaps too long...) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Lolita Ada or Ardour (Nabokov) American Pastoral (Roth) The Plot Against America (Roth) The Human Stain (Roth) I Married A Communist (Roth) The Blind Assassin (Atwood)
and, above all (it's tiny, it'll take up almost nothing of your limited time)
Ill Seen, Ill Said (Samuel Beckett)
Are you including poetry in "literature"? If so, try Heaney's Opened Ground, the Ezra Pound Cantos, and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Posts: 17027 | From: your gaff, nicking stuff. | Registered: Oct 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
John Dos Passos USA E.L. Doctorow Ragtime " World's Fair Gabriel Garcia Marquez - anything Jonathan Lethem The Fortress of Solitude James Ellroy - anything
Posts: 3320 | From: Goodbye Arganzuela, hallo Tyne & Wear | Registered: Jan 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Jesus, Toro. He's only got 'til April, and you put two different Joyce books there. I'd still be struggling through page one of Ulysses, I think, in April.
What they all said about At-Swim-Two-Birds and Lolita, of course.
I'll continue to rave about The Bridge Over The Drina by Ivo Andric; various of Ismael Kadare's books, particularly Broken April and The File on H; and The Good Soldier Schweijk by Jaroslav Hasek for your 20th century eastern European classics.
And, above all else, as mentioned elsewhere:
If This Is A Man by Primo Levi.
Posts: 4013 | From: London | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
Of modern British fun to read stuff, obviously David Mitchell. I think John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour and particularly The Debt To Pleasure are both magnificent.
Posts: 4013 | From: London | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
Since we're talking east europeans, replace with Kundera. Immortality or The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
Posts: 17027 | From: your gaff, nicking stuff. | Registered: Oct 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
I haven't read Immortality, but toro is quite right in recommending the Book Of Laughter and Forgetting. Everyone talks about The Unbearable Lightness of Being but the former is better.
Posts: 16877 | From: Gobias Industries | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
