i'm going to go with the lord of the rings trilogy.

and yeah, the story is pretty cool. but here's what grabs me about it- it's immense. you look at a book like this at first and go "jesus christ it'll take me four years to read that." but the man (even though i can't say he's the most eloquent writer in history) did not leave out a single detail.

there are appendixes FULL of family histories and timelines. he created an entire family tree for all of these people, origins of the "monsters," hell, he even ran down the lineage of the pipeweed the hobbits smoked. just a ridiculous read.

animal farm also gets a vote from me.

So this guy goes to Paris and writes some books about basically being a scumbag with a knack for picking the hairiest cunts. It's called the Tropic of Cancer and it is by Henry Miller.

I've gone the longest spell I've ever gone in my entire life without re-reading my favorite novel of all time. I think I've read it about 14 times, and every time I begin to question it being my absolute favorite novel, I get halfway through it once again and geniunely feel like it is an old friend...except it is a book. At the same time it is a feast. The human condition in stripped, fine form.

When I first began writing seriously (that is, taking myself way too seriously and writing at the same time), I attempted to write like Henry Miller. As I think all people who do too much reading and too much writing do, I had to force myself to stop and remember to live. But what is strange, this novel is one of only a handful of books I ever read that make you FEEL LIKE YOU ARE LIVING WHILE YOU ARE READING THEM. I have lived in the Villa Borghese. I have shaved Boris. Captain Expatriate shares with me these experiences so much more than the average author; it is almost as if he is offering his life-blood to you. Which is why I love and hate him.

Thanks for ruining my life you lying old fuck.

timpickens wrote:Another cliche one for me, as well. 1984.

I don't think I need to describe the plot but...

I finally got round to reading it back in 2001, after putting it off for years... I was about half to three quarters through on 11th September. Truly excellent timing - reading about permanent war and all that. For laughs, I read Brave New World straight later.

bellulah wrote:i'm going to go with the lord of the rings trilogy.

This is the first year in 15 consecutive years that I haven't re-read LOTR starting around my birthday (October). I finally had such a long list of books I was eager to read that I decided to take a break from Master Tolkien. But I still have the itch...

houseboat wrote:Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I think it's a deeply humane book, is all. Very funny, very warm, a great and ridiculous story, and written with an energy and sophistication that didn't crop up again in the English novel until Joyce came along. I think of it often.

Great choice.

It's almost incomprehensible how a book that tries to fictionalize John Locke's epistemology (and one written by an 18th-century Anglican parson, no less) is also perhaps the smuttiest book I've ever read (apart from maybe Philip Roth's "Sabbath's Theater"). But Sterne pulls it off. One of the weirdest and most mind-bending experiences I've ever had.

Sterne is similar to Shakespeare in that both of them hid tons of lewd jokes in their books and did it so carefully that the censors at the time didn't pick up on it.

the silmarillion by tolkien and journey to the end of the night by celine.

the silmarillion got me from the second i started it and may be the fastest i'd ever read a book. so expansive, desperate and exciting i just loved it. tolkien's world is . . . mind blowing.

as for journey to the end of the night, up until 6 and a half yrs ago i hadn't even heard of it until i found a copy in my boyfriend's library. flipping through it i found this quote underlined, which immediately got me reading. i've probably read the book 3 times since then.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of time to see what people and things really look like.

it's just funny, depressing, and makes me wish i knew french. good book.

kenoki wrote:
as for journey to the end of the night, up until 6 and a half yrs ago i hadn't even heard of it until i found a copy in my boyfriend's library. flipping through it i found this quote underlined, which immediately got me reading. i've probably read the book 3 times since then.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of time to see what people and things really look like.

it's just funny, depressing, and makes me wish i knew french. good book.

Definitely wonderful.

So I was thinking about my favorite books ever since I read this thread, even typing and retyping a definitive list numerous times trying to get it right.

Here's my top 19, subject to always be changing.

1. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
2. Never Come Morning by Nelson Algren
3. Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
4. ...And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
7. An American Dream by Norman Mailer
8. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
9. The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
10. Sexus/Nexus/Plexus by Henry Miller
11. Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
12. The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs
13. Women by Charles Bukowski
14. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
15. Watt by Samuel Beckett
16. Nausea by John Paul Sartre
17. Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
18. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
19. The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasnahorkai

Steve V. wrote:13. Women by Charles Bukowski

That's the only book I've ever returned to the bookstore for a refund.

My favorite novel is an impressionistic view of the French aristocracy, the narrator's life, and the narrator's rose tinted childhood.

A short description of a long book.

Heliotropic wrote:

Steve V. wrote:13. Women by Charles Bukowski

That's the only book I've ever returned to the bookstore for a refund.

Um...that was not a good idea in my opinion.

One of my favorite books is about how a bunch of persians tried to conquer a bunch of greeks and lost.
The other one is about a student who kills himself on easter and twenty years later his niece runs away from home