My 50 Notable Books...

[shadowkat]

Top 50 Notable Book List. No particular order, except by memory, I suck at ranking things and seriously, how could you? These are the memorable/notable books that I'd recommend as my top 50. I have rather diverse taste - so included in the list are genre fiction, plays, and graphic novels. I did not include poetry or non-fiction.

These are books that stick in my memory and in some way affected me deeply or influenced my writing and how I perceived things.

1. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
2. Beloved by Toni Morrison
3. Possession by AS Byatt
4. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
9. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
10. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
11. Dubliners by James Joyce
12. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
13. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
15. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
16. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
17. Metamorphsis by Franz Kafka
18. Brave New World by Adolus Huxley.
19. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman (this is a play)
20. Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg
21. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
22. The Code of the Woosters, Right Ho, Jeeves, and The Imitable Jeeves by PD Wodehouse
23. Ulysess by James Joyce
24. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
25. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
26. The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Quinn
27. The Prince by Machevilli
28. 1984 by George Orwell
29. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
30. Watchman by Alan Moore (graphic novel)
31. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (graphic novel)
32. Lord of the Flies by William Fielding
33. Exodus by Leon Uris
34. The People of Forever are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
35. Curtain by Agatha Christie
36. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
37. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
38. Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
39. The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
40. The Hunger Game series by Suzanne Collins
41. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
42. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
43. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello,
44. The Scarlette Pimpernell by Baroness Orzy
45. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole
46. Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll
47. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
48. The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
49. The Chronicles of Lymond by Dorothy Dunnett
50. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I love at least 48 of those! Don't know the Carroll or the Franklin.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

You should try Carroll and Franklin, both are interesting.

1. Miles Franklin's novel - My Brilliant Career was turned into a movie starring Judy Davis and Sam Neil.

It's an anti-romance. Basically about a young woman who throws over her suitor for a career as a writer, which may or may not happen.

My Brilliant Career is a 1901 novel written by Miles Franklin. It is the first of many novels by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879–1954), one of the major Australian writers of her time. It was written while she was still a teenager, as a romance to amuse her friends. Franklin submitted the manuscript to Henry Lawson who contributed a preface and took it to his own publishers in Edinburgh. The popularity of the novel in Australia and the perceived closeness of many of the characters to her own family and circumstances as small farmers in New South Wales near Goulburn caused Franklin a great deal of distress and led her to withdrawing the novel from publication until after her death

The heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, is an imaginative, headstrong girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1890s. Drought and a series of poor business decisions reduce her family to subsistence level, her father begins to drink excessively, and Sybylla struggles to deal with the monotony of her life. To her relief, she is sent to live on her grandmother's property, where life is more comfortable. There she meets wealthy young Harold Beecham, who loves her and proposes marriage; convinced of her ugliness and aware of her tomboyish ways, Sybylla is unable to believe that he could really love her. By this time, her father's drinking has gotten the family into debt, and she is sent to work as governess/housekeeper for the family of an almost illiterate neighbour to whom her father owes money. She finds life there unbearable and eventually suffers a physical breakdown which leads to her return to the family home. When Harold Beecham returns to ask Sybylla to marry him, she concludes that she would only make him unhappy and sends him away, determined never to marry. The novel ends with no suggestion that she will ever have the "brilliant career" as a writer that she desires.


2. Jonathan Carroll's Marriage of Sticks is the weirdest vampire story that I've read. And I truly have read nothing like it. It's creepy and asks more questions than it answers.

It's difficult to describe - sort of magical surrealism...think Collette's The Vagabound by way of Kafka on the Shore. Very weird book, and haunting.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I saw My Brilliant Career! Didn't know that was the same thing. It's been a long time, but I remember that I really loved it. I'd like to read it.

And I'll have to look for Marriage of Sticks. Sounds weird, indeed.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I think I either read it before or after I saw the film, can't remember. My parents had moved to Australia for a year - so they had all these Australian books - and I ended up reading a lot of them. Miles Franklyn is a major writer over there - sort of the Australian version of Jane Austen, except she reminds me more of George Eliot. Very tomboyish and her books center on the Outback.

My Career Goes Bung, which is the sequel, wasn't as good.

Marriage of Sticks...is ..sort of magical surrealism? Reminds me a little in tone to Kafka on the Shore or Ocean at the End of the Lane, has that sort of dark fantasy feel to it.