Book Recommendations Meme
May. 26th, 2006 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAfter reading my EW mag, the guilty pleasure, with all it's lists of things, which I don't agree with, thought I'd devise my own list of things. (The lists were:memorable moments of the WB network and Stephen King's Book Awards.) The other item that motivated these lists was a discussion on fiction vs. literature two days ago that I had in my lj. Which got me to thinking about books. So I thought, tonight, while watching a 2 part CSI written and directed by Quentin Tartino, about what books I'd recommend that someone read before they died - what literary books, what non-literary, what genre books? (Why so morbid - ah, you'd had to have been watching this two-part CSI episode to get that.)
Five "literary" books or books that I define as literature* - to read before you kick the bucket, get hit by a bus or die of old age. Note each one is from a different country, as opposed to all from the same one - it's highly annoying I know, when people recommend all books written by American or English writers:
[*Literature: a book that has layers of meaning, where the flaws add to as opposed to detract from the work, where style, word choice, characters, themes, all are work in careful orchestration. It's like music, I suppose, each word, each character, each theme, each piece complements the others, echoes or bolsters them, never overwhelms or detracts - creating something that echoes in heart and head and soul long after the reading, no matter how long, and can be analyzed forever in multiple ways. That's my criteria for a literary work, just so we're clear.]
1. Dubliners by James Joyce. (Odd choice I know. These are short stories and I'm not a fan of short stories, but Joyce knows how to write one, how to get to that difficult complicated emotion. One of the stories, the last in the collection was turned into a film, The Dead, but is far better as a story. Joyce's words are poetry, he has mastered their rhythm and unlike his more well-known novels, Ulysess and Portrait of An Artist, Dubliners snapshots of divergent lives says more about both the city in which he lives and the human experience. I've read all three, and Dubliners continues to haunt me. )
2. A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. A girl's coming of age story. Thought of saying To Kill A Mockingbird, but Member is quieter than Mockinbird, and murkier. McCullers through dialect and language subletly takes us inside the point of view of an adolescent girl, shows us the time period, and through the girl challenges our own assumptions about race relations, class, and family.
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - a poetic tale of love, loss, ghosts, and death. Marquez does what Joyce and Faulkner do, weave words into a tapestry of sound. And by doing so, he manages to get across the uncertainity of his characters, the feeling of being present but not, of wanting more, the ache for mystery and romance. The surrealness of reality.
Each character is fully realized no matter how minor and work stays in the mind long after, often changing the reader in the course of the reading.
4. The Little Prince (can't remember the author's name right now, but it's French and you no doubt know it. - a story about innocence and wisdom and war - or a man's coming of age story, if you will. If you can read it in French complete with the pictures. I read this in English and in French as a child. What child hasn't? And it seems on the surface to be a child's book, but it isn't. The writer based it on his experiences during a war. It is a chat between a French pilot, weary from fighting, and an alien prince who has visited many planets. )
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ( a story about relationships, war, sacrifice, and music, shared or not. You sink into Kundera's prose and it takes time to read him. He demands a great deal from the reader. The words transport you inside the heads of his cast of characters and their hearts. It is a romance in a way, a story about love and at the same time a contemplation on what it means to be in love, what love means, what it means to be real. Unlike anything I've read.)
Five books that aren't literary, but I adore, have memorized, and will often remember the story in my head from memory. Books, whose stories I've loved to death:
1. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Scarlett Pimpernell by Baroness Orzy
4. Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters
5. The Perilous Guard by...can't remember the name. Kid's book.
Have all five of these memorized. So don't really need to read them again.
Five guilty reads that comfort my brain, when it needs fun:
1. Harry Potter books
2. PG Wodehouse's Jeeves novels
3. Dresden Files
4. Janet Evanovich
5. Charlain Harris
And finally five books, that I adore and would recommend, just because:
1. The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Chess, murder, and art all wrapped in a puzzel.)
2. Grass by Sherri Tepper (it's not like her other books, even if you hate her, try this one)
3. Hyperion by Dan Simmons (struggles with faith and sacrifice from multiple points of view)
4. Sunshine by Robin Mckingley (a story about handling one's own internal fears)
5. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell (interesting take on a variety of issues, from vegetarianism to religion to anthropology to multi-culturalism. She discusses in this fascinating work the foibles of thrusting oneself, however innocently onto another culture)
Five "literary" books or books that I define as literature* - to read before you kick the bucket, get hit by a bus or die of old age. Note each one is from a different country, as opposed to all from the same one - it's highly annoying I know, when people recommend all books written by American or English writers:
[*Literature: a book that has layers of meaning, where the flaws add to as opposed to detract from the work, where style, word choice, characters, themes, all are work in careful orchestration. It's like music, I suppose, each word, each character, each theme, each piece complements the others, echoes or bolsters them, never overwhelms or detracts - creating something that echoes in heart and head and soul long after the reading, no matter how long, and can be analyzed forever in multiple ways. That's my criteria for a literary work, just so we're clear.]
1. Dubliners by James Joyce. (Odd choice I know. These are short stories and I'm not a fan of short stories, but Joyce knows how to write one, how to get to that difficult complicated emotion. One of the stories, the last in the collection was turned into a film, The Dead, but is far better as a story. Joyce's words are poetry, he has mastered their rhythm and unlike his more well-known novels, Ulysess and Portrait of An Artist, Dubliners snapshots of divergent lives says more about both the city in which he lives and the human experience. I've read all three, and Dubliners continues to haunt me. )
2. A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. A girl's coming of age story. Thought of saying To Kill A Mockingbird, but Member is quieter than Mockinbird, and murkier. McCullers through dialect and language subletly takes us inside the point of view of an adolescent girl, shows us the time period, and through the girl challenges our own assumptions about race relations, class, and family.
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - a poetic tale of love, loss, ghosts, and death. Marquez does what Joyce and Faulkner do, weave words into a tapestry of sound. And by doing so, he manages to get across the uncertainity of his characters, the feeling of being present but not, of wanting more, the ache for mystery and romance. The surrealness of reality.
Each character is fully realized no matter how minor and work stays in the mind long after, often changing the reader in the course of the reading.
4. The Little Prince (can't remember the author's name right now, but it's French and you no doubt know it. - a story about innocence and wisdom and war - or a man's coming of age story, if you will. If you can read it in French complete with the pictures. I read this in English and in French as a child. What child hasn't? And it seems on the surface to be a child's book, but it isn't. The writer based it on his experiences during a war. It is a chat between a French pilot, weary from fighting, and an alien prince who has visited many planets. )
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ( a story about relationships, war, sacrifice, and music, shared or not. You sink into Kundera's prose and it takes time to read him. He demands a great deal from the reader. The words transport you inside the heads of his cast of characters and their hearts. It is a romance in a way, a story about love and at the same time a contemplation on what it means to be in love, what love means, what it means to be real. Unlike anything I've read.)
Five books that aren't literary, but I adore, have memorized, and will often remember the story in my head from memory. Books, whose stories I've loved to death:
1. Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Scarlett Pimpernell by Baroness Orzy
4. Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters
5. The Perilous Guard by...can't remember the name. Kid's book.
Have all five of these memorized. So don't really need to read them again.
Five guilty reads that comfort my brain, when it needs fun:
1. Harry Potter books
2. PG Wodehouse's Jeeves novels
3. Dresden Files
4. Janet Evanovich
5. Charlain Harris
And finally five books, that I adore and would recommend, just because:
1. The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Chess, murder, and art all wrapped in a puzzel.)
2. Grass by Sherri Tepper (it's not like her other books, even if you hate her, try this one)
3. Hyperion by Dan Simmons (struggles with faith and sacrifice from multiple points of view)
4. Sunshine by Robin Mckingley (a story about handling one's own internal fears)
5. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell (interesting take on a variety of issues, from vegetarianism to religion to anthropology to multi-culturalism. She discusses in this fascinating work the foibles of thrusting oneself, however innocently onto another culture)
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 09:46 am (UTC)BTW, there's a rumor floating around that Elizabeth Peters will finally write a new Vicky Bliss. The latest Amelia Peabody Tomb of the Golden Bird is the final book in that series and she's been talking for years about linking up the two series. It's generally believed that Sir John is related to the Emerson clan through Uncle Sethos.
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Date: 2006-05-27 02:27 pm (UTC)It took me a year to read all of them. Got bogged down in Queen's Play and Disorderly Knights. My favorites are the last three. By that time, I'd gotten used to Dunnett's dense style.
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Date: 2006-05-27 04:41 pm (UTC)Like you I missed Christian who was my favorite character, we don't get another female character like that until Pawn. Can't say more without spoiling you.
Had the same fears...but I've learned skipping some of the action doesn't hurt. She feels the oddest need to write every nuance of the action. I think she's following the style of Dumas and other classical adventure novels, but reading it made me crazy at times.
I read the rooftop sequence in a subway and a doctor's office, with frequent interruptions. Took me two months to read that book.