15

[trishtrash]

Fun little survey [via hitchhiker] - rattle off the first 15 books you can think of that will always stick with you.

Comments

[maldeluxx]

Off the 'top books' list XD :

Salinger - Catcher In The Rye (yes, I'm one of those who liked this)
P.White - Voss
Joyce - Ulysses
Clavell - Shogun
Ballard - Running Wild
Tolkien - Silmarillion
Behan - Borstal Boy
Brautigan - Trout Fishing In America
Lurie - Nowhere City
Hornby - Hi-Fidelity (only book of his I like and/or am interested in)
Hawthorne - Scarlet Letter
Ende - Neverending Story
Warner - Morvern Callar
Clarke - Childhood's End

[trishtrash]

I'm always impressed when I meet someone who not only read, but enjoyed, The Scarlet Letter. That book defeated me; I didn't get halfway.

[maldeluxx]

I guess the notes coming with the Penguin version help, but I really did enjoy the subject and the language style :) Unlike, say, Henry James - now that writer writes oftentimes sentences that you forget what he was trying to say before one ends the sentence (but I have found a few among his that I did understand *lol*). :)

[edith_jones]

Someone else who has heard of and read Patrick White! I haven't read Voss yet, although it is next to me on my nighttable, but I loved The Solid Mandala and Riders in the Chariot so very much. He is a brilliant writer.

[maldeluxx]

I also love the other book I've read from him "The Cockatoos"... I need to read the others at some point (most are aviable at the library). Robert Smith is the reason why I've heard about him.

"Voss" is brilliant, it has a great, strong and determined heroine, and a great long-distance, unspoken love between her and the Voss character.

[edith_jones]

I admit that I have no idea who Robert Smith is - and doing a Google search would be pointless as there must be millions of Robert Smiths in the world!

I got to know Patrick White in a university course, many, many years ago. They certainly don't have them in my local library! They're back in print again in English due to the efforts of J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist who has relocated to Australia. I read Riders in the Chariot last year and was stunned by its beauty.

The Cockatoos isn't in print at the moment in English but I hope it will be. Who else do you enjoy reading?

[maldeluxx]

He's singer of The Cure, bit of a bookworm *lol*
The library's PW books aren't that new here, but there's still a bunch; I don't think his books have been translated to Finnish - at least not in recent years.

Others... if there was a 'top five desert island books' asked, I'd put "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" there; she'd not easy, a bit odd, but I really like her, she wouldn't get boring that soon (and the book is thick LOL).

Pretty much any book by Hermann Hesse, Jack London and
Charles Bukowski are also great to read. I might re-read them again since it's been a few years from the last time I've read them, and they would count in the 50books challenge *grin*

[edith_jones]

Wow....our reading differs greatly! I think I read some Hesse in a university German class once. My brother read a fair few of his translated novels in high school [he was at an odd high school; most schools don't tackle Hesse], and I remember that he loved Magister Ludi. Charles Bukowski I'd never heard of since I looked him up on Wikipedia just now, and I've not read Jack London since I was a child. As for Emily Dickinson....I read a poem I liked by her once! Something to do with a woman's husband dying - I think the last lines of the poem were "life will go on/though I don't see why

[maldeluxx]

I've mostly read Hesse in Finnish, a lot of his books have been translated, very well, to our language. I first read his stuff around the age of 15 or so, loved everything. I've read most of the Bukowski's stuff, except the poetry