Yet another literary meme - the 61 essential postmodern reads

[nwhyte]

Read Catherine Kellogg's explanation, which includes helpful icons to let you know if the author is a character and if the plot is self-contradicting. Then the usual: bold if you've read it, italic if you started it, struck through if you hated it.

Comments

[communicator]

John Berger's "G"
Roberto Bolaño's "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" (unfinished)

I recommend any of these to anyone who hasn't read them. Maybe not G.

[seawasp]

Dammit. I thought I might have a clean sweep of "No, never read it, never meant to", and the damn Shakespeare comes in and messes with my record. (I don't count the Kafka, that was assigned reading ... twice)

[redfiona99]

That's the one I've read too.

I've read other stuff by at least 3 of the other authors though.

[raycun]

I'm surprised you haven't read more.... I'd recommend
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" - one of his best, short and interesting
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" - I'm most surprised you haven't read this. Go out and get it now
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - Murakami has three really good books, and this is one of them
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" - excellent
Philip Roth's "The Counterlife" - read all Roth
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" - I'd start with DFW's non-fiction first, but this is brilliant

[anonymous]

Surely a good third of those are high modernist, not pomo?

[bellinghman]

Among those you've not read: "Gravity's Rainbow" is one of my all time favourite novels, one I've read enough times for it to fall to pieces. "Giles Goat Boy", on the other hand, has joined the less-than-a-dozen books I've ever failed to finish.

So, a mixed bunch in my view.

[unwholesome_fen]

Yes, I found Giles Goat Boy rather hard going. On the other hand almost all of Barth's other books are excellent.

[bellinghman]

I find this sort of list rather dubious on the whole. Why this book by this author, rather than that one?

In the end, it seems more than a little arbitrary, and I hate arbitrarity.