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What novels should everybody read? (1 Viewer)

KarmaPolice

Footballguy
I know there is a book thread and probably a book draft or two, but I've been trying to jump start my reading and am going to start a new thread anyway.  

What 5-10 novels would you suggest everyone read? I dont care how you grade it- favorites, most important, whatever.. 

 
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky

Hunger By Hamsun

Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis (sp?)

The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

All the Pretty Horses by McCarthy

The Naked and the Dead by Mailer

 
No surprise to me, I think I have read 1 1/2 of the books listed so far.  

Also, are these your faves, most important, both?

Also, if you mainly drift to the classics on your list, what is the one contemporary novel that would be closest to making your list?  I did a quick google search and novels like The Book Thief, Handmaid's Tale, and Underground Railroad popped up.  

 
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I'm easy - many of mine are short:

Catch-22

The Divine Comedy

The Painted Bird

Mother Night

Brothers Karamazov

The Great Gatsby

Moby ****

David Copperfield

Heart of Darkness

1984
This is damn near identical to my highschool AP English reqs.

Missing The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.

 
Someone already mentioned The Sun Also Rises. You should read at least one Hemingway book - and that's a good one. My favorite, though, is For Whom the Bell Tolls. And, of course, you can read The Old Man and the Sea in a day.

Some other books I loved - 

  • Breakfast of Champions - this is my favorite Vonnegut book.
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany - my favorite Jon Irving book.
  • Risk Pool - Great book by Richard Russo
  • Kite Runner
  • Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
 
No surprise to me, I think I have read 1 1/2 of the books listed so far.  

Also, are these your faves, most important, both?

Also, if you mainly drift to the classics on your list, what is the one contemporary novel that would be closest to making your list?  I did a quick google search and novels like The Book Thief, Handmaid's Tale, and Underground Railroad popped up.  
The Underground Railroad was good; one of my favorites from the last couple of years. George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was phenomenal, as was Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Those would be a couple others that I would throw in the contemporary mix.

 
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky

Hunger By Hamsun

Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis (sp?)

The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

All the Pretty Horses by McCarthy

The Naked and the Dead by Mailer
Is notes from the underground really a novel?  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it

 
This is damn near identical to my highschool AP English reqs.

Missing The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.
There's a reason for that - i quit school a few wks into my junior year and had the first play i wrote produced when i was barely twenty. I was deathly afraid of copying anyone from that point so read little fiction since. In the last few years i've become confident enough of my voice to read major fiction again but no longer have the concentration for great novels.

ETA: I only read Painted Bird as an adult because i had punched the author in a NYC bar without knowing who he was, so figured i owed him at least that. It made me glad i had - as dense & awful & wonderful as anything i've read.

Catch-22 probably at the top of my list as well. Mother Night is a great pick but I don't know if it'd be on my list... For an "everyone" book it's excellent, but for a "Vonnegut Only" list I'd place Sirens of Titan above it, so, conflicted there. 
You could put any/all early Vonneguts and i wouldn't argue. He & Robin Williams are the only famous deaths that made me cry. Mother Night's my specialspecial though, mostly for this reason: He tells what's going to happen in the next chapter throughout and still surprises & moves me with it each time.

 
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Modern fantasy stuff - lots of people would say ASoIaF, but for my money it's The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson.

 
One hundred years of solitude

Absalom, Absalom

Sometimes a great notion

Siddhartha

Lord of the Rings (all three)

Eta... KP- these are my favorites, and a few of them are objectively must reads.

 
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Here’s some of the great books I’ve read recently:

Dark Matter-Blake Crouch

King Suckerman-George Pelecanos

Lord of the Silver Bow-David Gemmel

Paradise Sky- Joe R Lansdale

The Name of the Wind-Patrick Rothfuss

 
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:blackdot:

I'm not very well read on classics. I'll add Confederacy of Dunces to the list though. Loved it!
Probably one of the finest, most astute, 20th century modern novels about the excesses of America as seen through a would-be moralist's eyes. 

Rollicking yet very smart. Love this book. Such a tragic ending to his life, much like another great comedian/serious writer, David Foster Wallace.  

My humble submissions to this list would be The Sun Also Rises, The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, and We by Alexander Zamyatin.  

I haven't read Moby ****, but I know Melville is the greatest American writer I've ever read from his shorter works.  

And a third vote for Notes From The Underground, though it's more a novella.  

 
In addition to what has already been mentioned:

Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Dalton Trumbo - Johnny Got His Gun
Stephen King - The Stand
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
Any/all Vonnegut

 
Forgot one:  

Lolita - Nabakov

If these lines can't convince one to crack the novel I don't know what can.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

 
I don’t have many of the so-called classics in my repertoire, but I’ll suggest Edgar Allen Poe’s C Auguste Dupin collection (3 shortish stories) as an entry in the category of Learn Something New About A Famous Author They Don’t Teach You In High School.  Before ‘detective’ was even a word and inspiration for Sherlock himself, Poe wrote 3 stories that laid the foundation for that entire genre.  I encountered them in English Lit 101 years ago and they remain one of my favorite forced readings

 
Lots of good ones listed. Ones I liked that come to mind:

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Animal Farm - Orwell

East of Eden / Cannery Row - Steinbeck

I remembered liking Tom Robbins books but when I went back and looked at the list I couldn't recall one thing from any of them.

 
ODD JOHN....Olaf Stapledon

Author Olaf Stapledon

GenreScience fiction

Published1935 (Methuen)

Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest is a 1935 science fiction novel by the British author Olaf Stapledon. The novel explores the theme of the Übermensch (superman) in the character of John Wainwright, whose supernormal human mentality inevitably leads to conflict with normal human society and to the destruction of the utopian colony founded by John and other superhumans.

The novel resonates with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and the work of English writer J. D. Beresford, with an allusion to Beresford's superhuman child character of Victor Stott in The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911). As the devoted narrator remarks, John does not feel obliged to observe the restricted morality of Homo sapiens. Stapledon's recurrent vision of cosmic angst – that the universe may be indifferent to intelligence, no matter how spiritually refined – also gives the story added depth. Later explorations of the theme of the superhuman and of the incompatibility of the normal with the supernormal occur in the works of Stanisław Lem, Frank Herbert, Wilmar Shiras, Robert Heinlein and Vernor Vinge, among others.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The first... Conan... by Robert E. Howard.  Will predict you get hooked and read all 12 that make up saga.

All the Elric of Meliborne  books by Michael Moorcock

Everything by H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Sinclair Lewis, Nathaneil  Hawthorne, Amrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany.

.End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.[1]

It is a light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of his later, more mature work. Set at small Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the American football team during the school's first integrated year. (Taft Robinson a black 9.3 sprinter/running back plays a major role)

Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" epic.

Any of the Louis L' Amour novels, you can actually smell the coffee, hear the coyotes howling, he's that good.

 
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This is me for hundreds of books I've read.  I think the brain can only hold so much information.  I see books I've read before and think "no idea what that's about".  

I hope this is normal.
Got lots of stuff to remember. It is weird thought to forget things that I spend 10 hours or whatever reading.

 
SlaughterHouse Five

World According to Garp

Great Gatsby

East of Eden

Taipan

Black Dahlia, Big Nowhere, LA Confidential

Also adding one I need to finish: Lonesome Dove, liked it but quit on it about 1/3 of the way in as I was too busy to give it attention at the time.  Need to go back and read this.

 
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Looked at my Kindle and it's littered with John Grisham.

Also one I forgot that I liked quite a bit at the time: Dog Stars - Peter Heller
Dog Stars was really good. 

All quiet on the Wester Front was very interesting and kept me reading way too late a few evenings. 

The Sun Also Rises was good in that it is just different.  

 
Godel, Escher, Bach


Great book but I don't know how fun it'd be to read. As an aside Douglas Hofstadter was pretty close with my grandparents and supposedly proposed to my mother.
Hofstadter is like speedballs for me. I am ravenous to read things about human intelligence but i've read parts of GEB, Mind's I and the impossible Metamagical Themas and it's just so close to my own constructs that i'm scared by it, it sends me off on such thought trains that i never make any real progress on it and end up dizzy, exhausted and more than a little grateful that i am not smart enough to understand myself. Oddly, the only thing which makes me feel similarly but safe throughout is Art of the Fugue....

 

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