The FBG Top 300 Books of All Time (fiction edition) | #2 The Stand by Stephen King | #1 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien ... it's a wrap

[rockaction]

That’s the problem sometimes with Melville—so many things are ironic and satirical you can lose what his authentic point of view is. He was a conflicted dude. Lemuel Shaw, the famous jurist that pioneered (being Massachusetts and all) a bunch of doctrines of law (workman’s comp among them), was Melville’s FIL and there were domestic issues to the point where Herman’s wife had letters where she purportedly asked people to abscond or kidnap her to get her away from Herman. It was bad. Herman was sympathetic to the working class while Shaw was patrician and well-heeled; so that was a tension, but there was also an inner tension because Herman desired status and success for his family and himself while fighting those very landed forces that included his own family.

So he had all of this inner tumult, intellectual unrest, and some heavy, self-imposed contradictory feelings regarding his status and successes and failures. Given this and his writing style, the reader is often not totally aware at all times what his point of view is on the issue he’s writing about and tackling when he sets about to critiquing big ideas and lofty things. One gets the feeling he either didn’t like himself or he loved himself like only a true narcissist could. He was underground like Dostoyevsky’s man. He ditched prose for poetry later in life and died, in his own mind, a failed poet.

eta* done editing

 

[kupcho1]

not sure the narrator in Dostoyevsky is anything but dyspeptic at best

Notes from the Underground was a miserable read. The monologue in part 1 was ... strange. He'd go on and on, anticipating the reader's (listener's?) reaction, and then in the very next section complete refute what he was saying. It was all a joke, as an example.

The 2nd part was a little more interesting, but still, what a terrible person. And those aren't just my words, its his own self description.

I think the only thing I've read by Dostoevsky that I've enjoyed was The Brothers Karamazov. I've also read Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot, and thought they were ok.

In short, when it comes to the Russians, I'm team Tolstoy. (FTR, it'd be Nabokov, but I don't lump him in with FD and LT as he skedaddled before writing in earnest.)

That does it for the "one from everyone's list" portion of the program. Also, there are no more portions.

 

[rockaction]

not sure the narrator in Dostoyevsky is anything but dyspeptic at best

Notes from the Underground was a miserable read. The monologue in part 1 was ... strange. He'd go on and on, anticipating the reader's (listener's?) reaction, and then in the very next section complete refute what he was saying. It was all a joke, as an example.

The 2nd part was a little more interesting, but still, what a terrible person. And those aren't just my words, its his own self description.

I think the only thing I've read by Dostoevsky that I've enjoyed was The Brothers Karamazov. I've also read Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot, and thought they were ok.

In short, when it comes to the Russians, I'm team Tolstoy. (FTR, it'd be Nabokov, but I don't lump him in with FD and LT as he skedaddled before writing in earnest.)

That does it for the "one from everyone's list" portion of the program. Also, there are no more portions.

Yeah, I totally agree with you except I do admire Fyodor the Dour and his ability to tap into the odiousness of the type of nihilism that needs God more than anything.

 

[kupcho1]

These are books I have either added or bumped up my "to read" list due to this thread.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm
Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
George Saunders - Tenth of December
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in a Castle
John Scalzi - Old Man's War
Ted Chiang - Exhalation
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Bram Stoker - Dracula

Update?

BTW, I was plowing through all of the on-line best books of 2025 lists and saw Scalzi has a new one out. I'm going to add the one mentioned above to my hold list at the library. Looking forward to it.

 

[Long Ball Larry]

I finished Stories of Your Life just now. Great book. Thought-provoking science fiction is the best science fiction, and man does Chiang deliver. Liking What You See: A Documentary, the last story in the collection, is one of the best I've read in a long time. I found myself going back-and-forth between the opposite sides of the question of how do we deal with "lookism" and the impact of beauty. I'll definitely be reading more Chiang.

Missed this before. Glad you enjoyed. He has an amazing way of writing in a fairly straightforward way but also presenting super interesting philosophical ideas within a fairly compelling narrative (usually).