Books Everyone Should Read

Why does a love for Shakespeare seem pretentious? His plays weren't exactly higbrow material. I love them myself, but did not see the point in listing them. After all, they were meant to be seen, not read.

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Am I a sucker for loving the hell out of Infinite Jest? Even the Pynchon-loving friend who recommended it to me didn't make it through. I've read it straight through twice and still occasionally pick it up just to read passages at random. I think that if you go into the book fully armed with TWO bookmarks, you'll do alright. For the most part, it's a lighthearted, easy read.

DFW has authored some obtuse crap in his time, but it's more evident in his essays and short stories.

I'd like to recommend Jim Shepard's short story collection "Batting Against Castro." I remember that the theme that ran through many of the stories had to do with alienation and family (except for the title story, which is about baseball, pretty much ). Shepard tackles the stories with a sense of humor that cloaks the dark subject matter in a surreal veil. For example, in "Mars Attacks" a man tells the story of his brothers decent into schizophrenia while looking through a box of old sci-fi trading cards. There was another story in which a boy's mom is a linebacker or something for the Minnesota Vikings and his dad is the coach.

I also second the original poster's recommendation for "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."



[Edited on Oct 16, 2005 by splush1]

what about John Grisham, guys?

I'm dead sure, if you really look at it it does talk about some other things, such as the piggie's adoption of human society, but also how they adopt religeon through it. You have to look at the books in context too, card was a christian missionary for years and a lot of the subsequent pooks featuring the pequennios (I can't remember the exact spelling, been a while since I read the books!) draw heavily on his experiences there.

Because shakespeare is commonly listed by people who want to seem intellectual by listing what they think is classical literature, shakespeare being one of the most famous authors/playwirghts in history. Everyone knows romeo and juliet, hamlet, macbeth etc. at least by name, so it's the uneducated's choice for classical literature.

Saying that, I'm not condemning anyone here's choice of Shakespeare, his stuff is certainly enjoyable enough, and he was (arguably) a total revolutionary in terms of plays and our literature in general. I do, however think he's over rated due to his fame, and his stuff has had so much influence on modern literature and film etc. that most of his stuff has become cliche, despite being the original.

[Edited on Oct 16, 2005 by Toole]

1984/George Orwell
Animal Farm/George Orwell
Heart of Darkness/Jospeh Conrad
The Catcher In the Rye/J.D. Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird/Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald

At least one book by Ernest Hemingway (I prefer A Farewell To Arms)
At least one Shakespearean play (get the leatherbound complete works volume)
Dante's Divine Comedy (or at least Inferno)
A collection of Edgar Allan Poe
A collection of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot
Any H.G. Wells novel

The Lord of the Rings trilogy AND The Hobbit/Tolkien (if you haven't already)

Something Wicked This Way Comes/Ray Bradbury

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Philip K. Dick (and also at least one collection of his short stories)

A collection of H.P. Lovecraft

At least one Michael Crichton and Dean Koontz

The Hannibal Lecter trilogy (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal--all by Thomas Harris)

Imajica/Clive Barker, and also all 6 volumes of The Books of Blood

The Stand and It, both by Stephen King. Also, at least one collection of his short fiction

The Serpent & the Rainbow/Wade Davis

Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail 72/Hunter S. Thompson

Almost forgot all about him! Everyone loves lovecraft. And Cthulhu

Things everyone should read (about the Twentieth Century) and why: (disclaimer: This particular list is being compiled by a surrealist major. That said, most of these works are weird. Not stupid weird like much of the Adult Swim line-up (which makes me laugh anyway) but the kind of weird that may leave you trying to stab your brain while working your head around them. That is all.)

Alfred Jarry: "Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo Scientific Novel" - in all liklihood, several of you are drawing a blank on this authors very name. He's the guy responsible for Absurdism in literature, and pretty much every aspect of surrealist literature that would follow. Jarry was a man who was perfect to stand as both cipher and counterpoint to his times. He did more drugs than probably our entire membership combined, and yet managed to pull away from his abuses an insight few of us will ever truly have about the world around us. Better yet though, he wrote it in a form that forces us both to consider the text, and the world we accept around us.

Michael Moorcock: "The Cornelius Quartet" and "The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius" - most know Moorcock for his Eternal Champion stories, but over the last half a century he also managed to produce a character who was both the honest refelction and representation of his times. The Cornelius stories show us the worlds that could have been - all of them just a little too close to be comfortably brushed off as fantasy.

Jorge Luis Borges: "Collected Fictions" - no matter what idea anyone has ever had for a piece of fiction, Borges had it too, and presented it better. His short work takes the concept of metafiction and turns it into something both magical and insightful.

Italo Calvino: "If on a winter's night a traveler" - because its genius. The pinnacle of the framed narrative structure was realised in this work: fiction about unfinished fiction that perfectly reflect the life of the characters searching for an ending... and its written in the second person.

Steve Aylett: "Shamanspace" - what if you found out where the heart of God was? Do you assassinte Him in revenge for his shoddy work, or do perhaps you learn something more about the universe and our place in it?

Howard Waldrop: "Dream Factories and Radio Pictures" - any of Waldrop's short story collections are highly recommended, but this one more than most of the others truly deals with the unique arts of the twentieth century, and how they changed everything. Waldrop stories are genius not only for how well they are written, but the fact that they are always about something more than what you first suspect. MUCH more.

Grant Morrison: "Invisbles" series and "The Filth" - yes, they're graphic novels, but they're more intelligent, well thought out, and chock full of contemporary societal self-recognition that ninety percent of what has been produced in traditional literature in the last half of the twentieth century. Morrison set out to show us that the apocalypse is not to be feared, and that dystopia is always a safer, and healthier, bet than utopia.

Warren Ellis: "Transmetropolitan" series - lets stick with graphic novels for a bit. Don't let Spider Jerusalem fool you, he's got the softest heart in the world, he just knows you won't listen to him be nice. More than just raunchy sci fi shock art, Transmet tries really hard to tell us something about where we're going and why we should care.

Margaret Atwood: "Oryx and Crake" - if you combined the ideas of friendship from "Of Mice and Men" with the presentation of love found in "Lolita" and set it agains the end of the world, you would get pretty close to what Atwood acheived in this work. Just remember, Crake and Jimmy are a lot more than they look, or think about themselves, on the surface.

Stephan Chapman: "Troika" - I don't actually have words for how good this is. It needs to come back in print, which is why I present it to you to demand for. Beautiful and surreal, it tells more about the state of the twentieth century from the fractured, tortured and melded memories of its three main characters than anything the greats of the Nineteenth century managed in six hundred page novels.

Anyway, lots of stuff I love and should be read, but most of this tends to be significant now, and says a lot about much of what we take for granted, or just overlook. Enjoy.