Book you love

[pmart]

The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson is still one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Ask the scores of Midwestern Freshman English majors I used to subject to it...

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford hit a little close to home when I moved to NJ.

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem.

Pieces by Robert Creeley.

And I second The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.

-p

[Swami]

Confederacy of Dunces (J.K. Toole), Sex (Madonna), The Corrections (Franzen), 1/8 of Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), Ulysses , 1/10 of Finnegan's Wake (Joyce) That's about as far as I get . . . stupid A.D.D.
Cane (Toomer), Augie March (Saul Bellow), Most Of T. Coraghessen Boyle, Jesus' Son (Johnson), Fat White Vampire Blues (Andrew Fox), Flannery O'Connor, N.Y. Mets Yearbooks 1962-present, Blood Meridian/All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), Robert Caro's "LBJ" books, Tim O'Brien's 'Nam Stuff. Dharma Bums (Kerouac. . . sentimental reasons; read it in the bathroom during "light's out" while in Basic Training back in '85. . .I took the beatnik thing a little too far)
And don't get me started on poetry. Or lit I HATE.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I think it's a tie between A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Stranger by Camus, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and White Horse Rider by some German. I know Sorrows of Young Werther and White Horse Rider aren't really books, but I think they count anyway.

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

[dania]

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. 
Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Dave Eggers' And You Shall Know Our Velocity
Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar
Anything by Daniel Clowes or Matt Brinkman,
There's so much more. 

[yesno]

I think it's a tie between A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Stranger by Camus, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and White Horse Rider by some German. I know Sorrows of Young Werther and White Horse Rider aren't really books, but I think they count anyway.

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

I've read Sorrows.  It's pretty short.

When I graduated college I had a span where I just dove into classics I'd been putting off.  I read Sorrows, the Aeniad, Paradise Lost, etc.

Now, I read sci-fi novels and boring government reports.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I think it's a tie between A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Stranger by Camus, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and White Horse Rider by some German. I know Sorrows of Young Werther and White Horse Rider aren't really books, but I think they count anyway.

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

I've read Sorrows.  It's pretty short.

When I graduated college I had a span where I just dove into classics I'd been putting off.  I read Sorrows, the Aeniad, Paradise Lost, etc.

Now, I read sci-fi novels and boring government reports.

I know, I was joking/lying.  I actually adapted Schiller's Mary Stuart, which I did read.  There are a few references to Sorrows in it, but I never bothered to read it.  I've read Thomas Mann and Nietzsche and listened to Wagner and watched a bunch of Herzog movies, surely that's enough!

Speaking of book recommendations: I spent an entire semester of grad school reading Mann - about a half a dozen of the short stories, and The Magic Mountain.  Do it!  I was like "ew boy" at first, but I'm really glad I did it - it changed my writing permanently, in a good way, and is something I never would have done on my own.  Nobody reads him anymore, except for "Death in Venice," but it's pretty great.

[B_Buster]

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

Not only have I read it, I didn't even commit suicide after I finished.

[B_Buster]

Speaking of book recommendations: I spent an entire semester of grad school reading Mann - about a half a dozen of the short stories, and The Magic Mountain.  Do it!  I was like "ew boy" at first, but I'm really glad I did it - it changed my writing permanently, in a good way, and is something I never would have done on my own.  Nobody reads him anymore, except for "Death in Venice," but it's pretty great.

I thought The Magic Mountain was a snooze. All that wrapping themselves in blankets business. C'mon, man, get on with it!

The part where he got out the records was pretty cool though.

[dave from knoxville]

I finished Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark; it was a laugh riot! Actually, there were a couple of funny scenes, in an unsettling way (the pig stampede, the protagonist's encounter with a horse on a current-ferry and its aftermath.) I imagine that the fleeting scene with the infant will bother most of you as much as it did/does me, though. I expected nothing of the sort, but I don't have much trouble classifying that thing as straight gothic horror, now that I am finished. I am told to expect to be sickened by his next, Child of God (apparently SOME of my less enlightened friends have a little trouble with necrophilia.)

But before I get to that, I have accepted Sarah's invitation to read Michael Malone's Handling Sin, which is deliciously close in ambiance to the George Singleton I keep shamelessly promoting (no, I am not related to him, except in the way that all southerners are related by blood to all others.)

I love that you people are diversely well-read; you're helping me stave off my midlife crisis by keeping my brain clicking.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

AP Mike with the Teutonic art fetish!

Speaking of book recommendations: I spent an entire semester of grad school reading Mann - about a half a dozen of the short stories, and The Magic Mountain.  Do it!  I was like "ew boy" at first, but I'm really glad I did it - it changed my writing permanently, in a good way, and is something I never would have done on my own.  Nobody reads him anymore, except for "Death in Venice," but it's pretty great.

I thought The Magic Mountain was a snooze. All that wrapping themselves in blankets business. C'mon, man, get on with it!

The part where he got out the records was pretty cool though.

Yeah, and the crazy duel over nothing between the romantic guy and that weird communist medievalist was pretty fun.  But you're not alone in your assessment - part of the fun of this class was watching the screenwriters in the class squirm in visible pain over the 700 pages of nothing happening.  Maybe it's best to start with the stories, or with Buddenbrooks, which at least has a plot.

[Julie]

I think it's a tie between A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Stranger by Camus, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and White Horse Rider by some German. I know Sorrows of Young Werther and White Horse Rider aren't really books, but I think they count anyway.

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

then I'm sending you into space!!! I cried when I read that!

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I think it's a tie between A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Stranger by Camus, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and White Horse Rider by some German. I know Sorrows of Young Werther and White Horse Rider aren't really books, but I think they count anyway.

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

then I'm sending you into space!!! I cried when I read that!

Send me into space if you must, but don't cry.  I was just kidding.  Look:

I know, I was joking/lying.  I actually adapted Schiller's Mary Stuart, which I did read.  There are a few references to Sorrows in it, but I never bothered to read it. 

"It" meaning my play, which I now realize was unclear.

[Sarah]

You never read your own play, Jasong?  Shame on you.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

The first "it," I meant.  Though there are other plays of mine about which that is definitely true.

[Julie]

Julie, you have to be messing with us.  No one has ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I adapted it and I never even finished it.

Not only have I read it, I didn't even commit suicide after I finished.

did you think it was as funny as Strozcyck?