The guy in the office next to me taught a course in financial math last fall, so at least a few times a week, I’d hear him say “rational market” to one of his students. An friend of mine teaches the course sometimes and told me once that he doesn’t like teaching it because he doesn’t believe the rational market hypothesis, so I asked the guy in the office if he believed in the rational market hypothesis. He said “yes, I think you have to, otherwise none of our mathematical models have predictive value.” So whenever any kind of human activity is described as “rational”, I think, well, that’s just some kind of make believe that helps them pretend to have predictive models for it.
If I can put my own pretentious douche hat on for a moment, I thought of this because I fell off the wagon today and found a link to an article about my favorite book of all time, Dostoevsky’s “Notes From The Underground” (the book is very short, so I recommend it to everyone). The article is written by David Denby, who’s a Lee Siegel-type jackoff for the most part, so it’s annoying in parts, but I liked this:
In the first part of the novel, the underground man, after introducing himself, complains, in his ejaculatory, stop-and-start way, about the spectacular Crystal Palace built in London (this was back in 1851). He rails against everything that the building represents—industrial capitalism, scientific rationality, and any sort of predictive, mathematical model of human behavior. Could anything be more contemporary? You can easily imagine what Dostoevsky would make of modern sociology, psychology, advertising techniques, war games, polling of any sort. What’s wrong with such techniques, in both their cynical or ameliorative uses, was simply stated by Sartre, in 1945: “All materialist philosophies create man as an object, a stone.” The underground man says that, on the contrary, human beings are unfathomable, unknowable. Given the opportunity, they may deny, for themselves, the certainty that two and two makes four. Why? Because the mere right to deny the obvious may be more important than the benefit of sheepishly acknowledging it.
This is why I have a lot more sympathy for the evolution-denying, global warming denying wingers than I do for the reasonable, TED-watching centrists. Never mind that Bobo and the Slatesters misuse and/or misunderstand all the pseudo-neuroscience about primal scents and IQs and incentives, what terrifies me is that they think if we ran enough marshmallow tests on kids, and explained the results to everyone via TED, we could build a perfect state.
Anyway…what’s your favorite book of all time?
jo6pac
True Believer by Eric Hoffer.
jl
But, how’s your liver holding up, Dygical UndergroundJ?
Constance
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Recently reread it after 50 years and it was better than the first time. No doubt advanced age and more life experience has something to do with my appreciation. What a writer!
c u n d gulag
I’m a Dostoevsky fan myself, so it’s “Crime and Punishment.”
Everyone may have forgotten about what the concept behind that title means, since in 21st Century America, we have an awful lot of the former, and almost none of the latter (especially if you’re rich/powerful).
Today, it’s more like “Crime and Cover-up,” “Crime and Bailed-out By Taxpayers,” or “Crime and Look Forward Not Back.”
Amir Khalid
Off topic:
Hear my plea, o mighty Randinho! We need an Euro 2012 open thread!
CW in LA
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole.
Maude
@Amir Khalid:
I vote for cheddar cheese.
slacker
RIGHT ON!
Fuck the enlightenment! Fuck science!
burnspbesq
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Sound and the Fury and The Plague are tied for second.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Favorite book-length literary work? This year it would be a tie between Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire and John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains. But ask me next year and you’ll probably get a different answer.
me
There are many a TED talk more interesting than anything you’ll ever hear from a creationist.
Hypatia's Momma
So far, Bridge of Birds by Mr. Barry Hughart is still narrowly holding the lead.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@jl:
“Off the wagon” means I started reading Sully or Politico again.
srv
Well of course, Catcher in the Rye, phoney.
Actually, Count of Monte Christo or Catch 22
Davis X. Machina
The Odyssey. All sort of downhill after that, isn’t it?
I’ve told my students that if I ever hear Disney is working on an animated version, they may scan CNN for helicopter footage of an angry old guy with a Ryder truck full of ammonium nitrate heading for Burbank…..
MikeJ
Death and sex are all that really matter, so Gravity’s Rainbow remains at the top of my list.
Arm The Homeless
Anyway…what’s your favorite book of all time?
The Holy Bible …
But seriously, Battlefield Earth … …
My fiance studies Virginia Woolf and questions whether Art, Love, Ethics, the recognition of desire’s whims upon us, is not ‘real life’. We are going to be poor. And I love her for it.
My reading list tends towards pithy and trash-filled. Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk has always been a good read.
The Swamp is one of the best state history lessons I have ever had. It’s well worth the read, if for no other reason than to relive the 2000 elections and examine the nexus of politics and the environment.
Ken E. Beck
I am in middle of “Being Wrong” by Schulz – good read.
MattF
Moby Dick. First aesthetic experience, & all that. If I ever manage to finish Ulysses, it will come in second.
gogol's wife
@c u n d gulag:
So you must have recognized the post title, right?
ETA: Oops, sorry, wrote that before reading the actual post!
jl
I disagree with your teach friend.
I am not aware of any theoretical result, or body of empirical evidence that says you need to assume some version of the rational expectations hypothesis (Edit: or other equilibrium hypothesis) in order to successfully predict and forecast.
Success at predicting and forecasting is an empirical issue, not a mathematical issue, or even one that is easy to fit into the formal hypothesis testing framework.
Speaking as an applied econometrician, from the viewpoint of what is actually done, numbers, model and statistics wise, equilibrium assumptions are just restrictions placed on the model parameters that enable identification of the structural relationships (like supply and demand).
If you want to just predict a stable system, without intervention, often it is better to do away with the equilibrium restrictions.
If you want to do an intervention on a part of the system and predict what will happen as a result of the intervention, then you usually need to identify at least some of the structural relationships. If you are working in the context of an economic model, that will mean some kind of restriction on the parameter space that picks our, or identifies the structural relationships (Edit: forgot to say that will involve placing an equilibrium restriction over parts of the model) that are involved n the intervention.
Sorry to get so wonky, but Doug MathJ brought it up. Nyah nayh nayh.
Maude
I don’t have a favorite book of all time.
One Damn Thing After Another is a small book by an US reporter during WWII who goes to the battle of El Alamein. He keeps getting kicked out by the different military commanders and goes with another unit.
The part that is chilling the night before the battle started and soldiers from both sides were crossing the line and then noticed they were in enemy territory. They turned and walked back.
Edit, had the title wrong.
srv
As you can see how out of touch the juiceosphere is, Ayn and Ron round out 7 of the top 10
http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
gogol's wife
The person in the quotation is identifying Dostoevsky with the Underground Man, which I don’t think is an entirely good idea. Dostoevsky isn’t as anti-rationalist as his narrator.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
This scans to me like an argument based on perceptions of authenticity, along the lines of “I have more sympathy for the angry but sincere kooks at the bottom than the hollow men at the top”. At an emotional level I get that, but arguments from authenticity can be a dangerous tool, after all look how much good they did in Martin Heidegger’s hands.
robertdsc-iPhone 4
Without Remorse by Tom Clancy.
Stephen King’s The Stand and James Clavell’s Shogun are close behind.
YellowJournalism
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
urizon
Catch-22
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@slacker:
For me, it’s more fuck slate, fuck pseudo-science.
There’s nothing scientific about the rational market hypothesis and the marshmallow test isn’t exactly Michelson–Morley either.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I can see myself believing stupid things because I feel like it. I try not to, but sometimes I’m sure I do.
RossInDetroit
@MikeJ:
Me too. Read it 35 years ago and nothing has topped it.
In nonfiction, probably Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos or Watchmaking by George Daniels.
I could come up with dozens but those three books really changed the way I think.
bend
The Secret History by Donna Tartt, because deep down inside, I love wearing my pretentious douche hat.
Maude
@YellowJournalism:
Joy in The Morning is also very good.
Laertes
Vonnegut’s Mother Night. I read it again every few years and it hits harder every time.
RossInDetroit
@urizon:
I get that it’s massively popular and influential but it didn’t click with me. Written in too simplistic a style, like I was being talked down to. Slaughterhouse Five was the antiwar book for me.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@srv: That whole list is fraudulent. The readers poll was skewed by all the nutjobs, and the methodology for the board poll was awful. They asked voters to pick books that belonged on the list instead of ranking them. So most voters felt that “Brave New World” belonged on the list, but not as high as it was.
Anyway, the best book of all time is “Catch-22.” Currently working on “Something Happened.”
Citizen Alan
The marshmallow test was interesting to read about, but from the wiki page, I’m left wondering whether they controlled for either income, child-rearing habits, or indeed anything about the parents and the environments in which the kids were raised. I would imagine that it would make a difference in how well a given child could delay gratification if a marshmallow or cookie were a rare treat as opposed to something a parent doles out every night. Indeed, it might also make a difference among children who get cookies all the time if the parent gives them out (a) because parents are over-indulgent and spoil their children or (b) are disinterested in the children and give them sweets to shut them up (a bag of marshmallows or cookies being much cheaper than healthy food).
Arm The Homeless
@Maude: I will have to look that one up. It sounds like a good read.
Have you ever picked up Homage To Catalonia?
It seems that old school ‘war-reporters’ may truly fall by the way-side as information itself becomes a tangible battle-field open to proxy forces.
I think Orwell had a gift for giving voice to what was truly important. Him and Hunter S. often arouse my righteous indignation gland.
jl
My favorite books for today (not really, they are hard and boring)
Robustness (Lars Peter Hansen and Thomas J. Sargent)
Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics (Thomas J Sargent)
Here, read these suckers DougJ.
Sargent explains the relatonship between equilibrium optmizaation frameworks, and non equilibrium adaptive in macro.
Sargent is one of the pioneers in rational expectations and equilibrium based macro, but eventually loosened up and became reality based enough to look around and think about what he was doing.
Turns out, unless you know the true model of the economy, the distinction, in terms of theories that are observationally equivalent or not, between equilibrium and non equilibrium hypotheses starts to disappear.
Sargent may be, as one commenter said, kind of an intellectual fraud. but in economics that kind of thing is all relative. And he has a Nobel Memorial Bank of Sweden prize now, so whatever, he is officially smart now.
He wrote another book on this that was very much based on empirical work in forecasting in macro, but cannot think of the name now. Something like ‘The Ultimate Fate of Rational and Adaptive Expectations'(?)
Edit: read Roman Frydman’s recent books for easier and jazzier intro to the issues.
Laertes
@RossInDetroit: I’m with you. Catch-22 left me cold. Heller has Vonnegut’s bite, but not Vonnegut’s heart.
Edit: To be fair, to say that a writer lacks Vonnegut’s heart is like saying that a thinker lacks Socrates’ smarts.
Valdivia
Doug do I have the ultimate link for you reagrding TED
Enjoy.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@Citizen Alan:
My take is that it’s probably largely a measure of how much the kids want to please adults and thus a measure of how craven a suck-up they will grow up to be. Give that our society reward being a craven suck-up, it probably does correlate with long-term success.
RossInDetroit
@Laertes:
Exactly. Vonnegut pleads with you from the first page to the last to use your heart and be a human being. Heller’s sending up the absurdity and keeping ironic distance.
jl
Real favorite book I feel like reading right now: Cat in the Hat. Or Wind in the Willows.
Valdivia
First: don’t get me started on the ‘assume perfect information’ and ‘rationality’ assumptions in economic models. It gets even worse when you have all those economists move disciplines and take over Politics Dept while making predictive models about everything in human behaviour based on sheer abstraction and zero contextual historical information.
Second: Gah I hate Denby. Didn’t he write a book about his midlife crisis and stalking a younger woman and/or his feelings of sexual inadequacy?
Favorite book of all time? I am going ot have to think about that.
Yutsano
@Valdivia: I’m honestly stumped, because there’s quite a few. But if I were to be honest, the very first Harry Potter book comes to mind. Especially after reading all 7, because there’s an amazing sweetness and almost naivete as JK sets her (unfortunately) fictional world. I tell people to go back and read the first one after they finish the series, it’s actually that much better.
RossInDetroit
My favorite book for years was Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. I used to read it every summer for the boyhood nostalgia. I may dig it out and read it again this year.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Valdivia:
__
Something I find fascinating about Asimov’s Foundation series is how very badly dated it is today, and how tightly bound it is to a very specific context in terms of the time and place in which he was writing. And it wasn’t his science that did that, it was his laughable assumptions about the pefectability of sociology on a scientific basis and what that required in terms of the predictability of human societies.
Maude
@Arm The Homeless:
I wrote it down. I will read it.
The reporter for One Damn wasn’t a war reporter at all. He did post columns home to his newspaper.
What I liked about it is he talked with different armies, not just US. It’s not just about the battle.
My favorite writer about WWII, the human history, not military is Cornelius Ryan.
Valdivia
@Yutsano:
It is so stumping because different books have had different effects on me at different times. I love that feeling when a book totally absorbs you (the feeling you don’t want the book to end because you will miss the characters) and also a little different the feeling of being challenged by a book.
A not final list:
I would say, just for the beauty of the writing, A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter. Salter is one of those writers not a lot of people know about but whose limited amount of works are each one gems of the cratmaship of writing. It’s not a book that is packed with action more like walking through a beautiful painting of a moment in life, that in the case of this book is filled with sensuality every moment. His short stories are fantastic and really pack a punch (see for example the collection Last Night)
A classic of American letters that I love and have also found not many people know is Stop Time by Frank Conroy. Don’t know how to describe it except as a powerful tale about becoming an adult.
And last but not least. Amos Oz’s A story of Love and Darkness. A biography of his life and an Israel that stopped being many years ago. Heartbreaking and also beautifully translated. This is the book he was born to write, better than anything else he did, and he did a lot of good stuff before.
I am leaving out the Spanish language stuff but the list is too long.
Kevin
@robertdsc-iPhone 4:
Shogun is #1 for me, but I’ve read your other two picks multiple times. You have good taste.
Amir Khalid
In the bathroom right now I have Irene Pepperberg’s Alex And Me, Alex being the famous parrot Dr Pepperberg worked with. Much more than a revelatory account of non-human creatures’ intellectual capacity, you get a sense of one as a person, a being that exists in the world in so much more than the reflex and instinct which is all that human prejudice has granted them for centuries.
Yutsano
@Valdivia: Annie Proulx’s book Close Range: Wyoming Stories is fantastic as well, and goes beyond just “Brokeback Mountain” in its plumbing a state that for a lot of Americans is just there.
R-Jud
@Davis X. Machina: It really is the original Great Yarn. Much better than the Iliad, where every fifth clause seems to be “and his armor clattered about him.”
Great Expectations and Slaughterhouse-Five were turning point books for me. I was different after I read them.
Favorite thing I’ve read recently is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
NancyDarling
@Valdivia: I have been thinking about that question for a long time. I have asked friends and family for years what book they would choose to memorize if they were one of Bradbury’s book people in “Fahrenheit 451”. I have had answers from “Huckleberry Finn” to “Zorba, the Greek”. I still don’t know the answer for myself but lean toward “A Tale of Two Cities” for its timeless themes.
For the history buffs here, I have recently read two that I recommend.
“The Worst Hard Time” about the dust bowl and those who stayed instead if joining the California migration.
The other is “Empire of the Summer Moon”. It is about the Comanches and their last stand and the story of Quanah Parker and his mother Cynthia Ann/Nadua . They were the most incredible horsemen/women and fierce warriors—backs to the wall and all that. They really changed the history of the west in their battles with the French, Spanish, and the U.S.
RossInDetroit
Here at the end of the thread I have to plug the best novel I’ve read lately by a young writer, It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice. It’s a romance tragicomedy about very gradually being painfully dragged into adulthood. I couldn’t believe how funny and true it was. I lent it to my brother, who is a very serious person. When he returned it he said he’d read it twice.
Capri
As a kid I was captivated by The Phantom Tollbooth. Still at the top. It’s tied with My Family and Other Animals.
Amir Khalid
And, since we still have no Euro 2012 open thread, I note that Greece’s surprise goal against Russia in first-half injury time up-ends all expectation. Unless the Czech Republic-Poland match yields a winner, both those teams will now go out, while Greece and Russia both make the quarterfinals.
Valdivia
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Exactly, I haven’t read Asimov but what you describe is what truly drives me up a wall.
@NancyDarling:
A Tale of Two Cities is a true favorite for me too. I really can’t say to have one book, it’s too hard to choose but maybe if I had one author to take with me to eternity it would be Dickens. Precisely because of the themes.
BGinCHI
Favorite book is “Goodnight Moon.”
Man, I did not see that ending coming.
Maude
@Amir Khalid:
I heard her interviewed when the book came out.
She believed what she said about Alex. I didn’t.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Valdivia
@Yutsano:
I haven’t read much of her so I am putting that on my list.
RossInDetroit
@Yutsano:
After The Shipping News (the great book, not the awful film) I read all her work through Postcards. Or Accordion Crimes, whichever was latest. Great writing but it left me existentially bummed so I left off after that.
techno
Favorite book? That’s easy. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I have now read it eight times (it gets a lot easier). I contend that I learned more about how the world works reading the first four pages of TOLC than I learned in 20 years of formal education and reading 350 books of serious social comment. It really is that good.
I once lived about 15 miles from the Veblen’s boyhood home in Minnesota. I would give tours of the house. Many of the “pilgrims” were scholars with serious academic credentials. Some were breath-takingly informed. But many were pretty third-rate. As a result of this experience I got a grasp on just how difficult this book really is. The two greatest misconceptions were that Veblen was merely a satirist—an 1899 Bill Maher—or worse, that he was some sort of lightweight Marx imitator. It got to the point where if I heard either of these two POVs, I would just ignore the speakers because there was usually someone on the tour with FAR greater insight worth listening to.
R-Jud
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I read that one tonight, as part of a double-feature with labor relations primer Click, Clack, Moo!: Cows That Type.
Barney
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ,
But you should remember that the typical reason for denying evolution is that they want all parts of the Bible to be literally true – so that they can be justified in their homophobia, and they get to await their opposition being tipped into a lake of fire. And global warming denial tends to spring from either hippie-bashing, or a very ‘rational’ love of fossil-fuel driven consumerism.
As far as a favourite book goes – one of mine is Titus Alone. While it’s nominally the third of the Gormenghast trilogy, it’s very unlike the first two, and if you never want to get into the dense gothic satire of them (is that the best way to describe them? Hard to say), and don’t mind plot spoilers, you could go straight to Titus Alone, which would fit the feelings of your post – it’s all about humanity over impersonal rationality, and it shows that Peake was a war artist who saw the horrors of concentration camps.
Johannes
C.P. Snow’s “The Light and the Dark,” in fiction. Non-fiction is much harder, but for today I’ll say Stone’s “Clarence Darrow for the Defense,” with Mark Twain’s Autobiography in a dead heat.
slacker
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ:
I’m sure that you know this but most of Science is just an approximation so even Michelson–Morley is not even Michelson–Morley in your sense if you get my drift. So rejecting first approximations to reality like RMH because it isn’t “reality” is like rejecting Newtonian mechanics because it isn’t “reality”. First order approximations can be useful sometimes. Scientists know when to apply them and when not to.
If your point is that non-scientific people make sweeping generalizations about social science research without knowing the limits, hey, I’m with you. On the other hand if you are saying that any attempt to quantify human behaviour in a systematic way (quantifying and detecting patterns in phenomena is the nature of Science after all) is invalid because humans are special and exceptional so we can’t/shouldn’t, then it smacks of religious booga booga. The tests should only be judged on the usual scientific basis of repeatability and falsifiablity.
Perhaps because I’ve never felt constrained by general rules and I’m acutely aware of how malleable personality is, I don’t find things like the “marshmallow test” threatening to who and what I am or can be and I find it difficult to be empathetic to people who are. In fact, I find such things more of a guide post rather than a railroad track in life and I’d rather know than not know.
gnomedad
@Valdivia:
Thanks for this. It makes Doug’s point much better than Doug, I think.
Really, Doug? Really? Holy shit.
hilzoy
I’m a big fan of rationality. But nothing — NOTHING — about human reason says that you have to use it uncritically, without turning it on itself, or that the need to pretend a problem is tractable in order to get “solutions” for it is a reason to think it *is* tractable, or in general that we should make things simpler than they are. Nor does human reason in any way imply that we should think of ourselves as utility maximizing machines, or deny our odder depths.
In general, when something is manifestly false, “reason” will not recommend believing that it is true. And when believing something requires that you close your eyes to what’s around you, “reason” doesn’t recommend that either. Reasoning is what we do when we try to figure out what’s true, and what it actually makes sense to believe.
Are human beings “unknowable”? I don’t know, since I have no clue how to distinguish between things I can’t figure out and things that no one will ever be able to figure out. But we’re certainly more complicated than the models the Underground Man criticizes. *Figuring this out is not hard, and does not require jettisoning reason.*
If we ran enough marshmallow tests on kids, and explained the results to everyone via TED, could we build a perfect state? Why on earth would anyone think the answer was “yes”? Surely even a teensy bit of awareness of human history should make us skeptical of *any* statement of the form “if we did X, we could build a perfect state.” Again, this has nothing to do with reason, and everything to do with not being hopelessly stupid about history and human nature.
Are people who are trying to find some quick fix for human nature, like marshmallow tests, making a mistake? Yes. Is David Brooks silly? Yes. What human capacity should we use to figure out what mistake they are making, and how exactly Brooks is being silly, so that we can avoid their errors? The ability to throw darts at a board? The ability to torture scripture the way the religious wingers do?
I leave the answer as an exercise for the reader.
the Conster
The Poisonwood Bible has stayed with me since I read it many years ago, and I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters and The Tao of Physics back to back when they were first out which was like tripping but less ephemeral. I got a lot of mileage out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, also too.
Tom Q
A vote for Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion. One of the few true literary achievements to emerge from the counterculture.
Also very fond of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Hungry Joe
@Barney: I loved “Titus Groan” and Gormenghast” when I read them never-mind-how-many years ago, but was thrown by “Titus Alone.” I should give it another shot. (Mervyn Peake was a fascinating character, as was his wife. Wasn’t there a recent bio?)
As for favorite book, I keep trying to come up with something more pat than “Huckeberry Finn,” but it is, in fact, “Huckeberry Finn.” “Catch-22,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and James Branch Cabell’s “Jurgen” are right up there, though.
bemused senior
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/
bemused senior
And for comic relief, The Pursuit of Love + Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford.
Bill
Probably my worst day of school was when they humiliated me with that candy experiment. I don’t even remember exactly how it went, but I remember being pulled out of a kindergarten class and getting the distinct sense that I was being manipulated, being treated not as an individual, but as some kind of little rat in a maze. I can’t even remember what choices I made in the silly candy game, but I remember having the inchoate sense that they were meaningless choices, regardless of whatever twisted interpretation might later be forced on them.
Mike in NC
Well, here’s a book that apparently NOBODY wants to read: “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” by Mitt Romney. It’s been remaindered in hardcover for $4.95.
the Conster
@Tom Q:
Oh yeah, forgot those two – both great. Loved Sometimes a Great Notion, and the movie was pretty good too.
Sibelius
@BGinCHI: Overrated. Goodnight Nobody, WTF?
Try Big Red Barn, same author, much more satisfying.
Robert, father to Madison (5) and Natalie (4).
ETA, and the homage to Snoopy on the pail is cool.
BGinCHI
@Sibelius: It’s already better to me because it has a barn in it.
Laertes
In Nonfiction: Milgram’s Obedience to Authority. It’s literally the most important book I’ve ever read. I’ve never anywhere else learned so much about human nature from so short a book.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
Stop-Time is a great book! Thank you, I had not thought of that in years. Another oldie to go back and reread.
I don’t have one favorite book, but there are some that I find myself coming back to quite often: Ficciones, Borges; Dubliners, Joyce; Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata; The Great Gatsby.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@BGinCHI:
__
No spoilers please, I want to enjoy the movie version. I hear that Michael Bay will be directing it.
NancyDarling
I have seen “One Hundred Years of Solitude” mentioned several times on this thread. At the risk of seeming obtuse, unlettered or something, I have to say I just don’t get the book. I have made three serious attempts to read it. The last was when I picked it up while bookstore browsing and a blurb on the back cover shouted at me that it was “the most important work of literature since the Old Testament and I thought “My God! I’d really better try again and get through it this time.
I just couldn’t do it. Every character’s name is Jose and I never knew what century I was in.
Am I alone in this?
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Jerome Charyn edited a fiction anthology called The Single Voice (1969) that was a gold mine of now classic authors. I had it in the early ’70s, and it was my gateway to Frank Conroy and a lot of other good writers.
wrb
Hard to top the big D but I like Karamazov a lot more than Underground. As I far prefer the Quartets to The Wasteland. Don’t have use for whippersnappers.
And Quiet Flows the Don is up there. Sholokov was better young. Homer, The Divine Comedy…
And of course serious fiction… Woodhouse, Pratchett…
Valdivia
@hilzoy:
Amen.
Laertes
@wrb:
Ain’t Wodehouse grand? I can’t read it without hearing Fry and Laurie’s voices. I wonder if I’d have enjoyed it as much if I wasn’t getting the voices right.
Omnes Omnibus
The Sun Also Rises. Anyone wanna fight?
Villago Delenda Est
The Right Stuff
BTW, I think the book club should read The City & The City by China Miéville. It’s a pretty good read, not too long (300 pages) and I guarantee you will not be able to put it down for the last 60 or so of them.
Valdivia
@gnomedad:
glad you enjoyed that. I did too. Makes the point of what can be useful of TED and the abuse of it by pseudo scientists.
@Steeplejack:
Biggest grin. I think you and I could talk books for ages. Loved your list. BTW I found the Caceres on Borges book in a spanish site (a condensed version running 600 pages instead of the original 1600) for 20 euros if you want the link.
dopealope
For many years, I would have said my favorite book Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”, but after reading Nick Harkaway’s “Gone away world”, I would now say it’s a toss up.
cookieinthehouse
The Handmaids Tale.
also, too… A Prayer for Owen Meany.
wrb
@Omnes Omnibus:
No.
I was once stuck in a cabin in the arctic- 24 hour dark, endlessly howling wind, 70 below zero with only boxed sets of Henry James, Carlos Castanedas, and Hemingway. James was unbearably, horribly bizarre, CC trippy but almost too much so– Hemingway’s sunlit pine forests saved my sanity.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv:
Freeping by fucktards means nothing.
Ayn Rand is shit. Her followers, who Steve Martin took to the cleaners with his “Non-conformists’ Pledge” are shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@wrb: Actually, I just glanced over at a bookshelf and another of Hemingway’s book caught my eye: A Movable Feast. I might need to fight myself; I’ll let you know who wins – even though it is the fighting and not the winning that is important.
Arm The Homeless
I will keep my Hemingway opinions to myself, since it’s elicited many a death stares from my lit friends. As a side note, a few of the doctoral candidates I play poke-her with are drinking profusely at The Hemingway Society Conference.
I predict the smug will be unbearable. /ducks
slag
Bravo, DougJ. Spoken like a man who’s never had to actually get shit done.
A favorite book of ALL TIME? Impossible. I’m far too shallow and capricious for such discernment.
Steeplejack
@NancyDarling:
I am the last person to say someone “should” read a book or should force herself to “just do it” and get through it. It’s not homework; if it doesn’t grab you, that’s okay.
But I do think One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great novel, and I offer one suggestion: maybe try putting your questions and disorientation in abeyance for a bit and just let the voice of the book wash over you for a while. Don’t worry about “getting it” right away. That will come. Or, if it doesn’t, then—eh!—you can drop it.
Like a lot of “magic realism,” the book twists and compresses reality in subtle ways, and it can take a while to feel your way into the novel’s space.
I apologize if I sound condescending. I think a lot of us have preconceptions of how a novel “should” be—I know I do—and when you run into one that is constructed differently it can take you aback.
Which reminds me of another of my favorite books, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, which takes the idea of the novel, turns it inside out and spreads the pieces all over the floor. And is funny doing it.
Valdivia
@NancyDarling:
I read the book when I was still in high school and it was a revelation. It used a quasi biblical structure to tell the sordid story of our latin lives. I haven’t re-read it since but I think it’s the kind of book you either love and get or you don’t. It is the classic of the magic realist genre that most everyone reads but there are better ones. The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier is exceptional and short and just as powerfully descriptive of the regional crisis of politics.
or what @Steeplejack: said much better than I did.
NancyDarling
@wrb: I see Omnes beat me to it, but I was also thinking of “A Moveable Feast”. He wrote so beautifully of his regret for how he treated Hadley. I love how he wrote about being poor in Paris and taking his son, Bumby, to the park in his pram, luring the pigeons with food, grabbing them and wringing their necks and then tossing them under Bumby’s blankets—squab for dinner!
hitchhiker
There can’t be a lifetime favorite . . . it’s unpossible. But I love The Known World, and Pride and Prejudice, and The Magician’s Assistant, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Tess of D’Urbervilles, and The Sleepwalkers, and My Year of Meats, and . . . can I say this? The one I wrote, which is called Some Things Are Unbreakable. :)
NancyDarling
@Valdivia: I like Eduardo Galeano as a go to guy for understanding Latin America.
wrb
@NancyDarling:
Our little parrot is named Bumby.
I do love 100 Years of Solitude (and Autum of the Patriarch) along w Sometimes a Great Notion
How did I miss Flann O’brian?
The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive more than At Swim, though.
The mollycules will get you.
NancyDarling
@wrb: Is he named for Hemingway’s son? Is it a Senegal? My daughter has a Senegal named Scout, and no, it’s not for Tonto’s horse.
Steeplejack
Thinking about having trouble “getting into” a novel . . .
I had that problem with Master and Commander, the first volume of Patrick O’Brian’s excellent Aubrey-Maturin series. You have a vague idea of the book’s background—the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars—but at the start of the book you’re just dropped into the mise-en-scène, a chamber music concert where two men sitting next to each other do not get along. Where are we? Who are these people? What’s going on? What I found was that I had to let O’Brian’s story wash over me for 50 or 60 pages, just getting in tune with it and trusting that I would catch on. And that’s what happened. And I went on to enjoy a 20-volume series that I really think is a towering fictional achievement: a huge, sweeping epic that is not just a ripping naval yarn but a detailed portrait of a whole society—Jane Austen with explosions. Highly recommended.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
Yeah, send me the link.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: The first couple of scenes in any Elizabethan play do that to me. My ear and brain adjust and then everything is fine – until they lop off some poor innocent girls hands. I mean, WTF?
Jamie
The Crying of Lot 49. Fucking brilliant.
Name of the Rose is a second place runner up.
Kokopellirunner
Another vote for Gravity’s Rainbow. A comment/quote apropos this post:
“Murphy’s Law is the brash, Irish proletarian restatement of Godel’s Theorem. If anything can go wrong, it will, and when you think you understand everything, you’ve made a mistake.”
Or sumthin’. Just wingin’ it from memory.
wrb
@NancyDarling:
Yes, he’s named for Hemingway’s son.
He’s just a cockatiel.
Atticus’s daughter?
Valdivia
@NancyDarling:
Galeano has some good insights but I think he goes totally astray a lot as well. I don’t like the relentless focus on the outside forces (as important as they are) while giving a free pass to a lot of the perniciously romantic local revolutionaries who carry a hefty dose of responsibility for our troubles. Our history is littered with them, and they get lionized in very bad ways.
ETA hoping that didn’t sound ranty. It’s my pet peeve about Latin politics and Galeano trades heavily on it, specially in Open Veins.
NancyDarling
@Steeplejack: @Valdivia: I will try a fourth time—someday. Too many books! I do know that sometimes books are accessible depending on one’s stage in life. Maybe I am too old for “One Hundred Years…”
I had that reaction to Laurens Van Der Post’s “Jung and the Story of Our Time”. I would fall asleep reading it, lose my place and come back to it the next time and read 15 pages before I realized I had already read that part. I returned to it a few years later and loved it—not so much for his ideas but for his way with words.
The Queen of Bithynia
either
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
or
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Baron Elmo
At gunpoint, I’d have to go with Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. Still mindblowing, even on the fourth read.
A few other fine reads of late:
Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. A masterpiece on the basis of language alone. Read the first paragraph, and you know you’re in the hands of a genius.
Nabokov’s Lolita, especially the annotated version, so you can catch all the jokes, puns and clevernesses Vlad hid in the text.
Madison Smart Bell’s Haitian slave trilogy, which begins with All Souls Rising. Best historical saga ever. This man has a flair for language that will have you shaking your head in wonderment.
Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. The densest, most detail-crammed prose imaginable. Pynchon casually tosses away ideas by the dozen that most writer would spin into full novels.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Two vastly different yet equally great novels from my current fave author. This guy is fucking brilliant.
I’ll stop there, but could add more if goaded into it.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
here you go. I have ordered books from them, they were reliable.
About the when to give up on a book–I too have had books that were hard to get into and then after sticking with them turned into gems. I give a book 100 pages always. If by then it’s not clicking I give up.
NancyDarling
@wrb: Yes.
@cookieinthehouse: I loved Owen Meany, too, especially how he would stand up in church during the sermon and argue with the preacher—more of that please.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is an important book—more so today than when it was published in 1985. I can’t say I love it, since I just finished a re-read a few days ago and the dark cloud is still hovering over me.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s a perfect analogy!
All of us–well, most of us–swim around unconsciously in the construct of Serious Literary Fiction, U.S. division (with Anglo mods), and we build up a lot of unconscious assumptions. So when we encounter something coming from outside of that it can be a little unsettling. One Hundred Years of Solitude is like that: a riot of colors and noise, everybody has the same name (or similar), and you start to distrust things when you find out that one of the big events is when the gypsies bring a magnet to Macondo and as they drag it through town pots and pans and even nails start flying out of the houses to follow it. WTF?! Is this “fantasy”? Is this “regular” fiction? No, it’s magic realism, so you have to roll with it. And inevitably some are going to like it and some won’t.
I found the beginning hypnotic:
That first sentence is up there with “Call me Ishmael” or “A screaming comes across the sky.”
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
¡Gracias!
RossInDetroit
@Baron Elmo:
I love all things Pynchon but I Could. Not. Finish. That. I bailed at page 400 in tears. Couldn’t follow it and I’m still depressed about it. Inherent Vice, on the other hand, was a blast.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
de nada!
If you want crazy hipnotic beginings. My all time consumed by it totally can’t believe what the hell this is: Detectives Salvajes, Roberto Bolaño, en español, of course. All his stuff is great but that book and that begging, wow!
Steeplejack
@The Queen of Bithynia:
For me, Gene Wolfe does a great job of making you feel like you are in a place unimaginably distant in time from ours. Creepy and exhilirating.
RossInDetroit
I’m currently reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orziel. I’ve been on a physics kick for the last year and it’s kinda starting to sink in. I think I get Heisenberg now that it’s been explained in canine terms.
katie5
@Villago Delenda Est: Loved the book but hated the ending, which felt contrived to me. Wouldn’t have been so bad if most of the book wasn’t so great.
As for favorite book: Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien wanted to be a single book.
Valdivia
@Baron Elmo:
Lolita. Yes. Talk about great beginnings :)
@Steeplejack:
that was so wonderfully said. You’re making me want to re-read la vida de Aureliano y los Buendia.
Steeplejack
Reading this thread is reminding me of a lot of other favorite/great books.
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman. The first books I read (in the early ’70s) that depicted a “modern” (post-Faulkner) South that I could recognize. I was living in “L.A.” at the time (lower Alabama).
The Moviegoer could be a great movie vehicle for Johnny Depp, if he could break his folie à deux with Tim Burton and/or the goddamn Disney Pirates franchise.
ETA: Regarding The Moviegoer, imagine having your novel win the National Book Award in a year when the competition is
Catch-22, Joseph Heller; Franny and Zooey; J.D. Salinger; and A New Life, Bernard Malamud.
On the other hand, feel sorry for Richard Yates, whose great novel Revolutionary Road was in that same group. Think how different his career might have been if he had gotten any decent recognition
IM
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, boring and dated. Bet then I generally dislike Hemingway. And I did red it in translation.
wrb
Also, Flann O’Brian’s tThe Hard Life covers Improving Schemes in Ireland in one brilliant scene:
The doers of good works find the poor irish family sleeping with the pigs in the mud in a leaking hut under never-ceasing rain.
They build them a snug cottage.
When they come back the family is sleeping in the mud in a leaking hut under never-ceasing rain, shivering, without the warmth from the pigs.
The valuable pigs are snug in the cottage.
Vince
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishuguro.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Desert island book would be Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Every time I read it, it got deeper. Probably not my favorite book of all time, though. That would be something a lot fluffier. Don’t know what offhand, though.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
Just bought that ebook. Thanks for the rec.
Steeplejack
@IM:
I think his short stories hold up really well. But then I like story collections, especially ones that aren’t just anthologies but make a thematic whole, e.g., In Our Time.
Also: Dubliners, James Joyce; Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger; Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson; Nabokov’s Quartet, Vladimir Nabokov; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley; and a Ray Bradbury collection to be named later.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
The Moviegoer? You’ll like it, especially if you have ever visited New Orleans.
Henry Bayer
Political: The Boys on the Bus, Crouse
Science: The making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes
History: The American Heritage Book of Indians, Brandon
Bathroom books. Can open to any page and read until I’m tired of sitting.
IM
Dostoevsky too. Bit I liked Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment more when I was younger. Now the relentless negativity then captivating me seems sometimes a bit whiny. Now I prefer the Idiot or the Demons.
Not so much the Brothers Karamasov. Because here, especially in the middle, Dostoevsky tries to be positive. And fails. He is unable to put up any alternative against the modern western society he criticize so relentless.
Wil
The Silmarillion, Tortilla Flat, East of Eden, Of Human Bondage, Hemingway’s short stories but not his novels. Fear and Loathing.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@slacker:
Too true. In freshman Physics lab I disproved the Law of Conservation of Momentum, with all my findings within the range of experimental error. The lab assistant gave my groundbreaking work a “D”. I contend in that time and place, space-time warped.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
yep. just got it and intend to read it as soon as I am done with Milosz. hhis about having lived in the south but never been to New Orleans.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Sibelius: My favorite children’s book of all time is “When the Goose Got Loose”. Fun rhymes, great art.
Stevep
From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell. It may be my favorite work in any medium, actually.
Hungry Joe
@Steeplejack: Richard Yates, “Revolutionary Road,” yes. A few dozen pages in there’s an incendiary husband-wife argument that’ll charbroil your frontal lobe. Also his short-story collection “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.” I reviewed a paperback re-issue and Yates called me, drunk, I think (him, not me), to thank me. MAY have been drunk; mostly he sounded sad. He died a month or two later.
I forgot to mention “Cloud Atlas” as one of my favorites. They’re filming it now, with three different directors. Should be either be astonishing or abysmal.
Fax Paladin
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (to me it’s one book), by Douglas Adams. Not sure I would call it a great work, unlike many of the others named so far, but it remains my favorite.
Second place? Ah, that’s a question. Contenders include Snow Crash, several Rex Stout novels, several Terry Pratchetts… I could probably come up with more candidates if I weren’t away from my bookshelves at the moment.
Ameziah
The Glass Bead Game – Hermann Hesse . Feel like it was written for me. Hesse also my favorite writer.
Steeplejack
@Fax Paladin:
There were two or three Rex Stout novels–later ones, I think–that transcended the genre and were just damn good novels. There was one in particular that I remember as having heavy Watergate overtones. Hmm, maybe A Family Affair (1975).
cthulhu
@Citizen Alan: My original plan in graduate school involved social psych and though I was definitely exposed to other work by Mischel, the Marshmallow Test was news to me. Just read through one of the key papers and I have to say that I have quite a few suspicions about it: low follow-up n, few of the many obvious covariates collected, and even curious approaches to the statistical model and way the results are reported. If anyone did start promoting it as a key predictor, it would be time to request the original data for an independent analysis. More likely, they managed a behavioral test of spectrum disorder without realizing it.
Hungry Joe
Okay, for more than 140 posts I’ve resisted, but I can’t anymore: Today the Washington Post selected my book, “Anyway*”, as one of eight to be featured in the KidsPost Summer Book Club. Full story/review to run July 11.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidspost-2012-summer-book-club-reading-list/2012/06/14/gJQAZxP2eV_story.html?wp_login_redirect=0
Steeplejack
@Hungry Joe:
Congratulations and good luck!
Valdivia
@Hungry Joe:
sounds fantastic. I have no kids (yet) but I would so get that. :)
Omnes Omnibus
@IM: @IM: I would guess that Hemingway does not translate particularly well. As far as being dated, I think the novel is of, and evokes, 1920s Paris. That is part of its charm. I was a perfect sucker for Midnight in Paris as well.
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus:
oh, raises hand and waves. Me too. Total sucker for that movie. Must watch that again soon.
RP
“I think you have to, otherwise none of our mathematical models have predictive value.”
You shoulda said, “That is a classic fallacy known as an appeal to consequences. If p, then q / q is bad / Therefore, not p. But that’s no correct logic. The consequences of a thing have no real bearing on whether that thing is true.”
Lou From Here
Catch-22 saved my life as a high schooler.
Lost Illusions by Balzac perhaps number two.
Or V. (Has my favorite women character in all literature) Oh, heck, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce. As youth, anything that let me know there were adults who were not craven bullies and that I had a mind to be respected. So Vonnegut should be here too.
Another Bob
Anna Karenina. I loved how the book meted out the fates of its characters with a sort of merciless logic, but at the same time, there was an overarching sense of loving compassion and acceptance of people in all their imperfection (except Count Vronsky, who is pretty much a dick). Anyway, it’s a great book, and a surprisingly effortless read.
RossInDetroit
@Hungry Joe:
That’s fantastic. Well done and best of luck!
RossInDetroit
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
I feel the same way. When I first read it in ’79 I got it on one level, as a narrative about war experiences. The next time I discovered subplots that hooked together and long plotlines that I’d missed. The time after that I noticed the character archetypes that fit together as metaphors for the world powers. It’s finite but it goes pretty deep.
gogol's wife
@Steeplejack:
Yes, that’s a fabulous first sentence, and it’s what made it possible for me to read the whole book. Your answer about how to read it was great.
I often judge books by their first sentences!
Fax Paladin
@Steeplejack: That is indeed the one with the Watergate overtones, although (mild spoiler alert) the Watergate references are there at least in part to misdirect from the murders’ true solution. But yeah, Stout after World War II definitely started working social and political commentary into the mix more.
gogol's wife
@Another Bob:
I think there’s a huge amount of compassion for Vronsky.
I teach literature, so it’s impossible for me to pick one book, but the one I read every year throughout my teens and still pick up and read every once in a while is Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter. All Bronte novels and all Austen novels are also on my constant re-read list.
RossInDetroit
@gogol’s wife:
The first page of A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower hooked me. Awesome prose. But by halfway I knew where it was headed and I didn’t want to go there. Never finished it but what I read I enjoyed.
YellowJournalism
@BGinCHI: Wait until you read Everybody Poops. You’re in for a surprise.
Hungry Joe
On one level “Catch-22” annoyed me because I read it as a sophomore in college and the whole time I was pissed off that I hadn’t read it in high school.
Schad
There’s a second person in the world who considers “Notes From the Underground” to be their favourite work?
Not a “Crime and Punishment” fan, to be honest; falls behind “The Brothers Karamazov” and many of his other short works on my list of favourites.
Another Bob
@gogol’s wife:
Interesting. Maybe I’m letting my own feelings about Vronsky color my judgment. But I really DID think he treated Anna with a lot of compassion, and I guess I was surprised that a writer from that era would be so fair and non-judgmental towards such a character. But doesn’t an epigram in the book, somewhere, say, “Vengeance is Mine”? I took that to mean that, paradoxically, it’s not for US to judge. Anyway, a beautiful book!
Thanks for your other recommendations.
Baron Elmo
@RossInDetroit:
Don’t feel bad, Ross. Hell, I read like greased lightning, and that sumbitch took me over three months to finish. A hard slog, but worth it in the end.
pixelpusher
Gravity’s Rainbow. It blew my mind. I think it also blew Pynchon’s, based on his subsequent output.
wrb
@YellowJournalism:
The World of Poo, by Miss Felicity Beedle, is more fragrant, more redolent, even warmer imo.
mcbbb
Who Moved my Cheese?
Best “book” ever!!
Johannes
How did I leave out Davies’ Fifth Business and The Rebel Angels, and Byatt’s Virgin Quartet?
Or Dumas’ Musketeer novels?
It gets harder the more I read the thread…
Nan Mccall
@wrb:
Madame Bovary and Pat Barker’s WW1 trilogy, esp. Ghost Road. Just read We have to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver and was knocked out
Nan Mccall
@wrb:
Madame Bovary and Pat Barker’s WW1 trilogy, esp. Ghost Road. Just read We have to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver and was knocked out
Mike Dixon
There are a few people up there talking about Vonnegut. My favorite book by anyone is Breakfast of Champions.
Nan Mccall
forgot david mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. someone is filming it, will be crap, the book is too incredible to be contained in a movie.
Gronald
@bemused senior: Definitely. The Master and Maragarita.
mclaren
Fiction: The Red and the Black by Stendhal (AKA Marie-Henri Beyle).
Non-fiction: Tao te Ching by Lao Tsu (another pen-name, meaning nothing more than “Old Master”).
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@mclaren:
Also one of my very favorites.
kuvasz
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.
Review from Amazon:
“Star Maker — totally ignored by literature, hard to find, hard to read when you’ve found it, and completely unforgettable once you have succeeded.
“Like another reviewer on these pages, I first heard of this book after reading Brian Aldiss’s epic critical history of science fiction. Trillion Year Spree, and I eventually tracked it down in a secondhand book store.
“Star Maker is less a novel than a vision of the physical and spiritual history of the cosmos, conceived on a scale that few other writers would dare even contemplate, let alone attempt — even today. Aldiss and others criticize Stapledon for the inhumanity of his stories, but I disagree — the grandeur of the themes of cosmic disharmony, strife and unity point up our everyday human concerns to an almost painfully intense, poignant degree. If Stapledon feels pain at the wanton destruction of entire star systems, then so do we: without this humanity, we would not share the narrator’s horror at the dismissive attitude of the Creator to the sufferings of his creations. Without this humanity, the book would have been a failure, when what we see before us is a hugely involving and mind-altering experience.
“After many years of reading SF and other branches of literature, I have found no other book that can inspire a real sense of existential terror than this — but also a kind of equanimity. Whatever our worries, they hardly rate a mote in the eye of Brahma.”
Yes, it has the capacity to change the life of a reader who dares the challege to read it.
handsmile
I’ve had the great good fortune of being away from the intertubes for much of the day. Hanging out with delirious Czechs, ecstatic Greeks, and other motley citizens watching football matches. So I’m just now reading through this remarkable thread.
Remarkable for the quality and variety of responses to its impossible question: “favorite book of all time?” Valdivia well understood and expressed the difficulty with her comment above (#50):
Valdivia
@handsmile:
Just to say: in purple I descended. :)
I simply adore Wallace Stevens.
When I’m more awake I want to say more about your great list.
PanurgeATL
@RossInDetroit:
Maybe the problem with our time, then, is that everyone’s using Heller as a role model instead of Vonnegut.
Omnes Omnibus
@handsmile: Kafka’s short stories are wonderfully well written, but so creepy (to me) that I can’t read them often.
James E. Powell
One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite novel ever. If you find that you are confused about the persons, the time, or the purpose, you are supposed to be.
Catch-22 is my favorite from the USA. It is not a book about war; it’s a book about the modern corporation-run USA.
handsmile
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, tales of bugs, torture, talking apes and dogs, and self-starvation would creep out pretty much anyone (myself included).
All the more astonishing then the account of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and first biographer, that Kafka himself considered these stories to be little more than comic sketches, and not very good ones. According to Brod (and in part confirmed by later biographers), Kafka would read aloud to assembled friends his stories or passages from novels-in-progess; while reading, he would convulse with laughter at their absurdity and poor quality, begging his friends’ indulgence.
Also, a belated response to your reply last night on Alan Riding’s And the Show Went On. While a work of popular history, it is exceptionally well-researched and wide-ranging. Riding, a former correspondent for the NYT, presents a balanced account of the responses by French artists and writers to the Nazi occupation: resistance, acquiescence, collaboration. Some cultural heroes do not come off at all well. I’m pleased that the book’s title/subject caught your interest and hope you’ll have a chance to read it.
Valdivia
@handsmile:
I am ashamed to say I never read the Raymond, one of those books I have long wanted to get to but haven’t.
On Berger: thought this was a nice little conversation with him.
Lenore Riegel
@Steeplejack: Nice to see this. I’m Jerome Charyn’s partner-in-crime and we’d love to hear from you – you can message us on the FB page for his crime novel series, just reissued: http://www.facebook.com/IsaacSidel – Lenore
divF
I’m *really* late to this party, but here are a couple of things, one that ties the two topics of this post together.
Even though it took a one-week solitary backpacking trip to Canyonlands National park to finish it, Gravity’s Rainbow is high on my list, if for no other reason than this quote:
I give this to my students so that they understand the relationship between theory and data.
If re-reading is an indication of what one’s favorites are, my list includes Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Tolkien, and Joan Didion, all of whose works I have read more times than I can count. Living in Berkeley, I have an image / fantasy of the early 1950’s here with Didion (then a Berkeley undergrad), Dick (living a hand-to-mouth existence around San Pablo Ave.) and LeGuin (in New York by then, but visiting her family in Berkeley).