what is your favorite book?Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. covered this already, here.
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller - this book blew me wide open. i am pretty sure this was the moment i finally started to think. everything changed after i read this one.
A Nation Gone Blind (ANGB) by Eric Larsen - again with the thinking. this one is a treasure, one everyone should read. and i think, not enough people know about. i have pulled ANGB out again and it is on my night stand. this time i'm going to take notes, and then after that i will be able to review it properly. i tried to before, both for the blog and for Amazon, but there was so much in my mind. picture having seen the statue of liberty for the first time in person, never having seen a picture of it before. now, turn around and draw it. you'd get some of the details right. giant lady, big spiky hat. what was that thing she was holding? hmmm. it's the kind of thing that is very big, but readable. i mean to say that the ideas are big. you shouldn't be intimidated by this book. but you should take it seriously. bring both your heart and your mind.
ANGB develops an argument that is subtle and takes the entire book to really flesh out, even though you can glean lots from every section (there are three, if i remember right). Eric is a man with the heart and soul of a poet. he knows, man, he knows. he opened windows to certain worlds of thought i didn't even know existed. you should also be warned that if you are a feminist, or into political correctness, or a member of an English department, this book might offend you. he finds ways to offend lots of people. thank the gods. he is on the trail of truth. no doubt at all about that. and he's written some novels too, and i plan to read them!
The Winged Energy of Delight by Robert Bly this one is an anthology of poems Bly translated over a period of fifty years. it is outstanding, a work of heart-felt, long wrought genius. this book is the fruit of a life long labor of love, the labor of a man who has spent his entire life in the service of poetry and truth. Bly is still among us, in his eighties now. when he disappears it will be for me like losing the Dalai Lama. there is something very special about him. i can pick up this book and open to any page and find wonder. seriously, it's that good.
well ok, there are a few. i'll post some more sometime. what about you? what book changed your life? what book opened your eyes? which one made you, in some perhaps inestimable way, a better person? a happier person? even if only for a few hours or days?
discussion thread| 1 |
Hmmm You B**T**D!
Every book I read is my favorite even if i hate it :-)
However lets see recent books
"The 5 people you meet in heaven" Mitch Albom which although it appears to be an overly religious book it isn't. The words flow like the best burgundy you could imagine, every sip a delight every paragraph a joy and in these times of doom and gloom it has a nice feel good glow.
"The Alexander Trilogy" by Valerio Manfreddi Sword and Sandel with Alex and the Macedon Possee. Available in English which kinda spoils the flow of the original Italian but a cracker of a book none the less.
"Star of the Sea" by my mate Joseph O'Conner, a detective story set on a coffin ship of migrants to the US from Ireland during the potato famine.
and without doubt the best book of poetry every written
"poems" by spike milligan
for who could match the towering majesty of
"In the Land of the Bumbley Boo"
In the land of the Bumbley Boo
The People are red white and blue,
They never blow noses,
Or ever wear closes,
What a sensible thing to do!
In the land of the Bumbley Boo
You can buy Lemon pie at the zoo;
They give away foxes
In little Pink Boxes
And Bottles of Dandylion Stew.
In the land of the Bumbley Boo
You never see a Gnu,
But thousands of cats
Wearing trousers and hats
Chorus
Oh, the Bumbley Boo! the Bumbley Boo!
That's the place for me and you!
So hurry! Let's run!
The train leaves at one!
For the land of the Bumbley Boo!
The wonderful Bumbley Boo-Boo-Boo!
The Wonderful Bumbley BOO!!!
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My absolute favorite:
The Lord of the Rings - it may seem trite, but I have read the book at least once a year every year since I was in 4th grade, and it never gets old, never fails to suck me in.
Some of my other favorites:
Riotous Assembly - Actually, I love every book I have read of Tom Sharpe's, but this was the first and favorite.
Swallows and Amazons - OK, it is more of a nostalgic favorite, but I still always keep a copy around.
Virtually anything by P.G. Wodehouse.
Rinkitink in Oz - The best Oz book, by far.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Favorite Latin American novel (I was a Latin American Studies major in college, so I have read more than my share of Latin American literature)
Atlas Shrugged - Brilliant, brilliant stuff, even if my political philosophy isn't quite the same as Ayn Rand's.
Ender's Game - Never ceases to thrill.
Mutual Aid, by Kropotkin - The most amazing answer to the Darwinian theory (not that Darwin really subscribed to it) of survival of the fittest.
Heck, I could do this all evening, but I have a version to release.
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Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut - a great way to understand the existential dilemma of whether it is your motives or your actions that matter most in making you who you are. it is pure genius in that the ideas embodied by this book rise into my waking awareness spiking my consciousness with its meme-like symbolic message which occurs to me in everyday life regularly ever since I read it. Truly consciousness raising fiction here.
Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco - I read this a while back, but this introduced me to the field of semiotics, and was the exact right kind of social and cultural critique of the US I needed to hear. This is the foundation of my own critique of what's right and wrong with our culture, and when I travel this book has granted me a permanent perspective for critiquing any culture, so it too has become part of who I am.
Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller aka "DJ Spooky" - Amazing book written in a McLuhan-esque odd font and picture mashup style ala Medium is the Massage about the artistic concepts behind dj culture and music in general. There is not nearly enough philosophical treatises on music being created anymore like there used to be in the Renaissance or Baroque era, so there are only a handful of modern musicians with enough clarity of vision to lay out their concept in written form in this way, so in this way Spooky aligns himself with the other rare geniuses of the microgenre like Brian Eno to show how his marriage of academia, (he is a music professor at a NY University and has worked with classical composers like Iannis Xennakis for instance) the music industry (lots of successful releases Internationally) and urban American life can be synthesized into a single unified whole expression. He places DJ Culture and sampling not only in the pop music era of the 1960s forward connecting it to the Jamaican "Sound System" and b-boying and sampling and graffiti but also to sound itself, and the movements of the universe which like music are just vibrations at a particular frequency. He takes some liberties linguistically by using both academic terms and urban slang intermixed with new words of his own spontaneous creation to deliver new mashup meanings while demonstrating the ever important "re contextualization" aspect of DJ Culture that is key to its understanding. I have had many similar ideas to his over the years, but have lacked the fortitude to be able to deliver it in such a compelling and cohesive way as he was able to here. This is very niche reading, but if you are an electronic musician, dj, producer or artist with a postmodern bent and a tendency towards the big picture philosophical, this book is for you. lol
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The collected works of Dorothy Parker
Double Whammy , Skin Tight -Carl Hiassen
Anything by Dashiell Hammett
Ditto Raymond Chandler
Ditto Ross McDonald
Ditto Carol O'Connell but especially Stone Angel and Shark Music
Ditto Jasper FForde both the Thursday Next and the Nursery Crime series
P G Wodehouse - but mostly Jeeves and Wooster
Agatha Christie
Company - Max Barry
Thank you for Smoking - Christopher Buckley
Harpo Speaks - Harpo Marx
City of Nets - Otto Friedrich
From Hollywood with Love - Bessie Love
Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin
Bleak House / Great Expectations / Nicholas Nickleby
Emma
any Jane Austen
Carter Beats the Devil
any Agatha Christie which I ate up when I was 11/12
I have to stop now and get back to work but I could go on for hours
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Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach changed my life.
Like Ben, I'm partial to The Lord of the Rings - and also the Hobbit - both are often revisited along with some of the "Unfinished" and "Lost" tales of Tolkien.
I love reading Ian Fleming's Bond-books, but "best"? Probably not!
Asimov's "I, Robot".
Frank Herbert's "Dune".
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The Good Earth- Pearl S. Buck
Once An Eagle - Anton Myrer
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (missed a flight because i was so into this one- attendant at the gate yelled at me that they were calling me for 30 minutes)
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wow what a great bunch of books!
tom, Crime and Punishment, i almost listed that one!!
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ben,
i think it is super interesting and neat that you keep reading LOTR. wow.
gab,
between you and ben i think i'm going to have to try wodehouse. i'd never heard of him!
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John, I loved your selections and all the responses as well. Some recent faves are The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie and The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer. For an oldie I'll throw in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which is still a favorite after all these years.