And the part where the war movie runs backwards, with the bombs coming up from the ground and going back into the planes, which fly backwards to the air base. And the bombs get shipped back to the factory, where they’re disassembled.
I’ve queued up Breakfast of Champions from him as my next book. I hope it is good as well.
His sense of humor in Slaughter was so scathing and cutting, just loved it.
Make sure you get Mother Night in there somewhere. It’s a personal favorite of mine, for whatever that might mean coming from some random goober on the internet. But I’m a random goober who’s had KV in his top five favorite authors list for fifty-plus years.
This is the real ship that was part of the inspiration for the novel. In some ways it’s a much more horrific story than the one that Melville wrote (starvation, cannibalism, murder, and men literally going mad!).
Melville also used this real whale for inspiration:
I read Moby Dick first and found out the real stories later. I think it’s better that way. The real stories then add to Melville’s story and you end up with a much more enjoyable experience. I think if you researched the real stories first and then read Melville’s work you’d be comparing what he wrote vs. reality and you wouldn’t enjoy the book as much.
Just my 2 cents though.
None of Hammett’s novels:
Red Harvest
The Dain Curse
The Maltese Falcon
The Glass Key
The Thin Man
are read enough today.
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
is cliche now, but it really is a great book. I mean, kind of incredibly so. I prefer it quite a bit to Animal Farm. I only read 1984 once, but I think about it quite often. I ended up living in China and I saw some of the character-types there. Here, too, of course.
Agree. I first read Homer when we were assigned The Odyssey in junior high – the entire poem. Fortunately, it was Robert Fitzgerald’s blank verse translation, and I devoured it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read The Iliad – only Fitzgerald hadn’t translated that, so I was stuck with Richmond Lattimore’s translation which was – well, – awful. It reminded me of the translations from Latin that I was doing in first year latin. The only other easily available choice was W.H.D. Rouse’s prose translation. But I’d had the Epic Poetry version, and wasn’t going back.
Fortunately, Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad came out shortly after I’d had to re-read his translation of the Odyssey, and I bought it and devoured that, too. Later I got his translation of the Aeneid.
More recently, I got the Robert Fagles translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey on audio. For some bizarre reason Penguin audio only released a butchered, horribly abridged version of the poem. Even having Derek Jacobi reading it didn’t entirely make up for that. But they released the full Odyssey, with Ian McKellan reading it, which is great.
By the way, if you’ve never read it, look up Christopher Logue’s translation – hat there is of it – of the Iliad. Easily the weirdest, most off-the-wall translation you’ve ever read, but weirdly faithful. I first read his translation of Book 16, under the title The Patrocleia. I later found out that he translated more of it, and got a copy of the most complete version released. It’s worth it just to read Achilles’ prayer to Zeus rendered in the form of the Christian “Our Father”.
I read Les Miserables in 1999 and I thought it was amazing. I had not seen the musical or anything else at that point.
I do dislike the extended “Paris is so great” sections of the book, but the core story is fantastic. I’m not sure who translated my copy, but the English translation seemed great to me.
Jane Eyre. A great classic that happens to be an absolute potboiler. I think I first read it in college but not for a class, and couldn’t put it down. This completely defied my expectations of what a Bronte sister’s work would be like, since I was tormented in high school by Wuthering Heights (still hate that book) and assumed wrongly that the whole family’s output would be similar.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a pretty good book. The worst section was reading the dialect of the old sailor, but overall I still think it’s a compelling story.
For French literature, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary has to be on the list, although I personally prefer his Trois Contes (Three Tales) and La Tentation de Saint Antoine.
Then, Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). As for poetry, Les Feuilles d’Automne (Autumn Leaves) and Les Contemplations, but first and foremost Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). Verlaine’s Poèmes Saturniens, too.
Apart from the 19th century, Montaigne’s Essais are still incredibly modern and insightful, Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel is a riot, hilarious and incredibly inventive linguistically and Voltaire’s Candide has held up well. I was also surprised to find Racine’s Berenice delightful. It should be the very epitome of what I dislike, but it was actually a very impressive read. Honorable mentions to Laclos’ Les Laisons Dangereuses and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes.
For the 20th century, I’d nominate Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Gracq’s Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore) and Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life a User’s Manual). Perhaps also Yourcenar’s L’OEuvre au Noir (Zeno of Bruges) and Butor’s La Modification (Second Thoughts).
dont forget there’s a continental op short story collection too … i had it but it fell apart … due to it being so hot when I Left it outside
The Big Knockover is one of my favorites; the title story is where someone organizes the robbing of every bank on Chicago’s Bankers Row at once.
I don’t know what kind of reputation it has in general. Still, I will defend and talk up Watership Down as a beautiful and emotionally draining literary classic until I stop running.
I read all the books in my junior high years and really enjoyed them. On the other hand, they don’t feel old enough to be classics. Even though they were written a few to several decades earlier, Tolkien’s works seem like they fit in more with writers like Stephen King (The Dark Tower), George RR Martin (Song of Fire and Ice), and Catherynne Valente (Fairyland) as opposed to Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, or James Joyce.
In other words they’re something I’d read for fun as opposed to something I’d read because it was assigned by my high school English teacher.
I also hated Wuthering Heights in high school but when I read in my 30s and realized it’s not about a romance at all that I learned to like it. Like, not love. I do love Jane Eyre, it is tied with Lonesome Dove as my favorite and re-read or re-listen to it (Thandie Newton version is excellent) on a regular basis.
I love Dicken’s tv/movie adaptations- I go through most of them every year around Christmas but the only novel of his I could get through was Great Expectations. At first, was a chore but it all started to come together in the middle and it was an example of a book that didn’t catch me in the beginning but was intensely rewarding to finish.
Wuthering Heights is one of my wife’s faves - which I really dislike. Just don’t care for any of the characters. And JE is one of my all-time faves.
Two of the great adventure books are really all they’re cracked up to be.
The Count of Monte Cristo has never been done justice by a movie. It’s a tremendously complex and layered tale of injustice and revenge, and the revenge elements are glorious; but the book has, as an additional theme, the idea that seeking vengeance destroys the vengeful, no matter how just their cause may be. The adaptations I’ve watched or read leave out that part.
Treasure Island has Long John Silver as one of the all-time great villains. Robert Louis Stevenson writes him masterfully. As a reader you’re just as seduced by his charms as the protagonist, young Jim Hawkins. Even after you see Silver commit treacherous murder and realize how evil he is, he eventually comes back around–and damned if you’re not seduced by him again. It’s a book well worth reading.
For classics that don’t stand up, consider The Three Musketeers. It’s full of heroism and derring-do; but it’s also got the protagonists committing armed robbery and rape. I find it hard to square the general light tone of the book with the brutal and undeserved violence they commit.
In science fiction, I find that a lot of the classics don’t hold up. Worst among them, IMO, is Foundation, a plodding, didactic story whose male characters are two-dimensional and whose female characters are little more than dress models.
I wouldn’t quite put it that way… Rather, I’d say that none of the characters really had any gender. Swap half of the "he"s for "she"s, and the characters would all still be equally two-dimensional, and the story itself wouldn’t be changed at all.
You could say that, but I think you’d be wrong.
99% of the characters were male, and the 1% that remained mostly walked onscreen to twirl in a futuristic dress, or were referenced as the housewife who would benefit from a nuclear laundromat that could fit in a closet. The book was rife with gender dynamics, and as flat as the male characters were, they had far more personality than the female characters. (I don’t have a copy of the book at hand, but if you do, I encourage you to count the total number of women with any dialogue at all–I think it’s less than two.)