# Most Evocative Book You've Ever Read is...? (HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [May 3, 2006, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282 "2006-05-03T19:36:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Rebecca\_DiMwitter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rebecca_DiMwitter)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/1 "2006-05-03T19:36:53Z")
I was thinking last evening about novels I’ve read that have been able to produce the deepest sensory reactions in me…that either describe places or events or characters (preferably all three) which come vividly alive in one’s mind, which evoke images palpable enough to feel, inhale or taste–and images which stay with you for days, months or years afterwards.
So my question to you is, which single book of your intimate acquaintance evokes the most complete sensory reaction in you?
If your book is part of a series, that is fine and the series can be mentioned, but I am looking for just one book which was able to create a sensory mindset for you, and which stuck with you for awhile afterwards. If you re-read this book periodically because of the sensations it gives you, I’m interested in that, too. You’re not required to mention plot points or characterizations, but I HAVE warned of spoiler potential in the title and if you’d like to tell which part or parts particularly overwhelmed you, feel free.
The most evocative book I have ever read is without a doubt “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Gabriel G Marquez. A friend of mine once described it as “the images which run through your mind during an especially excellent mushroom trip”, and I have to agree. I LIVED in every inch of Macondo with the rest of the erratic, fascinating Buendia family while I read this novel, and I do pick it up and re-read passages from time to time, several times a year. I have re-read it entirely only once, however.
I think it’s time for a full re-read this summer.
–Beck
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### Author:  [@Gordon\_Urquhart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gordon_Urquhart)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/2 "2006-05-03T20:13:08Z")
I’ve read _Titus Groan_ and _Gormenghast_ several times, mostly just to revel again in Mervyn Peake’s masterful use of descriptive imagery. Whether the action is taking place in a dusty, moldering castle room or in a lush and vibrant forest, Peake was a wonder at making the reader feel that You Are There. There are many passages in the books in which very little happens at all, but it’s still just a pleasure to read and see in the mind’s eye what Peake himself envisioned.
His character description, too, is something to behold – many different types of personalities are made three-dimensional through Peake’s writing.
I’m reluctant to read _Titus Alone_, the last the Gormenghast trilogy, because I understand that Parkinson’s was starting to get the best of Peake while he was writing it.
I watched, or rather tried to watch, the BBC’s adaptation of \*Gormenghast \* a few months ago – I didn’t care for it, and it was mostly because what was on screen didn’t come close to matching what I’ve envisioned from my own reading of the books.
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### Author:  [@Antinor01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antinor01)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/3 "2006-05-03T20:22:28Z")
Wow, this is a toughie. I get completely wrapped up in almost every book I read. I can usually see, hear, feel etc nearly every enviroment in a good story.
That said, Anne Rice’s Witch trilogy always does that for me. From really sensing the sounds, sights and smells of the garden district of New Orleans, the foggy moors of Scotland, to the luxury of an estate right in the middle of the untamed Australian wild. I feel as though I’ve lived there. Her verbose style turns off a lot of people, but I personally love how each setting comes alive.
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### Author:  [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/4 "2006-05-03T20:29:35Z")
I think “The Secret Garden” is one that had an impact since I was a kid when I read it and had a strong imagination about it. The stress and badness of the sickrooms and the hope of bringing the garden back to life…
“The Phantom Tollbooth” too, and the Oz books.
I think it’s the kid ones that stick with me because we didn’t have TV and with little exposure to the world my imagination depended on what they told me. Now I can think of real people and places to envision as what is being described and it’s not as fanciful.
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### Author:  [@well\_he\_s\_back](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/well_he_s_back)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/5 "2006-05-03T20:38:48Z")
I know it’s almost a cliche for me to say, but I still have to answer The Lord of the Rings. The descriptions carry me away to Middle Earth; never mind that it doesn’t “really” exist.
In a totally different way To Kill A Mockingbird is very evocative. Though I no longer live down South, the descriptions in that book bring small town Southern America completely alive to me again.
I’ll agree with One Hundred Years of Solitutde and add the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. Both succeed in evoking a place extremely well.
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### Author:  [@pinkfreud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinkfreud)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/6 "2006-05-03T20:43:41Z")
Something about Stephen King’s **The Stand** made me feel as if I had actually experienced it. The sequences in the desert were particularly vivid. I’ve never spent any substantial amount of time in a desert (other than driving through in a car), but King’s prose got under my skin and left little bits of sand there.
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### Author:  [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/7 "2006-05-03T20:46:25Z")
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
It’s not the deaths that made me feel sadness, but J.K. Rowling’s description of Harry Potter’s thoughts on how he is now alone. First his parents died. Then Sirius. Now Dumbledore. Very depressing ending and very well written.
Of Mice and Men
I’m a sucked for depressing endings. When George kills Lennie…it moves me. Actually, when they kill the old dog, it gets me too.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/8 "2006-05-03T20:50:54Z")
I’d have to go with _Midnight’s Children_ by Salman Rushdie, and _Life of Pi_ by Yann Martel. _Life of Pi_ was an easy story to visualize, but some of the images were great. There’s a bit about lightning strikes going into the ocean that I thought was remarkable. _Midnight’s Children_ is the really amazing one, though, as it’s a very dense, complex, dramatic and mystic book, and it’s set in India, where I’ve never been. But it nonetheless had a tangible reality as I read it.
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### Author:  [@alice\_in\_wonderland](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alice_in_wonderland)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/9 "2006-05-03T20:55:45Z")
_The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ is a very profound book for me.
I emotionally connect with every character and wind up sobbing and crying like a little girl every time I read it.
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### Author:  [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/10 "2006-05-03T21:15:42Z")
Flannery O’Connor’s **Wise Blood** evokes concrete and heat, and 50’s era men wearing fedoras.
I’m currently reading **In the Fall** by Jeffrey Lent (I think a Doper recommended it) and although I’ve never been to Vermont or lived on a working farm, I feel like I have.
The characters in **The Stand** came alive for me too. I’d wonder what they were doing when I wasn’t reading about them.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/11 "2006-05-03T21:19:59Z")
_**Riddley Walker
Kristin Lavransdatter
Independent People
The Dwarf
Molloy**_
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### Author:  [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/12 "2006-05-03T21:30:12Z")
Oh, thanks **AuntiePam** for reminding me that all Flannery O’Connor gives me a real creepy feeling, probably because I read them as a kid and the literal stories are so sickeningly real. I need to look again to see what I missed figuratively.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/13 "2006-05-03T21:48:27Z")
> [@gigi](#):
>
> Oh, thanks **AuntiePam** for reminding me that all Flannery O’Connor gives me a real creepy feeling, probably because I read them as a kid and the literal stories are so sickeningly real. I need to look again to see what I missed figuratively.
Flannery O’Connor’s one of my, what, top 5 or 6 favorite writers. But it’s her letters I keep returning to time after time, more than her fiction.
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### Author:  [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/14 "2006-05-03T21:48:58Z")
**gigi** , yeah, how does she do that? I was sick to my stomach after finishing A Good Man is Hard to Find. And I’m a horror fan.
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### Author:  [@mamboman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mamboman)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/15 "2006-05-03T22:00:49Z")
Delia Falconer’s two books - “The Service of Clouds” and “Lost Thoughts of Soldiers” are phenomenal in their spirit of place, and her abiliy to tie the emotions and reactions of her characters to them. She’s phenomenal.
mm
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/16 "2006-05-03T22:02:53Z")
O’Connor’s stuff is about when people choose Hell; way scarier than Stephen King.
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### Author:  [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/17 "2006-05-03T22:27:07Z")
> [@lissener](#):
>
> O’Connor’s stuff is about when people choose Hell; way scarier than Stephen King.
[hijack]One of my more surreal moments was reading _A Good Man is Hard to Find_ while seated on the porch of a shack on a blazing hot day at Flannery’s home, [Andalusia](http://www.andalusiafarm.org/home.htm). It was the first time I read the story and I didn’t know how it turned out (though I’d read many if not most of her lesser known stories). Chillbumps and sweat. The house is also spooky (especially Flannery’s monastic and dark bedroom) and the trees look like Ents in the pastures- add in her illness and her legendary [in central Georgia] mother (everybody has a “Miz Regina” story: “Yeh, I sold her fifty bales of hay in 1990 when she was about 90 years old— stood there and made me count every damned bale of it out loud, then made me take less cause some of it was too green”) and it’s no wonder she was so dark.[/hijack’
If it counts as a book since it’s a collection of articles and stories, but Capote’s [Music for Chameleons](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679745661/102-1542160-8701762?v=glance&n=283155) has some of my favorite evocative moments and one of my all time favorite sentences. In describing a very attractive black prostitute hawking her wares to him (see “numbers, wrong and misdialed”) in the French Quarter he says of her “She sounds the way bananas taste”. _THIS_, not his lifestyle or his pathological lying or other neuroses, is why Vidal hated him so much and took him to court- Gore could never in three times the normal lifespan have assembled six such simple words in a way that would bring about such a simultaneously auditory, visual, gustatory and quirky yet perfect feel.
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2006, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/18 "2006-05-03T22:39:36Z")
_Parfum_, Patrick Süskind - even in translation, it is stunningly evocative.
_Birdsong_, Sebastian Faulks - the horror of the sights and smells of World War One trenches, appallingly well rendered.
I was also very impressed with Anne Rice’s first two vampire books.
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### Author:  [@TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2006, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/19 "2006-05-04T01:22:12Z")
> [@Sampiro](#):
>
> If it counts as a book since it’s a collection of articles and stories, but Capote’s [Music for Chameleons](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679745661/102-1542160-8701762?v=glance&n=283155) has some of my favorite evocative moments and one of my all time favorite sentences. In describing a very attractive black prostitute hawking her wares to him (see “numbers, wrong and misdialed”) in the French Quarter he says of her “She sounds the way bananas taste”. _THIS_, not his lifestyle or his pathological lying or other neuroses, is why Vidal hated him so much and took him to court- Gore could never in three times the normal lifespan have assembled six such simple words in a way that would bring about such a simultaneously auditory, visual, gustatory and quirky yet perfect feel.
Amen x10000000. Why I like Capote’s nonfiction, essays, and travel writing a hundred times more than his fiction (and I love the fiction to pieces).
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### Author:  [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2006, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-evocative-book-youve-ever-read-is-here-there-be-spoilers/355282/20 "2006-05-04T02:35:28Z")
James Joyce’s “The Dead.”
Philip Pullman’s _The Golden Compass_.
Robin McKinley’s _Spindle’s End_.
All of these evoked intense images in my head.
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