For me, it’s Nabakov’s Lolita. I liked Pale Fire, and very much enjoyed Nabakov’s writing style, and I’ve considered Lolita a few times at the bookstore, but I never seem to buy it.
And, okay, this is embarassing, but…Atlas Shrugged. Partly it’s the 1,000-page length, but also it’s because I’m not so sure my pseudo-intellectual teenage appreciation for The Fountainhead (junior year of high school) will translate 15 years later.
Is there a book out there that you keep thinking about and saying, “I need to read this”, but then you never do?
And is Lolita entertaining, amusing, disturbing…or all of the above?
Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music - this has been thoroughly recommended by a friend, yet I still can’t get around to reading it.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children - This has been on my list forever. It just seems like everytime I go to the store there’s something else I want sitting in that bargain bin. Next time. I promise.
Dostoyevsky - The Idiot - I know it’s a classic and all, but it’s just so big. And there are other, shorter books currently infesting my bloated to-read list.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War - I’ve actually had this one sitting on the shelf for a year, but fiction keeps taking precedence over the great-grandaddy of history.
Since his death, I’ve been meaning to pick up some of Timothy Findley’s works but, sadly, they must start at the bottom of the to-read list like everyone else.
I’ve read the first five pages of Lolita about a dozen times, but never get around to finishing it. My attention span has been beaten down by too many years of “graphic novels” and “interactive entertainment,” and I can’t seem to… hey look! A penny!
Also: A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. I saw him at a book signing, where he read a section from it, and had the audience hanging on every word. I bought a copy, had him autograph, told him how much I loved The Snapper (both the book and the movie), took the book home, and haven’t opened it since.
And: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Heard great things about it, read the forward, started into the first chapter and didn’t make it through two pages before I just lost it. I can’t remember having such a weird reaction to a book/movie/TV show/anything – I imagined my parents dying and panicked, put the book away and haven’t touched it.
Meanwhile, I’ve read the first three Wheel of Time books; both Relic and Reliquary; a sizable chunk of the Dungeons and Dragons book The Dark Elf Trilogy, of all things; and watched every day of the last two months of the soap opera “Passions.” Hooray for the high arts!
deborak- to me, ATLAS SHRUGGED is VERY worth it (tho I still have yet to read all THE FOUNTAINHEAD or any of WE THE LIVING);
also- LOLITA qualifies as all of the above in your list; btw- of the two film versions, I recommend the 1960s Kubrick one
or maybe the upcoming animated Disney one with Lo voiced by Britney Spears; Humbert by John Lithgow; & Lo’s Mom by Kathy Najimy
This is sort of a weird one, because I don’t know the title. Anyhoo, I once heard a woman I know, sort of a friend of a friend thing, talk about a book she had read while growing up in China. Epic story, the whole love, war, death, honor thing. She said it was a Chinese classic, and that most Chinese people read it in school, or parts of it in school, or other works based upon it in school … sort of like Shakespeare in English classes. This sounded intriguing to me, so I wrote down the title, but then lost the scrap of paper. I emailed her a few months later, explaining that I lost the paper, and she emailed back with the info, and I accidentally deleted the email. Then, I wrote her AGAIN, and she told me AGAIN, and my computer crashed a few days later, etc etc.
I’m at the point now where I am too mortified to bring this up again, but I would love to track down this book. Sound familiar to anyone?
That’d be THE DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER by Tsao Hseuh-Chin.
Usually considered China’s greatest novel. But you might find the length daunting–it’s usually collected in 6 volumes. Never read it myself.
As ar as the other selections mentioned go…ATLAS SHRUGGED is beneath comment. A love-letter to the worst excesses of monopoly capitalism. This is “Mein Kampf” as rewritten by Alan Greenspan, though Hitler’s book is at least better written. LOLITA is fantastic. MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN is excellent but very much of it’s time…that Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon moment in the 70s. 'Course, Pynchon is a master, but he’s had about a million copycats who don’t have a tenth of their idol’s talent.
Books that I’ve never gotten around to reading: INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace and several of William T. Vollmann’s phone-book sized tomes.
I keep meaning to read Paradise Regained. Paradise Lost was brilliant to the point of being godlike, and Regained is like fourteen times shorter, but I never really liked anything else Milton ever wrote, so I’m wary of Paradise Regained.
Despite loving LOTR, I’d managed to get stuck two chapters into the Silmarillion on several occasions and never get further.
When I re-read LOTR around the time the movie came out I decided to have another go at the Silmarillion… but chose the read it backwards… well, not exactly backwards, but in reverse order; stories in the last section first and working forwards.
Bridget Jones’ Diary is very funny. Definitely worth reading, and it moves along very fast. Give it a try. You won’t be sorry.
For me it’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and pretty much any William Faulkner. I feel like I should have read The Sound and The Fury, but I just never got around to it.
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**Well, that REALLY review makes want to read it. :rolleyes:
I just bought A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at my library for $1.00, so if I hate it, I’m not out too much money.
Trying to work my way through Will Durant’s Story of Civilization but I have been bogged down in volume III (of 11!!) for the last year or so. (I keep getting distracted by other shiny books!)
Seriously though I am somewhat obsessed with the “survey literature” of history, having read Asimov’s little known History of the World (very readable) as well as some Gibbon and HG Wells 2 volume set. I am also trying to read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence but I think I will have to take it back to the library before I find the time to crack it open.
So I bought this beautiful, hardback copy of WAR AND PEACE at Barnes and Noble about 8 months ago, only to take it home and discover that it is abridged! (Translated and Abridged by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, it says). I normally never like to read abridged books because I want the full effect, but then I started thinking, this is a translation, I wouldn’t get the full effect anyway. Someday I hope to be able to read the original in Russian, but until then, does anyone think this abridgement will suffice, or is it worth it to get the uncut, “definitive” (if there is such a thing) translation? Actually, come to think of it, another thing that upsets me with this is that the French phrases are translated into English as well. They could at least leave that alone.
I thought of one more - the remaining Shakespeare plays that I haven’t read yet. Maybe I’m a freak, but I loves me some Shakespeare!
For me, it’s like working out at the gym - you know you’ll feel soooo good, but it’s also so easy to put off. Even though (as an English major) I adore well-written novels (sometimes the plot is secondary to beautiful writing), at the end of a long day, I reach for fluffy, mindless “beach bag” books instead of literature. I’m a total bookworm, but that doesn’t mean I automatically reach for the good stuff, even though I almost always enjoy it - or at least appreciate it.
Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card. A friend recommended it, saying it would put a new perspective on Ameican history since it’s a what if America never successfully broke away from England and somehow there’s a bunch of magic added in to the mix. Sounds good.
(we need a bookish smiley!)