# Which books would you describe as "brilliant"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 9, 2006, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164 "2006-01-09T16:02:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/121 "2015-06-30T04:27:58Z")
Catcher in the Rye. ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/122 "2015-06-30T04:47:42Z")
**Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid** on Earth by Chris Ware. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/123 "2015-06-30T16:00:41Z")
“Far Tortuga” by Peter Matthiesson. (Sp unsure). A brilliant book that straddles the line between poetry and prose without becoming in any way precious or artsy. It captures its topic, the lives of half a dozen poor doomed turtle hunters in the waning days of legal sea turtle hunting, in a way that makes their story epic, and makes longer novels with much higher word counts that aspire to “epic” seem bombastic and empty by comparison. ---
**Author:** ![stillownedbysetters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/41988e/32.png) [@stillownedbysetters](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stillownedbysetters)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/124 "2015-06-30T18:13:23Z")
Here’s a few I haven’t seen mentioned yet: _In Cold Blood_ - Truman Capote _Cutting for Stone_ - Abraham Verghese _The Devil in the White City_ - Erk Larson And read as a kid: _A Wrinkle in Time_ - Madeline L’Engle _The Phantom Tollbooth_ - Norman Juster ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/125 "2015-06-30T21:40:08Z")
This one seems appropriate for a zombie thread: Everyone in the entire universe should read Stephen King’s 11/22/1963. An absolute work of art. ---
**Author:** ![SpoilerVirgin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@SpoilerVirgin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpoilerVirgin)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/126 "2015-06-30T22:53:31Z")
Well, I saw the thread title and made a little list so that I wouldn’t forget while perusing the thread: > [@](#): > > _City of Glass > Into Thin Air > Foucault’s Pendulum_ And here is [Post #11](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6977754&postcount=11) from 2006: > [@SpoilerVirgin](#): > > _The New York Trilogy_ by Paul Auster, especially _City of Glass_ > \*Foucault’s Pendulum \*by Umberto Eco > > and a true classic of literature, \*Don Quixote \*by Cervantes At least I’m consistent. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2015, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/127 "2015-07-01T00:09:25Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > An idiosyncratic pick, but Watership Down by Richard Adams. Brilliant in concept, marvelous in execution. Seconded. Despite this thread being a zombie. > [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > This one seems appropriate for a zombie thread: Everyone in the entire universe should read Stephen King’s 11/22/1963. An absolute work of art. It’s great. But if I were to nominate a Stephen King, I’d have to pick **The Long Walk.** Or **The Stand** for an epic, but goddamn is **TLW** an amazing piece of writing. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2015, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/128 "2015-07-01T01:58:15Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > Actually though your reinvented quote works better today, I think Crane is using **wafer** in the sense of his times - the adhesive disk of paste used to seal letters. So he is saying that the sun looks like something round just stuck on up there. And it is poetic how it comes after this: > > \*He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face. The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh. > > As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves. > > The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. He shook his fist. He seemed about to deliver a philippic. > > “Hell–” > > The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.\* > > And that is the end of the chapter. > > F Scott Fitzgerald used the same meaning of **wafer** in another favorite _The Great Gatsby_: > > _A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. …_ > > See, he doesn’t mean a mere sliver of moon he means a big disc pasted up there. > > Sorry for the pedantry but in both cases I wondered what the author meant and found out. And thought it kind of interesting. Funny, I missed this response. What I would have answered was that I did understand it to be a round wafer, in fact my suspicious literary mind would have gone first to a communion wafer. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2015, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/129 "2015-07-01T22:32:47Z")
Since the last time this thread was active, I’ve remembered another one: David Griffith’s particle physics textbook. His E&M and quantum mechanics are quite good, but you could practically teach a particle physics course just by handing out a copy of his book and telling the students to read it. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [July 2, 2015, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/130 "2015-07-02T13:50:27Z")
[quote=“cmyk, post:127, topic:339164”] But if I were to nominate a Stephen King, I’d have to pick **The Long Walk.** The absolute bestest King work has to be the novella Rita Hayward and The Shawshank Redemption. No zombies, no monsters, nothing supernatural. Just a great, perfectly written tale made into a fantastic movie. And it added a word to our lexicon (shawshank–the act of framing someone for a crime). I heard Gibbs use it on NCIS. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164.md?page=6)