Which books would you describe as "brilliant"?

[Lucas_Jackson]

Catcher in the Rye.

[Son_of_a_Rich]

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware.

[Evil_Captor]

“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.

[stillownedbysetters]

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

[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.

[SpoilerVirgin]

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 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.

[cmyk]

@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.

[Maserschmidt]

@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.

[Chronos]

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.

[Annie-Xmas]

[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.