Hello all. I really love diving through everybody’s recommendations for movies and games. I still frequently look over the lists generated from our polls whenever I’m trying to figure out what to spend my spare time doing. That said, I realize that I don’t have a good sense of what books SB people enjoy, which ones hit people the hardest.
That’s why I want to make this thread so people can share 12 books* that are special to them. People don’t have to give reasons and I will not be tallying up votes to make some kind of ranked thing. I will be making some kind of spreadsheet for my own reference, sortable by language, genre, etc. I guess I could share that so others can use it too.
*I define “books” as anything in writing: novels, epic poems, short story collections, a poet’s life of work, plays, webpages, nonfiction. If you’re bringing up a work translated into another language, I’d like it if you shared your favorite translation. I really want to cast as wide a net as possible.
Here’s my list, in chronological order
The Iliad
Su Hui’s Star Gauge
Shahnameh translated by Dick Davis
Canterbury Tales
The Faerie Queene
Dream of the Red Chamber translated by David Hawkes
Haiku by Issa
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Sun Also Rises
Lolita
Gravity’s Rainbow
high life
wraiths of the broken land
memoirs of a spacewoman
cows
dr rat
lolita
a feast unknown
the sympathizer
mulata
dictionary of the khazars
cult x
empty mile
yes i tripled down on one author. im playing favorites
The Player of Games
World as Will and Representation Vol I
Foucault’s Pendulum
Steppenwolf
The Man who was Thursday
Finite and Infinite Games
Rationality: AI to Zombies
Popper Selections
Arms and Influence
The Rebel
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Letters from a Stoic
These are not necessarily my top 12. That would take too much thought. These are just 12 that came to mind right away, though some would definitely make my “real” list. I’ve put them in alphabetical order.
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Ecclesiastes by Kohelet
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (I know, I know.)
In Yana, the Touch of Undying by Michael Shea
The Righeous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
(Also, some of the most memorable books I’ve read in the past few years have been recommendations from Daphny and are in their list.)
Edit: I just realized that one of mine should definitely have been Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I’ll just be lazy and mention it here rather than figure out what to replace.
My tastes are a mix of very mainstream and received SB wisdom, plus also probably not very good. I’m going to lean into it. I’m trying not to read anybody else’s entries yet.
Samuel Delany, dhalgren
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy / omnibus
Ij/pale king- DFW
Rings of Saturn -Sebald
2666-Bolano
Home -Saunders
Ducks Newburyport -Ellman
Raise High -Salinger
Mezzanine -Baker
Lost scrapbook -Dara
Notes from the Underground -Dostoevsky
Gravity’s Rainbow -Pynchon
Building stories -Ware
The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reprroduction -Benjamin
Top of the head, traffic thoughts about favorite things to read/most influentual on my brain. Think JR will bump something off, probably the mezzanine or raise high though I will forever have a dumb crush on Seymour Glass and, man!, parts of the mezzanine are so pretty to read. What can I say, I love ramblin’ softies
One thing I intentionally left out of my list was comics, because I don’t know how I’d go about deciding how many/which ones to include and what to replace with them.
WELL NOW YOU GOTTA PUT IT IN. high life is my favorite, because I’ve watched so many people chase fame, but empty mile is the scariest because it takes place where I used to go on field trips all the time and get lost and seperated from the group and scared I was gonna die out there in the woods. maybe including it feels like I’m telling too much about myself so I gotta take it out for protection BUT I JUST SPILLED THE BEANS HERE OH NOOOO
jules renard’s journal
xavier de maistre - journey around my room by night
frederick seidel - ooga booga
greil marcus - mystery train
flannery o’connor - wise blood
christopher isherwood - down there on a visit
thomas pynchon - mason & dixon
samuel beckett - endgame
robert walser - any collection of short pieces
cellini’s autobiography
grimmelhausen - simplicissimus
thomas mann - the magic mountain
Le Morte d’Arthur
The Hobbit
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade*
The Faerie Queene
The Master and the Margarita
The Time Machine
Hamlet
The Maltese Falcon
The Sign of the Four
As I Lay Dying
Emma
Alice in Wonderland
Our Lady of the Flowers - Genet
Humboldt’s Gift - Bellow
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Mishima
The Tin Drum - Grass
The Rings of Saturn - Sebald
Pale Fire - Nabokov
Wittgenstein’s Mistress - Markson
The Loser - Bernhard
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
Against Interpretation - Sontag
The Counterfeiters - Gide
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems - Gibson
On the Sublime (Pseudo-Longinus)
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Rubaiyat (Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald 1st edition translation)
The Face in the Frost (Bellairs)
Star Maker (Stapledon)
Lud-in-the-Mist (Mirrlees)
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais)
War with the Newts (Capek, Osers translation)
Kindred (Butler)
The Mabinogion (Gantz translation)
Theory of Prose (Shklovsky)
The Neverending Story (Ende)
The most overlap I have if I included books others have listed is with wourme and shrug, unsurprisingly