Anybody want to play? Collected Stories -- Flannery O'Connor
Jayber Crow -- Wendell Berry
Infinite Jest -- David Foster Wallace
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Lord of the Rings -- J.R.R. Tolkien
The Heart of the Matter -- Graham Greene
Silas Marner -- George Eliot
The Moviegoer -- Walker Percy
Sure, I'll play.
ReplyDeleteLeaving aside plays and poems (perhaps for no good reason), my favourites are:
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis
Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Half of your list I have not read.
In no particular order.
ReplyDeleteInterpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammitt
The Water Method Man - John Irving
Mother, Night - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck
Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
These are some great recommendations Andy. I am going to check out of the library and try to read the Graham Greene soon (to my shame the only book he has written that I've read was the Wind in the Willows).
ReplyDeleteAndy, nothing by Clives Staples?
ReplyDeleteOff the top of my head:
CSL: Narnia, Great Divorce, Mere Christianity
JRRT: LOTR
JKR: Harry Potter
Lee: some novel about the death of a mockingbird
Smith: some novel about some tree growing somewhere in brooklyn
Wodehouse: ANYTHING Jeeves & Wooster (and the BBC series, starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, is to die for)
Arends: Wrestling with Angels
Yancey: What's So Amazing About Grace?
David, The Wind in the Willows was written by Kenneth Grahame, not by Graham Greene. It's a great book in any case. So is Andy's recommended The Heart of the Matter. They're awfully different though.
ReplyDeletehmmmm...
ReplyDeleteAn American Childhood - Annie Dillard
A Ring of Endless Light - Madeleine L'Engle
The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O'Connor
Silence - Shusaku Endo
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale - Frederick Buechner
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
The Hidden Art of Homemaking - Edith Schaeffer
The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Peace Like A River - Leif Enger
Tender At the Bone - Ruth Reichl
The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden
(I like reading; not counting)
7 Fiction:
ReplyDeleteThe Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
Lancelot - Walker Percy
Geronimo Rex - Barry Hannah
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem - William Faulkner
Collected Stories - Flannery O'Connor
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
3 Non-fiction:
Mere Christianity - CS Lewis
The Cost of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Radical - David Platt
Off the top of my head....
ReplyDeleteHoly the Firm - Annie Dillard
Surprised by Joy - C.S. Lewis
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Confessions - St. Augustine
The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Maytrees - Annie Dillard
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
And I would probably round things out with additional works by Dillard, Lewis, or Tolkien; perhaps: For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia (especially "A Horse & His Boy"), The Lord of the Rings.
But it seems I have surpassed my limit.
Great to see Greene on your list. He deserves some of my re-reading time. Ever notice Morrissey's references to Brighton Rock in "Now My Heart Is Full" off of Vauxhall & I?
ReplyDeleteI'm getting obscure, but I do love it when the wavelengths overlap. Like a Jungian thing.