Ten Books To Read Before You Die...

The Moviegoer
Gravity's Rainbow
The Tragic Sense of Life
The Trouble With Being Born
Moby Dick
The World as Will and Representation
The Birth of Tragedy
The Gift of Death
Being and Time
The Woodlanders

The Bible
Mein Kampf
Dianetics
Atlas Shrugged
The Da Vinci Code
Jurassic Park
Horton Hears a Who
The Pelican Brief
Pet Sematary
The Crying of Lot 49

hunger- knut hamsen
glass bead game - hermann hesse
the fountainhead - ayn rand
make way for ducklings -robert mccloskey
siddhartha - hermann hesse
9 stories- salinger
the sound and the fury- faulkner
notes from the underground- dostoyevsky

Dhalgren by Sam Delany
The 1001 Nights
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
Ficciones or Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
Seventh Heaven by Alice Hoffman
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Glass-Bead Game by Gunter Grass
Blandings Omnibus (I may have made this book up) by P.G. Wodehouse

Nah, Don Quixote.

1. "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger - yeah, an obvious choice, but damn if ain't ever a classic.
2. "Et Tu, Babe" by Mark Leyner - I laughed so hard I cried.
3. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris - Ditto, only more so.
4. "The Illiad" by Homer - Nevermind its more celebrated sibling, "The Odyssey," "The Illiad" is filled with bloodshed and betrayal and espionage and warfare and vengeance and all because of a woman (ain't that always the way?)
5. "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote - Because it farkin' rocks, obviously.
6. "A Handful of Dust" by Evelyn Waugh - You'd never know it, but I digs the Waugh!
7. "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster - just `cos.
8. The Ghormanghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peak - `cos it's excellent.
9. "The Westies" by T.J. English - the Irish Mob in NYC' s Hell's Kitchen - awesome!
10. "Helter Skelter" by Vincent Bugliosi - the death knell of hippie culture and true crime at its veritable zenith.

11. "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain - hilarious and informative.

I have never seen anyone claim Don Quixote as Postmodernist - the usual ancient citation is Tristram Shandy - but I agree that you could easily make a case (a not dissimilar case, based on referentiality and ironic parody, to that you could make for Madame Bovary and Northanger Abbey). I don't think it would be that strong or useful a case, though.

pretty much anything by fitzgerald
anna karenina, but the rest of the tolstoy canon can fuck right off
the ground beneath her feet by rushdie
the picture of dorian gray by wilde
kokoro by soseki
the plague by camus
anything by salinger (even his book of short stories, and i HATE short stories as a rule)
the idiot by dotoyevsky

xpost

Dune--Frank Herbert
The Dragonlance Chronicles/Legends--Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Legend--David Gemmell
Gormenghast/Titus Groan--Mervyn Peake
The Silmarillion--JRR Tolkien
The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath--HP Lovecraft
Conan the Conqueror--Robert E. Howard
Childhood's End--Arthur C. Clarke
The Elfstones of Shannara--Terry Brooks
The Worm Ouroboros--ER Eddison

1. Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
3. Baudolino - Umberto Eco
4. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
5. The Cider House Rules - John Irving

no one has said mason and dixon yet

plus also:
captain slaughterboard drops anchor by mervyn peake
the white deer by james thurber
no more school by william mayne
moominvalley midwinter by tove jansson
minima moralia by theodor w. adorno (no it's really good!)
the safety of objects by a.m. homes
whipping star by frank herbert
shot in the heart by mikal gilmore
arcades project by walter benjamin
devil's dictionary by ambrose bierce

ok that's 11 but 10 can fuck a dick

Cronopios and Famas, Julio Cortazar
Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Yasunori Kawabata
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
The Palm Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francoise Rabelais
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Novel on Yellow Paper, Stevie Smith

Don Quixote (just the greatest, funniest, most moving book ever)
Canterbury Tales (it's post-modern meta-fiction too!)
Sound & The Fury - William Faulkner (the Trout Mask Replica of literature - once you get it, you're ready for anything)
Milan Kundera - Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera (not as dazzling as 100 years, but beautiful)
Alisdair Gray - Lanark (fuck Martin Amis, THIS is the greatest, most visionary British novel of the past 25 years. Half semi-autobiographical bildungsroman about the artist as a young man in Glasgow, half dystopian sci-fi, with mischievous narrative trickery and various levels of reference.)

Much to my shame I've not gotten round to the Russians yet. Hey, I'm only 24!

"good summation of the entire scope of published works in the entire world ever."

Yes mouse, thanks!

...and translations don't count!!!

Well, in the sense that you've got a character called Geoffrey Chaucer who isn't necessarily the same person as the narrator, the whole pilgrims telling stories structure and the way their characters inform/are informed by the tales, the way the tales themselves often parody, subvert or transform established genres...

I was just agreeing with the point that some supposedly sub-modern devices aren't as new as some think.

i'll also throw in my usual plugs for "master & margarita" and basically anything by flannery o'connor

and a bunch of the ones already suggested.

and, of course,

10. GMAT Math Workout Jack Schieffer

I can think of an avalanche of female authors who are both good writers and good thinkers; here's a short sample:

Philosophy/Theory/Criticism: Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Susan Sontag, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Joan Copjec, Maria Torok, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Hannah Arendt . . .

Novelists: Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Austen, Kathy Acker . . .

Poets: Sappho, Marianne Moore, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout . . .

The list of brilliant and talented women is very long, and gets longer all the time. But Ayn Rand will never be on it. She is undoubtedly famous and popular. But that doesn't make her good.

it makes me vaguely sad that only two of these were read post-highschool, but i really haven't found much since then...

we like cutting her down partially because so many people are dogmatic followers of her thought, something few romance writers can claim. and about the female characters...you mentioned hesse and tolkien. they are men! but wouldn't you expect that a woman, who was taken seriously as a thinker by some and apparently wrote whatever she wanted, would have some good female characters?

Writer is the wrong word: Rand is a terrible prose stylist. She's wooden and repetitive and stilted. She is, however, a compelling storyteller. Different strengths. Otherwise, no one would ever finish Atlas Shrugged. Similarly, Stephen King can't "write" his way out of a paper bag--horrible use of the language. But clearly a vivid imagination and eye for horror--a brilliant and successful storyteller. Or John Grisham.

No one has the slightest obligation to include strong female characters in the books she writes. That has never been part of the definition of good writing. This kind of argument is nonsense. Akin to the Conrad was a racist and Wagner a Nazi tripe. A more sophisiticated response would be to ask why an apparently strong woman didn't include same in novels. Is it intentional? Is it a reaction to something? Does it mean something?

Ultimately, the books aren't novels, they're manifestos--screeds. Manifestos are inherently bad, blunt writing: they deny the possibility of subtlety, of other truths, other correct points of view. This, I think, is really why people love or hate her. Readers are reacting to her belief that people forge--entirely alone--their own destinies, are responsible for their own actions and the consequences; and that the state owes them nothing--indeed, can't give them anything. Again--if this isn't the manifesto of your belief system, you won't like it. And again--as a manifesto, her system doesn't allow any heterodoxy. But that positivist message is sure to be hated in a relativist world where governments are held responsible for taking care of everyone.

her writing is horrible. i would say that your comparison to stephen king laughable. king, though clearly no shakespeare, is a good storyteller and i would say has more than acceptable command of the language and engages the reader to the character quite adeptly, something rand seems completely incapable of. he doesn't attempt to marry his reader to his themes, but rather to draw them into the narrative. you may as well compare danielle steele to the person who wrote your high school motto. and i do not point out the weakness of her female characters as a lack in fulfilling any obligation other than a literary one. her characters, both male and female but more strikinly the latter, are one dimensional and extremely predictable to a point which renders them inhuman and impossible for the reader to identify with. this is a flaw in fictional prose and also in anything deemed "manifesto", though i would argue that "allegory" would be the more appropriate term to her fiction.

Allegory is an interesting word to describe Rand. I think you're correct, but it doesn't rule out manifesto, of course. Anyway all philosphy rendered in manifesto form is by nature "reactionary and simplistic." That's what a manifesto is. Moreover, almost any movement of any sort is reactionary in some way: art, politics, literature. Nothing is truly sui generis. "Reactionary" is not a useful term. It's generally code for "I find the issue/person at hand repugnant-and more politically conservative than I am-but don't want to elaborate so I'll just say reactionary."

Anyway, as I've already said twice now, I think Ayn Rand is a terrible writer. But she's not in the least similar to Danielle Steele. She's a serious thinker and writer. A deliberate intellectual. The problem is, she couldn't write very well and her politics are seen as simplistic in our advanced "modern" times. I think she's an important writer, if a bad one (mainly because she wanted to be an important writer. That's usually all we require of an artist in order to be worthy of study, the desire to be taken seriously).

But again, I must repeat, she's a terrible prose stylist.