POO: encyclopedic novel

Well, I haven't read most of these, but I am a Pynchon fanboy and perhaps could be considered a Benny Profance cosplayer in my street clothes, so.

Oh, wait, he's not in GR. Still, Pynchon for me.

Ulysses, of course.

which is the only one here i've finished.

pretty sure it's the best tho

if infinite jest wins i will shoot myself in the face.

voted for the magic mountain btw, but where is the option for harry potter & the half-blood prince????

Life, A User's Manual - Georges Perec

i have that here. should read it.

No Look Homeward Angel :(

I've only read Magic Mountain and I don't remember it that well. The rest of these seem so daunting.

Oh wait I've read Moby Dick.

Didn't realize the title was hyphenated haha.

i vote ulysses, although i haven't read many of the others. i read an article about the mathematical structure that underlies life a user's manual, and it blew my mind. need to read it.

also should add that journey is my favorite book out of all of them, but it's not as encyclopedic as ulysses.

eeh i don't recall that, but it did have some trippy ideas about the purpose of life (or some people's view of it). xp.

Needs some Neal Stephenson. Only two I've read are Tristram Shandy and Midnight's Children.

Ulysses 4 Life, obv. Still need to read the Melville, Musil and Gaddis. Still never need to read Infinite Jest. Will also be cool with Tristram Shandy or GR or FW winning.

haven't read most of these, War and Peace.

Have Gaddis on my shelf to be read. Just finished Gravity's Rainbow and although it started great, felt like it went a bit downhill.

Have read:

Tolstoy,
Joyce,
Celine,
Joyce,
Pynchon.

need to read: Moby Dick. Soon.

Of these the two wittiest (of those I've read) are Tristam Shandy and Ulysses. I chose Tristam Shandy for sentimental reasons, and because it sprang more or less fully realized from out of nowhere.

I'm proud to say I've read 5 of these plus swann's way.

Moby dick and gravitys rainbow are my two favorite novels.

C'mon, The Anatomy of Melancholy!

Except I suppose it makes little sense to call that a novel. wtf. nevermind.
I'm not entirely sure what encyclopedic means in this thread, but I've read less than half of these, so I'll abstain from voting.
I've found that the only way I really enjoy Finnegans Wake is when I read it out loud in an embarrassing norwegian-irish accent, but I don't imagine I'm ever going to read the whole thing.

A Glastonbury Romance!

This is my favourite genre of book I just realised - all my favourite novels kinda fit in this category.

I just got my old copy of War and Peace down from the top of my bookshelves. Doesn't smell and it's surprisingly easy to leaf through it considering I'm pretty sure I vomited on it one night when i was a student :/

my vote just made NV angry and contributed to ians self destruction ;_;

tristam shandy and gravitys rainbow were in the running though. TS is definitely the most stunning jump in literature as an art form, such a weird out of its time frame bizarro book. still, IJ is on my top 3 of all time list so...

first is still the best. gravity's rainbow comes close though

Finnegans Wake, definitely. Though I have read a surprisingly low number of these, actually. Most of them are on my 'will read when I finally finish having gigantic piles of things to read for university' list.

Life: A User's Manual is pretty great, too, but I prefer A Void.

I'm not angry, I can happily accept that my anti-Wallace prejudice might be misguided, but what with the number of books in the world I'll never get round to reading I don't suppose I'll ever find out. Still gotta say that if you voted for that book on this list that's a pretty big claim for him, but on the strength of what I've read I feel like he can do the style but never really gets at the substance.

I've read precisely one of these. The first one. Definitely need to improve on that quotient.

Don Quixote should've probly been at the top of the list.

Bleak House should have been in here as well. That would have upped me to 2!

I don't think of Bleak House as encyclopedic so much as a biggish novel with a 100 page coach chase inexplicably tacked on near the end.

Sorry, I'm just trying to think of "all the really big books I've read". Kinda falls short at Bleak House and Tristram Shandy. Next on my list would probably be Gravity's Rainbow, then Ulysses, then Don Delillo's Underworld.

I read the first 10 pages of Gravity's Rainbow and loved them! Then I gave up out of sheer laziness. I have also read the first 10 pages of Finnegan's Wake and in that instance I gave up because I was 14 and confused.

100 page coach chase inexplicably tacked on near the end

Paid by the word, that's why.

Martin Chuzzlewit has the encylopedic thing going on.

It's all debatable tho, right, what distinguishes long from encyclopedic. Long books can be anything from Mitchener (really liked him as a teenager, no idea what I'd think now) through Lord of the Rings and the whole fantasy genre - which is at least partially predicated on being Epic - up to late-ish period Mailer like Ancient Evenings or Harlot's Ghost. Encyclopedic makes me think of Ulysses as the archetypal stuffing of a broad range of ideas or subjects into a subtext, while the plot ties the thing together but isn't the whole thing at all. Some long books do that, lots don't.

xpost

Yeah sorry I knew why really, serial publication and everything. I think it slightly dilutes the rest of the book tho, which is a shame cos it's nearly his best maybe.

POO: encyclopedic POEM is Louis Zukofsky's "A", btw. I've only read parts one through seven of 24 but trust me on this one.

Never read the guy but as an Ezra Pound stan it seems like I probly should.

Since Martin S. doesn't post here anymore, I guess it's up to me to mention Dhalgren. Totally fits the description. But of the above, I've read two and voted for Gravity's Rainbow.

Yeah, well, Noodle, Melmoth The Wanderer is awesome (if a TEENY bit rabid in its anti-Catholicism), but despite containing stories-within-stories-within-stories and being about 700 pages long it isn't really encyclopedic.

He's better than Pound imo xp

(although he himself would probably punch me for saying that)

Some folks did a Zukofsky reading at university a couple of months ago but I failed to go. Bugger.

Don Quixote definitely should have been on the list. Wouldn't have changed my vote, though.

xpost to LJ

Yeah that's what I was getting at clumsily re: encylopedic. Joyce in part sets out to write a book that's like an encylopedia: it's full of stuff, the encyclopedia is one of the models for the final form of his novel. (More so with FW I suppose since Ulysses might've been a short story that got out of hand.) I feel like Sterne didn't start out to do that but realised at some point that he could put whatever he wanted into Tristram Shandy and it became a vessel for him to pour knowledge and autobiography into.

I'm now thinking maybe Candide is a short encyclopedic novel.

DQ wouldn't have changed my vote either but it is the daddy of this really if I arbitrarily discount epic poetry and multiply-authored religious texts.

ayo where's my fukkin middlemarch, where's my fukkin decameron, where's my pile of shitty michener novels, fuk this and fuk u

the Decameron is pish.

carry on the blackdeath.

middlemarch is my JAM <33

as a dude who loooves white noise and who sorta likes baseball, underworld is pretty much unreadable 2 me... i can never get past that boring opening chapter

I'm proud to say I've read 5 of these plus swann's way.

I am also proud to say that I've read 5 of these plus A Cote du Chez Swann. Ryan, which have you read?

Me:
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
Gravity's Rainbow
Midnight's Childrin (this one seems out of place to me)

Oh, and JD, you misspelled two of the books: it's Finnegan's Wake and Gravitys Rainbow, actually.

is that a joke?

It looks like the deadline for this poll should be extended to give us all the reading time and contemplation on the whole of this 'encyclopedic novel' business.

And on the true spelling of the Rushdie.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I really want to read Magic Mountain. I know nothing about it – I just like the idea of it. Unfortunately, the used bookstore does not have a copy. Any other Thomas Mann recs?

yo abbott I got a basically untouched copy of Magic Mountain on my shelf I can send you if you want

btw of this list, I have...

... read:
- Ulysses
- Tristram Shandy

... started as a precocious high-schooler and never finished:
- Gravity's Rainbow
- Magic Mountain
- Infinite Jest

... started as a pretentious college student and never finished:
- In Search of Lost Time

... bought and never opened:
- The Man Without Qualities

also I just randomly picked up Life: A User's Manual at the used book store a couple days ago, without having ever heard of it before (although I recognized Perec's name from Oulipo stuff)

POO: encyclopedic POEM is Louis Zukofsky's "A", btw. I've only read parts one through seven of 24 but trust me on this one.

I wish you meant your favorite volume of the encyclopedia was "A," like the girl in Maniac McGee.

ZOMG so sorry. It is actually titled Maniac Magee.

i voted tolstoy but i dont understand this thread

I emailed you bernard.

I'm pretty sure I registered my ILX account with an email address that I no longer have access to >_<

try:
otherfeet at gee, mail! daught cawm

if infinite jest wins i will shoot myself in the face.

― ian

Holy shit, this is too perfect! From the Infinite Jest characters page:

Eric Clipperton - tennis player who played with a 'Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm' pointed at his temple and threatened to commit suicide if he ever lost.

Another contender: Anthony Trollope's 'The Way We Live Now"
I voted for Tristram Shandy, because it's just so damn good and as everyone says above, completely came out of nowhere for its time.

Abbott, what is about the idea of Magic Mountain that makes you want to read it? I also have an almost untouched copy of it on my bookshelf. Even a Cliff's notes (I got them both for $1 a few months ago). I'm waiting to finish lol grad school before I get into any encyclopedic novels.

A gut reaction vote took me to Ulysses, though Infinite Jest would have stood a very good chance if I'd thought about it a bit more, as would Proust and Moby Dick, both of which I thought were excellent.

Of these I have read only four that follow and am now wondering what the hell I did during my four years studying book learning.

Moby-Dick
Gravity’s Rainbow
Midnight’s Children
Infinite Jest

Oh those I'm going to have to say Gravity's Rainbow although I do really love Midnight's Children.

http://assets.stepinsidedesign.com/stepicons/15487.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wait what just happened
xp oh right

I am clairvoyant, I guess

Intersting. Surprised that no-one here voted for Musil, as these forums was where I was first tipped off about The Man Without Qualities' existence, though I've yet to make a real crack at actually reading it.

Who's representing for Finnegans Wake?

I think I voted for the winner, but thought about writing in Lanark.

Ah yes, that would have been a very worthy addition to the choices.

Dear The Man Without Qualities,

I am sorry that you got no votes in this poll when I totally want to think you're the best thing ever but am kind of daunted by your size and have left you unread on my bedroom floor for months.

Yrs,
someone who shouldn't be on this thread if they can't read a damn book just cz it's longer than 300 pages

http://www.libraryofmath.com/pages/graphs-of-sine-and-cosine/Images/graphs-of-sine-and-cosine_gr_8.gif

No, YOU lysses!

Eric Clipperton - tennis player who played with a 'Glock 17 semiautomatic sidearm' pointed at his temple and threatened to commit suicide if he ever lost.

Clearly Infinite Jest lost on purpose, just like everyone did with Clipperton. (Although Clipperton did not exactly come to a good end, did he? The, umm, "Clipperton Suite?")

yeah ha weren't like Mario and James Inc, like, witness to Clipperton's suicide?

also--i can't remember if i voted for Moby Dick, the Recognitions, or Infinite Jest

george eliot was in todays ny times x-word

i got thru the first volume of man w/o qualities. it was a struggle and i was not really into it. voted gravity's rainbow.

Apparently this might be a challop on this thread but I fucking hate George Eliot. My senior seminar that was a full year course was on Eliot and Conrad and while the Conrad part was rad, I really struggled with the Eliot stuff. It just wasn't my thing. Maybe I'd feel differently if I reread her now.

I hate George Eliot, but I love Mary Ann.

Silas Marner was fucking comedy gold if you ask me.

Also this: Freshman Term Paper Discovers Something Totally New About Silas Marner

Alright, maybe I'll have to give her a 2nd chance. This was over 10 years ago so I might well like it now.

I mean I appreciated it in the same way of Castle of Otranto or something, like, 'oh my gosh where the hell did this come from?'

Okay all I really remember is Molly locked in the attic, flipping out on a laudanum binge, plus – damn – the writing style.

Yeah, I'm going to have to give it another shot.

Silas Marner was one of the books I read in high school English that I've totally forgotten everything about except the fact that I had to read it.

You'd think Burt Stanton at the very least would have voted for Celine. ILX misanthropes are falling down on the job here.

Mistah Stanton, he dead

Abbott, what is about the idea of Magic Mountain that makes you want to read it?

I have to admit it is because of a Blonde Redhead song. *blushes*

I was the only Finnegans Wake voter? Bah. Still, I'm glad Ulysses won.

Gravity's Rainbow was the only one of these that I've read.

Silas Marner was one of the books I read in high school English that I've totally forgotten everything about except the fact that I had to read it.

― i have very little to do right now and wanted to make a comment (sarahel), Wednesday, April 1, 2009 3:30 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i saw the wishbone ep

Haha I wanted to bring up the Wishbone ep so bad.

Every time I go to start one of these, I just end up reading another Umberto Eco book instead.

I've started, and not finished, exactly three of these. Moby Dick deserves another stab and Ulysses and the Pynchon have been on my list for years.