A museum has commissioned a major retrospective of your life and want a list of (x) must-read books to go with it. What is on that list?

Following talk on the Bowie books thread, where there was specific enthusiasm for emil.y's list, but hell throw it open and see what comes up.

Let's think.

• You've got a lot of fans. You'll want to point them at the interesting stuff.
• This is ~posterity~. You may as well pose a bit.
• Doesn't really matter how long the list is. People will prob glaze over after 25 or so and anyway who has time to do a hundred? (Bowie, that's who.)
• What is so bad about curating your taste anyway?
• But really this is an excuse to post lists of books that will cause enthusiasm for books they don't know in ppl who know they already like books in your list that they do know, if you get what I'm saying.

I will come up with something tomorrow I hope but frankly I am half cut and will just as likely wonder in the morning what I was doing starting this thread.

Wallace Stevens - The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems
Louise Fitzhugh - Harriet the Spy
Gore Vidal - Lincoln
Emerson - Essays
John Cheever - Stories
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Hannah Arendt - On Revolution
Joan Didion - Miami
Edmund Wilson - The Shores of Light
James Merrill - Selected Poems
Oscar Wilde - Stuff
T.S Eliot - Collected Essays
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

middlebrow list perhaps but im ok with that. really, most of the books i love are stuff that im sure everyone knows. heres a bunch of books that need more love and i dont hear about (or enough of)

anne enright - the gathering
simon reynolds - energy flash
sherwood anderson - winesburg ohio
robert stone - dog soldiers
boualem sansal - an unfinished business
simon garfield - the wrestling
eugene lyons - assignment in utopia
david gates - preston falls
george moore - a drama in muslin
james young - nico: songs they never play on the radio

Oscar Wilde - Stuff

oh you

I will think about a list. Firstly I must make dinner.

Ivan I Morris - The nobility of failure: Tragic heroes in the history of Japan
William Burroughs - The soft machine
Edward Gibbon - The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire
Deleuze & Guattari - A thousand plateaus
John Clellon Holmes - Go
Ted Hughes - Collected poems
Jonathan Swift - Collected works
Lord Macaulay - History of England
M.R. James - Ghost stories
Ezra Pound - The cantos
Luther Blissett - Q
Nelson Algren - The man with the golden arm
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected works
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical inverstigations
Richard Hoggart - The uses of literacy
Matt Thorne - Eight minutes idle
Albert Camus - The fall
Albert Camus - The rebel
Jacqueline Susann - Valley of the dolls

Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Janet Malcolm - The Silent Woman
Donald Barthelme - 60 Stories
Steven Bach - Final Cut
Steve Gerber - Howard the Duck
Bob Dylan - Chronicles
Phillip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Roger Lewis - The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift
David Thomson - The Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (2nd Edition)
William Gaddis - Carpenter's Gothic
Robin Wood - Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
Robert Coover - Spanking the Maid
Raymond Durgnat - A Long Hard Look at Psycho
George Saunders - Civilwarland in Sad Decline

I kept thinking I'd just quickly check some list of books I really liked, but I don't have a list like that anywhere. Never made one, & there is no magical iTunes star-rating/play count device hidden behind my bookshelves. It was interesting to put it together (revisiting the past, recalling enthusiasms and reading sessions at different ages, things friends put me on to), but a little deflating. Explicit expressions of my own taste are always a bit disheartening to me. Still, I do love these books.

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
The English Auden
Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling 
John Dryden  - Poems (4 vols ed J Kinsley, Spent 5 years with this fucker, I imagine my copy will be in the exhibition)
Philip Larkin - High Windows (tbh choosing this rather than the collected poems because I think single volumes look more sophisticated)
Evelyn Waugh - A Handful of Dust
Nicolas Chamfort - Reflections
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
Gustave Flaubert - Letters
Nick Tosches - Dino
Lawrence Osborne - The Poisoned Embrace
William Gaddis - JR
Frederick Exley - A Fan's Notes
PG Wodehouse - Code of the Woosters
Marianne Moore - Complete Poems
David Maurer - The Big Con
Joan Didion - The White Album
Los Bros Hernandez - Love and Rockets
Daniel Clowes - Eightball
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Thomas Browne - Garden of Cyrus
Tom McCarthy - Remainder
Stendahl - Rouge & Noir
John Gray - Straw Dogs
JG Ballard - Complete Stories
Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Arthur C Danto - Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
Borges - Labyrinths
Henry Fielding - Amelia
John Donne - Songs and Sonnets
George Dyson - Darwin Among the Machines
2000AD (to about prog 800 or so)
Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground
William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity
Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly
MR James - Collected Stories
Samuel Johnson - Lives of the Poets
Jocelyn Brooke - Image of a Drawn Sword (something about Fizzles in the accompanying catalogue essay here)
John Aubrey - Brief Lives
John Ashbery - Selected Poems
Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine
David Thomson - Biographical Dictionary of Film
Keith Thomas - Religion and the Decline of Magic
Elizabeth Bishop - Complete Poems
Robert Lowell - Imitations
Henry Green - Loving

Robin Wood - Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan

YES!

I was just recommended that book earlier today

Ward's ranking the Wood book makes me now wanna read everything else on that list. Already read A Scanner Darkly and Chronicles; bought a used copy of Final Cut a few years back but haven't read it yet.

crypto ty, think you wld def enjoy the durgnat if you like the wood - they're of a similar generation to each other, and tho' they are v. different people/theorists, they are both wild, excellent close readers of all kinds of films.

the only recent film crit bk to come close to the wood, for me, is The Material Ghost by Gilberto Perez, do you know it?

the only thing worse than other peoples lists of books is yr own

Installment #1, The Early Years:

Anabasis, Xenophon
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Tao Teh Ching, Lao-Tzu
Roughing It, Mark Twain
100 Poems from the Chinese, Kenneth Rexroth
Personae & ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps

i think for me it would be all sci-fi now. i'm so in love with it as a genre after ignoring it my entire life. who knew? and i have ray bradbury to thank for that. all my inspiration comes from sci-fi now. though i still buy normal books on occasion and i have a ton of normal books i still want to get to. and my normal list would be way more middle-brow than david bowie's list, i think. most of my heroes are pretty trad. and everything i learned that i didn't learn from them i learned from mad magazine and the national lampoon and Dazzler comics and Robert Crumb and t.v. i'm like a pop culture dumping ground. but the collected works of jack douglas would have to be on any list. he was such a big influence on me. and my boyhood faves like sinclair lewis and stephen king and sid fleischman and charles addams and shel silverstein and woody allen and donald e. westlake. i guess i'll just always love storytellers best. and jews apparently. man, i love those jews. where would i be without them? my adult faves are so normal. and typical, i guess. although, i don't know how many people own 20+ novels by louis auchincloss. actually the ladies and the jews. they are my biggest inspiration. i have learned so much from the ladies. everything i really need to know, pretty much. elizabeth taylor, muriel spark, janet frame, shirley jackson, flannery o'connor, barbara pym, joy williams, pauline kael, alice munro, ivy compton-burnett, patricia highsmith, sara orne jewett. my hall of fame. kael the only critic/non-fictioner. and chesterton and mencken would be the only other crits other than novelists or poets who critted. and my dudes are bellow and elkin and malamud and carver and dahlberg and crane and yates and abe and purdy and thurber and dos passos for u.s.a which had a profound effect on me. and brodkey's stories in an almost classical mode for the possibilities. and darius james for that's blaxploitation, the first book i ever read that made me want to write a book. and lardner and flaubert and dostoyevsky and jim thompson and von kleist and o'hara and james. and paula fox for desperate characters. and christina stead for the man who loved children. and marilynne robinson for housekeeping. and patricia eakins for the hungry girls and other stories. but dahlberg, man, if i could write like that i would totally write like that. and i would be the only person writing like that. and when i say woody allen not so much for his books - which i read as a kid and they mostly went over my head - but for his comedic writing because comedy writing and comedy writers my big influences other than fiction writers. my education begins with jean shepherd, soupy sales, the marx brothers, george carlin, hudson & landry, shelley berman, don rickles, jonathan winters, firesign theatre, richard pryor, bill cosby, carl reiner and mel brooks, and so many others. the writing of those people. though everything they did isn't written down. and warner brothers cartoons. mel blanc probably my favorite person who ever lived. language is amazing. i dig john donne! i really love all those metaphysical bastards. that's my kinda stuff.

wait, "must-read", nobody needs to read the Dazzler or the National Lampoon...

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Margaret Drabble, The Millstone
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice bobs her hair and other stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Louise Fitzhugh, The Long Secret
Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child
Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Henry James, The Europeans
Walter Karp, The Politics of War
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head
Katherine Mansfield, The garden party and other stories
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger, New Yorker Stories 1947-1965
Siegfried Sassoon, War Poems
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

^^ includes one book that does not actually physically exist, as my way of cheating and rolling three books into one

i forgot katherine mansfield...

i forgot Flann O'Brien

NV's list makes me think I have to read The Nobility of Failure.

I can't tell whether this is for books that are about who you are, or books that other people should read. I don't like telling other people what they should read.

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamazov
Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
David Foster Wallace - The Broom of the System
Lacan - Seminars (for gods sake not the Ecrits. they are pretentious!)
Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Illitch
William Gass - Willie Masters Wife
Gilbert Sorrentino - Under the Shadow
Solsjenitsyn - The First Circle
Garcia Marquez - Autumn of the Patriarch
Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo
Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
Svend Aage Madsen - Vice and Virtue in the Middle Time
The Sermon on the Mount (every 'christian' should be forced to learn this by heart. fuck the 'credo's and 'pater noster's)
Deleuze & Guattari - Thousand Plateaus
Sloterdijk - Critique of Cynical Reason
Joyce - Ulysses
Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Deleuze - Cinema 1 & 2
Simon Reynolds - Bring the Noise
Toni Morrison - Beloved

Hm, and eighty more or so. This is difficulter than I thought.

already taken

Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamazov
Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
JG Ballard - Complete Stories
Donald Barthelme - 60 Stories
Nelson Algren - The man with the golden arm
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected works
sherwood anderson - winesburg ohio

I haven't thought about this at all but these are all super important books to me

frederik's choice of willie masters is interesting to me cause I'm trying to decide which gass to pick and there are about 5 ahead of thatn

dfw - infinite jest
roth - sabbaths theater
updike - rabbit series
final cut (heaven's gate thing)
arthur phillips - the egyptologist
delillo - mao 2
dean young - all poems
marilynn robinson - housekeeping
sam lipsyte - home land
richard lloyd perry - people who eat darkness
chris bachelder - lessons in virtual tour photography
curtis sittenfeld - the man of my dreams
rivka galchen - atmospheric disturbances

& some others idk, prob plenty of short stories too

frederik's choice of willie masters is interesting to me cause I'm trying to decide which gass to pick and there are about 5 ahead of thatn

― swmp thing (wins), 3. oktober 2013 00:32 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's the only one I've read... Love it though. It's only with the new Showtime-series I've realized the title must be a reference to William H Masters, the gynecologist.

oh man read the rest, that guy rules

thinking a little more, sticking to stuff that really shook me up

john barth, the sot-weed factor/letters/chimera/tidewater tales
thomas pynchon, against the day
angela carter, black venus
william gass, on being blue/temple of texts/omensetter's luck/cartesian sonata/middle c/in the heart of the heart of the country
william faulkner, as i lay dying
stephen king, it
ishmael reed, the last days of louisiana red
celine, death on credit
leonard cohen, beautiful losers
gabriel garcía márquez, 100 days of solitude
alasdair gray, lanark
james kelman, not not while the giro
viz, profanisaurus
donald barthelme, not knowing
stanley elkin, the franchiser/the dick gibson show
robert coover, the public burning
david thomson, a biographical dictionary of film
ian penman, vital signs
david peace, the damned utd

I can't tell whether this is for books that are about who you are, or books that other people should read.

i totally took this to be "books that are formative or representative of me if i was in a slightly tawdry museum exhibition"

NV's list makes me think I have to read The Nobility of Failure.

it's a semi-scholarly retelling of mostly well known episodes from Japanese myth/history but the way it's arranged and the title/theme and the blurriness of its lines between fact, conjecture and blatant hagiography is just right

also it was that best of all book types, the random find in a library sale for 20p

Infancy:

I am adopted - susan lapsley
dr. desoto - william steig
mary poppins in the park - p.l. travers
some dragonlance thing - weis & hickman
fade - robert cormier

Childhood:

manchild in the promised land - claude brown
portrait of a pimp - iceburg slim
autobiography of charlie chaplin - charles chaplin
watership down - richard adams
the great ponds - elechi amadi

The lover:
ulysses - joyce
le grand meaulnes - alain fournier
in youth is pleasure - denton welch
dhalgren - delany

i totally took this to be "books that are formative or representative of me if i was in a slightly tawdry museum exhibition"

Yes, the ones with the nicest covers will be available in the museum/gallery shop.

Near the tote bags

herman melville - the confidence man
robert musil - the man without qualities
elias canetti - auto-da-fé
philip larkin - selected poems
frank o'hara - selected poems
raymond carver - what we talk about when we talk about love
halldor laxness - independent people
jd saliinger - catcher in the rye
primo levi - if this is a man
haruki murakami - underground

i'm probably forgetting some here.

Jack London - The Call of the Wild
JRR Tolkein - Lord of the Rings
George Orwell - 1984
Franz Kafka - The Trial
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Ian Macdonald - Revolution in the Head
Jonathan Lethem - Fortress of Solitude
Louis de Bernieres - Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows
Victor Klemperer - I Will Bear Witness
Junto Diaz - Drown
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty
Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Don DeLillo - Libra
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater
John Updike - Rabbit series
Don DeLillo - Underworld
Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair

I forgot Paul Auster - The Music Of Chance

I forgot Henry Treece - The Viking Saga

the only recent film crit bk to come close to the wood, for me, is The Material Ghost by Gilberto Perez, do you know it?

No! But consider it added to my non-grad school reading list (meaning, I'll get to it one of these years).

Henry Treece - The Viking Saga

^ oh boy, those were my favourites when I was nine or ten! that and the tripods trilogy, agaton sax and sherlock holmes

Perez wrote this article on Haneke, which I was agnostic on after getting over the meaty-ness of it.

Striking a pose:

Ruskin - Hope the hatchet job of this upcoming film actually encourages
more re-prints and collections of essays.
Proust - In Search of Lost time. More slow-mo fiction in the big city with more commas and essays and Ruskin.
Hazlitt - Liber Amoris. The essays are magnificent but its that writing where everything is open and shame isn't a word in the dictionary.
Pavese - Diaries. The novels are for all time but I'll go for the odd one out publication. A hodge-podge of misogny, notes on literature and all-round despair. Suicide at 41.
Mishima - Sun and Steel. Suicide at 45. My 2nd favourite (body or otherwise) fascist and fatalist. This - apart from Patrotism - is his manifesto. Read all you can tho'.
Celine - Death on Credit. My number one fascist. Died of bitterness. This has the right balance between ellipsis overload and paranoic breakdowns.
Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet. Another fascist, but he'd rather watch sunsets.
Bernhard - Old Masters. He could only wish the bitterness or suicide consumed him, but the money was good and the middle-classes kept lapping it up. His greatest performance.
Denton Welch - Diaries. Crazy there this hasn't been re-printed. He was our Proust!
Genet - Querelle. Talking about performances...
Hubert Selby - The Room. And yet more...I should just place my copy in the freezer and keep it there..
Arthur Schnitzler - some of the best "what is hidden beneath"-type fiction in his Games of Love and Death collection. Due a re-read.
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood. More posing.
Musil - The Man Without Qualities. I have missed stops in the tube on more than the odd occassion whilst reading this. A mark of, ahem, quality.
Juan Rulfo - just incredibly intense, so different from the "carnival" of other Latin American fiction.
Rabelais - the best carnival.
Boccaccio - best Arabian Nights rip-off.
Krudy - The Adventures of Sinbad. The Hungarian version. We all need one.
Bolano - 2666. Best of the last 25 years?
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai. This is the other one. The best ILB reading group ever. We will never be this positive again! Got me to discover the world of Icelandic Sagas.
Jim Thompson - I have a dream to collect them all and read 'em over a week.
Sciascia - Day of the Owl but also Equal Danger/To Each his Own/The Moro Affair. Nothing is solved because we don't want it to be!
Platonov, Victor Serge, Shamalov - they believed in it, they were killed by it. And Platonov reads so bizarrely (and yet believably) in English. Be interesting to see what happens to his bizarre post-soviet reputation if Robert Chandler ever finishes translating Chevengur.
Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope against Hope. Brodsky called it "a judgement on the age" or what have you and it really feels like that.

I'll re-read ILX's number one book Gravity's Rainbow and report back someday on whether this will be in my museum. Maybe also Gadda's Acquainted with Grief to square on the budding engineer fiction front.

Don't feel I can include SF, this is the serious stuff and I haven't taken it seriously enough for ever :-(

"I should just place my copy in the freezer and keep it there.."

dude, for real. so frightening. there are very few books i've read that put me in such a bleak place without being, you know, horror novels or whatever. its quite an achievement artistically, but you do kind of want to lock it up somewhere when you're done.

I've not read enough books. Probably just Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing else really seems worthy

i'm glad i get along so well with you pynchon people. i still blame my dyscalculia for not being able to hang with pynchon and nabokov. also their idea of humor is really not mine.

if there are 5 other books I adore above all else, they're probably

laurence sterne - tristram shandy
henry green - concluding
iain sinclair - white chappell, scarlet tracings
tom mccarthy - remainder
and of course
thomas pynchon - against the day

i haven't read enough books. although i'm currently on 'pale fire'. you see how ludicrous it is for me to compile this list *now*.

Hubert Selby >>> Pynchon

forgot henry green - a recentish fave - and selby, tho' requiem for a dream is my go-to selb

v. interesting list xyzzzz

Yes, great list and from that I think I have just realised I should be reading Platonov - in fact have just received Robert Chandler's Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov.

I imagine Scott's list occupying a whole wall of one room of his exhibition. Like carefully painted on the wall in large clear type in that format, visitors standing back and nodding as they read it. And yes, Von Kleist! And Spark, why did I leave off Spark? I might pick The Public Image.

I'd go with The Driver's Seat but she wrote few outright duds.

Yeah, The Driver's Seat or Memento Mori might be more honest choices for me. Public Image not exactly a posey choice, but deliberately picking something that isn't in the usual top 5.

norton juster - the phantom tollbooth
fyodor dostoevsky - demons
vladimir nabokov - pale fire
trotsky - history of the russian revolution
ray bradbury - something wicked this way comes
edward gibbon - decline and fall of the roman empire
george orwell - homage to catalonia
herman melville - moby-dick
william faulkner - absalom, absalom!
joseph heller - catch-22
jane austen - mansfield park
lev tolstoy - hadji murat
ludwig wittgenstein - philosophical investigations / on certainty

Everyone is talking about posing. The baseball player once said, "it ain't braggin' if you can do it." I say, it's not posing if you've really read them.

D'oh, then remove Proust from my list... Still only halfway through.

i dunno i think calling him lev is posing pretty hard

Lev Tolstoj is how it's spelled in Denmark, and I assume lots of other places.

dlh, when you read "homage" a couple months ago, was that your first time? it really WAS that good, wasn't it?

things i've read in the past year or so that are among my very favorites

nabokov - lolita
turgenev - first love
salinger - zooey
milton - paradise lost
orwell - homage to catalonia

spark is like the epitome of the kind of author i wouldn't leave in a list like this? she's also the author i know who best accomplishes what she sets out to do i think and a talent i feel kind of dwarfed by

Krishnamurti - Krishnamurti's Notebook
Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Edmund Gosse - Father & Son
Samuel Butler - The Way of All Flesh
Gordon Burn - Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Patrick Hamilton - The Slaves of Solitude
Philip Larkin - A Girl In Winter
Turgenev - First Love
W G Sebald - Rings of Saturn
Ludwig Lewisohn - The Case of Mr Crump
Hugh Trevor Roper - The Last Days of Hitler
George Eliot - The Mill On The Floss
H G Wells - The Passionate Friends
Guy de Maupassant - Pierre et Jean
Mary Lutyens - To Be Young
Max Beerbohm - Zuleika Dobson
Graham Greene - The Power & The Glory
Chekhov - Collected Stories
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero Of Our Time
Knut Hamsun - Mysteries
Henry Handel Richardson - The Getting of Wisdom
Antonia White - Frost in May
Rebecca West - The Foutain Overflows
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
A E Ellis - The Rack
The Autobiography of Augustus Carp, Esq.
The Mahatma Letters to A P Sinnett

Really need to read more non-novels: poetry, myths, fairytales, etc.

Okay, actually had a bit of spare time today and thought I'd throw something together, even though I'm sure people are going to just dig into it and call me an idiot.

I kind of wish I'd not even started putting philosophy books in here, partly because I could go on for ages (I had to yank out 'Naming and Necessity' near the end, b/c ffs despite it being a great book I don't agree with much of it), partly because I've ended up trying to balance classic philosophy with continental and crit theory and then it becomes less 'books I love' and more of a didactic 'what you should read' thing. Also, I have almost certainly forgotten something that's one of my favourite books of all time. And and and, I limited myself to one text per author, otherwise some of these guys would basically have their entire bibliography in here.

So. 25 books:

Adorno & Horkheimer - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Simone de Beauvoir - the Second Sex
Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot
J.L. Borges - Labyrinths ~~very popular with ilx, and rightly so.
Leonora Carrington - the Hearing Trumpet
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Jacques Derrida - the Animal That Therefore I Am
Rene Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
Sergei Eisenstein - the Film Sense
The Epic of Gilgamesh
B.S. Johnson - the Unfortunates
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
KLF - the Manual
Clarice Lispector - the Passion According to G.H.
Paul van Ostaijen - Bezette Stad
Milorad Pavic - Dictionary of the Khazars
Georges Perec - A Void
Plato - the Republic
Bern Porter - I've Left
Jan Potocki - the Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Ann Quin - Three
Alain Robbe-Grillet - For a New Novel
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations ~~very popular with ilx, and rightly so.

Bonus entry: any good collection of horror short stories is essential for a true library. But I can't actually find my favourite one on the shelves at the moment and it has a relatively generic title: 'tales/stories of (something scary) and (something mysterious)' or something like that.

This is tough. I don't believe in telling other people what to read, so there is no "must-read" message here. Some of these really are my favorites, some not, but every one epitomizes a time. I'm adopting the strong sense of the "formative" interpretation, but ruling out textbooks and professional stuff.

Brown/Charlip, Four Fur Feet
Farjeon, Kaleidoscope
Juster, Phantom Tollbooth
Bradbury, Martian Chronicles
Dick, Eye in the Sky
Disch, Camp Concentration
Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Kenner, The Pound Era
Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
Wolfe, Peace
Mandy, On the Balcony
Conquest, The Great Terror
White, Forgetting Elena
Mehra/Milton, Climbing the Mountain
Denninger, Leverage

Bonus entry: any good collection of horror short stories is essential for a true library.

For you, "Monster Mix: 13 Chilling Tales" goes in at the 4th spot.

You know how they're publishing floods of pop-philosophy books with titles like Pink Floyd and Philosophy? Someone should do that with horror.

dlh, when you read "homage" a couple months ago, was that your first time? it really WAS that good, wasn't it?

― k3vin k., Friday, October 4, 2013 10:02 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep/yep

i don't think anyone would call anyone an idiot here. plus, your list is all fancy and shit.

x-post

"Krishnamurti - Krishnamurti's Notebook"

K's parables and nature writing don't hit me as hard as the actual transcribed talks. i would include something like The First and Last Freedom or one of the other collections of talks. he's my man. i will always live with him.

on the list so fast cuz it's one of those things where you've read lots of stuff by a writer and know you really like him but haven't found an epitome yet xp

i dunno i think calling him lev is posing pretty hard

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, October 4, 2013 9:57 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hadji murat also a p posey choice

I don't believe in telling other people what to read, so there is no "must-read" message here.

I am very much with you on that.

i like the idea of doing a 'stages of life' list like soda did upthread, so what the hell, here's another list, with no repeats from the first one:

childhood:
le petit prince
the cartoonist - betsy byars
the calvin and hobbes lazy sunday book

adolescence:
foundation trilogy - isaac asimov
the thurber carnival - james thurber
the smithsonian collection of newspaper comics - ed. bill blackbeard and martin williams

teens:
rock from the beginning - nik cohn
one flew over the cuckoo's nest - kesey
season in hell/illuminations - rimbaud

20s:
essays - orwell
the human condition - hannah arendt
crime and punishment - dostoevsky

now:
code of the woosters - p.g. wodehouse
miss lonelyhearts/day of the locust - nathanael west
lincoln - gore vidal

The Code Of The Woosters was 11 year-old imago's favourite Jeeves as well, although his favourite Wodehouse was probably a little-known standalone called Hot Water

K's parables and nature writing don't hit me as hard as the actual transcribed talks.

The Notebook is obviously decades after the parables, which could almost be described as juvenilia (at least by his standards). I'd also say it's much more than "nature writing" - more like the well-spring of his teaching, as Mary Lutyens put it. The Notebook and The Ending of Time are his two greatest books imo. The Jayakar and Lutyens biographies are pretty great, too.

I thought about including Mark E Smith's Renegade in my list, but thought better of it. Others I might have added: The Blind Owl, Mrs Dalloway, Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy.

should have listed a wodehouse. either code or in the morning for best jeeves; maybe something with monty bodkin for best overall.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations ~~very popular with ilx, and rightly so.

yahh it's interesting how wittgenstein on family resemblances is necessary background for the ~old-school ilm viewpoint~ right

emil.y i like your list but jeez, naming and necessity??

should have listed a wodehouse. either code or in the morning for best jeeves; maybe something with monty bodkin for best overall.

i quite like the idea of a list of Totally Not Quite The Right Kind Of Thing books for this context. if i did that it would definitely have wodehouse and spark on it. sorry i made fun of you for calling him 'lev' btw

I didn't have any poetry bah..

I think I have just realised I should be reading Platonov - in fact have just received Robert Chandler's Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov.

How is the Platonov story in that? Love to read the Pushkin as well.

that's ok thomp it's prob better to call him leo since it makes "levin" an easier character name to deal with

i did soda/j.d.'s thing cuz how can you not, it's like facebook

childhood:
douglas adams - the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
bill watterson - the indispensable calvin and hobbes
jrr tolkien - the hobbit

adolescence:
avi - nothing but the truth
arthur conan doyle - the hound of the baskervilles
p.g. wodehouse - code of the woosters

teens:
f. scott fitzgerald - collected stories
soren kierkegaard - the sickness unto death
james joyce - dubliners

college:
ivan turgenev - fathers and sons
thomas pynchon - mason & dixon
david foster wallace - oblivion

whatever this is:
plato - phaedo
thomas hobbes - leviathan
flannery o'connor - wise blood

I got started and couldn't stop. In alphabetical order (thanks to Goodreads).

Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon (I and II)
Donald Antrim: The Verificationist; The Hundred Brothers
Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine
Saul Bellow: Adventures of Augie March; Henderson the Rain King
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
Stanley Booth: The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charles Burns: Black Hole
James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
Robert Coover: The Public Burning
Lydia Davis: The End of The Story
Don Delillo: Underworld
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Joan Didion: Play It As It Lays; Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album
E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime
Richard Dyer: Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
Stanley Elkin: The Franchiser
Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis translation)
Molly Haskell: From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in The Movies
Andrew Holleran: Dancer From The Dance
Lewis Hyde: The Gift
Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son
James Joyce: The Dead
Nella Larsen: Passing
Kelly Link: Stranger Things Happen
Anita Loos: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces
Herman Melville: Bartleby The Scrivener
Vladamir Nabakov: Lolita
Geoffrey O'Brien: The Phantom Empire
Jennifer Saginor: Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion
Peter Shapiro: Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
Dan Sicko: Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huck Finn
Kurt Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan
Nathaniel West: Day of The Locust/Miss Lonelyhearts
Carl Wilson: Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

This made me realize how much I need to read older stuff, and more non-American stuff (I just have a weird thing about always worrying that I'm reading the wrong translation).

have always wanted to read 'leviathan' but am a bit intimidated by the old-timey format -- i can deal with that more easily in novels.

What type of museum? There are other types of museum besides artist / cult figure / cult of personality / genius museums. If you were a naturist your reading list wouldn't look so "rock star", but the actual syllabus might be relevant for a broader audience.

I studied art history, where biographical material is difficult to come by. So you have to read a lot of history, science, economics and politics. One topic I read up on a lot is Jack the Ripper, and the raw material there is history, urban history, sex roles, social relations.

so late on this. so late on everything at the moment. let's do it though.

The Image of a Drawn Sword - Jocelyn Brooke (revisted it recently as a result of this thread - thanks woof - and yes, it's about the closest thing to my heart I can conceive)

More Ghost Stories - MR James
A Hero of Our Time - Lermontov
The Hill of Dreams - Arthur Machen
The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
Venusberg - Anthony Powell
The Last Samurai - Helen deWitt
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - V Nabokov
The Slaves of Solitude - Patrick Hamilton
A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick
The Letters of Kingsley Amis
The Drowned World - JG Ballard
The Unnameable - Samuel Beckett
Venusberg - Anthony Powell
Men & Women - Robert Browning
Remainder - Tom McCarthy
The Blood of the Lamb - Peter de Vries
The Short Stories of Julian McLaren-Ross
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
Apes and Ape Lore - Waldemar Janson

omg, <3 you for having Blood of the Lamb, which was one of the first titles I thought of when I considered making a list. I really wish the University of Chicago would reprint a few more of his books -- surely he must have more than two good ones!

Never really thought of reading any other Powell than the Dance. Ditto on the Camus. After The Plague & Stranger, I had the impression that I'd basically read the worthwhile ones.
As a curiosity I'll mention that "venusberg" is the Norwegian word for the Mons pubis.

Which have you got as his other one, Ø? I've read one other - his more conventional comic style - but I can't remember what it's called now. Very nice to find someone else who likes it - it's his control over the unspoken (something that feels like it comes from his comic writing) that makes it so harrowing, I think.

The Myth of Sisyphus was one of the first books I started reading when I felt self-consciouisly intellectual, and it has a personal status beyond any critical evaluation for me - I did try to pick it up last year again, but it's so deeply internalised for that it felt sort of trite and hackneyed - or rather purveying truths already obvious and known.

The Norwegian word is non-trivial! The book takes place in a ficitonalised Scandinavian state, and deals with melancholy love. It has a unique feeling amongst Powell's books, I think, though parts of A View to a Death (also excellent) get close (the suicide of one of the main characters). I think somewhere on ilx/ilb there's a 'greatest run of novels by an author' and if Powell were to be in there, I'd probably start with his early comic novels and only include the first handful of ADttMoT volumes.

Fizzles man I am so rueful that I didn't get together with you while you were here, you have the best fkin taste.

fiction:

soseki natsume - kokoro
j.k. huysmans - against nature
elias canetti - auto-da-fé
robert musil - the man without qualities
l.f. celine - death on the installment plan
samuel beckett - malone dies
yukio mishima - confessions of a mask
alfred döblin - berlin alexanderplatz
j.l borges - ficciones
thomas mann - doktor faustus
louis paul boon - chapel road
julio cortazar - hopscotch
hermann hesse - the glass bead game
alain robbe-grillet - jealousy
hermann broch - the sleepwalkers
karel capek - war with the newts

non-fiction:

jacques lacarrière - the gnostics
alan watts - the way of zen
d.t. suzuki - introduction to zen buddhism
diamond sutra (red pine trans.)
chögyam trungpa - crazy wisdom
sogyal rinpoche - the tibetan book of living and dying
anonymous - the cloud of unknowing
bhagavad gita
morton feldman - give my regards to eighth street
the donald richie reader
paul schrader - ozu, bresson, dreyer

big ups on the morton feldman book.

Fizz: the other one is _Slouching towards Kalamazoo_. I've held off on reading it for a good while now -- which I realize is kinda ridiculous, since I have no doubt a bunch of his books can be bought cheap on the web. Have considered doing the "recommend a book" thing on NYRB Classics' website (I've only tried to get them to reissue John Galt's _The Entail_. No response...)
I'm three books in on Powell's Dance, so I doubt I'll look at his other stuff till I've reached the end. Glad to hear he has some great stand-alone work though.

alan watts - the way of zen
Vaguely curious about this -- think I may have to get it from the library some day when I'm not in too cynical a mood.

_Kokoro_ is part of a kinda terrible category for me: "favorite books that I don't really remember anything about." I'm not too bright, obviously. I went out and bought a copy right after finishing it, because I really wanted to have it around and re-read. But I haven't really touched it since, and now I have only the vaguest recollection of what it's even about. Good reason to re-read soon, I guess.
Other books in the forgotten favorites category: Sadoveanu's _The Axe_; Dahlberg's _Because I Was Flesh_; Moore's _Who Will Run The Frog Hospital_; Unamuno's _Mist_; Kristensen's _Havoc_. The Unamuno I don't even have a vague idea what it's about? I should probably use this list for a little bout of re-reading. Or at least as inspiration to spend a little more time thinking about what I read.

definitely recommend watts for even a skeptic — he is extremely practical and undogmatic, and makes the teachings accessible to westerners without pandering.

Watts saved my brain when I was 18 in '88 and having my first major freakout. Especially The Wisdom of Insecurity.

The Wisdom of Insecurity is where Watts first honed his chops. It contains almost every idea he kept restating for most of the rest of his adult life, but rarely better than the first time through.

thanks, i haven't read that one yet.