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The best book you ever read?

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro has really stuck in my head since I read it five years ago. Love that book.
 
IrishSlim, have you read Exley's A Fan's Notes ???

You, more than anyone else here, strike me as a person that would get a lot out of it. Read it just as the season turns to autumn.
 
Fiction: To Kill a Mockingbird

Non-Fiction: The Drunkard's Walk (still working on Thinking Fast and Slow but this might take the top spot)
 
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1) The Sun Also Rises
2) The Razors Edge
3) The Count of Monte Cristo
4) Siddhartha (Hesse)
5) Dune
6) Coyote Blue and Lamb (Christopher Moore)
 
Similarly, what are everyone's least favorite books? I had a really hard time getting through Beloved but maybe it deserves a second reading. Tess of the D'urbervilles was probably my least favorite book though. I just couldn't sympathize with any characters and I thought it was dry and boring.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Similarly, what are everyone's least favorite books? I had a really hard time getting through Beloved but maybe it deserves a second reading. Tess of the D'urbervilles was probably my least favorite book though. I just couldn't sympathize with any characters and I thought it was dry and boring.
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good call on Tess. she had a kid, named it Sorrow, and it died within the space of a page and a half. The fucking book was like 900 pages long. At least, that's exactly how I remember it from AP lit 75 years ago. I hate that book with the passion of a thousand white hot suns, or some other fitting allusion.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Similarly, what are everyone's least favorite books? I had a really hard time getting through Beloved but maybe it deserves a second reading. Tess of the D'urbervilles was probably my least favorite book though. I just couldn't sympathize with any characters and I thought it was dry and boring.
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I wouldn't call it least favorite, but I really did not enjoy White Noise.
 
They're not the worst I've read, but these are books that I thought would be much better:

Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer - a real snoozer. Nothing about this book stayed with me apart from a single impressive passage that described a partially clad woman

Evidence of Things Unseen - this was a Pulitzer finalist and I have no idea how. The prose is unbearable. It's hard just getting past the first page

Tinkers - boring and formulaic

Olive Kitteridge - the first chapter was excellent, and after that it was all downhill fast
 
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Wakeforest22890 said:
Similarly, what are everyone's least favorite books? I had a really hard time getting through Beloved but maybe it deserves a second reading. Tess of the D'urbervilles was probably my least favorite book though. I just couldn't sympathize with any characters and I thought it was dry and boring.
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Moby Dick... not even close.
 
TenaciousKory said:
The Awakening.
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Winner

Especially b/c I had to read it 3 different times during my education.

It's fun to get my mom (American Lit Professor) to go off on a rant about this book being included in the Am Lit Canon as a representative of early feminist literature. She claims it's not really feminist and the writing is terrible.
 
As someone earlier said, The Old Man and the Sea is great, especially now as an adult as I have been out in blue water a good deal and have seen some of the things the old man saw in the book. Hemingway could paint a picture in your mind. Some of Faulkner's short stories have been enjoyable. I have struggled with "The Sound and The Fury"...just the style...it's all over the place.

Up Country, a detective novel about a vet returning to Vietnam in the role of an investigator is good...I read it several years ago. I am currently reading U.S. Grant's Bio by Jean Edward Smith. Really enjoying it so far. I've learned a ton about the Mexican War I didn't know, even though I have read Grant's memoirs. Smith gives more context to the war than Grant's memoirs did. I am still early in the read.
 
The style being all over the place is why I love The Sound and The Fury. It's amazing to me how well Faulkner is able to convey each different character through style.
 
wakephan09 said:
IrishSlim, have you read Exley's A Fan's Notes ???

You, more than anyone else here, strike me as a person that would get a lot out of it. Read it just as the season turns to autumn.
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Haven't read it, but just added it to my Wish List
 
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