Recent comments in /f/books

berlpett t1_j9t01c2 wrote

‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus

‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad

’Three Men in a Boat’ by Jerome K. Jerome

’The Löwensköld Ring’ by Selma Lagerlöf

’Candide’ by François Voltaire

‘The Crying of lot 49’ by Thomas Pynchon

‘Silas Marner’ by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

‘The Pearl’ by John Steinbeck

‘The Grass is Singing’ by Doris Lessing

‘Stoner’ by John Williams

‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath

’The Process’ by Franz Kafka

‘The Devil and the Good Lord’ by Jean-Paul Sartre

’A Burnt Child’ by Stig Dagerman

I noted that you’re up for some light reading with ‘The Second Sex’ by Beauvoir; I’d suggest you make a day of it and add ’Phenomenology of Spirit’ by G. W. F. Hegel and ‘Process and Reality’ by A. N. Whitehead - you know - to keep yourself occupied.

Made me think of some other classics that just never seem to end.

‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon

‘A Critique of Pure Reason’ by Immanuel Kant

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IUsedToBeGifted177 t1_j9szkk6 wrote

The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (my personal favorite. Some of the most beautiful writing and the way the story is told will be unlike anything else on the list)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

The House Of Spirits by Isabel Allende (magic realism at its finest)

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. (If you want to do a religious book without doing a religious books but more for general spiritual philosophy.) .

For Christianity I'd recommend anything by C.S. Lewis. Like, literally anything.

Night by Elie Wissel. (Which, IMHO, should be required reading for life.)

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Accomplished_Web1549 t1_j9szf1o wrote

Halfway isn't bad, don't think I made it even a quarter the way through this, and it isn't that long. I thought from the hype this was going to be something special, but never got pulled into the story and the prose wasn't good enough to keep the pages turning, quite a rare DNF for me. I don't think the second person narrative was the problem, it can work in the right context.

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winter_mute t1_j9syfab wrote

Could be a job to whittle things down to 100. Could add Kipling, Zola, Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, D.H.Lawrence, Chekov, Virgil, Camus, etc. etc.

Having no Middlemarch in there is a straight-up crime though.

Just to be forewarned, a couple of those texts are probably going to be pretty dry, heavy going. Reading The Bible cover-to-cover is no joke. The Second Sex isn't riveting, and it's long. A Room of One's Own (while an important text) is essay-writing Woolf, rather than language-loving, exhuberant Woolf. Still, fun to see how it goes. Probably worth keeping a log of what you've read and what you liked / disliked.

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LilLebowskiAchiever t1_j9sxyrt wrote

After you read “The Odyssey”, wait 6 months and then read Charles Frasier’s “Cold Mountain”.

Other books that stuck with me:

“Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe

“Eat a Bowl of Tea” Louis Chu

“There Eyes We’re Watching God” Zora Neale Hurston

“A Suitable Boy” Vikram Seth (very long)

“Collected Poems” Langston Hughes

“Pillars of the Earth” Ken Follett

“The God of Small Things” Arundhari Roy

“Another Country” James Baldwin

“A Fine Balance” Mistry

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CitizenWolfie t1_j9sxm44 wrote

I'm kind of on the fence about Grady Hendrix after reading two of his books so far. I really enjoyed We Sold Our Souls even though it had some flaws, but I thought Final Girl Support Group started off well and quickly fizzled out into a dull, disjointed mess. At the moment I don't know whether to give him another shot, but maybe a non-fiction history of horror would be different.

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