Portnoy’s Complaint was my first time. I read it when I was 17 and I can still remember the outlaw sensation. This was a best-seller? This was literary fiction! Wow! Today, this famous/infamous book is still as funny, obscene, and obscenely funny as any book I’ve ever read. Terry Southern, in his Blue Movie, could […]
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian who left his country as a young man before the war tore his country apart. In Chicago, he learned his craft as a writer, in English, and now sees his stories regularly printed in the New Yorker magazine. His fine second volume of short stories, Love and Obstacles, contains eight […]
I know, I know. But, a.) I’m on vacation, so I needed something I could write about off the top of my head and briefly, and, b.) while you may have read it, you’d be surprised how many people, particularly young people brought up on the LOTR movies, have not read Tolkien’s masterpiece.
Now read this! is taking a brief vacation, because I am! Last week I wrote about my favorite novel of all time. Now it’s your turn. Leave a brief comment about your favorite novel of all time and we’ll see if any of us agree. Until next week!
My list of the top five novels of all time changes from time to time. Currently it is: 1. Anna Karenina, 2. Lolita, 3. Sabbath’s Theatre, 4. Cousin Bette, 5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Numbers two through five will likely change or change in order, but Tolstoy’s novel of adultery in 19th century Russia has been at the […]
I first read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his Lectures on Literature said, “Mansfield Park is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.”
I dislike the term “genre fiction.” It’s pejorative, and is used to make a value judgment on works of art for their content, rather than their execution. There’s a reason why we don’t think of Poe as a genre writer of horror or detective fiction. Though others might disagree, I don’t think of Tolkein’s “Trilogy” […]
I won’t often devote this column to poetry. Since much of the best poetry is written in shorter forms, it doesn’t really fall within the scope of a “great books” column. (Though, even as I write this, it occurs to me that I may have to write about handfuls of poems by Stevens, Wilbur, and […]
Okay, okay. You’ve read The Great Gatsby. We’ve all read The Great Gatsby. You were assigned it in 8th grade, then in high school, and again in Freshman English in college (though your subsequent readings were the Cliff’s Notes!). And you still have that crushed paperback with the cheesy neon lights on the cover. You […]
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back […]
Evidence of its being possibly the finest novella of the 20th century, Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice has inspired more than a few offshoots: the gorgeous, haunting Visconti movie (with music of Gustav Mahler), the Benjamin Britten opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2007 presentation of the ballet by John Neumeier, Robert Coover’s fantastical Pinocchio […]
It’s always puzzled me that, at least in some forums, Joseph Conrad is seen as an adventure story writer, as though he wrote for teenage boys. Admittedly, some of his long stories like Youth, Nigger of the Narcissus, and Typhoon have incredible scenes of high adventure and action, but even these are great works of […]
A few weeks ago I recommended Carson McCullers’ stunning novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. Since then I’ve read her short novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is now my new favorite of her works. Like Ballad, Reflections is concerned with the grotesque, but while in the former work the main characters are physically […]
My last few columns have all dealt with pretty heavy stuff — time for a palate cleanser. Kurt Vonnegut fans know that Slaughterhouse Five may be his most famous, and even his best, book. But the most enjoyable, the funniest, the most original, and Slaughterhouse’s predecessor by 10 years, is the interplanetary space romp The Sirens […]
Most of us have read or been obliged to read, by a high school English teacher or college professor, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Many have read the indelible story collection Dubliners. Hardly any of us have got past the first few chapters of Ulysses, let alone the entire book […]
I like lists. Here’s one: Balzac, Dickens, Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Tolstoy, Conrad, Nabokov, Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shakespeare. These are my top ten authors calculated by the amount of time I estimate I have spent reading them. The winner going away is Honore de Balzac.
From time to time I will write about the short novel or novella. Over the last 100 years, American authors have written some of the finest novellas in any language. For authors like William Styron and Carson McCullers, their novellas, The Long March and The Ballad of the Sad Café respectively, are the best things […]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the movie, as most people know, is based upon a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not one of his best, Fitzgerald’s story is relatively brief, a rather obvious playing-out of what he must have considered a clever idea — a life lived backwards. It’s […]
Of the friends I’ve asked about this, those who have read any of Updike’s four Rabbit books have either read them all, including the novella in the story collection Licks of Love, or they stopped, as I did, with the second book Rabbit Redux. The last two novels of the tetralogy either seemed just too much more Rabbit […]
William Faulkner is not an author whose books one tends to reread. When you’ve mounted the Everests of Absalom, Absalom! or The Hamlet, for example, you may feel exhilarated and triumphant, but you don’t particularly yearn to start all over from the beginning. I’ve read Light in August twice and will again. Of all Faulkner’s […]
