Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
My favourite five.
The post earlier today was actually inspired by a conversation I had with a co-worker this morning about books (I was in the process of lending her Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – the melancholy and mysterious tale of three friends sharing a second-rate life without ever really understanding why – it’s a wonderful novel)… In any event that book-loan lead us into the discussion of our top five favourite novels of all time.
Although it is very difficult to pick from all the great fictions I have read – I suspect my list would look something like this (in no order):
- Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
- The Diviners – Margaret Laurence
- 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
- City of Darkness, City of Light – Marge Piercy
It’s an since these books share little in common – but they each have a special place on my permanent bookshelf – necessitating a re-read once every few years at least.
Narrowing down is more difficult that it looks – Go on, give it a try. What are your favourite five?
11 Comments on “My favourite five.”
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Red Cedar 
indeed, not an easy task. but right now, i’d have to go with:
*Song of Soloman – Toni Morrison
*Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
*The Fifth Sacred Thing – Starhawk
*Harry Potter series (I know, i’m cheating) – J.K. Rowling
*A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (have you agree with you here).
it’s weird, cause asked for favorite authors latetly, i’d have gone with margaret atwood & marge piercy, but no one novel really made the cut. Shrug.
Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
Siddartha – Herman Hesse
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Moon Magic – Dion Fortune
Sassafra Cypress & Indigo – Ntozake Shange
That was hard… I liked the book Geek Love too, and Anais Nin books and Ayn Rand books, and soooooo many more.
catcher in the rye – jd salinger
l’etranger – albert camus
crying of lot 49 – thomas pynchon
white noise – don delilo
nip the buds, shoot the kids – kenzeburo oe
honorary mention (aka, the “cheatin’ sixth”)
woman in the dunes – kobo abe
catcher in the rye makes it on the merit that i like ‘9 stories’ more, but it’s not a novel, so i apply those points to catcher. woman in the dunes gets the honorary mention based on the fact that i spent two years of my life only reading japanese fiction, and it’s under-represented in my top five.
I tried, and tried, to whittle down to a list of five. I failed. This is
the bare minimum it seems.
It’s an arbitrary list, in no particular order, of all-time faves. If
asked another day, it might be different, give or take five books or so…
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Middlemarch – George Elliot
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Wind-up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballad – Federico Garcia Lorca
Beloved – Tony Morrison
murakami? damn. can i add an honorary seventh?
hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world – haruki murakami
I’m more a non-fiction reader; my stuff veers to rawk and roll, with occasional forays into structuralist theory and stuff. Here are six; I’m giving myself a lazybones out because I’m *still* really sick. Augh.
– Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung – Lester Bangs
– Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
– Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion
– I’m With the Band – Pamela Des Barres
– Mythologies – Roland Barthes
– Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 – Hunter S. Thompson
Worst book ever written? Anthem, by a country mile.
Oh! now I feel like I have to comment on a few things:
christine – i agree, atwood i thought would have been in my top five, but no one book really does it. perhaps if we asked the question top five authors she would appear more readily……
julia – geek love is also in my often re-read pile. now that you mention it i’ll have to haul it out again, it’s been a couple of years since i read it last and it’s a great and quirky story that’s good for almost any mood.
haymarketeer – camus, you anarchists and your camus! i’ve never gotten into his work much, but i keep promising it a re-read. i’m interested what lead to two years of reading only japanese fiction. i have gone through periods of only reading women’s fiction, and periods of only reading canadian fiction – but those seem much more standard given my context.
diane – i picked up a copy of fugitive pieces this weekend as a result of our conversation – i found it at the local secondhand store and you have never steered me wrong on literature before (okay except the four-gated city, though i think that’s just my problem at the moment).
steph – mythologies is one of my favourite books i read in uni. hands up for post-modern semiotics theorists!
and yes, feel free to add on to the list. i’ve got lots of leads for books to read next (murakami – haven’t read any, keeps getting suggested to me from various people and i’m going to have to try for some next).
Hmmm. Been reading a lot of nonfiction lately – gardening and stuff. But here’s five that I’d read again, in no particular order….
1. The Monkey Wrench Gang, Ed Abbey (I tend to be drawn more to his non-fic., but that’s not what you asked for.)
2. Catcher in the Rye, Salinger (such a joiner, I am.)
3. Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach (the writing’s not great, but it’s kinda like anarchist porn I guess.)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, P.K. Dick
5. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Tolkkein (escapism, the final frontier)
Honorable mention (yes, I’m cheating, but it’s the Internet…): Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. And, being a Eugenean, I’m obligated to include something by Ken Kesey, and my pick would be “Sometimes a Great Notion.”
why so much japanese literature? hm. the best answer i can think of is that japanese lit has some of the most profound and most subtle approaches to tragedy i’ve found yet (note here i’m talking about late-showa era only. basically mishima onwards)
sure, the russians have this rep for tragedy. but, really, they lack grace. russian tragedy is basically this one-sided beatdown where the author kicks the protagonist through 400 wincing pages and dumps the body in a shallow, unmarked last chapter. it runs pretty cold, pretty quick.
japanese tragedy, on the other hand, is more psychological and, above all, social. the disconnect of the individual from those around him or her and their expectations, and the friction (internal and external) that this causes is the usual basis of conflict. but the tragedy stems from the fact that resolution of this conflict is almost impossible, for simply entering into the conflict of individual-vs-group is a defeat in the first place.
so, yeah, we anarchists may love our camus, but those themes that feelings that make l’etranger and ‘a happy death’ hit the spot, really come to the fore in modern japanese lit.
so, as long as i’m in cheatin’ mode (i defy your arbitrary rules!), here’s the top five japanese tragedies:
‘woman in the dunes’ kobo abe
‘confessions of a mask’ yukio mishima
‘the ruined map’ kobo abe
‘a personal matter’ kenzaburo oe
‘dance dance danc’ haruki murakami
Oh my, just have to respond to H’s note about Russian authors’ lacking grace, with the characters limping along and being dispatched to the grave or something in the final installment. What authors? Turgenev? Tolstoy? Pushkin? Dostoyevsky – whose influence on moden writers couldn’t be more profound? Everyone from Marquez to Proust to Kafka to Nabokov to yes, Camus and Mishima. We’d be hard-pressed to find in the literary realm a more incisive analyses of political, social, philosophical and spiritual states than that conveyed by Dostoyevsky. Book after book (Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, to name a few) spills over ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into a high-pitched crescendo. Fireworks, and depth. He’s considered the founder of literary symbolism, and existentialism. A truly quirky purveyor of originality was Fyodor.
As for Japanese literature, a must-read is Kafka by the Shore, by the incomparable Murakami. His latest but for one….sublime. I would say more magic realism than tragedy, though undoubtedly a tinge of that for sure.
Megan – I think I lent you The Four Gated City after a conversation we had on mental illness. It made me think of a character in the book – Linda – who arrives in the novel later on and becomes a central fixture. I think Lessing did an amazing job depicting mental illness, positioning certain characters as precursors of the future. But I won’t give away the plot, just in case you decide to slog through!
The Bone People – Kerri Hulme
The Depford Trilogy – Robertson Davies (yes, another cheater!)
The Diary of Anne Frank
Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak
Crime and Punishment – Dostoyovski (sp)
I would have included A Fine Balance as well, but I had to mix it up a bit.
Ask me on a different day and I’m sure you’ll get a different list of five..