the book crew for you

Well I got banned at the BookYouCrew. Here's the list I applied with. Oh well. Their loss. Now I will have fun discussing books with you folks instead.

Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
City of Glass - Paul Auster
A Lover's Discourse - Roland Barthes
Moise & the World of Reason - Tennessee Williams
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Master Pipers - George Sand
The Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson
Duino Elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Complete Poems of e. e. cummings
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
The Wasteland - T. S. Eliot

yonmei wanted to hear about books that she might like, and my answer is well, a bit...unwieldy. So, ( it's all here...Collapse )

*points to subject line*...I'm not usually that ditzy. *thinks* Who am I kidding? Yes I am. Be that as it may, I love books. In a major way. These, then, are some of the ones I love the most. Well, short stories too. And poems. Well, I think my first three (a short story, a graphic novel, and a "regular" novel) show how narrow-minded I am in terms of type and genre. ;-)
1. Roald Dahl - "Skin"
2. Raymond Briggs - When the Wind Blows
3. Robin Jarvis - Deathscent
( The rest...Collapse )

Okay, so this has already been linked to over here, but I figured it might be a good idea to post it directly as well, and then people can leave comments on the comm and not my journal. (Not that I mind people leaving comments on my journal one bit, but this way the discussion stays in the community, if there is any discussion.) This list is not 20 books long. It is 33 books long. This is because a.) I am as indecisive as Wembley from the old Fraggle Rock show, and b.) I am sufficiently psychotically attached to my books that it would have felt like Sophie's Choice to narrow the list any further. ;) Anyway, so, my 33 top books, in no particular order:

Aquamarine, Carol Anshaw
Nothing But the Truth, Avi
Big Trouble, Dave Barry
The Woman Destroyed, Simone de Beauvoir
No Way to Treat a First Lady, Christopher Buckley
A Seahorse Year, Stacey D'Erasmo
Hood, Emma Donoghue
Slammerkin, Emma Donoghue
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Helen Fielding
How All This Started, Pete Fromm
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
we so seldom look on love, Barbara Gowdy
Exposure, Kathryn Harrison
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
Blue Heaven, Joe Keenan
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell**
Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery (actually, basically anything by L.M. Montgomery - I'm picturing Anne of Avonlea and Rilla of Ingleside and The Story Girl and Jane of Lantern Hill and A Tangled Web and The Blue Castle and all the rest looking at me with pitiful puppy-dog eyes, as if to say "after all the love we shared in your childhood we don't even make your list?")
Metamorphoses, Ovid
Blue Angel, Francine Prose
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
All the Names, Jose Saramago
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

For what I'd most like to discuss... I would like someone to discuss Carol Anshaw with, and if anyone has ever heard of her I will be blown away. So as far as "discussing" her goes, it would probably consist of my babbling on about why she deserves to be so much better-known than she is and why she's not and all that jazz. Beyond that, I pick Hood, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and... uh... damn, any one of those that you know/like! They're all good!

Questions, comments, whatever, please.

Well, here's the list they hate me for:
1. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
2. Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
3. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
4. Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny
5. Gesualdo Bufalino, The Keeper of Ruins: And Other Inventions
6. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality
7. Ann Fadiman, Ex Libris
8. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
9. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman series
11. Lord Byron, Collected Works
12. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
13. Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
14. A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower
15. Woody Allen, Without Feathers
16. Raymond Williams, Keywords
17. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
18. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
19. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
20. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

Now, to be fair, these aren't my twenty favourite books of all time. But they're certainly books that left an impact on me/I would definitely reread/led me to explore other works by the same author. The three I would like to squee about are:
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (because he's ridiculously, inevitably, unbelievably underrated)
Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny (because she inspired the-book-that-never-seems-to-get-written)
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves (first book I read by him, and it planted the seeds of a deep and abiding love).

Ask away!

Either my list was so hopelessly plebeian that thebookyoucrew mod saw me at once for the phony wannabe-snob I was, or else they'd read yonmei's post about thebookcrew4you and saw my comment grumbling about having to post at their community. Either way, I was banned before I'd even begun! Go me.

( This is my list.Collapse )