Badmovies.org Forum

From this topic:most hated literary works (http://www.badmovies.org/forum/index.php/topic,135836.0.html), why not post some stuff you actually like!
here's my list:
The Princess Bride- this is absolutely the funniest novel I ever read, it is just so comedic and knows it while also trying to be serious at the same time.
Life of Pi- A book that has some questions about life, the one that stuck out was 'Why does a person have to choose one religion, why not be multiple?' and it really makes sense, since most religions share the same God and has variants on the story, but the followers are so ignorant about it that it just makes a person not have the freedom to choose.
I highly recommend these two novels, check them out.

Anything Charles Bukowski, and I adore Hunter S. Thompson.

I really appreciate the work of Leon Uris. He writes fictional novels but in historical and cultural settings. The man does exhaustive research in preparation for his novels. His personal background seems to have given him a unique insight into understanding differences in culture, and his novels deal with them in very even-handed ways. That, and they are just good story-telling.

His novel Trinity is set the violent history of Ireland seen from the sides of both the Catholic/Irish and the Protestant/Loyalist perspectives. I asked my father-in-law, who grew up in Belfast and left with is family because of the troubles, if he read the book and we had a very long conversation about it. He thought the book captured the tumultous Irish history extremely well. I thought that was a pretty solid seal of approval.

There are plenty of others, I just mentioned Leon Uris because I noticed my copy of said book on the shelf the other day and was thinking about re-reading it since it's been quite a few years.

I'm also pretty big on Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know if I have a favorite. I've read the majority of his novels, and I would say that Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan are arguably my favorites, but I don't know if I really have a favorite Vonnegut book. Mother Night is another one I love, and incidentally, was given pretty good film adaptation in 1996 starring Nick Nolte as the central character. The central theme of Mother Night, "be careful who you pretend to be, because in the end you ARE who you pretend to be," is something I believe to be a profound truth in life and have quoted many times. Back during a time when I smoked and drank fairly heavily, I used to borrow his line about how, after an evening of smoking an drinking Scotch my breath smelled "like mustard gas and roses."

hmm I had to read Slaughterhouse 5 for my A-Level but I don't remember much about it. I don't think I was ready for it tbh, combined with the fact that I tend to lose interest in book or film if I'm told to 'study' it. I prefer reading because I want to, not for the purpose of being examined on it

my favourite books are

American Psycho (infinitely darker and more claustrophobic and low key than the almost slapstick film)
Fear And Loathing (ditto in many ways, although it is hilarious)
Stepford Wives
Clockwork Orange
The Cement Garden

THE LORD OF THE RINGS
THE HOBBIT
THE SILMARILLION for starters.
Then
THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT
Colleen McCullough's MASTERS OF ROME series
And most, but not all, of Stephen King's stuff

I like Joseph Conrad.  Heart of Darkness was very enjoyable in my opinion.

I like most of Frank Herbert's Dune series.  It does a good job of developing social, political and religious interaction over long periods of time. 

While I don't enjoy most of his work, I did like Stephen King's The Stand. 

In my opinion "Lolita" is the greatest novel in the English language. 

Think you can't sympathize with a child molester?  Well, maybe you can't, but Nabokov gives you the option to side with him---in fact, he pretty much forces you to make a choice as to whether he redeems himself in the end or not.  Plus the fact that every single word is jewel-like---there are no great passages because they're ALL great, open the book to any random page and you'll read pure poetry.  Not for everyone because it's difficult reading and the subject matter is too dark for many, but it's enormously rewarding if you can get into it.

As an English major I had read a lot of things for my classes. Here are  my favorites, among them things I had to read for classes: Band of Brothers, Catch-22, Closing Time, The Scarlett Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby.

From my younger days I enjoyed The Boxcar Chlidren, the Narnia books, and the Goosebumps books.

And anything by Edgar Allen Poe is gold in my eyes.  :thumbup:

I thought it was underwhelming. Not because out was too dark or anything, if anything I like dark.

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.  :thumbup:

When I was in college, I took a course entitled "the Literature of the Great War"

It was my introduction to Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Arthur Graham West, and all the other brilliant writers of the Lost Generation.

They ROCKED MY WORLD!

But the poem that absolutely gave me chills - and still does, every time I read it to my history classes - is one that I have never found the author of.  It's simply called, "On the Wire."  It is a first person narrative from the point of view of a gravely wounded soldier snagged on the barbed wire in No Man's Land - unable to get himself loose, unable to die.  The last stanza is incredibly haunting - I think I can recite it from memory:

"Again the shuddering dawn, weird and wicked and wan.
Again, and I've not yet gone.
The man that I heard is dead. And now I can understand;
A bullet hole in his head, a pistol gripped in his hand.
Yes, he knew what to do - and now I know too!
I've suffered more than my share.  I'm shattered beyond repair.
And now I demand the right - God! How his fingers cling!
To do without shame this thing.
Hark! The resentful guns! Oh, how happy am I
To think my beloved ones, will never know how I die.
Good, there's a bullet still.  And now I'm ready to fire.
Blame me, O God, if you will.
Here on the wire . . . .the wire."

Powerful stuff.

Lolita is really a fantastic book. I don't sympathize with Humbert Humbert, something I've explicated on here (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/144325348). Nabokov's book is queasy, deliberately so, but its just such a fantastic piece of English wordplay. All the more surprising since English is not Nabokov's native language.

If I had to pick a favorite book, which I won't because it's stupid, I would pick Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's magnum opus is famous for being difficult to read. It's not really. Well, the book is full of run-on sentences that may shift viewpoints for characters who are decades apart in time frame. And then there all those bits where the narrator literally attacks the reader. But it's very readable, and very funny.

Part of the reason it is viewed as a difficult read is that the author, Pynchon, expects you to get all his references and ideas. At no point is the book dumbed down, it doesn't even bother to explain its abstruse topics. It's all just there, you are the one who will have to do all the work to get it. I haven't even mentioned that the book is incredibly perverse. Did I mention coprophagia?

Difficult book; author with no interest in pleasing his audience (famous recluse); entire passages dedicated to calculus, organic chemistry, and the kabbalah; the entirety of human civilization reduced to a mechanical death wish... my favorite book.

But he is an actual writer, when he wants to be and isn't deliberately obscuring his own work. Look at this passage:

"Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which--though it is not often Death is told so clearly to f**k off--the living genetic chains prove even labryinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail.  Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea?  As a spell, against falling objects. . ."

Fantastic book.

Anything by Shirley Jackson.
Try The HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE,or WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED  THE CASTLE.
I have a big book that contains those two novels,plus tons of short stories,including the infamous the LOTTERY,The SUMMER PEOPLE, ONE ORDINARY DAY WITH PEANUTS,and my favorite The TOOTH.
 Miss Jackson's work is like entering the twilight zone. No big scary monsters,vampires,or things blowing up. It's not King or Lovecraft. It's the wierd parralell universe that exists just below the surface of mundane life...it's very dreamlike and poetic. And very scary.
My FAVORITE author!

 Though I struggled to read the LORD OF THE RINGS books (Tara Sue loved them-a fanatic-pushed them on me),and am not a big fan of "Fantasy" fiction,I quite enjoy Robert E. Howard's CONAN series of stories and books.
. Robert Heinlien is also an author I am completly devoted to. I have at least 20 of his boks,including many old first editions. The PUPPET MASTERS and NUMBER of the BEAST being favorites.
. I enjoy Ray Bradbury quite a bit-but some of his work-like DANDILION WINE is a lttle too syrupy sweet for my tastes.
. Lovecraft,of course!
. William Shirer-yes he's a historian-but his work is important and very well written. Try the RISE AND FALL of the THIRD RIECH. Epic.
. Dee Brown's BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE will bring you to tears. It's the story of the white man's betrayal of the Indian Nations.
. John Hersey's HIROSHIMA is a blunt,no punches pulled account of the dropping of the A Bomb on that city. Horrifying and touching.
. I just picked up a 1913 edition of O.Henry's ROLLING STONES...I wasn't really familiar with his work outside of the Monkey's Paw...but this is quite good!
 
 

Despite my lukewarm feelings towards the ending (even if it does fit the tone and works), I enjoy Animal Farm.  Pretty interesting and fasincating book for something I was actually assigned to read in school.  I did also like Number the Stars, my all time favorite book I had to read for school.

For stuff that I read on my own, I enjoy pretty much all of Micahel Crichton's works (Jurassic Park, Prey, Andromeda Strain, etc.) that I've read.  I've also enjoyed a lot of Stephen King's work, with Night Shift being my favorite, even if it is a collection of his short works.

Of course, I have read and liked a lot of comics, but my personal current favorites are The Unwritten by Mike Carey and The Drifting Classroom by Kazou Umezu.

Wow.  There are so many.  But here are a few that come to mind (in no particular order).

* CATCHER IN THE RYE - J.D. Salinger

* THE BRONX ZOO - The funniest sports book ever written.  Some parts made me laugh out loud.  It's essentially a day-by-day recap of the 1978 New York Yankees season with plenty of clubhouse shenanigans.

* THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO - Alexandre Dumas

* Just about anything by Charles Dickens

* DRACULA - Bram Stoker

* DELIVERANCE - James Dickey

* THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME - Victor Hugo

Orwell was an interesting man. I respect him a great deal. His work is quite good. He contributed some very profound metaphors on human behavior.

not forgetting the works of Phillip K Dick

Almost done reading 1984. Love it.

Let's see,

  Douglas Adams and Stephen King are always fun.

  The columns of the late newspaper columnist Mike Royko

  The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

   James Thurber, E.B. White and Robert Benchely's short stories and essays are all excellent. I'm also just getting into Max Shulman.

  The Name of the Rose by Umbero Eco is a great book and a great mental workout! His Foucault’s Pendulum is really good too.

  Phillip K. D@#k

  Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

  Virgil's The Aeneid

  Dr. Jekyl and Mister Hyde.

  H.G. Wells' works

  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck



 

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I like most works by Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger.  I also like reading different things about Greek and Roman mythology.  Spent a lot of time reading as a kid and am told I was reading very early on.  I remember being in Kindergarten or 1st Grade and able to read a book for 6th graders. 

A few books that are particular favorites:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Have A Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks by Mick Foley
It by Stephen King

I also dig Homer's Odyssey and Iliad

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are still wonderfully entertaining!

I have always been a voracious reader, so as soon as I entered junior high, or middle school, if you wish, I started taking those great works of literature classes in school, and continued taking them till I graduated from college. Thus, let me limit myself to those great works of literature, that they made you read. As there are not many of them that are my favorites.

Overall bodies of work
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course. Who is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, but if you read him, then read not only those, but his other works of fiction, since he also created the Professor Challenger series of novels, and is one of the few civilians who I have found who could write an arousing action scene. As an example: his "The White Company," which is about a group of English mercenaries in medieval France and Spain.

And in the realm of what might have been. If director John Ford had lived a bit longer, he wanted to do a film version of "The White Company" with Sir Alec Guiness, Lord Laurence Olivier, and John "the Duke" Wayne. Now there is a cast that makes you stand up and take notice.

Jules Verne. As I previously posted, I find most French literature incomprehensible. The only European literature I find more incomprehensible is Russian, but Verne is an exception. Maybe because he seemingly writes more like an American or an Englishman than a Frenchman. I especially enjoy some of his more obscure novels, and he wrote alot of novels that are relatively obscure such as "Michael Strogoff," and a novel specifically written for children, whose title I cannot remember.

Individual works
H. Rider Haggard. His great novel and one of the greatest adventure novels of all time "King "Solomon's Mine." Though, as a work of literature, I prefer his sequel to it "Alan Quatermain."

Bram Stoker. "Dracula." Probably the greatest "trash" novel ever written. But, if you read it, then read an annotated version of it, and of the annotated versions, then read the one annotated by Leonard Wolf. You'll get so much more out of it.

Another reason to read it, is to read it for all the sex in it. You may have to read between the lines, but someone once said that the following subjects can be found in "Dracula:" seduction (both attempted and accomplished) rape, gang rape, group sex, necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, adultery, oral sex, menstruation, veneral disease, and voyeurism. And I'll throw in homosexuality and/or bisexuality.

They don't write books like they use to.

Oh . . . I forgot this one.  Highly recommended book about depression-era criminals including John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, the Barkers, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and others.  It's also a very interesting look at the early days of the FBI and all the mistakes they made trying to apprehend bad guys.  The movie starring Johnny Depp concentrated on the Dillinger aspect, but the book has a much greater scope than what the movie covered.  A riveting read.

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John Steinbeck's lighter works- Cannery Row, the Log of the Sea of Cortez, Travels with Charley (not fiction), and Sweet Thursday are some of the finest books ever written. 

Almost all Hemmingway, minus For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It not literature, but its a classic: Riders of the Purple Sage by Louis Lamour.

I love the Glass Family stories by JD Salinger, theres a dog-eared copy of Franny and Zooey I cherish. 

The Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes.

The Continental Op books by Dashiell Hammett.

Modern Literature... Pete Hammill is an absolute genius both fiction and non fiction. 

FRANKENSTEIN - possibly my favorite horror story of all time.
Just about anything by Lovecraft works for me
Jane Eyre
The Inferno (I like all of Divine Comedy but Purgatory & Paradiso get pretty surreal and don't have the "visual" power of Inferno)
The Terror by Dan Simmons - Simmons is kind of uneven for me, liked Summer of Night but wasn't all that crazy about Drood (a friend recommended the Hyperion series to me but I try to shy away from series, so haven't picked it up yet.) but I love this book.

On the nonfiction front:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Thompson is always great but this one's my favorite
John Adams by David McCullough
Albert Camus' The Rebel - blew my mind
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by William Cuppy - kind of obscure but it's hilarious

On the poetry front:
Idylls of the King by Tennyson
Anything by Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost, or Langston Hughes

My favorite book of all time:  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
My second favorite book of all time:  Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants by Dav Pilkey

I think that's ROBERT W. SERVICE  

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5310/ (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5310/)