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Book List

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Someone asked in another place what are your five favorite books? I started a list but quickly gave it up. I've read thousands of books in my life; to extract five from that was impossible. But it got me thinking.

I have a list of books. I started it for my kids, a sort of TBR for them, but it grew to be an inventory of all the books I physically owned, then the electronic ones, then also books that I intended to read. So it really is massive.

I went through that file in the wake of the Five Books exercise with this criterion: was this book important to me in some way? It didn't have to be great, it just had to be important to me.

I came up with fifty-nine of them. Most are fiction but some are history books that were important in my career as a historian. I had expected most would be from my youth, in the way that most of my favorite bands date to a span from about age fifteen to twenty-five. To my surprise, a good many date from more recent decades. That made me feel good, for reasons not entirely clear to me.

It was an interesting exercise. Some were important, as I said, because they shaped my precepts and understandings as a historian. Some were important because they introduced me to other types of literature (e.g., The Brothers Karamazov showed me there was more to the world besides SF). Some simply resonated with me and continue to do so. Taken all together, they form a kind of narrative of my life.

I recommend it to any and all. It's easy to start a spreadsheet and just list what is ready to hand. You can add your TBR books to it. One use I've put it to is for gifts. I extract from it the books I have yet to read--not my whole TBR, but the "great books" that I really do intend to read--and share that with my kids. If they want to know what to get me for a birthday or whatever, I tell them to pick a book. I also do this other thing with books as gifts: my kids know they can buy a book for me that *they* have read. A physical book. Inscribe it. Those books sit on their own shelf at my house. It's an eclectic set, but it does provide a kind of view into where my kids' heads were at a given time.

Anyway, like I said, I recommend starting your book list.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I find it remarkably easy... except whether LoTR counts as multiple books, LOL. Fiction only.

I would do this:

Hobbit & LoTR
Umberto Eco’s Name of of the Rose
Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
Martin’s Game of Thrones, and you can include the rest of the series so far, but first book is the best to me.

Honorable Mention:

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
Mark Twain’s Adventures of... combine the two books into one, and throw in the Letters from the Earth for good measure.
Frank Herbert’s Dune... but only the first book, after that I wasn’t impressed.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs

Poets of note:

William Blake
Samuel Coleridge

Playwrights:

Shakespeare
Tennesee Williams
 
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skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Yep. That was way better than I was expecting it to be.

But I was focusing on books that were important to me. Pride of place there belongs to Martian Chronicles, the first book that struck me as literature. I was so bowled over (I was fourteen), I actually typed out whole chapters, just to feel the words.

I discovered The Hobbit entirely by accident in my school library, at fifteen. Liked it. Lord of the Rings was right next door. Hoo boy. Went full-scale geek then. The same year, I found Asimov's Foundation trilogy in a box in the back room of a book store. Hardcover, all three volumes. Fifty cents. That one so impressed me I spent weeks drawing charts of the evolution of civilizations. I was going to be Harry Seldon.

Those are the books that made it onto my Specials list. An essay by Marc Bloch on the history of the word servus, plus Feudal Society plus The Historian's Craft. LeClercq's Love of Learning and the Desire for God. Eric Hobsbawm's Dual Revolution. These are all history books that had a profound effect on how I view the discipline of history.

Then there's Poe and Verne and Wells, all of whom I consumed in more or less the same summer, all of whom opened whole panoramas of imagination. Or Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom I similarly devoured within the span of a year, but as a much older person. Together they rekindled my love of language.

Then there are stand-alone gems. First to mind is A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that reminded me how great stories about young people can be when you don't try to make them "YA" or "MG".

Demesnedenoir mentioned Conrad, one of my heroes. I'll put Graham Greene on there--his Brighton Rock young hoodlum is, imo, far scarier than Alex from A Clockwork Orange.

Sometimes I think it's not just the book. It's the book arriving at a specific time in a person's life.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Yes, the specific time certainly counts. Game of Thrones brought me back to fantasy, hence it achieved special status. Eevrything else on the list I read at a younger age, teens and early twenties.

Conrad, even when I don’t love his story, could just write his ass off.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I suggest reading Mirror of the Sea, which was a sort of compilation of articles Conrad wrote about seafaring in the last days of sail. Not a novel. His descriptions of sailing up the Thames and docking is utterly vivid. Which is to say, standard Conrad.

What surprised me in my list was how many books came from later years. I didn't read Chandler and Hammett (and Mosley!) until I was in my forties. I did not read The Last Unicorn until just a couple of years ago. Even Conrad I did not discover until I was grown (not sure I would have appreciated him when I was younger). In fact, it was realizing this that caused me to consult "greatest hundred books" lists of various types to create my master TBR list. Going down through that has brought me some real gems: True Grit, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Man Who Was Thursday, The 42nd Parallel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Naked and the Dead, Appointment in Samarra, Angle of Repose, The House of Mirth. There were plenty of duds, too, which shall remain nameless.

I have to say, no fantasy. The only fantasy that really stuck with me was old--The Last Unicorn, which was a lovely book. For the most part (and I did like the first volume of ASOFAI, and even the second), though, the fanta I sy books have been distinctly second- or third-tier. The best of them are enjoyable but hardly memorable. I include my own in that, without hesitation (actually, I'd be damned glad if people found my stories enjoyable). I read SF almost not at all now. I subscribe to Clarkesworld, and the stories there nearly always range from disappointing to downright irritating. I do need to give a shout-out to Daemon and Freedom[TM], by Daniel Suarez. Those were great.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Oddly enough I'm not at all "influenced" by a great many books I enjoyed. I enjoyed a lot of Piers Anthony when young, but I can only recall one book. I won't get into history stuff, I'll stick to fiction. And I was trying to stick to one book rather authors as a whole... but Twain without Letters from the Earth just isn't the same, LOL. LoTR and GoT are without a doubt two the most influential books to my writing and favorites. The Unbearable Lightness of Being could be tossed in there. Poe I love, but no one thing makes the top for me. And Poe is really... fantasy in a way. Faulkner... I used to love Faulkner in my lit days... now, he just doesn't interest me.

And... a book that should be top 5 but I forgot... Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Flat out one of the best stories ever told, and the dude was an insanely skilled writer. As a whole, Dickens has to be a top 5 all around for me, but I forgot about Christmas Carol and was thinking Tale of Two Cities... which should probably be honorable mention.

Now the funny thing is, look at my top 5 and one could argue that at least 4 out 5 are fantasy. Frankenstein, easy to classify as fantasy. My add in, Christmas Carol = Fantasy. Name of the Rose, on the other hand, uses a lot of fantasy elements with the threat of the devil in its murder mystery. Heart of Darkness certainly evokes the fantastic for me, as does Crime and Punishment in a weird, guilt driven, fever state sort of way. Maybe madness/insanity = an element of the fantastic, the not quite real.

An evocation of the fantastic is almost a must for me to make my top, from what I can tell. Even if it's not strictly speaking fantasy. McCormac is a good example of that, too.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
Getting to my list...well, this is always difficult for me but I'll give it a shot. Some of these are seminal works to me, simple because I was exposed to them early and they were important to me. Others I came to later. No particular order.

Chance, Joseph Conrad
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Gormenghast books, Mervyn Peake
The Elric books, Michael Moorcock
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
Lolita, Nabokov
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Diaspora, Greg Egan
Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, Tolkien
Howl's Moving Castle, Dianna Wynne Jones
Sabriel, Garth Nix
Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Hitchhikers Guide books, Douglas Adams
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Focault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
The Conan stories, Robert E. Howard
Lovecraft's short stories
Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein
The short stories of William Trevor
Dubliners, James Joyce
The Black Company, Glen Cook
The Malazan books, Steven Erikson
Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel
The Paksennarion books, Elizabeth Moon
The Valor books, Tanya Huff
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederick Pohl
The short stories of Poul Anderson
Freedom and Necessity, Steven Brust and Emma Bull
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken
The Dark is Rising series, Susan Cooper
The short stories of Flanney O'Connor
Island, Alistair MacLeod

Anyway...I could go on like this for some time, but those are the first ones that came to mind. I'm sure there are oversights here that need to be remedied :)
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Yeah I love Focault’s Pendulum, but not as much as Name of the Rose. I was actually surprised a while back when chatting with my editor to find she hated Pendulum while being a Rose fan. Eco’s other books never quite thrilled me, but if I had two books of that quality I wouldn’t die totally disappointed in myself, LOL.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Oh, and Silence of the Lambs I just read recently. Not only it is it a phenomenal book, but the construction of the plot and all of its little bits and pieces are stellar. If I ever taught a class on plotting and story, I think I might use this book. It’s straight forward in its thriller manner, but at the same time complex in its nuances of character and foreshadowing.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Thanks, Steerpike. There are a few there that I need to add to my own list.
 
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