We already have threads on favorite classical pieces, favorite bands, favorite movies...does anyone have favorite books or authors that they'd like to share? First, do you like to read? What novels/poems/plays do you enjoy the most or have meant a lot to you?
For me, I have a lot of favorites:
William Somerset Maugham - I've had friends laugh at me for liking him because they say "everybody thinks he's wonderful when they're twenty"
but I like almost everything he's written - Of Human Bondage, and recently I read The Painted Veil, which I thought would make a good film. Not many people I know have heard of it, but Theatre is a fantastic novel; I love his style, the way he writes, and his ideas too: I keep turning them around trying to see where they fail but they stand up pretty well.
So at the moment I am enjoying liking Somerset Maugham
Thomas Mann, with his Death in Venice - sometime last spring I reread that novella again and I've remembered it over and over since then - especially one passage about "the communion of a mind and a body," when the hero is watching Tadzio on the beach and in the hotel, thinking over what his name could be and watching him from afar - maybe being alone so often this summer in crowds of people had something to do with it
but anyway, I think this is a beautiful book.
I used to love Sartre's plays: "Huis Clos," "Les Mouches," "Les Mains Sales" - I still like them, but not as much as I did. I like Hesse too, Steppenwolf and others - Kafka's stories - The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This summer I picked up Immortality by Milan Kundera and kept returning to passages long after I'd read them the first time...I think I like Kundera
I also read Haruki Murakami for the first time, his novels Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart, which after hesitation I decided were pretty good. And now I'm reading Vladimir Nabokov's Russian works, which I like much, much better than I thought I would; a long time ago I thought his Lolita was absolute genius - several English novels later I decided he wasn't so great after all, which is still sort of what I think - in some ways he is too narrow-minded for me - although his Russian works are pleasant to find, a real treat - Nabokov at his best is like twentieth-century classical music
I like VS Naipaul too; his books disturb me because they're so depressing, somehow, but somehow I feel like it's very accurate, and pointed, and right to the heart
I don't know how to explain exactly...I liked his Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River.
Huh, I guess that's more than enough (and a REALLY odd collection), although there are a lot more that I like...anyone else here have books they like? Can be any book, by anyone, doesn't even have to be fiction