{"id":4480,"date":"2012-08-22T12:58:18","date_gmt":"2012-08-22T12:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=4480"},"modified":"2023-07-16T16:13:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T16:13:17","slug":"two-lists-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/two-lists-of-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Two lists of books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In succession to <a href=\"http:\/\/brockley.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/08\/bobs-lists-novels.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this<\/a> post which seems to have originated a meme, herewith two lists of novels &#8211; one list influential when younger, and the other later, with influence measured by strength of memory.&nbsp; In each case, I include a couple of works of non-fiction, because of their superb writing.<br \/>\nThe rules only allow listing of one book per author.&nbsp;&nbsp; In fact, all the books of some writers would merit inclusion.&nbsp; In this group, I would include Brautigan, Camus, Conrad, Faulkner, Gordimer, Ishiguro, H. James, Joyce, Maugham, Perec and Turgenev.<br \/>\nInfluential when younger:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Albert Camus:&nbsp; <em>The Plague<\/em><\/li>\n<li>JM Coetzee:&nbsp; <em>Waiting for the Barbarians<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Joseph Conrad:&nbsp; <em>The Secret Agent<\/em><\/li>\n<li>William Faulkner:&nbsp; <em>As I Lay Dying<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Nadine Gordimer:&nbsp; <em>Burger&#8217;s Daughter<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Joseph Heller:&nbsp; <em>Catch-22<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Ruth Prawer Jhabvala:&nbsp; <em>Heat and Dust<\/em><\/li>\n<li>James Joyce:&nbsp; <em>Ulysses<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Franz Kafka:&nbsp; <em>The Trial<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Arthur Koestler:&nbsp; <em>Darkness at Noon<\/em><\/li>\n<li>William Least Heat-Moon:&nbsp; <em>Blue Highways:&nbsp; A Journey into America<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Doris Lessing:&nbsp; <em>The Diary of a Good Neighbour<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Thomas Mann:&nbsp; <em>Dr Faustus<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Gabriel Garcia Marquez:&nbsp; <em>100 Years of Solitude<\/em><\/li>\n<li>W. Somerset Maugham:&nbsp; <em>The Razor&#8217;s Edge<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Herman Melville:&nbsp; <em>Moby Dick<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Gerald Murnane:&nbsp; <em>Landscape with Landscape<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Michael Ondaatje:&nbsp; <em>Coming Through Slaughter<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Bertrand Russell:&nbsp; <em>The Autobiography<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Jean-Paul Sartre:&nbsp; <em>Nausea<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Mikhail Sholokhov:&nbsp; <em>And Quiet Flows the Don<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Alice Walker:&nbsp; <em>The Color Purple<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Patrick White:&nbsp; <em>Voss<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Yevgeny Zamyatin:&nbsp; <em>We<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Influential more recently:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Henry Adams:&nbsp; <em>The Education of Henry Adams<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Richard Brautigan:&nbsp; <em>An Unfortunate Women:&nbsp; A Journey<\/em><\/li>\n<li>William Burroughs:&nbsp; <em>Naked Lunch<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Italo Calvino:&nbsp; <em>If on a Winter&#8217;s Night a Traveller<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Robert Dessaix:&nbsp; <em>Corfu<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Shusaku Endo: <em>Silence<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Mark Henshaw:&nbsp; <em>Out of the Line of Fire<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Kazuo Ishiguro:&nbsp; <em>An Artist of the Floating World<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Henry James:&nbsp; <em>The Princess Casamassima<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Ryszard Kapuscinski: <em>The Emperor:&nbsp; Downfall of an Autocrat<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Naguib Mahfouz:&nbsp; <em>The Journey of Ibn Fattouma<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Norman Mailer:&nbsp; <em>Harlot&#8217;s Ghost<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Alberto Moravia:&nbsp; <em>Boredom<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Georges Perec:&nbsp; <em>Things:&nbsp; A Story of the Sixties<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Antonio Tabucchi:&nbsp; <em>Pereira Maintains<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Henry David Thoreau:&nbsp; <em>Cape Cod<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Ivan Turgenev:&nbsp; <em>Fathers and Sons<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Glenway Wescott:&nbsp; <em>The Pilgrim Hawk<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As these lists may indicate, there are some writers (eg, James, Turgenev) whom one may only appreciate after a certain age and passage of years.<br \/>\nOn the other hand, for various different reasons, books by the following authors do not speak at all to me.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The family Amis<\/li>\n<li>Saul Bellow<\/li>\n<li>The family Bronte<\/li>\n<li>Peter Carey<\/li>\n<li>David Caute<\/li>\n<li>George Eliot<\/li>\n<li>Richard Ford<\/li>\n<li>Graham Greene<\/li>\n<li>Ernest Hemingway<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2012\/09\/hoja-do\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Howard Jacobson<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Thomas Keneally<\/li>\n<li>Milan Kundera (the Benny Hill of Czech literature)<\/li>\n<li>Iris Murdoch<\/li>\n<li>Anthony Powell<\/li>\n<li>Marcel Proust<\/li>\n<li>Philip Roth<\/li>\n<li>Tom Sharpe<\/li>\n<li>Anthony Trollope<\/li>\n<li>PG Wodehouse<\/li>\n<li><em>and many more.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For some of these authors, the issue may be a generational one:&nbsp; for example, I know of no members of late <em>Generation Jones<\/em> or later-born readers who appreciate that early-<em>Baby Boomer<\/em> obsession, <em>A Dance to the Music of Time<\/em>, Powell&#8217;s long-winded novel sequence.&nbsp;&nbsp; <strong>Added 2013-02-12:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong> The age threshold of my personal sample is confirmed by that of Max Hastings, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/books\/3619199\/Patterns-partners-and-pedigrees.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">writing in 2004<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Anthony Powell&#8217;s fan club, always far smaller than that of his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, will continue to shrink as admirers die off and are not replaced.&nbsp; Nobody whom I know under 40 reads his books, while Waugh&#8217;s position as the greatest English novelist of the 20th century seems secure.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course,&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/normblog.typepad.com\/normblog\/2012\/11\/a-roth-ranking.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">not everyone<\/a> shares my low opinion of Roth&#8217;s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In succession to this post which seems to have originated a meme, herewith two lists of novels &#8211; one list influential when younger, and the other later, with influence measured by strength of memory.&nbsp; In each case, I include a couple of works of non-fiction, because of their superb writing. The rules only allow listing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,16,26,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-concats","category-fiction","category-writing","p1","y2012","m08","d22","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11423,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4480\/revisions\/11423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}