My Five Favorite Books (This Week)
Favorites are such a fickle thing. One is tempted to put them into all sorts of categories so one can have so many more favorites. After all, is it fair to measure Harry Potter against Marcel Proust?
But I was talking about the very subject of this post with my wife and son, and thought I'd share the results of that conversation with you because it comprises my five favorite books of the moment. Always subject to change, but it records the zeitgeist.
(1) Ulysses--James Joyce (I'm sure that's a stunner)
(2) Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass--Lewis Carroll (My guess is, sitting within the rest of this list, this may come as a bit of a surprise.
(3) Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner
(4) To the Lighthouse--Virginia Woolf
(5) The Sound and the Fury--William Faulkner
The first two are fairly solidly entrenched as life-transforming books. My son and I are often quoting to one another, "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards." Or, "My you live in a very slow country. Here, you must run as fast you can to stay in the same place, twice as fast if you want to get anywhere."
The last three are subject to "the shifting and the solid" as Ms. Woolf would have it. The works themselves change with rereading and sometimes it's Mrs. Dalloway, others its The Waves or Light in August. There are moments with The Violent Bear it Away intrudes into the list and other such books. But the top two are the top two.
But I was talking about the very subject of this post with my wife and son, and thought I'd share the results of that conversation with you because it comprises my five favorite books of the moment. Always subject to change, but it records the zeitgeist.
(1) Ulysses--James Joyce (I'm sure that's a stunner)
(2) Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass--Lewis Carroll (My guess is, sitting within the rest of this list, this may come as a bit of a surprise.
(3) Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner
(4) To the Lighthouse--Virginia Woolf
(5) The Sound and the Fury--William Faulkner
The first two are fairly solidly entrenched as life-transforming books. My son and I are often quoting to one another, "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards." Or, "My you live in a very slow country. Here, you must run as fast you can to stay in the same place, twice as fast if you want to get anywhere."
The last three are subject to "the shifting and the solid" as Ms. Woolf would have it. The works themselves change with rereading and sometimes it's Mrs. Dalloway, others its The Waves or Light in August. There are moments with The Violent Bear it Away intrudes into the list and other such books. But the top two are the top two.
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