A Momentary Taste of Being

What's Your Favorite Book? Easy as pie, hands down-- Ulysses .

Rather than favorite books, which seems so arbitrary given the minimal amount of reading that I can do in a year, it seemed worthwhile for me to note the book blogs I return to time and again in the course of the year because of the variety of  interesting things offered there.  This is my way of trying to make up for occasions when I should have credited someone and may not have done so. By far and away, my top three favorite locations for sheer bulk and variety of posts are: Books Inq. Biblioklept Open Culture Then three that don't post as much, but always have material of quality First Known When Lost The Common Reader Interpolations This should by no means be read as a "best of list."  I'm in no position to judge and I really enjoy all the blogs that I've listed in my right-hand column.  But I do know that over the year, I've spent an inordinate amount of time at these blogs (and many of my links reflect the time spent)--the webmasters have...

And have already tossed aside your well-worn editions of Shirley Jackson.  Stephen King not to your taste?  Looking for Lovecraft that isn't Lovecraft? Well you could do worse than to check out The Literary Gothic,   a site that I have been perusing for what seems like forever at this point (but obviously cannot be).  Collected here are a great many public domain texts--books and short stories.  You can find a great many of the works mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft's magnificent essay " Supernatural Horror in Literature,"  indeed, as the link indicates, you can find the essay itself. Additionally, you can find works by Vernon Lee, J Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Maria Edgeworth, Matthew "Monk" Lewis; in many cases you can also find critical essays and biographical information to accompany the works.  So if you're looking to head into October Country, this could be your one-stop shop.

Fred lists his favorite SF books Most of which I concur with (3-5, 8-9, 12, 16 would all be on my list), but to which I would add some of my favorite texts: The Man in the High Castle --Philip K. Dick Lord of Light --Roger Zelazny The Diamond Age --Neal Stephenson And being an ardent fan of dystopian fiction: 1984 --George Orwell Brave New World --Aldous Huxley And debatably (not as to favorite, but as to the designation Science Fiction) I would further add: At the Mountains of Madness --H. P. Lovecraft and Swan Song Robert R. McCammon But favorites are not necessarily "best"  and I won't make any argument that they are.  I just fine dipping into these, among others, even if I don't read the entire thing is always a source of pleasure.

An appreciation of five of Hemon's favorite books.   WARNING: Graphic Death Camp Imagery (going along with the discussion of Tadeusz Borowski's powerful This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.

Here Includes Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann, so another eclectic, wonderful list.

The Christianity Today List of Favorite books.   The only book I saw on the list that I've seen mentioned in any other list or presentation is Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice --a rather surprising choice from the above-mentioned source.

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....

I said in a prior entry that Yiyun Li is rapidly becoming a favorite.  I read the book of short stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers , and had the same frisson I felt when I had read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies .  Now I'm hoping that I don't suffer the same disappointment that I did with Lahiri's subsequent, somewhat lackluster books. I found A Thousand Years of Good Prayers far more readable than Ha Jin's Waiting , and her novel-length fiction, The Vagrants , verifies this for me.  Alternately poetic and horrific, the novel capitalizes on her observational and poetic strengths, while showing that she has the ability to sustain suspense and storyline in the long term.  How wonderfully satisfying.  And here is an example: from The Vagrants Yiyun Li In the period of indecision and uncertainty, old winter-weary snow began to melt. The ground became less solid, the black dirt oozing with moisture in the sunshine. The willow trees lining bo...