ITT we explain to other people why they should read our favourite book.
I’ll go first. Mine is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro was born in Japan but moved to England as a young child. Ishiguro won the Man Booker prize for The Remains of the Day in 1989 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, the award citing him as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
Ishiguro’s style is to write in first person, with narrators whose blindness to their own situation and evasiveness around certain topics ends up illuminating, by omission, what it is he wants to get at. For example, Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, is set in Nagasaki in 1950 and never mentions the bomb or the war.
Never Let Me Go is narrated by a woman who introduces herself as “Kathy H.”, which hints at one of the things Ishiguro is going for here. The novel is a recounting of life growing up at an English boarding school, but there’s a sinister undercurrent about who Kathy is and what she is doing there. I won’t spoil it, but it wouldn’t matter if I did, because Ishiguro is monumentally uninterested in the sci-fi-ish conceit driving the plot. He’s interested here in an array of big questions: around identity, conformity, alienation, and the value of lives. This is all dealt with in oddly stunted prose, “emotional poverty” as I once put it to a friend who read it. It’s not a book for everyone. The Amazon reviews are a weird brew of people who have no idea how anyone could like the book, people hailing it as a masterpiece, and everything in between (including a lot of people who claim to like it while in my view totally missing the point).
After I read this it occupied my thoughts for days afterwards and my mind still wanders back to it at times. I could easily write an essay on it and still not feel like I’d explained why I find it so compelling.
Loved Catch 22 and highly recommend. Don’t find it to be too deep and meaningful but just a thoroughly enjoyable novel about the futility of war, government and beauracracy.
I’ve read this a couple times, good book. The juxtaposition of comedy and then suddenly dropping into shocking brutality is effective. You might like The House of God by Samuel Shem, it’s a flawed book but has some of the same sensibilities. It’s about the insanity of being a doctor in training and coping with the horror of sickness and death.
Not a heavy book but I’ve enjoyed Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. Cracking yarn about a doctor ending up as a pirate captain.
If Sabatini had taken Moby Dick and rewritten it in his style, it’d be far more popular. Someone should do that.
I once recommended The House of God to a female friend for an almost-all-female book club (which I later joined). She liked it, but I think everyone else hated it. Being published in 1978 you should, uh, not expect progressive sexual politics. To me the value is the exploration of that tension between laughing at things that are fucked up and thereby distancing from them, on the one hand, and retaining one’s humanity on the other hand, which requires real compassionate engagement with suffering and unpleasantness. Catch-22 and House of God both explore that dichotomy.
My favorite non-fiction book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
An aging, long suffering but also insufferable Midwestern woman tries to orchestrate one last family Christmas at home before her sick, tyrant husband dies. Their children, all of whom have issues tied to decades of family dysfunction, navigate a range of emotions and personal struggles as the holiday approaches.
I just typed up and deleted a bunch of stuff trying to explain why it’s awesome but really, just read it.
I’ve read them all. Guy is an amazing writer. I always think about the lake in woods by him. Not his best but its one of those books I still remember after 15 years.
I don’t think I can pitch my favorite novel, or even explain why it’s my favorite novel. In fact, I’ll offer a couple of strikes against it:
I was assigned to read this book in my freshman year of college, and didn’t enjoy it at all. (I probably didn’t even finish it.)
The movie based on this novel is literally the worst adaptation of any novel ever.
With those caveats out of the way, I love this book so, so much. I think John Irving is an incredible writer - his style tickles me right where I itch. Some (all?) of his novels feature plots that go off the rails a little bit, but I think the language/writing more than compensates for plot problems.
When I re-read this book, the very first sentence immediately puts me in a warm and fuzzy place:
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
Did anyone else read this and…not care for it? I didn’t hate it but definitely wasn’t my thing, I see at least some of the Amazon reviewers agree with me.
This detective who this story is loosely based on is the father of an old friend of mine.
I guess I should also include a recommendation even though I’m hard-pressed to come up with a favorite. Best book I’ve read in recent memory is easily The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which I know a few other people here read and enjoyed. Not sure what to say without giving anything away but it takes place in North Korea and the unique setting allows the author to take some liberties that make it really stand out.
Another favorite is The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Been a while since I read this one but it’s about two Jewish cousins who become successful comic book authors in the time period around World War II. These are both indicative of the kinds of novels I enjoy most, where we follow someone through their life across a number of interesting experiences, some of which are probably at the edge of believability but not quite out of the realm of possibility.
I really enjoyed The Corrections and I do think it’s a really solid work overall but man Franzen is just crazy variable, some of his stuff is hot garbage.
Walker Percy is mostly known for The Moviegoer but I think The Last Gentleman is a much stronger work. If you’ve ever felt like a fish out of water this book will hit you hard. Percy in general is going to resonate with you if you have any attraction to existentialism.
My favorite Faulkner novel. It focuses on a man who cons his way into wealth and tries to marry his way into rich society and start an empire. The book is told through different people’s perspectives and you learn about his past and what he did to arrive in ruin. Each new perspective uncovers a new layer of debauchery. So engrossing.
We talked about this in the other thread, one of the rare books I have started but not finished because I found his prose unreadable. Interested to hear other’s opinions! I do love the concept so much.