Books We're At Home In

[BlackShanglan]

Those warm, cozy old friends that we come back to again and again.

Watership Down
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Wind in the Willows
Gulliver's Travels
Pater's The Renaissance, particularly the introductory and concluding essays.
Pope's "Essay on Criticism"
Doyle's "Silver Blaze" or "The Yellow Face"
Anything by John Stuart Mill. Even pieces new to me have at once the feeling of old friends, for they are written by one.

 

[bluebell]

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb by Valerie Hurley
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Bird by Bird/Operating Instructions/Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
The Pop Larkin Chronicles by H.E. Bates
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anything by James Herriot
Rose by Li-Young Lee (poetry)
Father Melancholy's Daughter by Gail Godwin

I didn't list a few of the young adult books I like. Sometimes it's the seemingly "fluffy" ones that pack a good wallop.

 

[sethp]

the hobbit, and the ring trilogy. nothing else compares.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

I came to it late but I do adore it.

Anything by James Herriot

Ah, yes! Wonderful choice.

And I should add my tattered old Norton Anthology of Poetry.

 

[bluebell]

I came to it late but I do adore it.

Me too. In fact, I hated it beyond all hatred after my first reading.
Threw it across the floor and hoped it would ricochet off a corner, out a nearby open window and into a strategically-placed bird bath below where the birds would, you know...

Thank goodness I came around. I was a lost soul to Flaubert.

Ah, yes! Wonderful choice.

And I should add my tattered old Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Mmm. Herriot is both cozy and entertaining. The BBC series is actually pretty good as well.

I find it's always the oddest reads that draw me in time and time again.
I'll re-read a book until I die.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Retained from childhood,
The Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
The "Green Knowe" series by L. M. Boston,
The books of E.B. White, particularly The Trumpet Of The Swan

Newer home territories;
ADA, or Ardor, a family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
The "Lucia" stories by E. F. Benson
The "Gormenghast" trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Little, Big by John Crowley
The Mouse and His Son and Riddly Walker both by Russel Hoban

Anything Fritz Lieber or R.A.Lafferty cared to write, anything Terry Pratchett cares to write, ditto Neil Gaiman.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Me too. In fact, I hated it beyond all hatred after my first reading.
Threw it across the floor and hoped it would ricochet off a corner, out a nearby open window and into a strategically-placed bird bath below where the birds would, you know...

Thank goodness I came around. I was a lost soul to Flaubert.

Can I just say that this passage makes me like you immensely? Wonderful stuff! And indeed I do love the old BBC series of "All Creatures."

And The Hobbit! How could I forget that? But that's the joy of a thread like this - it reminds one of all sorts of beloved old acquaintances.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Do you notice that I left Tolkien off my list?
Twenty years ago it most certainly would have been on. The last time I went to read them, I was mostly irritated by the style and the extraneous rambling. This makes me feel rather sad. I think I've been Elmore Leonarded.

 

[bluebell]

Can I just say that this passage makes me like you immensely? Wonderful stuff! And indeed I do love the old BBC series of "All Creatures."

Well I daresay I wouldn't deny you a nice bucket of oats and some sugar lumps.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Do you notice that I left Tolkien off my list?
Twenty years ago it most certainly would have been on. The last time I went to read them, I was mostly irritated by the style and the extraneous rambling. This makes me feel rather sad. I think I've been Elmore Leonarded.

I didn't really enjoy The Lord of the Rings, and have felt no urge to re-read it; the characters didn't really come alive for me. But I do love The Hobbit. It's just lovely being on an adventure with a person whose chief concern is second breakfast.

Oh, and The Chronicles of Narnia! Quite possibly my truest home. *happy sigh* The first time the SO listened to The Horse and His Boy (we were listening on audio CD in the car), the SO smiled and said that it showed where a great deal of me (and "Will") came from.

 

[cloudy]

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Descent, Jeff Long
Maia, Richard Adams
The King's Women, Dinah Lampitt
The Outlander series, Diana Gabaldon

eta: The Chronicles of Narnia.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I didn't really enjoy The Lord of the Rings, and have felt no urge to re-read it; the characters didn't really come alive for me. But I do love The Hobbit. It's just lovely being on an adventure with a person whose chief concern is second breakfast.

Oh, and The Chronicles of Narnia! Quite possibly my truest home. *happy sigh* The first time the SO listened to The Horse and His Boy (we were listening on audio CD in the car), the SO smiled and said that it showed where a great deal of me (and "Will") came from.

I like The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader the best, but those books don't exactly feel like "home" to me.
Cloudy, you have Maia on your list!

 

[sethp]

ok so it's been a good 10 years since I read the hobbit books. will I be disappointed? fuck..now what? lol

 

[Stella_Omega]

ok so it's been a good 10 years since I read the hobbit books. will I be disappointed? fuck..now what? lol

Do you still smoke? Roll a nice fat one, first. You'll be fine!

 

[sethp]

Do you still smoke? Roll a nice fat one, first. You'll be fine!

hmmm well I don't any;moe so... I better burn my tolkien books.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Retained from childhood,
The Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
The "Green Knowe" series by L. M. Boston,
The books of E.B. White, particularly The Trumpet Of The Swan

Newer home territories;
ADA, or Ardor, a family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
The "Lucia" stories by E. F. Benson
The "Gormenghast" trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Little, Big by John Crowley
The Mouse and His Son and Riddly Walker both by Russel Hoban

Anything Fritz Lieber or R.A.Lafferty cared to write, anything Terry Pratchett cares to write, ditto Neil Gaiman.

Gasp! Another human being who reads Mervyn Peake!

I'm on my third set of the Ghormengast books. The previous sets got so dog-eared and broken I had to retire them.

Let me add:
The Face in the Frost
and The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs
The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
Medieval Myths by Norma Lorre Goodrich
The Professor Branestawm stories by Norman Hunter

bijou

 

[sethp]

who's Mervyn Peake?

 

[unpredictablebijou]

who's Mervyn Peake?

Google him, darling. Get a copy of Titus Groan and tuck in for a feast of language you will not soon forget. He is as brilliant as his autobiography is poetically tragic. If you like your sentences to be complete meals, with several courses, dessert and a nice cognac, this is the author for you.

bijou

 

[sethp]

Google him, darling. Get a copy of Titus Groan and tuck in for a feast of language you will not soon forget. He is as brilliant as his autobiography is poetically tragic. If you like your sentences to be complete meals, with several courses, dessert and a nice cognac, this is the author for you.

bijou

Thanks and from you...give me a short summary of that book in your own words please. (you're better than google)

 

[LadynStFreknBed]

Dante's Inferno
Anything by Ray Bradbury or Jane Austen
Quicksilver by: Neal Stephenson

 

[sethp]

anne rice or old stephen king.

 

[CeriseNoire]

1984, Georges Orwell
Cry to Heaven, Anne Rice
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
American Gods, Neil Gaiman


Huits clos, Jean-Paul Sartre
Les fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
L'étranger, Albert Camus

ETA: authors

 

[Stella_Omega]

Thanks and from you...give me a short summary of that book in your own words please. (you're better than google)

"In a castle of mythic proportions, labyrinthine and fabulously aged, the Earls of Groan have long resided amidst regal splendor, brutal squalor, fierce loyalties and desperate traitors, and-- most especially-- a never-ending routine of ceremony that turns nearly every waking moment into a monument of pompous meaninglessness. Into this world is born Titus, destined to be the 77th of his line-- will he or nill he. "
How's that?

Bijou, you'd probably enjoy "Ada" very much.

 

[RunningJib]

No Hemmingway?

Have to add Movable Feast.

What about some O.Henry? I've read and reread Retreived Refromation a million times.

I love Pressfield's Legend of Bagger Vance (no, it's not about golf)

 

[Picodiribibi]

The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus) by Henry Miller
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

Growing up, Watership Down (by Richard Adams) was one of my favorite books.

And, of course, The Hobbit.