Books

[AChild]

Other than books of poetry what books (or genre of books) have inspired you as a writer?

 

[Decayed Angel]

books...

Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy - Yukio Mishima
Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Wind Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote...

among others. Each actually not only inspiring prose, but poetry.

 

[Tzara]

Off the top of my head:

• Shakespeare
• Sophocles
• Euripides
• Jane Austen, especially Persuasion
• The Brontës, especially Emily's Wuthering Heights
• Knut Hamsun: Mysteries and Pan, two of the best and most erotic books I've ever read
• Thomas Pynchon, everything
• John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse (stylistic invention)
• Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones, some of the most perfect stories I've ever read
• Stanisław Lem, damn near everything
• Raymond Chandler, ditto
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, stark linguistic philosophy that reads like poetry
• I'd second Mr. Angel on Kawabata and Murakami, but would pick different books (Snow Country and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, respectively)
• Comic books
• Paul Feyerabend: Against Method
• B.F. Skinner's theoretical work on radical behaviorism, and Chomsky, Seligman, etc.'s reaction and rebuttal to that

That should be enough for now.

 

[clutching_calliope]

.....

 

[Angeline]

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev, both by Chaim Potok
Great Expectations, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, all by Charles Dickens
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtrey
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Most of Shakespeare, but especially Julius Caesar
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Germinal, Emile Zola
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
Orlando, Virginia Woolf


There's lots more, but those come to mind immediately.

 

[Decayed Angel]

Murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,

It's all those sideways running elevators... Have you read Kafka on the Shore? Good stuff there too. Had me wondering if I could talk to cats. I even tried, but I think my cat is not too bright.

 

[cherries_on_snow]

A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (a lovely liar of a man)
Freddy and Fredericka (also by Mark Helprin)
The Cherry Orchard (a play by Chekhov)
The Tempest (a play by Shakespeare)
Shameless Hussy (by Alta--ok it is poems but they were unconventional and caught my adolescent attention)
The Silver Metal Lover (Tanith Lee)
The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme)
Coming Through Slaughter (Ondaatje)
In the Skin of a Lion (Ondaatje)
and everything I've ever read by Jean McKay.

And lots of stuff other people said. (Angeline, I think we must have read a lot of the same books!)

 

[ishtat]

1 Dead Souls by Gogol
2 Beowulf
3 anything by Jane Austen or George Eliot
4 The Bible as literature and history
5 trashy historical novels
6 anything by John le Carre

 

[Angeline]

A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (a lovely liar of a man)
Freddy and Fredericka also by Mark Helprin
The Cherry Orchard (a play by Chekhov)
The Tempest (a play by Shakespeare)
Shameless Hussy (by Alta--ok it is poems but they were unconventional and caught my adolescent attention)
The Silver Metal Lover (Tanith Lee)
The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme)
Coming Through Slaughter (Ondatje whose name I'm probably slaughtering also)
In the Skin of a Lion (Ondatje)
and everything I've ever read by Jean McKay.

And lots of stuff other people said. (Angeline, I think we must have read a lot of the same books!)

Well your list will likely get me to read In the Skin of a Lion. Everyone keeps raving about it to me.

Oh and I just finished reading Tis, Frank McCourt's sequel to Angela's Ashes. What a lovely book!

 

[arienette]

Okay, well besides poetry, (because poetry book do a lot to stimulate my mind; such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Margaret Atwood) but besides poetry...

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays by Anais Nin
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

 

[Tzara]

It's all those sideways running elevators... Have you read Kafka on the Shore? Good stuff there too. Had me wondering if I could talk to cats. I even tried, but I think my cat is not too bright.

No, I dully admit, no. I have not.

But. Have you read Tanizaki? The Key, among others? Have you read Rashomon by Akutagawa? (Yeah , yeah, the movie rocks.)

So. I am teasing you, Mr. Angel.

Peace and good comfort.

B

(Hey. Recommend books to me, mister, 'cuz I love it when you do. I like to read.)

 

[Decayed Angel]

Japanese Lit...

But. Have you read Tanizaki? The Key, among others? Have you read Rashomon by Akutagawa? (Yeah , yeah, the movie rocks.)


(Hey. Recommend books to me, mister, 'cuz I love it when you do. I like to read.)

Tanizaki is another favorite of mine... The Key was the first of his I read. Have you read Naomi? Talk about a brutal female character here...

I have not read any Akutagawa...

Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was pretty shocking too.

Of course if you want to get into some pretty bizarre Japanese stuff you might want to look into Ryu Murakami, no relation to Haruki, actually I just reviewed one here on lit:
Ryu Murakami's "In the Miso Soup"

 

[Decayed Angel]

Certainly more people here read books...

I am surprised how quickly this thread is falling away.