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Jun. 30th, 2012 07:19 pmHaven't listed books I love in a while, an activity that always comforts me despite proving impossible. This won't differ much from earlier lists - the challenge is "what books do you feel you truly need?"
Books that seem indispensable to me:
Shelley's poems, esp. Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, Alastor, Witch of Atlas
Peer Gynt
Shakespeare, above all Othello, next Hamlet, Macbeth, Mids., Winter, Lear, Henry 4-1
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Childhood Trilogy, esp. two latter parts
Tolstoy's shorter fiction, esp. Snowstorm, Kreutzer
Dickinson's poems
Remembrance of Things Past
Moby Dick
Kafka's stories, esp. Metamorphosis, Colony, Burrow, Investigations, Wall, Josephine
Wordsworth's poems, esp. Tintern, Two Book Prelude, Ruined Cottage
Borges' stories, esp. Garden of Forking Paths volume, Order of the Phoenix, Congress
Invisible Cities
Bishop's poems
To the Lighthouse
The Magic Mountain, esp. Naphta v. Settembrini chapters, Snow, biology one
Little, Big
Engine Summer
Aegypt, esp. Pierce's city recollections in first volume
Melville's stories, esp. Piazza Tales, I and My Chimney
Complete Cosmicomics, esp. moon and dinosaur stories, Priscilla sequence
Bishop's prose, despite not having finished it
The Waves, likewise
Frost's poems, every one, Directive above all
Whitman, esp. Song of Myself, ferry Crossing, Sleepers, Body Electric
Emerson, esp. Poet, Fate, Illusions, Experience, Bacchus
Stevens' poems
Woman in the Dunes
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Orlando, just for chapter 1
Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, esp. for middle period essays
Sabbath's Theater, esp. for last third
Carson's poems, esp. the three narrative poems, and god, town, and short talk bits
The Trial, mostly for cathedral section and concept
Chekhov's stories, esp. 1892 on, tr. Garnett
Hawthorne's stories, esp. Molineux, Goodman, Wakefield, Earth's Holocaust
Ulysses, mostly for Circe and Ithaca sections
Crying of Lot 49, esp. for the night walk and structure
Suttree for scattered sections
Blood Meridian
Hazlitt's essays
Once quite meaningful to me, but might not hold up as well if I reread them now:
Faerie Queene, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Goethe's poems, Faust, Women in Love, Lawrence's short novels, My Life as a Man, Sentimental Education, Victory, Explosion in a Cathedral, Red and Black, Hofmannsthal's works, Hemingway's stories, The Crossing, Byron's poems, Light in August, Man and Dog, Sportsman's Sketches, Zuckerman Bound, rest of Ibsen, First Love, Silas Marner, Shaw's plays, Rilke's poems, Eugene Onegin, Swinburne's poems, Lotte in Weimar, Rubaiyat, Vidal's essays
Loved but slightly less important to me:
Beddoes' works, Nightmare Abbey, Gryll Grange, Miss Lonelyhearts, Browning's poems, Robinson's poems, Ammons' poems, Mrs. Dalloway, The Road, Blake's poems, Holderlin's poems, Keats' poems, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Tennyson's better poems, Milton's poems, Chekhov's plays, Stoppard's plays, Dubliners for The Dead, the Alice Books, Pessoa's poems, Trelawney's Recollections, Conversations with Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1805 Prelude, rest of Calvino, Yeats' poems, Marvell's poems
Looks like c. fifty volumes, plus about seventy-five for uncertain ones and runners-up. Not sure where to put some active ambivalence cases, like Walden and Kafka's Diaries, or Bloom, who I love but whose books tend to dissatisfy me as wholes, maybe Yeats excepted. His literature anthologies are great though.
(I think I did an earlier list where I ended up with 125 or 150. About which books I'd retain if I only had one tall shelf - including some stacks on the top, apparently. This one's probably about the same, just with some of the books fading out with the person who read them.)
Books that seem indispensable to me:
Shelley's poems, esp. Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, Alastor, Witch of Atlas
Peer Gynt
Shakespeare, above all Othello, next Hamlet, Macbeth, Mids., Winter, Lear, Henry 4-1
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Childhood Trilogy, esp. two latter parts
Tolstoy's shorter fiction, esp. Snowstorm, Kreutzer
Dickinson's poems
Remembrance of Things Past
Moby Dick
Kafka's stories, esp. Metamorphosis, Colony, Burrow, Investigations, Wall, Josephine
Wordsworth's poems, esp. Tintern, Two Book Prelude, Ruined Cottage
Borges' stories, esp. Garden of Forking Paths volume, Order of the Phoenix, Congress
Invisible Cities
Bishop's poems
To the Lighthouse
The Magic Mountain, esp. Naphta v. Settembrini chapters, Snow, biology one
Little, Big
Engine Summer
Aegypt, esp. Pierce's city recollections in first volume
Melville's stories, esp. Piazza Tales, I and My Chimney
Complete Cosmicomics, esp. moon and dinosaur stories, Priscilla sequence
Bishop's prose, despite not having finished it
The Waves, likewise
Frost's poems, every one, Directive above all
Whitman, esp. Song of Myself, ferry Crossing, Sleepers, Body Electric
Emerson, esp. Poet, Fate, Illusions, Experience, Bacchus
Stevens' poems
Woman in the Dunes
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Orlando, just for chapter 1
Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, esp. for middle period essays
Sabbath's Theater, esp. for last third
Carson's poems, esp. the three narrative poems, and god, town, and short talk bits
The Trial, mostly for cathedral section and concept
Chekhov's stories, esp. 1892 on, tr. Garnett
Hawthorne's stories, esp. Molineux, Goodman, Wakefield, Earth's Holocaust
Ulysses, mostly for Circe and Ithaca sections
Crying of Lot 49, esp. for the night walk and structure
Suttree for scattered sections
Blood Meridian
Hazlitt's essays
Once quite meaningful to me, but might not hold up as well if I reread them now:
Faerie Queene, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Goethe's poems, Faust, Women in Love, Lawrence's short novels, My Life as a Man, Sentimental Education, Victory, Explosion in a Cathedral, Red and Black, Hofmannsthal's works, Hemingway's stories, The Crossing, Byron's poems, Light in August, Man and Dog, Sportsman's Sketches, Zuckerman Bound, rest of Ibsen, First Love, Silas Marner, Shaw's plays, Rilke's poems, Eugene Onegin, Swinburne's poems, Lotte in Weimar, Rubaiyat, Vidal's essays
Loved but slightly less important to me:
Beddoes' works, Nightmare Abbey, Gryll Grange, Miss Lonelyhearts, Browning's poems, Robinson's poems, Ammons' poems, Mrs. Dalloway, The Road, Blake's poems, Holderlin's poems, Keats' poems, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Tennyson's better poems, Milton's poems, Chekhov's plays, Stoppard's plays, Dubliners for The Dead, the Alice Books, Pessoa's poems, Trelawney's Recollections, Conversations with Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1805 Prelude, rest of Calvino, Yeats' poems, Marvell's poems
Looks like c. fifty volumes, plus about seventy-five for uncertain ones and runners-up. Not sure where to put some active ambivalence cases, like Walden and Kafka's Diaries, or Bloom, who I love but whose books tend to dissatisfy me as wholes, maybe Yeats excepted. His literature anthologies are great though.
(I think I did an earlier list where I ended up with 125 or 150. About which books I'd retain if I only had one tall shelf - including some stacks on the top, apparently. This one's probably about the same, just with some of the books fading out with the person who read them.)
