(no subject)

[proximoception]

Next year I'll ditch books and master pinball.

In the meantime this question might be fun: what authors have you read all, or all in their major line, or nearly all of?

I like running through an author, where possible--so this list resembles all my others--though there's been little time for it in recent years. Seems to help one understand a writer better than the best criticism can. Mine:

Possibly only Shakespeare for complete writings. I missed some bits of Wilde--early verse plays, some poems, letters and fairy tales. I think I've read everything translated by Goethe but his non-fictional prose. Probably everything by Kleist that's been translated. Short Finnegans and "Penelope" for Joyce.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marlowe, everything translated by Moliere post 1900, Ibsen, Chekhov for plays. All Stoppard and Pinter through the '90s. Probably all but a handful by Beckett, Shaw too. Must have missed three or four by Racine. Read all Valery's and Buchner's but there's few. Everything by Hofmannsthal I could find, likewise Musset & Marivaux. Never finished Congreve's Old Bachelor. All or nearly all of Sheridan.

Only Kafka & McCarthy for fiction (apart from one-shots like Emily Bronte). Borges for non-collaborative fiction. All Tolstoy's but Resurrection, all but three of Roth's books, all but the last two of Crowley's. All Calvino's but Castle of Crossed Destinies, a double handful of stories and whatever hasn't been translated. Haven't read Proust's minor works. Must have read all Hemingway's fiction but that early parody and the posthumous novels. For O'Connor I've missed a handful of short stories and the latter half of Wise Blood. Haven't read Dream Life of Balso Snell. I wonder if I read all of Douglas Adams' novels. Did read all four Salinger books.

Dante, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Rossetti, Rimbaud, Yeats, Housman, Thomas, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Crane for poems. Also people like Stephen Crane, Dowson, Thomas Gray etc. who wrote so little it shouldn't count. I skipped a few of Spenser's early poems, likewise Beddoes. Probably read 90% of Dickinson by now. Nearly all available Holderlin, Pushkin, Morike. All Carson's verse or verse-ish books. All Lorca but some of Poet in NY. Most everything by Borges that's been translated. Marvell except some dubious satires. Almost all of Wordsworth through 1806. All Owen but his Andersen story. Haven't read Bishop's uncollected poems.

I kept up with Vidal's non-fiction till lately. May have missed a few pages of Bloom here and there. Most everything by Borges that's been translated.

Forgetting things, as always, but I find listing soothing. Sample of yours?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Very quick take: Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Beckett, Blanchot, Henry James, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Hammett, Chandler, Bishop, Merrill, Austen, probably others....

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

All of James! I think of his five Library of American story volumes when fantasizing about what to read in my End of March-style dream house.

You've never seemed like an Austen fan.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I love her even when I don't love her. But I love Northanger Abbey to pieces. True, I probably like Trollope more. But she's the greater.

Also all of Joyce (senior thesis in college on Finnegans Wake), and Flaubert and Roth (well, still catching up to the last couple). Salinger, yes.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Northanger Abbey goes on the list.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This is fun. I've read everything I can get my hands on by Emerson - only about 33% of the journals though. All of Pynchon that I know exists. All of Fitzgerald unless there are some stories I don't know about. Only about half of his collected letters. All of Dickinson's poems collected as of the 1990s. Collected Stevens but who knows what else is out there. A good 80% of Merrill. All of McCarthy except the plays. Working on Keats now.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I think I know, but which are your favorite Emerson essays?

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Experience, Fate, Circles, The Poet and Nature I think are the ones I'd take to the desert island. Or I'd trade them all for the poem "Threnody."

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I'm sticking that list in my Collected copy. (I love "The Poet and Nature," too. All that stuff about fossil poetry!)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I've read little of him systematically, just mostly around; I don't think I've read all of The Poet even, maybe out of irritation at his owing so much to Shelley despite execrating him his whole life through.

My Emerson poems are Bacchus and Two Rivers. And the Channing Ode. And Merlin and Brahma and Threnody and Uriel and etc.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Lots of great Stevens left out of Collected, esp. '50s poems, most of which is in Opus Posthumous.

I tried to read Emerson's journals through but young Emerson seemed like an intolerable prig.

Don't miss Sunset Limited and Stone Mason!

What Fitzgerald stories do you like best? I've read only the most anthologized double handful. But not The Rich Boy.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I agree with Bloom and have been saying for a decade to nobody listening that Emerson's journals starting around 1842 are the secret treasure of American writing. His published stuff is so ordinary. If you read the letters between him and Carlyle it's like a dope (Emerson) and a genius (Carlyle) chatting on AOL. But his journals have those great flashes that cause the earthquake of thought.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Starting in 1842, check.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I think the double handful you know are the best. But the book many non-obsessives skip is The Crack-Up.

i'm nothing if not not well-read

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

beckett, vonnegut, lethem, pavic, salinger, wanted to say toole, but haven't read the neon bible, working on bellow, but a ways to go still.

and wasn't going to go genre, but since you mention him, douglas adams, yes.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Vonnegut and Lethem seem generic (genre-y?). I'll have to look up Pavic.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

it's definitely a cataloguer's fence they straddle. but neither want(ed) their work so labeled. certainly the elements that make them genraic are part of their appeal for me.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I'm very predictable: Proust and Nabokov. Although there are essays and letters and short fiction that I haven't. In the case of the latter, it began as a pre-grad school sort of private pissing contest and, many years later, found me sick to death of Nabokovian minutiae, and ended up making me wish we (that was the *we* of academia) could just stick to his truly good stuff and not hermeneuticize the trivial details of the stuff that just...isn't.

And, actually, most of Michael Chabon: chronologically, almost. He's the one, actually, whom I've really, really enjoyed seeing develop as a writer - and just as a person.

But, then, Austen - too, I realize as teach P&P. Well, Austen in the conventional sense that most of us have - all the novels, none of the juvenilia or un-finished. And yes, Salinger - went through that phase in my teens. All of Joyce, save the Wake, which doesn't really appeal. Not now. Pretty predictable stuff. More Shakespeare than any other author but Nabokov, but still not by far all of Shakespeare. Almost all Fitzgerald - not The Last Tycoon, though - and not letters. Many, many, many by Stevens - but always new ones surface.

Again, not surprising names. I wouldn't ever read everything by the author of a novel I loved just to say I did. So often, just single novels, single collections of poetry or shorts, or whatever, are marvelous, but there's no clear need (outside of academic pursuits) to read the rest. Because there's just so much else.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

The Last Tycoon is wonderful. Also I owe you an email.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

It's more officially on my list, then. It's nice to think there's more good Fitzgerald left. This fall, I purchased a little collection, put out by a local publisher, of his so-called St. Paul stories. It's nice to have, but I'd already read most of them - not realizing they were such. I was sort of nostalgically thinking or re-reading This Side of Paradise, just because I haven't since high school, which essentially means that, save for fragments and a general sense of it, I haven't.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

There's a neat little essay on Fitzgerald's French that talks a lot about St. Paul. I think the author is Michael Hollington. You might be able to find a PDF through a library online database if you're interested.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Sounds perfect! Thank you.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I tried to post a nice episode from The Last Tycoon here, but it was too long for a comment. Will post in my lj.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Nabokov was a favorite of Calvino's--and Crowley's, of course. I'll try Lolita again sometime soon.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

rather, why don't we do a group read of pale fire?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yes, why not?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I'm in. The lost glove is happy.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

If we read Ada I bet we could get Karin to join in.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

if you invite her & she says yes, i can set it up

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I think that one can't swing a dead cat in a room full of writers without hitting many who adore Nabokov.

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

Mine are predictable too, and not very numerous. All of Woolf, save Night and Day, and I'll get to that, I'm sure, as the dissertation proceeds. Proust, also. And I think most of Anne Carson. From earlier infatuations, Austen and Wilde. I also attempted to work my way through the entirety of DeLillo's corpus in undergrad, and made it pretty far before I lost interest. What a nice idea this is.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I admired Underworld but felt that earned me my DeL badge. You remind me I've been meaning to go back and finish The Waves. Which of hers are you most interested in?

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

Underworld is exactly where I hit a wall. I made it about a third of the way through, I think. Of Woolf, my favorites are To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Mrs. Dalloway. I think (like most people) these are the clearly the best. Which Kafka do you like best?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I love To the Lighthouse and Orlando (Ch 1) and what I've read of The Waves. Dalloway's great but those speak to me more directly.

Lotsa Kafka! At the moment I like best The Burrow, Investigations of a Dog Reflections on Sin Suffering Hope and the True Way, all the parables, Before the Law (& the whole Trial Cathedral scene), In the Penal Colony, & anything set in China.

Just avoid Michael Hofmann's translations, which have temporarily killed Metamorphosis and Josephine the Singer for me. Calvino's favorite book was Amerika, but I'll have to hunt down someone else's translation to find out why. The one I read left episodes out, but I'm not sure there's another in print than Hofmann's.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Which DeLillo is your favorite? I've never loved anything by him as much as I love White Noise, but then, there's so much by him that I haven't read.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

The Names!

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I remember your post about that. I think a bunch of times, I almost purchased it, only to decide to find it at a library - and then fail to. Now will look harder.

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

White Noise is by far my favorite. I also quite liked Libra, the one about the Kennedy assassination. Now that I'm really trying to remember, though, I find it hard to recall distinct impressions of many of the others.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read Americana? I read it directly after I first read White Noise. It's not amazing, but I liked it well enough at the time, because of it's (and my, at the time) fixation with cameras.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

when i was young i had a conversation with the husband of one of my mother's friends and he told me his theory of reading, that he read around and found someone he liked then read everything they wrote. if the person was alive then he'd have to wait around for them to publish their next book so in the meantime he found someone else to read all of. strange man, his biggest recommendations that i can remember were faulkner and john grisham.

I can't even say Hart Crane since I bet there's stuff in the back of collected I glazed over.