Question:
list 100 favorite authors or books, or describe one book. A Basenotes book report.
is anyone here a completist (read every book the author wrote)
some authors I'm reading or just finished
Wodehouse, P. G.
Heller, Joseph
Dickens, Charles
Wright, Stephen
Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest mad me laugh harder than any other book I'v read
Mailer, Norman
Chandra, Vikram
Murakami, Haruki
Kazantzakis, Nikos
Vonnegut, Kurt
Bulgakov, Mikhail
Mccarthy, Cormac
Miller, Henry


Answer:
Originally Posted by fredricktoo list 100 favorite authors or books, or describe one book. A Basenotes book report.
is anyone here a completist (read every book the author wrote)
some authors I'm reading or just finished
Wodehouse, P. G.
Heller, Joseph
Dickens, Charles
Wright, Stephen
Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest mad me laugh harder than any other book I'v read
Mailer, Norman
Chandra, Vikram
Murakami, Haruki
Kazantzakis, Nikos
Vonnegut, Kurt
Bulgakov, Mikhail
Mccarthy, Cormac
Miller, Henry
Of the authors you've mentioned I've really enjoyed 'Quiet Days at Cliny' (Miller) and Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut) My favorite, however, is Kazantzakis; I loved all his novels, esp. Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ.
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Ok, my 'book report' choices:
Fyodor Dostoevsky--Everything, but The Brothers Karamazov tops the list.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez--Love in the Time of Cholera.
Graham Greene--The Power and the Glory.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--All of S. Holmes.
Christopher Moore--Everything; The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, (described by one reviewer as Godzilla meets The Bridges of Madison County) Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Bloodsucking Fiends: A love story. The Stupidest Angel, etc. Best comic writer around today.
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Grey.
Pearl S. Buck-- Pavillion of Women.
Ayn Rand--Anthem, The Fountainhead.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte--The Fencing Master.
Guy Gavriel Kay--Tigana, The Lions of al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium.-- Best adullt fantasy writer since Tolkien.
George R.R. Martin--'Song of Fire and Ice' series--Best adult fantasy since Robert E. Howard.
Mika Walkari--The Egyptian.-- Runs neck to neck with Grave's 'I Claudius' and Sienkiewicz' 'Quo Vadis' for the best historical novel, ever.
O. Henry---Everything. So underrated . . .
Roger Zelazny--Lord of Light. Great sci-fi, just call me Sam . . .
Emily Bronte--Wuthering Heights.
Charles Bukowski---Everything! ' Ham on Rye' may be his most polished.
Herman Hesse---Everything, but Narcissus and Goldmund tops the list for me.
Cheers,
Mario

Answer:
Another bookworm here...
Biggest faves:
Andrei Bely: Petersburg (wrote my master's thesis about it)
Mikhail Bulgakov: Master and Margarita
Raymond Chandler
Agatha Christie
Joseph Conrad: Secret Agent
Fedor Dostoevsky: Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment
Marguerite Duras
Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls, The Portrait, Nevsky Prospect, Diary of a Madman, The Nose
Hermann Hesse: Demian, Steppenwolf
James Joyce: Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Milan Kundera
Hanif Kureishi
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, Lolita, Nikolai Gogol
Dorothy Parker ("I'll have a martini, two at the very most, after three I'm under the table, after four I'm under the host" )
Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar, poems
Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time (my desert island novel!)
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings
Sue Townsend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, many plays
Tennessee Williams
Émile Zola: Nana
These came to mind first.
(if no separate books are mentioned, I have read if not all, then almost all, or at least a big part of the works)
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Originally Posted by Mario Justiniani Mika Walkari--The Egyptian.-- Runs neck to neck with Grave's 'I Claudius' and Sienkiewicz' 'Quo Vadis' for the best historical novel, ever. Mika Waltari is a Finnish writer! He never visited Egypt, btw.
I love Sinuhe, too, and his debut novel: The Great Illusion.
Might as well add some more Finnish writers:
Monika Fagerholm
Mikko Rimminen
Pirkko Saisio

Answer:
Originally Posted by tigrushka Another bookworm here...
Milan Kundera Which Kundera, and WHY? Don't try to pull a fast one, i've read all of them.

Answer:
Originally Posted by CoTHukoB Which Kundera, and WHY? Have read these:
Laughable Loves
Life Is Elsewhere
The Farewell Waltz
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Immortality
of which Life Is Elsewhere and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were the ones I liked most. In the former one of my favourite bits was the one in which the protagonist can't go to bed with a girl because he's wearing some horrible underpants chosen by his mother!
Sadly the film (which didn't do justice to the book) has messed up my memories of the latter, but I love the recurrent theme "Es muss sein!".
It's been long since I last read them, but I love Kundera's bittersweet black humour.

Answer:
Another bookworm here. I have read many Tigrushka mentioned, but James Joyce is my favorite out of the list. When I can figure out what he is saying, it is quite a revelation. I especially like "Ulysses" and the hardest to understand "Finnegin's Wake." I mostly ready non-fiction 'supposedly' and then science fiction/fantasy. Lately I have been into quantum physics, lucid dreaming, and creating your own reality. So far I have made a mess, but am working on it.

Answer:
some of my favorite writers are:
Richard Russo
John Irving
Nick Hornby
Ernest Hemingway
Mary Shelley
John Knowles
William Faulkner
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Silas House
Eudora Welty
Stephen King
Cormac McCarthy
Jhumpa Lahiri
Leif Enger

Answer:
Originally Posted by tigrushka Sadly the film (which didn't do justice to the book) has messed up my memories of the latter.[/i]. Lena Olin had a strong performance, i thought. But whereas i liked Juliette Binoche in later films, in this one i really disliked her interpretation. Or perhaps, Tereza, as portrayed by her, is simply the antithesis of the types of women i find myself attracted to. Either way, the book was so much superior.
i like the way Kundera speaks about things, real things. To use the Lightness, a quick example:
"What is flirtation? One might say that it is the behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee."
Etc., etc.
... i like the way he expresses himself, i s'pose he's compatible to the way i comprehend language and concepts. Mmm, i rather like his Farewell Waltz which is more traditional story-telling, and The Joke as well. Identity is short and sweet but is an odd animal, very dry in style though interesting in premise. In other things, he's been somewhat uneven, imo.

Answer:
Originally Posted by TDDanae Another bookworm here. I have read many Tigrushka mentioned, but James Joyce is my favorite out of the list. When I can figure out what he is saying, it is quite a revelation. I especially like "Ulysses" and the hardest to understand "Finnegin's Wake." I mostly ready non-fiction 'supposedly' and then science fiction/fantasy. Lately I have been into quantum physics, lucid dreaming, and creating your own reality. So far I have made a mess, but am working on it.
As I am sure you already know, Joseph Campbell of PBS fame (The Power Of Myth etc.) co-wrote the 'Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake', a huge help in understanding what the hell is going on in that singularly abstruse book.
Also, if you haven't already discovered it, an interesting look at Quantum Physics from a perspective of spirituality AND physics both is 'The Quantum and the Lotus' by Matthieu Ricard, a 'Buddhist monk who trained as a molecular biologist and once worked in the lab of a Nobel prize-winning scientist, and Trinh Thuan, an acclaimed astrophysicist, offer an incisive account of the many remarkable connections between the teachings of Buddhism and the findings of recent science'.

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kbe, absolutely and absolutely. Yeah, I've been interested in this for quite some time.