I must think carefully before I put together my list.

Ah, yes, all those fat leather bound volumes of the complete works of Thackery or Scott or Irving sitting in second hand books stores waiting to be bought by the foot. Who will be the Thackery of the 20th century?

Are best-sellers available for selection? Can we say Dan Brown, or are we stuck with the F. Scott's of the world?

Can we say Dan Brown, or are we stuck with the F. Scott's of the world?
If we let in Dan Brown then it becomes too easy.

Here's one....Norman Mailer.
Here's another....John Updike.

Oh yes, let's put Norman Mailer at the top of the list. Maybe I should revise my first comment to read, 10 Famous Titles (with Literary Pretensions) Least Likely to Stand the Test of Time.

OK,

I have taken lessons in being a provocateur at the Enrique-Macumbeira School of Dynamite. I passed with flying colors.

Here comes my nomination:

Lolita

(How quickly will I get 10 posts disagreeing, I wonder. Will I get anybody to agree?)

Uh, I dont agree, polutropos. (I see 33 minutes have elapsed since your post.)

So I dont make some uncharitable assumptions about you, you should say why it wont last. I want to be friends! :)

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 1:13pm.

Sans uncharitable assumptions, polu, i don't agree either. Overrated, likely, but so poor as to be forgotten by posterity (not that that's the measure of all things)? No way.

I'd like to nominate Lucky Jim. I think the forgetting process has already started with this one.

Also, thanks, urania, for finally (hopefully?) taking this list business to its reductio ad absurdum. Not that I haven't been enjoying it.

All things are forgotten eventually. Will Lolita be sooner forgotten or later? I think odd-ball professors will continue to teach it (how many of them find stimulation in the discomfort of the apparently innocent, a sort of verbal deflowering), and that it will continue to have a small cult following, but will slowly fade off to become a footnote. There is nothing Nabokov does that isn't done better by someone else. It's not that he's not good - but he's only good.

Gore Vidal is another in this category. Someone else does everything better. To cross the ocean, I can only hope Ted Hughes is soon forgotten. I fear Iris Murdoch will be, because while she is only good, I think I'm fonder of her work than almost any other British novelist of the 20th century.

how many of them find stimulation in the discomfort of the apparently innocent

I'm not following. Are you saying the oddballs will teach it if they are sexually stimulated by the story? or stimulated by cruelty?

I'm saying it's a license for a male prof to talk dirty with a bunch of women half his age. And will survive in part because of that.

^ Ha. I bet you're right, A. I had a couple nasty old professors like that.

Ted Hughes is unlikely to be forgotten. And you might want to explain why he would be, since it seems so unlikely...

Similarly Nabakov's Lolita, while not necessarily 'great' is certainly a good novel, and inspired a great movie by Stanley Kubrick. Perhaps you think Kubrik will also be forgotten, in which case your position is beginning to look absurd.

There's a qualitative difference between being forgotten in 50 years and forgotten in 500 years. The latter may happen to the best, the former cleans up after the rest.

I like Ted H! I don't think he's big enough to qualify in the spirit of this game though.

I can see Conrad slipping from must be read status. Forgotten though?

Totally on board with Mailer. Name the work, it's already becoming a footnote as is he.

This is going to be from my own personal opinion, but having read Pale Fire and Bend Sinister if Lolita, which I haven't read, uses games, tricks, wordplay and other literary masturbation techniques, I expect it will survive as a curiosity, but won't have long term staying power. It may be the Pamela of the modern age.

I don't think much of modern lit that does so well in a trickster sort of way will have staying power. Fashions change. Will we be reading Gravity's Rainbow outside of college courses in a hundred years? How about Eco or Rushdie? Will they survive outside of the academy in a hundred years?

I can't say.

Nabokov will survive, he's so pretty and witty.

Beauty will survive.

Well, come on, people! We can't just say "I think it will be forgotten because it's not that great" and "I think it's great. Your opinion is wrong." Let's talk rationales. I'll start:

I think the continued presence of Lucky Jim in the (on the margins of the?) canon is attributable to a hangover from the total zeitgeist-capturing omniprevalence it had at the time, combined with perhaps Kingsley's profile being a little bit higher than it otherwise would have been because of his son Martin's success as a writer (it's hard for journalists to resist comparing the two or mining Martin's childhood for anecdotes--Kingsley, incidentally, seems to have been a swinish wallow of a human being). I think otherwise it would have dropped out of sight already. Why? The tiny stirrings of self-realization, sixties rebellion, sexual liberation which gave such a frisson when the book was published were to be superseded SO HARD within the next decade--why am I going to go back to the shitty fifties when I can go to the lushness of Giles Goat-Boy or the density of White Noise? Or move forward to On Beauty or David Lodge? Or step outside the campus novel and pick up one of a million tracts on disaffected middle-class British youth that are sexier and more pertinent, because they come post-sixties, post-mass existentialist explosion, etc., etc., etc.? I won't rule out the possibility that there may be an uncanny-valley effect going on here, and that Amis will begin to look better or at least of more historical interest the further he fades in time, but I wouldn't bet on it--take this book's closest equivalents from the early 20th century, like Brideshead Revisited, and they seem a lot closer in time as well as more powerful. The fifties were an ugly time best forgotten, and Kingsley Amis was a bully who used sex and intimidation to get his way. Everyone who reviews this book on LibraryThing seems to say "Ah yes, the classic campus novel, I remember this from my school days, gotta love Lucky Jim, things haven't changed a bit, pip pip", and that can't bode well. When they die so will this book.

Also, while I wrote that post, several content-filled posts came up. I did not mean to refer to any of you!

Slick,

I think if you go to England they actually think of Ted Hughes as a major poet, on the scale of Yeats or Auden. In London, he'd be "big enough".

Werkmeister,

Hughes is just full of bluster and bombast while really being utterly trivial. If he wrote those things with a sense of humor instead of a sense of self-importance and grandeur, I think he'd have more claim to survival. I think he is very much the Sir Walter Scott of his day.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 2:30pm.

Walker Percy - Last Gentleman? Moviegoer? etc.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 2:33pm.

Good to see some support for big Ted, though I'd disagree that he's not 'big' enough to qualify. I think it's simply that being English, Northern English, a poet, and being associated with two suicidal women including one famous American poetess, he has been swept under the carpet for a few years. He's enjoying something of a revival at the moment - enough to wake him from the literary, not literal, dead.

Norman Mailer - yep, I agree, though it'll be a sad day when there are no longer any belligerent macho authors around - there's always room for anyone that can string together a few coherent and compelling sentences, even if they are in the context of verbal abuse. Literary journals and talk shows are pretty turgid without the occasional literary brawler throwning drunken punches.

Hughes is 'just full of bluster and bombast'.

Did you have a particular example in mind?

Start with his crows - all of them. But I don't really want to get into a long discussion of a guy who is going to be forgotten. I'm thinking pleasant thoughts about Clarice instead.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 2:54pm.

I think I like the Crows better than Ashberry's bones, which I also like.

'Crow' is black comedy, I'm not sure it counts as either bluster or bombast. I'd be more likely to complain that Hughes is a little too heavy on the irony there, but it wasn't written for an elite audience, and it's fair to say that his imagery is rarely subtle.

That hardly makes him 'just bluster and bombast'.

I'm saying it's a license for a male prof to talk dirty with a bunch of women half his age. And will survive in part because of that.

Yikes! It seems you envision that the book will be taught by oddballs who dont understand it. That's pretty depressing.

Lolita will last because of the exhuberence aand beauty of the prose, the focus and selection of metaphors and allusions, the preciseness of the images, the depth of the psychology, and the wilfull play with literary conventions (the detective story, the doppelganger, readers identifying (or not) with the protagonist, etc.)

16 > Gene, I really think your reading of Nabokov is superficial. I would recommend reading Lolita and then trying to figure out why Nabokov lists certain parts in the Afterword as "the secret coordinates by which the book is plotted".

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 3:15pm.

Hi! New to the group, but I read the title to this thread and immediately thought Beloved by Toni Morrison. Nobel or no Nobel, that book is painful and most people seem to want to forget it as soon as they've read it.

I look forward to the day when Sartre is widely-regarded as a charlatan. Discuss.

By the way, I enjoyed reading Lucky Jim recently, but I agree that it's time has passed. Amis senior has all the requisite skills, but I suspect his stories have little of the content required to sustain his reputation for very many decades. I suspect that the same could be said for David Lodge, though again I've enjoyed reading his novels.

Nobel winners! Good choice. I couldn't agree more. The recent Peace Prize absurdity is cause enough to reassess the entire back catalogue of the literary prize. Hmm, let's see...

I agree with all those who dismiss Lucky Jim. I enjoyed it the first time I read it (I was very young). The second time I read it, I found it masterbatory nonsense (for men, that is, if it had been illustrated. The book is cocky, but prose style, technique, content (as #29 says) are absent. It is a pretentious novel and not even the best of its genre - academic satire.

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

>32 Woohoo!!! Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!! A thoroughly pretentious and awful book.

I would have to disagree about The Fountainhead...not because Rand is a great writer because she isn't, but because she's such a SLEDGEHAMMER that provokes either visceral hatred or adoration. No one is neutral about her. Her philosophy is flawed, she was (arguably) a little crazy, and there isn't anything subtle about her prose, but she incites high levels of emotion that are hard to come by from other authors. People will continue to go to Rand for a rush, for the debate.

Anything by Cormac McCarthy. I enjoyed Suttree and Blood Meridian, but I can see him falling off the map and having to be rediscovered in fifty years. Perhaps he'll remain on the lists in the States, assuming that the popularity of Westerns is unlikley to wane in those parts, but he could easily slip off the radar elsewhere. Richard Ford - again I think he may be too 'American' to remain on the map of English literature outside of the states, and again I think he might just be good enough to be rediscovered. I can't see Updike being forgotten though.

The English writer Alan Bennett could easily go missing, though he doesn't deserve to. His soft wit, acute observation and elegant prose should survive any radical change in fashion.

Rand is a local phenomenon, she's practically unknown outside the US.

36>
Then maybe she's already irrelevant (hopefully) to "literature" writ large.

Lola. I think you may be right. She's 'known' in the UK, but few people pay her books any attention, one way or another.

#37

Heh. I'm not the one to speak--I glanced at a couple pages when a friend was toting Atlas shrugged to work--but based on that evidence I must wonder if she was ever relevant to literature.

Oh! Oh! Can I also add Brideshead Revisited? A three hundred page love letter to the Catholic church. A boring three hundred page love letter.

>39,

Unfortunately she was and still is in some places. In Charlotte, N.C. (city of wicked failing capitalist bankers), the former President of BB&T (a large regional bank) gave a huge sum of money to UNC-Charlotte, with this contingency. Every student there must be required to read The Fountainhead. The book is referenced in a fair number of novels about boarding schools of the period. And some of my best students suffered from the intellectual blip in their brains.

28> Beloved??? I think I've read it at least 5 times. And imho it's absolutely unforgettable.

>42 I agree.

>42,43, me too

Margaret Atwood.

She's a fine poet, but not many seem to read her poetry. But as a novelist? Isn't she another Hemingway.

>45,

I wouldn't class her with Hemingway, whom I consider bad and whom I would put on the this list. I've enjoyed almost everything by Margaret Atwood. Will she stand the test of time? Umm . . . probably not. For that matter, neither will Joyce Carol Oates.

45> How much Atwood have you read? The early stuff is pretty light, but some of her novels are gorgeous: Cat's Eye, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, etc. And she's far, far, far more versatile than Hemingway. Realistic novels, dystopias, historical fiction, and as you mentioned, poetry.

> I mainly just wanted to use a comparison to Hemingway as an insult. You don't get to do that every day.

I think I have 3 Atwoods under my belt, but none of the 3 you identified. Edible Woman was the one I really, really, really despised.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 4:15pm.

>45

Another Hemingway? You mean destined to be read for decades to come? I guess not, but then what do you mean?

I disagree about Sartre - at least as far as his fiction goes (I admit I haven't read No Exit! I have read some shorter non-fiction.) I admit its been quite a while but I recall the stories collected in the Wall are excellent and don't recall a negative reaction to Nausea. I will concede that he's not historically had as strong an influence as he and others probably expected he'd have back in the post WW2 day.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 4:24pm.

See this thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/76178

Hemingway's not done well in this group.

The Blind Assassin is very good, but may be swept away with the inevitable backlash against elliptical narratives.

Hemingway is obviously not going to be forgotten, his influence on literature, especially in the US has been enormous, like it or not.

>50

I've heard good things about Sartre's short fiction, but his philosophy was muddled and I didn't like Nausea. Sarte's character was despicable, though I wouldn't denigrate the writing because of that. As far as philosopher novelists go, Camus did a much better job with L'Etranger, or whatever it's called, and Alberto Moravia's Contempt, Conformist and Boredom are also effective as 'existentialist' literature.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 4, 2009, 4:58pm.

Agreed: I'll take Camus over Sartre any day.

Sartre shall survive as long as men look good in black turtlenecks and women in berets. But no longer.

I think it is a question of time for Hemingway; 50 years from now, I expect Gertrude Stein to be read more than Hemingway, and Hemingway's work to be read in the same way Sir Walter Scott is today. Yes, we all know his name, and some may have read him, but mostly his books gather dust and take up space.

Thank God Hegel didn't try his hand as a novelist...

55: re first paragraph: So forever.

Wait a minute! Didn't we just learn that manuscripts don't burn?

>46 I'd ixnay both Atwood and Oates as possible long hauls. Though I've enjoyed Atwood (Blind Assassin and Alias Grace) and can't stand Oates, I'd admit that Oates might have a better shot at posterity, but not by much.

>55 Stein already may be read more than Hemingway, but almost as a historical footnote. I'm not sure that will change.

Sartre? Author of The Age of Reason? You are wrong, so wrong! His philosophy may have come out of a certain moment, but it gives the novel a touching, chilling spine. I think he'll survive.

Brideshead? The Catholicism detracts, but--among its other virtues--Sebastian is one of the most perfect psychological sketches I've seen in fiction,and that scene on the boat where Charles Ryder and whatsername finally do it rings so true. Also, it's had a certain hipster cachet in recent years, hasn't it? At least in Victoria, BC, it has.

Is Atwood rated that highly outside Canada? I thought her popularity here was a sort of cultural nationalism thing and limited to here, Booker notwithstanding. But if we think of her as a skilled non-genius (and a very nice woman--she and my aunt corresponded extensively on the topic of chicken-slaughtering methodology), I think she'll persevere. And nobody's mentioned what I think are her best--The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.

Hemingway? I'll take The Old Man and the Sea over anything he's done, and over anything most of the American modernists have done,any day. Maybe it helps that we didn't have it in school? Fitzgerald, on a similar note--Gatsby is a bit dated, maybe, but it's about the only book that does what it does--and The Crack-Up is just dead brilliant.

. . . apparently I only dislike Kingsley Amis. Oh! Also Ayn Rand--seconded.

Stein already may be read more than Hemingway...

That is crazy talk.

A quick check of LT users says Hemingway 52155 copies, 468 reviews; Stein 4322 copies, 32 reviews. All the Stein readers must be on some other site. :)

All the Stein readers must be on some other site.

Goodreads, maybe? ;)

I am rereading Stein right now. The difference is spreading. She was a brilliant writer.

> 58 Exactly

> 62 But I'll bet the Stein reviews are more interesting, and that fewer of the Stein volumes have gone unread on shelves...

64> Which Stein book are you reading?

Does anyone think the Internet will effect the whole...I don't know...forgetting process?

A site like LibraryThing especially, where forever accounts will sit, and penny dreadfuls like the Da Vinci Code (which I recognize is not what this thread is about) will forever have over 30,000 owners, be at the top of the charts for a long time. A big-selling PD from 40+ years ago like Valley of the Dolls is nearly forgotten already, even on LT.

OK SO ON TOPIC RITE?

Martin mentions Lucky Jim. That was the first to come to mind. Somehow, despite not having read the book, I've always associated it w/ the idea of forgotten classic.

-Deliverance is a great example, no? NO!?!?

-Everything James Cain's written. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce are all overshadowed by their film adaptations at this point, and really, they're not very interesting books, anyway.

-One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and all Solzhenitsyn.

-The Pigman

-Grendel

-Jonathan Franzen's the Corrections.

-Ferlinghetti's poetry is largely forgotten, the most well-known being A Coney Island of the Mind.

-Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.

-Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, or is Brautigan coming back in style? Speaking of coming back in style and going way OT, it seems like every writer I study @ ?Uni lately was a big failure during the majority of their careers or even until long after they were dead, and were later "re-discovered," suddenly booming into classic status. Folks like Chopin, Hurston, Bill Faulkner....When's the last time this has happened? I want to just see it happen with an author, any author. Hm. Could you say this happened with Cormac McCarthy and the power of Oprah?

-Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me's already been forgotten.

-I kinda feel like Flann O'Brien's stuff is declining slowly into obscurity.

-Iain Banks' Wasp Factory as well.

-Barth's Lost in the Funhouse seems to be disappearing from short story anthologies everywheres.

NO MORE.

Not bad for a fellow who had a full time job as a Civil Servant. I'd like to dash off AT SWIM TWO BIRDS in my spare time. Writing was a hobby for Brian O'Nolan.

>66,

All of them. Simultaneously. While doing "other" things as well.

RSHab:

I think you're prolly right about Grendel, which is a fucking tragedy.

Oh! Hunter Thompson.

J C Oates would not make it to the end of the month, if it wasn't for the fact that she brings out something (indifferent) every month.

Atwood and Smiley are others who will not be read 50 years from now, as are the British novelists Ian McEwan, Whatisname, Thingummyjig and Whodyacallit.

Solzhenitsyn will definitely survive, if only for the fact that he is the main witness of life in Soviet Russia. Sartre will also survive: Les Chemins de la liberte trilogy is brilliant and canonical already.

(Men will always look good in black turtle neck sweaters and women will always look chic in berets, A-musing, your fashion sense is as off as your literary pred(il)ictions.)

Brideshead Revisited? oh Puhlease........ upper class twits. The best thing in it is the teddy bear's name.

Pynchon will always be read, especially by the young. And I fear Gore Vidal will also fall away from the radar, but I think Myra will be rediscovered by future generations and become a cult classic.

and as for Ayn Rand? Let's not befoul literature with talk of her. She was a bully and her 'philosophy' is a 'philosophy' for bullies.

These are my prognostications.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 6, 2009, 4:58am.

Michael Herr's Dispatches, I'd say, no?

Yeah, I can see Atwood not being read, but that just might be because I didn't like the Handmaid's Tale. I kinda thought it was stupid and the least plausible most ridiculous dystopia I'd read.

What all exactly is wrong with Ayn Rand? I've never read her, mostly b/c I already dread the day I do as being a miserable one. I expect to go in hating it. Otherwise I don't really know anything about her other than a) she was apparently a shitty prose stylist, b) she was an arrogant twat, and c) objectivism is stupid as a motherflipper (I remember looking it up a little in high school and thinking it sounded a lot like LaVey's Satanism...). I have a few friends constantly trying to push her books on me, but I can't exactly say anything against it besides "Oh, I hear tell..." sorts of lines.

a) she was apparently a shitty prose stylist, b) she was an arrogant twat, and c) objectivism is stupid as a motherflipper
That's a pretty neat summing up of Ayn Rand. That is all you need to know.

It amazes me that thinking, well-read adults have anything to do with her, frankly.

Ayn Rand is just horrific. It's like reading a badly written script to Days of Our Lives. That never ends. And is about railroads/architecture. She's so incapable of being subtle, or witty, or ironic, or anything else that makes good writing, good that most of her characters make speeches hundreds of pages long that just reiterate the previous 500 pages. If good literature is mind expansive, and gently turns the reader on to other ways of thinking, Ayn Rand is a gang rapist in the name of freedom. Which is really a shame. However, she is much beloved by teenagers just beginning to think for themselves, so I do think she'll be around, at least in this country (America) for awhile.

Ayn Rand makes one good point: we should all strive to do the best we can with what gifts we have. A laudable goal for anyone, of any social persuasion. Beyond that she writes thousand page polemics that can basically be summed up as "I got mine, now, go get yours and leave me alone". She extols the virtues of narcissism and selfishness.

Ayn Rand is a gang rapist in the name of freedom. Hear hear.

We should all strive to do the best we can with what gifts we have How utterly trite and banal.

I'm sorry, that came across not as I intended it too, geneg, my apologies.

I want to say, that the sentiment AR is expressing is a trite and banal sentiment, not the way you paraphrased it. It's a kind of boy scout sentiment: let's all do our best.

I agreed with everything else you wrote in your post.

Again, apologies, and a herring.

My mistake, too. It momentarily passed my mind that you were talking about the idea rather than how I put it. Being a fairly unaccomplished person all my life, I've given a lot of thought to my inability to find a groove of any sort and the sentiment of being all you can be is much on my mind.

Peace!

ETA: Pretty much everything in Rand (at least the two I've read) were trite and banal.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 6, 2009, 11:13am.

RSH in 72: I had the exact same reaction to LaVey's satanism (I read the first half of it in high school - the second half was all recipes). It was so stupid it was making me laugh. I couldn't believe anyone would take it seriously. Kind of like Tanstaafl's reaction to the Book of Mormon - only I didn't bother to write a review, and if I had it would not have been one tenth as brilliant as that.

Hate to say it because they're both favorites of mine...but probably anything by Hunter Thompson and probably Nadine Gordimer as well.

The conversation moved to to Hemingway, and Joyce said, "We were with him just before he went to Africa. He promised us a living lion . Fortunnately we escaped that. But we would like to have the book he has written. He's a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is. We like him. He's a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is more behind Hemingway's form than people know.

*Hemingway has said of Joyce, Once in one of those casual conversations you have when you are drinking, Joyce said to me he was afraid his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get around a bit and see the world. He was afraid of some things - lightning and things, but a wonderful man. He was under great discipline - his wife, his work, and his bad eyes. His wife was there and she said, yes, his work was too suburban - "Jim could do with a spot of that lion-hunting." We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: "Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!"

JAMES JOYCE, Richard Ellmann
p. 708

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 7, 2009, 12:25pm.

In a review of two biographies of Ayn Rand in this week's New Yorker, Thomas Mallon writes:

"Both biographers overestimate, Heller more seriously, the literary achievement of their subject, whose intellectual genre fiction puts her in the crackpot pantheon of L. Frank Baum and L. Ron Hubbard; it is no closer to the canon of serious American novels than Galt's Gulch is to Brook Farm."

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart--a "paint by numbers" that patronizing (yet pious) people point to to show they can appreciate another culture--although I suspect the actual culture is much more subtle and sophisticated than that described by Achebe. Like reading Dick and Jane visit Africa.

"From the brilliant mind of Ayn Rand"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7CjdJ1Qy...

82 Thanks Porius for these quotes

Check out the latest book of Umberto echo echo echo : "The Magic of Lists"
superb reading for the listmaniacs !

We are not alone !

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 27, 2009, 1:50pm.

The 10 best "Slow down" book list

1) Idle thoughts of an idle fellow by jerome K Jerome
2) The wisdom of the snail by david ridge
3) In praise of slow by Carl Honoré
4) The art of the siesta by thierry Paquot
5) In praise of idleness by Bertrand rusell
6) How to be idle ? By Tom Hodgkinson
7) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov ( Check Tomcat's review )
8) Homer 's Odyssey ( i!ll be home late Baby )
9) An apology for idlers by RL Stevenson
10) Downstream by Tom Fort

with thanks to LRB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBhdKrwT...

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 27, 2009, 1:55pm.

I am going through my ECo books... Baudolino is signed by Umberto himself....
When did we meet ? Can't remember...

89: What about Small is Beautiful?

90: You can't remember meeting UE? Wow... you must meet many famous writers! Helps to have that European location...

I just finished Foucault's Pendulum and decided after Les Miz I am going to give myself a treat and re-read The Name of the Rose.

The one writer I clearly remember giving me an autograph was the famous French WW 2 ace pilot : Pierre Clostermann. But I was only 14 year then.

His "Le grand cirque" is one of the best air combat books coming out of the war.

If you do re-read " in the name of the rose", give me a call, I'll join you.

Anna, if you stay in London and you work on it, you can easily grab authographs of quiet a few famous writers.

Great writer is not a synonym of popular.

My sister got me a Salman Rushdie authograph, at the time of the Fatwah, so you see... it can be done.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 27, 2009, 2:43pm.

#91 & 92: I have yet to read any Eco, but have The Name of The Rose and have been staring at it on my bookcase for the better part of the year. Anything specific I should know before diving in?

#72 re Atwood: As a woman, The Handmaid's Tale scared the begeezus out of me. I think it's a book that strikes fear into the heart of every good feminist...

I just finished rereading The Name of the Rose last night.

I hope to review it once I have settled in (I am moving house this weekend and my life is upside down...)

Mac, I did not finish Baudolino......couldn't get into it at all.

As an introoduction to this topic, I remembered
5 books that, within my life time (1931-- ) have already failed to stand the test of time. They were frequently seen I suppose in the 30s and 40s, or perhaps the decades immediately before I was born. By the 50s and 60s when I was frequenting book stores (and for a while was Gifts & exchanges Librarian at a university) my knowledge of them comes from the frequency with which I saw them relegated to the status of 2nd hand offerings, or items in a large mass of gifts:

Slippy McGee by Marie Oemler

The Ivory Mischief by Arthur Meeker

Helenʻs Babies by John Habberton

Independent People by Halldor Laxness*

The Fifth Seal by Mark Aldanov

Then Iʻll think about whom to list of the Fowleses, Rands, et al. who are closer to the present (but alreeady pretty well belong to the past.)

*probably the only non-Russian to have ever won both the Nobel Prize and the Stalin Prize.

92 don't rush, read it slowly

95 I didn't even reach half way !

Eco and autographs>

I was at a seminar 'with' Eco just a couple of months ago. At some point he read a long passage from Baudolino in Italian to demonstrate Baudolino's affected encyclopedic language. As you'd imagine, it sounded an awful lot better than the English translation, but I didn't understand half of it.

No autographs - not my thing. Eco told an anecdote about having been invited to join Borges for dinner in New York. He told it like this, more or less: "I turned it down. What could I say to the great man? If I had spoken to Borges then I'm sure that I would now be regretting having said something so stupid to my literary hero, and that I'd never be able to think of Borges again without recalling that same embarassing incident." So now I have a literary hero to justify my refusal to speak to literary heroes, should the opportunity arise.

Denne beskjeden har blitt redigert av forfatteren, nov 28, 2009, 1:20pm.

Thanks, Third,

I love that anecdote. I travel great distances to see my literary heroes and am frequently, perhaps usually, disappointed.

Yes, I have seen them live, yes, I have their autographs and their photos, but now the interaction of those few seconds with them clouds my appreciation of their books.

Eco is right.

But I am not sure I can resist. :-)

I once almost bumped into Toni Morrison on a sidewalk in Princeton, NJ (my son was looking at colleges). I was breathless with excitement -- but I didn't introduce myself, ask for an autograph or aught else -- she was deep in conversation with a student. My husband told me I looked like my daughter did when she caught sight Matt Perry, the TV star, earlier that week in NYC. I do agree that literary heroes are best worshipped at a distance.

94> Moira,

The advice I took when I finally sat down and tackled The Name of the Rose is: No matter what, don't give up during the first 100 pages. It's pretty well known that Eco purposely made the beginning extremely dense and convoluted at times, but you'll get rewarded down the road once you stick with it. I didn't follow all the time what the heck was happening, but understood enough to make it a stellar and satisfying read.

Here's a link (among many on the book) that might prove helpful for you: http://www.bookrags.com/The_Name_of_the_...

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Le Freeque.

96. Roland, there are some of us, namely me, who think Independent People is the best novel. It is kept in stock at the book stores.

Robert

To Mr. Durick:

I havenʻt read Independent People, but I have read other Halldor Laxness, and I knew he was great. Itʻs just that I donʻt see him in the past few decades, and I very much connect him with available second hand books of the 1950s.

Of the ones I listed, the Oemler and Habberton titles were almost always part of a not too impressive gift collection. The Aldanov, Laxness and Meeker items were 2nd hand book s tore items. And there isnʻt much to compare it with, when you consider the paucity of 2nd hand books stores now compared ot the 1950s.

Youʻr probably right that Halldor Laxness doesnt belong in the Aldanov/Meeker class.