Top ten works of literature ever?

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by stevechafin
1) Thomas "Every Book's A Masterpiece" Bernhard - Gargoyles
2) Joseph Heller - Catch 22
3) Jon Dos Passos - U.S.A.
4) William Burroughs - The Western Lands
5) Philip K. D i c k - A Scanner Darkly
6) Elias Canetti - Auto Da Fe
7) Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margerita
8) Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
9) J.G. Ballard - Concrete Island
10) J.K Huymans - A Rebours (AKA Against The Grain AKA Against Nature)



Edit: Put spaces in Phil's last name

The Western Lands: I enjoyed the trilogy, but do you really feel it is superior to Naked Lunch?

Concrete Island: Great book. I have never read anything quite like it before.

Are you a Martin Amis fan? Dead Babies, London Fields, Success, Money are all very good reads.

[stevechafin]

Originally posted by MosesPresley

The Western Lands: I enjoyed the trilogy, but do you really feel it is superior to Naked Lunch?

Concrete Island: Great book. I have never read anything quite like it before.

Are you a Martin Amis fan? Dead Babies, London Fields, Success, Money are all very good reads.

I haven't read any Amis, but I will have to check it out.

NL is probably Burroughs best work, but the Cities of the Red Night trilogy really shows his final maturity and I get a lot more out of it. It's packed full of wisdom, but heavy on the rectal mucus and caterpillers a few parts parts.

Concrete Island threw me into a depression so severe I couldn't go into work for two days.

If you like those writers you should check out Thomas Bernhard, especially Gargoyles as a good introduction. His work is the bleakest, blackest, most desolate you'll ever read (but funny at the same time), and almost nobody has ever heard of him.

[monolith94]

The Western Lands, indeed! I'm reading Naked Lunch right now, and can't wait to get my hands on The Western Lands!

[S. Kroeze]

Since it is almost Christmas I would like to recommend my favourite short story, taking place during Christmas:
'The Dead', the last story of "Dubliners" by J.Joyce; it is just some 35 pages long.
I always need a handkerchief.

Here is a fragment, the end:

"...One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by monolith94
The Western Lands, indeed! I'm reading Naked Lunch right now, and can't wait to get my hands on The Western Lands!

http://www.kharoozo.narod.ru/Books/NakedLunch.html

Naked Lunch was one of the strangest books I have ever read. I felt it was a little bit closer to hallucinatory poetry than literature.

The scene where the surgeons start a scalpel fight in the operating room is classic.


"I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull my God.
Benway is directing the R.C., Reconditioning Center.
I drop around, and "What happened to so and so'?" sets
in like: "Sidi Idriss 'The Nark' Smithers crooned to the
Senders for a longevity serum. No fool like an old queen."
"Lester Stroganoff Smuunn -- 'El Hassein' -- turned him-
self into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic
Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry..."
( Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia.
Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every mo-
tion once their attention is attracted by snapping the
fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive in-
voluntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves
trying to imitate the motions of several people at once. )
"Stop me if you've heard this atomic secret...."
Benway's face retains its form in the flash bulb of
urgency, subject at any moment to unspeakable cleav-
age or metamorphosis. It flickers like a picture moving
in and out of focus.
"Come on," says Benway, "and I'll show you around
the R.C."
We are walking down a long white hall. Benway's
voice drifts into my consciousness from no particular
place... a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud
and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a
windy street.
"Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archi-
pelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God
damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual,
conformist and prosaic. Find yourself in a matriarchy
walk don't run to the nearest frontier. If you run, some
frustrate latent queer cop will likely shoot you. So some-
body wants to establish a beach head of homogeneity in
a shambles of potentials like West Europe and U.S.A.?
Another ****ing matriarchy, Margaret Mead notwith-
standing... Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a
colleague in the operating room. And my baboon as-
sistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces.
Baboons always attack the weakest party in an alterca-
tion. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious
simian heritage. Doc Browbeck was party inna second
part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a
veterinarian actually) recalled to service during the
manpower shortage. Well, Doc had been in the hospital
kitchen all morning goosing the nurses and tanking up
on coal gas and Klim -- and just before the operation he
sneaked a double shot of nutmeg to nerve himself up."
(In England and especially in Edinburgh the citizens
bubble coal gas through Klim -- a horrible form of pow-
dered milk tasting like rancid chalk -- and pick up on the
results. They hock everything to pay the gas bill, and
when the man comes around to shut it off for the eon-
payment, you can hear their screams for miles. When a
citizen is sick from needing it he says "I got the klinks"
or "That old stove climbing up my back."
Nutmeg. I quote from the author's article on nar-
cotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction ( see
Appendix ): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have re-
course to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed
with water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with
side effects of headache and nausea. There are a number
of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the
Indians of South America. They are usually administered
by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. The medicine
men take these noxious substances and go into convul-
sive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought
to have prophetic significance." )
"I had a Yage hangover, me, and in no condition to
take any of Browbeck's ****. First thing he comes on
with I should start the incision from the back instead of
the front, muttering some garbled nonsense about being
sure to cut out the gall bladder it would **** up the
meat. Thought he was on the farm cleaning a chicken.
I told him to go put his head back in the oven, where-
upon he had the effrontery to push my hand severing
the patient's femoral artery. Blood spurted up and
blinded the anesthetist, who ran out through the halls
screaming. Browbeck tried to knee me in the groin, and
I managed to hamstring him with my scalpel. He
crawled about the floor stabbing at my feet and legs.
Violet, that's my baboon assistant -- only woman I ever
cared a damn about -- really wigged. I climbed up on the
table and poise myself to jump on Browbeck with both
feet and stomp him when the cops rushed in.
"Well, this rumble in the operating room, 'this un-
speakable occurrence' as the Super called it, you might
say was the blow off. The wolf pack was closing for the
kill. A crucifixion, that's the only word for it. Of course
I'd made a few 'dumheits' here and there. Who hasn't?
There was the time me and the anesthetist drank up all
the ether and the patient came up on us, and I was
accused of cutting the cocaine with Sanifiush. Violet
did it actually. Had to protect her of course....
"So the wind-up is we are all drummed out of the
industry. Not that Violet was a bona fide croaker, nei-
ther was Browbeck for that matter, and even my own
certificate was called in question. But Violet knew more
medicine than the Mayo Clinic. She had an extraordi-
nary intuition and a high sense of duty."

[Graag]

Hello to anyone who knows me from my occasional flirtations with Apolyton these days...

1. Naked Lunch.

The most important book of the last 50 years. A mind blowing read every time, guaranteed. Burroughs is a genius.

2. um...

3. nothing else seems to matter.

[Sheik]

These are some of the most influential books ever written IMO:

Bible
Qur'an
Rig Veda
The Origin of Species
Art of War
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Wealth of Nations
Works of Aristotle
The Republic
The Prince
Second Treatise of Civil Government

[stevechafin]

Originally posted by Sheik
These are some of the most influential books ever written IMO:

Bible
Qur'an
Rig Veda
The Origin of Species
Art of War
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Works of Aristotle
The Republic
The Prince
Second Treatise of Civil Government

Of course you realize you'll burn in hell for putting Calvin's book alongside all these unbelievers.

[El León]

Originally posted by Sheik
These are some of the most influential books ever written IMO:

Bible
Qur'an
Rig Veda
The Origin of Species
Art of War
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Works of Aristotle
The Republic
The Prince
Second Treatise of Civil Government

I would say the Gita (perhaps even the whole Mahabharata) over the Rig Veda. And what about the Heart Sutra? Das Kapital? Confessions of St. Augustine? (Maybe not, but it is a cool book once you get into it and it's quoted in SMAC). What about An Inquiry Into the Origins of the Wealth of Nations?

[stevechafin]

How about the Icelandic sagas?

[Sheik]

What about An Inquiry Into the Origins of the Wealth of Nations?

I am adding that one.