Best NON-SF/Fantasy Novels

[Nostromo]

An extract from The Man Without Qualities. Too bad I didn't get hold of the first paragraph of the book. Its one of the best first paragraph ever.

Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, moneygrubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother of technology, was also the primordial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.

The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scientists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the black wheel of the rider in front of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate "scientific outlook" into "view of life," "hypothesis" into "attempt," and "truth" into "action," then there would be no notable scientist or mathematician whose life's work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds of history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: "You may steal, kill, fornicate - our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams." But in science it happens every few years that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob's ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Ulrich felt: People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.

[Nostromo]

Another one. I'm feeling the sudden urge to read it again...

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them. But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition, avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality is a real deficiency. But the possible includes not only the fantasies of people with weak nerves but also the as yet unwakened intentions of God. A possible experience or truth is not the same as an actual experience or truth minus its "reality value" but has - according to its partisans, at least - something quite divine about it, a fire, a soaring, a readiness to build and a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be invented. After all, the earth is not that old, and was apparently never so ready as now to give birth to its full potential.

To try to readily distinguish the realists from the possibilists, just think of a specific sum of money. Whatever possibilities inhere in, say, a thousand dollars are surely there independently of their belonging or not belonging to someone; that the money belongs to a Mr. Me or a Mr. Thee adds no more to it than it would to a rose or a woman. But a fool will tuck the money away in his sack, say the realists, while a capable man will make it work for him. Even the beauty of a woman is undeniably enhanced or diminished by the man who possesses her. It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

But such a man is far from being a simple proposition. Since his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn, he, too, naturally has a sense of reality; but it is a sense of possible reality, and arrives at its goal much more slowly than most people's sense of their real possibilities. He wants the forest, as it were, and the others the trees, and forest is hard to define, while trees represent so many cords of wood of a definable quality. Putting it another and perhaps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of realty which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there's any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man - which he not only seems to be but really is - will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him that to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. Today he is still far from being consistent. He is quite capable of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that produced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would accept a slap in the face with the same detachment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn't have. Moreover, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction. At present this development still has some way to go and affects the individual person as a weakness as much as a strength.

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.

[Barinthus]

well... I enjoy reading Chekov's works.

Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi was enjoyable as well.

Bill Clinton's My Life

[GePap]

I second Don Quixote.

Cervantes

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Barinthus
Bill Clinton's My Life

Autobiography != novel

[Boris Godunov]

The most recent good novel I read fitting this description was "The Corrections" by Jonathan Frazer. I thought it was very well done, and emotionally captivating.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian (basically representing his great series of books)

I've just picked up Cold Mountain, which I hear a great book, so I'll be reading that soon (by 'soon', I mean like August).

[Kuciwalker]

Another good one is The Killer Angels.

[DarkCloud]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


Autobiography != novel

Maybe he consideres Bill Clinton's book fiction?

[DerSchwarzfalke]

Despite the disdain professed in the first post for SF/Fantasy threads on this forum, one can easily see why: it has almost been universally crap listed above me as "best novels."

I have way too many to go through. A non-representative list:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood -- This is not on many college reading lists yet like The Handmaid's Tale, but this is the superior dystopian novel by Atwood.

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien -- Sparsely, interestingly told, one of the best character stories out there, and a troubling examination of one man's participation in an atrocity.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy -- McCarthy is one of America's most underrated authors, and this is one of his masterpieces.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- Simply one of the best samples of American literature, and one of the better anti-war novels out there.

The Comedians by Graham Greene -- Greene is one of my favorite authors, so I include this here as representative of all his novels. See especially The Quiet American.

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck -- I rank this up there with Steinbeck's more popularly known works and is to some extent better. Definitely worth a read if you enjoy Steinbeck.

[MosesPresley]

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima and
London Fields by Martin Amis are two of my favorites that I don't think that I have mentioned before.

[SpencerH]

Anything by either Tom Sharpe (Wilt etc) or George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman series and my favorites, which I'm planning to re-read this weekend, his autobiographical adventures from his time in a highland Regt after the war).

[Urban Ranger]

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Shakespeare yet.

[Barinthus]

Originally posted by DarkCloud


Maybe he consideres Bill Clinton's book fiction?

Alright if you're going to nitpick, I guess it's not a novel techinically.

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Shakespeare yet.

He wrote a novel?