<p>Thank you for your opinions, 2forcollege, alwaysamom, mathmom! I am definitely going to look into your suggestions – only problem, the eyesight is really going – guess I’d better make an appointment with the eye doc.</p>
<p>Mathmom, I really like Jon Hassler too! Yes, the list is a bit strange; it’s hard to fathom why some of my favorite books/authors that did not make it onto such a list.</p>
<p>JHS, I am envious as I can only read them in translation. to me also, writers of El Boom are becoming tiresome and sadly irrelevent. I too first read Bolano in the New Yorker, and I am glad that his books, though limited, are being translated now into English. </p>
<p>I think China is finally turning out some interesting writers; although so poorly translated, they are unlikely ever to catch on here. The Fench, for reasons that escape me, do a much better job at it. Perhaps it is because the two languages share similarities in their cadence.</p>
<p>I just read that list. It’s a weird mixture, like any such list, with a bunch of odd compromises. “Crying of Lot 49” is probably Pynchon’s weakest book, but it’s also the only one short enough for most people to read. “Portnoy’s Complaint”? Historically interesting, but Roth has written at least 10 better books. Maybe 15. "Are You There, God . . . " Hey, I love Judy Blume, too, but this doesn’t make my top 10 of young-adult fiction, much less qualify as one of two examples of the genre. And I gotta tell you, if you want to read Cormac McCarthy, start with “All The Pretty Horses,” not “Blood Meridian”.</p>
<p>Also, what’s relevant about 1923 to the present? And why English-language novels only? It’s not like most of us aren’t happy to read a few translations?</p>
<p>Here are some of my other best-loved “modern” novels, at least what I can remember off the top of my head:</p>
<p>Mishima, The Sea of Tranquility
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude & Love In The Time Of Cholera
Vargas Llosa, The War Of The End Of The World & Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter
Bryce Echenique, A World For Julius
McCarthy, All The Pretty Little Horses
Roth, The Ghostwriter & The Human Stain
Morrison, Song of Solomon
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses & Haroun And The Sea Of Stories
Babbit, Tuck Everlasting
Dai, Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress
Willard, Things Invisible To See
Mathiessen, Far Tortuga</p>
<p>and, especially,</p>
<p>Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow</p>
<p>Padad: The Savage Detectives is apparently coming out in a few weeks in English. It’s a weird, difficult book, not at all straightforward, but very rewarding to read.</p>
<p>One great book of Bolano’s that seems NOT to be coming out in English any time soon is called The History of Nazi Literature in America. It’s a fake academic monograph by a highly-unreliable academic narrator about a bunch of completely fictional fascist and neofascist authors from the 30s through 60s in North and South America, many of whom apparently knew one another. It is hilarious.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s when Time magazine started publishing. :)</p>
<p>I think limiting it to English was just a decision. So what would people list as favorite non-English books of the 20th century?</p>
<p>Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier made a huge impression on me at 19.</p>
<p>And I thought Romain Gary’s semi memoir La Promesse de L’Aube was laugh aloud funny.</p>
<p>Camus I liked La Peste much more than L’Etranger.</p>
<p>In German I loved Hesse’s Glass Bead Game in college. I read it in translation and always meant to read it in the original. Aren’t that many German writer’s I really liked. I thought Patrick Susskind’s Parfum (Perfume) was amazing when it came out. Haven’t seen the movie - wasn’t sure I’d want to. The first novel I ever read in German was Der Richter und Sein Henker by Friedrich Durenmatt. It was pretty darn good.</p>
<p>Count me as another Latin Boom reader. I couldn’t get enough–circa 1976-88.</p>
<p>I still love Isabelle Allende and I still read most of what she writes.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I’m in agreement–the ‘Pow!’ factor of magical realism is gone.</p>
<p>However, I can highly recommend Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir “Living to Tell the Tale.” </p>
<p>I read a number of Asian writers in translation. </p>
<p>Chinese–Gao Xingjian “One Man’s Bible” and “Soul Mountain” are worth reading in translation.</p>
<p>Chinese–Xinran Xue “Sky Burial” and “The Good Woman of China” are both good. You’ll never forget some of the images from “Sky Burial”</p>
<p>Chinese–Ha Jin “War Trash” and “Waiting”. Both great.</p>
<p>Korean American --Chang Rae “A Gesture Life” and “Aloft”. </p>
<p>Indian–Rohinton Mistry (Future Nobel winner IMO) “A Fine Balalnce” and “Such a Long Journey” I’d eat dirt to be able to participate in a literary discussion on either book alongside a couple of Indian literary critics. The books were so good but I know I missed half of it. He won’t go to the US anymore because he and his wife were targeted by security.</p>
<p>“Oracle Bones” (about modern China) by Peter Hessler is a terrific update on “Iron and Silk.”</p>
<p>Other places ‘booming’ on the global literary scene are:</p>
<p>Eygyptian: Naguib Mahfouz “The Cairo Trilogy” (3 books)</p>
<p>Iranian: “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi</p>
<p>Turkish: “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk</p>
<p>African: Nadine Gordimer “Jump and Other Stories”</p>
<p>Haitian: “The Farming of Bones” by Edwidge Danticat</p>
<p>Canadian: Robertson Davies “What’s Bred inthe Bone”</p>
<p>mstee…if I wanted to delve back into the greats, I might re-read Melville, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Ellison, Mann and Musil.</p>
<p>Robertson Davies, now he wrote in English. How could Time have left him out?</p>
<p>I liked Allende’s House of the Spirits, but most magical realism leaves me cold. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to read 100 years of Solitude!</p>
<p>Did you ever read Allende’s “Paula?” That was one of my favorites, although I found it heart wrenching. Has anyone read, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez? I just loved it.</p>
<p>I just started “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith. I haven’t been drawn into the plot yet, but I do like her writing style.</p>
<p>PADAD: I also read “The Catastrophist” last summer: I liked it, although it took me a while to really get into it.</p>
<p>I agree with the other posters who liked “The Gatekeepers” by Jacques Steinberg. It gives such a unique insight into the admissions process, especially, the very arbitrary nature. Besides that, my HS freshman is already quite intent on checking out Wesleyan in a couple of years.</p>
<p>I noticed a couple of comments about “The Corrections.” I started reading it about a couple of years and have periodically picked it up since then, but I just can’t stay with it; to me, it’s one of those books that I feel like I “should” like, but don’t.</p>
<p>momonthehill,
I tried to read White Teeth a couple years ago. A friend from my cooking group was in a book club and it was their next book. I had talked with her about coming along when my schedule allowed and so she told me the next title. Honestly, it was the first book in my life that I didn’t finish. For some reason I always finish books, even ones I don’t like! Come to think of it, I’m the same way with movies :rolleyes: . But like you, I could not get into it. I’ll be interested to see if you get through it and what you think by the end. FWIW, my book-club friend later told me that over half the people didn’t finish it either.</p>
<p>I liked White Teeth fine, and had no trouble finishing it, but it seemed like a nice first novel, not 100-greatest material.</p>
<p>Everyone else in my family read and loved The Corrections (which is full of local color), but I have never gotten around to it. Ditto Everything Is Illuminated and The History of Love.</p>
<p>Speaking of local color – I’ll recommend two books that are somewhat obscure, but to which I have a connection, and which are extremely enjoyable:</p>
<p>City of Light, by Lauren Belfer. It’s a well-researched historical murder mystery centering on the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY in 1899 (where William McKinley was assassinated). Most of the action takes place within half a mile of the houses where I grew up. It was written by a former student of my mother’s, and largely involves the school she attended, taught at, and of which she still serves as a trustee. Anyway, it’s a really enjoyable book, and would appeal to anyone who liked the (similar, but nonfictional) Devil In The White City. Lots of interesting stuff about the Niagara Power Project and the effect of cheap electricity on American industry. Also, the political history of Grover Cleveland.</p>
<p>The Last Billable Hour, by Susan Wolfe. This roman a clef about Silicon Valley law firms won an Edgar for best first mystery novel way back when, but the author – a good friend in law school – never wrote a second book. (One of our other class- and law review-mates, Michael Nava, later became a successful and well-regarded mystery writer, though, and I heartily recommend his Henry Rios series, too.) This book is really funny, and not at all inaccurate about venture capital law practice. The firm in question bore a lot of resemblance to Wilson Sonsini, which has since grown into one of the largest firms in the country. And without giving away plot points I can say that the solution turns on a realistic legal issue which has made a lot of news recently. It also contains one of the best depictions of a business meeting ever, especially the differing speeds at which participants figure out that someone has actually said something worth listening to.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I seriously enjoyed </p>
<p>-Carlos Fuentes’-Christopher Unborn &</p>
<p>-Mario Vargas Llosa’s-Conversation in the Cathedral</p>
<p>both of which I read as a junior in high school.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I cannot guess what all the hub-bub is surrounding GG Marquez’ “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I prefer either of the two above.</p>
<p>Latin Boom, uhm? Has anyone read anything from Julio Cortazar or Jorge Luis Borges?</p>
<p>JHS, thanks for the suggestion of City of Light. It sounds interesting and I, too, enjoy reading books with local flavor. I read The First Desire by Nancy Reisman (a UMich prof) last fall, a novel about family dynamics which takes place in Buffalo. I didn’t realize that you had grown up there. It’s funny, we seem to have switched places! Have you read any of Steve Lopez’ books?</p>
<p>I’ll have a look for The Last Billable Hour. Being married to a lawyer for all these years, I’m always on the lookout for law-related fiction that he’ll enjoy. It hasn’t been easy to find.</p>
<p>Dorothy: I’m not surprised you liked those books (and not necessarily Love in the Time of Cholera, which turns out really to have been GGM’s magnum opus). You would probably like everything of Vargas Llosa’s – I often describe him as the best 19th Century novelist writing in the 20th Century. In some respects, it’s shocking that the author of that book came within a few inches of being elected President of his country, but there’s no question that there’s a gravitas in his work – even in his comic novels – and a concern with things that matter to people in the real world that is missing from lots of contemporary fiction.</p>
<p>Have you read The War of the End of the World? I think that’s really Vargas Llosa’s great political novel, beating out Conversation by a thinnish margin. It’s also perhaps his least characteristic novel, one of the few in which he or a close stand-in is not a principal character, and which takes place in a context with which he had no personal experience. I am quite saddened by the decline in Vargas Llosa’s skill in his last few books, but he had thirty years, from the mid-60s to the mid-90s, where he didn’t write anything that wasn’t absolutely worth reading. (I would say his last really good book was probably The Storyteller – which is something of a rewriting of Aunt Julia, see below – although In Praise of the Stepmother/Don Rigoberto’s Notebooks, his autobiography, and Lituma in the Andes all retain some interest in conjunction with his other books. After that, mostly not.)</p>
<p>The other book to read if you liked Conversation is Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which is something of a romantic comedy and meta-text about narrative. What’s cool about the Conversation/Aunt Julia pairing is that, if you are familiar with MVL’s biography, the events depicted in the two books were practically contemporaneous. They are both novels of college life, and the same life provides all of the details, but there is only a tiny overlap in which details he chose to use for each book, and so the stories wind up being radically different. </p>
<p>Conversation was the apogee of the first phase of MVL’s career, where he developed a difficult, modernist, and technically amazing writing style. (You must like that; there are few more difficult, modernist books than Christopher Unborn.) After that, he simplified his style radically, while doing many of the same things. So while Conversation is a dazzling fugue in which three conversations among different people at different times will be layered on top of one another, in Aunt Julia you generally go 20-30 pages at a time without shifting perspective or time. And yet (without giving anything away), all of the stylistic elements of Conversation are present, and commented upon, in Aunt Julia. </p>
<p>(I also think Aunt Julia is a commentary on 100 Years of Solitude, but that’s a different essay. MVL actually had a lot to do with the canonization of GGM, notwithstanding their vast political, national, social, and stylistic differences. Prior to 1969, MVL was by far the better known young Latin American author, much prized and granted, and with three critical and commercial successes under his belt. After 100 Years came out, MVL published a book-length study of GGM’s then-not-very-extensive life and oeuvre – an amazing act of homage to a contemporary and rival.)</p>
<p>And, if you liked Christopher Unborn, maybe you should try Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, which is similar and (for me) better, without being any easier to read.</p>
<p>Borges and Cortazar sort of got wrapped up in the Boom, but neither really belongs to it. Borges – whose stories I and everyone else love – was really of a completely different generation and outlook. Cortazar was only half a cohort away, but his literary project was really wrapped up with French surrealism: he wanted to grow up to be Celine or Cocteau. GGM, MVL, Fuentes, and others were looking at Faulkner and Flaubert.</p>
<p>. . . Ummm, sorry about that. I really like Vargas Llosa.</p>
<p>Speaking of foreign authors. Has any one read any of these three books?</p>
<p>Chinese: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie</p>
<p>Norwegian: The Orange Girl, by Joslein Gaarder</p>
<p>Portuguese: Blindness, by Saramago</p>
<p>I really liked them all. The first two were very light reading. The last just the opposite. But they all make you think!</p>
<p>I have really enjoyed most Vargas Llosa books, but the last one I read, Travesuras de la Nina Mala (translated roughly as Mischiefs of a Bad Girl) was terrible!</p>
<p>There are a few Latin boom books I haven’t read in those lists…thanks to all. DH is in the US at the moment and I shall add a few more books to my order! </p>
<p>Even if you never loved the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez–read his memoirs–especially if you have a boy. The happy and unhappy accidents of his actual life are pure Latin Boom–not quite on the scale of Frida Kahlo’s magically-real life but close. Her autobiography is also fantastic.</p>
<p>For me, magical realism has a wonderful dualism. First, it illustrates the absurdity of daily life in desperately poor Third World society–Mistry’s novels about India do the same. These are windows that rational and obscenely rich Americans can barely imagine, much less discern. Then, as a bonus for a creative person who is interested in such things, magical realism puts creative “flow” on the page. Not easy to do–I hate most obvious attempts–and lots of fun for another practioner who uses a different medium (space and surface).</p>
<p>Side note: “The Corrections”. Ugh. Jonathon Franzen is no Phillip Roth–and I can’t see him discovering his inner Roth in the distant future. There is no there there. So says me.</p>
<p>mathmom,
I’m so happy to hear of someone else who loved Snowcrash! You will LOVE reading William Gibson…make Neuromancer next on your reading list. Although his prose isn’t as wonderful, you would probably enjoy reading Gregory Benford (so far Cosm was my favorite).</p>
<p>It will take me some time to get through all of Neal Stephenson’s books, but there are some great suggestions on this thread that I look forward to reading. Beyond Sci Fi, I think you can pick up any book by Kinky Friedman, Gore Vidal and James Michner and expect a good read.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>Thanks. I knew virtually none of this. Good to know.</p>
<p>I have much to read and learn. I have only dabbled as yet. I was seriously chastised by my 11th grade teacher for choosing to read Fuentes. In retrospect it was a wonderful baptism of sorts and has affected my view of fiction, language and infinity.
I will look forward to reading Llosa’s The War of the End of the World.</p>
<p>Going a bit further, I would love to see more literary posts and threads in this forum (notwithstanding the self-styled and censorious Savoronola’s pecking away amongst us [not TD, this time].</p>