Thursday, October 26, 2006

Suggested List for Further Reading (part 2)

by Michael Duncan, author of Line Jester and Other Stories

10 things you may have read and should reread

  1. The Waves by Virginia Woolf

  2. Quite simply my favorite novel ever. Experimental, touching, and completely inimitible. A work of artistic perfection.

  3. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  4. The first novel that I know of that I would describe as a 'modern' novel. Strangely structured, contradictory, and leaves one with more questions than answers.

  5. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

  6. The 'first' European novel may be the best, and almost certainly is the funniest. Not in a Shakespeare ha-ha-I-understand-the-pun-he's-making way, but in a look-like-you're-crazy-laughing-aloud-in-public way.

  7. Light in August by William Faulkner

  8. The best American writer of the 20th century, hands-down. And never let anyone tell you any different.

  9. "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor

  10. I could just have easily said "The Artificial Nigger," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," or just told you to read everything she ever published like I have, because it's all great.

  11. On Photography by Susan Sontag

  12. Everything criticism should be and rarely is: lucid, deep, surprising. You will look at the modern world differently having read this.

  13. Let us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

  14. Agee's baroque, poetic prose humanizes the overlooked Depression-era tenant farmers he is reporting on even more effectively than the beautiful and famous photographs by Walker Evans in the book.

  15. Collected Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

  16. What can one say? I think he will be looked back on in 300 years as one of the 2 or 3 most important writers of the 20th century.

  17. White Noise by Don DeLillo

  18. At first glance it seems dark and apocalyptic, but on a second read, it really stands out as incredibly funny. Seems as if it were written yesterday, even though it's from the mid-1980s.

  19. Frederick by Leo Lionni

  20. This is my favorite picture book, and it will teach your children and remind yourself that art is important!

AND DON'T FORGET Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Thomas Frank, Gertrude Stein, W.G. Sebald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Onion, Imre Kertesz, Gustave Flaubert, Samuel Beckett, and anyone who ever wrote anything in 19th-century Russia!!

1 comment:

Tim said...

I would love to read more commentary (meta- and non-meta-) by and about RP's authors. Do Hungerford and Sparling have suggested reading lists, or other prose-y documents to share?