Serious, yet enjoyable Western canon literature

[Robin L]

Hesse's Siddhartha

I'd also like to mention "Journey to the East". Short, deep and to the point.

 

[Robin L]

The Pulitzer Prize was, as I remember it, essentially awarded to Gravity's Rainbow, but then withheld due to the perceived pornograpic nature of some of the episodes in the book. I imagine in 1973 it was a bit outre (I didn't first read it until 1976).

I believe I have everything Pynchon's ever published, and maybe most of what's been published about him, too.
I can see Mason & Dixon from my easy chair even as I type this.

Didja see this?

The Daily Show – Pynchon’ Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program

In 2006, Thomas Pynchon was asked to write the foreword for the program for the The Daily Show's 10th Anniversary Concert. Here it is in all its glory. Hilarious!

thomaspynchon.com

 

[Wicky]

The Outsider, Albert Camus
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Road, Jack Kerouac
On Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau

As others have mentioned: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

 

[Somafunk]

Here’s some more of my favs that I consider essential reading,

1984 - George Orwell

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Doors of Perception- Aldous Huxley

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

 

[DVDdoug]

If you want a novel, Les Miserables is a very good story. A lot of good stuff that's not in the musical* although that's a good story too. But look for a modern translation. The version I have was difficult to read... Mot as bad as Shakespear but I needed a dictionary. I was probably half way through when I realized it was translated from French anyway and there's no reason for the English version to be so difficult.



* As for the music, l like Broadway soundtrack better than the movie. My analysis of the movie was, "Too much sobbing and not enough singing." ...The lyrics & story are emotional enough.

 

[mhardy6647]

Didja see this?

The Daily Show – Pynchon’ Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program

In 2006, Thomas Pynchon was asked to write the foreword for the program for the The Daily Show's 10th Anniversary Concert. Here it is in all its glory. Hilarious!

thomaspynchon.com

No, I hadn't! Thanks!!!!

EDIT: You know... sometimes I think that Pynchon is the Frank Zappa of the literary sphere. Or maybe Zappa was the Pynchon of 'serious' music...

 

[mhardy6647]

Here’s some more of my favs that I consider essential reading,

1984 - George Orwell

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Doors of Perception- Aldous Huxley

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

I was thinking about some of these myself (great minds and all that...)
At any rate -- some of my favorite books and authors in that list. (as if that matters to anyone but me).

I am not sure that all rise to the level of canon, but they're all worth a read.

 

[BostonJack]

Not deep in the Western canon, but I would recommend: Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) plus Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
I'm currently reading Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell) and loving it.

Maybe these are best characterized as English literature coping with/trying to understand the dynamics of Totalitarianism.

I second Gravity's Rainbow. its a bit of a slog, but fascinating at many points.

for lighter, shorter Pynchon try "Vineland"

current commentary on Orwell (sort of) is "Orwell's Roses" by Rebeca Solnit
(well outside the thread now, but I love her "Call Them by Their True Names")

Continuing on the totalitarianism theme: The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt)
Post-Gorbachev Russian history: The Future is History (Gessen)

"Salvador" (Dideon) is very impactful. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

enjoy your quest.

 

[krabapple]

I had to read Pirsig's above-mentioned book for... an undergrad biochem laboratory course.
Taught by a really, really odd professor, who ended up doing hard time in jail --for some pretty bad stuff.

Was his name...Walter?

Re: the thread request: I recommend Moby Dick

I've read it a few times now. Brilliant, and kinda nuts. Ecstatic and surprisingly funny in its way. For more Melville, the story 'Bartleby the Scrivener' is justly famous.

Also the Tolstoy novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Devastating.

And I second the Borges Labyrinths and the Joyce Dubliners.

 

[Robin L]

No, I hadn't! Thanks!!!!

EDIT: You know... sometimes I think that Pynchon is the Frank Zappa of the literary sphere. Or maybe Zappa was the Pynchon of 'serious' music...

Pynchon's more into the Bonzos:

 

[Triliza]

- In search of lost time (Remembrance of things past) - Marcel Proust. Slow read so may or may not be to your liking.
- Dangerous Liaisons - Choderlos de Laclos. In my youth when I read it I found it quite a read.
- Books from Soren Kierkegaard I have found also very interesting.

 

[bluefuzz]

A somewhat random selection of my all time favourites:

Anything by Franz Kafka - esp. The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis.
Fjodor Dostojefski - Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov.
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Edgar Allen Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Aldous Huxley - Eyeless in Gaza
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
Tove Jansson - all the Moomintroll books (yes I still read them)
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Metamagical Themas, I am a Strange Loop
David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Anything by Bertrand Russell (except perhaps Principia Mathematica)
Sir James Frazer - The Golden Bough
Anything by Daniel Dennett
Don Cupitt - The Sea of Faith
Erwin Schrödinger - What is Life?
Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes.
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media, The Medium is the Massage
Jean Genet - Diary of a Thief
Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine
William Morris - News from Nowhere

 

[mhardy6647]

Was his name...Walter?

Nope. Robert.

 

[mhardy6647]

Pynchon's more into the Bonzos:

or The Fool

 

[DVDdoug]

I don't know if it's "canon" but Atlas Shrugged is a good story too. (Maybe it's a "modern classic"?) I probably thought of it because like Les Miserables, which I mentioned above, it's over 1000 pages. But the first time I read it "I couldn't put it down" and I was reading it in bed until after midnight and it's easy to read.

It's also probably the most famous Libertarian book but it's not "preachy". But if you are liberal it's got trains, and liberals love trains! The main character is also a woman running a railroad, although her useless brother is the president of the company because he's a man.

As a warning against over-reaching government it's WAY better than 1984! Not as "dark", a more interesting story with more than one hero, and in the end you are left with hope.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Joseph Heller Catch 22. It's really about corporate culture.

Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five. The horror modern warfare, complete with allied atrocities against civilian populations, and the PTSD it engenders in those who survive it.

Thomas Pyncheon Gravity's Rainbow. Because "Shit, money, and the word" makes American culture go round, and how the end of WWII was a critical inflection point that put all that on steroids.

Amanda Foreman The Dutchess. Historical treatment of Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, the 5th Dutchess of Devonshire (and the great-great-great-great aunt of Princess Diana). Covers roughly the same time period as Jane Austen's novels. Very revealing of the lifestyles of the upper crust of English Society (The Tonne) in the late 18th-early 19th century. Hint: Lots of affairs and lots of gambling taking place on those great estates.

Truman Capote In Cold Blood. Capote along with Norman Mailer gave birth to a new kind of journalism. In Cold Blood is its seminal text.

 

[Vacceo]

From the present time, even if not canon (yet); I'd recommend McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

 

[Robin L]

or The Fool

I think there's only a single citation of the fool in "Gravity's Rainbow". There's three citations of the Bonzo's in "Inherent Vice.".

I'd say the all important hidden figure is [are?] the Byrds, appearing first as the Paranoids.

Also Miles Davis, with his muted horn. There's a Miles in both "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Against the Day".

Can't forget George Formby:

 

[mhardy6647]

... and, of course, McClintic Sphere/Ornette Coleman.

... but we digress.

 

[REK2575]

Ulysses for Joyce, which is a bs endurance test at times.

The endurance test of all Joycean endurance tests is Finnegans Wake. I got through it but it took me the better part of two years with a lot of subsidiary critical/explanatory reading to go with it.

What I realized toward the end is that it's a book (novel isn't quite right) that can really only be re-read. You need to read it once in order to be able to go back and read it again, because it doesn't proceed by way of plot or even character, but by way of resonances and similarities and repetitions. Which is why the end of the book flows right back into the beginning.

It's an immensely frustrating but also very funny book that, if nothing else, will change the way you think about narrative and language and meaning. Enjoyable? Not really enjoyable, but definitely rewarding.