Novels that stay with you

When I neared the end of "1984," I told myself "I can never re-read this." It was so disturbing to me.

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

[quote]For me it’s The Secret History.

Why was that one never made into a film?

I absolutely adore that book OP. Both The Secret History and The Goldfinch should be adapted into miniseries.

I love The Secret History too. It’s one of my favourite novels.

For R4:

"Journey to the End of the Night," by L-F Celine. Everyone is rotten and no one is redeemed in France 1930's. Sordid lives in the midst of urban decay.

r6 Sarah Paulson? Oh ffs!

Song of Achilles

The Bell Jar

Memoirs of a Geisha

A Thousand Acres

Is Sarah Paulson playing the trashy Palm Springs wife? I can't imagine who else.

bump

I loved The GoldFinch, I read it in 2 days. I wish it was a mini-series instead of a movie. Ansel Eghort (or whatever his name is) doesn't fit my idea of the lead character.

I'm still trying finish The Secret History. For some reason, it's not as riveting as The Goldfinch.

R2, I thought I was the only one who read The Poisonwood Bible. Why haven't they made that into a movie? It's heartbreaking.

R11: yes Sarah is playing Xandra, the Las Vegas girlfriend.

Faggots

Falling in Place by Ann Beattie. Summer of ‘79 —Skylab is falling.

What happened?

"Everything Matters!" by Ron Currie, Jr. It has a profound, simple truth at the end that has stayed with me over the years. And I remember trying to finish it through the tears in my eyes.

What r16 said.

What r20 said.

R10, Loved Memoirs of a Geisha.

A Little Life

Middlemarch. I picked it up as a sort of Calvinist act of self-discipline. It's a classic. I should read it.

And once I started, I could hardly put it down. George Eliot is the best writer I've ever encountered. Including Shakespeare.

"A Bell for Adano."

"Wuthering Heights."

"The Swiss Family Robinson."

Blood Meridian

A Little Life was heartbreaking but the novel I reread is Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. It's about a talented musical family abandoned by their father and how music and art sustain them. It's magical realism before Latin American writers captured the genre.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenidis. It rocked my world. I also loved The Goldfinch, The Secret History, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Also, check out All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, bitches.

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. I read that awful novel about extreme bullying over 20 years ago and it fucked with my head. Have hated Atwood ever since.

So agree about Middlemarch. I took it on because I saw it as a foothold in some literary Olympus and was greatly surprised. It's one of my favorite novels but I can't get any of my friends interested.

R29 - Atwood is a genius, you moron.

Buddenbrooks (which is largely why Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize).

It's hard to believe he wrote it at only 25.

r31: Fuck off and Die.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope was my introduction to this great and prolific author, and it's still my favorite of his. Highly recommended and so topical in our current day and age, as the Melmotte character is basically a photo-Trump.

I read The Secret History in high school when it came out and it left a big impression on me. It's one of the few books that I loved as a kid that I decided to re-read as an adult, but it didn't quite hold up. I think The Goldfinch is a superior novel.

It should read "proto-Trump", not "photo-Trump" (damn you, Autocorrect!).

City of Night by John Rechy

Cry To Heaven by Anne Rice. It is not a vampire book. It is a historical set in Italy in the 18th century. I read it over 10 years ago, never read it again but I still think about it..

Sweet Valley High -Double Love........ it was chilling

What R36 said and Rechy's Numbers.

Giovanni’s Room

paul scott, the raj quartet

I really wanted to love The Secret History, and I found parts of it interesting, but as a whole, it disappointed me -- I don't know if I somehow missed the point of the whole thing, but nothing about the book grabbed me beyond the first few lines, which are genuinely memorable. (Something like "I suppose that at one time I might have had any number of stories to tell, but now there are no others. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." -- that's good!)

Maybe I should try The Goldfinch.

RE Anne Rice, r37, I didn't love it while I was reading it, but for some reason her novel The Feast of All Saints has stayed with me for all the years since I first read it. Very vivid characters, and she really brings the antebellum New Orleans Creole world to life in that book.

The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil. Very disturbing.

Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer.

A brilliant novel about middle age regret.

Lolita stayed with me. Despite its questionable subject matter it's one of the best written books ever.

Let The Right One In.

I didn't think I would like it, based on the subject; but it's one of the best novels I've read.

'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' by Muriel Spark

'Passing' by Nella Larsen

Hey OP -- I'm reading "The Secret History" right now! While I agree that it's not as engrossing as "The Goldfinch", which is simply brilliant, it is still an excellent piece of writing. She really gets to the core of her characters so that you can not only picture them perfectly but you also know them psychologically because of how the speak and interact with others.

Some books that have stayed with me are "Time and Again" by Jack Finney, "The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald, and "Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Huburt Selby, Jr.

"The Secret History" is one of my favorite novels. I remember reading it in H.S. and being riveted, sympathetic to the group and despising Bunny. Re-reading it years latter as an adult I was appalled by the group think and felt oddly sorry for Bunny. It showed how a little life experience can really change one's perspective. Quick question for those who've read it. Was the bacchanal a literal event in your opinion, or a product of group hysteria?

I don't remember a thing about The Secret History, except that it ended up at Second Hand Books at some point, and this nasty little cunt of a book buyer picked it up between his thumb and his forefinger and shrieked at me "You want me to buy THIS???" He was run out of the store before long, but that's what I remember best about The Secret History.

The only thing I remember about reading The Secret History is that I was shocked the characters hadn't developed emphysema by the fourth chapter.

Winesburg, Ohio

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. After I read that, I could not stop thinking about it.

The Road, Carson McCormack

The War of the Worlds, HG Wells

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Bleak House, Dickens

[QUOTE]She really gets to the core of her characters so that you can not only picture them perfectly but you also know them psychologically because of how the speak and interact with others.

It's not a novel, but I recently read a collection of short stories called "Read by Strangers" that has stayed with me ever since I finished it last week. This quote above almost perfectly described how I felt about the characters in that book, some of whom are etched in almost nightmarishly precise detail by the author. There is one story about a woman who becomes addicted to a video game and begins to neglect her newborn that is almost like an episode of "Black Mirror." It's a book that seems very much in tune with our current moment in many ways and, as one of the writers who blurbed the book put it, describes the "surreal cruelties" people can inflict upon each other. At times, I was reminded of Mkary Gaitskill's collection, Bad Behavior.

The novel that haunted me for a long time after I read it was A Little Life. I can still remember places I was when I was reading certain sections because they were just so unforgettable and seemed to be place an immediate stamp of time and place with whatever I was doing when I was reading it.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

Till We Have Faces, C.S.Lewis

The Dancer From the Dance, Andrew Holleran

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.Tolkien

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

The Greater Trumps, Charles Williams

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault

Om the Secret of Ahbor Valley, Talbot Mundy

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

[QUOTE]Dancer From the Dance, Andrew Holleran

This book is phenomenal and not nearly read by enough people. I've heard it described as the "gay Great Gatsby."

R58: love Andrew Holleran. The Beauty Of Men is as good as Dancer. I wish he published more often.

It's a short story but,

The Machine Stops, EM Forster

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male by Janice Raymond

R60 / R61

Anything by Martin Amis. LAnguage is incredibly advanced.

R1 I hated that book. It was so grim and horrible.

Butcher Boy is another novel that stayed with me - it's horrible.

[quote] The Road, Carson McCormack

I beg your pardon?

Gorgeously written, no? R22

I read it in high school and have read it three times since. Rarely does that happen.

Another one I loved, though a bit schmaltzy, was One True Thing by Anna Quindlen.

White Oleander

Ordinary People by Judith Guest

Scruples - Judith Krantz

On The Beach by Nevil Shute. Had to take to bed after reading it. The characters attempting to lead normal lives while waiting to die from radiation sickness seemed too stiff upper lip, but I think Shute meant to show them as being in shock. Neither film version was as good as the book.

Map of the World by Jane Hamilton.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John Le Carre. I reread them each every 2 or 3 years.

The grossly underrated Satan Was A Lesbian by Fred Haley.

I picked this up off the shelf at the library, not knowing what it was about, and read it in a day. It was gripping and very disturbing.

Loved Secret History. The Physician by Noah Gordon. Could not put it down.

The Message to the Planet by Iris Murdoch. I've never met a single other person who has read this book and it's very hard to locate, but it has stayed with me for the past ten years in such a profound way. I think it's one of Murdoch's finest novels and I highly recommend it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini . Tears were pouring down my face by the end. I havent been moved by a book like that in years. I read The Goldfinch not to long ago,and while it was okay,I really dont get the adulation.

The Poisonwood Bible is one of the best books of the 00s. I'm surprised more people haven't read it.

R77 They would have if it had won the Pulitzer (it was a finalist)--instead "The Hours" won. A toss-up, as I love both.

Someone described TPB to me as Little Women meets Heart of Darkness. My students have loved it when I've used it in classes.

Coming Up for Air by Orwell

Travels with my Aunt by Greene

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by le Carré

To the various le Carre lovers: If I've never read le Carre before, what would be the best book to begin?

TIA!

I agree with ‘The Road’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, I will add ‘You are not a Stranger Here’, Adam Haslett.

Group hysteria IMHO R49. There was never a hint of the "supernatural" in any other parts of the book (or her other novels).

It is similar to Ellis' novels where the characters are often unreliable narrators, and she is a "fan" of his. I think it works for the story since they were attempting something supernatural. For Ellis he pushes my suspension of disbelief most notably in Glamorama and Lunar Park, and while I didn't dislike the books, I wasn't sold on them either.

The Robber Bride - Atwood

The Women's Room - French

Flowers for Algernon - Keyes

The Secret History was a great book, I'd kind of forgotten about it OP.

I loved Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. It wasn't necessarily the best book, but it blew me away at the end. I didn't see it coming. I made a friend read it just to talk about, and she cursed me out. She was traumatized.

Prayer for Owen Meany, many years ago. I still remember where I was sitting, sobbing, when I finished it.

More recently, Little Life.

There's lots of love here for Donna Tartt. A friend of mine in publishing told me her first book was heavily rewritten at the direction of the editor. I don't know if her subsequet work required as much handholding.

The Crimson Petal and The White by Michel Faber. I'm normally more drawn to science fiction and fantasy but this is a book I have read multiple times and still find compelling.

‘Beloved’ is brilliant, unforgettable, also torture porn.

Seasonal suicide notes-Roger Lewis. Less-Andrew Sean Greer. Blue Heaven-Joe Keenan. The comfort of Strangers-Ian McEwan. Little Deaths-Emma Flint. Alexander McQueen: Blood beneath the skin-Andrew Wilson. The hearts invisible Furies-John Boyne. Dan Davies In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile-Dan Davies.

Beloved is highly overrated ...

I'm so glad to see the love for Atwood's The Robber Bride here (and on other current DL book threads). It always gets overshadowed by The Handmaid's Tale, and while it's not political (except perhaps for its feminism), it's a great read.

As a matter of fact, I must reread it soon!

THE HUMAN STAIN

IMHO Phillip Roth's greatest novel.

That wouldn't surprise me R86. First novel, very young, etc. There is probably a lot of un-credited writing that should go to editors.

Dune had a powerful impact on my worldview that still holds today.

While Mists of Avalon had me obsessing over the plot for years.

Finally to this day I wish the Losers gang from It by Stephen King were my actual childhood friends. I was sad to say goodbye to them when the book was over

The Goldfinch would have been GREATLY improved by some judicious editing.

Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles

Giovanni's Room. I read it in college and couldn't put it down. I haven't read it since, but I think about the characters all the time, nearly two decades later.

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobia Smollett.

A holiday journey around 18th-century Britain is irresistibly sweet

Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty. Heartbreaking.

No Holleran? The Beauty of Men stuck with me. It nicely examines survivor's guilt and aging.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

I'm at the last chapter of The Secret History and I've been stuck there for over a year. I can't finish it because I am so damn bored.

The Spy who came in from the cold R80

Another vote for Middlemarch.

[quote]love Andrew Holleran. The Beauty Of Men is as good as Dancer. I wish he published more often.

After reading another recent thread here, I went to Amazon to look for some Holleran books that had been recommended, and was dismayed to see that almost none of his works are currently available as e-books. I really wish more writers with older OOP works whose rights have reverted to them would get that stuff to publishers like Open Road Media or someone else who will do the work of formatting, etc and make it available. Yes, I can and do still buy paper books, but I worry about stuff that isn't being digitized. I remember the big changeover from albums/tapes and from VHS to dvd - so much stuff gets lost when formats and habits change. And there's already a TON of gay-themed books from the 70s/80s/90s that will probably never see the light of day again, stuff like the books from Alyson, GMP, or other niche imprints.

I wish I had held onto my original printing of Dancer from the Dance.

R97 Thank you for that. I had never read Giovanni’s Room and just started it. It is exquisite.

[QUOTE]After reading another recent thread here, I went to Amazon to look for some Holleran books that had been recommended, and was dismayed to see that almost none of his works are currently available as e-books. I really wish more writers with older OOP works whose rights have reverted to them would get that stuff to publishers like Open Road Media or someone else who will do the work of formatting, etc and make it available.

I'm friends with Holleran and can mention this to him if you'd like. I just got an email from him last night, in fact.

Yes, please do, r108. All of his books need to be on Kindle.

Oh, R108, if you would encourage him to seek a digital publisher for at least some of his back catalogue, you'd be doing the world a favor. Right now all he's got available in the Kindle store is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited and some anthologies he's participated in. I know several of his novels are available to borrow via OpenLibrary.org, but you can't keep them, and they are essentially bootlegs, with all the imperfection that implies. I don't know the economic feasibility of it all - for all I know he's already looked into getting some of his work reprinted as e-books and decided not to pursue it - but it just seems criminal that classics like Dancer From The Dance and Nights In Aruba can't be legitimately purchased in digital form.

R105, I will pass this all along to him. Thanks for going into detail.

You can also go to the Amazon pages for the physical books and request that they be made available on Kindle. I don't know how much attention Amazon pays, but it can't hurt.

R107 you're quite welcome. Baldwin is so under appreciated. He really is on the Mt. Rushmore of 20th Century writers in my estimation. Enjoy the ride...

Ancient Evenings - Norman Mailer

The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks is a novel that stayed with me long after. The BBC version with Eddy Redmayne does not come close. It is a World War I novel set in the trenches in France for the most part--intensely moving.

I concur with Paul Smith's "The Raj Quartet" mentioned above--it was made for TV as "The Jewel in the Crown." The books (4) are even better than the 1980s (?) version of Jewel.

A Passage to India by Forster was a book I remember being very affected by when I read it. Then I went on to read all of Forster.

Roth's American Pastoral is usually considered his best and it is strange and unforgettable IMO.

Re Le Carre--I've read literally all his books. I agree, start with "The Spy who came in..." but go on to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then if you're still into it, try the other books in the trilogy, An Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. I think Le Carre might have won the Nobel if he hadn't been a genre writer, especially back in his early days when it was look down on.

You never forget "Lolita." Such a beautifully written, bizarre book. Nabokov was a genius IMO.

Dan Simmons tends to be overlooked because he does genre fiction but he is usually great to very good. The Hyperion Cantos is spectacular. They've turned his novel The Terror into a series. I haven't seen it but the book is great.

Another vote for Cloud Atlas and David Mitchell.

I've also read A Secret History and I loved it at the time but like others I can't remember too much of it.

Other favorites: The Historian and The Croning.

R108: tell him his fans would love new work. Short stories, essays, or a new novel. Anything!

Prince of Tides. Les Miserables. We Were Liars. The last one haunts me. It’s a great, easy read.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's the only book I've read twice, I loved it so much.

White Noise by Don Delillo. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Read both in high school and felt like I’d been hypnotized. Reread them years later and still feel like they put me under a spell.

Another vote for The Crying of Lot 49. Even though I read it twenty years ago, I still think of it weekly. I recently read The Goldfinch and loved it because it felt like a modern day Dickens novel. I was eager to read Secret History thinking it would be similar but I found it hard to get through. All of Margaret Atwood's works and many of Alice Munro's short stories linger in my mind too.

I used to own that first edition of Dancer From the Dance, signed by the author. We were friends at the time, but he didn't want to add any sort of message along with his signature. He's "skittish" about any semblance of amitie--his own word, skittish. Typical Eric, so fearful of getting close to anyone, or of letting anyone get close to him. But that's his right.

I finally told him to write just "Good luck on your new job." Years later, I sold the book on Amazon. Someone out there has a signed copy of Dancer with an offbeat message in it. So be it, I guess.

The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler

Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

Interested in the 'Dancer' first edition prices. Bought the UK first edition way back from a remainder section piled high with copies bearing that version's distinctive dark blue cover.

Still have it in a box somewhere, having enjoyed and been informed by the novel. (Recall LOL at one particular killer camp line.) Glib hindsight of course makes me wish I'd picked up a few more copies.

r124 I bought it in the spring or summer of 1978, in Los Angeles. It felt like the gay life I'd observed in New York the previous three years, but never felt a part of. Not that I had any problem getting laid. I just didn't like disco, or the culture that grew up around it. I found it just as easy to pick someone up on the street as at a bar, and I didn't have to wait until late at night to do it.

The Handmaids Tale stayed with me so much I couldn’t bring myself to watch the television series. Oddly enough Great Expectations. I’ve gone as Miss Haversham for Halloween many times. It’s surprisingly easy to find a cheap wedding dress that fits a six foot man.

r120: I was a huge White Noise fan (and DeLillo in general though didn't read Underworld beyond the amazing "Pafko at the Wall" first chapter). I think White Noise now seems dated (30 years later!) but I just remember how funny it was--the main character is the department head of "Hitler Studies" at this fictitious midwestern college. I remember the wonderful satirical description of the pop culture specialists (they all talk like gangsters from New York and one guy always coughs into his armpit). After Underworld, DeLillo started writing these short, uninteresting novels--none of them as good as his pre-Underworld books. Libra is also brilliant--and probably less dated than White Noise. Most of DeLillo's work is very funny (esp White Noise), and with these extraordinary sculpted sentences that you realize he must have read aloud to create them until they were perfected. DeLillo probably won't but should win the Nobel. He's in his early 80s now, so they better do it while they can.

[quote]You never forget "Lolita." Such a beautifully written, bizarre book. Nabokov was a genius IMO.

Absolutely. His command of the English language and his ability to bend it to his will is magnificent. I can’t think of another author who could make such a an abhorrent narrator almost likable at times.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Moby-Dick

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Dancer from the Dance

George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss

Ellison's Invisible Man

Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers

Jane Eyre

Crime and Punishment AND The Brother Karamazov

The Great Gatsby (which I was completely bored with when I read it in HS, but fell in love with it when I reread it about a year or two ago)

Jude the Obscure

and I'm tempted to mention a couple of Stephen King novels, but posters will laugh

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Felt it really captured being gay in the 1980s perfectly. And the ending, with its foreshadowing of the 90s, was really well done. Like pretty much all of his stuff - but Line of Beauty really resonated based on my experiences and age.

Dancer from the Dance.

It was the first serious gay novel I read, and I don’t think anything I’d read in my 20s quite has stuck with me as profoundly. I read it at a time I was profoundly lonely and using sex to anesthetize my emptiness. The novel made more introspective and self-aware of what I was doing and I stopped. A few months later, AIDS hit the news.

I decided to read a couple of Italian classics during a month-long trip in Italy recently. One of these really stayed with me: Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli.

It is auto-biographical. Carlo Levi, a doctor and painter, was active against Mussolini in the 30s, and so, like many political dissidents in Italy at the time, he was banished to a poor and remote village in southern Italy for a couple of years. His description of the region's medieval poverty and the mentality and superstitions of the miserable peasants, as well as the various strange characters he meets there, is spell-binding.

Agree about 'The Line Of Beauty.' It was a stroke of genius for Hollinghurst so plausibly to introduce Margaret Thatcher into the narrative for a vivid cameo.

Those of us of a certain age grew up as Thatcher and AIDS predominated. AH catches the mood of that time better than anyone I can think of. 'TLOB' was a worthy winner of the Booker Prize, and I think the novel will stand the test of time well.

At Swim, Two Boys.

"What cheer!"

Howards End. One of the best novels ever written.

I absolutely love the “Only connect!” passage.

Another vote for The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. it's truly haunting. Another I've loved is the Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.

I'm reading The Book Thief right now, R136. Really good, such beautiful writing.

Another vote for Celine's 'Journey to the End of the Night.' Brilliant book.

Henry Miller's Nexus was amazing - all in that series were.

John Paul Sartre's 'The Age of Reason' is amazing. The character of Daniel in particular, and the kittens...harrowing.

George Orwell's 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' - a lower class poet failing at every turn.

Janet Frame's 'To the Is-land.'

Herman Hess' Demian, Journey to the East and Steppenwolf. Very important books for me at that time in my life.

Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain.' The lady whose lungs got 'overfilled' - christ.

Anthony Burgess 'M/F' just a really funny story.

Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim' is excellent. Read it as I travelled through India.

I agree with you about Kim. I wasn't expecting much and ended up being really impressed with Kipling's writing. I went on to read Plain Tales from the Hills - his short stories set in India.

Speaking of India, The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott (the basis for the 1980s BBC/PBS series "The Jewel in the Crown") is a fantastic read, sort of the novelistic equivalent of a binge series. Once you start you just can't put it down--a very well-written realistic novel. I'm a fast reader, and I think I read the whole thing in 3 weeks; just couldn't stop once I started. The book(s) were better than the series, although the series was one of the best ever from the BBC. Don't be daunted by the length.

Can we STOP with the Donna Tratt comments. Tratt is like the "Follies" of any literary thread.

FOLLIES! OMG! I LOVE FOLLIES!!!