Chapotraphouse

I read 32 but two or three I only read substantial portions of (like a few hundred pages of The Magic Mountain (which was really good) and Bleak House (which was boring)). I took lots of literature classes in college and decades later still can't get a good job and I knew this was going to happen even at the time but w/e.

Western writers are in love with Nabokov even though he is sus as fuck. His cousin was in the CIA. Not one, but two of his novels are about pedophilia. And the mystique about his style really wears off if you know a little French. A lot of his hypnosis of the English-speaking intelligentsia comes from just translating French terms into English. Nabokov is like "mauve" and "wavelets" and college-educated westerners are like HOLY FUCK. I want to like Orhan Pamuk but the dude is literally just super into Nabokov and also has nothing to say about Palestine.

Anyway.

Interesting that Middlemarch is at the top. George Eliot has other novels that are much shorter and more approachable. But she's good, folks. I only read the first few pages of Middlemarch but it was about the beginnings of capitalism in England so that was cool.

Ulysses is doable if you get some books to help you. There are books out there with a line-by-line analysis of Ulysses (shitloads of the confusing shit in that book are just lyrics from 19th century Irish songs). The first couple of chapters are so good too. There's also a podcast called re:joyce where the guy reads like a paragraph of Ulysses and then talks about it. Sadly he died before he could finish the book.

IMO Virginia Woolf is suuuuuuuuuuuper overrated. White feminists fucking LOVE her but not many other people are interested, maybe because she was into blackface? Holy shit, they put almost all her fucking novels on this list. The only one I kind of liked was Orlando.

Gogol is the best of the famous 19th century Russian writers, way better than Tolstoy (who would be much better if he would just shut the fuck up and let his characters breathe) and Dostoevsky (who ends one of his most famous novels with his main characters reading the fucking Bible). I spent years believing that Tolstoy was my favorite writer. The Bondarchuk film of War and Peace is superior to the novel and very true to it. But if you read any Gogol you will be hooked immediately. Fun should be a factor in these considerations. Gogol is fun.

Tolstoy is also like the George Lucas of 19th century Russian novels. His wife "helped" a LOT with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, obviously his best books, but when they stopped working together and decided to spend the next few decades screaming at each other (while Tolstoyremovedd his peasants) his writing quality fell off a cliff. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is still good though, but it's a short story he wrote much later in life.

Borges and Lovecraft didn't make it because they didn't write novels, but they're both great. Borges was super racist and so was Lovecraft, but Lovecraft has a redemption arc while Borges doesn't.

I didn't see any Zola here. L'Assommoir is SO GOOD. And Dostoevsky clearly began Crime and Punishment by ripping it off.

Flaubert is really good, don't miss him, but Sentimental Education SUCKS. Madame Bovary and Salaambo are amazing though. But he's also a lib and just totally contemptuous of humanity. There are no good people in any of his novels. Tres Contes is a good quick backdoor into Flaubert if you're interested. Flaubert literally spent his life writing, masturbating, and catching syphilis from sex workers. Once a month he hung out in Paris with other writers. The rest of the time, he was either jerking off or shouting at the top of his lungs in his house in the countryside in order to read his own prose and make sure that the style was good. His family tolerated this because he was a famous writer.

Moby Dick fucking rules and is one of the few genuinely good novels written by a white American, no wonder it was ignored for decades until the French discovered it (like Poe, the only other genuinely good white American writer).

Cormac McCarthy is good but he's such a fucking chud though. I was rereading a bit of the road and he has a lengthy random scene where the MC and his uncle or whatever go fishing for a whole day and don't say a word to each other the whole time, and he's like, that day fucking ruled bro, my uncle and I did DUDE STUFF and we didn't even FUCKING SAY ANYTHING unlike ALL YOU FUCKING PANSIES WHO WON'T SHUT THE FUCK UP. I imagine that the road is how reactionary men view the world at all times. Like when they go to the gas station, they expect to be attacked by cannibals from all directions at any moment.

Things Fall Apart is really good and quick but the author's other novels seem to have been written by another person.

I actually read The Leopard a long time ago. I tried to read it again but couldn't. It's like...I'm a Sicilian landlord at the turn of the century and everyone's angry at me, why?????

I have tried so many times to read A Fine Balance. Just can't get into it.

A House For Mr. Biswas was really good but the author is a dickhead.

Kindred is really good. And Parable of the Sower. But I couldn't finish Dawn. I tried to...twice! It still sticks with me though. Also couldn't finish Parable of the Talents.

I guess they didn't include The Satanic Verses. Stylistically I liked it. A much, much, much, much, much better book about Islam is No God But God, which also reads like a novel.

I read Beloved and The Great Gatsby in high school and wasn't ready for them. I glanced at Beloved recently and was like, whoa. I'm not sure if The Great Gatsby is actually good. Ditto for Catch 22. Catch 22 is white male boomers' favorite novel (if they have ever actually read any novels).

They didn't include The Dispossessed...which is like, the hexbear novel.

This list is of course super lib. And Quiet Flows The Don (gonna be Trump's epitaph) should be there as well as Memed, My Hawk, just off the top of my head. They include Flaubert so they should include these. The Forever War, Explosion in a Cathedral, Black Boy, A Grain of Wheat, The Sorrow of War, Sea of Lentils—should also be here.