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Thoughts What Modern Classics Would You Recommend For Someone Who Usually Hates Classics?

My favourite novel still to this day is And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave (read it almost 30 years ago). His second book wasn't that good.

The Australian accent sounds wrong to me because it's set in the American South, but anyway

😂




Other memorable books (that people might not have on their list)..

-A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
-American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
-A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
-The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
-Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
-The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments by Margaret Attwood
-We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver


I've read a lot of Stephen King. I loved The Bachman Books. One I read in the last couple of years I liked was Full Dark, No Stars which is four short stories. I read/started couple of others but thought they were crap ☺️
 
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negrogesic said:
I will give the best answer out of anyone:

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

Thank me later!
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My mother was an English teacher and has read a LOT of books. Lolita is her favourite by a long shot. I read an article in which some famous musicians listed their favourite books and Lolita was included by Nick Cave (who wrote my favourite) and David Bowie. I had to check it was Bowie and yeah. Here's his list:

faroutmagazine.co.uk

A list of David Bowie’s 100 favourite books of all time

David Bowie, one of the most creative, influential and experimental musical icons of all time, had a particularly keen love of literature.
faroutmagazine.co.uk faroutmagazine.co.uk
 
AbbeyLee said:
My mother was an English teacher and has read a LOT of books. Lolita is her favourite by a long shot. I read an article in which some famous musicians listed their favourite books and Lolita was included by Nick Cave (who wrote my favourite) and David Bowie. I had to check it was Bowie and yeah. Here's his list:

faroutmagazine.co.uk

A list of David Bowie’s 100 favourite books of all time

David Bowie, one of the most creative, influential and experimental musical icons of all time, had a particularly keen love of literature.
faroutmagazine.co.uk faroutmagazine.co.uk
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Yeah I read that Nick Cave novel (And the Ass Saw the Angel). He was clearly influenced by Nabokov. It was interesting (though i think his music is more interesting than his writing, i wouldn't listen to it but it is original and interesting).

But your mother's favorite book is Lolita and you haven't read it? Why not give it a go? It is one of my favorites if not my favorite book of all time (hard to pin it down). It is not a difficult read (though some of his other novels are difficult). I suppose it isn't an easy read either; I tried to get my girlfriend to read it but she is a weak reader (perhaps below average, at least for a college graduate).

That David Bowie reading list is interesting. Interesting that he ranks (among others) Camus's "The Stranger" above Lolita. The Stranger is a good and iconic story, but as a piece of literature it pales in comparison to Lolita. But given the subtext of The Stranger, it is sort of extraliterary in a way, so it is hard to compare to a traditional novel.

In any event give Lolita a try. It is beautifully written.

Though written in a style nothing like Lolita, here is a short story by Nabokov. This short story is far more dreamlike and disorienting than Lolita so don't let it dissuade you. It is beautifully written:

thefloatinglibrary.com

Gods :: Vladimir Nabokov

Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs. Under the snake&#82…
thefloatinglibrary.com thefloatinglibrary.com

From that short story:

You’re laughing. When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you. But your eyes are instantly extinguished. You say, passionately, fearfully, “Would you like to go . . . there? Would you? It’s lovely there today, everything’s in bloom. . . .”

Certainly it’s all in bloom, certainly we’ll go. For aren’t you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . . .

Listen—I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.

Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life

To help understand the story abit more, the narrator is speaking to his wife who just had a miscarriage. He is speaking in a rambling but beautiful fashion.

And here is the full-text of Lolita itself:

 
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AbbeyLee said:
Oh wow 😀 It was worth ploughing through I thought. It lacks female characters though.
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Yeah, it's pretty thicc lol. I'm not used to it anymore as most of the modern/classics are 200 pages or less, so 700+ feels huge. I'm sure I'll get through it. I read Stephen King as a kid/teen and remember how being 300 pages into one of his books didn't necessarily mean you had read more than 1/4 of it.
Psyching myself up to read The Count of Monte Cristo (1300 pages).
 
ChemicallyEnhanced said:
Yeah, it's pretty thicc lol. I'm not used to it anymore as most of the modern/classics are 200 pages or less, so 700+ feels huge. I'm sure I'll get through it. I read Stephen King as a kid/teen and remember how being 300 pages into one of his books didn't necessarily mean you had read more than 1/4 of it.
Psyching myself up to read The Count of Monte Cristo (1300 pages).
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1300 pages! I struggle to read an entire newspaper article atm. But in "reading mode" I can get through a 300 pager in a couple of nights (if it's good). A Little Life is around 900 I think.. That book stayed with me for quite a while afterwards. It was quite fascinating.
 
AbbeyLee said:
1300 pages! I struggle to read an entire newspaper article atm. But in "reading mode" I can get through a 300 pager in a couple of nights (if it's good). A Little Life is around 900 I think.. That book stayed with me for quite a while afterwards. It was quite fascinating.
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Yeah I go through periods where I can read hundreds of pages a day and then periods where I barely read at all, too.
 
negrogesic said:
Yeah I read that Nick Cave novel (And the Ass Saw the Angel). He was clearly influenced by Nabokov. It was interesting (though i think his music is more interesting than his writing, i wouldn't listen to it but it is original and interesting).

But your mother's favorite book is Lolita and you haven't read it? Why not give it a go? It is one of my favorites if not my favorite book of all time (hard to pin it down). It is not a difficult read (though some of his other novels are difficult). I suppose it isn't an easy read either; I tried to get my girlfriend to read it but she is a weak reader (perhaps below average, at least for a college graduate).

That David Bowie reading list is interesting. Interesting that he ranks (among others) Camus's "The Stranger" above Lolita. The Stranger is a good and iconic story, but as a piece of literature it pales in comparison to Lolita. But given the subtext of The Stranger, it is sort of extraliterary in a way, so it is hard to compare to a traditional novel.

In any event give Lolita a try. It is beautifully written.

Though written in a style nothing like Lolita, here is a short story by Nabokov. This short story is far more dreamlike and disorienting than Lolita so don't let it dissuade you. It is beautifully written:

thefloatinglibrary.com

Gods :: Vladimir Nabokov

Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs. Under the snake&#82…
thefloatinglibrary.com thefloatinglibrary.com

From that short story:

You’re laughing. When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you. But your eyes are instantly extinguished. You say, passionately, fearfully, “Would you like to go . . . there? Would you? It’s lovely there today, everything’s in bloom. . . .”

Certainly it’s all in bloom, certainly we’ll go. For aren’t you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . . .

Listen—I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.

Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life

To help understand the story abit more, the narrator is speaking to his wife who just had a miscarriage. He is speaking in a rambling but beautiful fashion.

And here is the full-text of Lolita itself:

Click to expand...

Thank you ☺️ I have started Lolita (mum's got a copy from god knows when) but I wasn't in a good frame of mind for reading at the time. I've read excerpts and quotes by Nabokov and he is exceptional. One of the quotes I've got saved is that Let all of life be an unfettered howl..

Also this:

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron..


That one sort of amuses me because it'd be considered quite unPC in our society these days. Like using the word "peasant" haha.

I'll take a look at the short story.. I like being around non-vulgarians for a change! 😎
 
@negrogesic Saw this on Twitter after searching for Nabokov. It's from "Speak, Memory". Just wow 💫🌟✨⚡️

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."
 
Atomic_Decay said:
It’s such a variously suspenseful and rollicking page turner that you’ll be through it no time.
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Hope so! I fecking love revenge stories (seriously; Jennifer Hills is one of my heroines lol)

LOVEEEEEE A Little Life so far. Only on page 76 of 720, but the characters are just SO well written and I'm dying to delve into Jude's mind and find out what really going on/his past/what happened to him [NO SPOILERS PLZ].
 
S.J.B. said:
Just finished A Scanner Darkly. This is essential reading for any dope fiend. Very relatable at times.
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I :heart6: this book. I read it a few years before Richard Linklater made into a digital rotoscope animation film starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr., et al. Reading the novel first helps one contextualize and make better sense of the movie, which is visually quite arresting, but it was also perhaps a bit too ambitious trying to package all of the novel's depth into a 90-min-or-so film. All the same, it's still a really cool movie and an stellar book and totally second the recommendation. It's a great introduction to PKD's work before attempting to tackle his later works like VALIS.
 
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