Let's play a game this morning

[decemberthirty]

A book recommending game!

I spent most of 2012 in a reading rut. You know the sort of thing I mean--reading all sorts of books, always hoping that I would fall in love with the next one, but never quite getting there. This year, I'd like to feel passionate about my reading again. And I'd like it if you, dear LJ-friends, would help me break out of my rut.

Here's how it'll work: I'll give a general description of my taste and the sort of things I like (longtime readers probably already know more than enough about my taste in books!), and you tell me about an author you think I might like or describe the last book that knocked you head over heels. BUT! This is not a one-way street! If you'd like to receive recommendations too, post a comment that tells us about you as a reader, and if I've got any good recommendations for you I'll share them. Others can chime in too, and soon (I hope!) we'll all be sharing our favorites with each other and adding lots of titles to our to-read lists. If this sounds like fun to you, feel free to pass it around--the more the merrier!


Favorite authors: E.M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson, Virginia Woolf, Colm Tóibín, Pat Barker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Michael Chabon, Sherwood Anderson, etc...
Preferred genres: Fiction. Fiction of all sorts: short stories, novels, novellas. I mostly read fiction of the 'literary' variety, but I am happy break out of those bounds for well-written sci-fi, mysteries, or thrillers. Very occasionally I read memoir and essay collections.
Things I like: historical settings, queer characters, queer characters in historical settings, beautiful prose, believable love stories even (especially?) when the endings aren't happy ones, dark elements, real human emotion, coming-of-age stories, tight plots but also sometimes introspective plotless rambles, books that make me work, stories about families, characters I can love.
Last book that really blew me away: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. You can read my post about here, if that would be useful.


Okay, go!

Comments

[rachel2205.livejournal.com]

Oooh, so many books off the top of my head. You may well have read many of these already!

The Sparrow (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/334176.The_Sparrow) - Mary Doria Russell
The Blind Assassin (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78433.The_Blind_Assassin) - Margaret Atwood
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37380.The_Heart_is_a_Lonely_Hunter) - Carson McCullers
The Song of Achilles (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11250317-the-song-of-achilles) - Madeleine Miller
The New York Trilogy (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/431.The_New_York_Trilogy) - Paul Auster
I Capture The Castle (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31122.I_Capture_the_Castle) - Dodie Smith
Human Traces (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7482.Human_Traces) - Sebastian Faulks
The Crystal Cave (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82192.The_Crystal_Cave) - Mary Stewart
Perdido Street Station (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68494.Perdido_Street_Station) - China Mieville
Loitering With Intent (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58680.Loitering_with_Intent) - Peter O'Toole

It would take aaages to write why I like all these/why I think they'd match your tastes but I'm happy to discuss any that might strike your fancy!

[great-dame.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh! This is a weird one, but it falls in there with the emotion, the love, the fiction. VURT by Jeff Noon is a "cyberpunk" novel that is full of fantasy but not the dragon stuff...DEFINITELY dark elements and unlike anything you'll ever read again. It's practically a secret language as you read it. Lots of substance abuse as the plot revolves around feathers that are programmed with a collective Matrix that people tickle their throats with and escape to.

[silas-says.livejournal.com]

My recommendations for you:
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (if you haven't already read it)
anything by Ali Smith
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins (full disclosure, this is one of my friends--but I mean it: INCREDIBLE.)
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock (also The Devil All the Time, but only if you're REALLY okay with dark)

[pax_athena]

Christa Wolf. German, East-German, to be exact, one of the leading names in German literature (was unfortunately, she died last year), but not very well known outside, for reason which I don't fully understand.

Her books are - hard to read, beautiful, haunting, true. I hardly ever get the feeling of someone writing their very soul out. I do so with Wolf. It's like somebody letting light into all the dark corners we are always afraid to look into. At the same time, there is great mastery to how she builds the books: the scaffolding of the story, which is sometimes not held together by a plot, but by something else: associations, feelings, characters and their relationships.

I don't think there is a book of fiction of hers which did not wholeheartedly get five stars from me, even if those are books which I would not have picked up if they were not by her. My favourites are perhaps Medea and Kassandra - both re-imaging of the reality behind the Greek myths, the last one accompanied by five essays on the writing process. Her other books are like this, not about what they superficially seem to be, but about everything. But on the surface they are about evenings, spent with friends in a tiny village - about the day that Chernobyl happened, even though spent in middle Europe - about ... Oh really, just about everything.

Some other books which come to my mind:

Christoph Hein: The Distant Lover
Jorge Luis Borges: Short Fiction (Ficciones and/or Alpha)
Sandor Marai: Embers

If you want to break into SF, John Tiptree Jr.'s (Alice Sheldon's ) "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever". Or Marge Piercy, both "He, She and It" and "Women on the Edge of Time" (her non sf work is great, too, but I haven't read much there - yet.).

*******************

And about me as a reader:

Things I like, it random order: short (but I also love Umberto Eco, so I like long, if it's good enough), crisp, clear, extreme mastery of language, character-driven stories, contemporary, post modern, classics, literary, the personal and the political interconnected, strong women, books which ring true, stories which ring real, good science fiction preferably aware of the New Wave heritage, science fiction which is actually literary fiction just with the wrong label, painstakingly constructed stories (Borges, I look at you), meta-levels, Greek but not only Greek mythology, actually the antique Greek comedies and tragedies (Aristophanes is frighteningly modern - all the things sold as new, were already there), books which left a trace in literature (Paradise Lost).

I mostly read fiction and will very rarely venture into non-fiction. I don't like historical setting for their own sake, except when it's about the last 100 years or so, it has to be about the story that is told (as, say, in Eco's Name of the Rose) not about the time.

So, recs for me?

P.S. Sorry for typos, I have to run to teach ...

[xphilega.livejournal.com]

haruki murakami is a love-it, hate-it type of author, but I LOVE him.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Dance Dance Dance are my favorites. :)

[mabith.livejournal.com]

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Adichie
Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz
The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
The Cry of the Go-Away Bird - Andrea Eames
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (similar to Jane Austen, but while I just can't get into Austen I adore Gaskell, who's also much funnier though this isn't one of her humorous ones.)
Antigonick - Anne Carson
Black Swan Green – David Mitchell (definitely my favorite recent coming of age story)
The Secret River - Kate Grenville
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Schaffer
Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger (maybe. It's quite dark and rather odd, sort of coming of age plus a bit of supernatural business, but in a not-too-annoying way.)
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece - Annabel Pitcher (this had some issues, but all in all was an excellent book, I think it's technically aimed at young adults but could easily go in the adult section, I feel.)

These are mostly sort of random, but I think all fit at least one of the likes you mentioned. I also just have a great love for both Naguib Mahfouz and Pearl S. Buck. Sometimes I see The Good Earth being assigned as summer reading to high schoolers and then they hate it because they're teenagers with little world knowledge or experience and or patience with history. So I try to get people who read it too young to read it again.

[dianora77.livejournal.com]

Aww, you like Forster, he's one of my faves too!

From the writers I've recently discovered I really liked Knut Hamsun (Hunger and Growth of the Soil), Muriel Barbery's L'élégance du hérisson, John Gardner's Grendel, Daniel Keye's Flowers for Algernon, and Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck.

[salvagejob.livejournal.com]

So here's a weird one for you, offered in total seriousness: "The Long Secret" and "Sport" by Louise Fitzhugh. Yes, Louise Fitzhugh, who I'm willing to bet you, the avid reader, read growing up. She wrote "Harriet the Spy!" I recently read all three of these books and they blew me away, especially "The Long Secret." Outside of Beatrix Potter, who is a completely different sort, I cannot think of a better children's writer, period. And Fitzhugh is just a brilliant writer, period. I would read anything of hers and don't really consider it children's lit, although it is that as well, of course. Does it fit your specs? Well, in a way. Fitzhugh was gay and though this doesn't feature obviously in any of the stories, you do get a different feel for some of the characters knowing it. I actually ordered a book about her and am excited to read it because there's so little about her on the web and she strikes me as such a strong, interesting character.

Seriously. The Long Secret.

[lusimeles.livejournal.com]

wide sargasso sea by jean rhys or really anything by jean rhys comes to mind. maybe george saunders' new one, tenth of december since you seem to enjoy short story writers? as for queer characters, i recently read alan hollinghurst's the line of beauty and thought it was quite alright, although it's famous enough of a book that i feel like you've probably read it already - he feels like a good forster inheritor, though. also, to almost everything on your 'things i like' list: call me by your name by andre aciman. pretentious but AMAZING and definitely one of my fiction faves. pascale quiviger's the perfect circle is another that comes to mind, although it's also uber pretentious - the style of prose makes me think of something you might like, though (it has a really slow and beautiful cadence).

[diabological.livejournal.com]

Hello. I found your new lj friends post and it prompted me to check out your journal. First, an introduction. I'm Kate. I read and write, but most of my journal is a psycho-spiritual battle ground, rather than a lace to calmly talk about reading or writing. But I've been on LJ for 11 years, so it's served different functions and could change again. Now, onto important matters. If you don't mind the plotless non-linear as long as it poignant and draped in stunningly beautiful prose, consider reading Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels - The book is as potent as poetry. And if you haven't picked it up already (since above you were talking about reading German literature), Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is as powerful as it is short.

Let me know if you're interested in "friending." Be well.