Thoughtage

Books To Read In This Lifetime


Ulysses by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov....
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ....
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert ....
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ....
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead....
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Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini....
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Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths.....
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17. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot....
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26. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

"I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"....

28. Stendhal The Red and the Black

"A novel is a mirror that strolls along a highway. Now it reflects the blue of the skies, now the mud puddles underfoot."....

52. Nathaniel West Miss Lonelyhearts....
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Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep....

67. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim

70. Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."....

71. Jack Kerouac On the Road

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it... and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?"....
77. Mary Shelley Frankenstein

"Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world."....

84. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying

"I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time."....

71. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: The Leopard

"For things to stay the same, things have to change"

Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities

"He is a man without qualities . . . There are millions of them nowadays . . . What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context -- nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is."

Thomas Mann The Black Swan

"One of the swans, however, pushing close against the bank, spread its dark wings and beat the air with them, stretching out its neck and hissing angrily up at her. They laughed at its jealousy, but at the same time felt a little afraid."....

Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."....