Well, we have a thread right now about literature we don't like, so I figured I'd start one about literature we do like.
I mention Waiting for Godot because that's what I just read.

Has anybody else read Waiting for Godot? I liked it a lot. It made me laugh out loud a few times.

I love Waiting for Godot! It's hillarious... I got to act it out (as Vladimir) for my class. But the first time I read it was on a flight from Frankfurt back to the US, and I was feeling pretty miserable at the time, so it took me a while to appreciate it.

Another great play that's quite similar is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Personally, I love this one more than Waiting, but the Beckett is probably better literature.

One of my greatest favorites in all of literature is Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It's such a poignant work, and manages to work in some experimental modernist aspects without being completely unintelligable. I'm not sure why Faulkner is better remembered for The Sound and the Fury or his other books... personally, I think this is by far his best.

On a different level, I'm curious what people think about works like Dune or LotR as works of literature, and not just popular entertainment.

I am currently reading Waiting for Godot for my NON sucky english class (I have 2, *stabs Heart of Darkness with a flaming book stabber) it's pretty good so far, I have to read the entire thing by tomorrow, and we'll also be acting it out, WITH BOWLER HATS (I don't know if that's the proper spelling of bowler, too lazy to check, I'm pretty sure it's wrong though)
Oh god yes.

Other books for this course are:
Kafka's "The Trial"
Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha"
Camus' "The Fall"
John Irving's "A Prayer For Owen Meany" - My teacher stalked the author of this book, and apparently the movie "Simon Birch" is based on it
Elie "The Weasel" Wiesel's "Night"

Hooray.

Anthing by Bradbury, Heinlein, or Vonnegut.

!!!!

<3

I love those crazyass dinos.

I want to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead sometime.

I think LotR is very much a literature book. It's fairly weak as entertainment, but very strong for literature. Same for Dune.


I've read Camus' The Stranger. It was good. The funny thing is, I thought the book was trying to make the opposite point it was actually making. I thought it was showing how the philosophy of the protagonist is bad, but it's not.

I have A Prayer for Owen Meany. I'm going to read it when I finish some of my other books.
Simon Birch was based on it, but Irving hated it so much that he made them change the title and not mention his name in the credits.


Right now, I'm reading Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I'm liking it. The prose was really hard to get through at first, but now it's one of my favorite parts of the book.
About a month ago I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a bunch of books:

Naked Lunch
A Prayer for Owen Meany
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Waiting for Godot
American Splendor (a collection of the comics)

I can think of at least 2 things wrong with that title

I recommend these classics to you and all sassians:
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumbass (:p)

Excellent, extremely thought provoking works, although getting through Crime and Punishment was one of the toughest things I've ever done.

Some new literature:
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
**Confluence - Paul J. McCauley**

I highly recommend it. It's excellent.

There's a really good French miniseries of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Gerard Depourdeau (I spelled his name wrong I think.)

The other old literature I definitely want to read. I've never heard of Confluence. I'm going to have to bookmark this thread for future reference.

I've read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and was mightily disappointed. His collection of short stories, called something like Fog and Mirrors, is really good though. I'm also reading through the Sandman, a comic series he wrote.


If the title of Naked Lunch sounds wrong, just read the story. It's mighty messed up, but the prose is just so wonderful. I just have to post some examples:

"The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!! Come Back!!' and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts."

Here's an example of how it's disturbing:

"You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: 'She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for the atom bomb, the bedbugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh... Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose.' "

Now would probably be a good time, too. Hamlet is fresh in my mind. Last year I read high school for English, I read it again for another class last semester, and we read it again in another class this semester.