Books, Novels, Authors, Poems, Short Stories

[Cosette]

Oh geez! I can't believe I did that...

I meant to put The Secret Garden, but I just watched Little Women this morning (one of my favourite films... beautiful adaptation of the novel), so it was on my mind I guess. I love A Little Princess as well.

 

[lostgirl]

Oh geez! I can't believe I did that...

I meant to put The Secret Garden, but I just watched Little Women this morning (one of my favourite films... beautiful adaptation of the novel), so it was on my mind I guess. I love A Little Princess as well.

Which adaptation? I'm partial to the one w/ Winona Ryder but the Katherine Hepurn one isn't bad...

 

[Cosette]

The one with Winona Ryder is my favourite. The only other one I've seen is the one with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy.

 

[lostgirl]

The one with Winona Ryder is my favourite. The only other one I've seen is the one with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy.

You have good taste-the Winona Ryder one is my favorite too

 

[Cosette]

You have good taste-the Winona Ryder one is my favorite too

Isn't it wonderful? I cry *every* time I watch it... which must be at least fifteen times or more by now.

 

[lostgirl]

Ditto. When do you cry? I'm a mess when Beth dies (obviously).

 

[tiffany]

Adding another title:

The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

 

[scblonndie]

(my apologies to any names I misspelled)
Books:
The Stranger - Albert Camus
A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Notes From the Underground - FD
Extremly Loud and Incredibly Close - JS Foer
Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonegut
Brave New World - A Huxley
The Fall - Camus
Cat's Cradle - Vonnegut
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Everything is Illuminated - JSF
To Kill a Mockingbird -
Angela's Ashes - F McCourt
The Old Man and The Sea - Hemmingway
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Plague - Camus
Candide - Voltaire
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
The Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
A Confederacy of Dunces - JK Toole
Bambi - Felix Salton

Short Stories:
A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O' Connor
A Long Walk to Forever - Vonnegut
Miriam - Capote
Harrison Bergeron - Vonnegut
Roman Fever - Edith Wharton
A Rose for Emily - Faulkner

Poems/Poets:
Spoon River Anthology - EL Masters
EVERYTHING TS ELLIOT!
Poe
Langston Hughes
Robert Frost

 

[tvsnow]

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Anna Karenina
Catcher in the Rye
Eating the Chesire Cat
House of Leaves
How The Light Gets In
Like The Red Panda
Memoirs of a Geisha
Neverwhere
White Oleander
The Poisonwood Bible
The Virgin Suicides

Authors: Brett Ellis, Deaver, Gaiman.

 

[PrinceOfCats]

Il Gattopardo - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

 

[Yppe]

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo

Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flauvert

Memories of Adrian, Marguerite Yourcenar


Well, and I also like Harry Potter.

 

[susie_bubble]

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
The Forsyte Saga Trilogy - John Galsworthy
Orientalism - Edward Said
Aristocrats - Stella Tillyard
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (much better than Anna Karenina in my opinion!)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Mitford Girls - Mary S. Lovell
White Teeth - Zadie Smith

All the 70th Anniversary Penguin Pocket classic books are great short stories.

 

[Golden_butterfly]

^ I'm currently reading white teeth !

Bricklane by Monica Ali

 

[Miss Dalloway]

I thought of some more. Since I'm a major bibliophile (and a literature major) I might update these lists from time to time.

Novels:
To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf
Bridget Jones' Diary &Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason- Helen Fielding
House of the Spirits- Isabella Allende
Eva Luna- Isabella Allende
A Garden of Earthly Delights- Joyce Carol Oates
A Prayer for Owen Meany- John Irving
The Hotel New Hampshire- John Irving
Daugher of the Forest- Juliet Mariller
Son of the Shadows-Juliet Mariller
Child of the Prophesy- Juliet Marriler
Lord John and the Private Matter- Diana Gabaldon
Shopgirl- Steve Martin

Poetry:
Shakespeares sonnets
Christina Rosetti
Emily Bronte
Emily Dickenson

Short Stories:
Katherine Mansfield
Angela Carter
Joyce Carol Oates

Lostgirl i really like your pick.I wanted to ask you what do you think about Virginia Woolfs:Mrs Dalloway and Marguerite Duras:The lover i am obssesed with those books i have a ritual i read Mrs Dalloway every sommer and The Lover every winter!Did you read them-what do you think!

 

[Miss Dalloway]

I found out,yesterday that there is a movie "The Lover"did anybody saw it.

 

[ivypixie]

Elizabeth Wurtzel is my hero. If I could chose ONE person in the world to meet, I would chose her. Prozac Nation was so great and real. And b*tch: In praise of difficult women is my bible!

I also love Sylvia Plath, her poems and The Bell Yar. My fave short novelist is Edgar Alan Poe, and I also love his poems.

And Francesca Lia Block. She is a godess, and she makes me feel special, unique and like a goddes myself. I love all her books and short stories, but my faves by her is Violet & Claire (it's almost like my bestfriend and I), Withbaby and Echo (which by the way is my avatar!!).

 

[lostgirl]

Lostgirl i really like your pick.I wanted to ask you what do you think about Virginia Woolfs:Mrs Dalloway and Marguerite Duras:The lover i am obssesed with those books i have a ritual i read Mrs Dalloway every sommer and The Lover every winter!Did you read them-what do you think!

I think they're both brilliant for different reasons. Mrs. Dalloway is so sadly and wonderfully beautiful in the way it pick out what makes our lives- not the major decisions like who to marry or how many kids to have, though that plays a part, but rather the day to day fabric of existance: watching a plane fly across the sky and realizing (or not realizing) that total stangers on the street are in that moment doing the same thing as you. And that the simplest actions like buying flowers have all these associations for us that call to mind the big decisions we make. If you take all those associations together than the actions of a single day are just as significant as the actions over a lifetime.

The Lover facinates me more in terms of the narrator. She's experienceing her first love afffair yes, but the book is more about her first experience of herself. I mean we don't even learn her lover's name! Everything she experinces with him (and sex is a big part of that) is a discovery about herself. Her discovery of her body is extrodinary. She describes herself as if she were describing someone else in the begining. After her affair she's talking more about herself. And everything that happens after the affair- her career, her marriage, her children, are a result of that self-discovery.

Reading these books is like an experience. But it's a different experience each time. They're fluid works in that way, I think. They never stay the same for me.

Why Mrs Dalloway in the summer and The Lover in winter?

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Why Mrs Dalloway in the summer and The Lover in winter?

I really dont know for no reason its just that i think that the first time i read the books was in that order and i am doing the same since!Do you have similar habit?What are the books that you read,more then once?Hey have you maybe seen the movies!I didnt and i cant get them on dvd in my country but i am really courious if they are any good.Mrs Dalloway is played by Vanessa Redgrave(so it should be great,but i would love to see Meryl Streep in that role)!Did you read any other Marguerite Duras books and if so wich would you recommend?Thanks!

 

[lostgirl]

I really dont know for no reason its just that i think that the first time i read the books was in that order and i am doing the same since!Do you have similar habit?What are the books that you read,more then once?Hey have you maybe seen the movies!I didnt and i cant get them on dvd in my country but i am really courious if they are any good.Mrs Dalloway is played by Vanessa Redgrave(so it should be great,but i would love to see Meryl Streep in that role)!Did you read any other Marguerite Duras books and if so wich would you recommend?Thanks!

I don't known if I read and reread books in a certain order... I should pay more attention to that. Maybe I do and I just never realized it.

There are a lot of books I read more than once and a lot I plan to read again but there's sooo much new stuff to read as well. I've read Wuthering Heights about a million times. I always get mad when people dismiss it as a simple romance. There's nothing simple (or traditionally romantic! about it). I also adore Jane Austen- she's great for when you need to laugh at yourself and the people around you. I think Virginia Woolf couldn't have written what she did without authors like those providing a foundation. She even discusses it in A Room of One's Own. Have you ever read that? I plan to reread To the Lighthouse soon, which is my other favorite novel by Woolf. I love the way the individual voices in that novel come together to create a unified whole.

I've seen the film version of Mrs. Dalloway. Vanessa Redgrave gives a good performance but I think ultimately the film was way too literal in it's interpretation. A lot of the books action takes place with internal voices which is handled with a narrator voicing over the film. I actually preferred The Hours as an adaptation. Meryl Streep's character is a sort of modern day incarnation of Mrs. Dallway (her name is even Clarissa) planning a party for an old friend dying of AIDS. That story is combined by the depiction of the day that Virginia Woolf decides to begin work on Mrs Dalloway, and the day a 1950's housewife begins reading the book. It deals with multiple themes of the original novel and it uses music (instead of voiceover) to carry you through the internal turmoil of the characters. Have you ever read the book The Hours? I recommend that as well.

I haven't seen te film version of The Lover but it seems to me like another book that's difficult to translate into film, so I'd be interested to see how it's done. The only other Duras novel I've read is The North China Lover, which is a must for any fan of The Lover IMO. It's sort of a reworking of The Lover that zeros in more closely the relationship between the narrator and her lover. The story is told in a more linear way and there's more background and detail.

BTW, have you ever seen the film Hiroshima Mon Amour? Margurite Duras wrote the screenplay, and I'd recommend it highly.

Are there other books that you reread?

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Wow i cant belive how similar taste we have!Wuthering Heights is amazing but i hated the movie i mean it was just bad(the one from the 2003 with Erika Christensen as Cate-terrible)because of that i refuse to see other adaptations!I also agree that Jane Austen gave foundation for writers who came after her like Virginia Woolf,I read"The Room of One´s Own"but i prefferd The Lighthouse!You saw the movie MRS Dalloway!!!!I hope i will soon get the chance to see it!Oh and yes i watched the Hours and read the book but i think the movie was bettre(just my opinion)and it proved that film adaptations can be as good or bettre than the book! I just loved the pararelles betwen writing ,living and reading the book!Werent Meryl,Nicole and Juliane excellent!

I havent seen the Hiroshima Mon Amour but i read about it and i know she wrote the screenplay its on my mustsee list!There arent any others books i reread,i just havent read anyother that touched me like those two but i am only 22 years old and maybe i will in the future find a novel that i will love as those two!But one thing is for sure i will reared them till the the day i die because everytime i do they are bettre,and older i get the more i love them.I still havent read the novel that i loved the first and the last sentence of the book like in Mrs Dalloway or The Lover!Thanks for all recommendations i appreciate it!

Hey talking about Jane Austen do you know they are filming a movie about her and Anne Hataway plays her i hope it will be good!

What book are you reading now,i just finished D.H.Lawrences:Lady Chatterley and its good well i think its bettre than Henry Millers:Tropic of the Cancer.
Lostgirl do you know who is Anais Nin?And did you maybe read any of her diaries.I watched a movie called:Henry&June(its about Her affair with Henry Miller and her love for his wife June and how she influenced and helped him with the Tropic of the cancer i highly recommend it)but i didnt read any of her books because in Slovenia we dont have them.I hope to get them when i go to London or Los Angeles!

Hey do you like poetry i really like Robert Frost and T.S.Eliots poems!There are so many books and so little time(do you fell the same)i just want to read all of them i am interested in so many writires and poets its crazy specially since my friends prefer movies and tabloids and other stuff,i dont know why but i love books i love getting to know and live throu charathers and their lives one thing is for sure i would rather read a good novel then watch a movie like Halle Berrys Catwoman!!What are your thoughts on that matter?