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I thought I’d start another thread, and copy and paste from the Game of Thrones thread. Not assuming I can do this for others, so I just did my own.
Please feel free to add your own, and I’ll add some more, here and there:
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Classics for me, focusing mostly on the quality of the prose itself:
Ulysses, by James Joyce, is probably number one. Yes, I’d say London counts, but I haven’t read him in a long time. Need to go back and reread.
Love Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-two-birds. It’s a page-turner, fun and brilliant.
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy. Just magnificent writing.
JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. Also incredible prose. One of my favorite fictional characters in all of literature, Sebastion Dangerfield.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, especially. Easily one of the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century. Beautiful sentences, one after another.
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. One of a kind. Prose poetry.
I’m also a big reader of international literature, Latin American, European, Asian, African and a bit from the Middle East . . . but I can’t read the originals, so I don’t really know how great those books are as far as prose style goes. It’s hard to know if we love them because they’re great translations, or because of the original itself. Usually it’s both.
I need to update my old 100 Favorites, which I made back in 1997. It was in response to some list from some Literary Review. Will post it here when I revise it at least a little bit.
Excellent list, ZN. I’ve read all of those except for Otsuka and Adichie. Should have named Faulkner in my list for the greatest prose stylists, too.
Riffing off of Garcia Marquez, I think people who haven’t read the “Boom” artists of Latin American, and Magic Realism in general, would greatly enjoy them. Jose Donoso, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Jose Maria Arguedas, for starters. Another cool thing is they also wrote great short stories, especially Borges, Fuentes, Cortazar and the Italian, Calvino. Strange, weird, beautiful, fantastical stories.
Also long those lines, Franz Kafka (Czech), Bruno Schulz (Pole) and Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese) — and a contemporary of ours, Haruki Murakami (Japanese). Kafka is, in my view, the most important writer of the 20th century. Not necessarily the best, though he was great. But the most important. Primarily because of how he seemed to capture what would become the zeitgeist, the political imaginary that hit so much of the world after Kafka escaped it in 1924. Less “magical,” but nearly as astute, I’m also a huge fan of the novels of Joseph Roth (Austrian). He wrote of the dying world of 19th and early 20th century Mitteleuropa. Central Europe, etc. They make a great pair: Roth and Kafka. Tribune of the past. Herald of the future. Pessoa seems all to himself with his Book of Unquiet and his many masks, his separate, invented biographies. Schulz died in the Holocaust, but left us brilliant fantasies and drawings.
Murakami’s best work, IMO, is his earlier stuff. Dance Dance Dance, Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood. But it’s all very good.
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