www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall What Are Your Favorite Literary Works ?

For most of my life my favorite author has been Charles Dickens, and among his works, Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop are my personal favorites. Others at the top of my list with there best works in my opinion, in parenthesis, are George Orwell (1984-Coming Up For Air-Animal Farm) James T Farrell (Studs Lonigan, my favorite American novel, and the Danny O'Neill tetralogy) John Steinbeck (In Dubious Battle-The Grapes Of Wrath). For poets I'm most partial to Edgar Allen Poe and Tom Moore, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake and William Wordsworth, and as for playwrights I prefer John Millington Synge, Oscar Wilde, and for the first time in my life I've REALLY come to appreciate Shakespeare. I first read William Shakespeare over 30 years ago, but for some reason, only recently have I totally gotten into his plays. Yesterday I spent 4 hours alone watching a 1980 BBC production of Hamlet that was magnificent. Hamlet is truly one of the world's literary masterpieces, and it really appeals to my love of the macabre, not to mention it's very Catholic theological references. OK that's enough of my likes.

Umberto Ecco's, The Name of the Rose, is still one of my favorite novels. I must get back to reading just for the pleasure of it. You have inspired me.

CDL

My favorite author is Mary Stewart, but not for her books written after 1980. Her early novels have it all--plot, character and setting, and her use of prose is often quite poetic. Her genre during the 1950s and 1960s was romantic suspense novels and one of the things that drew me to them was the integrity and courage of her heroines. In one of them, a young Greek girl is angry at her boyfriend for letting the bad guy get away. Her godfather was an English stage actor, and she quotes in Greek: "I would have cut his heart out and eaten it in the marketplace." Straight out of "As You Like It." Her boyfriend replies, shortly after the bad guy's boat blows up: "I have cooked it for you, little sister."

The first two of Stewart's Merlin books, The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, really captured me and I wound up reading them over and over again, perhaps 5 or 6 times, during the course of a year. Stewart managed to capture the feel for Dark Ages Celtic Britain. She throws in Biblical allusions as well. At one point Merlin says something to the effect that he would "look to the hills" for help. There's also a scene at the beginning of The Hollow Hills describing Merlin spiriting Arthur away from Tintagel to Brittany so that he isn't murdered by the king. The picture of Merlin leading a donkey on which sits a nursemaid holding the baby Arthur is definitely evocative of the flight to Egypt. Once, many years ago, I used Stewart's poem, "The Winter King," as the verse on my homemade Christmas cards.

I love your poetry selections! I would add Coleridge, Maya Angelou, Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, Keats, Yeats, Longfellow... I better not start on poems considering how many books I love!

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront�
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront�
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Black Like Me by John Griffin
1984 by George Orwell
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor
Let the Circle Be Unbroken by Mildred Taylor
The Road to Memphis by Mildred Taylor
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori
Native Son by Richard Wright
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The BFG by Roald Dahl
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolfe

There are so many wonderful books and so little time!

Has anyone ever read/heard of "Gentian Hill" by Elizabeth Goudge? It's one of my all-time favorites. A little girl in Napoleonic Britain befriends two people who will change her life around completely. She finds out a secret of her past, while learning the trials and tribulations as well as the beauty that life beholds. It's very Christian, very romantic, very adventurous, very bittwersweet, with a climax that will absolutely thrill you. I highly recommend it.

1984 - Orwell
Les Miserables - Hugo
Count of Monte Cristo -
Pilgrim's Way
Brother's Karamazov - Dostoevsky
Clockwork Orange - Burgess
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

I particularly like these lines from Hamlet.

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

Not a popular topic in Elizabethan and Stuart England.

Here are some of my favorite authors of literature:

Abbey, Edward
Asimov, Isaac
Bradbury, Ray
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Orwell, George
Tolkein, J.R.R.

And my new possible favorite: Dick, Philip K.

-- John

Let's see, at the top of my list,

Homer, Iliad
Bhavad Gita
Plato, Republic
Dante, Divine Comedy
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet
Jane Austen, Emma
George Eliot, Middle March
Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathusra
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Camus, The Stranger
Camus, The Plague
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

For poetry, my favorites are Frost, Goethe, Holderin, T.S. Eliot, Poe, Coleridge