Nathan "N.R."’s Comments (group member since Sep 17, 2012)

Nathan "N.R."’s comments from the Completists' Club group.

Lobstergirl wrote: "Honestly it makes me just want to ignore the people who are coming up with these lists."

Then please do; or simply offer your supplements.

I'd like to see Marguerite Young up there. Why not? And Finnegans Wake and Women and Men should both be up there. The Beckett thing must be a typographical error, cuz that trio/trilogy should be treated as a singularity.

But complaints about lists like this are boring. Four complaint comments and only one suggestion, Woolf (thnk-u, Mark). Which plays and poems, Jonathan? Which currently-overlooked, Nate D? Which women, Lobstergirl?

Forgot to add the link, cuz the other lists are interesting too and one can complain about them too.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GC...

It's a problem in this group as well.

Not enough Female authors in the Completists' Club? Add some.

Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Beckett Trilogy -- Malone Dies, Molloy, The Unnamable
The Lime Works, Thomas Bernhard
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
JR, William Gaddis
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
Ulysses, James Joyce
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Inquisitory, Robert Pinget
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino

--taken from Dalkey Archive's Context No 1; attention brought by bibliokept.

The following lists are also to be found there:

"Literary Works All Students Should Have Read"

"Most Influential Critical Books of the 20th Century"

"Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century"

"The 20th Century Novels Students Most Like"

"The Pre-20th Century Novels That Most Influenced the 20th Century Novel"

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GC...

All of these lists make my heart race. Perhaps I will find myself one day having completionized all of them. Delicious.

The above list I have a good start on.

[edit :: since Dalkey reorganized their website, the above link no long works ; and at the moment I am unable to locate the various issues of Context]

Eh, I've only got five down: the Tolstoy (W&P), the Faulkner (S&F), Random bits of Proust, Vlad's Glory, and Leibowitz. Lots o' excellent good stuff to go.

Vollmann, 1990, has provided us with a list of his most admired contemporary (i.e., the past two centuries) books. The list appears in Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader and biblioklept has reproduced it here: http://biblioklept.org/2011/09/24/wil...

Again, we get the occasional author sans specific singular book, so for the sake of completionism we would count as acceptable the reading of a major work of such an author sans specified book.

(c-n-p'd from biblioklept) the list ought to be further disseminated:

By “contemporary” I assume you mean “from the last two hundred years.”

1./2./3. Right now it seems like I’ve learned a lot from Mishima, Kawabata, and Tolstoy;

4. Hawthorne may be the best;

5. Then Faulkner;

6. Hemingway is usually a wonderful read, especially Islands in the Stream and For Whom the Bell Tolls—that is to say, the grandly suicidal narratives;

7. Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time is beautiful;

8. I also love everything I’ve read by Mir Lagerkvist;

9. Sigrid Undset’s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter;

10. Multatuli’s Max Havalaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company;

11. Kundera’s Laughable Loves;

12. Andrea Freud Lowenstein’s This Place (which deserves more recognition than it has received);

13. Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders (which I had the wonderful experience of finding and reading a few months after completing my own book about Greenlanders, The Ice-Shirt).

14. Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men;

15. Farley Mowat’s The People of the Deer;

16. The first three books of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy (how could I have forgotten that?);

17. Random bits of Proust, Zola’sL’Assommoir;

18. Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai;

19.The first two books of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy;

20. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land;

21. Poe’s stories about love;

22. Everything by Malraux (especially his Anti-Memoirs);

23. Nabokov’s Glory and Transparent Things and Ada;

24. Melville’s Pierre;

25. Thomas Bernhard’s Correction;

26. David Lindsay’s Voyage to Acturus;

27. Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly;

28. A few of Boll’s short novels (Wo warst du, Adam? and The Train Was on Time);

29. Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel;

30. Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things;

31. Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz;

32. James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy (which is just plane fun);

33. The first three volumes of Lawrence Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet, and I don’t know what all.

There’s lots more. I am sorry not to be able to put down less contemporary things such as Tale of Genji, which is one of my all-time favorites.

Finished now SPAMing y'all with LARRY's 100. Should my tabulation be approximately correct, I've got 30 read, currently-reading The Wake inclusive. Muchmuch togo. Friends-o-Library at the end of the month, this time I'll queue up a bit earlier, maybe.

James wrote: "into Women and Men and finally finishing that review I know I owe y'all. Keep hope alive. "

As long as you believe it is owed, we may continue to believe that it is forthcoming. And Actress is usually available for low quantities of $$$ when the time comes for a slap across stage which may not be staged and what that is going to mean.

Brian wrote: "Do we all just start chewing through the list individually; or should we begin from the bottom and work our way up? A book a month? "

I can only guarantee my own inability to read any of these in any kind of organized fashion. It DOES occur to me however that a McCaffery 100 Group could be in the offing, but not by yerstruly. But I'd join. THAT would be the limit of my organization. But meanwhile my chewing WILL be rather random and as you please.

Nate D wrote: "Like: completion of all Tel Quel works published before 1970 or whatever?

I guess Surrealist Novels is something I'm going to try to hit pretty hard even though some of them are going to be awful,..."

Do either of of those two come in list form?

Geoff wrote: "I mean I can't foresee into the future and know all that will happen but this is okay this is a really fine and interesting list and I'll read a bunch of stuff off here a lot in fact thanks for the..."

Reallyreally looking forward to Moore's second volume this fall. THAT should be consisting of some serious UNEARTHING.

MJ wrote: "Who is this Cucornet? Ducornet, if you please."

I have placed an order for a new keyboard.

Sketchbook wrote: "Pls, explain..what's happening..."

With me involved? Not a chance.

Uh, MJ?

Jonfaith wrote: "Gunter Grass?"

I pray daily that the above is not exhaustive. The prayers are unnecessary. There's lots more.

Con McVeety wrote: "I didn't like "The Development" but it's still better than what passes today for as literture. "

There are indeed an occasional low-Barth point along the way.

Traveller wrote: "Good grief. Have fun. When you're done, please let me know what had happened to the Unfortunate Traveller."

I've got a looong way to go to work through this one.

And from Larry McCaffery, we have The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction. It remains yet to take an accounting of how much of this list I've already chewed through, but soon, soon. Maybe there are five books on the list which might not appear so yummy, but completionism will be as completionism does. And we'll do.

The quick version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Cen...

The commentated version:
http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/1...

Any takers?

Another list from Moore, this one taken from his The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600; indicating the tradition of Rabelais. So I reproduced the list on my Rabelais review, which is asking for more Likes from your good selves: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

And I reproduce it again below for your pleasure. My completionist intent on this one is to read all the books explicitly listed or at least one novel from authors for which no specific book is rec'd. Give me a few moments to collect my current score.

“With the motto ‘Do What You Will,’ Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came
Aneau’s Alector
Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller
López de Úbeda’s Justina
Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales
Sorel’s Francion
Burton’s Anatomy
Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels
Fielding’s Tom Jones
Amory’s John Buncle
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
the novels of Diderot
and maybe Voltaire (a late convert)
Smollet’s Adventures of an Atom
Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr
Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Southey’s Doctor
Melville’s Moby-Dick
Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Becuchet
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels
Bely’s Petersburg
Joyce’s Ulysses
Witkiewicz’s Insatiability
Barnes’ Ryder and Ladies Almanack
Gombrowicz’s Polish jokes
Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces
Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren
Patchen’s tender novels
Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones
Nabokov’s later works
Schmidt’s fiction
the novels of Durrell
Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers)
Gaddis and
Pynchon
Barth
Coover
Sorrentino
Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Brossard’s later works
the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism ( Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico)
the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas
Markson’s Springer’s Progress
Mano’s Take Five
Ríos’s Larva and otros libros
the novels of Paul West
Tom Robbins
Stanley Elkin
Alexander Theroux
W M. Spackman
Alasdair Gray
Gaétan Soucy and
Rikki Ducornet (‘Lady Rabelais,’ as one critic called her)
Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels
the writings of Magister Gass
Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and
Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies
Vollmann’s voluminous volumes
Wallace’s brainy fictions
Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language
Danielewski’s novels
Jackson’s Half Life
Field’s Ululu
De La Pava’s Naked Singularity and
James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga.”
--from Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternate History volume 1: Beginnings to 1600, p330-331.


Any takers?

We begin with the visual:



And the quote (from the Moore IJ review):

While reading William Gass’s The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis’s Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gaddis again with J R, The Public Burning, LETTERS), went baroque in the eighties (Darconville’s Cat, Take Five, Women and Men, You Bright and Risen Angels), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers’s Gold-Bug Variations and Gass’s massive masterpiece. Who was left to write such novels, or to read them at a time when some scorn such books as elitist, testosterone-fueled acts of male imperialism? For those of us who regard these works as our cultural milestones, not as tombstones in patriarchy’s graveyard, David Foster Wallace demonstrates that the encyclopedic novel is still alive and kickin’ it.

So but I've been completionizing this LIST for a few years now. Outstanding is are The Public Burning and the final 1/3 of Gravity's Rainbow. The Public Burning I hope to get to in the near future. GR, the reading of which's first 2/3 can't honestly be credited to me, is scheduled for 2014, or after I finish The Wake, whichever is cheaper.

Intended, also, is completionism of all authors indicated here, with the likely exception of Richard Powers, but he may eventually tag along as well.

Any takers?

MJ wrote: "Jeez. Made a folder. This better start making sense."

With me involved? Not a chance.

MJ wrote: "As requested by the creator of that other gruppe, BURIED something."

Ah heck. Guess I could've done it that way. No folder?

Can I get perhaps a folder for nonauthor-oriented completionist lists? I've got three or so such lists squirreled away which I treat with completionism enthusiasm.