Who've You Read?

[Kris]

List the works of the Nobel winners you've read, and comment if you like.

[Kris]

All right, I'll start. I've read a fair amount of them, but have some noticeable gaps (Shaw, O'Neill, Beckett, Grass):

Kipling - stories
Tagore - stories
Hamsun - PAN; HUNGER; MYSTERIES; VICTORIA; GROWTH OF THE SOIL
Yeats - poems
Mann - stories
Lewis - KINGSBLOOD ROYAL
Bunin - stories
du Gard - LIEUTENANT-COLONEL DE MAUMORT
Buck - several novels in high school (the GOOD EARTH series, etc); MY SEVERAL WORLDS
G. Mistral - poems
Gide - STRAIT IS THE GATE; THE IMMORALIST; LA SYMPHONIE PASTORALE & ISABELLE
Eliot - poems
Faulkner - SANCTUARY; AS I LAY DYING
Russell - essays
Lagerkvist - BARABBAS; THE SYBIL
Mauriac - THE UNKNOWN SEA; THERESE; THE DESERT OF LOVE
Hemingway - THE SUN ALSO RISES; A FAREWELL TO ARMS; A MOVABLE FEAST; stories
Laxness - PARADISE RECLAIMED; UNDER THE GLACIER
Camus - THE STRANGER
Pasternak - AUTOBIOGRAPHY; LETTERS TO GEORGIAN FRIENDS; poems
Quasimodo - poems
Perse - poems
Andric - THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA; stories
Steinbeck - THE RED PONY
Seferis - poems
Sachs - poems
Kawabata - THE MASTER OF GO; BEAUTY AND SADNESS; SNOW COUNTRY; THOUSAND CRANES; SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN; stories
Solzhenitsyn - THE FIRST CIRCLE; CANCER WARD; ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH; essays
Neruda - poems
Boll - AND NEVER SAID A WORD; ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE
White - THE TREE OF MAN; VOSS; THE AUNT'S STORY; THE SOLID MANDALA; stories (currently reading THE VIVISECTOR)
Montale - poems; THE POET IN HIS TIME
Bellow - THE VICTIM; MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET
Aleixandre - poems
Singer - LOVE AND EXILE; stories
Elytis - poems
Milosz - YEAR OF THE HUNTER; THE SEIZURE OF POWER; THE CAPTIVE MIND; poems; essays
Canetti - MEMOIRS; VOICES OF MARRAKESH
Marquez - ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE; stories
Golding - LORD OF THE FLIES; DARKNESS VISIBLE
Seifert - poems
Brodsky - poems; essays
Mahfouz - ARABIAN DAYS AND NIGHTS
Cela - JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA
Paz - poems; essays
Walcott - poems
Oe - THE SILENT CRY
Heaney - poems
Szymborska - poems
Saramago - THE DOUBLE
Gao - ONE MAN'S BIBLE; SOUL MOUNTAIN
Naipaul - THE MIMIC MEN
Kertesz - THE UNION JACK; LIQUIDATION
Coetzee - SUMMERTIME; DIARY OF A BAD YEAR; DISGRACE; SLOW MAN; ELIZABETH COSTELLO; essays
Pinter - THE HOMECOMING
Pamuk - ISTANBUL; MY NAME IS RED; THE BLACK BOOK; SNOW
Le Clezio - THE BOOK OF FLIGHTS; TERRA AMATA
Muller - THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS
Transtromer - poems
Mo Yan - THE GARLIC BALLADS

Two books I didn't list because I didn't finish them:

THE CONSERVATIONIST by Nadine Gordimer, which was very dry and dull, and A PERSONAL MATTER by Oe Kenzaburo, which was very unpleasant and, I suspect, poorly translated. However, Oe's THE SILENT CRY is superb, and I will try another Gordimer sometime down the line.

Books I hated:

DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Golding. THE BLACK BOOK by Orhan Pamuk (though I've enjoyed all his others, this was torture - and in the new, improved translation as well!). STRAIT IS THE GATE, by Gide is fairly awful, though I like his other books.

The cream of the crop:

PAN by Hamsun. THOUSAND CRANES and SNOW COUNTRY by Kawabata, as well as several of his stories collected in the volume PALM-OF-THE-HAND STORIES - but as with Hamsun, anything by this author is grand. THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA by Ivo Andric is simply the best historical novel I've ever read; JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA by Camilo Jose Cela one of the best travel books. MY SEVERAL WORLDS by Pearl Buck is a fascinating autobiography, despite its lulls and flaws. VOSS by Patrick White cannot be recommended highly enough, though the author himself came to hate it (it was the only one of his books anyone knew). Seferis and Montale are a magnificent, melancholy poets. Solzhenitsyn wrote some of the best essays about the crumbling of the world order in the late 20th century - his Nobel speech and his Harvard address remain terrifically potent, provocative stuff - and his books are little-read these days, though when he won the award he was huge. Of the recent winners: MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk, SOUL MOUNTAIN by Gao Xingjian, and DIARY OF A BAD YEAR by J. M. Coetzee are excellent novels written in the last 20 years.

Writers I ought to read:

I'd really like to read something by Frans Sillanpaa, strangely enough, as I'm kind of a sucker for leisurely rural Scandinavian tales. Claude Simon, Harry Martinson, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Juan Ramon Jiminez, Sigrid Undset, Grazia Deledda, Selma Lagerlof, Anatole France, Henryk Pontoppidan, Paul von Heyse, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and Frederic Mistral. Some writers on the shelves I need to get to (Grass, Vargas Llosa).

Writers I'd like to read more of:

Kipling! Mann, Bunin, du Gard, Andric, G. Mistral, Mauriac, Laxness, Quasimodo, Sachs, Boll.

Writers I have no interest in or have problems with:

Churchill: not much interest, though he made some witty public statements ("I may be drunk, madam...") and a few good speeches. Morrison: no interest. I've read enough of her public statements (Clinton was "our first black President") to be suspicious of Ms. Morrison, but also the first few pages of BELOVED - it just ain't my sort of writing. In fact, I feel much the same about Faulkner - though everyone else adores him, I've never developed a taste for his "corncobbly chronicles." AS I LAY DYING is a novella that feels like it's three times the length. Sartre also said so many stupid things in support of his radical politics that it's kept me away from his books. I have no huge enthusiasm for Steinbeck or O'Neill or Sinclair Lewis (sheesh, I've already listed most of the American winners in this category!). Jelinek I'm not sure I want to read, though I may give her a try one of these days. Beckett I have trouble with. I've dipped into a few different books and given up. The whole "literature of exhaustion" just leaves me feeling... exhausted.

[Leajk]

That's quite an impressive list, I've only just started to think about reading more books of the laureates. In Sweden there will each year be such a rush to be the first one to have read the latest laureate that it's often quite put me of reading the latest ones. Having seen pieces on/read about e.g. Pinter, Jelnike, Grass hasn't made me more eager.

I tried Lessinger (The grass is singing) this summer and was very underwhelmed. I've bought one more to give her a new chance.

I actually really liked Sula by Morrison although I did not care for my next one Jazz by her. It might be easier for me since I don't have any connotations to her as a person, but I suggest to try Sula with an open mind.

[Luke]

Read

Svetlana Alexievich - Voices of Chernobyl
Alice Munro - Open Secrets
Herta Müller - The Appointment
Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist
Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
John M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Imre Kertész - Fateless, Liquidation
José Saramago - Blindness, Baltasar And Blimunda
Toni Morrison - Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Playing in the Dark
Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter
Derek Walcott - Omeros
Wole Soyinka - Aké: The Years of Childhood
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Gabriel García Márquez - Strange Pilgrims, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, a couple others I've forgotten
Czeslaw Milosz - The Captive Mind
Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Yasunari Kawabata - Beauty and Sadness
Jean-Paul Sartre - The Age of Reason
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
Albert Camus - The Stranger
Halldór Kiljan Laxness - Independent People
Ernest Miller Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea, the Sun Also Rises
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist - Barabbas
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Go Down Moses
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth, The Pavilion of Women, Imperial Woman
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Joseph and His Brothers
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter
Knut Pedersen Hamsun - Growth of the Soil
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf - The Saga of Gosta Berling

Planning to Read

Mo Yan - Big Breasts and Wide Hips
Tomas Tranströmer - The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
Mario Vargas Llosa - War of the End of the World, In Praise of the Stepmother
Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio - Terra Amata
Doris Lessing - Martha Quest, On Cats, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Shikasta
Orhan Pamuk - Snow
John M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians
Imre Kertész - Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Dossier K: A Memoir
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul - A Turn in the South
Günter Grass - The Tin Drum
José Saramago - Cain
Seamus Heaney - Human Chain
Kenzaburo Oe - A Personal Matter
Octavio Paz - The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
Wole Soyinka - The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, Of Africa
Gabriel García Márquez - The Autumn of the Patriarch
Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Last Demon
Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift
Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair
Heinrich Böll - The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Pablo Neruda - The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn - The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelago
Samuel Beckett - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital, The Master of Go, Thousand Cranes
Miguel Angel Asturias - Men of Maize
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov - Quiet Flows the Don
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea, The Words
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago
Albert Camus - The Plague, The Fall
Juan Ramón Jiménez - Platero and I
Halldór Kiljan Laxness - The Fish Can Sing
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist - The Dwarf
William Faulkner - Absalom, Abalom!
Thomas Stearns Eliot - The Waste Land and Other Poems
André Paul Guillaume Gide - The Immoralist
Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
Sinclair Lewis - Elmer Gantry
Thomas Mann - Doctor Faustus, Buddenbrooks
Sigrid Undset - Gunnar's Daughter
George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion
William Butler Yeats - The Collected Poems, The Celtic Twilight
Anatole France - Revolt of the Angels
Knut Pedersen Hamsun - Wayfarers, Mysteries
Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis

[Colin]

Here's my contribution. In reverse date order of Nobel Prize. RK means Read and Kept. RR means Read and Rejected.

Llosa - RR - The Green House
Le Clézio - RK – Desert
Pamuk - RK – The Museum of Innocence, The Black Book, The New Life. RR – Istanbul, My Name is Red, The White Castle, Snow
Jelinek - RK – The Piano Teacher
Xingjian - RK – Soul Mountain
Grass - RK – Danzig Trilogy, Too Far Afield, Crabwalk, My Century, The Flounder, The Call of the Toad, Local Anaesthetic
Saramago - RK – The Year of Ricardo Reis. RR – Blindness, Baltasar & Blimunda
Morrison - RK – Song of Solomon
Gordimer - RK – Burger’s Daughter
Cela - RK – The Hive
Mahfouz - RK – Palace Walk Trilogy, Short Stories
Golding - RK – Lord of the Flies. RR – Pincher Martin
Márquez - RK - Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Leaf Storm, No One writes to the Colonel, Strange Pilgrims, Of Love and other Demons, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. RR - The Autumn of the Patriarch, In Evil Hour, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Bellow - RK - The Adventures of Augie March. RR - Ravelstein, Herzog
Böll - RK - Billards at Half Past Nine, The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum, Group Portrait with Lady, Women in a River Landscape, End of a Mission, Absent without Leave, Collected Short Stories, The Silent Angel. RR - The Clown
Solzhenitsyn - RK - Cancer Ward
Kawabata - RK - Snow Country, Thousand Cranes
Steinbeck - RK - Of Mice and Men
Andric - RK - The Bridge Over the Drina
Hemingway - RK - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, Collected Short Stories. RR - Across The River And Into The Trees
Mauriac - RK - Thérèse
Faulkner - RK - As I Lay Dying
Hesse - RK - The Glass Bead Game
du Gard - RK - The Thibaults, Summer 1914
Galsworthy RK - Fraternity
Lewis - RK - Main Street
Mann - RK - The Holy Sinner, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Little Herr Friedemann etc

[[deleted user]]

Hi. Not a lot. And I didn't write down what I've read of the few I've read. I'm somewhat limited by living in a cultural desert, little available at the library. But as to authors, they are as follows. I own quite a few books that I have to read more in, so I don't mean that anyone should infer that I've read widely of any of these authors, and I haven't belonged to GR for long enough in my very long life to have all my books up. Pearl Buck? Everything. Garcia Marquez, all the novels, the same things most folks have read. So on and so forth. Reading is so private, so intimate. I never anticipated giving an account of myself! Anyway:

Rudyard Kipling
William Butler Yeats
George Bernard Shaw
Sigrid Undset
Thomas Mann
Sinclair Lewis
John Galsworthy
Eugene O’Neill
Pearl S. Buck
Hermann Hesse
André Gide
T.S. Eliot
William Faulkner
Bertrand Russell
Winston Churchill
Ernest Hemingway
Albert Camus
Boris Pasternak
Ivo Ancric
John Steinbeck
Jean-Paul Sartre
Samuel Beckett
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Pablo Neruda
Saul Bellow
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Czeslaw Milosz
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
William Golding
Joseph Brodsky
Naguib Mahfouz
Octavio Paz
Toni Morrison
Kenzaburo Oe
Seamus Heaney
Gunter Grass
V.S. Naipaul
J.M. Coetzee
Harold Pinter
Orhan Pamuk
Doris Lessing
Mario Varha Llosa
Mo Yan
Alice Munro

[Sano]

I've read books by the following:

Selma Lagerlöf
Romain Rolland
Knut Hamsun
William Butler Yeats
George Bernard Shaw
Thomas Mann
Luigi Pirandello
Eugene O’Neill
Hermann Hesse
François Mauriac
Ernest Hemingway
Albert Camus
John Steinbeck
Jean-Paul Sartre
Yasunari Kawabata
Samuel Beckett
Heinrich Böll
Gabriel García Márquez
Nagib Mahfuz
Octavio Paz
Kenzaburō Ōe
Günter Grass
Gao Xingjian
Elfriede Jelinek
Orhan Pamuk
Patrick Modiano
Kazuo Ishiguro

[Xalatan]

I've read them all except three ! I read in French or English.