Posts
- Outside Noise (Ted Fendt)
- Actual People (Kit Zauhar)
- Deception (Arnaud Desplechin)
- One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)
- The Cathedral (Ricky D’Ambrose)
- Peaceful (Emmanuelle Bercot)
- In Front of Your Face (Hong Sang-soo)
- Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford)
- Wood and Water (Jonas Bak)
- Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (Dan Geller & Dayna Goldfine)
It could be that Return to Seoul (Davy Chou) belongs on this list, but I need to see it again to focus my reaction. Runners-up include The Girl and the Spider (Ramon & Silvan Zürcher) and Memory Box (Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige).
12 comments:
Hello Dan, I'm a big fan of your film criticism and those color-coded lists of your favorite films — thanks to them I've seen dozens of outstanding movies I probably would never have heard of otherwise.
My question may seem odd as it's not film-related, but I would love to know what are your favorite novels, let's say, your TOP 20? I think you mentioned on Twitter once that you like „The Man Without Qualities” and „Tom Jones”, which sounds great.
Best regards, David
Excited to see a real comment! A semi-inactive blog gets about a hundred spam comments for every one of those. Unfortunately, I don't have a thought-out, official list of favorite novels. A few that occur to me, beyond the two amazing books that you mentioned: a number of Dostoyevsky works, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from the Underground; some D. H. Lawrence, especially Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover; Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; Stendhal's The Red and the Black; Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts; Nabokov's Lolita; Bolaño's The Savage Detectives; Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children; Coetzee's Boyhood>; Todd McEwen's Fisher's Hornpipe. I want to include Lorrie Moore, but I think maybe I'd choose her short story collections over her novels.
Thank you for responding so quickly! So many marvellous books, I’ve read all of them except the last four (but „The Man Who Loved Children” has long been on my to-read list).
I also plan to read D. H. Lawrence's „The Rainbow” and „Women in Love” as I really, really loved „Sons and Lovers” — do you like them?
It's been a long time, but I liked them less than my favorites, found them a bit more difficult to integrate in my mind. I can easily imagine myself going up on them upon rereading.
Hello Dan, it’s me again. As a list-maniac I thought I would also ask you about your favorite albums, especially since I know you like Richard Thompson whom I really admire.
Best regards,
David
David - I don't actually have a list of favorite albums, but here's something I gave to a friend when he asked me something similar about a decade ago. It's all modern pop or rock.
Richard Thompson (I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT, HENRY THE HUMAN FLY)
Gene Clark (THE FANTASTIC EXPEDITION OF DILLARD AND CLARK, WHITE LIGHT)
Big Star (RADIO CITY, THIRD)
Neil Young (AFTER THE GOLD RUSH, HARVEST, TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT)
Leonard Cohen (first album, VARIOUS POSITIONS)
Game Theory/Loud Family (THE BIG SHOT CHRONICLES, TWO STEPS TO THE MIDDLE AGES)
Joni Mitchell's BLUE
Simon and Garfunkel's BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
Liz Phair's EXILE IN GUYVILLE
Hello Dan, it's me again, and again I'd like to ask you about literature as you are well-read and I like your taste. In recent months, I have read several books by Delillo, Philip Roth, McCarthy and Pynchon (the “four great American novelists alive and working” as Harold Bloom once called them) — they’re also very popular in my country, Poland. Unfortunately, none of their books appealed to me and I'm really curious if you like any of these writers, any novel specifically, and if so, which one is your favorite?
David - I'm afraid it's a long time since I was anywhere near "well-read." Of the four novelists you mention, I've read only Pynchon and some DeLillo, with mixed feelings in each case. My previous post pretty much exhausted my list of literary recommendations - but Todd McEwen writes in a semi-Pynchonian way, and appeals to me more. You might try FISHER'S HORNPIPE. Most other contemporary writers I mentioned in that post aren't very modernist - in any case, my reading since then has been minimal...
Thank you as always for your kind and quick reply!
That’s OK! I asked in part because there was a mention of Pynchon and Delillo in your film, “The Unspeakable Act”, and I was just curious about your opinion.
So I'm assuming the typical postmodern American literature just isn't for me, because I read Lorrie Moore on your recommendation (I picked “Birds of America”) and she was great.
David - I remember another 20th-century modernist work that I greatly admire: Robert Musil's THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. It was never finished, but what exists appeals to me a lot.
Dan, I also greatly admire “The Man Without Qualities” (especially the first volume) and it's probably my favorite German-language modernist novel, at least I like it far more than anything by the more famous and acclaimed Thomas Mann.
I love a lot of 20th-century modernist American literature, including Faulkner or Nathanael West you mentioned above, so I was very curious about the four postmodern writers I asked you about, but sadly what I read left me completely cold, It just didn't resonate at all. At first I thought it was just a matter of the fact that I just prefer older literature (because I do), but on the other hand there are some more contemporary writers I like a great deal: Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald or Javier Marias.
I still have a few books to read, by DeLillo I've only read “White Noise,” and I know that while it's his most popular novel, quite a few people prefer “Libra” or the monstrous “Underworld”. Then there is Toni Morrison, who I am also completely unfamiliar with.
I don't know Morrison's work either, and I too have read only WHITE NOISE of DeLillo. It's true, that first volume of MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES is what's really impressive - it ends just as the focus shifts to the Ulrich-Agathe relationship, which has such a different tone.
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