{"id":22,"date":"2014-01-23T05:28:34","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T05:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/?p=22"},"modified":"2014-01-23T05:28:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T05:28:34","slug":"my-top-ten-favorite-literary-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/23\/my-top-ten-favorite-literary-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"My Top Ten Favorite Literary Novels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hemingway<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Sun Also Rises<\/strong><\/em> by Ernest Hemingway.\u00a0 Powerful and tight, and Hemingway at his best.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad that most people just think of him as a writer with simple sentence constructions, blunt and curt prose, and a small vocabulary.\u00a0 One of my private conceits is that I imagine myself the only person who really sees the artistry of what he\u2019s doing.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad nobody else is paying attention.\u00a0 I love when I work for hours on a small paragraph and achieve something even remotely close to what he might have written.\u00a0 \u201cI can\u2019t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I\u2019m not really living it.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. The Grapes of Wrath<\/strong><\/em> by John Steinbeck.\u00a0 This man was not so much a writer as a composer.\u00a0 The prose attains a lyrical beauty.\u00a0 Beginning writers need to learn how to avoid word repetition and starting sentences with the same words\u2026 Then you read Steinbeck and you realize that these are instruments too sharp for your clumsy little hands, but if wielded properly can slay the soul. \u00a0\u201cThere is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.\u00a0 There is a failure here that topples all our successes\u2026 And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange\u2026 the food must rot, be forced to rot\u2026 and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.\u00a0 In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. Love in the Time of Cholera<\/strong><\/em> by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.\u00a0 He writes with an epic scale and when reading Marquez I feel him creating the whole world around me.\u00a0 I admire the way he evokes passion and yearning.\u00a0 \u201cShe was no more than twenty-five, she was slender and golden, she had Portuguese eyelids that made her seem even more aloof, and any man would have been satisfied with only the crumbs of the tenderness that she lavished on her son.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. The Tin Drum<\/strong><\/em> by Gunter Grass.\u00a0 Oskar Matzerath might be my favorite protagonist of all time.\u00a0 He\u2019s memorable because he\u2019s a sort of tortured superhero (or super-villain), if you take him literally (although he\u2019s composing his memoirs from an insane asylum)\u2026 but here\u2019s a boy who became a dwarf because he chose to stop growing, and who becomes the leader of a gang based on his drumming and his abilities to shatter windows with his shrieks.\u00a0 He inherited the desire to hide under his grandmother\u2019s dress because his mother had been conceived by a man who\u2019d taken refuge from soldiers there (under her dress in a potato field).\u00a0 \u201cFor several minutes Oskar stood there in a very tight skin, a prey to so many thoughts of the most divergent origins that his heart had difficulty in imposing any sort of arrangements upon them.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. Dandelion Wine<\/strong><\/em> by Ray Bradbury.\u00a0 The charge in this novel is the sense of wonder with which the world is viewed, and a sense that things are so perfect and beautiful that you fear that the end or some darkness is lurking nearby.\u00a0 \u201cBees do have a smell, you know, and if they don\u2019t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  6. The English Patient<\/strong><\/em> by Michael Ondaatje.\u00a0 I love the dreamlike, lyrical prose and the mysterious unfolding of the story, so elegantly crafted.\u00a0 \u201cSo the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  7. A Sport and a Pastime<\/strong><\/em> by James Salter.\u00a0 Sometimes an author\u2019s prose style evokes a visual image for me; I see the words like brush-strokes.\u00a0 I visualize Salter\u2019s work as pointillism\u2014many small, distinct images that you have to view from afar to appreciate the full picture.\u00a0 \u201cI only want everyone who reads this to be as resigned as I am.\u00a0 There\u2019s enough passion in the world already.\u00a0 Everything trembles with it.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  8. Lolita<\/strong><\/em> by Vladimir Nabokov.\u00a0 This is a scandalous book and one that many still condemn.\u00a0 The most compelling thing about it is the electricity created by the sheer magnitude of Humbert Humbert\u2019s internal conflicts and passions.\u00a0 There\u2019s a continuous charge created by his inner torments; he\u2019s helpless to his lust, he\u2019s mad with guilt yet still thrills in his sins.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost as though in writing his memoir he\u2019s both titillating and torturing himself; condemning himself and trying to win sympathy.\u00a0 \u201cThe dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  9. The Lover<\/strong><\/em> by Marguerite Duras.\u00a0 I appreciate her ability to convey an atmosphere and enigmatic emotions through language.\u00a0 \u201cThe story of my life doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 Does not exist.\u00a0 There\u2019s not any center to it.\u00a0 No path, no line.\u00a0 There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it\u2019s not true, there was no one.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n
  10. Catcher in the Rye<\/strong> <\/em>by J.D. Salinger.\u00a0 More than anything, what gets me about this one is just how in tune you feel with Holden Caulfield\u2014every quirk of his personality comes out through his thoughts and his voice. \u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s the thing about girls.\u00a0 Every time they do something pretty, even if they\u2019re not much to look at, or even if they\u2019re sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.\u00a0 Girls.\u00a0 Jesus Christ.\u00a0 They can drive you crazy.\u00a0 They really can.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now I get to cheat and mention a few I wish I would\u2019ve fit into my top ten:\u00a0 James Baldwin, Tim O\u2019Brien, James Jones, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Haruki Murakami.\u00a0 Except, now that I\u2019m cheating I want to go on and on\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.\u00a0 Powerful and tight, and Hemingway at his best.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad that most …<\/p>\n

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