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I've compiled a list of some of my favorite authors,
books and passages. It is by no means
comprehensive as particularly difficult to choose
just one work by some of these writers.
Suffice it to say, pick any work by the authors listed
and be assured that you're in for a sublime reading
experience.
* Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
"All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went
down the steps into the breathless garden, my
knees were like reflections of knees in rippling
water, and my lips were like sand and--
'That was my Lo,' she said, 'and these are my lilies.'
'Yes,' I said, 'yes. They are beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful.'"
* Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet
"Yes, one day I found myself writing down with
trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four
faces!) with which every story-teller since the world
began has staked his slender claim to the attention
of his fellow men. Words which presage simply the
old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: 'Once
upon a time...'
And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a
nudge!"
* Joan Didion
A Book of Common Prayer
"She talked constantly. She talked ferverishly. She
talked as if Victor had released her from vows of
silence by walking up to where she stood with Ardis
Bradley and offering her a crab puff. Every memory
was 'lyrical,' every denounment 'hilarious,' and
sometimes 'ironic' as well. Her face was flushed but
she was not drunk: she stood very straight and
refused even the weak rum punches the Bradleys
favored for general entertainments. She seemed to
be receiving these pointless but bizarrely arresting
stories out of some deep vacuum of nervous
exhaustion, transmitting them dutifully in a voice
soft and clear and oddly confidential. She used
words as a seven-year-old might, as if she had
heard them and liked their adult sound but had only
the haziest idea of their meaning, and she also
mentioned names as a seven-year-old might, with a
bewildering disregard for who was listening.
'Leonard,' she would say, as if the Minister of
Defense of a Central American republic and his
norteamericana sister-in-law, acquaintances of an
hour in the crush of an official reception, were of
course privy to all the people and places in her life."
* Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita
"And at midnight the was a vision in hell. A
dazzlingly handsome black-eyed man with a
dagger-shaped beard, in a frock coat, came out on
the veranda and cast a royal eye around his domain.
It was said, it was said by mystics that there had
been a time when the handsome man did not wear a
frock coat, but a wide leather belt with revolvers
tucked into it, and his raven hair was tied with
scarlet silk, and he comanded a brig that sailed the
Caribbean sea under a dead black flag bearing the
sign of a skull.
But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying. There
are no Carribean seas in the world, no reckless
buccaneers are sailing them, and no corvettes are
chasing them, no cannon smoke drifts low over the
waves. There is nothing and there never was! There
is only a stunted linden tree out there, an iron
fence, and the boulevard beyond it... And ice
melting in a bowl, and someone's bovine bloodshot
eyes at the next table, and fear, fear... Oh, gods,
gods, poison, give me poison!..."
* Nikolai Gogol
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
"Rumours suddenly started getting around St.
Petersburg that a ghost in the form of a government
clerk had been seen near the Kalinkin Bridge, and
even further afield, and that this ghost appeared to
be searching for a lost overcoat. To this end it was
to be seen ripping all kinds of overcoats made from
cat fur, beaver, quilted overcoats, racoon, fox, bear
-- in short, overcoats made from every conceivable
fur or skin that man has ever used to protect his
own hide. One of the clerks from the department
saw the ghost with his own eyes and immediately
recognized it as Akaky Akkakievich. He was so
terrified that he ran off as fast as his legs would
carry him, with the result that he did not manage to
have a very good look: all he could make out was
someone pointing a menacing finger at him from the
distance. Complaints continually poured in from all
quarters, not only from titular councilors, but even
from such high ranking officials as privy councilors,
who were being subjected to quite nasty colds in
the back due to this nocturnal ripping-off of their
overcoats. The police were instructed to run the
ghost in, come what may, dead or alive, and to
punish it severely, as an example to others - and in
this they very nearly succeeded."
* Nigel Nicholson / Vita Sackville-West & Harold
Nicholson
Portrait of a Marriage
"I long to stop over Violet -- to tell how much I
secretly admired her, and how proud I was of the
friendship of this brilliant, this extraordinary, this
almost unearthly creature, but how I treated her
with unvarying scorn, my one piece of really able
handling, which kept her -- but I am going to tell
other things first because all the present is filled
with Violet, and during the past she appears
constantly too. I will stop only to say that from the
beginning I was utterly sure of her; she might be
elusive, she might be baffling, she might even be
faithless, but under everything I had the rather
insolent (but justified) certainty of her keeping to
me. I listened to stories about her with a superior
and proprietary smile. I would have remained for ten
years without hearing a word from her, and at the
end of those ten years I would have held the same
undamaged confidence that we must inevitably
re-unite. There isn't a word of exaggeration in these
statements -- nothing, for that matter, in the whole
of this writing is to be exaggerated or 'arranged'; its
only merit will be truth, but truth as bleak as I can
make it."
* Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
"Can it be that their prayers and their tears are
fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred devoted love,
is not all powerful? Oh, no! However passionate,
sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb,
the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with
their innocent eyes; they tell us not only of eternal
peace, of that great peace of 'indifferent' nature;
they tell us also of eternal reconciliation and of life
without end."
* John Barth
The Sotweed Factor
"'I too have admired men on occasion,' Ebenezer
said grudgingly, 'but my flesh recoils at the thought
of amorous connection!' His unseen partner's
words, in fact, had recalled to him the indignities
which he had suffered more than three months
earlier in the Poseidon's fo'c'sle.
"'Then more's the pity,' Tim said lightly, 'for there's
much to be said of men in verse. Marry, sometimes I
wish I had a gift with words, sir, or some poet had
my soul: what lines I would make about the bodies
of men and women! And the rest of creation as well!'
Ebenezer heard him patting Portia. 'Great rippling
hounds, sleek mares, or golden cows -- how can
men and women rest content with little pats for
such handsome beasts? I, I love them from the last
recesses of my soul; my heart aches with passion
for their bodies!'
"'Perversity, Mr. Mitchell!' the Laureate scolded.
'You've parted company now with Plato and
Shakespeare, and with every other gentleman as
well!'
'But not with mankind,' Timothy declared. 'Europa,
Leda and Pasiphae are my sisters; my offspring are
the Minotaur, and the Gorgons, and the Centaurs,
the beast-headed gods of the Egyptians, and all the
handsome royalty of the fairy tales, that must be
loved in the form of toads and geese and bears. I
love the world, sir, and so make love to it! I have
sown my seed in men and women, in a dozen sorts
of beasts, in the barky boles of trees and the
honeyed wombs of flowers; I have dallied on the
black breast of the earth and clipped her fast; I have
wooed the waves of the sea, impregnated the four
winds, and flung my passion skyward to the stars!'
So exalted was the voice in which this confession
was delivered that Ebenezer shrank away, as
discreetly as he could, some inches farther from its
author, who he began to fear was mad.'
'Tis a most -- most interesting point of view.' he
said."
* Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure
"'What, WHAT shall I do! I am such a vile
creature--too worthless to mix with ordinary human
beings!'
'This is terrible!' said Jude, verging on tears. 'It is
monstrous and unnatural for you to be so
remorseful when you have done no wrong!'
'Ah--you don't know my badness!'
He returned vehemently: 'I do! Every atom and dreg
of it! You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or
Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called, if it's
that which has caused this deterioration in you. That
a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul
shone like a diamond--whom all the wise of the
world would have been proud of, if they could have
known you-- should degrade herself like this! I am
glad I had nothing to do with Divinity--damn glad--if
it's going to ruin you in this way!'
'You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't
see how things are.'"
* Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies
"'Oh Nina, what a lot of parties'
...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties,
Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties,
Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as
somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John's
wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and
ships and hotels and nightclubs, in windmills and
swimming baths, tea parties at school where one
ate muffins and meingues and tinned crab, parties
at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and
smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London
and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting
dances in Paris -- all that succession and repetition
of massed humanity...Those vile bodies...)
He leant his forehead, to cool it, on Nina's arm and
kissed her in the hollow of her forearm.
'I know darling,' she said and put her hand on his
hair."
* Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings
will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you
how ardently I admire and love you."
* Robertson Davies
The Salterton Trilogy
* George Eliot
Middlemarch
When I have the time and the patience, I will add
more!
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