New year, no more fucking around with light reads. I'm building a list of 12 serious, challenging books to get through. My benchmark is stuff like Krasznahorkai and Alasdair Gray
I'm looking for novels that are an event. Philosophical, formally ambitious, bleak, brilliant. Think Gass, Bernhard, Gaddis, Sebald territory. No bestsellers. No comfort reads.
Give me one. Give me five. What's the most demanding, mind-altering book you'd put on a list like this?
by robyromana
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Blindness by Jose Saramago
The works of William Faulkner
House of Leaves, without a question. Footnotes in footnotes, different fonts, different text directions within the same page, different genres of writing. I once saw it being described as a book that resists being read. I’d perhaps call the genre “academic horror.” You could read it 12 times and you still wouldn’t be done with it. Brilliant and heavyweight.
Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. Probably the best book written in this century thus far.