...you've got a reviewer who can't be bothered with a lengthy novel, and who has trouble with parsing sentences... why would anyone listen to him?

= Mindy

...To Kill A Mockingbird? Hmmm. I've never read better writing. Ms. Lee manages to convey the essential underlying sweetness of the culture and what it's like to grow up in it. Reminds me of the best of Capote (which may be no accident). With all the ugly mess of a defeated people coming to grips with the continuing injustice, the soul of the place (and the time) is still kind.

I'm not sure that it says anything to Yankees, never having been one. Probably reads like alien code. But they invariably pick up on it when they visit, which aught to tell you something...

I'll defend Hemingway, specifically 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. I don't think it brilliant writing, but it was an interesting read and certainly doesn't warrant a 'worst of' list.

Hawking - what's wrong with clear, accessible science writing? I agree that the bizarre time-reversed 'unbreaking teacup' in his last section was crap (and which he later admitted as such ), but the book is worth checking out.

Jane Austen - I don't like the genre. The plot is inevitably people getting married, and I really don't give a damn about pre-Victorian nobility. If a book is going to be set in 1810 England, I want the Napoleonic wars, not how-many-pounds so-and-so makes or what ball they're attending. That said.. Austen crafts characters extremely well. They're subtle and interesting, even minor characters, and she has a surprising dry wit. Jane Austen will never be my type of book, but that doesn't mean she isn't a very capable author. Definitely does not belong on a 'worst' list.

Jared Diamond - I extremely highly recommend 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', and would give less resounding but still strong recommendations for 'Collapse' and 'Third Chimpanzee'. Excellent ability to write on diverse topics of botany, zoology, archaeology, virology, etc. in a way that is clear and incredibly interesting. GGS is probably the best nonfiction book I've in the past 5 years.

I skim-read 'Atlas' like I'd been used to with most cheap fiction -- which is all I thought 'Atlas' was when I was 'seduced' into picking it up -- but realised when I got to about page 89 (strangely enough) that there was something going on here I was missing, and I started in again reading it properly this time.

Glad I did.

As for 'The Fountainhead,' that grabbed me right from the very first line: "Howard Roark laughed."

Marcus, you must be a fast reader -I read the other 1100 pages or so in about four weeks, during the school holidays. I didn't spend all day reading, though (most of which was done at night).

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand

...and I read Atlas Shrugged in about a week. I am quite surprised about the comments here, if anything the opening of Atlas Shrugged is exciting.

If any part dragged on a bit I would have thought it was the party scene. Frisco gives a good lecture about money not being evil, but it does actually read more like a essay than a natural conversation.

Yes. I think I am up to about there now. Domaniq is a sexy thing thats for sure. It's just so long and laboriously descriptive. The romantisation of a mans puritism in that style just doesn't spark my flame at all.
kkulak

I could only ever read ten pages of The Fountainhead at a time, so I was amazed to see I got to page 250 in what seemed like a rather short time.

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand

Seesh Mitch! It took me over a year to read!!!!! I had to soak up every little bit. Admitedly it was a slow start. But for me it was the most riveting book I have read. My christianity came a tumbeling down with it.

I am about to begin my 4th attempt on the Fountain head. I really struggle with it as I find it so incredibly boring. Shandi keeps telling me I have to 'just get into it man'.

kkulak

The first 80-odd pages of Atlas took me three months to read. I finished the rest of it in about two weeks.

"One game commenter on Fark.com tells us “I tried on 4 separate occasions to try to read it, at least a year apart. Never made it past page 89 on any try.”

Actually, that's pretty much the page where I gave up Atlas Shrugged for a few months (while Dad decided to read it). However, I found Atlas very enjoyable when I started reading it again.

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand

The Iliad plays my music to reveal
In Hector the magnanimous ideal.

http://theeleutherian.blogspot.com

I find the Iliad musically swift
In grandeur, giving me a cardiac lift.

The Iliad plays my music, not at odds
With majesty, reechoing with Gods.

I find the Iliad musically close
To Zeus in measure, never lax or gross.

The Iliad plays my music with the rage
Of oceanic tempests on the page.

I find the Iliad tunefully severe
Like thunder, all affirmatively clear.

http://theeleutherian.blogspot.com

It had to happen sooner or later. There was such a huge response to this article that the Times Online Books Editor Michael Moran felt he needed to distill those response into a list of five books that didn't make the list. Suffice is to say that I probably disagree with everything listed on this additional list. I say "probably" because I haven't read The Leopard.

Top of the list is Atlas Shrugged:

1: Atlas Shrugged

"The book most frequently mentioned by readers. Atlas Shrugged is a dauntingly gigantic brick of novel by Ayn Rand. It’s technically a science fiction work, in as much as it’s set in a parallel or future world that’s subtly different from our own. There are no spacecraft or ray guns though, just a lengthy rumination on industrial relations. The titanic novel is one of the longest ever written, and is fittingly Rand’s last before she turned her fierce intellgence to works of pure philosophy. One game commenter on Fark.com tells us “I tried on 4 separate occasions to try to read it, at least a year apart. Never made it past page 89 on any try” Despite its reputation for indigestibility Atlas Shrugged still sells consistently, some half a century after its publication."

It will please you all to know that many responders to this article disagree with Atlas Shrugged being listed!

However, there is a much better earlier article from June in which various writers name their most-loathed books.

Here's a taste:

Stephen Amidon, novelist and fiction reviewer

"The Waves by Virginia Woolf is everything a novel should not be – and so much less. After the triumphs of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and the fascinating experimentation of Orlando, Woolf decided to change tack with this “playpoem” and wound up sinking into a putrid morass of unreadability. Beloved of American academics – which ought to tell you something right there – the book fairly accurately simulates the experience of sitting next to a pretentious old windbag on a flight to Australia."

"Fear and Loathing = pomo-journalism"

I say it can't even approach that level of dignity. "Campaign Trail '72", however, is a very different matter. To my mind it's the first book on politics in American history in which the brutality of the prose matches its subject, blow-for-blow. This is illumination.

I know it might be a hard-sell around here, but I emphatically recommend the collections of Thompson's correspondence. The man's work ethic never served him well, but there was a lot more to him than is evident in the rest of the corpus. He's a heartbreaking case, to me: he could have served the cause of freedom well, if his passions had been rationally reined.

Other notes:

On "Gravity's Rainbow" -- that was recommended to me by an acquaintance who did not succeed to friendship. Good god, what a pile of rot.

"I think that reading Free to Choose by Milton Friedman is a waste of time."

Me, too. I'll recommend to newbies Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson" every time, and then "VOS" for the ethical uptake. I have no respect for Friedman.

"Finding a play from the 20th Century is a trifle tougher,..."

"Twelve Angry Men". Rand once wrote that "The Miracle Worker" is the only epistemological play ever written," and I disagree. This portrayal of a relentless exercise of logic on facts is just as powerful a demonstration of the life and death power of the human mind, in a different context, and the imperative to use it right.

On Tom Wolfe: "The Right Stuff" is a very good introduction to flight-test and early space-flight history. If you knew who Mel Apt or Joe Walker were, it might bore you. If not, and the subject somehow interested you, this was a valuable book. I enjoyed it for his style in the treatment.

Just like Gravity's Rainbow? What the fuck's that?

(That's only a marginally rhetorical question, BTW.)

Eco writes with what Jose Louis Borges calls both "algebra and fire" -- in love with learning and with language and with (at their best) with life.

A professor of semiotics in his day job, Eco does sometimes make me wonder if academics simply have too much time on their hands, but if all post-modernists were as witty and sharp as Eco, I could easily be seduced. ;^)

Brilliant. 

The Great Gatsby is a most enjoyable read and Tom Sawyer still makes me laugh aloud.

I loved A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I keep meaning to read it again but it's very, very  l  o  n  g.

"The ultimate result of shielding men from folly is to fill the world with fools."

-Herbert Spencer 

Elijah, I'm well aware of Dickens' commentary on events in those times. However, he does write brilliantly -Great Expectations is one of the finest books I've read.

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand

After all, who could invent a tale in which the greatest industrial barons of the age create a fantastically beautiful city out of a swampy park adjoining a great American metropolis, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to America?

While America's mightiest minds are bringing the intellectual fruits of their reason and sweat to the celebration, three blocks from the main entrance to the fair, Dr. H.H. Holmes (a fiend that makes Hannibal Lector look like a suckling dove) creates his own building in time for the fair's opening. It has a much darker purpose...

Meanwhile, the city's mayor is being stalked by a madman who vows revenge for imaginary wrongs...in THE DEVIL AND THE WHITE CITY. [Erik Larson (2003) Random House, ISBN 9780375725609]

Or, take the story of a young immigrant boy who comes of age during the American Civil War. Like many of his era, he becomes a "bounty jumper," enlisting for the cash bounty and then deserting. However, unlike other jumpers, he actually goes into battle and, as a trained artilleryman, braves the teeth of the fighting. It is only after the battle is over that he switches identification with one of his dead comrades and repeats the process. This bizarrely twisted sense of honor would serve him for good and ill in the years to come.

After the war, he gets trained in the social and criminal graces by the greatest fence in New York City history and embarks on a decades-long duel with America's master detective, William Pinkerton, first in Paris (where he introduces American cocktails and American crime to the Surete), and then London, where he runs rings around Scotland Yard and the corruptly incompetent Inspector Shore.

Eventually, he becomes "the master of half that is evil, and all that is undetected" in the capital of the world's greatest empire. Shore and Pinkerton tell his story to a Scots-Irish ophthalmologist with an interest in detection, and Adam Worth is immortalized forever as the NAPOLEON OF CRIME [Ben Macintyre {(1997) Delta. ISBN 0-385-31993-2}.

Worth finds out too late that the love of his life, the even more fantastic Kitty Flynn, was right about the perils of the criminal life. His career culminates in a final confrontation with Pinkerton unlike anything seen at Reichenbach Falls...

"Be it a question of science, metaphysics, or religion, the man who says: 'What is truth?' as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race."-Jacques Maritain

Kaiwai

"...the most pointless, ass paralysingly boring book ever conceived..."

Haven't read Hobbes yet, eh?

"Be it a question of science, metaphysics, or religion, the man who says: 'What is truth?' as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race."-Jacques Maritain

Das Kapital - the most pointless, ass paralysingly boring book ever conceived. I don't think Karl Marx was ever serious; he was more interested in torturing people with his ass paralysingly boring and verbose diatribes on issues he didn't have a clue on. I read that, along with the communist manifesto when I was a teenager - never again, never again.

When he started writing books, communism as an ideology didn't yet exist.

I have seen it argued very convincingly, that Dickens actually was politically conservative, and wanted to keep the status quo.

He did make 'social commentary' on poverty at the time, but was only concerned with morality rather than Government intervention.

The left have simply taken what they want from his work as a critique of capitalism and used it for their own ends.

Oh Callum...gosh...Dickens was a communist! ..(before those chaps were even invented!) ...his moaning minnie complaining about things, gosh, what Dickens needed was a good slap!

Pleased someone mentioned that other great work of communism, To Kill A Mockingbird..gosh, so overrated!

In terms of appalling books I would add...

1. Anything by Gore Vidal (such a bore)

2. Tom Wolfe (in later years)

3. Frank Sargeson...*yawn*

4. James Clavell...(can't he tell a story in less than 4000 pages?!?!)

5. Larry McMurtry's 107 sequels to the brilliant 'Last Picture Show' ....(the series was getting a bit tiresome by the time I was halfway through "Duane's Depressed")

For splendid works of fiction you chaps should read....

1. Evelyn Waugh novels ...(splendid chap!)

2. Sir Robert Jones novels...(hilarious and very libertarian)

3. Agatha Christie ...(such fun)

4. Peter Mayle ...(predictable, but enjoyable)

5. John Mortimer ....the Rumpole series, Paradise Postponed, Summer's Lease, Titmuss Regained (etc) - all of them are just splendid, hours of reading pleasure.

http://www.nzcapitalist.blogspot.com/

Surely I'm not the first.

Umberto Eco. Love all his novels. 'Foucault's Pendulum' my favourite.

Surely you jest?

I never gave that book much of a chance I'm afraid. I rang the guy I borrowed it from after getting through the early part of the book, he said: "Don't worry, it's just like Gravity's Rainbow - it takes a while to get your head into the style".

Just like Gravity's Rainbow? Fuck that! I might add the only reason I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was that it was recommended on the basis of enjoying Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

Incidentally on Stephenson vs Pynchon:
"In the long run, stories will always win out against character sketches, metatales, and rootless bursts of dazzling prose."

Nicely put.

However, since the great PC himself, someone I may assume is not prone to fits of pomowankery, recommends Mr Eco, I shall look into it once more.

Tom Sharpe...some sketches are just plain hillarious. PJ also occasionally reduces me to silent fits of mirth.

Wilbur Smith..In some of his novels his heroes...although somewhat fatalistically projected, are larger than life...and his action descriptions brilliant.

Frank Herbert...Dune Trilogy..managed to enthrall me with about 1/3 the power of that achieved by The Fountainhead

Bill Bryson's Short History of nearly everything...more for illuminating what I didn't know than for his writing style.

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the starless night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.- - Robert Green Ingersoll

I have that Saki collection you gifted me once. Still unread — goddam print is too small for geriatric farts.

And I have fond memories of the radio serialisation of No Highway when I was a kid.

"This will seem terrible to some, but I'm one of those for whom Rand spoiled all fiction-reading. She was an impossible act to follow..."

For me too, almost. Much like Wagner in music, really. ;^)

But I still love reading fiction, and for the most part my test for a good book is whether or not it's sharp. I can put up with a lot as long as there's a damn fine read trying to get out.

Here's some of my favourite damn fine (non-Rand) reads, in addition to the obvious:

Nevil Shute. How come more Objectivists don't read Nevil? Aside from 'On the Beach' (which was unrelievedly depressing), these are great tales of achievement, conflict and the triumph of the human spirit. My special favourite is 'No Highway,' which with one slight flaw is almost the perfect epistemological novel.

Umberto Eco. Love all his novels. 'Foucault's Pendulum' my favourite.

Saki, short stories of. If you've ever thought Oscar Wilde should be just a trifle more vicious, then Saki is just for you. Woundingly incisive.

Robert Heinlein. He doesn't do much in the way of plotting; most of his novels read like one long series of asides -- but by golly they're great asides. 'Time Enough for Love' is my favourite.

Robert Parker. Hilarious, sharp and heroic. Great package.

Graham Greene. By God, he's sharp. Pun intentional.

Dickens. At his best he's brilliant. In 'Tale of Two Cities,' 'Great Expectations' and 'Bleak House' he's at his best.

Wodehouse. Like Lindsay says, wonderful but 'inconsequential.' 'Tiddlywink literature,' like O. Henry.

Hemingway. Yes, I love his style too. 'Old Man & the Sea' his best.

Philip Roth. Yes, he rambles, but I enjoy keeping up.

Herman Wouk. Esp. 'Caine Mutiny' and 'Winds of War,' where he does with early WWII what Margaret Mitchell did with the Civil War.

Robert Anton Wilson. His 'Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy' is great, for a hippy.

David Lodge, especially when his Rummidge Uni novels.

Raymond Chandler has his moments, and many of them there are too, and so too do Mickey Spillane, Lee Child, Daniel Silva, Len Deighton, Robert Parker, Dick Francis, Martin Cruz Smith, Anthony Burgess, Gerald Seymour...

But for all the world's literature, it's a damn short list.

> Glenn wrote:  [click on pic for a rosy purchase]

Was this a deliberate pun or an accidental one?! 

Rosie

Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
This was a great one. I actually felt like I had committed the crime myself.
kkulak

Rosie,

Guns Germs and Steel - Jarred Diamond

I have always seen the title in the book shop and been intrigued. Maybe I will give it a go now?

Chris,

"I shall always defend Hemingway, if necessary, ad nauseam. His "A Farewell To Arms" is to my mind the most vivid account of a man broken by war but able to retain sufficient of himself for romantic love."

I've just finished that book. I must say that the second half was better than the first half. It's an OK book, but not one I would advise anyone to go out of their way to read.

Linz,

"Ditto Jane Austen, and I would remove Pride and Prejudice from the Times's list."

I agree with you there. Although I haven't read the book, the TV adaptations are rather good. Charles Dickens too.

A few of my old favourites that come to mind:

Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment, The Idiot

Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure

George Eliott   - The Mill on the Floss 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

Guns Germs and Steel - Jarred Diamond

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy

Lord Frederic Hamilton My Yesterdays - trilogy autobiography of Lord Frederic Hamilton, a diplomat during the mid to late 1800s and lived all over the world - absolutely fascinating read.

Cicero's Essay on Friendship - the best book ever written on friendship (and there are too few)

Oscar Wilde De Profundis - fantastic letter written to The Horrible Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) while O W was in prison 

Rosie

This will seem terrible to some, but I'm one of those for whom Rand spoiled all fiction-reading. She was an impossible act to follow, for me. In my pre-Objectivist teen days I adored Dickens(!), especially David Copperfield. I still enjoy seeing re-runs of TV adaptations. Such characters! Ditto Jane Austen, and I would remove Pride and Prejudice from the Times's list. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were always riveting. I got off on Mark Twain, Huck and Tom! And I would hide myself away to read Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet still tugs at the heart-strings, and conveys a powerful anti-tribalist message: and was the language ever more beautifully employed? I now have the Zeffirelli film version, which came out when I was slightly younger than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, which I saw just once at that time, and which I now love to bits. Hemingway was force-fed to my class at school and I can't for the life of me even remember what I thought of him. Joyce was force-fed to me individually because I was deemed to be singularly likely to appreciate him. I enjoyed Portrait of the Artist ... but thought other stuff was crap. One time I almost died laughing, quite literally, at something by James Thurber, but don't ask me to remember what it was: I just remember nearly choking to death and my mother being quite concerned. I was absorbed in Anna Karenina. I was rapt when it came out on TV. Back then I didn't understand the evil of the duty ethic and all that stuff, but I knew good writing when I saw it. (Same with George Bernard Shaw.) Then, too, I was captivated by Tolstoy's non-fiction account of his religious beliefs. Oscar Wilde, of course, was special, but, post-Rand, irritatingly shallow. Exquisite but unsatisfying. Wodehouse, also, is priceless, if inconsequential.

More and more, music swept me before it and became exclusively my language of choice, and remains so in my dotage. This moment, for instance, I'm listening to Schumann's A Minor Piano Concerto, 2nd movement. Utterly sublime. In my book, no book can compete in the value-swoon stakes. But the great wordsmiths do come close, no doubt. Are there any, any more?

I am amazed any one has even gotten to the latter stretches of "A Brief History of Time!"

I restrict my views to the 20th Century:

I shall always defend Hemingway, if necessary, ad nauseam. His "A Farewell To Arms" is to my mind the most vivid account of a man broken by war but able to retain sufficient of himself for romantic love. No other writer, and he has had many attempt to ape him, can write so truthfully as to his own feelings at the moment they exist. After this novel he fell away due to his own turmoils. The other US novelist of comparable measure would be Walker Percy whose novel "The Moviegoer" delivers a triumph in gorgeous syntax.

The best verse is Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings." I know he is far more famous for "This Be The Verse" and "High Windows" but this is a crafted work which belies the simplicity of the subject matter; an early summer train journey.

The best short story, Dylan Thomas' "The Followers." This is a crisp rendition of loneliness and the cost of being an outsider. His works during the latter years, particularly while on lecturing trips in USA were sodden from his own dependency.

Finding a play from the 20th Century is a trifle tougher, but I suggest Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke" or Eugene O'Neill's "A Long Day's Journey Into Night." Both works culminate in a celebration of the human spirit. Cf this to the dreary nihilism of Stoppard, Becket, Albee, Arthur Miller et al!

A few to avoid:

The Bone People. (There is only one NZ novel of last century worth more than a cuss and that would be John Mulgan's "Man Alone.") I understand that this dirge is now regarded as one of the most inferior nominees of the Booker ever. (NB The New Yorker, May 2004.)

All of the Beats work other than "On The Road" and a few of Kenneth Rexroth's poems. After OTR Kerouac slunk around in the depths of masturbatory gibberish.

Saul Bellow's allegedly quirky works of Yiddish cuteness. This is a writer, albeit a Noble Laureate (as with others above,) possessed of one idea and one idea alone. The loosening of the diaspora has created a loosening of personal standards. To be avoided.

Sartre: This "philosopher" wrote his own theory of emotions in a novel titled "Nausea." The premis of this work is that nausea is a foundational truth. A type of reality lurking behind our delusions...OK,OK,OK. To top this we are evidently all objects of our own consciousness and possess no independent reality. So much for "A=A."

These are a few of my tastes...

Chris R,

Don't agree with you there Callum.
Free to choose is great for its straight forwardness, candidness and clarity. I vote it as a must read.
Unless of course people have the stamina and interest to read much further with works like
Von Mieses
George Reissman etc.
kkulak

If you already know a smidgen of basic economics, I think that reading Free to Choose by Milton Friedman is a waste of time.

And if you allow me to be the devil's advocate, I found that Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (which I've recently finished reading as an English assignment) to be a good book -which luckily, didn't involve Dickens' political views.

"Socialism may be dead, but its corpse is still rotting up the place." -Ayn Rand

... seemed to take an aeon to read (though the documentary was very good; succinct and thought-provoking).

The best science non-fiction I've ever read was E=mc2 ~ absolutely brilliant:

[click on pic for a rosy purchase]

Fear and Loathing = pomo-journalism.

Dice Man = pomo-psychopathology.

Iliad = homer-erotica.

Pride and Prejudice made for a good miniseries.

In defence of Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea is one of the most beautiful novellas I've ever read ~ and reread.

Nobody is more tedious than Tolkien.

Les Miserables is so good. It makes me so happy to have a thing like that in the world.

The Narnia Chronicles and Lord of the Rings series are for children only. They appeal to adolescent boys due to the the preponderance of fighting, daring do and the absence of anything adult like romanance; essentially they are Biggles on horseback. Though Biggles never attempted to mascarade as serious fiction.

Sadly, many will die in a ditch to defend them against proper adult literature like Les Miserables.

And as I recall War and Peace was published as a serial in a magazine was it not? I wonder if the steady paycheck helped stretch Tolstoy's narrative...

 Hard to argue with that list: "The Hemingway style is impressive..."

Excellent to see 'Lord of the Rings' there. And 'Fear and Loathing'.

'Women in Love.' Agreed, terrible, turgid stuff.

"The ultimate result of shielding men from folly is to fill the world with fools."

-Herbert Spencer 

I agree with "the list" except for Pride and Prejudice.... I loved that book and all the film productions made from it. Jane Austen created a lovely heroine in Elizabeth Bennett. I would imagine though, she appeals more to women than to men, on the whole.

I haven't read Hemingway, so don't have an educated opinion about For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Couldn't agree more about Narnia Chronicles and the Lord of the Rings. Big yawn. I did however, love other CS Lewis books like Voyage to Venus and the Great Divorce. Brilliantly imaginative and beautifully written as far as allegories go.

I would also add to the "Don't bother reading" list D.H Lawrence's Women in Love. Terrible book. An absolute load of hoo-haa about nothing. Pretentious, dull, ugly - typical postmodern puke.

Hemingway and Joyce. Duck from Duck, resile from Riggenbach!