Books and the Fall

Alas, none. I’m 61, and the magic appears to be over.

For me to get absorbed into a fictional world, the book requires three things: a feeling of truth, that the author understands how people think and feel; a degree of emotional intensity, because otherwise I won’t care what’s happening; and clear prose, because if I have to decode the prose, it pulls me back enough from events to get emotionally invested. (That’s not a dig on ornate language; but its distancing effect is real.) I’m pushing forty, and recently “fiction absorption” has hit me twice, both courtesy of the Old Masters: Great Expectations and Moby-Dick. Holy chocolate-frosted shitballs, the power in those.

Ahab rants: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me?”

That shit’s intense. It’s hard not to get sucked into the adventures of the mothafuckin’ Pequod.

Hold on, Lyra ages? I totally did not get any sense of aging significantly, the novels seems to me to occur in a very short span of time, only a few months at most. That was a major point to me, that things had to be done now, because the severing tragedy was imminent.

The adult woman in the third novel was not Lyra, is was a scientists from another world.

Soulless Merchant of Fear is right on the money about Moby Dick. One of those books that I always dragged my feet about reading, and then when I got around to reading it: thoroughly absorbing. Even dare I say it an easy read.

I find that the ability to be absorbed by a book hasn’t exactly changed for me, but the kind of book it takes to absorb me is different. As a kid, all that was required was a raygun or a sword on the cover and I was off: the author’s actual story was really just a springboard for my own imagination, and playtime was spent essentially dreaming up fanfics about the stuff I’d read (though the word “fanfic” wasn’t popular yet). As an adult, I require the author to have done more work: I want to learn something, to be surprised or dazzled, to marvel at things like attention to detail or the rendering of characters or a fascinating literary conceit. If it can do that, a good book still gives me the same creative charge I felt when I was a kind — but I can’t get it from pulp anymore. Historical fiction (in the brain candy department), nonfiction (especially ambitious and well-written historical scholarship), or just plain fiction are the main plausible sources of a fix.

Music and poetry are as magical and indispensable to me as always (I was so deeply absorbed in the recent Met HD broadcast of Götterdämmerung that the whole thing seemed to go by in barely an hour) but I’ve never been a great fiction reader.

I still, if/when I am feeling depressed, re-read Watership Down.

Another, more recent book, that had that kind of impact for me is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Also Water for Elephants.

So yes, I think that kind of immersion still happens for me. I very rarely read fiction any more, though, which makes me sad.

I also happily wasted my teenagerhood immersed in fictional landscapes but I have seldom managed the same kind of obsession since. I blame the interwebs and computer games for this – the bath is much broader but shallower now. One interlude that does stand out is ‘Last and First Men’ by Olaf Stapleton. The sheer evocativeness of this old fashioned narrative refuses to leave me.

I’ve recently discovered the humane and delightful Alexander McCall Smith, and keep up with his prolific production in both the Sunday Philosophy Club Series and the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series (shout-out to J. Otto Pohl: the latter is set in Botswana, and is wonderful). When I was young I was devoted to the great 19th century novelists, and keep trying to return to them – but one finds one’s attention span shortened by demands of daily life. A nice substitute for me has been watching the BBC series of many of these – e.g. Trollope’s Parliamentary series (the Pallisers), which was superb, or the Forsyte Saga (John Galsworthy). I read Stieg Larsson’s trilogy last summer and liked all three volumes; I read some of Jo Nesbo’s works recently, and didn’t care for them so much. I do find generally that it’s harder to achieve that wonderful sense of being transported by a work of fiction I had felt as a girl; perhaps the only book from my youth that reliably still transports me is P&P, which I reread fairly regularly.

The big doorstop Pynchons. Every character feels fully realized and complex; we just don’t get to see a whole lot of many of them. Maybe that’s why they feel that way. Maybe not.

And everyone’s in constant motion without really achieving anything: trying to figure out where they fit in an incomprehensible world, or pursuing things they’ll never get, or doing things they don’t understand for reasons they don’t comprehend, or else after having done understandable things for comprehensible reasons realize there was another dimension to what they were doing that they were completely ignorant of which changes things completely. Of course a few are able to stop doing all that, and achieve a kind of grace.

It’s so much like the actual world how can you not just fall in? Plus there’s a lot higher concentration of puns, dick jokes and crazy sex than in real life. At least mine.

Yeah, Gravity’s Rainbow has so many different things going on it’s hard to appreciate each thing. Mason&Dixon (my favorite, too) probably strikes the best balance between doing Pynchon things and having enough of a narrative thread that you can sort everything as you’re reading (which is weird, because half the book is just traipsing through the forest having adventures). Against the Day is probably the one that best matches my description though.

And yeah, everyone should at least take a run at Moby Dick. One of those “best of all time” books that is somehow better than its reputation.

I still get that with a really rare book. To the Lighthouse, which I read as a teenage but didn’t understand, was a life changing read for me over the holidays: the perfect book for someone my age and stage of life (30 with kids and a new mortgage). Their thoughts were my thoughts and mine theirs.

Friends of Eddie Coyle did this for me also, though not to the same level.

I think that the immersion gets harder as an adult because you have more experiences and know more, so that either suspension of disbelief is harder or you’ve seen this type of story/ characters/ world before and you lose the feeling of exploration which helps suck you in.

It is still possible to get back, but harder and I at least am pickier about the books I read.
It also doesn’t help that I’ve started writing stories myself, so have fictional worlds of my own in which to immerse myself.

Ursula Le Guin. When I was a kid I read The Wizard of Earthsea 1000 times and it transported me in a way that LOTR did not (though I read that about 5 times). In my 40s I read The Dispossessed and it did just the same. She is an extraordinary writer, and all the more so because it is a wholly imagined universe.

Nitpick: Tim Winton (not Swinton) wrote Cloudstreet (not Cloud Street).

It’s fun to take a minute to consider what it is that’s drawn me into some of my favorite books. My requirements are pretty simple: good writing (an awkward phrase jerks me right back to the present and leaves me looking for my red pen), and strong unique characters. I love a book that makes me laugh out loud no matter where I’m reading it (I recall being on an airplane, reading Stiff by Mary Roach, and trying to explain to my curious seat mate that I was laughing about a passage in a book about how cadavers are used in research; no further conversation was attempted). For me, it can happen with both fiction (Stieg Larsson’s books also comes to my mind) and non-fiction (most recently Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs of growing up and returning to Africa).

The older I get, the more of my reading is rereading, and I’m ever less willing/able to tolerate fiction that’s unremittantly dark and depressing; life is depressing enough all on its own.

I first read LOTR when I was fifteen and have “read” it probably once a year since then. I skim fast through certain parts now and still cry at the same places where I’ve always cried. (“I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.” “Thus came Aragorn…” “I will not say do not weep…” “We will meet again in the willow meads of Tasarinan.” — Clearly I have a strong sentimental streak. :) (Almost as much as with Shakespeare or GBS, there’s a quote in LOTR for every occasion.)

But other things I loved when I was a kid don’t move me or absorb me any more. I just reread Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, and while I enjoyed it, the first person narration seemed just a little too precious, something I wouldn’t have recognized as a teenager.

Other stuff —

— Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I get lost in that world and I love the characters (Nanapush and Lipsha especially). She’s an odd writer for me: some of her books I reread every few years, others I can’t even finish.

— Middlemarch — loved it (repeated readings) in college/grad school, couldn’t finish it when I tried in maybe my forties, read it again a couple of years ago and was back to loving it.

I think Erdrich and Eliot pull me into their worlds so strongly in part because they both seem to love the world and everyone in it, in the sense that most of their characters are flawed (like real people), and some of their characters are villainously bad (like some real people), and yet — there’s no judgment. I wish I could love and forgive my idiotic younger self the way Eliot seems to have forgiven hers, presuming that Dorothea is in some sense a stand-in for the younger Mary Ann Evans.

Other books where I can still lose myself:

— Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.

— Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and The Children of God. Who would have thought that “Jesuits in space” could make such absorbing fiction? MDR gets a little too sentimental at times, even for me, but not enough to make me stop liking the books.

— Dickens: Our Mutual Friend.

— Pynchon — I really enjoyed Vineland when I read it for a facilitated book group a couple of years ago, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to try the longer ones yet.

How cool to see some of my favourite books already in these comments…

Big shout out for Gravity’s Rainbow – but no, it didn’t transport me, partly because roughly once a page I had to pause for a moment of wonder at the virtuosity of a sentence or the richness of an idea.

Moby Dick I ended up loving but it was a struggle for a period in the middle, somehwere around the chapter about the meaning of white. I’m jealous of those who found it a breeze.

The Imperfectionists didn’t transport me but stayed with me for weeks.

Of all those mentioned, only Wolf Hall really took me somewhere else, and kept me hungrily, blearily going long after lights-out, like every book used to when I was a kid.

And I have to add Neal Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon, his first that I came across. My beloved and I lived in different cities, she was talking about this great book she was reading, I was skint but couldn’t wait to see what the fuss was about so I skipped a meal and bought it. I caught up with her about 100 pages in, and pretty soon we were calling each other up to talk about what just happened in the book.

(We had been best friends for 14 years before we got together as a couple and fell in love. One of my other friends asked at the time what that was like, and I compared it to having this book on your shelf for years that you know is supposed to be a wonderful classic, but you’re never quite interested enough to actually get around to reading it. And eventually one Sunday afternoon you find yourself slightly bored and in the right kind of mood, and you finally pick it up, and it turns out to be this completely amazing thing that you never imagined.)

I wonder if one of the reasons genre novels still have the ability to transport is that they don’t tend to forget about the plot and the pacing. The greats don’t either, but novelists with pretentions to greatness sometimes seem to think it’s beneath them.

I am so glad to see LOTR appear so frequently in this thread, and, like JanieM above, I get tears in my eyes every time I get to certain bits (“I will not say ‘do not weep’…” always does it for me. Interestingly, I think I get more tears now than when I read it as a child; I guess I’ve just evolved into a sentimental old fool…

I’ve lucky enough to teach it, and therefore read it, every spring for the last few years. A couple of days ago a student complained “You said Eowyn was one of the strong female characters, but all she’s done is complain about being left behind.” Tonight they read the Pelennor Fields. I am very much looking forward to tomorrow’s class.

I would say that about 3/4 of each year’s class is absolutely passionate about LOTR. The school does an International Foods Festival on the last day before spring break and each year my class does a Middle Earth table, where we serve lembas, miruvor, and other delicacies. Last year two girls baked a cake in the shape of Mordor, complete with precisely sculpted chocolate icing ered lithui and ephel duath (the mountain ranges around Mordor), a graham cracker Black gate, a dark chocolate dark tower (topped by a marshmallow eye) and Mount Doom was a mound of chocolate with a glass of dry ice inside. When water was added, it erupted.

The book I’ve read within the last decade that hooked me was Infinite Jest. The chapters set at the Ennett House House (sic) did an indescribably good job of reaching in to the core of what it is to be a newly sober addict. I miss DFW very much.

Two novels of late have transported me to an alternative reality. Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and China Mieville’s “Embassytown”.

I have enjoyed discovering the novels of George Sand: “The Master Pipers” and “The Miller of d’Angibault”, “Valentine”. These are marvelous and reminded me of the Brontes.

I have also loved discovering some British “gothic” fiction of the late 18th and early 19th centuries recently, such as Godwin’s “Caleb Williams”, Hogg’s “Confessions of a Justified Sinner”, and Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer,” along with some very early twentieth c. gothic, such as John Meade Falkner’s “The Nebuly Coat” — this last particularly took me back because it has glancing references to earlier works by writers one has read in one’s youth.

I love Bulgakov’s Country Doctor’s Notebook. It’s a collection of short stories, not surrealist at all but very Russian. And humane, like Oliver Sacks.

Complete immersion in an alternate world, since turning 25 … doesn’t happen much.

Patrick McGrath, Martha Peake
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Not the other two of his that I’ve read.

I’m glad someone else mentioned Wolf Hall as well as me. Even though I was reading it on a Kindle, I felt that I had to physically swim up from the depths of the late 1500s every time someone wanted my attention. That strange feeling of raising one’s eyes from the words, looking around and thinking ‘where am I?’. Mantel’s French Revolution book, A Place of Greater Safety, is pretty good too. Especially if you read it in Paris.
I’m currently in 1870s New York with Edith Wharton, which is just fine.

Hopscotch is almost certainly the last novel I read that had me totally spellbound. (Actually, no, that would be Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, but it was a much darker kind of spell.) In general, I think, to quote Greg (at 36), I’m attracted to “the virtuosity of a sentence or the richness of an idea” more than anything else—The Waves is close to an all-time favorite.

And to the Pynchon lovers: no V.? Think that’s my favorite (though frankly I’ve read neither Gravity’s Rainbow nor Mason & Dixon).

JakeB. Thank you so much for “urban miserabilism”, and everybody else for a remarkable job in adding to my reading list.

In that spirit, the early books of Michael Marshall Smith (before his hack work) are wonderful. “Spares”, “One Of Us” and “Only Forward” (I still want to live in the Cat neighbourhood), and have had to replace my copies twice through general household wear and tear.

The last really immersive and memorable book I read was Diana Wynne Jones’ The Merlin Conspiracy; she was a wonderful writer for building worlds, building characters and hanging it all off what seems like a one-damn-thing-after-another event-driven plot, but generally turns out not to be.

Oooh! I forgot! Cormac McCarthy! Blood Meridian! Got lost in that thing for – I dunno, days? Months? A mythical length of time.

And it occurred to me that I read a lot when I’m on the road, halfway between worlds, which seems to help with the whole transformation thing.

And MPAVictoria, you know what, I totally agree.

Immediate thoughts echo a lot that’s already been said: there are some writers who can still manage to create the combination of a convincing alternative reality (often by keeping it quite close to current reality but changing it in subtle ways), engaging characters and gripping plot – Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Mieville (for me, above all The City and the City, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I find that I can read most of my favourites from childhood only through a haze of self-conscious nostalgia – but was delighted to find last year that Russel Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child still casts its spell perfectly.

I share the weaknesses of many commenters here (LOTR was my much-asked for Christmas present at 13, and finished within a week. What a great week that was). I don’t think adulthood is the problem too much so long as you find the right book — but it’s often a YA or genre book; I loved His Dark Materials, and I agree with whoever above said that many literary authors aren’t well suited. Others that have done it for me over the years are:

– some genre fiction (especially on planes), Stephen White’s “Kill Me” being one that stands out,

– when I was 25, The Colour Purple was one of the few books I’ve ever read in a single sitting. Trainspotting would have been another if I didn’t have young children at the time; we were on holiday and I think I became a foul-mouthed Scotsman for a few days.

– of literary fiction, Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (and I loved the film) and Murakami’s “After Dark” are about the only two that I can think of this way.

– occasional non-fiction with a narrative thrust (maybe this is why Gladwell’s so successful): Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation”.

Meanwhile, I borrowed Gravity’s Rainbow from a friend about 18 months ago. It’s still on the shelf staring accusingly at me. I think I’m at page 73.

“Immersive authors have the trick of giving the impression that there’s more to the world than you’re seeing. Tolkien in particular.”

Yeah. One of the things that sucked me in when I first read it (at 17 or so, and then maybe a dozen times since) was in the early chapters, when the hobbits are hiking through the woods of the Shire all muddy and sweaty and then they look back and see a Nazgul on top of the hill. The previous night they’d spent talking to elves who were on their way to the immortal lands across the sea. Scenes that were exactly like my own life (taking shortcuts through the woods that led you into tangles that got you all scratched up) side by side with 2000 year old sorcerers who’d made a pact with the devil (or his righthand man Sauron) and elves on their way to the earthly paradise–well, I couldn’t put it down.

I’ve seen people complain that so much of Tolkien is just about people hiking, but that’s a big part of what attracted me. A few chapters later the hobbits are complaining about being bitten by little gnats, and at night Frodo and Aragorn see heat lightning on the horizon which we later learn was Gandalf fighting off the Witch King of Angmar and his Nazgul underlings. I’d had much the same experience, except it was really just heat lightning.

What a wonderful thread! So many thanks to all.

My Science Fiction and Fantasy class (taught to HS seniors) has a supplemental reading list that contains Mieville, Stephenson, LeGuin, Gaiman, and Russell (along with a few others). Seeing all of you speak your passion for these texts helps me believe that I made good choices.

I hope you all remembered to celebrate Aragorn’s birthday yesterday.

A somewhat relevant vignette, which perhaps speaks to the depth and breadth of the love that many people have for LOTR – Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek spoke on our campus recently to an audience both from our school and the local community. When, in the midst of some reaaally conceptually difficult physics stuff, he made a LOTR reference (“one arrow of time to rule them all” was the exact quote) a substantial portion of the audience began laughing and applauding. There was something slightly magical about seeing this great scientist standing at the podium with a delighted grin on his face as his audience acknowledged the love that they shared.

…and JanieM – IJ is sooo worth it. My one suggestion might be to not worry too much early on about keeping all the characters straight and understanding exactly what the world looks like. All (or at least enough) will be revealed over time (with puppets.)

It works for me with audio books now– listening to War and Peace in the middle of the night by myself, and listening to Winnie the Pooh and the Roald Dahl books and the Lemony Snicket books with my daughter.

Reading Ozma of Oz and the Neverending Story to my daughter gave me some of the same thrill. I’m no longer very good at entering fictional worlds by myself, I see, but I can be carried along into them if I have company, recorded or real. I worry about when I’ll lose even that capacity, my attention too ennervated for long journeys over the mind’s sea.

Thanks, TheSophist, I’ll give IJ another try.

I remembered another get-lost-in-it book for me, of recent vintage: Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

A friend introduced me to Under Heaven a while back as one of the best books she had ever read. I didn’t think it was that great, but I liked it enough to try some of Kay’s others. I think it was right here on CT that someone called Tigana the best fantasy (?) novel ever written, but I could barely finish it. (Tastes differ….) Sailing to Sarantium, though, was good enough to get me going on the sequel, which is a definite for the rereread pile.

This is a great thread, and I’m looking forward to trying out books people are listing. In the “tastes differ” department, t’s interesting how mixed and remixed people’s likes and dislikes are. My best book-reading friend and I trade titles all the time, and after long years of knowing each other we’re still never sure whether the other one will enjoy what we’ve enjoyed.

So many will still do it for me. The Sword in the Stone (the original version, not the one rewritten for The Once and Future King); The City and the City; Little, Big; and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zout all have that transporting effect.

Thanks for the question, Maria. People are also being nice, thank you people.
I now have a couple of years’ worth of new books and authors to explore.

I keep coming back to this thread because I forgot something. I saw JanieM mentioned Barbara Kingsolver, and I wanted to put a word in for The Lacuna as a first-rate transportation device. Trotsky and Kahlo, how can you not win? A great book to experience, and almost as good just to think about later.

I’ve started rereading all of Robert Stone’s novels. I loved them in college mostly for the style and the politics– didn’t have enough of a real-life reference for the parts about work and love and unwise behavior. They work even better for me now.

Oh man. Never Let Me Go. I’d forgotten that I walked around in a daze for a week or two after reading it. One of the few books I can think of where the plot isn’t utterly engrossing, in fact kind of boring, but the thematic resonance of the plot as it unfolds is so goddamn powerful that you get sucked in anyway.

1982 Janine was an amazing reading experience for me as well. Also, but in very different ways: The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities. Plus non-fiction: Truffaut’s Hitchcock interview. It helps to be in your 20s and a student. More recently, I got hooked on Franzen’s “Freedom”, but with less intensity.

Hob @77

imo, A Flag for Sunrise is esp. good

I don’t think I’ve ever thought “what he said” as often as in this thread: who knew that so many people love Ursula Le Guin etc. But the reference to LITTLE BIG reminds me to add the great later John Crowley quartet of novels that begins with THE SOLITUDES and LOVE AND SLEEP. I guarantee amazement, fascination and delight!

Also swept away by LOTR and at Stranger in a Strange Land age 13 in 1967- a walking 60s cliche.

Along with HDM, “The Hunger Games” was absorbing enough for a 57-year-old. As with Pullman, the first book was great, the second off-peak and the third a let-down, but both left me with an intense feeling of “Boy, I wish I could have read this at thirteen.

And add another cheer for “Little, Big”.

All sorts of books can summon up my imagination. Its always good to get lost in creativity and fantasy. It can bring back childhood innocence or provide a distraction from the bad world. The Hobbit, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games all are great stories of interesting settings for all ages. But books of literature and philosophy such as Island and Brave New World by Huxley or The Catcher in the Rye and 1984 &ct &ct all strengthen the mind and get it thinking.

Dan,

Do you rec Huck Finn to black readers too? (I sure don’t.)

+1 to Dan’s comments, both halves of it.

There was a story the other year about an outraged mother pulling her daughter out of English classes because of the racist filth they were forcing her to read. It turned out that they were doing To kill a mockingbird.

When I’d finished banging my head against the wall, I read the rest of the story – particularly the bit where it said that this girl was the only non-White kid in her class. Knowing how cruel kids can be for the sheer merry hell of it, or just to break up a boring lesson – let alone how cruel they can be when they actually want to – I could imagine what might have been going on & felt a bit more sympathetic.

Gosh, tearing up as I read this comment thread. Yes! I remember getting so lost in a novel that all the activities of teenage life (conversing with your family, brushing your teeth, going to swim practice) seemed somehow insubstantial, weightless, mere marking time until you could return to your “real” life. Feeling a terrible sense of loss and nostalgia — it’s been a long time (in my fifties now) since any novel has engulfed me like that.

Suspect that the experience of reading fiction like a teenager can’t be recaptured now; can the satisfactions of reading faction as a middle-aged person be rewarding nevertheless?

This is not totally complete, I’m pretty sure I missed a couple here and there, but this may save some people the time it took me!

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

Tim Winton’s Cloud Street,
Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book and
Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

SK’s Fear and Trembling

The Imperfectionists,
Shadow Tag, and especially
Olive Kitteridge. The latter contains one story about a lounge piano player that I regard to be (as a self-contained tale) short story perfection.

Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and The Children of God. Who would have thought that “Jesuits in space” could make such absorbing fiction? MDR gets a little too sentimental at times, even for me, but not enough to make me stop liking the books.

Dickens: Our Mutual Friend.

Rafael A. Lafferty, Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, John Le Carre, Kobo Abe, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. . . .
I still like Thomas Malory.

Neal Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon

Infinite Jest

Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and
China Mieville’s “Embassytown”.

George Sand: “The Master Pipers” and “The Miller of d’Angibault”, “Valentine”. These are marvelous and reminded me of the Brontes.

I have also loved discovering some British “gothic” fiction of the late 18th and early 19th centuries recently, such as
Godwin’s “Caleb Williams”,
Hogg’s “Confessions of a Justified Sinner”, and
Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer,” along with some very early twentieth c. gothic, such as
John Meade Falkner’s “The Nebuly Coat”—this last particularly took me back because it has glancing references to earlier works by writers one has read in one’s youth.

Patrick McGrath,
Martha Peake
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station and The Scar.

DeLillo’s White Noise did that for me. Something so uncannily real and yet otherworldly about it (with the bonus of hilarity).

Mantel’s French Revolution book, A Place of Greater Safety, is pretty good too. Especially if you read it in Paris.

Hopscotch is almost certainly the last novel I read that had me totally spellbound. (Actually, no, that would be
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, but it was a much darker kind of spell.)
The Waves is close to an all-time favorite.

Pynchon lovers: no V.? Think that’s my favorite

George Eliot,
Ursula K. LeGuin,
Murasaki Shikibu.

early books of Michael Marshall Smith (before his hack work) are wonderful. “Spares”, “One Of Us” and “Only Forward”

Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy as

Diana Wynne Jones’ The Merlin Conspiracy; she was a wonderful writer for building world

Breath also had that effect on me, as did a bunch of
Anne Tyler novels of which, looking back, I think I was most captivated by Breathing Lessors and The Amateur Marriage.

Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,
Mieville (for me, above all The City and the City,
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
Russel Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child
Stephen White’s “Kill Me”
The Colour Purple Trainspotting
Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (and I loved the film) and
Murakami’s “After Dark”
Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation”.

Haruki Murakami 1Q84 yet,
Norwegian Wood,
the Rat trilogy and
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are pleasures up there with DFW Dickens/Trollope/Dostoievski sprawling novel side.

John Crowley’s Little Big

(audio) War and Peace
Winnie the Pooh and the Roald Dahl books and the Lemony Snicket books

Ozma of Oz and the Neverending Story

Rivers of London.

Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Under Heaven a while back as one of the best books she had ever read. I didn’t think it was that great, but I liked it enough to try some of Kay’s others. I think it was right here on CT that someone called Tigana the best fantasy (?) novel ever written, but I could barely finish it. (Tastes differ….)
Sailing to Sarantium

The Sword in the Stone (the original version, not the one rewritten for The Once and Future King);
The City and the City;
Little, Big; and
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zout

Steven Erikson’s Malanzan Book of the Fallen, most of
Guy Gavriel Kay’s works (save the Fionavar Tapestry, which was all too like Power Rangers), and
R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing.
I’m also a huge fan of historical novels, particularly those set during the Saxon and Danish invasions of Britain. In that department, nothing stands the test of time half as well as
Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles trilogy, which is the best (and most historical) portrayal of Arthur that I’ve ever read.

I also enjoy his other works set in the periods prior to the development of firearms (Stonehenge is quite an impressive work), as well as
Robert Low’s Oathsworn series (his use of language is quite something) and
Simon Scarrow’s Eagle series (these are just pure cotton candy for me).

When I run out, I just read Scandinavian sagas. I guess I’m a titch bloodthirsty.

Barbara Kingsolver, and I wanted to put a word in for The Lacuna as a first-rate transportation device.
Trotsky and Kahlo,

Robert Stone’s

Moby Dick and 2666 have done it.
Bulgakov can do it just so easily, as can
Marilyn Robinson.
And Joyce (especially if you read him out loud, which I do). And
China Mieville can really irrupt into real life in a weird way. I am neither a sci-fi nor a fantasy fan, but his books, with their hyperactive imaginary worlds and creatures, are pretty “intrusive” in that way. I find myself in his The City and the City some of the time,

Never Let Me Go.

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and
1982 Janine
What a carve-up!

The Magic Mountain and
The Man Without Qualities.
Plus non-fiction: Truffaut’s Hitchcock interview.
Franzen’s “Freedom”

A Flag for Sunrise

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome
Connie Willis’ time travel novels have stuck with me as well, in particular ‘Doomsday Book.’ ; ‘To Say Nothing of The Dog’

‘A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’ by James Joyce
‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ by John Fowles.

John Crowley quartet of novels that begins with THE SOLITUDES and LOVE AND SLEEP.

A Prayer For Owen Meany- Irving
A Sacred Hunger- Unsworth
The Secret History- Tartt
The Crow Road- Banks
Instance of the Fingerpost- Pears
In The Lake Of The Woods- O’ Brien (though Things They Carried is his best)
The Stand- King
The Dark Tower (whole series)- King
Geek Love
Never Let Me Go
Alaska, Hawaii & Texas- Michener
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Blindness- Saramago

Stranger in a Strange Land(?)
Hunger Games

Last and First Men” by Olaf Stapleton
“Gormenghast”, by Mervyn Peake
“The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett
Austen
Dickens

Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter

Island and Brave New World by Huxley or
The Catcher in the Rye and
1984

Bulgakov
Hadzhi Murat from Tolstoy
Iain M. Banks

‘Last and First Men’ by Olaf Stapleton

Mantel’s Wolf Hall.;
EF Benson’s Lucia novels of 1920s England

Charles de Lint.

Short stories. Carver, Trevor.

Proust

To the Lighthouse; Friends of Eddie Coyle

Unconsoled is my favourite Ishiguro

Patrick O’Brian;
Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo Rising series a;
Jack Campbell’s space operas and
Sean McMullen’s Greatwinter books. Hrmb. I do see
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate on my shelves, which I read last fall and found to be exceedingly involving, in that classic Russian novel kind of way. Although exceedingly bleak.

Ursula Le Guin. When I was a kid I read The Wizard of Earthsea 1000 times and it transported me in a way that LOTR did not (though I read that about 5 times). In my 40s I read The Dispossessed

Moby Dick; Girl with Dragon Tattoo

Huckleberry Finn
My Family and Other Animals – Durrell
War and Peace

The Book Thief – Zusak