List 5 essential novelists in your library

[Rabrrrrrr]

For me, the essentials are:

Isaac Asimov
Frank Herbert
Ernest Hemingway (I mean, really, is there any better?)
Neal Stephenson
Saul Bellow

[Wickerman]

1. ok

Thomas McGuane
Richard Brautigan
Nathanael West
Kurt Vonnegut
Lorrie Moore

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Ah, Brautigan! Love his stuff.

And Vonnegut, of course, also essential.

The others I am not familiar with.

[punpirate]

16. Glad to see a West fan...

... most people have forgotten him (is Shagpoke Whipple ever more relevant and current than today? :) ).

I'd have to put:

Richard Powers
Wm. Faulkner
Doris Lessing
Wm. Shakespeare
Thomas Pynchon

But, asking an English major to limit to five is really too much to ask. :)

[Wickerman]

44. Indeed

he died way too young. Would've loved to have seen if he would have maintained his edge what with celebrity creeping up on him. We might have seen irony defined.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

17. Damn. Forgot about Vonnegut

Just got Ninety-Two in the Shade but haven't read it yet. McGuane comes highly recommended from a friend.

[hfojvt]

22. I forgot Vonnegut as well

but I am not sure which one of my five I would get rid of.

[swag]

2. Henry James

Jane Austen
Gore Vidal
Haruki Murakami
Kathy Acker

[Zenlitened]

4. Ann Tyler, Margaret Atwood, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and...

... Carl Sagan, because his writing is every bit as awe-inspiring as the best of any of the great novels out there. :)

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. Which reminds me - you can buy huge ass fuckin' furniture of every type

except for one thing: try to find a decent, big enough *&$!&$ bookshelf. Just try it. You can't. The only real bookshelf option is custom built.

Fuckin' America.

"Well, what do you wanna have books for in your house, just takin' up space?"

[fleabert]

37. agreed! it really annoys me when the professional organizers on

hgtv and tlc tell people, 'okay, you can buy new books, but you have to get rid of one for every one you bring home.' WHAT?!?!?!?!!!

It's called a LIBRARY, and I want my house to have my own personal one, tyvm! Even if it is spread into every room and every nook and cranny I can cram one into! back off my books, none of them are going into the garage sale or the charity truck fuckers!

[NoMoreMrNiceGuy]

14. Except for his argument against UFO was weak...

How could someone so smart think that beings that could possibly have a civilization a billion years older than our own(yes there are suns out there a billion years older than our own) couldn't figure out a way to cross the universe. Think of how far we have come in the last 10,000 years....now imagine a billion years...think they know a little bit more about physics than we do? There was only 66 years between the Wright Bros and putting a man on the moon...mindboggling right...again think what we could do in a billion years from now...very simple logic really. I think he was paid by the government to do a little disinfo. He was way too bright not to figure out what I've figured out.

[hfojvt]

23. my sister got "Contact" for me a long time ago

It was on the best-seller list, which I usually consider a repository for fly-by-night trash, but I thought it was quite good. Same with "Demon haunted world" but I never made it through "Broca's Brain"

[AverageJoe]

5. Just five?

Okay:

Hemingway (You're right--there's none better)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Larry Brown
Charles Bukowski
Jack Kerouac
Richard Brautigan

I couldn't help myself--had to add a sixth. That was the best I could do....

[Aristus]

7. Mine. (No order).

Harlan Ellison
Mark Twain
Alexandre Dumas fils
J.R.R. Tolkien
Anthony Burgess

[Rabrrrrrr]

9. Ooh, Ellison! Yes! Brilliant, incredible writer

just wonderful.

[Aristus]

10. I'm going to see him in September at a FantasyCon thing

in Bellevue. Can't wait!

[alarcojon]

8. Mine:

Dostoevsky
Richard Wright
Nabokov
Rushdie
Camus

[shugah]

11. in no particular order

charles dickens
anne rice
j.r.r. tolkien
diana gabaldan
thomas hardy

[PassingFair]

12. In order....

Dickens
Anthony Burgess
Sommerset Maugham
Thomas Hardy
Philip K. Dick

wow, 5 is tough, didn't get to mention a hundred others. I really like the British ACK! I really NEED to add George Orwell.
If I don't stop now I'll..................................

[hfojvt]

24. seeing Dickens reminds me of what Howard Fast has Altgeld say:

"When I put Clemens and Tolstoy together, it's because one has found the soul of America and the other knows the soul of Russia, but Dickens never went deeper than the soul of a shopkeeper. I've never been to England, but, my god, I find no smell of it in Dickens, no taste of it, no love of it, no real hope for it either, and I want a writer to give me that, and to give me people who love and hate and suffer and dream sometimes, like the poor devils in my lawbooks, or like the men and women in Tolstoy and in Mark Twain, not paper cutouts pasted over with so much fancy trimming that never an inch of flesh shows through, if there is any flesh..." The American Howard Fast 1946 p. 206

I find that Howard Fast and Michael Collins tell stories from a working person's (or maybe I mean Marxist) perspective.

[PassingFair]

48. ...but I DO have

"the soul of a shopkeeper". To each his own, and "keep the aspisdistra flying".......

[Redneck Socialist]

Only five? Ack, that's tough...

Melville
Faulkner
Kesey
Cormac McCarthy
TR Pearson

Honorable Mentions

Glen Cook
Charles DeLint
William Gibson
Neil Gaiman
JRR Tolkien

I guess I'll stop there before I list just about every author on my book shelves.

[SnohoDem]

13. Well,

E. Hemingway
J. Steinbeck
J. Irving
R. Heinlein
P. S. Buck

but that's like the 10 best movies or whatever. Ask me tomorrow and the list will be different.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

15. Five for Writing

Martin Amis
James Joyce
Thomas Berger
Umberto Eco
Dashiell Hammett

And an honorable mention (since he's only written two):
Jeffrey Eugenides

[Robeson]

18. OK, first, Gore Vidal. Then....

...Arthur C. Clarke
William Faulkner
Robert Graves
Ray Bradbury

[leftofthedial]

19. well . . . the list might change month-to-month

tony hillerman
robert crais
kurt vonnegut
john nichols
christopher moore

[mykpart]

20. Y'all are all so danged intellectual.

Here's my list:

Stephen King
Anne Rice
Dean R. Koontz
Mary Higgins Clark
Andrew Greely

[hfojvt]

21. Hemingway is the worst

he tells a good story, but then he does not know how to end it, so he kills off all his characters or dumps a big bucket of sh*t on them. Maybe that is the point, but it ends up being pretty depressing reading for me. My five
Poul Anderson
Clifford Simak
Dean Koontz
Daniel Quinn
John Brunner

Imagine that, almost totally sci-fi.

[mitchum]

25. Twain, Flaubert, Selby, Cather, Hammett

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

26. Faulkner, Orwell, Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck,

Cervantes.

[Hatalles]

27. Oh, I've got plenty but if I must narrow it down to five...

Here they are, in no order whatsoever:

1. George Orwell
2. Richard Wright
3. Charles Dickens
4. Charles Johnson
5. Edward Said

Ah... and just took another look at my bookshelf and I can't leave this one off...

6. Toni Morrison

Drat... took another look and because I already have Said on here, I can't leave off...

7. Noam Chomsky

[Heidi]

28. Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Isabel Allende . . .

Umberto Eco, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac . . . about a jillion others.

[mark414]

29. Kurt Vonnegut

Flannery O'Connor

Sylvia Plath

Jack Kerouac

Bret Easton Ellis

[MuseRider]

30. Only 5?

OK, lets see if I can decide.

William Faulkner
Isaac Asimov
Norman Mailer
Alice Walker

and just for fun

Stephan King

At least that is what I would say today.

[Seneca]

31. My high five

1. Miguel de Cervantes
2. Mark Twain
3. Jack London
4. James Baldwin
5. Ken Kesey

[DrZeeLit]

32. It's late.... or early.... and

my list is...

Kingsolver
Clavell
Gabaldon
Shakespeare
Updike

three for fun, one forever, one for USA....

but 5 isn't even enough
I must own 2,000 books
oi

[cestpaspossible]

33. Pynchon, Kozinski, Maughm, Greene, Spinrad

[petronius]

34. Iain Banks, P.G. Wodehouse,

Patrick O'Brian, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler (today, anyway).

[fleabert]

35. I collect Oscar Wilde books, but othewise I am a ho for books, I will

read anything really. except right wing shit.

[EstimatedProphet]

36. Philip K. Dick, Walter Jon Williams, John Brunner, Sinclair Lewis,

Frank Herbert

[REP]

38. G.B. Shaw, Twain, Toole, Kornbluth, Nabakov

Okay, they're not all novelists and one only wrote one novel (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces*) but they're all essential.

*The Neon Bible doesn't really count

[non sociopath skin]

39. My five would be ...

Charles Dickens
James Joyce
Gore Vidal
Thomas Hardy
Emile Zola

The Skin

[SKKY]

40. Ok, no comments. It's my list, not yours...

Herman Hesse
Stephen King
Caleb Carr
Hemingway
Michael Crichton

[NMMNG]

41. Only five?

Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Ray Bradbury

[Hippo_Tron]

42. I like Hemingway and I don't like Hemingway

Hemingway is one of those existentialist authors that tells those who base their life off of religion, that their life is meaningless. On the other hand, he also says that life is meaningless no matter what. I guess I need to be more depressed to fully appreciate Hemingway.

[Lannes]

43. In no particular order

John Updike

Tom Wolfe

Earnest Hemingway

Toni Morrison

Ray Bradbury

[khashka]

45. Well you asked

Robert A. Heinlein
Jane Austen
Iain Banks
Poppy Z. Brite
Dorothy Allison

But honourable mentions go to:
Kate Orman and Paul Cornell




Khash.

[Burma Jones]

46. Vonnegut, Hemingway, Robertson Davies, J.K. Toole, Tolkien

[bertha katzenengel]

47. okay

Sinclair Lewis
Sue Monk Kidd
Betty Smith
Rita Mae Brown
Charles Dickens

[enigmatic]

49. Mine

Charles Bukowski
Sherwood Anderson
Harry Crews
Jack Kerouac
John Steinbeck