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This is the first great work of modern fiction I ever read - and it changed the way I looked at fiction forever. Obviously it holds a special place! For a long time during my fascination with film-making (when I was an undergrduate) I toyed with the idea of making a film out of it. The subjective viewpoint of the entire novel - throughout which we hear only one half of a conversation - as if the other person engaged in conversation is the reader him/herself - simply amazed me when I read it for the first time. What I found most moving was that while Camus notes that ``the absurd is human attempts at friendship and love in the face of death'', it is this constant attempt to invest the inherently meaningless with a meaning that gives our pitiful lives such tragic grandeur. |
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Samuel Beckett somehow resonates with Camus - at least it does to my mind. Beckett;s conecption of the absurd finds a common ground with Camus' existentialism ("Life is absurd") - and nowhere is this more clear than this play by Beckett. I read it one afternoon having borrowed it from my sister (it was part of her required reading for a MA course) and was in a daze throughout the evening - everything seemed unreal. I guess it launched me into a mild form of hallucinogenic trip. Anyway, it's quite a short play - so no one can give the excuse of not having read it because s/he doesn't have time. I also liked Beckett's Endgame. |
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Being the account of a day in the life of Adam Appleby - a graduate student of literature , a practicing Catholic, married and father of three children (a direct outcome of his inability to use contraception which will violate his Catholic beliefs), desperate for a job to support his ever-increasing family. This is another one in the British ``campus novel'' tradition - started by Kingsley Amis with his ``Lucky Jim''. However the special feature of this book that I loved was the way Lodge parodies the style of several famous writers (like Conrad, Woolf, Kafka to name a few) in different chapters. I particularly enjoyed the chapter written in Kafkaesque style. |
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"Life is one big Plan B". That's one of the really deep truths about life that the book talks about. Fantasy meets cyber-punk - well, that's one way to explain what reading it felt like. The very first chapter gives you the feeling that this is an out-of-the-ordinary tale. And as you progress more you start to get the idea that all the action is taking place inside someone's mind - in fact the narrator is trapped inside a wholly imagined universe in his own mind. |
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OK - so everyone knows about this one! But I still thought I better include it - especially as I really didn't like Tolkien's other well-known book The Hobbit all that much. Fortunately, I read Lord of the Rings first - but in case someone has been turned off Tolkien after reading The Hobbit, I definitely would recommend that you try out at least one of the three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of theKing) before giving up Tolkien for good. And I'd recommend getting the one-volume edition of the trilogy if you are reading this for the first time. I read the first two volumes from the local British Council library - and had to wait an agonizing three months before I tracked down the third volume in the St Xavier's College library - it was sheer torture not knowing what was going to happen at the end ! But the thing to really marvel at is the way Tolkien invents languages and lore for his Middle-Earth. Incidentally, you might also enjoy two spin-off volumes: The Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad (which can be enjoyed for the wonderful maps alone, even without its connection to Tolkien) and The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth by Robert Foster (a handy reference book to have at your side, if like me, you occasionally dip into one of the volumes at random and get thoroughly confused by who's who). |
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Partly autobiography, partly informal essays, this is one of the best pieces of prose writing that I have read - I can recall only a few book of essays that come close (like George Steiner's Language and Silence) to the sheer beauty of language. And I haven't even started saying anything about the content. The essays range from memoirs of his growing up in England, arrival in USA and working with physicists like Bethe and Feynman (in fact Dyson was the one who showed that Feynman's diagrammatic version of Quantum Electrodynamics was equivalent to Schinger's more abstract formalism - and should be considered one of the co-founders of Quantum Field Theory) to his stint as scientific advisor to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, his mentoring of a student who designed a home-made atomic bomb and his musings on extending our civilization to outer space. Also strongly recommended is Dyson's Infinite in all Directions. |
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William Golding should definitely be considered a SF author who was never considered as such by the critics. Fortunately for him - because otherwise I doubt he would have won the Nobel Prize for Literature - considering the fact that it has eluded Stanislaw Lem so far. But both his first novel as well as The Inheritors are very much in the SF tradition. I don't know whether the title of this book was meant as a parody of the Lord of the Rings but apparently Golding did deliberately set about writing a book which will overturn all expectations about a story of boys' adventure in a desert island. I once read a Golding interview in which he said that he tried to counter the prevailing notion about the innocence of children. As he shows tellingly in this book - children are remarakably sadistic and vicious and left to themselves (i.e., without adult supervision) will end up killing each other. It's not something that we would like to face - but it is the truth. Golding does a remarkable job of ripping apart one of our most cherished illusions. |