book with beautiful prose

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gilead is a great suggestion! I adore that book and also re-read it sometimes.

Marilynne Robinson just came out with a new novel that is the backstory of the one of the characters in Gilead. It's called "Lila" and it's on my book wish list

Some great suggestions above from the PPs. I also thought that "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel were extremely well-written and also very interesting -- I learned a great deal about English history.

I thought Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were well-written. But beautiful, not so much. Same for the Joyce suggestion (and I actually finished Ulysses). To me, creative/revolutionary/well-written prose is often quite different from "beautiful" prose. YMMV.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What a great question - I'm going to totally check out the suggestions you get!

The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard, is a book that definitely found the limits of my vocabulary, and also was written in a way that demanded attention. And it had one of the best endings I've ever read (so hang in there - I found it tough going in the beginning but then I got into it.)

Oh, I never meet anyone who knows of Hazzard. I know there's a low probability here, but are you by any chance a Barbara Pym fan?

No, I haven't heard of her. Why do you associate the two?

I'm somehow feeling this very peculiar sensation that lurking on DCUM has elevated me today, instead of encouraging me to wallow in the murkier depths of parenting!

Hazzard was one of the British authors who called Pym a 20th-century Jane Austen and helped revive interest in her work in the 1970s, when she had been discarded by her publisher as too unfashionable. She had a unique voice and wrote small, quiet, sharply observed novels about middle-class English women. Nothing much happens in these books, but how I love them. I believe Shirley Hazzard called one of her novels "comic, heartbreaking and brave, like life itself," and she was one of many novelists who were Pym fans: Laurie Colwin, Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates, and Penelope Lively are some of the others who come to mind. You might enjoy her.

And I love Transit of Venus and am going downstairs now to get it off the shelf and put it in the stack for a reread. Thanks for reminding me of it. Now we can crawl back into the usual DCUM mire of parenting and Ebola.

[Anonymous]

Anything by Annie Proulx or Julia Glass
Whitman's Leaves of Grass
Cormac McCarthy

[Anonymous]

beloved by toni morrison

[Anonymous]

Jane Eyre - before all others!

[Anonymous]

Anything by Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen.

[Anonymous]

I'm really enjoying All the Light We Cannot See

[Anonymous]

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
So long, see you tomorrow by William Maxwell
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Master and Margerita by Bulgakov
James Baldwin--I particularly love Giovanni's Room

I also love Roberto Bolano and Haruki Murakami's writing, but they are more of an acquired taste.

[Anonymous]

Agreed--The English Patient. Absolutely stunning prose.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agreed--The English Patient. Absolutely stunning prose.

The Captain's Table, another good Ondaatje

[Anonymous]

The Goldfinch. Some passages are so gorgeous they knock me over. A paragraph early on in the book comes to mind in which the narrator recalls the stark horror of what losing his mother really means -- that she is never coming back -- and how everytime he remembers it's so crushingly horrible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agreed--The English Patient. Absolutely stunning prose.

The Captain's Table, another good Ondaatje

Sorry Autocorrect made it "captain" instead of "cat." It should be "The Cat's Table."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Goldfinch. Some passages are so gorgeous they knock me over. A paragraph early on in the book comes to mind in which the narrator recalls the stark horror of what losing his mother really means -- that she is never coming back -- and how everytime he remembers it's so crushingly horrible.

I completely agree with you.

[Anonymous]

I loved Shantaram, Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. I thought they were all beautifully written, but I don't know that you'll improve your vocabulary reading them.

[Anonymous]

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Absolutely beautifully written

Anything by lorrie moore - she writes some sentences so gorgeous I stop reading to marvel and wish I had written them

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (she also has a mystery series that is incredibly well-written)