Seventeen years ago, I asked a number of people I knew:

What's a novel you love? What comes to mind?

--=Interpret those questions as you like. The only clarification I will offer is that any novel you love will do; it doesn't have to be the sort of thing we usually discuss here.

Anyone care to respond here?

Blood Sport, Robert F. Jones

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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I love novels that I can return to time and again, getting something new (as well as something pleasantly familiar) from them every time.

Two books (if I may) do that for me more than any others: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, and De kleine Johannes (“Little Johnny”) by Frederik van Eeden.

The first is a well-known tale for children, in which a nerdy boy finds a magical book and at a certain point while reading it ends up literally inside the story it contains. I remember first reading it at the age of nine or so, and running upstairs to tell my mother that I had found “a book that contains everything!” Re-reading it first as a teenager and then as an adult, I found that my appreciation for the second half of the book, which has a more melancholy tone than the opening adventures, got to me more and more.

The edition I have is printed in two different colours, to indicate in which reality the part of the story we are reading is taking place, and has gorgeous illustrations by Roswitha Quadflieg, which sadly have been removed from more recent editions and replaced with something more contemporary. Sic transit…

De kleine Johannes is perhaps somewhat comparable to Pinocchio, in that it is a kind of bildungsroman disguised as a fairy tale. A young boy goes looking for a book that contains the aswers to all questions (seriously) and ends up meeting various magical creatures that either deceive him or help him make sense of the world. When I first read it in high school, being too young to get everything out of it, I was struck especially by the imagination and symbolism at work in it, but as with The Neverending Story, as I get older I find that the later, sadder parts of the book speak to me more everytime I re-read it. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been able to read its closing line without shedding a manly tear or two.

From the above, a recipe for novels that I love emerges: books that you can return to and that age well, that are imaginative/fanciful but still convincingly tell you something about human nature, and preferably are at least a little melancholy. The fact that both these novels are about boys with a passion for books is perhaps not entirely coincidental.

For sake of the discussion, I should have added just a bit about Blood Sport and Jones, as Avoosl did for his novels.

As best I can tell, Jones fits into the Kerouac philosophical lineage that included the likes of Jim Harrison, and to my mind, Steinbeck had a bit of this in him before Kerouac--Kerouac was an affected Steinbeck, in a way. Now, I could never stand to read Kerouac, but I have read Harrison. Jones is in many ways more effective.

He really grapples with the masculine id, and it resonated with me in a way that was meaningful. You'll read an insightful passage and it'll go off in your head: "Bingo! Yep, that's there in me, too...".

Catch-22 meant a lot to me, too.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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I am sorry to say, ... trying to grasp for it, I don't have a particular novel that I love. Well, it might be Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. But no, I honestly don't think of that one often, in afterthought, ... even though the reading itself was a passionate love affair. My broken heart has sought something else in literature, it has been on an endless quest of discovery, seeking aesthetic marvels and terror, ... in deep space, and in ancient sinister corners of the World.

I enjoy the company of Lovecraft, I do that; his wide intellect gives me the greatest sense of comfort. But the closest to genuine love I have come in literature, must probably be Tolkien's world; to walk the undulating paths and visit the sun-dappled forest glens of Middle-earth, ... to meet the elves at Rivendell, ... to go on quests of exploration. In retrospect Tolkien also uprooted the evils of our present world, cleansed it. (He was the opposite of corruption, that you always risk running into whichever other author you read. His only vice was smoking, but it is a minor quibble.) That is where I want to settle down, including the whole body of manuscripts in The History of Middle-earth.

I used the wrong word, I meant glades, not "glens". But glens are nice too, especially the secluded ones where no axe has cut.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 9 Jun 21 | 05:24AM by Knygatin.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' by William Hope Hodgson. An impressive first novel (1907), which, despite the weak later chapters, displays his finest development of naturalistic weird atmosphere.

jkh

Knygatin wrote:

"Tolkien also uprooted the evils of our present world, cleansed it. (He was the opposite of corruption, that you always risk running into whichever other author you read.)"

There's so much truth in what you say here, Knygatin, that I wish to salute you from my North Dakotan enclave.

Dale

I salute you back, and hail you, Dale. Your disciplined and stable character, and courtesy, is exemplary for us all to emulate.

Thank you for such kind words, Knygatin. By the way, apropos of your comments about Tolkien, the History of Middle-earth, etc. -- just today I read something that puts our current hyper-exposure to rubbish and lies in perspective; over against that foetid part of reality there is the fact that an abundance of good things to read is available to us, and abundance not so readily available in former times.

Specifically, I got hold a the letters section of Johyn o' London's Weekly for 3 March 1960. J. Burn of Sheffield writes about her passion for buying books and reading, but also the experience of disappointment when she has taken too seriously some reviewer's excessive praise. Yet, she says, one cannot simply disregard reviews, else how would one find out about what's there? But anyway, she mentions how she has ignored some books that would have been good to read, and gives Tolkien's The Lords of the Ring [sic] as an example. Reviews gave her the impression that it was "some sort of fairy-tale with humanised animals as heroes," and so she wasn't interested till a friend loaned the first two volumes to her. Then she "became an addict" who still looks "for the advertisement of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien."

I rather hope she lived to read The Silmarillion when it was published 17 years later.

But for us, the wealth of Tolkien's writing that's available, including the History that you mention, would've been inconceivable in 1960.

And reading him we are put in touch with parts of reality that are not foetid, not corrupt, but the opposite of corruption, as you say. How fortunate we are!

That is a very uplifting post, Dale! Fortunate indeed! In spite of all the darkness and deceitfulness, we live in very interesting times.

And there is great potential for overturning the deceivers, thanks to all the information that is now slipping out. Before the Internet, only 25 years ago, most people were kept completely ignorant and in the dark.

But that is off topic ...

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Seventeen years ago, I asked a number of people I
> knew:
>
> What's a novel you love? What comes to mind?
>
> --=Interpret those questions as you like. The
> only clarification I will offer is that any novel
> you love will do; it doesn't have to be the sort
> of thing we usually discuss here.
>
> Anyone care to respond here?


"The Return", by Walter De la Mare, and "The Country of the Pointed Firs", by Sarah Orne Jewett. They both explore the tension between past and present, real or imagined, in compelling style.

jkh

You like The Country of the Pointed Firs too? :)

You know who else did?

M. R. James.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> You like The Country of the Pointed Firs too? :)
>
> You know who else did?
>
> M. R. James.

Hah! I got them both from Project Gutenberg!

Two new works to read, vetted by seasoned EDers! What could be better!

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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