Susan's Place Transgender Resources

You can list 1, 5, 10, 20, 100, or however many novels you'd like.

1. Tolstoy - War and Peace
2. Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
3. Nabokov - Lolita
4. Murakami - Norwegian Wood
5. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
6. Murakami - The Windup Bird Chronicle
7. Orwell - 1984
8. Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
9. Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
10. Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises

Practically anything by George Eliot.  Her mind is incredibly powerful and analytical.

The best one by her I've read so far is Middlemarch.  It's not an easy read - long and convoluted, with dozens of characters and dense, sometimes endless paragraphs.  In a way, it's a historical novel, because she is setting it some forty years in the past (around 1830) from when she wrote it (1871), and she tracks many real events that were unfolding at the time of the action in the story line.

Eliot really lights up the inside of her characters.  She doesn't just describe actions.  She shows the wheels turning inside the heads of the characters, showing why they do what they do.  There is often a little philosophical paragraph set in the action that illuminates some principle of human behavior.

Eliot herself is a fascinating figure.  She was Mary Ann Evans.  She adopted the pen name of George Eliot because she refused to be pigeonholed as a "female novelist" at a time in England when female writers were treated with condescension.  She lived a remarkably unconventional life for the time, consorting with all manner of freethinkers, scientists, radicals, and progressive intellectuals.

Quote from: itsApril on February 01, 2016, 03:29:07 PM
Practically anything by George Eliot.  Her mind is incredibly powerful and analytical.

The best one by her I've read so far is Middlemarch.  It's not an easy read - long and convoluted, with dozens of characters and dense, sometimes endless paragraphs.  In a way, it's a historical novel, because she is setting it some forty years in the past (around 1830) from when she wrote it (1871), and she tracks many real events that were unfolding at the time of the action in the story line.

Eliot really lights up the inside of her characters.  She doesn't just describe actions.  She shows the wheels turning inside the heads of the characters, showing why they do what they do.  There is often a little philosophical paragraph set in the action that illuminates some principle of human behavior.

Eliot herself is a fascinating figure.  She was Mary Ann Evans.  She adopted the pen name of George Eliot because she refused to be pigeonholed as a "female novelist" at a time in England when female writers were treated with condescension.  She lived a remarkably unconventional life for the time, consorting with all manner of freethinkers, scientists, radicals, and progressive intellectuals.

Thank you for sharing April, and as always your beautiful and intelligent writing.  :)

 
        V.                         Thomas Pynchon
        Gravity's Rainbow       Thomas Pynchon
       Slaughter House Five     Kurt Vonnegut
       World According to Garp    John Irving

Wow! I have a lot of them. Well, here goes.

Dharma Bums- Jack Kerouac
Stone Butch Blues- Leslie Feinberg
Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath

:)

every thing from Aldous Huxley , Soren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus

The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
Time Enough for Love - Robert Heinlein
Without Remorse - Tom Clancy (His best IMHO)
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. le Guin
This Perfect Day - Ira Levin
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
1984 - George Orwell
All My Sins Remembered - Joe Haldeman
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

There is 15 off the top of my head. 

Wow, there are some great choices here. What a fine, literate bunch we are! (https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthefiringline.com%2Fforums%2Fimages%2Fsmilies%2Fwink.gif&hash=fd49c1687b59c0ea097a7b4f1ed562a996fdaf5c)

Off the top of my head, some of my favorites, in no particular order...

English Passengers -- Matthew Kneale
Mansfield Park  -- Jane Austen
The Wings of the Dove -- Henry James
Morality Play -- Barry Unsworth
Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy:  Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road
Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried -- Tim O'Brien

And that reminds me... the entire Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series, by Patrick O'Brian.

And the entire Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser.  (https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthefiringline.com%2Fforums%2Fimages%2Fsmilies%2Fbiggrin.gif&hash=fa2db8a2d15c338f95b7a2cbcb46a673a808a937)  (https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthefiringline.com%2Fforums%2Fimages%2Fsmilies%2Fbiggrin.gif&hash=fa2db8a2d15c338f95b7a2cbcb46a673a808a937)

Let's See
Interview with the Vampire
Queen of the Damned
Lost Souls
This Side of Paradise
The Beautiful and Damned
The Three Musketeers

and as I'm sure many of you can too, I can go on and on