• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Transcendent Reads - your thoughts and lists

Yes. sometimes it is the little things that stand out.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le
Guin are good books I really injoyed the first three, although I haven't yet gotten a chance to read the last book.
 
I know that my list is rather long and one might reasonably wonder just how many transcendent books I can have read. Well as many as you see, each one transcending ordinary good and excellent writing in some easily noticeable way. But, still, there has to be a top of the heap, somehow, you might ask, a best of the best? And yes, there is.
The three most beautiful books in that entire list are undoubtedly:
The Hunters by James Salter​
Light Years by James Salter​
Memories of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine.​
They are my best of the best: exquisite stories and scenes, told in breathtakingly beautiful writing. That's what does it for me, and there are three tied for first. That's just the way it is. :)
But please pick any one to start, anyone who wishes to try one out.
​
 
Peder said:
Sometimes it is just a chapter that is transcendent for me and like nothing I have ever seen before, or even just a paragraph. But when it hits home it really does and I remember it forever.
Click to expand...

Sometimes an author gives us such a fantastic sense of place, and you've reminded me of one such instance.

In Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke, his opening description of the Gulf (of Mexico) is just that....transcendent. :) Appealing to all our senses.

I was just off Southwest Pass, between Pecan and Marsh islands, with the green, whitecapping water of the Gulf Stream to the south and the long, flat expanse of the Louisiana coastline behind me--which is really not a coastline at all but instead a huge wetlands area of sawgrass, dead cypress strung with wisps of moss, and a maze of canals and bayous that are choked with Japanese water lilies whose purple flowers audibly pop in the morning and whose root systems can wind around your propeller shaft like cable wire. It was May and the breeze was warm and smelled of salt spray and schools of feeding white trout, and high above me pelicans floated on the warm air currents, their extended wings gilded in the sunlight, until suddenly one would drop from the sky like a bomb from its rack, its wings cocked back against its sides, and explode against the water's surface and then rise dripping with a menhaden or a mullet flapping from its pouched beak.

But the sky had been streaked with red at dawn, and I knew that by afternoon thunderheads would roll out of the south, the temperature would suddenly drop twenty degrees, as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out from under an enormous dark bowl, and the blackened sky would tremble with trees of lightening.
Click to expand...
 
Pontalba, that is truly a gloriously beautiful and transcendent beginning to a detective novel. That is why I like James Lee Burke. The images, oh the images! Trees of lightning -- worth a place in any beautiful poem.
 
Burke is one of the most intense writers of detective novels I've encountered. Nothing laid back about that Southern fella! His Dave Robicheaux is a complicated and extremely intense character. Multi-layered.
 
pontalba said:
Burke is one of the most intense writers of detective novels I've encountered. Nothing laid back about that Southern fella! His Dave Robicheaux is a complicated and extremely intense character. Multi-layered.
Click to expand...
Yup! The kind of writing I go for.
 
I thought they were rather 'flocking' lol at least as much as anything 'flocks' on this forum :) which can be a tad slow.
 
adjust away :)

So are we going challenge each other to read at least one book off some one elses' list and compare notes?
 
Wow, discussion on a forum called "Book and Reader".....whadda concept! /evil grin/

It seems that not enough posters have similar enough tastes to be able to discuss. I wish that it could be emphasized that dissimilar tastes can discuss just as effectively, just as interestingly as similar. It's not enough to say "I liked it" or "it was good". Why??? /sigh/
 
Meadow337 said:
adjust away :)

So are we going challenge each other to read at least one book off some one elses' list and compare notes?
Click to expand...

We might do that naturally. I am already eyeing several on your list.

I could prefer that each of the readers on BAR might think of one book (or more) that stands out for them and post it. Each one must have one, at least. But there seems to be a reluctance.
 
pontalba said:
Wow, discussion on a forum called "Book and Reader".....whadda concept! /evil grin/

It seems that not enough posters have similar enough tastes to be able to discuss. I wish that it could be emphasized that dissimilar tastes can discuss just as effectively, just as interestingly as similar. It's not enough to say "I liked it" or "it was good". Why??? /sigh/
Click to expand...

Oh does that ever deserve to be in bold!

Excellent thought, Pontalba.
 
Meadow337 said:
adjust away :)

So are we going challenge each other to read at least one book off some one elses' list and compare notes?
Click to expand...

Actually.......I've already ordered one from your list. Blood of Flowers by Amirrezvani Anita, and the next one...name escapes me by the same author. I'd had my eye on the former for a while, and your estimation knocked me off the fence. :)
 
Sky Burial by Xinran Xue stands out for me from your list, Meadow. Way different from my usual.
 
Peder said:
We might do that naturally. I am already eyeing several on your list.

I could prefer that each of the readers on BAR might think of one book (or more) that stands out for them and post it. Each one must have one, at least. But there seems to be a reluctance.
Click to expand...

That would be good :)
 
pontalba said:
Actually.......I've already ordered one from your list. Blood of Flowers by Amirrezvani Anita, and the next one...name escapes me by the same author. I'd had my eye on the former for a while, and your estimation knocked me off the fence. :)
Click to expand...
oh good :) I have also been taking a look at books from the lists.

I was too busy with other things today to look further, but it's on the list for tomorrow.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top