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Transcendent Reads - your thoughts and lists

"I know it when I see it" originates with Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) but that is getting off topic.

To update my list:

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

I think my strong sense of wanting to right wrongs probably originates with this book or reading it gave expression to an innate feeling.

The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien

Still one I reread with the same enjoyment every time. There are passages in LOTR that transport me to another time and place entirely - the description of Lothorian and Galadriel for example are filled with such unbearable lightness of being - its the only way I can describe that feeling.

Salman Rushdie

oh the joy of reading a man who plays, indulges, manipulates, controls words like he does. Pure joy!

Dune - Frank Herbert

Still one of my all time favourite sci-fi books. The size of the universe he created combined with the intimacy which the story is told still blows me away.
 
753C said:
Here's a start....
The Bible
To put it succinctly, no other book has had such a profound effect on the way I live and behave. Not that I am a perfect Christian (no such thing), but I frame everything I do for better or worse within the concepts and teachings of this book.


The Hobbit & The Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien
Outside of Bible stories, this was the first truly epic adventure story I ever heard. It seems exposure as a child goes along way towards framing people's opinions of this story, but for me it will remain one of the greatest fictional tales ever told.


All The Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
The landscape, characters, dialogue, prose. McCarthy is masterful.


The Heart of The Matter – Graham Greene
A richly and beautifully told morality play. One of the first stories I read cast in a British Colonial landscape. These settings have been a draw for me ever since.


Independence Day – Richard Ford
Ford's Bascombe trilogy, is, in my opinion the greatest work by any living American author that I have read. I have never read of a more richly drawn and complex character than Frank Bascombe.


James Lee Burke – Four way toss-up between Heavens Prisoners, Burning Angel, Dixie City Jam, and Crusaders Cross.
Burke is simply the best there is in this genre. And he writes some of the best prose from any genre.


The Piano Tuner – Daniel Mason
In 1886 a humble London piano tuner accepts a commission from the department of war to travel through British India to Burma to repair a rare piano owned by a mysterious surgeon-major who is somehow using the piano to further the expansion of the British Empire. Absolutely mesmerizing prose that paints all the beautiful little scenes and interactions with magic and mystery.


Pet Cemetery – Stephen King
Transcendent because it scared the &%*# out of me when I was thirteen.


Man Child In The Promised Land – Claude Brown
The grittiest, most realistic, and most honest piece of writing I've ever read about growing up black in the Ghetto. Sad, exciting, funny, provocative, hopeful. I think it would be difficult for anyone to read it and not be changed.


Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain
Stayed with me for a looong time after I finished it. The stream of consciousness of young Iraq war combat vet Billy Flynn is hilarious, profound, indicting, forgiving, terrified, and brave all at once.


The Things They Carried – Tim O'Brien
Wrenching, beautifully told stories from the Vietnam war. Everyone should read it.
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LOL I was older when I discovered Stephen King and he still scared the --- out of me too :) For me one of his scariest was 'It'. I'm sure lots of people have developed a fear of clowns because of that book.

Based on recommendations from other readers on this forum I have some of James Lee Burke but my TBR list is sooo long I haven't got to them yet.

The Vietnam book just reminded me of another book that was pretty transcendent when I read it

"No Number is Greater Than One" - David Weiss
 
Oh yeah! To Kill a Mockingbird. I forgot that one. Also one I would consider transcendent. I think I re-read it about once every two summers or so.

If it speeds Burke along your TBR list, there's this :)

“In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.”
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And it just keeps coming with him. Beyond "descriptive prose", he writes things that are profound to me on a deep level. The dialogue between characters is ridiculously entertaining as well.
 
Not really no - but thanks for trying :) - I have this entirely eccentric way of selecting my next book - when I've run out of a current series of reads (I tend to get stuck in a spate of reading a particular author or a particular series) I go through pretty much every book I have (all 1900 of them!) until something jumps out and grabs my eye and says 'read me'. It might be something new or something old I'm rereading.
 
hmm I would need to think about that. I have read some non-fiction that I have thoroughly enjoyed, but transcendent .... hmmm???
 
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