He’s a pretty voracious reader, I think now he’s retired he’s getting through 3 or 4 books a week.
Ulysses is his favourite book, recent reads he’s spoken to me about are the Burrows autobiography, Stefan Zwieg & an Oppenheimer tome.
I’d like to get him something good he hasn’t read.
All suggestions welcome.
by BlueSmarties12345
14 Comments
My dad fucking loved *Moby Dick.*
EDIT: I missed “obscure.” Sorry. Obscure and classic is a tough needle to thread. Maybe *The Anied*? I’ve certainly never gotten all the way through it.
The Master of the Day of Judgement by Leo Perutz .
Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen.
These are three novels that I really enjoyed – not too obscure, but all very readable;
*The Woman in White*, by Wilkie Collins
*Foucault’s Pendulum*, by Umberto Eco
*The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant*, by Pablo Tusset
If Ulysses is his favorite book, has he already read The Odyssey?
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
As a dad who also likes big, chunky books: **Gormenghast** trilogy – Mervyn Peake, **Book of the New Sun** – Gene Wolfe or **First and Last Men** – Olaf Stapledon
If he liked Oppenheimer, try Richard Feynman’s autobiography Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman. A very cool book.
[lightly edited for clarity]
I’m on a real [ergodic lit](https://medium.com/illumination/what-is-ergodic-literature-c4f015b4d40a) kick right now, and **House of Leaves** by Mark Danielewski has to be the most brilliant, experimental novel I’ve ever read. Since *Ulysses* is such a perfect example of the potential of the modernist genre, maybe he’d enjoy reading something that is similarly held up in the ergodic genre.
A few warnings – it’s fairly immersive solipsistic horror, and can, on occasion, get somewhat graphic with the curse words and sex acts (though I promise sex is not a big focus of the story). Much of it is written in the style of an academic textbook, and I had to break out the dictionary on a few occasions (my tagline for the book is usually “hope you like footnotes and nightmares).
Very basically, *House of Leaves* is a book about a journal about a manuscript about a documentary about a house that is larger on the inside than the outside. But that is only the start of it.
One of the glowing blurbs on the jacket of the book perfectly sums up how I feel about my experiences reading the book:
*“A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent – it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, JG Ballard, Stephen King, and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.” – Bret Easton Ellis.*
***
One other suggestion for classic ergodic literature is **Cain’s Jawbone** by Edward Mathers (who wrote under the pen name Torquemada – a name he borrowed from the very first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century).
*Cain’s Jawbone* was first published in 1934 and told the story of six separate murders. The book is exactly 100 pages, but all the pages are out of order. If you can put them in order, you’ll figure out exactly what happened to all six. Sound easy? There are literally millions of permutations possible, and it will require research of now-obscure topics hinted at within the pages to figure out the correct order. To this day it’s still considered one of the most difficult literary puzzles in history.
You can get it as an ebook, but I highly recommend a box set that has the pages already separated so you can spread them out and reference them more easily.
The Rim of the Morning by William Sloane. It’s early cosmic.
Mornings on Horseback by McCullough (or almost any David McCullough title)
The Path Between the Seas is also good
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
“Take Me Where the Good Times Are,” by Robert Cormier
“Three Tales from the Life of Knulp,” by Hermann Hesse
Has he read Hunchback of Notredame and Toilers of the Sea by victor Hugo??
A modern classic, but if the stream-of-consciousness writing is an aspect of Ulysses he enjoys, Jon Fosse’s Septology is brilliant!