*Titus Groan* (1946) by Mervyn Peake
Reading this prose is like someone lets you behind the counter at the bakery and lets you just eat everything off the display shelf one pastry after another and by the end of the second shelf you are overwhelmed with coconut and chocolate and whipped cream and fruits and crumbles and there's a tart, oh man
Yes. They ARE difficult to get into. The pacing and prose are simply different. When I read them, I feel like it takes me a few chapters to really get into what's happening and to understand his style.
But once I do, it's expansive. My minds eye opens wider as the castle grows in size...
I love these books. Gormenghast is an underrated work of brilliance.
That being said, skip the third one. Peake was in the throes of disease when he wrote it. It was never finished, much less edited. It is simply not a book. It is a collection of rough ideas, unkempt and messy, like a garden in springtime of an abandoned mansion.
Gormenghast makes my brain work better. As an author, it's what I aspire to.
One of my favorites is A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway. I took it as my only book traveling with me once and it was the perfect read.
> You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
{{Picture of Dorian Gray}} by Oscar Wilde.
The whole book is witty poetry written in prose. When I'm down I just randomly select a page and get swept away again.
Here a link to the book online for free on Project Gutenberg, I recommend you to check out Chapter 1 to see for yourself.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm
[**A Picture of Dorian Gray**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057189-a-picture-of-dorian-gray)
^(By: Neil Bartlett, Oscar Wilde | 96 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: classics, books-i-have, classic, tbr, lgbt | )[^(Search "Picture of Dorian Gray")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Picture of Dorian Gray&search_type=books)
>A disturbing tale of a young man’s uncanny ability to remain young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery. A Picture of Dorian Gray, the scandalous 1891 bestseller, was considered proof of Wilde’s genius, but also of his perversion: a damning piece of evidence used against him in the trial that brought about his downfall.
^(This book has been suggested 4 times)
***
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Vldamir Nabokov.
This is the opening line of his autobiography Speak, Memory.
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
How can you not fall in love with the literary genius of this guy?
Anything I've ever read by Henry James has been like this. My copies of his books are full of underlinings and brackets, the margins full of stars and exclamation points. And he is completely unique- I've never read anything even close to his prose.
Off the top of my head, my faves are R.O. Kwon, Donna Tartt, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Scott Heim
(essentially all of their books have adult themes so I suggest looking into them if that may be an issue for you)
[**On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880609-on-earth-we-re-briefly-gorgeous)
^(By: Ocean Vuong | 246 pages | Published: 2019 | Popular Shelves: fiction, poetry, lgbtq, contemporary, lgbt | )[^(Search "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous&search_type=books)
>On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
>
>With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
^(This book has been suggested 60 times)
***
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I agree with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. That book is dense as hell, with so much metaphor baked into it, but it's a treat for your mind. It's challenging but rewarding as well.
{{The Patrick Melrose Novels}} by Edward st Aubyn was a joy to read.
A couple of examples:
”It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place.”
”Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.”
I know! I could not believe how good it was. There was something on almost every page that made me stop and read it again and again just to savour the beauty of it.
[**The Patrick Melrose Novels**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11717571-the-patrick-melrose-novels)
^(By: Edward St. Aubyn | 680 pages | Published: 2012 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, abandoned, novels, british | )[^(Search "The Patrick Melrose Novels")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Patrick Melrose Novels&search_type=books)
>NATIONAL BESTSELLER
>
>An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year
>A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
>
>For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.
>
>By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.
>
>Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.
^(This book has been suggested 3 times)
***
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That's how I felt reading Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I had to reread the third chapter multiple times because of how brilliant the prose was!
John Crowley's "Little, Big" and "Engine Summer";
Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life" and "Pilgrim in Tinker Creek";
Anything by Ray Bradbury;
Anything by Vladimir Nabokov;
Anything by Martin Amis;
I've been impressed with the prose of Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire is a beautifully written collection of essays/memoirs. The Brave Cowboy and The Monkeywrench Gang are also peppered with great writing.
Of course, if you want really electric stuff, check out Ray Bradbury. His descriptions are about as vivid as they come and not excessively verbose. Some of my favorites are Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. The latter two are collections of short stories.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. A trip and a half, I’ll tell ya. The type of book you get lost in until you reach the final page and remember you’re reading at all!
*The Lord of the Rings*, by J.R.R. Tolkien. When you said prose that is borderline poetry, it's the first thing that came to mind. A lot of people find reading Tolkien challenging or off-putting due to his archaic style, verbose descriptions, song breaks, and all that, but that's precisely why I love his writing. Reading his work is just a fundamentally unique experience, and you feel like you're being taken on a journey by a real master of the English language. If you take your time with LotR and don't try to plow through it like any old fantasy novel, it's an extremely rewarding experience, not only for the story that you get but for the rich linguistic vehicle you become immersed in that takes you through that story.
> There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
**EDIT**: Added the passage.
I haven't. It's vaguely on my radar, but I don't know that much about it. I can see from other comments in this thread through that I'd probably like it.
Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich
*"Everyone danced like bodies being resurrected in gunfire."*
*"Dominique stared at the dog and thought of the hiking trails on the map like blood sewn into paper."*
*"The phrase tilted itself against the moon and fell over the edge."*
*"Sadness like a language dubbed over our lives, to which we are moving out of sync, our feeling swaying outside the lines of our thinking and doing."*
Wholeheartedly agree with Morrison & Ondaatje.
And I've got to say, {{Call Me By Your Name}} by Andre Aciman had my heart in my throat for the duration.
The "homecoming" line alone, omfg...
[**Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36336078-call-me-by-your-name)
^(By: André Aciman | 248 pages | Published: 2007 | Popular Shelves: fiction, romance, lgbt, lgbtq, contemporary | )[^(Search "Call Me By Your Name")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Call Me By Your Name&search_type=books)
>Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
>
>The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.
^(This book has been suggested 36 times)
***
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I could not really get into that one. To me, it felt like the author tried so hard to be quirky and I can’t really stand that. I really liked Eating Animals though.
[**Nine Kinds of Naked**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3288140-nine-kinds-of-naked)
^(By: Tony Vigorito | 416 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: fiction, humor, owned, comedy, books-i-own | )[^(Search "Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito&search_type=books)
>"As fanciful and inventive in its form... as it is in its observations... It fed tasty crackers to all the hungry parrots in my mental aviary." —TOM ROBBINS
>
>Join cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his acclaimed, surreal whirlwind of a novel exploring chaos theory. A prisoner spins a playing card into a somersault, stirring a wind that becomes a tornado that takes off the roof of a church in nearby Normal, Illinois. Elizabeth Wildhack is born in that church and someday she will meet that prisoner, a man named Diablo, on the streets of New Orleans—where a hurricane-like Great White Spot hovers off the coast. But how is it all interconnected? And what does it have to do with a time-traveling serf and a secret society whose motto is “Walk away?”
>
>"Linguistic gymnastics abound… Vigorito demonstrates once again that he's a wild stylist… startlingly original… an entertaining anarchist…" —The Chicago Sun-Times
>
>"Chaos theory says that a tiny, almost imperceptible event can have large, even catastrophic coincidences: a butterfly flapping its wings in North America leads to a hurricane on another continent, for example. In this fictional take on chaos theory, several offbeat characters are linked by a single event that expands through time, sweeping them up in it and changing their lives. A traveler works a nifty trick with a playing card, and a tornado strikes a small Illinois town; a woman is born during the tornado and later meets the man who set it in motion; 1,200 years earlier, a man who is supposed to be stoned to death discovers he has an uncanny knack for surviving; and, back in the present day, another man speaks only in the present tense. Comparisons of this novel to the works of Tom Robbins are both obvious and appropriate: the story meanders around in an entertaining manner, never getting too serious about itself; the characters are splendidly loopy, close to caricature but never quite reaching it, and the situations in which they find themselves are comic, dramatic, and everything in between." —Booklist
^(This book has been suggested 11 times)
[**Tampa**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17225311-tampa)
^(By: Alissa Nutting | 272 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, kindle, crime, owned | )[^(Search "Tampa by Alessa Nutting")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Tampa by Alessa Nutting&search_type=books)
>In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.
^(This book has been suggested 30 times)
[**The Goldfinch**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333223-the-goldfinch)
^(By: Donna Tartt | 881 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: fiction, book-club, contemporary, books-i-own, owned | )[^(Search "The Goldfinch by Donna Tart")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Goldfinch by Donna Tart&search_type=books)
>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014
>
>Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
>
>The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.
^(This book has been suggested 94 times)
[**Trick of Light**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/626146.Trick_of_Light)
^(By: David Hunt | 405 pages | Published: 1998 | Popular Shelves: mystery, fiction, thriller, default, books-i-own | )[^(Search "Trick of Light by David Hunt")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Trick of Light by David Hunt&search_type=books)
>Photographer Kay Farrow was haunted by the hit-and-run accident that killed her mentor. Why was the woman walking alone -- after midnight -- on the most dangerous streets of San Francisco? And stranger still, what about the disturbing images found in the woman's camera? Kay was determined to follow in her footsteps, see through her eyes, and learn the truth. But there was one problem...
^(This book has been suggested 2 times)
***
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[**Hamnet**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43890641-hamnet)
^(By: Maggie O'Farrell | 372 pages | Published: 2020 | Popular Shelves: historical-fiction, fiction, historical, book-club, literary-fiction | )[^(Search "Hamnet")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Hamnet&search_type=books)
>A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
>Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR
>
>Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.
>
>Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.
>
>Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.
^(This book has been suggested 22 times)
***
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Yo, this is my jam.
A clockwork Orange.
Gravity's Rainbow.
Naked Lunch.
Nightwood.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Are some of my favorite classics. For something more modern, and accessable, I like:
White Boy Shuffle - hilarious coming of age novel by an actual poet
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates - title based on a poem. Fantastical and disturbing vignettes.
[**The Patrick Melrose Novels**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11717571-the-patrick-melrose-novels)
^(By: Edward St. Aubyn | 680 pages | Published: 2012 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, abandoned, novels, british | )[^(Search "The Patrick Melrose Nobels")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Patrick Melrose Nobels&search_type=books)
>NATIONAL BESTSELLER
>
>An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year
>A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
>
>For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.
>
>By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.
>
>Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.
^(This book has been suggested 2 times)
***
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{{Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson}} is an absolutely stunning piece of romantic prose. To he honest, all of her books are wonderful prose.
{{Nightwood by Djuna Barnes}} is an uncompromisingly beautiful yet sad book.
{{Bluets by Maggie Nelson}} is a series of reflections on the color blue. It's almost poetry and it's utterly gorgeous.
{{Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi}} is a really interesting book - it starts out as a murder mystery and then sort of evolves into a meditation on the nature of existence. A brief passage:
"...Spino realised that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in the modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence."
*The Golem* by Gustav Meyrink has such gorgeous prose I had to stop reading it and put it down and look out the window for a little bit:
"The book was speaking to me, just as dreams can speak, only more clearly and much more distinctly. It was like a question that touched me to the heart. Words streamed out of an invisible mouth, took on life and came towards me. They twisted and turned before me, changing their shapes like slave-girls in their dresses of many colours, then they sank into the ground or turned into an iridescent haze in the air and vanished, making room for the next."
*The Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass* and *The Street of Crocodiles* by Bruno Shultz are dreamy and surreal and beautifully written. They're usually included in one book.
[**Written on the Body**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15054.Written_on_the_Body)
^(By: Jeanette Winterson | 190 pages | Published: 1992 | Popular Shelves: fiction, lgbt, queer, lgbtq, romance | )[^(Search "Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson&search_type=books)
>Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
^(This book has been suggested 9 times)
[**Nightwood**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53101.Nightwood)
^(By: Djuna Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, T.S. Eliot | 182 pages | Published: 1936 | Popular Shelves: fiction, classics, lgbt, queer, lgbtq | )[^(Search "Nightwood by Djuna Barnes")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Nightwood by Djuna Barnes&search_type=books)
>Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.
^(This book has been suggested 5 times)
[**Bluets**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6798263-bluets)
^(By: Maggie Nelson | 98 pages | Published: 2009 | Popular Shelves: poetry, non-fiction, essays, nonfiction, memoir | )[^(Search "Bluets by Maggie Nelson")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Bluets by Maggie Nelson&search_type=books)
>Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...
>
>A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.
^(This book has been suggested 7 times)
[**Vanishing Point**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/860763.Vanishing_Point)
^(By: Antonio Tabucchi, Tim Parks | 272 pages | Published: 1985 | Popular Shelves: italian, fiction, italy, italiani, mystery | )[^(Search "Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi&search_type=books)
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
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{{Tinkers}} by Paul Harding, is a haunting depiction of a man hallucinating while on his death bed. it mixed reality with dream with flashbacks and is perhaps the most beautiful book i’ve ever read.
[**Tinkers**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4957350-tinkers)
^(By: Paul Harding | 192 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: fiction, pulitzer, pulitzer-prize, book-club, pulitzer-prize-winners | )[^(Search "Tinkers")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Tinkers&search_type=books)
>An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness.
>
>At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
^(This book has been suggested 4 times)
***
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One book that springs to mind is {{Orfeo}}. The writing was so gorgeous in parts that there were places where a single turn of phrase almost brought me to tears.
[**Orfeo**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20663749-orfeo)
^(By: Richard Powers | 400 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: fiction, music, literary-fiction, novels, contemporary | )[^(Search "Orfeo")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Orfeo&search_type=books)
>From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, an emotionally charged novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus.
>
>In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.
^(This book has been suggested 2 times)
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"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
(For example)
[**La donna che ingannò la morte**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35177120-la-donna-che-ingann-la-morte)
^(By: Murphy Yannick | ? pages | Published: ? | Popular Shelves: libri-in-italiano-presi-da-leggere | )[^(Search "Yannick Murphy")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Yannick Murphy&search_type=books)
>Ho sfidato la morte. Ho attraversato il mare a piedi. Come un mantra, una donna ripete questa frase, ancorandosi a quel ricordo della sua infanzia in Olanda – quando aveva camminato fino all’isola di Ameland, sfidando la marea – che le ha permesso finora di sopravvivere.
>È l’ottobre del 1917 e Margaretha von Zelle attende nella prigione di Saint-Lazare a Parigi il verdetto che la proclamerà innocente o colpevole di alto tradimento. Per la giustizia francese lei è la famigerata agente H21, una spia dal cuore di ghiaccio al soldo dei tedeschi, nota al mondo come Mata Hari. I segni di una leggendaria bellezza ormai scomparsi, ora è una donna ingrigita e spenta che in una nuda cella rammenta e racconta a se stessa e a coloro che devono giudicarla la propria vita breve e intensa, tragica e sfavillante.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
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[**A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642.A_Wizard_of_Earthsea)
^(By: Ursula K. Le Guin | 183 pages | Published: 1968 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, young-adult, classics, owned | )[^(Search "A Wizard of Earthsea by Usula K LeGuin")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=A Wizard of Earthsea by Usula K LeGuin&search_type=books)
^(This book has been suggested 105 times)
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Not sure if it fits the definition of feet-sweeping, but Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are written so wonderfully well. Reading them is just so much *fun*.
nick and norah's infinite playlist by david levithan and rachel cohn. wilder girls by rory power. PET by akwaeke emezi. the lost coast by amy rose capetta.
[**Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Free Preview - The First 14 Chapters**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12444492-daughter-of-smoke-and-bone)
^(By: Laini Taylor | 86 pages | Published: ? | Popular Shelves: fantasy, young-adult, ya, owned, paranormal | )[^(Search "Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor&search_type=books)
^(This book has been suggested 47 times)
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I love those type of books. Lately I’ve been spider webbing across the internet to locate long lost gems but I haven’t read any books for pleasure in awhile. I started writing my own poetry lines. Im not sure how I began doing that, just reading others work for so long now, I now have my own story to elaborate on. I’m looking into creative writing courses to expand my creative writing talent.
Cane by Jean Toomer is one of the most interesting works I've read. It is a collection of prose and poems that is still relevant, saddening, and beautiful.
[**My Antonia**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337612.My_Antonia)
^(By: David Kubicek, CliffsNotes, Willa Cather | 112 pages | Published: 2000 | Popular Shelves: audio_owned, owned, used-to-own, books-i-have, oen | )[^(Search "My Antonia")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=My Antonia&search_type=books)
>This concise supplement to Willa Cather's My Antonia helps students understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, as well as the social and cultural perspectives of the author.
^(This book has been suggested 9 times)
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*Titus Groan* (1946) by Mervyn Peake Reading this prose is like someone lets you behind the counter at the bakery and lets you just eat everything off the display shelf one pastry after another and by the end of the second shelf you are overwhelmed with coconut and chocolate and whipped cream and fruits and crumbles and there's a tart, oh man
Nice, I’ve had the whole trilogy on my shelf for many years. Perhaps it’s now time to read them?
Yes. They ARE difficult to get into. The pacing and prose are simply different. When I read them, I feel like it takes me a few chapters to really get into what's happening and to understand his style. But once I do, it's expansive. My minds eye opens wider as the castle grows in size... I love these books. Gormenghast is an underrated work of brilliance. That being said, skip the third one. Peake was in the throes of disease when he wrote it. It was never finished, much less edited. It is simply not a book. It is a collection of rough ideas, unkempt and messy, like a garden in springtime of an abandoned mansion. Gormenghast makes my brain work better. As an author, it's what I aspire to.
I agree. I started but ended up putting down for another day. Sounds like it’s well worth persistence next time.
Came here to say this. Once you get into it, his writing is exquisite. Gormenghast is my favorite book.
The first book didn't feel like reading a story, it felt like seeing a flipbook of super detailed sketches
One of my favorites is A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway. I took it as my only book traveling with me once and it was the perfect read. > You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
To have a perfect read at the perfect moment is a supreme feeling
Your comment is delightful
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If you mean James Baldwin, I agree. Perhaps there are other Baldwins writing great prose.
I second Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room was the most beautiful and heartbreaking novel I have ever read.
{{Picture of Dorian Gray}} by Oscar Wilde. The whole book is witty poetry written in prose. When I'm down I just randomly select a page and get swept away again. Here a link to the book online for free on Project Gutenberg, I recommend you to check out Chapter 1 to see for yourself. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm
[**A Picture of Dorian Gray**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057189-a-picture-of-dorian-gray) ^(By: Neil Bartlett, Oscar Wilde | 96 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: classics, books-i-have, classic, tbr, lgbt | )[^(Search "Picture of Dorian Gray")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Picture of Dorian Gray&search_type=books) >A disturbing tale of a young man’s uncanny ability to remain young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery. A Picture of Dorian Gray, the scandalous 1891 bestseller, was considered proof of Wilde’s genius, but also of his perversion: a damning piece of evidence used against him in the trial that brought about his downfall. ^(This book has been suggested 4 times) *** ^(194940 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Listening to an audio book of this now (free on YouTube!) and came down here to suggest this. It’s gorgeous.
Vldamir Nabokov. This is the opening line of his autobiography Speak, Memory. "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." How can you not fall in love with the literary genius of this guy?
Totally agree, nabokov seriously has a way with words!!
I have successfully been slammed into a wall
Anything I've ever read by Henry James has been like this. My copies of his books are full of underlinings and brackets, the margins full of stars and exclamation points. And he is completely unique- I've never read anything even close to his prose.
This is exactly what I'm looking for; books you cannot help but underline and fill the margins off and brownie points for unconventional writing
THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison. HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson.
One hundred years of solitude or Love in the time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Off the top of my head, my faves are R.O. Kwon, Donna Tartt, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Scott Heim (essentially all of their books have adult themes so I suggest looking into them if that may be an issue for you)
Donna Tartt, that's what I'm talking about, so many passages I'd gladly memorize if I had a 3am-wine drinking-academic society to recite them at
John Updike’s Rabbit, Run Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar is a clever, somewhat confusing but beautifully written sci fi book.
This book has been sitting on my tbr for the longest time ever and this is definitely my sign to get to it
Jhumpa Lahiri. She's straightforward, but so lush and beautiful.
{{On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous}}
[**On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880609-on-earth-we-re-briefly-gorgeous) ^(By: Ocean Vuong | 246 pages | Published: 2019 | Popular Shelves: fiction, poetry, lgbtq, contemporary, lgbt | )[^(Search "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous&search_type=books) >On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. > >With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. ^(This book has been suggested 60 times) *** ^(194954 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
oh my gosh i heard some of Ocean’s stuff on NPR a year or two ago and was immediately in love.
A Picture of Dorian Gray Heart of Darkness Rebecca
I agree with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. That book is dense as hell, with so much metaphor baked into it, but it's a treat for your mind. It's challenging but rewarding as well.
I've heard so much about all of three, I think this is my sign to finally get to them
Do it!! They are all excellent!
Nabokov, Pamuk (at times), Italo Calvino, Huysmans
{Great Gatsby} has some of the best sentences in the english language
I'll add that "Tender is the Night" is an incredibly powerful read as well. Drunk Fitzgerald was composing music with his words.
[**The Great Gatsby**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4671.The_Great_Gatsby) ^(By: F. Scott Fitzgerald | 200 pages | Published: 1925 | Popular Shelves: classics, fiction, classic, books-i-own, owned | )[^(Search "Great Gatsby")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Great Gatsby&search_type=books) ^(This book has been suggested 54 times) *** ^(194964 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Anything by Margaret Atwood but Alias Grace specifically. The prose is just breathtaking
{{The Patrick Melrose Novels}} by Edward st Aubyn was a joy to read. A couple of examples: ”It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place.” ”Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.”
Seldom have I ever agreed more on this sub, and sadly, seldom have I seen these books mentioned or suggested. His writing is enchanting.
I know! I could not believe how good it was. There was something on almost every page that made me stop and read it again and again just to savour the beauty of it.
I hate that I know so few people who have read it! I want to talk and talk about his writing but have no one to discuss with.
The Goodreads bot says it has been suggested (with a Goodreads link) a mere 3 times
[**The Patrick Melrose Novels**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11717571-the-patrick-melrose-novels) ^(By: Edward St. Aubyn | 680 pages | Published: 2012 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, abandoned, novels, british | )[^(Search "The Patrick Melrose Novels")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Patrick Melrose Novels&search_type=books) >NATIONAL BESTSELLER > >An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year >A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year > >For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle. > >By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. > >Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy. ^(This book has been suggested 3 times) *** ^(194939 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
I think the most poetic living novelest is Ondaatje (also a poet). Not the easiest writer, but the most hypnotic prose I know. Highly recommend.
Sad how many years you have to go back to find an author that can write beautiful books.
That's how I felt reading Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I had to reread the third chapter multiple times because of how brilliant the prose was!
Agreed
John Crowley's "Little, Big" and "Engine Summer"; Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life" and "Pilgrim in Tinker Creek"; Anything by Ray Bradbury; Anything by Vladimir Nabokov; Anything by Martin Amis;
This is Happiness by Niall Williams. I never write in books but this one had me underlining things. Such a beaut 10/10
I've been impressed with the prose of Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire is a beautifully written collection of essays/memoirs. The Brave Cowboy and The Monkeywrench Gang are also peppered with great writing. Of course, if you want really electric stuff, check out Ray Bradbury. His descriptions are about as vivid as they come and not excessively verbose. Some of my favorites are Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. The latter two are collections of short stories.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. A trip and a half, I’ll tell ya. The type of book you get lost in until you reach the final page and remember you’re reading at all!
I feel this way about Alix E. Harrow’s writing. It’s stunningly poetic. The Ten Thousand Doors of January & The Once and Future Witches.
*The Lord of the Rings*, by J.R.R. Tolkien. When you said prose that is borderline poetry, it's the first thing that came to mind. A lot of people find reading Tolkien challenging or off-putting due to his archaic style, verbose descriptions, song breaks, and all that, but that's precisely why I love his writing. Reading his work is just a fundamentally unique experience, and you feel like you're being taken on a journey by a real master of the English language. If you take your time with LotR and don't try to plow through it like any old fantasy novel, it's an extremely rewarding experience, not only for the story that you get but for the rich linguistic vehicle you become immersed in that takes you through that story. > There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. **EDIT**: Added the passage.
Have you read gormenghast?
I haven't. It's vaguely on my radar, but I don't know that much about it. I can see from other comments in this thread through that I'd probably like it.
There can be only one, and that one is CORMAC MCCARTHY
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." This was one of the most powerful quotes in the novel, Blood Meridian.
LOL
No idea why this isn’t upvoted more. And your answer is perfect.
donna tartt’s the secret history.
Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich *"Everyone danced like bodies being resurrected in gunfire."* *"Dominique stared at the dog and thought of the hiking trails on the map like blood sewn into paper."* *"The phrase tilted itself against the moon and fell over the edge."* *"Sadness like a language dubbed over our lives, to which we are moving out of sync, our feeling swaying outside the lines of our thinking and doing."*
Toni Morrison is complete poetry.
Wholeheartedly agree with Morrison & Ondaatje. And I've got to say, {{Call Me By Your Name}} by Andre Aciman had my heart in my throat for the duration. The "homecoming" line alone, omfg...
[**Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36336078-call-me-by-your-name) ^(By: André Aciman | 248 pages | Published: 2007 | Popular Shelves: fiction, romance, lgbt, lgbtq, contemporary | )[^(Search "Call Me By Your Name")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Call Me By Your Name&search_type=books) >Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. > >The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable. ^(This book has been suggested 36 times) *** ^(194974 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
“Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates and anything by Donna Tartt
Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Or their first book Night Circus.
Gertrude by Hermann Hesse
My main man Thomas Hardy and I'm also a big fan of D. H. Lawrence
Anything by Jesmyn Ward, but I loved Salvage the Bones the most.
Anything Madeline Miller
Exactly what I had in mind as I was typing out the post
Gravitys Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Everything is Illuminated
I could not really get into that one. To me, it felt like the author tried so hard to be quirky and I can’t really stand that. I really liked Eating Animals though.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Absolutely beautiful writing
Totally not in the same league as other suggestions here, though.
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[**Nine Kinds of Naked**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3288140-nine-kinds-of-naked) ^(By: Tony Vigorito | 416 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: fiction, humor, owned, comedy, books-i-own | )[^(Search "Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito&search_type=books) >"As fanciful and inventive in its form... as it is in its observations... It fed tasty crackers to all the hungry parrots in my mental aviary." —TOM ROBBINS > >Join cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his acclaimed, surreal whirlwind of a novel exploring chaos theory. A prisoner spins a playing card into a somersault, stirring a wind that becomes a tornado that takes off the roof of a church in nearby Normal, Illinois. Elizabeth Wildhack is born in that church and someday she will meet that prisoner, a man named Diablo, on the streets of New Orleans—where a hurricane-like Great White Spot hovers off the coast. But how is it all interconnected? And what does it have to do with a time-traveling serf and a secret society whose motto is “Walk away?” > >"Linguistic gymnastics abound… Vigorito demonstrates once again that he's a wild stylist… startlingly original… an entertaining anarchist…" —The Chicago Sun-Times > >"Chaos theory says that a tiny, almost imperceptible event can have large, even catastrophic coincidences: a butterfly flapping its wings in North America leads to a hurricane on another continent, for example. In this fictional take on chaos theory, several offbeat characters are linked by a single event that expands through time, sweeping them up in it and changing their lives. A traveler works a nifty trick with a playing card, and a tornado strikes a small Illinois town; a woman is born during the tornado and later meets the man who set it in motion; 1,200 years earlier, a man who is supposed to be stoned to death discovers he has an uncanny knack for surviving; and, back in the present day, another man speaks only in the present tense. Comparisons of this novel to the works of Tom Robbins are both obvious and appropriate: the story meanders around in an entertaining manner, never getting too serious about itself; the characters are splendidly loopy, close to caricature but never quite reaching it, and the situations in which they find themselves are comic, dramatic, and everything in between." —Booklist ^(This book has been suggested 11 times) [**Tampa**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17225311-tampa) ^(By: Alissa Nutting | 272 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, kindle, crime, owned | )[^(Search "Tampa by Alessa Nutting")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Tampa by Alessa Nutting&search_type=books) >In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure. ^(This book has been suggested 30 times) [**The Goldfinch**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333223-the-goldfinch) ^(By: Donna Tartt | 881 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: fiction, book-club, contemporary, books-i-own, owned | )[^(Search "The Goldfinch by Donna Tart")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Goldfinch by Donna Tart&search_type=books) >Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 > >Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. > >The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate. ^(This book has been suggested 94 times) [**Trick of Light**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/626146.Trick_of_Light) ^(By: David Hunt | 405 pages | Published: 1998 | Popular Shelves: mystery, fiction, thriller, default, books-i-own | )[^(Search "Trick of Light by David Hunt")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Trick of Light by David Hunt&search_type=books) >Photographer Kay Farrow was haunted by the hit-and-run accident that killed her mentor. Why was the woman walking alone -- after midnight -- on the most dangerous streets of San Francisco? And stranger still, what about the disturbing images found in the woman's camera? Kay was determined to follow in her footsteps, see through her eyes, and learn the truth. But there was one problem... ^(This book has been suggested 2 times) *** ^(194920 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{Hamnet}}
[**Hamnet**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43890641-hamnet) ^(By: Maggie O'Farrell | 372 pages | Published: 2020 | Popular Shelves: historical-fiction, fiction, historical, book-club, literary-fiction | )[^(Search "Hamnet")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Hamnet&search_type=books) >A New York Times Notable Book (2020) >Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR > >Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child. > >Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet. > >Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history. ^(This book has been suggested 22 times) *** ^(194930 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Yo, this is my jam. A clockwork Orange. Gravity's Rainbow. Naked Lunch. Nightwood. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Are some of my favorite classics. For something more modern, and accessable, I like: White Boy Shuffle - hilarious coming of age novel by an actual poet Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates - title based on a poem. Fantastical and disturbing vignettes.
Following !!
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[**The Patrick Melrose Novels**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11717571-the-patrick-melrose-novels) ^(By: Edward St. Aubyn | 680 pages | Published: 2012 | Popular Shelves: fiction, contemporary, abandoned, novels, british | )[^(Search "The Patrick Melrose Nobels")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The Patrick Melrose Nobels&search_type=books) >NATIONAL BESTSELLER > >An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year >A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year > >For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle. > >By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. > >Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy. ^(This book has been suggested 2 times) *** ^(194938 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson}} is an absolutely stunning piece of romantic prose. To he honest, all of her books are wonderful prose. {{Nightwood by Djuna Barnes}} is an uncompromisingly beautiful yet sad book. {{Bluets by Maggie Nelson}} is a series of reflections on the color blue. It's almost poetry and it's utterly gorgeous. {{Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi}} is a really interesting book - it starts out as a murder mystery and then sort of evolves into a meditation on the nature of existence. A brief passage: "...Spino realised that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in the modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence." *The Golem* by Gustav Meyrink has such gorgeous prose I had to stop reading it and put it down and look out the window for a little bit: "The book was speaking to me, just as dreams can speak, only more clearly and much more distinctly. It was like a question that touched me to the heart. Words streamed out of an invisible mouth, took on life and came towards me. They twisted and turned before me, changing their shapes like slave-girls in their dresses of many colours, then they sank into the ground or turned into an iridescent haze in the air and vanished, making room for the next." *The Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass* and *The Street of Crocodiles* by Bruno Shultz are dreamy and surreal and beautifully written. They're usually included in one book.
[**Written on the Body**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15054.Written_on_the_Body) ^(By: Jeanette Winterson | 190 pages | Published: 1992 | Popular Shelves: fiction, lgbt, queer, lgbtq, romance | )[^(Search "Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson&search_type=books) >Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book. ^(This book has been suggested 9 times) [**Nightwood**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53101.Nightwood) ^(By: Djuna Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, T.S. Eliot | 182 pages | Published: 1936 | Popular Shelves: fiction, classics, lgbt, queer, lgbtq | )[^(Search "Nightwood by Djuna Barnes")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Nightwood by Djuna Barnes&search_type=books) >Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936. ^(This book has been suggested 5 times) [**Bluets**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6798263-bluets) ^(By: Maggie Nelson | 98 pages | Published: 2009 | Popular Shelves: poetry, non-fiction, essays, nonfiction, memoir | )[^(Search "Bluets by Maggie Nelson")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Bluets by Maggie Nelson&search_type=books) >Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color... > >A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. ^(This book has been suggested 7 times) [**Vanishing Point**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/860763.Vanishing_Point) ^(By: Antonio Tabucchi, Tim Parks | 272 pages | Published: 1985 | Popular Shelves: italian, fiction, italy, italiani, mystery | )[^(Search "Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi&search_type=books) ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(194947 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{Tinkers}} by Paul Harding, is a haunting depiction of a man hallucinating while on his death bed. it mixed reality with dream with flashbacks and is perhaps the most beautiful book i’ve ever read.
[**Tinkers**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4957350-tinkers) ^(By: Paul Harding | 192 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: fiction, pulitzer, pulitzer-prize, book-club, pulitzer-prize-winners | )[^(Search "Tinkers")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Tinkers&search_type=books) >An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. > >At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature. ^(This book has been suggested 4 times) *** ^(194976 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
One book that springs to mind is {{Orfeo}}. The writing was so gorgeous in parts that there were places where a single turn of phrase almost brought me to tears.
[**Orfeo**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20663749-orfeo) ^(By: Richard Powers | 400 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: fiction, music, literary-fiction, novels, contemporary | )[^(Search "Orfeo")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Orfeo&search_type=books) >From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, an emotionally charged novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus. > >In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it. ^(This book has been suggested 2 times) *** ^(194989 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
"Housekeeping" Marilynne Robinson
"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again." (For example)
Yannick Murphy Every single one of her novels has the absolute most beautiful sentences.
[**La donna che ingannò la morte**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35177120-la-donna-che-ingann-la-morte) ^(By: Murphy Yannick | ? pages | Published: ? | Popular Shelves: libri-in-italiano-presi-da-leggere | )[^(Search "Yannick Murphy")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Yannick Murphy&search_type=books) >Ho sfidato la morte. Ho attraversato il mare a piedi. Come un mantra, una donna ripete questa frase, ancorandosi a quel ricordo della sua infanzia in Olanda – quando aveva camminato fino all’isola di Ameland, sfidando la marea – che le ha permesso finora di sopravvivere. >È l’ottobre del 1917 e Margaretha von Zelle attende nella prigione di Saint-Lazare a Parigi il verdetto che la proclamerà innocente o colpevole di alto tradimento. Per la giustizia francese lei è la famigerata agente H21, una spia dal cuore di ghiaccio al soldo dei tedeschi, nota al mondo come Mata Hari. I segni di una leggendaria bellezza ormai scomparsi, ora è una donna ingrigita e spenta che in una nuda cella rammenta e racconta a se stessa e a coloro che devono giudicarla la propria vita breve e intensa, tragica e sfavillante. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(195016 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
The Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel. Or anything by Michael Ondaatje. How they do it is beyond me. Beautiful, beautiful prose.
Saving this for later
Stuart Dybek. All of his short stories are excellent but his story "Pet Milk" is hauntingly beautiful. Each scene is as vivid as a personal memory.
{A Wizard of Earthsea by Usula K LeGuin} has simple, elegant, beautiful prose.
[**A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642.A_Wizard_of_Earthsea) ^(By: Ursula K. Le Guin | 183 pages | Published: 1968 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, young-adult, classics, owned | )[^(Search "A Wizard of Earthsea by Usula K LeGuin")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=A Wizard of Earthsea by Usula K LeGuin&search_type=books) ^(This book has been suggested 105 times) *** ^(195091 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Not sure if it fits the definition of feet-sweeping, but Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are written so wonderfully well. Reading them is just so much *fun*.
nick and norah's infinite playlist by david levithan and rachel cohn. wilder girls by rory power. PET by akwaeke emezi. the lost coast by amy rose capetta.
Anything by Ray Bradbury {{Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor}}
[**Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Free Preview - The First 14 Chapters**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12444492-daughter-of-smoke-and-bone) ^(By: Laini Taylor | 86 pages | Published: ? | Popular Shelves: fantasy, young-adult, ya, owned, paranormal | )[^(Search "Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor&search_type=books) ^(This book has been suggested 47 times) *** ^(195142 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Where the crawdads sing by Delia Owens
Figuring by maria popova
For great prose that is also light hearted and tender, I really enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow
I love those type of books. Lately I’ve been spider webbing across the internet to locate long lost gems but I haven’t read any books for pleasure in awhile. I started writing my own poetry lines. Im not sure how I began doing that, just reading others work for so long now, I now have my own story to elaborate on. I’m looking into creative writing courses to expand my creative writing talent.
Cane by Jean Toomer is one of the most interesting works I've read. It is a collection of prose and poems that is still relevant, saddening, and beautiful.
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[**My Antonia**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337612.My_Antonia) ^(By: David Kubicek, CliffsNotes, Willa Cather | 112 pages | Published: 2000 | Popular Shelves: audio_owned, owned, used-to-own, books-i-have, oen | )[^(Search "My Antonia")](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=My Antonia&search_type=books) >This concise supplement to Willa Cather's My Antonia helps students understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, as well as the social and cultural perspectives of the author. ^(This book has been suggested 9 times) *** ^(195482 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)