Recommended Novels

03 Jan 2010 23:46

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I have separate recommendations pages for fantasy, mysteries and science fiction. This is for the residual class, of books that don't belong to any of those genres. This includes what I've taken to calling "scientist fiction", stories by non-scientists about the creative lives and travails of scientists. I've marked those as such.

• Iain Banks
  • The Business
  • Whit, or, Isis Amongst the Unsaved
• Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever [Scientist-fiction]
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
• A. S. Byatt
  • Angels and Insects
  • Possession
• Calvino
• Joseph Conrad
• Jenny Davidson, Heredity
• Joan Didion
• Anatole France
• George MacDonald Fraser, The Pyrates
• Amin Maalouf, Ports of Call [Very beautiful, and very sad]
• Patrick O'Brian
• Orhan Pamuk
  • My Name Is Red
  • The White Castle [Review]
• Jill Paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels [Review]
• Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
• Richard Powers
  • Gain
  • The Gold-Bug Variations [Scientist-fiction. Prose almost as dense and slow-reading as pure math; it took me months to read a few hundred pages, and I enjoyed every word.]
• Frederic Prokosch, The Seven Who Fled [Review: Where Every Prospect Pleases, and Every Man Is Vile]
• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
• Ivan Turgenev
• Gore Vidal