The OF Blog: A personal Top 50 list

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

A personal Top 50 list

Jeff VanderMeer recently posted his 64 Favorite Fiction and stated that a main purpose for doing such a list was not to provide 'essential reading materials,' but instead to encourage thought and similar lists from others. With that in mind, here are some of my favorite fictions that contain elements of the speculative in them (although a great many will not be found in the Fantasy/SF section of any bookstore), in the current order only for the snapshot effect (as after the first couple, my ranking could vary wildly):

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciónes (Spanish)
2. Borges, El Aleph (Spanish)
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
4. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude
5. Ben Okri, The Famished Road
6. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
7. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
8. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun
9. Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
10. Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler...
11. Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
12. Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (Spanish)
13. José Saramago, Ensayo sobre la ceguera/Blindness
14. Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos/The Lost Steps
15. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
16. Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
17. T.H. White, The Once and Future King
18. Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors
19. Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
20. Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La sombra del viento/The Shadow of the Wind
21. Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
22. China Miéville, The Tain
23. R. Scott Bakker, The Prince of Nothing
24. Zoran Živković, The Fourth Circle
25. Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk
26. Ian MacLeod, The Light Ages
27. Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves
28. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
29. Saramago, Las intermitencias de la muerte (Spanish)
30. Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Spanish)
31. Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
32. Borges, El Hacedor (Spanish)
33. Saramago, El hombre duplicado (Spanish)
34. Caitlin Sweet, A Telling of Stars
35. Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
36. Borges, El libro de los seres imaginarios (Spanish)
37. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
38. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño (Spanish, play)
39. Miguel Cervantes, Don Quijote (Spanish)
40. John Crowley, Little, Big
41. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
42. Franz Kafka, Collected Stories
43. Gina B. Nahai, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
44. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
45. Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
46. Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels
47. Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos de amor de locura de muerte (Spanish)
48. Jan Potacki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
49. Ovid, Metamorphoses
50. John Milton, Paradise Lost

There, the 'top 50' as it stands at the moment. There are a great many others that I could have put here, but I just am not as inclined to read their works right now although I will likely acknowledge their importance if stated. And it was no accident that very little 'true' SF made this list, as I frankly am not as interested in it as I am in other topics/styles. Feel free to discuss this as moved to do so.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

~copy pastes from wotmania~

I like ze list, because I've read/own and shall read about 23 of them (feels like a high number to me!).

I don't like the fact that you made a list. Stop being so freaking male for a bit and let things be. Lists are discriminatory! Aren't you supposed to pretend to not be, these days? :P

 
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