Any recommendations for Ballard books to take a look at? I remember being assigned to read Crash in my university science fiction course, and I just could. not. get through it.
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Not all of his books are like that. He delved into some different genres outside of experimental fiction, there are his disaster novels such as the Drowned World or the Burning World, or the Crystal world. Then he does some hard sci-fi stuff, mainly in his short stories, which there is a complete short stories that has my favorite short story in all of history, The Secret History of World War 3, then there are his semi-autobiographic works like Empire of the Sun (which was a decent movie) and The Kindness of Women. The Empire of the Sun really sets the tone for his weirder stuff, I always thoughtāthe Spielberg movie doesnāt really get to the heart of thatāI always saw that book as beingāhere is where I come from and why kind of thing. Then he wrote on consumerism and class in books like SuperCannes and Kingdom Come. What I like about Ballard is that his work is diverse enough that you are likely to find something you enjoy in his workāitās not all cut-up weirdness and auto-centric eroticism.
If I had to say my favorite books by him, Iād go with Empire of the Sun, Concrete Island, Kingdom Come, and Hello America (which is a sci-fi story about a rediscovering American after it had been abandoned).
Anyway, here is his bibliographyāmaybe start with the Complete Short Stories, as you can dip into a variety of his styles:
http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-bibliography
You know, looking at that list, Iām not sure Iāve read much of his non-fictionā¦ maybe I should give that a shot!
I know Martin Amis liked Ballard.
Will Self, too.
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High Rise remains one of my favorite Ballard novels.
No Dostoevsky?
Hrrrrrrm.
Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot are some of the most powerful books Iāve ever read.
Then again, theyāre public domain so I guess thereās no money in them for Amazon.
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You know that there is a Dcotor Who story based on High RiseāParadise Towers, a 7th Doctor story? Itās one of the better stories of that era, I think.
And Ben Wheatly is supposed to be making a film of it sometime soon. io9 had an interview with him this week, because heās direct the first couple of Doctor Who stories with Capaldi:
http://io9.com/doctor-who-director-says-capaldi-brings-back-the-classi-1515244187
And Hiddleston is starring, and it will be set in 1975:
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Nice - Iām currently in the middle of Garp and this whole time Iāve been thinking, āthis deserves to be on more lists.ā
Looks more like a list of books to buy than a list of books to read. So many fundamentally important works are missingā¦
This might be the real reasonā¦not the books you probably already bought when you were in high school or college, but rather the ones you can be convinced to buy now with the right couching.
As someone else already pointed out, a lot of important books are PD. No benefit to Amazon to suggest you read those.
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Amazon does sell print copies (and even Kindle versions!) of public domain books (the aforementioned Brothers Karamazov, for example, has versions for sale in just about any format you could want it in). Just because a work is in the public domain doesnāt mean that a company canāt make money off it.
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I agree.
I donāt think that Amazon went out of their way to specifically not include public domain books - rather, I feel that they were tailoring the list to the interests of most people who read recreationally these days. A lot of classics (e.g. Moby Dick) wouldnāt be appealing to a large part of todayās book-buying audience - theyāre too long, or too wordy, or something else that just makes them unappealing to much of todayās reading population. In other words, since āa classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read,ā (Mark Twain), folks arenāt going to be interested in many of the books which are known to be important books.
Of course, itās fair to say that Amazon also tailored this list as they did because they want the books on the list to sell. Amazon is a company, and it wouldnāt exist if it didnāt make money.
It should also be noted that just from skimming the list, I saw two public domain books - Great Expectations, and Alice in Wonderland. Both of these books are available free as ebooks from Project Gutenberg, and available as free audiobooks from Librivox yet Amazon still decided to include them. Itās likely that there are more PD books too, which I didnāt notice, but either way, Amazon didnāt completely ignore public domain books. Though I do agree that they are underrepresented.
Moby Dick isnāt on the list because itās shite. A decent novella cut into bits and wedged into Herman Melvilleās Big Book of Whales.
Iād almost rather read War and Peace again.
Hey, Iām with you there. Iām definitely never reading Moby Dick again. I was just using that as an example of a book which is widely considered to be āgreat,ā but wouldnāt appeal to most folks these days who would be reading that list.
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An interesting New Yorker article about Amazon, as well:
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