Sunday, March 20, 2011

5 Books That I Never Wanted to End

I know I've said this before, but I want to say it again just incase you missed it last time - I'm not really one for the whole meme fetish... but every once and awhile I see one that I just can't pass up.

Indie Reader Houston hosts a weekly meme called "5 Best Books". This week, she asks "what are the 5 best books that you never wanted to end?"

And I totally have to answer that, don't I? I dare you to show me a reader that hasn't ever fallen so hard and invested so much into a book that they haven't wished for it to go on forever!

Here are the 5 books that I never wanted to end:

1. The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

Ooohhh. This novel hit my Lost-soft spot like no other book ever could. It's got mystery and mayhem, secrets and sneak attacks. A bunch of prisoners and their dog get stranded on an uncharted island in the middle of nowhere when escaping jail in a hot air balloon. While they wait for rescue, they must put their collective brain power together in an effort to survive. So much of the early Lost story line was inspired by this book. I devoured it in 11 days, though as I raced from page to page to uncover the island's secrets, I was also secretly wishing it would last forever....


2. Blindness - Jose Saramago

The book that began my addictive and obsessive love for all things Saramago! Blindness, with it's run-on sentences and multi-paged paragraphs, it's nameless characters and tormented governmental statements, wowed me on the first page. I had never read anything like it before, and it just kept getting better and better. A devastating look at what humankind would be reduced to were we to suffer a seemingly incurable, irreversible plague. While I wanted the characters to stop suffering, I also wanted to remain enveloped in Saramago's words forever...



3. The Divine Farce - Michael Graziano

This book blew me away. Published by Leapfrog Press, this little novel packs a gigantic punch. In it, we are introduced to three naked strangers who find themselves confined in an incredibly small, pitch black concrete tube. Unsure whether they will be there for eternity, but convinced it is some sort of Hell, they surrender themselves to their wretched predicament. Until one day, the concrete wall that holds them in begins to crumble ... An amazing allegory for the human condition. The author toys with our natural curiosity towards heaven and hell and God. A short 125 pages that I wished went on much, much longer...



4. The Book - M. Clifford

This book shows us what the future could look like if the government were to force all it's citizens to purchase and read only ONE book - a digital book that is governed, updated, and edited by the government. A book that is full of lies. An eery peek into an almost-so-real-I-can-picture-it-happening future. Twists and turns and a semi-opened ending left me craving more...



5. Death of an Ordinary Man - Glen Duncan

Glen Duncan puts his twist on the afterlife. Waking to a world of bright whiteness, with the ability to see and hear his loved ones, drawn into objects that hold specific memories for him, we follow a man as he searches for his dead daughter and attempts to figure out how he died. I wish this book would have investigated the "other side" forever, and never solved the mystery of the man's death... I was really wrapped up in what was happening to him - both externally and internally.


And there you have it, guys. A difficult choice, since I've read so many great books that I wished would never end... but there you go.. the best of the best.

What 5 books do you wish never ended???

4 comments:

  1. Blindness is an excellent choice. Great book and his sequel, Seeing, managed to break my heart.

    One book that I've read this year that I did not want to put down, ever, was Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. An engrossing, fascinating work of fantasy, set in a world that feels like a hybrid of Dickens' London and 'Unthank', from Alasdair Gray's Lanark.

    Nice post.

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  2. Thanks Emmet! I fell in love with Saramago so hard, I am sure China felt the ground quake! I was sad to hear of his passing last year, because that means there will be no more new novels to devour (besides the ones that have yet to be translated).

    So happy to hear you are a Saramago fan too!

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  3. Great post, and it got me thinking. So here's a few books I wish had never ended.

    * A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
    * House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
    * The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen (Better than anything else he's written, in my opinion)
    * Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
    * Read Hard by Various (A collection of Essays from The Believer. These were all good, and many were great. I wanted more, more, more).

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  4. Thank you, I have rediscovered Jules Verne.....Love the list!

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