The Long Goodbye
In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
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What Hacker News says
- Although I'd change some books (actually, quite a lot,) I'm positively surprised by some choices, with books you usually don't see in "best of" lists but which rank high in my personal preferences.
For science fiction I'd change Dune... Even though it's a great book and I like it (I even read Herbert Jr.'s sequels... spoiler: don't) I'd pick something "shinier." Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, or 2001: An Space Odissey... or go with the weird and pick Rendezvous with Rama. Or just Foundation. Sci-Fi-wise you can't go wrong with Foundation.
Ninja-edit: How could I forget The Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon? Written in the late 40s, I didn't give much for it as Sci-fi goes. I read it in one sitting. Ended with a headache, dizzy and hungry. It was well worth it.
For Murakami, I'd pick instead a relatively unknown book by him: Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of The World. An inception-esque plot-inside-plot book, set in an almost Neuromancer-like setting. I love it.
For Dystopian... Even though I have not read The Giver, just classification-wise I'd have to pick Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde's book, not to be confused with another, numbered, similarly named book.) It was a thrilling read (I think it's the best novel I've read in the past 3 or 4 years, but well, I don't read that much fiction lately), sadly part of a trilogy waiting to be finished. Beware: once you are done with the book you'd want to go to Britain and tie Fforde to his desk until he is done with the next book.
The books that surprised me though are incredibly well-spotted. I like that Guns, Germs and Steel is there. It's been on my reading list for... 3 years already (I have it, but it's a heavy book so I'm always eager to pick an ebook or thinner material for a commute,) because the theme is so compelling. The Right Stuff is not the usual book you see in a best-of list, but for me, it should be in all these lists. Heck, writing from it is used as example of good writing in On Writing Well (which is surprisingly a very good read).
The Long Goodbye, by Chandler. Chandler is great, period. Having one of his books in this lists validates other books I'd never consider... Even though you can't have a Chandler and don't have a Hammett. You can't go wrong with a book by Hammett, I'd probably pick The Maltese Falcon. A classic.
Of course, there are some books that I'd personally treat to a Bradbury process... Catcher in the Rye and On the Road are two books I was looking forward to reading (not being English-based meant I didn't get to read them on high school) and found dull. I guess read in a different context would have made it different, but I couldn't see all the praise. Personal opinion, though.
- > I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation.
Whenever I think about this I'm reminded of a book of Voltaire stories I once read, where the translator's note ended: "...but mostly I've tried to say out of Voltaire's way, for I find that he speaks very good English". It stuck in my mind because I kept thinking how hard it is to imagine an EN↔JP translation with a similar kind of note. I'm no expert but my gut feeling is that the translator's style plays a bigger role for highly dissimilar languages, since "just staying out of the author's way" isn't really an option.
On the other hand, some years ago Murakami did a JP translation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. I'd read the original a bunch of times so I was really curious to find out what Murakami would do with it, how different it would be, etc. But everywhere I checked, it seemed to be very much a rote, practically word-for-word translation, to the extent that it seemed flat and overly explanatory to me (as a non-native reader). It felt more like he'd gone to pains not to leave any imprint on it. But of course Murakami isn't mainly a translator, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.
