THE TARTAR STEPPE
Idealistic young officer Giovanni Drogo is full of determination to serve his country well. But when he arrives at a bleak border station in the Tartar desert, where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, he finds the castle manned by veteran soldiers who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy to advance across the desert, for one great and glorious battle... Written in 1938 as the world waited for war, and internationally acclaimed since its publication, The Tartar Steppe is a provocative and frightening tale of hope, longing and the terrible sorcery of dreams and desires.
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- Apparently! I'm mostly a non-fiction reader but a few fictions I really like:
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle
- A River Runs Through It
- Stoner
- The Tartar Steppe
- Siddhartha
And a very cliche recommendation but will still make it, the first 3 Game of Thrones books. I also like the Dark Tower series.
- Not sure if "the best", but one of the best was "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. I was reading it out of curiosity for the solarpunk genre, it ended up helping me a bit on the self-acceptance side.
Other than that, "Il deserto dei Tartari" by Dino Buzzati (in english: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tartar_Steppe). Gave me some different point of view when thinking about time passing by. This was actually an audio-book, but I don't think there's any difference.
- I've never really felt like Kafka seems to have and I read a lot, mostly novels. For what it's worth, I don't love Kafka's novels: I think he wanted them burned for a reason -- they're meandering failures. Very clever but they don't go anywhere. His short stories, though, are excellent.
Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby Dick, any Alice Munro. All well known "good books".
- Since time is a key part of the OP's question, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (published in Italy in 1940 as Il deserto dei Tartari) is an excellent novel about life and time. In other words, the mistakes we often make with how we spend our lives, time wasted without a clear purpose or enjoyment. I read it when I was in my twenties and it had a great impact on me. Now in my early fifties, I'm not sure I would have the courage to read it again.
- For sure. For worldwide literature translated to English you could do a lot worse that the Complete review[1] its father site the Literary Saloon is quite good too[2]
If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3]
In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4]
I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive.
Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6]
To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever:
1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati
2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo.
3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman
4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar
5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa
6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata.
7. Midaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz
[1]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [2]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [3]https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ [4]https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html [5]https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themod... [6]https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literat...
- I suggest "The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati". A great book about the meaningless of everyman planning about leaving a successful life. Mr. Paolomar by Italo Calvino is another last century Italian masterpiece with the reflection of a math teacher about the world and life in general.
