Gormenghast
"Titus Groan is seven, Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral stairacse to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder"--P. [4] of cover.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
16mentions
14people
2009–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Other difficult books, in a somewhat increasing order of difficulty:
0) The autumn of the patriarch, by Marquez
1) Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake
2) The third period of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl).
3) The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch
I do suggest trying Gormenghast, it's an amazingly written fantasy series.
- Piffle. I myself use many of these words on a daily basis.
Seriously though if you want a read something by an author who really went for it and used maybe 75-85% of this list, get a copy of the Gormenghast series of books by Mervyn Peake. Just don’t come blaming me afterwards that you lost a chunk of your time.
- I always thought the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake broke these rules wonderfully. The amount of stuff I had to look up in the dictionary..
- I had to laugh a little bit when I looked at the philosophy section and it seems like with few exceptions it's books from the 2000s including such gems as
>Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!
I'm not overly conservative or classically leaning when it comes to education but I think people who really want to expand their minds would benefit from trying some of the classics first.
Mill, On Liberty. Accessible and incredibly important book for people who live in liberal democracies and want to understand where a lot of their own ideas come from. Plato's Republic. Not as accessible, but very important. Girard has become popular again and has some very unique ideas, so people will probably get a lot out of it. Same for Chesterton.
Kafka's Metamorphosis deserves to be in the Lit section. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is a must read for science fiction fans, the sci-fi section has some genuinely horrible recommendations in it. Also given that it's supposed to be a mind-expanding list, throw in Blindsight by Peter Watts. The fantasy section needs Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. (and throw Harry Potter out)
Sexual Personae by Paglia deserves to be named in the Gender/sexuality section.
And an off-beat recommendation. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a truly smart book on comics, in the form of a graphic novel.
- For a fantasy classic, you could try John Crowley's Little, Big, which was reputedly the late lit critic Harold Bloom's favorite novel. Bloom notoriously hated most fantasy novels - the Harry Potter series in particular - so that's a noticeable endorsement.
For an older fantasy series, you could also try Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (starts with Titus Groan), which actually predates the Lord of the Rings and has a crowd that thinks it's better written. I think Neil Gaiman has worked on a TV series adaptation.
- I was talking to a very intelligent Chinese friend of mine who was struggling to describe scenes in English. My first thought was "Gee, maybe he should memorise passages from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, since that has some of the best scene descriptions I have ever read".
No shortage of students like that. You can imagine my hopeful start at seeing Peake's name on the list at the start of this article, then my slump on discovering that that was for death+50 years countries, and Australia/US are death+70.
This stuff kills culture. I can't even propagandise great English literature to someone trying to learn English. He'll have to go with Jane Austin like every body else, and he can chuse something more modern if he's got more money than sense. Thank goodness she died 200 years ago, or I don't know what I'd do. Maybe learn how to read Chaucer.
