Top 10 books

I decided to make this blog entry more spiffy by adding images and words to it.

10. A Brief Life - Juan Carlos Onetti


This novel by the Uruguayan author of the acclaimed The Shipyard concerns Breusen, who seeks to escape the dreary existence of his everyday life by channeling his consciousness into other people - some real, some imagined.

9. The Unlimited Dream Company - J. G. Ballard


When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is strangely transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.

8. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (3 novellas)



Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.

7. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo

Pedro Paramo - father, overlord, lover and murderer - dominates the landscape of the novel which flows hynotically through dreams, desires and memories. The novel propels the reader down a dusty forgotten road to a town of death, a place populated by ghosts and living memories.

6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rasholnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. As he embarks on a dangerous cat and mouse game, he is pursued by his conscience.

5. Bestiario - Julio Cortazar (short story collection)


In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.

4. Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard


The heartrending story of a British boy's four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.

3. The Trial - Franz Kafka

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

2. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges (short story collection)
By common consent, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest writers to have emerged from Latin America. His finest work is "Ficciones", a collection of brilliantly-crafted, essay-like short stories.

1. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

The story of the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove to be inadequate to their own family history, unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.