[spooneybarger]

a few off the top of my head in the fiction genre: Joyce's Dubliner, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake. Cervantes' Don Quixote. Borges. Dashiell Hammet. William Burroughs. Bukowski. Faulkner. Jim Thompson. Stewart O'Nan. Nabakov. Philip K Dick's more schizophrenic works ( Scanner Darkly, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale ). Henry Miller. Gogol. Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. Flannery O'Connor. Denis Johnson. Hunter S. Thompson. Italo Calvino. T Coraghessan Boyle.

I reread Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote every couple years.

EDIT: and I have to admit to an odd attraction to and repeated returns to reading Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

[red_malang]

Don Quixote? re-read? very impressive. I have to say I gave up after following him and his horse around for a few days. I probably just didnt get it..

[spooneybarger]

I love Don Quixote obviously. I find the symbolism to be something I can regularly latch onto as a way to describe things in my life. On the same note, I reread Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee for the same reason.

[red_malang]

Coetzee is on my wishlist, heard great things about him - as soon as I am done with my current read I suppose: Portrait of a lady (Henry James) ;)

Update: Great, thanks for the suggestion - I'll go look it up at the uni library.

[spooneybarger]

Waiting for the Barbarians is a great start. It is a good read + it works as a great analogy that can be brought up when talking to people who let fear run their lives.