reading list for these times

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I picked most of these because they only work if you read them slowly--often out loud--and let the language become music. they are not really about plot, they are about flowing images, sounds, thoughts and perceptions:

Isolation reading list: Ulysses by Joyce; Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon; Tropic of Cancer - Miller; Baudelaire; Proust (all 6 books); Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon (all 16 volumes); and for light reading the Hyperion "quartet" by Dan Simmons. One could add One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Plague by Camus, Call It Sleep by Roth, and No Exit (and other plays) by Sartre.

At present I am rereading Miller and Gibbon and Proust--I just finished Pynchon and have read Ulysses for the 17th time last year... I'm also reading "A Distant Mirror" about the 14th Century Plague and its impact on religion, economics and politics; "Turning Points in the History of the Mid-East because: OIL. My guilty pleasure books are too numerous to mention, but probably the best lately has been the middle books of King's Dark Tower Series

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oldernow:
@kaicito try it as a book on tape - but sample it first--there are at least two readers and one is pretty unbearable, while the other 'feels' like Proust.  (I have read a good deal of him in French, where the language absolutely soars...but there are a lot of words i have to look up on account of this not being the 19th century any more.)  He can be quite snarky - more so as the books go along.  for example "she looked at me as though  I were an oily stain on her favorite rug" --also if you know French a lot of the names are a hoot - like "Madam Fatass and Madamoiselle Bullshit &c.
kaicito:
@oldernow As my French is barely serviceable enough to find a restroom or to order an omelet, I'm reading what I can only hope is an adequate German translation. It has the plus of being annotated, which as you say helps the contemporary reader to get some of the hidden meaning. Guilty pleasure these days: the Founders series by Robert Jackson Bennett - loved the first volume "Foundryside" and have just downloaded to my Kindle the just-published 2nd one, "Shortfall". Good fun!

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