h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The woman I should have liked to have been - for her intelligence, her guts, her talent.

And her damn heal the world, holier than thou b/c I think better than everyone else attitude? You don't care for Elfriede Jelinik - I feel the same about Susan -I'm-Smarter-Than-Everyone-Else-Sontag

I'm not surprised... Didn't think she would appeal to you somehow!
Jelinek you have not read, at least you may have done since she got her Nobel Prize - she is even further away from you than Sontag.

No, haven't read Jelinek (didn't I promise you that I wouldn't?) - was using her as an example. Though, I have to say that no one makes me want to puke more than Gertrude Stein. Well, maybe Emily Dickinson. Greatest female writer - George Eliot (with the Brontës coming in a very close second)

George Eliot - at least we agree on that!

Well, maybe not all the Brontës, but definitely Charolette. Villette is a superb book - M. Paul and Lucy - what a romance. OK - I'll shut up now. Starting to sound too girlie. Have only read 3 Eliot books -Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede. Somehow I don't think they would have been as good if she had written them under her real name (Mary Ann Evans Cross - but you know that already)I think writing under a male nom de plume gave her a different insight into the human psyche. But the finest English novel is The Woodlanders. Sometimes I imagine myself as Fitzpiers.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda, a masterpiece, and nothing to do with the fact that she was George Eliot or Mary Ann... - It's the writing that counts, not a believer in the idea that women can only do petitpoint in lit. She proves the opposite.
Thomas Hardy, another of my all time favourites.
Next time you are high, think of Thomas de Quincey and what he managed to do with "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" or Baudelaire et al.

Favorite Hardy novels in order of favoritism -

The Woodlanders
The Return of the Native
Two on a Tower
Tess of the D'ubervilles
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Jude the Obscure
Under the Greenwood Tree
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Far From the Madding Crowd

Haven't read Two on a Tower or A Pair of Blue Eyes, guess I have some catching up to do. Did read his poetry many moons ago, remembering liking it but cannot remember any of it...Probably didn't work quite as well for me as John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets in general, as well as Yeats and Auden and oh, mustn't forget T.S.Eliot. That for the English. For the German and French, my list gets a bit longer, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, François Villon to name a few.
German, quite definitely Rilke as my favourite.
Novel - have you read "Under the Volcano" (getting back to drugged writers and their masterpieces here)

Never read Under the Volcano - keep meaning to read Confessions. . .but get diverted. Here's a new year's resolution I 've made for myself - read the entire Human Comedy - so far only read four.

Under the Volcano and Confessions - both definitely worth reading. I have a friend who goes so far as to say he classifies people into two categories, depending on their reaction to Under the Volcano - and the guy is French and only ever read it in translation!
Human Comedy - Comédie Humaine or Divine Comedy?
Both masterpieces even if I haven't read all of either.

Balzac
Already read Dante

Comédie humaine - a lot of books there.
Dante - as said, have some catching up to do.
That being so, I have come to the conclusion that a lifetime is not enough to read all the books I should like - and go on living...
Tough choice...