Best european poetry books according to redditors
We found 211 Reddit comments discussing the best european poetry books. We ranked the 102 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 211 Reddit comments discussing the best european poetry books. We ranked the 102 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
You could always read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but honestly, it's a long poem that has little to do with the character in LOTR. There isn't much information about him; Tolkien himself was (purposely or not) extremely vague on the topic. There are any number of internet fora where you can find discussion and Wild Mass Guessing, but here's what the man himself had to say about the matter:
"Frodo has asked not 'what is Tom Bombadil' but 'Who is he'. We and he no doubt often laxly confuse the questions. Goldberry gives what I think is the correct answer. We need not go into the sublimities of 'I am that am' - which is quite different from he is. She adds as a concession a statement of part of the 'what'. He is master in a peculiar way: he has no fear, and no desire of possession or domination at all. He merely knows and understands about such things as concern him in his natural little realm. He hardly even judges, and as far as can be seen makes no effort to reform or remove even the Willow. I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already 'invented' him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an 'adventure' on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an allegory - or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name - but 'allegory' is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an 'allegory', or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are 'other' and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with 'doing' anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture . Even the Elves hardly show this: they are primarily artists. Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. You must concentrate on some part, probably relatively small, of the World (Universe), whether to tell a tale, however long, or to learn anything however fundamental - and therefore much will from that 'point of view' be left out, distorted on the circumference, or seem a discordant oddity. The power of the Ring over all concerned, even the Wizards or Emissaries, is not a delusion - but it is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that part of the Universe."
-- J. R. R. Tolkien, draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, 2000, Houghton Mifflin, pg 192.
That probably doesn't help much. It isn't supposed to. One is obviously not intended to inquire too deeply into exactly what Bombadil is -- and it doesn't matter anyway. The Silmarillion and most of the rest of the Middle-earth corpus is intended as a history of the Elves, and anything else that enters it is generally coincidental and of only passing interest to Tolkien himself. The fact that LOTR involves hobbits and men is only to show that the world of the Eldar is ending; it closes the history begun in The Silmarillion. In that history, Bombadil plays little part, and anything said of him must be regarded as speculation. Here's a 1986 essay on Tom by Gene Hargrove that may be interesting.
Here is a link to the hardcover version on Amazon. :)
For anyone who's interested, there's a newly released translation by JRR Tolkien out. I've only read excerpts so far, but it seems more lyrical than Heaney's translation.
It wasn't apologetics so much as just reading the earliest Christians while I was studying at a Protestant seminary (on my own, of course - they would never have read the Fathers so closely). The place of Rome in the early Church was pretty obvious to me such that Orthodoxy was never an option. Books that help prove this point are:
Chapman, John. Studies on the Early Papacy
Fortescue, Adrian. The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451
Rivington, Luke. Roman Primacy, A.D. 430-451
Scott, S. Herbert. The Eastern Churches and the Papacy
I also read a bunch of modern Catholic theologians and I'd be happy to suggest sources. But my conversion took years. It was something I spent all my free time thinking about for about 3 years.
I think Lutheranism is highly problematic. Luther's philosophical and theological starting points - rooted in nominalism - tend to lead to pretty disastrous theological positions. And the Reformers did reach out to the Orthodox. The Orthodox turned them down. They saw that they were preaching novelties, just as the Catholics saw.
Hi,
I have been trying to learn a bit Icelandic myself, as a Norwegian, I do see some similiarities between the two languages, but belive me when I say that Icelandic is crazy difficult. It's not to put you off, but you have to be prepeared.
I bought a nice little book to get me started, I haven't read so many "learn-languages-yourself books" so I can't really comparere, but I found this to be helpful (looks like it's sold out :( )
Icelandic have, as you pointed out, grammatical genders, wich means that you will have to learn what "gender" a noun have. Icelandic have 3 genders, masculin, feminin and neuter. You will have to learn the genders with the nouns. The difficult thing with grammatical genders is that it does not seem to follow any rules. (In Norwegian for instance, "Pike", wich means "little girl" is a masculin noun)
Some nice websites
Chapman, John. Studies on the Early Papacy
Fortescue, Adrian. The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451
Rivington, Luke. Roman Primacy, A.D. 430-451
Scott, S. Herbert. The Eastern Churches and the Papacy
You should also read the article by Brian Daley, SJ titled "Position and Patronage in the Early Church: The Original Meaning of 'Primacy of Honour'" The Journal of Theological Studies, NEW SERIES, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Oct. 1993): 529-553.
I bought it at Barnes and Noble, but it is also available on Amazon here.
Das Parfüm von Patrick Süßkind https://www.amazon.de/Das-Parfum-Geschichte-eines-M%C3%B6rders/dp/3257228007/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314457197&sr=1-1
Rainier Maria Rilke
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.
Da ich nicht genau weiß, was du mit "ältere Schriftstellern" meinst bzw. welchen Zeitraum, einfach mal ein paar detusche Bücher, die mir spontan einfallen: Patrick Süßkind - Das Parfüm, Martin Suter - Die dunkle Seite des Mondes, Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Die Physiker und Michael Schmidt-Salomon - Sollbergs Inferno
Evan Currie's Odyssey One series is more military than pure space opera, but it is awesome.
The Golden Oecumene series by John C Wright is a Transhuman Space Opera of epic proportions. I highly recommend it.
Rachel Bach has a great series called Fortunes Pawn. Also a lil closer to military sci-fi but it has some nice Space Opera themes.
Joshua Dalzelle has a great series called the Black Fleet, again more military sci-fi than true space opera, but very good none the less.
The Reality Dysfunction series though, if you are looking for a meaty Space opera to lose yourself in is a must read series.
____
I almost forgot about the Manifold Series by Stephen Baxter and the Darwin's Radio series by Greg Bear. Both are phenomenal reads, and while technically they are set in the near future and aren't space opera per say, they are must reads for anyone into Sci-Fi.
Not exactly what you asked for, but you did ask what you had to read and, well, that makes things easy. Philip Larkin and W.H Auden are often thought of as the finest poets of the 20;th century. The following two books have brought me tremendous pleasure. Auden was also one of the most skilled and versatile formal poets who has ever lived.
http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Philip-Larkin/dp/0374529205
http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Auden-W-H/dp/0679731970/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1404601714&sr=8-3&keywords=w.h.auden
Hope you enjoy.
/J
In response to this comment, Egan's one example of someone who wrote near-future stories in the '90s that remain non-ridiculous.
Yeah, Tolkien's poetry is usually overlooked but there's a lot of great stuff he wrote. "Cat" was from a collection called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" and it's definitely worth a look if you want to get into some of his easier poetry...
Mine:
Somewhere a Raven is Dreaming, $10
free version
 
A Soul in Baker's Dozen Pieces, $5
free version
 
Kick and the Cheese Warehouse, $5
free version
 
Mine and others:
The Best of OCPoetry, Years 1-3
free version
 
I believe the role of the modern poet to be much the same as the modern comedian or comic artist, albeit in a different format - which is to say or write in a way that is societally relevant and/or essentially forces someone to use their brain.
Starting out, I imitated Robert Frost, Robert Browning, and William Blake.
I want to be more like James Elroy Flecker (when it comes to use of meter), Brenden Norwood (the guy keeps coming up with these brilliant images that I wish I thought of first), and LF Call (an unending wellspring of creativity. I mean those birdsong poems, mein Gott...). There's plenty more, including the rest of the team here, but those are who come to mind at the moment.
The most recent thing to inspire one of my poems was playing Taps at a military funeral - not just hearing it over a loudspeaker at night, or even hearing a bugler play it as I watch the casket get loaded on the plane, but being the one to play it - the cold metal, the shifting light, the family and me both trying to keep it together, the whole experience.
I don't read so much fantasy (the closest involves dragons in The Napoleonic Wars… alt history instead of fantasy), but for sci-fi I have one suggestion I frequently mention here. The Golden Age by John C Wright is the most densely compacted sci-fi epic I have ever read in a 300 page book. There is only one main character instead of an ensemble, but every other page introduces another element of the universe to wrap you melting noggin around that, for some, the pace of reading will be slow. I myself slammed through it for fear of forgetting or never finishing it. The second and third book of the series (the author intended it to be one doorstopper, but the publisher wanted to cut it up) ease up a lot compared to the first. READ SOME REVIEWS FIRST. Also the third book has an appendix that should have been included in the first book. If you see it on a bookstore, flip through it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Age-John-Wright/dp/0765336693
they are all rather short. Tolkien has a book he wrote the story fo sigurd and Gedrun ( seigfreid and brunhilde des ringes des neibelungs)
https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Sigurd-Gudr%C3%BAn-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0547273428/ref=sr_1_25?ie=UTF8&qid=1480607861&sr=8-25&keywords=Tolkien
then there are these
http://sagadb.org/
and others online
Other works of fiction that contain the concept of a metaverse;
Books
Anime and Manga
Film
----
I know I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the genre, because if there's one thing humans are good at, it's writing fucktons on what we like.
So feel free to comment additions to this list, or opinions on what I've currently included. I have by no means read/watched all of these, so having someone with actual experience with each of these weigh in would be nice.
The Golden Age by John C. Wright, and its two sequels, The Phoenix Exultant: and The Golden Transcendence.
It's not quite what I think you mean by transhumanism, but it's a great posthuman novel. The publisher says:
> The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on all the races of humanity and transhumanity.
The trilogy is written with style and humor, with a strong dash of the classics, and with an eye toward limits and implications of communication across different levels of computational capacity, mind architecture, and processing speed.
In fact I think I just talked myself into re-reading it :-)
The Golden Age trilogy has a lot of future-law in it. The main character is essentially caught up in a legal battle which he can't remember due to his memories being erased. One of my favorites of the last 10 years or so.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0781811910/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1397625371&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40
Beginner's Icelandic by Helga Hilmisdóttir Is a good resource. It comes with discs with examples of pronunciation. The pronunciation guide is written for Brits which it's only evident in one example. It gives a simple overview of the language.
Other than that I would say that pretty much everyone you will meet will speak English. Almost to the point of frustration if you are trying to learn icelandic.
There's húsabœr or staðr. Both can mean "farmstead" or "farm" but húsabœr gives the connotation of the buildings that make up the farm or the dwellings for people/animals while staðr is closer to the English "-stead", meaning more of the land/location. Its also used widely to mean "place" or "spot."
There's also bú which means "farming" (like the action or business of farming) or "household" but is used for a lot of other things as well.
If you wanted to be a bit dramatic with the river bluff feature, you could use nes, which is "headland". So, for example, in Landnámabók, there's a "Herjólfsnes", which is the land taken by a man named Herjolf. I've seen a lot of personal names incorporated into geographical terms to make place names. So if your name was Aaron, say, you could then have "Aaronsnes" or "Aaron's Headland."
Edit: You could also do the same with staðr, so: "Aaronsstaðr".
You can look at Zoëga's dictionary to see more details on the terms.
In modern Icelandic, I found býli or kot (for a small cottage farm). See here and here.
Good luck and congrats on getting a farm!
I've used Hippocrene's Beginner's Icelandic as well as Complete Icelandic. I fell off the wagon and haven't devoted any time recently to learning, but both books were helpful when I was trying to learn. If I had to choose only one of them, I'd probably choose Complete Icelandic, but they were useful to me in tandem because each covered little things that the other didn't.
I've also heard that Icelandic Learning is very useful. IIRC, you have to pass the entire course before you can apply for citizenship/visas. I could be wrong on that, it's been a few years.
If you have not yet read it you might enjoy Will Self's Dorian, which updates the story to the era of pre-cocktail HIV/AIDS.
If it is fin de siecle libertinage that attracts you then you might be interested in the Decadent Movement. My personal favorite work is Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal which is just dripping with sickly sweet amorality, but it is Huysman's Against Nature that is considered the manifesto work.
This translation by Alexis Lykiard is the one I have, it's very good.
https://www.amazon.com/Maldoror-Complete-Works-Comte-Lautr%C3%A9amont/dp/187897212X/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=le+chants+de+maldoror&qid=1562627249&s=gateway&sr=8-11
Pretty recent stuff:
John Brown's Body
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
Aniara
The item on my wishlist I want is this. It is the album that introduced me to punk when I was a little guy. It is just such an important album for me and the genre as a whole. It was and is revolutionary. Plus Johnny Rotten is probably your cousin or something!
The coolest thing on my wishlist is this. A little known sci-fi epic poem full of hoplessness and despair, what is cooler than that! Also, the only sci-fi book to win a nobel prize. Just all around cool-ness.
Consider Philip Larkin. He's super down-to-earth, the language is no-frills but still beautiful, and he tackles some of the biggest subjects out there. Take for example the infamous "This Be the Verse."
I have this edition and really like it.
Awesome! Here is the Amazon page!
Also, I haven't mentioned this, but the book is also a great read! The author doesn't deign to explain his complex ideas to the reader, instead you are left to work it out on your own, which makes the reading that much more enjoyable, especially the second read through when you can truly appreciate the intricacies of the writing.
You forgot the book of poems! The Adventures of Tom Bombadil were published during his lifetime and therefore are canon!
I just happened to end up at a university that had a professor of Old Norse. Modern Icelandic and Faroese are pretty close and there is an Old Norse dictionary (Zoega's concise dictionary - it's concise because he was going to make a larger one but died before he could). My old norse professor has two textbooks you can get on amazon (textbook 1 and textbook 2) but I don't know how good those are because he was writing them while I was taking his courses. There's also this textbook which I've never used but has good reviews.
You can also learn modern Icelandic and then study Old Norse because they very similar. It may be easier to do it that way. We also read the sagas in the original Old Norse which was very interesting.
My favorite post-singularity fiction is the Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright. Superintelligent AI, virtual reality, and mind uploading, and he still manages a deeply human tale of epic heroism. It's a little hard to get into for the first three or four chapters, but then it really takes off. I've read it three times.
Greg Egan's work is pretty interesting, eg. Permutation City, which is mainly about uploading etc.
For more of the near-future speculation side of Accelerando, Cory Doctorow writes a lot of good stuff. And there's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which is post-singularity.
Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is pretty much a classic, covering nanotech, AI-based education, and all sorts of craziness. One of my favorites.
The Esoterism of Dante
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quiet-Nights-Till-Lindemann/dp/1935738712
Waiting eagerly for Flake's book in English though...
Collected writings of Rilke. Maybe this one.
Why would you ask a question about taxes without asking what those taxes pay for? They pay for the shit everyone needs.
As for learning the language, there are two decent books I can recommend: Colloquial Icelandic and Beginner's Icelandic. But nothing is going to save you from the fuckton of grammar you have to learn within the first 40 pages or so. Spend the extra on the companion CDs.
first replying to the topic of clarity & purple
didnt know they had a phrase for this:
tho i understand it harms clarity tho:
---
it seems overall that many dont like thes kinds of things,
& overall culturally this has been the trend
---
i also dont like these kinds of things tho i can understand some of the main reasons why others would think that this is the only and best that certain things could said
tho i should add that i dont consider the scene/piece that poetic/purple cos it could be 1000x more so
tho that's the thing with relative words like 'purple' and such, they're all just relative, and in that way, they do lose 1) clarity & 2) meaning
---
Here are my favourites:
Philip Larkin -- one of the greatest English poets, who uses the English language in its most elegant, plain and beautiful way. Often deals with death and love. A sample poem about the fear of death
Derek Walcott -- A poet of the Caribbean, known for epic poems. A sample poem about love
ee cummings -- a popular American poet who played with form. A sample poem
Emily Dickinson - maybe one of the most famous American poets, you can read a lot of her poetry online
Also online are the other big famous poets: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Keats, William Blake, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery. For each of these I'd just suggest googling and seeing what you like.
But I'm going to suggest to you some poetry by some new, rising poets, who are still alive and writing.
Sam Sax -- a young queer American poet who was the winner of the National Poetry Series. His work is incredible. Here is a video of him performing one of his earlier poems
Meg Freitag -- another young American poet who writes intimately about the self, heartache, etc, with gorgeous imagery. A sample poem
Kaveh Akbar -- an Iranian-American poet who has won a ton of awards.
Claudia Rankine is not young or up-and-coming given that she won a MacArthur and a Pulitzer prize but she is one of the most important poets writing today, and her work often revolves around blackness in America. She also writes prose poetry.
Maggie Nelson is also already famous -- Bluets is the most beautiful book, a meditation of grief and the colour blue.
I would honestly just go browse through https://www.poetryfoundation.org. It's so fun, and you can read poets by theme. That's a very good way to get into both classical and contemporary English language poetry.
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Icelandic-Two-Audio-CDs/dp/144410537X
https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Icelandic-Audio-CDs-Hippocrene/dp/0781811910
https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Icelandic-Complete-Course-Beginners/dp/1138949736
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Icelandic-idiosyncrasies-delights/dp/993592985X/
Thanks for your analysis. I definitely understand what you're saying about the subconscious/surreal element, and I guess I can see where you find a personal honesty in his films, but I don't know if I can agree that understanding Lynch's films can be a "very involving and rewarding process," simply because I haven't really enjoyed the physical process of watching his films.
Again, that's not to say they aren't good. I actually love works of art that are thematically similar. Sometimes shockingly so. If anyone here is a big fan of Eraserhead and is looking for something that's difficult to read, for example, check out the Comte de Lautréamont. There is one chapter in the Comte's most famous work where our (anti-)hero, Maldoror, while staying in a brothel, converses with an enormous hair follicle fallen from the scalp of God, which goes on to explain how its master enjoys coming down from on high to flay young male prostitutes alive. There is no discernible plot to the book, and the language is incredibly dense, but it is beautiful and dark and weird and grotesque. And, most importantly, so, so very difficult to understand. But worth it. As Lynch is, I'm sure.
I certainly plan on giving him more of his due down the road. Like I said, Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway are on my list of films I really ought to see. I would actually very much like to get David Lynch the way others do. To go back to a previous analogy, it's why I keep watching Steven Soderbergh films. I've wanted to catch that something that I've been missing in others' appreciations. With Soderbergh, I came to the conclusion that I simply do not like his filmmaking. (Please no one ask to explain that one.) I know I haven't given Lynch enough of a chance yet to say with finality that I won't some day "get it."
As it stands, though, I know Eraserhead is one of the more popular releases from Criterion this year, and I felt compelled to stand up for the few (Or is it just me? Just me? Okay. Just me.) who are not fans.
That was the first and only thing that came to mind when I tried to think of one. I was thinking only of Geir T. Zoëga, the apparently quite well-known guy who compiled my Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. (Spoiler alert: it's not very concise.)
I recommend Wendy Cope and Billy Collins.
Wendy Cope is a UK poet. Her first collection Maiking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis is perhaps her most famous.
Billy Collins was the US Poet Laurette. He has a wonderful way with words. Highly recommended.
>The Poets of Reddit: The Best of OCPoetry Years 1-3 $5.14, 186 pgs, softcover
Do you take poems that users post in this subreddit and sell them in a book?
A bit OT (you might already know this, other readers might not), but Tolkien was so into Beowulf he penned his own translation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0544442784?pc_redir=1412081864&robot_redir=1
https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Sigurd-Gudr%C3%BAn-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0547273428/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468172385&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=the+lay+of+sigurd+and+gudrun
Ive always felt there was a slight disconnect between the fate version of her and her mythos. fate (as far as I know) kinda skips over her righteous fury over being tricked and lied to.
There's probably a few ways you could go about expanding your knowledge base. The two that seem most fruitful are
If (1), then I'd probably suggest one of two courses. Either, (a) read the stuff that influenced the existential thinkers that you've listed, or (b) read some literature dealing with issues related to the thinkers you've listed.
For (a) I'd suggest the following:
For (b) it's really a mixed bag. I'd suggest going through the SEP articles on the thinkers you've listed and looking into some good secondary literature on them. If you're super interested in Nietzsche, I'd definitely suggest reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality. I really couldn't tell you more unless you told me something more specific about your interests.
If (2), then I suppose I'd suggest one of the following:
Again, it's hard to give you better directions without more information on what you're actually interested in. I've just thrown a bunch of stuff at you, and you couldn't possibly be expected to read, say, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation over break and be expected to really understand it.
It’s a fantastic read, by the way. The commentary is good if you’re into that sort of thing, but there’s also some other writing in their that’s a lot of fun.
Amazon link
I love Wendy Cope and she has some good collections - Family Values and Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis ae two of my favourites
Existem duas astrologias. A astrologia do João Bidu, dos horóscopos, das ciganas que pedem pra ler a tua mão e jogar búzios; e tem a astrologia que foi fundamental para as ciências naturais e para a literatura ocidental durante alguns séculos. Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare e Newton estudaram astrologia, simbolismo astrológico e cosmologia antiga.
A maioria das pessoas aqui entrou em contato apenas com a primeira astrologia, que eu também sou o primeiro a denunciar como falsa. Mais sobre o tema aqui.
This one, though admittedly it is pricey.
What about this one? https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Comedy-Divina-Commedia-Translation/dp/1781393192
I'm not sure if Longfellow's translation is the best, but he was both an accomplished poet and a professor of Italian, so that's encouraging. Plus, this professor from Bard claims his is one of the best: https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-read-dante-in-the-21st-century/#
You can get Till's books translated however that's about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Nights-Till-Lindemann/dp/1935738712
Hey man, sorry for not getting back to you yesterday. Here are some recommendations.
https://www.amazon.com/Maldoror-Complete-Works-Comte-Lautréamont/dp/187897212X/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2UG7IORZO7MOG&keywords=maldoror+english&qid=1563734129&s=gateway&sprefix=malodor%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-3
​
https://www.amazon.com/Exploits-Opinions-Dr-Faustroll-Pataphysician/dp/1878972073/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3FIN94ANSVCSJ&keywords=exploits+and+opinions+of+dr.+faustroll%2C+pataphysician&qid=1563734228&s=gateway&sprefix=dr+faustroll+%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1
​
https://www.amazon.com/Valerie-Week-Wonders-Vitezslav-Nezval/dp/808626419X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MVWRWT2G7RYS&keywords=valerie+and+her+week+of+wonders+book&qid=1563734389&s=gateway&sprefix=valerie+and+her+wee%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-1
​
https://www.amazon.com/Mount-Analogue-Non-Euclidean-Symbolically-Mountaineering/dp/1585673420/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_pd_crcd_0_20?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1585673420&pd_rd_r=885af56e-246c-4203-b69a-3ada3d549cad&pd_rd_w=nBgvG&pd_rd_wg=D0uLp&pf_rd_p=d17c2de0-cc1d-4b09-aad8-987099a21717&pf_rd_r=MPT3RGNB79T8MX0H41BF&psc=1&refRID=MPT3RGNB79T8MX0H41BF
​
the first two are not surrealism in the sense of the authors being part of the actual movement but they were precursors for it as well as being hugely influential to all who took part within the movement; the first one specifically, was said to be, by the surrealists themselves, their bible and holy grail. Surrealism can be quite difficult to read and hard to understand if one is not acquainted with the time period and the history of their epoch but if you stick with it it will pay off in time. You may have to do a little research into the back-stories of each author but this will only benefit you in the end: the last two will be much simpler to read on their own as they are more or less, linear straight-forward fictions. Good Luck!
Faust
Die Physiker
Die Leiden des jungen Werther
Der Prozess
Buddenbrooks
Emilia Galotti
Das Parfüm
Die Blechtrommel
Im Westen nichts neues
These are the ones I remember from school.
I am not sure if they are easy enough to read for you, "Die Physiker" and "Emilia Galotti" are probably the easier ones to read out of these.
The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin.
I've read most of those and LOVED them. I'll just say you're looking for fictional "good books" and go from there. I recommend: