Book You Read This Year - 2009

[lovejuice]

probably i won't finish anything else by the end of this year. i rank my nonfictions from one to ten, but for fictions the ranking will overlap with my top 100 novels anyway. and obviously, a lot of these are re-reading.

Nonfiction

1. H.H. The Dalai Lama’s “The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World”
2. D. Adam's "Last Chance to See"
3. A. Sen’s “Development as Freedom”
4. T. L. Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded"
5. C. Levi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind”
6. R. Barthes's "Writing Degree Zero"
7. J. Derrida's "Of Grammatology"
8. E. H. Gombrich's "Art and Illusion"
9. J. Leslie's "Deep Water"
10. W. Kamkwanba's "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"

J. Rawls's "A Theory of Justice"
K. M. Brown's "Mama Lola"
U. Eco's "Serendipities"
S. Freud's "Totem and Taboo"
P. Krugman's "The Conscious of a Liberal"
F. Taylor's "The Berlin Wall"
D. J. Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music"
S. Ozment's "A Mighty Fortress"
S. Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"
S. D. Levitt, S. J Dubner's "Freakonomics"
G. W. F. Hegel's "The Essential Writings"
M. Berman's "All That is Solid Melts into Air"
M. Foucault's "The Care of the Self"
S. Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents"
U. Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics"
E. Larson's "The Devil in the White City"
A. Rand's "Return of the Primitive"
C. Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan"
O. Lange's "On the Economic Theory of Socialism"
A. Hewitt's "Political Inversions"
R. R. Nelson's "The Moon and the Ghetto"
C. Bongie's "Exotic Memories"
T. C. Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior"
E. K. Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet"
G. P. Cestaro's "Queer Italia"
R. Williams's "Marxism and Literature"
K. J. Arrow's "The Limits of Organization"
M. Levitt's "Hamas"
U. Eco's "Turning Back the Clock"
N. Frye's "The Educated Imagination"
I. Calvino's "The Road to San Giovanni"

Fiction

S. O' Casey's "Three Dublin Plays"
N. Marfouz's "Arabian Nights & Days"
A. Carter's "Shadow Dance"
A. B. Toumi's "Madah-Sartre"
G. Greene's "The Captain and the Enemy"
M. Amis's "Other people"
J. Conrad's "The Secret Agent"
I. Murdoch's "The Philosopher's Pupil"
F. S. Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"
C. Buckley's "Little Green Men"
D. Lessing's "The Memoirs of a Survivor"
K. Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss"
N. Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
R. E. Howard's "The Black Stranger and Other American Tales”
H. Hesse's "Peter Camenzind"
R. Banks's "Continental Drift"
T. Sturgeon's "More than Human"
E. S. Bowen's "Return to Laughter"
R. Banks's "The Book of Jamaica"
H. James's "The Wings of the Dove"
I. Murdoch's "The Time of the Angels"
U. Sinclair's "The Jungle"
E. Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales"
I. Bergman's "The Reduction Trilogy"
R. Bradbury's "The Golden Apples of the Sun"
I. Murdoch's "The Nice and the Good"
U. Saba's "Ernesto"
I. Murdoch's "The Italian Girl"
R. Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder"
O. Pamuk's "Snow"
I. Murdoch's "The Flight from the Enchanter"
V. Woolfe’s “Mrs. Dalloway”
I. Calvino’s “If on a Winter Night a Traveler”
J. D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories”
V.S. Naipal’s “Guerrillas”
C. Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”
R. Bradburry’s “Fahrenheit 451”
M. Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
R. Davies's "A Mixture of Frailties"
T. Wolfe's "The Right Stuff"
J. Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
W. Scott's "Ivanhoe"
H. Melville's "Moby-Dick"
G. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"
R. Davies's "Leaven of Malice"
R. Davies's "Tempest Tost"
J. Joyce's "Ulysses"
A. Moravia's "Erotic Tales"
H. Ellison's "I, Robot"
E. Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"
W. Faulkner's "The Reivers"
S. Brijs's "The Angel Maker"
D. Lodge's "Author, Author"
G. Greene’s “Brighton Rock”
S. Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verse”
W. James’s “The Turn of the Screw”

[Melville]

Here's everything I read, arranged in the order in which I read them, and with ratings out of ten:

1. The Book of Chuang Tzu (Chuang Tzu) - 8
2. The Satyricon (Petronius) - 6
3. Growth of the Soil (Hamsun) - 8
4. Song of Roland (Anonymous) - 6
5. The Poem of the Cid (Anonymous) - 4
6. Nadja (Breton) - 8
7. From a Logical Point of View (Quine) - 7.5
8. The Problems of Philosophy (Bertrand Russell) - 2
9. Ideas I (Husserl) - 6
10. Course on General Linguistics (Saussure) - 5
11. The First Philosophers: the Presocratics and the Sophists (various) - 6
12. The Social Contract (Rousseau) - 6.5
13. Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Emerson) - 7.5
14. Discipline and Punish (Foucault) - 7.5
15. On Certainty (Wittgenstein) - 7.5
16. The Wings of the Dove (Henry James) - 5.5
17. Waiting for God (Simone Weil) - 4.5
18. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Harlan Ellison) - 1
19. The Castle (Kafka) - 8.5
20. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino) - 5.5
21. Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) - 8.5
22. Envy (Olesha) - 8.5
23. The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Duras) - 9
24. Time and Free Will (Bergson) - 7
25. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous) - 7.5

Considering how short most of those books are, that's a pretty shameful list.

[Derek]

probably i won't finish anything else by the end of this year.

Seriously? You still have 3 full days. That should be time for at least 2 or 3 books at your pace. ;)

[dreamdead]

I'll chime in with a depressingly short list.

Stephen Crane's Maggie
John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer
Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers
Nella Larsen's Passing
Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete
Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Lots of stuff that was skim-read throughout the semester as classes necessitated knowledge, but those ones were fully devoted reads.

[Spun Lepton]

probably i won't finish anything else by the end of this year. i rank my nonfictions from one to ten, but for fictions the ranking will overlap with my top 100 novels anyway. and obviously, a lot of these are re-reading.

Nonfiction

1. H.H. The Dalai Lama’s “The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World�
2. D. Adam's "Last Chance to See"
3. A. Sen’s “Development as Freedom�
4. T. L. Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded"
5. C. Levi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind�
6. R. Barthes's "Writing Degree Zero"
7. J. Derrida's "Of Grammatology"
8. E. H. Gombrich's "Art and Illusion"
9. J. Leslie's "Deep Water"
10. W. Kamkwanba's "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"

J. Rawls's "A Theory of Justice"
K. M. Brown's "Mama Lola"
U. Eco's "Serendipities"
S. Freud's "Totem and Taboo"
P. Krugman's "The Conscious of a Liberal"
F. Taylor's "The Berlin Wall"
D. J. Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music"
S. Ozment's "A Mighty Fortress"
S. Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"
S. D. Levitt, S. J Dubner's "Freakonomics"
G. W. F. Hegel's "The Essential Writings"
M. Berman's "All That is Solid Melts into Air"
M. Foucault's "The Care of the Self"
S. Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents"
U. Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics"
E. Larson's "The Devil in the White City"
A. Rand's "Return of the Primitive"
C. Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan"
O. Lange's "On the Economic Theory of Socialism"
A. Hewitt's "Political Inversions"
R. R. Nelson's "The Moon and the Ghetto"
C. Bongie's "Exotic Memories"
T. C. Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior"
E. K. Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet"
G. P. Cestaro's "Queer Italia"
R. Williams's "Marxism and Literature"
K. J. Arrow's "The Limits of Organization"
M. Levitt's "Hamas"
U. Eco's "Turning Back the Clock"
N. Frye's "The Educated Imagination"
I. Calvino's "The Road to San Giovanni"

Fiction

S. O' Casey's "Three Dublin Plays"
N. Marfouz's "Arabian Nights & Days"
A. Carter's "Shadow Dance"
A. B. Toumi's "Madah-Sartre"
G. Greene's "The Captain and the Enemy"
M. Amis's "Other people"
J. Conrad's "The Secret Agent"
I. Murdoch's "The Philosopher's Pupil"
F. S. Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"
C. Buckley's "Little Green Men"
D. Lessing's "The Memoirs of a Survivor"
K. Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss"
N. Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
R. E. Howard's "The Black Stranger and Other American Tales�
H. Hesse's "Peter Camenzind"
R. Banks's "Continental Drift"
T. Sturgeon's "More than Human"
E. S. Bowen's "Return to Laughter"
R. Banks's "The Book of Jamaica"
H. James's "The Wings of the Dove"
I. Murdoch's "The Time of the Angels"
U. Sinclair's "The Jungle"
E. Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales"
I. Bergman's "The Reduction Trilogy"
R. Bradbury's "The Golden Apples of the Sun"
I. Murdoch's "The Nice and the Good"
U. Saba's "Ernesto"
I. Murdoch's "The Italian Girl"
R. Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder"
O. Pamuk's "Snow"
I. Murdoch's "The Flight from the Enchanter"
V. Woolfe’s “Mrs. Dalloway�
I. Calvino’s “If on a Winter Night a Traveler�
J. D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories�
V.S. Naipal’s “Guerrillas�
C. Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart�
R. Bradburry’s “Fahrenheit 451�
M. Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
R. Davies's "A Mixture of Frailties"
T. Wolfe's "The Right Stuff"
J. Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
W. Scott's "Ivanhoe"
H. Melville's "Moby-Dick"
G. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"
R. Davies's "Leaven of Malice"
R. Davies's "Tempest Tost"
J. Joyce's "Ulysses"
A. Moravia's "Erotic Tales"
H. Ellison's "I, Robot"
E. Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"
W. Faulkner's "The Reivers"
S. Brijs's "The Angel Maker"
D. Lodge's "Author, Author"
G. Greene’s “Brighton Rock�
S. Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verse�
W. James’s “The Turn of the Screw�

Holy crap! Are you, like, a brain in a jar with eyes and access to the Internet?

[Mysterious Dude]

1. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnetugt)
2. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (Kenzaburo Oë)
3. The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
4. Confessions of a Mask (Yukio Mishima)
5. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
6. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
7. The Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain)
8. The Immoralist (André Gide)
9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
10. Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
11. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
12. Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)
13. The Satyricon (Petronius)
14. Chéri (Colette)
15. Zeno's Conscience (Italo Svevo)
16. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
17. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
18. The Pillow Book (Sei Shonagon)
19. Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Adichie)
20. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
21. Cise De Rat (Piet Bakker)
22. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
23. The War of the Buttons (Louis Pergaud)
24. The Song of Roland (anon.)
25. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
26. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
27. Life of an Amorous Woman (Ihara Saikaku)
28. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
29. Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre)
30. Nadja (Andre Breton)
31. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)

I'm currently reading Don Quixote; I don't think I'll finish it before New Year's.

[monolith94]

Not a terribly distinguished reading list, but honesty, honesty…

A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The New World — Winston Churchill
Soldier of the Mist — Gene Wolfe
Soldier of Arete — Gene Wolfe
Kidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson
Swamp Thing Earth to Earth / Reunion — Alan Moore
Soldier of Sidon — Gene Wolfe
Endangered Species — Gene Wolfe
7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century — Andrew Krepinevich
The Book of Frank Herbert — Frank Herbert
Brainwash — Dominic Streatfeild
The Geography of Thought — Richard E. Nisbett
Three Victories and a Defeat — Brendan Simms
As Above, So Below — Rudy Rucker
Star Light, Star Bright (Vol. 2) — Alfred Bester
Underground Classics — Denis Kitchen
The Gothic War — Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen
Out of the Silent Planet — C.S. Lewis
Perelandra — C.S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength — C.S. Lewis
Hellboy Library Edition Vol. 2: The Chained Coffin, The Right Hand of Doom, and Others — Mike Mignola
The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins
The Book — Alan Watts
Hyperion — Dan Simmons
From Hell — Alan Moore
The Murder at the Vicarage— Agatha Christie

[ledfloyd]

hmm. i was keeping a list, but it was on my old computer. i'm pretty sure denis johnson's tree of smoke was my favorite thing i read this year. but you know, i could be wrong.

[lovejuice]

Holy crap! Are you, like, a brain in a jar with eyes and access to the Internet?
metaphorically yes, since i have no life. :P

[lovejuice]

8. The Problems of Philosophy (Bertrand Russell) - 2

have you ever read anything good by Russell? his idea seems compelling, but i've never found a good angle to approach it. his book on mathematical philosophy reads like a Math book for laymen.

[Hugh_Grant]

I probably read a thousand college essays over the course of the year, so my book-reading time is non-existent.

[Benny Profane]

This should all be in a separate thread!!!

[EvilShoe]

Good year for me:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Rabbit is Rich - John Updike
Rabbit at Rest - John Updike
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Amerika - Franz Kafka
About a Boy - Nick Hornby
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
Survivor: A Novel - Chuck Palahniuk
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The Collector - John Fowles
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Women - Charles Bukowski
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
2666 - Roberto Bolano
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Generation X - Douglas Coupland
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
Ex-Drummer - Herman Brusselmans
A Widow for One Year - John Irving
De Helaasheid der Dingen - Dimitri Verhulst
The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
The Yiddish Policeman's Union - Michael Chabon
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Two Women - Harry Mulisch
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk
Homicide: A Life on the Streets - David SimonAlso plan on finishing A Scanner Darkly before the year is over.

[Kurosawa Fan]

I'm fairly ashamed at my small list this year:

Clockers – Richard Price
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Election – Tom Perrotta
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs – Chuck Klosterman
2666 – Roberto Bolano
World War Z – Max Brooks
The Neverending Story – Michael Ende
Florence of Arabia – Christopher Buckley
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
The Pearl – John Steinbeck
Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
The Blind Side – Michael Lewis
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
Under the Banner of Heaven – Jon Krakauer
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – Angela Carter
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
Nine Stories – J.D. Salinger
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
Straight Man – Richard Russo
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Too Cool to Be Forgotten – Alex Robinson
Friday Night Lights – Buzz Bissinger
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card


That's in the order I read them, with those highlighted in red being the ones I loved. That's the least number of books I've read in five years or so. The best book I read this year was 2666.

[Dukefrukem]

Those are solid lists guys... I travel a lot and I read more than ANY of my friends combined!! My list included;

Why We Suck - Dennis Leary
Too Fat to Fish - Artie Lange
Cemetery Dance - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
Rip Tide - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
Tyrannosaur Canyon - Douglas Preston
The Codex - Douglas Preston

Currently Reading - The Cabinet of Curiosities - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

[Raiders]

Ranked by preference:

1. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
2. The Silent Cry (Kenzaburo Oe)
3. V (Thomas Pynchon)
4. The Member of the Wedding (Carson McCullers)
5. A Fable (William Faulkner)
6. On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan)
7. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon)
8. A Dangerous Encounter (Ernst Junger)
9. "The Stories of Jacob" from Joseph and His Brothers (Thomas Mann)
10. The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse)
11. The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
12. The Naked Sun (Isaac Asimov)
13. Fell Vol. 1: Feral City (Warren Ellis)
14. Love (Angela Carter)
15. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Michael Pollan)
16. Insomnia (Stephen King)

[Benny Profane]

Ranked by preference:


3. V (Thomas Pynchon)


Did you ever post any thoughts on this one?

[Melville]

have you ever read anything good by Russell? his idea seems compelling, but i've never found a good angle to approach it. his book on mathematical philosophy reads like a Math book for laymen.
I've only read that one book and part of Why I am Not a Christian, which I also disliked. Is the book you're referring to Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy? I've considered reading that one, but your description of it doesn't sound so good. His most famous book is Principia Mathematica, which presumably reads like a math book for logicians, but I've heard that it is rather clunky and outdated. I know Qrazy likes him more than I do, so he's probably a better person to ask.

[Raiders]

Did you ever post any thoughts on this one?

No, and I really ought to read it again. Suffice to say that Pynchon's mastery of prose is second to none. There are countless passages I could isolate and just read over and over again. I'm not sure how successful he is in this book at balancing between the two main characters and so much of the little details just sort of flew by me on the first time 'round. I think the Benny stuff is rather easily digestable, but the Stencil stuff has, just ten months later, sort of blurred in my mind. I think that's probably the only con to Pynchon's style is that there's just so much there.

By contrast, Lot 49 felt a bit too much like a novel written with the feature film adaptation already in mind, if that makes any sense. It's Pynchon-lite with plenty to chew on but it felt a bit backwards from V.

[D_Davis]

1. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (Paperback) by Spider Robinson

2. Insomnia (Paperback) by Stephen King

3. The Tombs of Atuan (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 2) by Ursula K. Le Guin

4. Spacetime Donuts (Paperback) by Rudy Rucker

5. Under the Dome (Hardcover) by Stephen King

6. Dungeon Master's Guide: A 4th Edition Core Rulebook

7. Monster Manual: A 4th Edition Core Rulebook (D&D Core Rulebook)

8. Player's Handbook I: A 4th Edition Core Rulebook

9. The Stand (Expanded Edition) by Stephen

10. Night Shift (Paperback) by Stephen King

11. Use of Weapons (Paperback) by Iain M. Banks

12. High-Rise (Flamingo Modern Classic) by J.G. Ballard

13. Deeper (Paperback) by James A. Moore

14. The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) by Patrick Rothfuss

15. Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Paperback) by James Morrow

16. Vamphyri! (Necroscope, #2) by Brian Lumley

17. Necroscope (Necroscope, Book 1) by Brian Lumley

18. We Can Build You (Paperback) by Philip K. Dick

19. Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon (Hardcover) by William Saroyan

20. The Tyrant (Paperback) by Michael Cisco

21. The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams (Paperback) by Arthur Machen

22. The Game-Players of Titan (Paperback) by Philip K. Dick

23. The House on the Borderland (Paperback) by William Hope Hodgson

24. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Perennial Classics) by Muriel Spark

25. Fears Unnamed (Mass Market Paperback) by Tim Lebbon

26. Extra (Ordinary) People by Joanna Russ

27. Pedro Páramo (Paperback) by Juan Rulfo

28. Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice (Paperback) by Thich Nhat Hanh

29. Viriconium: The Pastel City/A Storm of Wings/In Viriconium/Viric... by M. John Harrison

30. The Variable Man and Other Stories (Paperback) by Philip K. Dick

31. Living Buddha, Living Christ (Paperback) by Thich Nhat Hanh

32. The Big Jump (Vintage Ace SF, G-683) by Leigh Brackett

33. Professor Dowell's Head by Aleksandr Beliaev

34. Different Seasons (Paperback) by Stephen King Different Seasons

35.To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare (Hardcover)

36. The Driver's Seat (The New Directions Bibelots) by Muriel Spark


Top 10

10. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark – I discovered Ms. Spark this year, and instantly fell in love. I love her brisk style. With an economy of words that even Hemingway would be jealous of, Spark weaves a coming of age tale with a sinister streak of juvenile angst.

9. To Sleep, Perchance to Dream…Nightmare – Various Authors. A fantastic collection of weird fiction. The best of the bunch: The Drunkard’s Dream - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; The Yellow Sign - Robert W. Chambers; The Dreams in the Witch-House - H. P. Lovecraft; Dream of a Mannikin - Thomas Ligotti; In the Flesh - Clive Barker

8. Living Buddha, Living Christ – Thich Nhat Hanh – I would challenge every Christian to read Nhat Hanh, and to open their minds to his deep understanding. This is a very, very good book.

7. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (Paperback) by Spider Robinson

6. Zen Keys – Thich Nhat Hanh – I believe that it is impossible for the Western mind to truly grasp Zen and Buddhism. I believe this is why there are different religions – they represent different ways that God speaks to different cultures. Nhat Hanh does a wonderful job at explaining some of the deeper ways of Zen.

5. Shambling Towards Hiroshima – James Morrow – Hilarious and thought provoking. Morrow’s WWII satire is brilliant and endlessly entertaining. A great new discovery for me; I can’t wait to read more. He’s like a far less cynical and less emotionally disconnected Douglas Adams.

4. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark – This novella blew my mind. It is unbelievably good. The prose is perfection, and the narrative is razor sharp and unforgettable. Contains one of the greatest characters in all of literature.

3. The Great God Pan – Arthur Machen – An early example of weird fiction, and still one of the best. This story is sinister. Because of the time it was written the most gruesome stuff is only implied and hinted at. At one time it was considered incredibly risque and dangerous, and I can see why. Unlike a lot of weird fiction of it's time, Machen's tale is easy to read, not burdened by the overly purple prose.

2. The Stand (Unabridged) – Stephen King - finally got around to reading this behemoth. Read the original when I was far too young to really get it, and now, as bona fide adult (I'm usually in bed before 11 p.m., and I am spending this Friday night doing house work), I totally loved it. It's a great American epic full of memorable characters (The Trashcan Man), and a dark apocalyptic narrative about a killer flu exponentially worse than the swine flu. Can't think of a better time to read The Stand than right now.

1. Under the Dome – Stephen King - I am prepared to declare this "King's best novel." It has some of his best characters, some of his best writing, a tense, relentlessly plotted narrative, and some of his darkest, most disturbing moments. King weaves a complex tale of small-town American politics and religious hypocrisy all wrapped around the very real atmosphere of fear and willful ignorance that currently plagues our country. The plotting is complex, and through deft narration King keeps things plowing along, juggling the actions of dozens and dozens of characters, through a number of harrowing action set-pieces offset with moving human drama face-to-face with one of his most evil villains - Big Jim.

[Mara]

Davis!

:pritch:

[Benny Profane]

No, and I really ought to read it again. Suffice to say that Pynchon's mastery of prose is second to none. There are countless passages I could isolate and just read over and over again. I'm not sure how successful he is in this book at balancing between the two main characters and so much of the little details just sort of flew by me on the first time 'round. I think the Benny stuff is rather easily digestable, but the Stencil stuff has, just ten months later, sort of blurred in my mind. I think that's probably the only con to Pynchon's style is that there's just so much there.

By contrast, Lot 49 felt a bit too much like a novel written with the feature film adaptation already in mind, if that makes any sense. It's Pynchon-lite with plenty to chew on but it felt a bit backwards from V.

I agree with everything you just said. Needless to say, he bounces forwards from Crying to Gravity's Rainbow, so don't be dismayed.

[Raiders]

I agree with everything you just said. Needless to say, he bounces forwards from Crying to Gravity's Rainbow, so don't be dismayed.

Oh I'm not. I already have Gravity's Rainbow at home. Might be the next book I tackle. That or I'll finish up Mann's Joseph and His Brothers.

[ledfloyd]

i'm stuck at 500 pages in gravity's rainbow. it has some great passages, but overall i just don't dig it.

[EvilShoe]

Should probably also mention what I thought was best. Read a lot of good stuff, so there's a lot that stand out:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier, the Rabbit books, The Great Gatsby, Breakfast of Champions, Blood Meridian, The Collector, 2666, Animal Farm, Grapes of Wrath, Anna Karenina & Homicide: Life on the Streets.

[Benny Profane]

The All-Timers:

1. 2666 - Roberto Bolano
2. JR - William Gaddis

The Almost Elite:

3. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
4. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
5. Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon

The Truly Excellent:

6. Blindness - Jose Saramago
7. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
8. Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme
9. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

The Very Good:

10. Women - Charles Bukowski
11. Wait Until Spring Bandini - John Fante
12. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer
13. Brazil - John Updike
14. Breakfast at Tiffanys - Truman Capote
15. Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris

The Pretty Good:

16. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
17. Panic - Michael Lewis, Various
18. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
19. Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
20. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

The Average/Forgettable:

21. New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
22. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
23. Beneath the Underdog - Charles Mingus
24. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
25. Tales of Ordinary Madness - Charles Bukowski
26. Three Short Novels - William Faulkner

The Mediocre to Bad:

27. Closing Time: A Memoir - Joe Queenan
28. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman - Angela Carter
29. Retail Anarchy - Sam Pocker


All in all, in terms of quality and quantity, probably my best year of reading ever.

[Kurosawa Fan]

The Average/Forgettable:

21. New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
22. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
24. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury


That's just staggering to me. Hard to wrap my brain around.

[Ezee E]

Read 10-20 books this year. The 3/5 of 2666 is the best. I should finish it now

[SpaceOddity]

* indicates re-reads
Zola - The Masterpiece
T.S. Eliot - Prufrock and Other Observations
Daphne Du Maurier - The Birds and Other Stories
Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories
Bertolt Brecht - Life of Galileo
Zola - Germinal
Kate Williams - England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton
Anne Bronte - Agnes Grey
Noel Streatfeild - Ballet Shoes *
Dumas - The Three Musketeers
Paula Byrne - Perdita The Life of Mary Robinson
Virginia Woolf - Orlando *
Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca *
Muriel Spark - Loitering with Intent
Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd *
Lloyd Alexander - The Book of Three
Lloyd Alexander - The Black Cauldron
Lloyd Alexander - The Castle of Llyr
Lloyd Alexander - Taran Wanderer
Lloyd Alexander - The High King
Lloyd Alexander - The Foundling
Dumas - The Knight of Maison-Rouge : A Novel of Marie Antoinette
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Blue Flower
Flaubert - Madame Bovary *
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic
Nick Bantock - Griffin & Sabine
Susan Cooper - Over Sea, Under Stone
Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising
Susan Cooper - Greenwitch
Susan Cooper - The Grey King
Susan Cooper - Silver on the Tree
Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems
Henry James - Portrait of a Lady *
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White *
Edna O'Brien - Byron in Love
Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Nina Auerbach - Romantic Imprisonment
Frank O'Hara - Lunch Poems
Giorgio Bassani - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Bram Stoker - Dracula *
Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories
Kate Chopin - The Awakening *
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Avonlea
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness *
Winifred Watson - Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan
L.M. Montgomery - Emily of New Moon
L.M. Montgomery - Emily Climbs
L.M. Montgomery - Emily's Quest
Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde
L.M. Montgomery - The Story Girl
Stella Gibbons - Nightingale Wood
Tolstoy - War and Peace
Joan Aiken - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Angela Carter - Shadow Dance
Mary Shelley - Transformation
Daphne du Maurier - The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved
Thomas Hardy - The Woodlanders
L.M. Montgomery - The Blue Castle
Willa Cather - My Antonia
Ann-Marie MacDonald - The Way the Crow Flies
Thomas Hardy - Under the Greenwood Tree
Bernhard Schlink - The Reader
Rachel Ferguson - The Brontes went to Woolworths
Jeanette Winterson - Tanglewreck
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter
Adam Gopnik - The King in the Window
Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger
Ovid - Metamorphoses
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory
Daphne du Maurier - Don't Look Now and Other Stories
Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast
Marilynn Robinson - Housekeeping
Tom Stoppard - Arcadia
Balzac - Cousin Bette
J.G. Ballard - The Complete Short Stories Volume One
Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Lady Audley's Secret
Sally Gardner - I, Coriander
George Eliot - Adam Bede
Elizabeth Gaskell - Gothic Tales
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
Charlaine Harris - Dead Until Dark
Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture
Dickens - Little Dorrit
John Connolly - The Book of Lost Things
George Eliot - Felix Holt: The Radical
Philip Pullman - Northern Lights *
Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife *
Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass *
Philip Pullman - Lyra's Oxford
Philip Pullman - Once Upon a Time in the North
Dostoevsky - A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
Stefan Zweig - The Post Office Girl
Mary Seacole - Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Louisa May Alcott - Good Wives
Dickens - Our Mutual Friend
George Eliot - Brother Jacob
Stefan Zweig - Journey into the Past
Elizabeth Bowen - The Last September
Rebecca West - The Fountain Overflows
Rebecca West - This Real Night
Rebecca West - Cousin Rosamund
D.H. Lawrence - The Virgin & the Gipsy
Carson McCullers - Reflections in a Golden Eye
Jeanette Winterson - The Battle of the Sun
Turgenev - Home of the Gentry
Joan Aiken - The Winter Sleepwalker
A.S. Byatt - The Children's Book
Bernardine Evaristo - The Emperor's Babe
J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan (the play)
Edith Wharton - The Children
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Wilkie Collins - Armadale
Elizabeth Gaskell - Cranford

[Melville]

That's obscene. What did you think of War and Peace, particularly the several-hundred page ramble about a calculus of history?

[SpaceOddity]

That's obscene. What did you think of War and Peace, particularly the several-hundred page ramble about a calculus of history?

It had a happy ending. The bint I loathed got fat.

*vodka toast*

[Melville]

It had a happy ending. The bint I loathed got fat.

*vodka toast*
:lol: Good old spite.

I don't really remember the characters. Which girl got fat? The one with the fuzz on her lip?

[SpaceOddity]

:lol: Good old spite.

I don't really remember the characters. Which girl got fat? The one with the fuzz on her lip?

Natasha of the slender arms. They ain't slender no more.

[Melville]

Natasha of the slender arms. They ain't slender no more.
Oh, she seemed like the typical flighty young girl of 19th century literature. I'm surprised you disliked her so much. Too flighty?

[Mara]

Ooh, you hit several of my favorite children's series.

[Ezee E]

Showoff.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Did not read much. Was too busy rounding out the horror films of the past decade, becoming obsessed with BSG, and doing my rewatch of Lost.

1. Slaughterhouse Five
Expected a sci-fi story, got a personal, deep account of war and confusion. Overall, I was okay with that.
2. The Sea Wolf
Wolf Larsen is such a vivid, amazing character. So alive and humorous that he more than forgives the bad romance.
3. When the Sleeper Wakes
Flawed but fascinating precursor to dystopian fiction, worthwhile because the main character provokes the future he awakens to.
4. When the Women Come Out to Dance
First time I've read Elmore Leonard, or, rather, listened to on audio tape courtesy of Taye Diggs. Great characters, good stories.
5. Dune
At times interminable, at times riveting. Consistently intelligent, inconsistently dramatic. Sometimes too archetypal to fully engage.

[lovejuice]

That's obscene. What did you think of War and Peace, particularly the several-hundred page ramble about a calculus of history?
i misread your post as "a history of calculus." :lol:

[Melville]

i misread your post as "a history of calculus." :lol:
Well it is a pretty long book, so that might have been in there somewhere too.

[ContinentalOp]

Read quite a lot (for fun) compared to recent years. Graduating from college last year and having a no-brainer job helped.

The Killer Inside Me- Jim Thompson
Day by Day Armageddon- J.L. Bourne
The Grifters- Jim Thompson
Cry Yourself to Sleep- Jeremy Tinder
Ripley Under Ground- Patricia Highsmith
The Talented Mr. Ripley- Patricia Highsmith
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved- Judith Freeman
The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler
Black Hole- Charles Burns
The last couple the Walking Dead trades
The first four Y the Last Man trades
The Zombie Survival Guide- Max Brooks
A Dame to Kill For- Frank Miller
Batman: Dark Victory- Jeph Loeb

Kind of went nuts with zombie/mystery stuff.
Particularly liked the bold.

[jesse]

Alas, I didn't beat SpaceOddity per my resolution, but still by far my all-time high. Nothing for school (both assigned and research) counted unless I read the entire volume.

* - Volume of Poetry
** - Reread

The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth - Xialu Guo
Spring Awakening - Steven Sater
Twelve Pillars - Jim Rohn & Chris Widener
Madwomen: The "Locas Mujeres"* - Gabriela Mistral
Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War - Lynn H. Nichols
New Moon - Stephanie Meyer
Ours* - Cole Swenson
A Metaphorical God: Poems* - Kimberly Johnson
Carmilla - Sheridan le Fanu
Eclipse - Stephanie Meyer
Blue of Noon - Georges Bataille
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Notes to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits - Samara O'Shea
Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947 - 1963 - Susan Sontag
Poems: 1972 - 1982 - Denise Levertov
Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal
Invasions* - Adam Kirsch
The Oresteia: Agamemnon - Aeschylus
The Oresteia: Libaton Bearers - Aeschylus
The Oresteia: Eumenides - Aeschylus
Breaking Dawn - Stephanie Meyer
In Praise of the Unfinished* - Julia Hartwig
The Gay Canon - Robert Drake
19 Names For Our Band* - Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Without Saying* - Richard Howard
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle - C.G. Jung
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia - Laura Miller
Wild Nights! - Joyce Carol Oates
An Experiment with Criticism - C.S. Lewis
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
Flow Chart* - John Ashbery
The History of Sexuality: Volume I - Michel Foucault
The Complete Poems of Michelangelo - John Frederick Nims, Ed.
Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality - Dwight A. McBride
Vienna 1900: Art and Culture - Christian Brandstätter, Ed.
The Ballets Russes and its World - Lynn Garafola, Ed.
When We Were Three: George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler & Glenway Wescott - Anatole Pohorilenko
Water From a Bucket: A Diary (1948 - 1957) - Charles Henri Ford
Reader's Block - David Markson
Flags of Ecstasy: Selected Poems* - Charles Henri Ford
Totally Tenderly Tragically: Essays & Criticism - Phillip Lopate
Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies - Parker Tyler
The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle and Sexualities - Ramsay Burt
A Queer History of the Ballet - Peter Stoneley
The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (Under the Hill) - Aubrey Beardsley
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky - Joan Acocella, Ed.
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son - Tim Wise
Contempt - Alberto Moravia
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
The Innocence and Wisdom of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
The Devil in the Flesh - Raymond Radiguet
The Beautiful Room is Empty - Edmund White
Last Year at Marienbad (BFI Film Classics) - Jean-Louis Leutrat
The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares
Chess Story - Stefan Zweig
The Princess of Cleves - Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
Xala - Ousmane Sembene
Last Year at Marienbad - Alain Robbe-Grillet
Woman Native Other - Trinh-T Minh-ha
The End of the World Book: A Novel - Alistair Mccartney
Little Men** - Louisa May Alcott
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot DÃ*az
Agnès Varda (French Film Directors) - Alison Smith
Theorem - Pier Paolo Pasolini
The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
Another Country - James Baldwin
The French New Wave: A New Look - Naomi Greene
Intertextuality - Graham Allen
Storyteller - Leslie Marmon Silko
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
Mrs. Dalloway** - Virginia Woolf
Ordinary Jack** - Helen Cresswell
Postcards from the Cinema - Serge Daney
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays - Zadie Smith
Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet

Favorites:: Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, The Rape of Europa, A Metaphorical God: Poems, In Praise of the Unfinished, Screening the Sexes, Water from a Bucket: A Diary, The Invention of Morel

Runner's Up: Nightwood, Levertov's Poems: 1972- 1982, Contempt, Wuthering Heights, The Innocence and Wisdom of Father Brown, Theorem, Storyteller, Our Lady of the Flowers

[jesse]

F. S. Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"
K. Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss"
E. Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales"
V. Woolfe’s “Mrs. Dalloway� You ended up finishing the Fitzgerald? If I'm remembering correctly, you weren't too thrilled with it.

Did you like the Desai?

Had the Rohmer out from the library for a while, but never got around to it.

Was it your first read of Mrs. Dalloway?

Impressive list, as always. Am planning this year to take on Barthes, Levi-Strauss and more Derrida myself.



17. Waiting for God (Simone Weil) - 4.5 The low score for its content? She keeps piquing my interest... And I will actually finish Bergson's Matter and Memory this year--have started it several times, but never completed it.


13. The Satyricon (Petronius) Worth reading?


The Collector - John Fowles Have you seen the film? I had forgotten it was adapted from a novel.


* indicates re-reads
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic
Carson McCullers - Reflections in a Golden Eye How did I miss that you read these? I can't imagine you liked the former much; what did you think of the latter?

[SpaceOddity]

Alas, I didn't beat SpaceOddity per my resolution

Foolish Earthling.

[Mysterious Dude]

[Re: Satyricon]

Worth reading?
I kinda liked it. There is a whole lot missing from the original book (I've read that it might have been as long as Les Miserables, but I think that's just speculation). In any case, what's left doesn't feel at all like a complete book, but it's still interesting to read about modern life from first century Rome. I especially found the passages about slavery interesting.

I like Fellini's movie more, though.

[Melville]

The low score for its content? She keeps piquing my interest... And I will actually finish Bergson's Matter and Memory this year--have started it several times, but never completed it.
Weil's book has an interesting take on faith, but both the book and her ideas are so relentlessly focused on her fixation with her own martyrdom that they don't add up to much. Bergson's book has some interesting, seminal ideas about the qualitative nature of time, which prefigured later authors like Proust and Heidegger, but a lot of his argumentation was sloppy, and some of his ideas (particularly regarding numbers) were just obviously flat-out wrong. I don't know if his later work is better. Is Matter and Memory good?

[lovejuice]

You ended up finishing the Fitzgerald? If I'm remembering correctly, you weren't too thrilled with it.
I wasn't too thrilled with it, but you -- or some other posters here -- were right. if you can get pass the first hundred pages or so, it's getting better. i end up quite enjoying it.


Did you like the Desai?
a lot. it's in my top 100 novel thread actually.


Had the Rohmer out from the library for a while, but never got around to it.
it's essentially the same thing as the movies. or even less so. unlike bergman whose script is detailed enough to be of interest by its own, rohmer's is more like a shooting script.


Was it your first read of Mrs. Dalloway?
it's my second.

[EvilShoe]

Have you seen the film? I had forgotten it was adapted from a novel.

I haven't yet. It's supposed to be pretty good, right?
Novel itself is just immensely creepy and involving, especially as Fowles switches narrator midway through. Does the movie attempt this?

[SpaceOddity]

How did I miss that you read these? I can't imagine you liked the former much; what did you think of the latter?

Really, I wished they'd get their jealous mits off the Lit.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Almost forgot I read Candide by Voltaire. Cute story, that.

[Mara]

Almost forgot I read Candide by Voltaire. Cute story, that.

I was shocked that I actually found it somewhat shocking.

[Hugh_Grant]

In a French theater class in college, I played Paquette, the maid/prostitute in Candide.