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Dead & Messed Up
02-02-2010, 07:20 AM
How does one request a sticky?

Anyway, I like the top 10 films threads, since they can be a good motivator to watch films. So I figure this could be a good motivator as well.

As of now:

01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02.
03.
04.
05.
06.
07.
08.
09.
10.

Milky Joe
02-02-2010, 08:23 AM
Alright.

1. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
2. Confessions by Jacob Boehme
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
4. The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Winston*
02-02-2010, 08:34 AM
01. Catch 22 (Heller)
02. More than Human (Sturgeon)
03. Occupied City (Peace)
04. My Dead Body (Huston)
05. Ender's Game (Scott Card)
06. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Larrson)
07.
08.
09.
10.

Liked the first 4.

Our Aurora
02-03-2010, 04:21 AM
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
2. Uncle Tom's Children (Richard Wright)
3. Blues People (Leroi Jones a.k.a. Amiri Baraka)
4. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
5. Lucy (Jamaica Kincaid)
6. Arrival of the Snake Woman (Olive Senior)
7. Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour (Peniel E. Joseph)
8. Buxton Spice (Oonya Kempadoo)
9.
10.

Ezee E
02-03-2010, 10:09 AM
1. The Old Man and the Sea (E. Hemingway)
2. Dali (?)
3. White Jazz (J. Ellroy)

Llopin
02-03-2010, 01:27 PM
1. The End of the Road by J. Barth
2. The Living End by S. Elkin
3. Michael Kohlhass by H. von Kleist
4. Personal Mythology by A. Embrikos
5. A pale-blue woman's handwriting by F. Werfel
6. Theater and its Double by Artaud
7. Lenz by G. Buchner
8. L'agrume by V. Mréjen

Duncan
02-03-2010, 02:40 PM
1. The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. by Robert Fagles)
2. 2666 (Roberto Bolano)
3. Stoner (John Williams)
4. Sixty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
5. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)
6. The Human Stain (Phillip Roth)
7. The Interrogation (J.M.G. Le Clezio)
8. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
9. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Malcolm Lowry)
10. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)

Others:
Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
Warlock (Oakley Hall)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard)
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
Gargoyles (Thomas Bernhard)
Tinkers (Paul Harding)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Hunger (Knut Hamsun)
The Bell Jar (Silvia Plath)
The Golden Mean (Annabel Lyon)
Malone Dies (Samuel Beckett)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Ilustrado (Miguel Syjuco)
Gertrude (Hermann Hesse)
Mother Courage and her Children (Bertoldt Brecht) [play]
City of Glass (Paul Auster)
Life and Times of Michael K (J. M. Coetzee)
The Sickness Unto Death (Soren Kierkegaard)
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
The Colossus (Sylvia Plath) [poetry]
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Blood Wedding (Federico Garcia Lorca) [play]
The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
The Collector (John Fowles)
Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Luigi Pirandello) [play]
Chimera (John Barth)
A Night at the Movies (Robert Coover)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)
Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) [play]
De Niro's Game (Rawi Hage)
The Odes of Horace (Umm...Horace)
The Inferno (Dante)
Runaway (Alice Munro)
The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

D_Davis
02-03-2010, 02:57 PM
Man - you guys are reading fast!


1. Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
2. Book of the New Sun - Volume 1 - Gene Wolfe
3. Ancient Sorceries and Other Tales - Algernon Blackwood
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Spaceman Spiff
02-03-2010, 08:39 PM
Do re-reads count? If no,

1. Darkness at Noon

ThePlashyBubbler
02-08-2010, 10:34 PM
1. White Noise (Don Delillo)
2. Go Tell It On the Mountain (James Baldwin)
3. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
4. The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
5. At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien)
6. The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
7.
8.
9.
10.

Liked all 6, tough to order them.

ledfloyd
02-08-2010, 10:41 PM
1. 2666
2. Catch 22
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Freedom
5. All the Pretty Horses
6. The Trial
7. Blindness
8. The Handmaid's Tale
9. Henderson, The Rain King
10. The Castle

Dead & Messed Up
02-09-2010, 06:44 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
03. The Walking Dead Volumes 1-3 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
04.
05.
06.
07.
08.
09.
10.

Milky Joe
02-15-2010, 11:52 PM
Alright.

1. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
2. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
3. Confessions by Jacob Boehme
4. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
5. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
6. The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
7.
8.
9.
10.

lovejuice
02-16-2010, 04:25 AM
5. At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien)

Liked all 6, tough to order them.
ooh...can't wait to start this book.

ContinentalOp
02-16-2010, 05:24 AM
1. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
2. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
3. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

TWD continues to impress me with its solid character development and pace, while Ripley's Game was an alternately fascinating and adequate addition to the Ripliad (I wanted more of Tom Ripley and less of the other main character). About a third of the way through Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and about halfway through King's Under the Dome. I want to read at least 20 books this year.

monolith94
02-16-2010, 02:01 PM
only 2 so far…
1. The Variable Man & Other Stories — Philip K. Dick
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. A Secret Atlas — Michael A. Stackpole (pretty bad)

Dead & Messed Up
02-16-2010, 05:42 PM
TWD continues to impress me with its solid character development and pace, while Ripley's Game was an alternately fascinating and adequate addition to the Ripliad (I wanted more of Tom Ripley and less of the other main character). About a third of the way through Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and about halfway through King's Under the Dome. I want to read at least 20 books this year.

Nice. I just caught up with Walking Dead also, and I was engrossed by the "end." My goal is 20 also. I'm listening to Jaws in my car, reading the Gita at work, and working through Paradise Lost at home.

kuehnepips
02-17-2010, 10:51 AM
Millennium-Trilogy
First book very good, second good, third so so



5. At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien)


I love this one.

Milky Joe
02-18-2010, 12:31 AM
The Third Policeman, however, is O'Brien's masterpiece.

Dead & Messed Up
02-18-2010, 01:08 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
03. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
04. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
05.
06.
07.
08.
09.
10.

dreamdead
02-22-2010, 03:25 PM
1. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
2. A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather
3. Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
4. Their Eyes were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
5. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
6. Daisy Miller by Henry James

Kurosawa Fan
02-22-2010, 05:21 PM
1. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
2. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
3. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
4. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

EvilShoe
02-22-2010, 05:33 PM
Not counting comics/counting re-reads.
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole

Kurosawa Fan
02-22-2010, 05:55 PM
10. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole

Uh oh. Was this not good? Did I miss your thoughts on this one?

EvilShoe
02-22-2010, 06:20 PM
Uh oh. Was this not good? Did I miss your thoughts on this one?
Nah: It's still pretty good, rather liked it. Only read one dud this year (Belgian novella).

Impressive work for a 16-year old, but it's also very simplistic and obvious for the most part. Worth a read for fans of Confederacy.

Melville
02-22-2010, 06:30 PM
1. The Unnamable by Beckett - 10
2. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy by Beckett - 10
4. First Love and Other Shorts by Beckett - 9.5
5. Malone Dies by Beckett - 9
6. Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras - 9
7. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier - 8.5
8. Summer Rain by Duras - 8.5
9. Dance of Death by Strindberg [play] - 8.5
10. Story of the Eye by Bataille [reread] - 8.5
11. The Soldier and Death by Arthur Ransome [short story] - 8.5
12. Pedro Paramo by Rulfo - 8
13. The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard - 8
14. The End of the Affair by Greene - 8
15. Repetition by Kierkegaard - 8
16. 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings - 8
17. The Malady of Death by Duras - 8
18. The Lankavatara Sutra by Anonymous - 8
19. Solaris by Lem - 8
20. A Sentimental Journey by Sterne - 8
21. Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
22. Correction by Bernhard - 7.5
23. The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 by Beckett - 7.5
24. Selected Tales by Brothers Grimm and David Luke (translator) - 7.5
25. Billy Budd and Other Stories by Melville - 7.5
26. The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard - 7.5
27. Vermillion Sands by Ballard - 7
28. At Swim-Two-Birds by O'Brien - 7
29. The Long Goodbye by Chandler - 7
30. The Holy Terrors by Cocteau - 7
31. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos - 7
32. Basic Writings by Heidegger - 6.5
33. Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 6.5
34. The Storyteller by Anthony Minghella - 6.5
35. Go Down, Moses by Faulkner - 6.5
36. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - 6.5
37. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by Kingsland (translator) - 6
38. Emily L. by Duras - 6
39. Strait is the Gate by Gide - 6
40. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho by Beckett - 6
41. Erotism: Death & Sensuality by Bataille - 6
42. Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau - 6
43. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard by Ballard - 6
44. Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare [play] - 5.5
45. The Trouble with Being Born by Cioran - 5.5
46. The Painted Bird by Kosinski - 5.5
47. Moderato Cantabile by Duras - 5
48. Valis by Philip K. Dick - 5
49. Twelfth Night by Shakespeare [play] - 4.5
50. Maldoror by Lautréamont - 4.5
51. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
52. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Hardy - 4
53. Don Pablos the Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo - 4
54. Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome - 3.5
55. Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - 3.5
56. Story of O by Pauline Réage - 3
57. Emily of New Moon by LM Montgomery - 2.5
58. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2
59. Her by Ferlinghetti - 1

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen by Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool by Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There by Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show by Al Columbia - 8
6. Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware - 8
7. Buddy Does Seattle by Bagge - 8
8. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974 by Schulz - 7.5
9. Misery Loves Comedy by Brunetti - 7
10. Criminal (deluxe edition) by Brubaker & Phillips - 7
11. The Golem's Mighty Swing by Sturm - 7
12. Ultra Gash Inferno by Maruo - 6.5
13. Lullabies from Hell by Hino - 6.5
14. It Was the War of the Trenches by Tardi - 6
15. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea by Delisle - 6
16. Fun Home by Bechdel - 6
17. A Contract with God by Eisner - 6
18. Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker - 6
19. MW by Osama Tezuka - 5.5
20. Explainers by Feiffer - 5.5
21. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976 by Schulz - 5
22. Child of Palestine by Naji al-Ali - 5
23. In Pictopia! by Moore & Simpson - 5
24. Kick-Ass by Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
25. Uzumaki Vol. 1 by Ito - 4
26. A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
27. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Moore & Swan - 3
28. Promethea Book 3 by Moore & Williams - 1

kuehnepips
02-23-2010, 05:56 PM
2. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings


Wow.

Any fav.?

Melville
02-24-2010, 06:15 PM
Any fav.?
Probably "anyone lived in a pretty how town":

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

But I like a lot of the little pieces, turns of phrase, more than whole poems: e.g.,

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

or

—to have tasted Beautiful to have known
Only to have smelled Happens—skip dance kids hop point at
red blue yellow violet white orange green-
ness

Overall, I really like the way he breaks down language in such a sentimental, emotive fashion.

Benny Profane
02-24-2010, 06:20 PM
You can use that as "Exhibit A" as to why I hate poetry so much.

Hugh_Grant
02-24-2010, 07:47 PM
You can use that as "Exhibit A" as to why I hate poetry so much.
You're breaking my heart, BP. First White Teeth, now this.

Benny Profane
02-24-2010, 08:28 PM
You're breaking my heart, BP. First White Teeth, now this.

Vincent D'Onofrio is a lousy actor.



;)

Llopin
02-25-2010, 08:53 AM
2. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings
5. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran


Excellent.

kuehnepips
02-25-2010, 10:40 AM
But I like a lot of the little pieces, turns of phrase,



...I too, have known autumn too long.

Milky Joe
03-04-2010, 01:37 AM
1. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
2. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
3. Cane by Jean Toomer
4. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
5. Confessions by Jacob Boehme
6. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
7. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8. The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
9.
10.

Dead & Messed Up
03-05-2010, 08:51 PM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
03. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
04. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
05. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
06.
07.
08.
09.
10.

Melville
03-12-2010, 12:54 AM
Made it to 10.


1. Dance of Death, Strindberg
2. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings
3. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous
4. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke
5. The Long Goodbye, Chandler
6. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare
7. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran
8. The Painted Bird, Kosinski
9. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator)
10. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia
6. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz
7. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti
8. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips
9. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo
10. Lullabies from Hell, Hino
11. Fun Home, Bechdel
12. A Contract with God, Eisner
13. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson
14. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr.
15. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito

ContinentalOp
03-12-2010, 03:55 AM
1. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
2. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
3. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
4. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Melville
03-20-2010, 08:06 PM
1. The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. by Robert Fagles)
Nice. Not sure if I talked to you about this before. It's one of my favorites. I love the sense of history/destiny hurtling on, juggernaut-like, crushing romance, conscience, and peoples in its path. I was also impressed by the emotion of the sacking of Troy and the love affair with Dido, which contrasted starkly with Homer's treatments of similar things.

Duncan
03-23-2010, 02:08 PM
Nice. Not sure if I talked to you about this before. It's one of my favorites. I love the sense of history/destiny hurtling on, juggernaut-like, crushing romance, conscience, and peoples in its path. I was also impressed by the emotion of the sacking of Troy and the love affair with Dido, which contrasted starkly with Homer's treatments of similar things.
I don't think we did talk about it. I loved basically everything about it. It was way more complicated than I thought it would be. I was expecting a sort of glorified account of the travels of Rome's ancestors, and even though Aeneas is a demigod, he still makes mistakes, has anxieties, some nuanced as well as powerful emotions. It's also sort of a strange book to be Rome's founding epic, especially considering the last act in the book is one of brutal vengeance, and there's really no redemption for any of it. All his descriptions of violence throughout the book are very bracing. There's some scene in The Iliad where Ulysses and Diomedes (I think) sneak into the Trojan camp and kill a bunch of people and then sneak out and the whole point of the scene is basically how awesome these two guys are. There's a similar scene in The Aeneid where the two guys get caught and killed and butchered and have their heads put on stakes for their mothers to see. There's a lot more consequence in the The Aeneid, and a lot more sympathy and compassion, at least from the author, if not from some of the characters. And, yeah, just the pace and rhythm and momentum of the whole thing. It's amazing.

edit: Oh, I also loved how the gods stay out of it at the end. A character will throw a javelin and say stuff like, "I believe in my right arm, my only god" or something. That's really interesting to me in a book this old.

trotchky
04-01-2010, 03:10 AM
1. God Jr. (Dennis Cooper, 2005)
2. Wrong (Dennis Cooper, 1992)
3. The Dream Police (Dennis Cooper, 1994)
4. Point Omega (Don DeLillo, 2010)
5. The Sluts (Dennis Cooper, 2004)
6. Ugly Man (Dennis Cooper, 2009)

Raiders
04-01-2010, 02:53 PM
So far...

1. Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCullers)
2. The Autumn of the Patriarch (Marquez)
3. The House of Blue Leaves [play] (Guare)
4. Myra Breckinridge (Vidal)

Benny Profane
04-02-2010, 12:56 PM
So far...


2. The Autumn of the Patriarch (Marquez)



As much as I love Marquez, this did nothing for me. I completely forgot about it a week after I read it. Use a paragraph, man.

Kurosawa Fan
04-02-2010, 01:10 PM
As much as I love Marquez, this did nothing for me. I completely forgot about it a week after I read it. Use a paragraph, man.

How did you like Of Love? Any extended thoughts?

Benny Profane
04-02-2010, 01:33 PM
How did you like Of Love? Any extended thoughts?

I liked it fine. It kinda rambles and meanders and for a 140 page book it has a ton of minor characters, but it's written very eloquently and has a nice flow. It definitely captures its time and place beautifully.

ContinentalOp
04-04-2010, 03:15 AM
1. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
2. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
3. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
4. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

1. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
2. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
3. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
4. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
5. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
6.
7.
8.
9.
10

Dead & Messed Up
04-08-2010, 05:01 PM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
04. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
05. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
06. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
07.
08.
09.
10.

Dead & Messed Up
04-11-2010, 06:37 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
04. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
05. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
06. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
07. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
08.
09.
10.

Melville
04-12-2010, 02:37 PM
Update to promulgate the greatness of We:


1. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
2. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
3. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
4. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
5. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
6. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
7. Solaris, Lem - 8
8. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
9. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
10. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
11. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6
12. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
13. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
14. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
15. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 5
17. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4.5

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 8
7. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
8. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
9. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
10. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
11. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
12. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
13. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
14. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
15. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
16. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5.5
17. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
18. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
19. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4

Benny Profane
04-12-2010, 03:07 PM
Hm, as far as dystopias go, I found We to be very weak. I hardly remember a thing about it.

Milky Joe
04-12-2010, 07:38 PM
Yeah, We is awesome.

Updating to promulgate the greatness of Either/Or.


1. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
2. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
4. Cane by Jean Toomer
5. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
6. Confessions by Jacob Boehme
7. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
8. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
9. The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
10.

Melville
04-12-2010, 07:43 PM
Yeah, We is awesome.

Updating to promulgate the greatness of Either/Or.
Absolutely god damn right to both. Oh, and you should convince me to read Infinite Jest.

kuehnepips
04-12-2010, 07:46 PM
Oh, and you should convince me to read Infinite Jest.

Me too please.

EvilShoe
04-12-2010, 07:55 PM
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy 11. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
12. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
13. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
14. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole

kuehnepips
04-12-2010, 08:13 PM
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace


In English?

Milky Joe
04-12-2010, 11:26 PM
Absolutely god damn right to both. Oh, and you should convince me to read Infinite Jest.

Um, well, I'm in the middle of a Kierkegaard/Adorno class (with a total badass professor by the name of John Vignaux Smyth) and I'm about to start working on my final paper for it which will be a discussion of Infinite Jest's treatment of irony as it relates to Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony among other things. It's still in its infancy but after class today I'm having a nearly overwhelming amount of ideas swimming around in my head about it.

It's the most important piece of literary fiction of the 20th century, at least other than Gravity's Rainbow though that's arguable. It's deceptively complex, infinitely so. And Wallace was by no means a lightweight when it came to philosophy, continental or otherwise. Someone with your background could get so much out of it--more people such as yourself should read it, it really needs that kind of support. Wallace said that it's a book that should take about 2 months to read well--contrast that to the reviews of the book that came out a week after it was released... did those people really read it? It's a shame that Wallace was marketed as some kind of rock star or whatever, because that's so far from the writer that he actually was: deeply considerate of and influenced by the Western tradition, etc etc. I'm sure that if he had had the choice he would have been as reclusive as Pynchon.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm doing a good job of convincing you. By all means ask me questions and I'll try to answer.


In English?

Do you mean as opposed to German?

Melville
04-13-2010, 12:14 AM
I'm about to start working on my final paper for it which will be a discussion of Infinite Jest's treatment of irony as it relates to Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony among other things.
Nice. I love me some Kierkegaardian irony (though I haven't read Concept of Irony). What's your thesis?

I've been reading (rereading, in some cases) a collection of Melville's stories. His is probably the most interesting use of irony I can think of.


It's the most important piece of literary fiction of the 20th century, at least other than Gravity's Rainbow though that's arguable.
How are you gauging importance? I liked GR, but I can't say I was as impressed by it as were most people on here.

Adam
04-13-2010, 01:08 AM
I can't say how Milky Joe gauges importance but, by any standard, Infinite Jest is totally essential. This side of maybe Don DeLillo (who would win my "most interesting use of irony" award), David Foster Wallace was the author with the firmest grasp on the American mindset in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Or at least he was the one who knew how to frame that mindset in the most logical way possible. Infinite Jest is the perfect snapshot of a mood and a time and a culture and thousands of years from now, people are going to read it and then they'll understand us

Milky Joe
04-13-2010, 01:59 AM
Nice. I love me some Kierkegaardian irony (though I haven't read Concept of Irony). What's your thesis?

Don't really have one yet. I'll let you know when I do.


How are you gauging importance? I liked GR, but I can't say I was as impressed by it as were most people on here.

I'm in the same boat actually. I guess by important I somewhat shallowly meant "most likely to be canonized and read 100 years from now." It's a Major Work, in other words, that deals with essential themes in a completely systematic and completely original way. There is this great little review posted the other day (http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2010/04/infinite-jest-david-foster-wallace.html) that contains this (probably the main reason I mentioned GR actually--it's just so in vogue amongst the literati): "Harold Bloom (lampooned in endnote 366 of Infinite Jest) defines canonicity as: strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. By this definition at least, it is safe to assume that Infinite Jest, the most important work of fiction in English, probably, since Gravity’s Rainbow, looks set to become canonical."

The 20th century could be broken down to its essentials as such: Joyce (Beckett), Gaddis, Pynchon/(Barth? Delillo?), Wallace, but that's mostly meaningless, the kind of measuring-contest crap people like to spout on internet forums. The point is you should read and enjoy it because it is eminently readable and enjoyable, particularly someone who enjoys the maximalism of say, Joyce, or Melville.

lovejuice
04-13-2010, 03:09 AM
the maximalism of say, Joyce, or Melville.

haven't heard the word before. love it!

Melville
04-13-2010, 03:11 AM
strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. By this definition at least, it is safe to assume that Infinite Jest, the most important work of fiction in English, probably, since Gravity’s Rainbow, looks set to become canonical."
Gotta love the uncanny. Okay, I'm sold on it, especially given your comparison to Joyce. Probably start reading it after Gide's Strait is the Gait and Bernhard's Correction.

EvilShoe
04-13-2010, 08:07 AM
In English?
Definitely. Don't think there's even a Dutch version out there.

ContinentalOp
04-19-2010, 09:14 PM
1. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
2. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
3. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
4. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
5. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
6.
7.
8.
9.
10

1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
5. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
6. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Blown away by the last 150 or so pages of RUW. Such a darkly satisfying read. I'm well on pace to finish 20 books this year. Still working on Under the Dome (about 700 pages in) and I'm going to start either Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block or Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard.

Kurosawa Fan
04-19-2010, 09:20 PM
1. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
3. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
4. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
5. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
6. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
7. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

I can't bring myself to list The Kite Runner. It was far too abysmal to receive mention in a 'Best of' list. I'd rather the list remain shorter than give anyone the impression that it's worth reading.

Milky Joe
04-20-2010, 09:58 PM
Updated w/ more Kierkegaard, plus bumping Woolf up a bit.


1. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
2. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Concept of Irony by Søren Kierkegaard
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. The Concept of Anxiety by Søren Kierkegaard
6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
7. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
8. Confessions by Jacob Boehme
9. Cane by Jean Toomer
10. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Barty
04-21-2010, 06:34 AM
1. Human Action - Ludwig von Mises
2. Game Change - John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
3. Day of Deceit - Robert Stinnett
4. The American Story - Garet Garret
5. Lies the Government Told You - Andrew Napolitano

Currently Reading:

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith - Murray Rothbard
Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
Where Keynes Went Wrong - Hunter Lewis

Dead & Messed Up
04-24-2010, 02:56 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
04. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
05. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
06. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
07. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
08. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
09.
10.

EvilShoe
04-26-2010, 10:35 AM
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Perfume - Patrick Süskind
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
12. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
13. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
14. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
15. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
16. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
17. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole

ledfloyd
04-27-2010, 12:17 AM
1. Catch 22
2. 2666
3. Henderson, The Rain King
4. Chronic City
5. Herzog
6. The White Tiger
7.
8.
9.
10.
i've been doing too much rereading this year and over the last 7 weeks i've only finished about 3 books. need to pick it up.

Melville
04-27-2010, 10:40 PM
Update to mark 20 books read.


1. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
2. Molloy, Beckett - 10
3. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
4. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
5. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
6. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
7. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
8. Solaris, Lem - 8
9. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
10. Billy Budd and Other Stories, Melville - 7.5
11. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
12. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
13. Strait is the Gate, Gide - 6.5
14. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6
15. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
16. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
17. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
18. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
19. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 5
20. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4.5

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 8
7. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
8. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
9. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
10. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
11. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
12. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
13. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
14. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
15. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
16. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5.5
17. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
18. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
19. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4

Milky Joe
04-28-2010, 12:56 AM
2. Molloy, Beckett - 10

Oh, yes.

Melville
04-28-2010, 04:16 AM
Oh, yes.
Yeah, took a break from Infinite Jest to read Molloy, but now I think I'll read the whole trilogy. Seriously brilliant stuff. Everything's falling apart. All the rifts in human existence are laid bare.

Benny Profane
04-28-2010, 12:38 PM
1. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
2. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
3. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
4. Nine Stories - Salinger
5. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
6. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
7. Red Harvest - Hammett
8. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
9. White Teeth - Zadie Smith

ContinentalOp
04-30-2010, 07:58 PM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
5. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
6. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Blown away by the last 150 or so pages of RUW. Such a darkly satisfying read. I'm well on pace to finish 20 books this year. Still working on Under the Dome (about 700 pages in) and I'm going to start either Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block or Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard.

1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
5. Under the Dome by Stephen King
6. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
7. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
8. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

D_Davis
04-30-2010, 08:03 PM
5. Under the Dome by Stephen King


Nice. Did you really like it, or is it just here because you haven't read much that is better this year?

Personally, I loved it. I think it's King's best single novel. It's 90% brilliant.

The first 200 or so pages are sublime, containing some of King's strongest writing.

ContinentalOp
05-06-2010, 10:13 PM
Nice. Did you really like it, or is it just here because you haven't read much that is better this year?

Personally, I loved it. I think it's King's best single novel. It's 90% brilliant.

The first 200 or so pages are sublime, containing some of King's strongest writing.

I was impressed by and in awe of the first 700 pages or so, until a certain event happened, the explosion. I thought it lost a lot of the tension it once had and turned into something that didn't hold my interest as much. That said, King created some fascinating characters, interactions and situations. It was definitely worth a read for these pluses.

D_Davis
05-06-2010, 10:54 PM
I can see that, and understand. It's incredible how he keeps things going, and in how he juggles so many characters. I never once lost track of who was with who, and never confused by who was where, or why. That is a major accomplishment with this many characters. King truly does create an entire living and breathing community.

Milky Joe
05-13-2010, 05:46 AM
1. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
2. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
3. The Concept of Anxiety by Søren Kierkegaard
4. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
6. The Concept of Irony by Søren Kierkegaard
7. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
8. Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
9. Cane by Jean Toomer
10. Confessions by Jacob Boehme

dreamdead
05-14-2010, 06:22 PM
Updated:

1. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
2. A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison
4. The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt
5. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
6. Pembroke, Mary Wilkins Freeman
7. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
8. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
9. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
10. Cane, Jean Toomer

11. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
12. Daisy Miller, Henry James
13. McTeague, Frank Norris

Benny Profane
05-14-2010, 06:26 PM
1. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
2. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
3. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
4. Nine Stories - Salinger
5. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
6. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
7. Red Harvest - Hammett
8. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
9. White Teeth - Zadie Smith



1. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
2. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
3. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
4. Nine Stories - Salinger
5. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
6. Mysteries - Hamsun
7. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
8. Red Harvest - Hammett
9. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
10. White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Dead & Messed Up
05-14-2010, 10:32 PM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
05. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
06. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
07. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
08. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
09. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)
10.

ContinentalOp
05-17-2010, 02:13 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
5. Under the Dome by Stephen King
6. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
7. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
8. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
5. Under the Dome by Stephen King
6. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
7. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
8. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
9. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
10. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

Dead & Messed Up
05-17-2010, 03:54 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
06. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
07. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
08. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
09. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
10. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Broke ten! Haven't done that in years. Everything after this is gravy.

Benny Profane
06-01-2010, 01:31 PM
1. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
2. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
3. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
4. Nine Stories - Salinger
5. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
6. Mysteries - Hamsun
7. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
8. Red Harvest - Hammett
9. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
10. White Teeth - Zadie Smith



1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
7. Mysteries - Hamsun
8. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
9. Red Harvest - Hammett
10. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes

Kurosawa Fan
06-01-2010, 01:58 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
4. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
5. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
6. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
7. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
8. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

EvilShoe
06-01-2010, 02:34 PM
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Perfume - Patrick Süskind
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
12. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
13. Glamorama - Bret Easton Ellis
14. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
15. Atonement - Ian McEwan
16. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
17. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
18. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
19. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
20. Roger's Version - John Updike
21. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole
22. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

Hugh_Grant
06-01-2010, 02:57 PM
Since I couldn't read anything (new) for pleasure until a few weeks ago, this list is woefully short. I could, however, add a long list of post-colonial short stories!

1. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
2. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
3. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
4. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith

Benny Profane
06-01-2010, 03:13 PM
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Perfume - Patrick Süskind
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
12. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
13. Glamorama - Bret Easton Ellis
14. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
15. Atonement - Ian McEwan
16. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
17. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
18. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
19. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
20. Roger's Version - John Updike
21. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole
22. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

I may be one of the few people who likes #10 more than #2, not that the latter is anything to sneeze at.

EvilShoe
06-01-2010, 09:06 PM
I may be one of the few people who likes #10 more than #2, not that the latter is anything to sneeze at.
I don't think I'll ever like Tender more than Gatsby, but the latter is definitely a great novel. Will re-read it one day. Stays with me.

Winston*
06-03-2010, 05:57 AM
Catch 22 (Heller)
Dune (Herbert)
The Plague (Camus)
More than Human (Sturgeon)
Occupied City (Peace)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Dick)
My Dead Body (Huston)
The Shotgun Rule (Huston)
The Killer Inside Me (Thompson)
An Artist of the Floating World (Ishigiro)
11.Ender's Game (Scott Card)
12. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Larrson)
[/LIST]

Would feel weird ranking:

The Histories (Herodotus)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Bauby)

ContinentalOp
06-04-2010, 07:01 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
3. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
4. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
5. Under the Dome by Stephen King
6. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
7. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
8. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
9. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
10. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald
3. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
4. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
5. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
6. Under the Dome by Stephen King
7. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
8. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
9. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
10. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

11. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

Hugh_Grant
06-04-2010, 01:05 PM
1. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
2. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
3. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
4. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith

1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
3. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
4. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
5. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
6. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith

Melville
06-05-2010, 07:31 AM
Update to mark 30 books read:

1. The Unnamable, Beckett - 10
2. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy, Beckett - 10
4. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
5. Malone Dies, Beckett - 9
6. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier - 8.5
7. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
8. Story of the Eye, Bataille [reread] - 8.5
9. The End of the Affair, Greene - 8
10. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
11. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
12. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
13. Solaris, Lem - 8
14. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
15. Billy Budd and Other Stories, Melville - 7.5
16. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
17. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
18. Go Down, Moses, Faulkner - 6.5
19. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6.5
20. Emily L., Duras - 6.5
21. Strait is the Gate, Gide - 6.5
22. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Ballard - 6
23. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
24. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
25. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
26. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
27. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
28. Twelfth Night, Shakespeare - 4.5
29. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4.5
30. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 8
7. Buddy Does Seattle, Bagge - 7.5
8. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
9. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
10. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
11. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
12. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
13. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
14. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
15. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
16. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
17. MW, Osama Tezuka - 5.5
18. Explainers, Feiffer - 5.5
19. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5.5
20. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
21. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
22. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4
23. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
24. Promethea: Book 3, Moore & Williams - 1

endingcredits
06-05-2010, 04:03 PM
1. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B Singer [9/10]
2. VALIS, P.K Dick [4/10]
3. The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick [5/10]
4. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer [10/10]
5. Harmonium, W. Stevens [8/10]
6. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams [4/10]
7. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron [6/10]
8. Legs, W. Kennedy [3/10]
9. Incognito, E. Brubaker and S. Phillips [7/10]
10. Criminal, E Brubaker S. Phillips [8/10]

dreamdead
06-06-2010, 12:43 PM
Update to mark 30 books read:

Dude, WTF with the Promethea rating?

Melville
06-06-2010, 11:29 PM
Dude, WTF with the Promethea rating?
It's an inane, pedantic tour of obnoxious mysticism. It has a vapid, glib, smug tone. Almost the whole of it consists of the characters providing superficial, obvious, insipid explanations of what's occurring; if a book is going to spend its entire length explaining some mystical or philosophical system (rather than exploring it in some interesting narrative or formal way—no, the gimmicky layouts don't count), I want it to give me the depths and breadths of that system, rather than leading me through it as if I were a moron, treating every point in the most obvious, repetitive, and inconsequential way. It's one of the most irritating books I've ever read. I'd point to concrete examples, but I sold the book to a used bookstore immediately after finishing it.

lovejuice
06-06-2010, 11:54 PM
Dude, WTF with the Promethea rating?
his rating of fun home on the other hand is just about right.

ledfloyd
06-07-2010, 12:25 AM
1. Catch 22
2. 2666
3. Henderson, The Rain King
4. The Handmaid's Tale
5. Chronic City
6. Generation Kill
7. Austerlitz
8. Herzog
9. Inherent Vice
10. The White Tiger
finally gotten to ten on the year. i've been rereading too much. hopefully i can ramp it up for the second half of the year. i enjoyed all those books except for the last two. and the top four are all great.

Heidi
06-07-2010, 01:26 PM
http://www.paradoxplace.com/Food%20&%20Restaurants/Food_Books/Books/Dickie-Delizia-BAR.jpg

best read of 2010 so far

Raiders
06-07-2010, 01:35 PM
I'm starting 2666 tonight.

Benny Profane
06-07-2010, 01:44 PM
1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
7. Mysteries - Hamsun
8. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
9. Red Harvest - Hammett
10. The Blood Oranges - Hawkes




1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
7. Mysteries - Hamsun
8. Beloved - Morrison
9. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
10. Red Harvest - Hammett

ThePlashyBubbler
06-08-2010, 02:11 AM
I'm starting 2666 tonight.

Coincidentally, I just started it this morning. Race you to the end!

kuehnepips
06-11-2010, 02:09 PM
Coincidentally, I just started it this morning. Race you to the end!

I started yesterday. Should be done tomorrow. :P

ContinentalOp
06-13-2010, 03:07 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald
3. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman
4. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
5. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith
6. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
7. Under the Dome by Stephen King
8. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
9. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
10. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

11. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
12. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

Kurosawa Fan
06-16-2010, 02:52 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
4. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
5. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
6. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
7. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
8. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
9. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

Including The Kite Runner, I've just now finally hit 10 books on the year. Embarrassing. Damn you, school!

Hugh_Grant
06-22-2010, 12:41 PM
1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
3. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
4. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
5. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
6. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith
7. The Imperfectionists -- Tom Rachmann

Dead & Messed Up
06-25-2010, 02:33 AM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
06. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
07. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
08. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
09. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
10. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)

11. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Hugh_Grant
06-29-2010, 12:37 AM
1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
3. House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe--Christina Lamb
4. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
5. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
6. The Zero--Jess Walter
7. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
8. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith

Duncan
06-30-2010, 12:17 AM
At the halfway point:

1. The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. by Robert Fagles)
2. Stoner (John Williams)
3. Sixty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
4. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
5. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)
6. Warlock (Oakley Hall)
7. 2666 (Roberto Bolano)
8. The Interrogation (J.M.G. Le Clezio)
9. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
10. The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard)

Others in rough order of preference:
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
Gargoyles (Thomas Bernhard)
The Golden Mean (Annabel Lyon)
Malone Dies (Samuel Beckett)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Mother Courage and her Children (Bertoldt Brecht) [play]
City of Glass (Paul Auster)
Life and Times of Michael K (J. M. Coetzee)
The Sickness Unto Death (Soren Kierkegaard)
The Colossus (Sylvia Plath) [poetry]
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Blood Wedding (Federico Garcia Lorca) [play]
Chimera (John Barth)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)
Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) [play]
De Niro's Game (Rawi Hage)
The Inferno (Dante)
Runaway (Alice Munro)
The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

Derek
06-30-2010, 12:42 AM
1a) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10
1b) We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10
3) The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
4) Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
5) The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
6) Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0
7) Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5
8) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
9) The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0
10) My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
--------------------------------------------------------
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5

Melville
06-30-2010, 01:26 AM
1a) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10
1b) We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10
Nice.

Kurosawa Fan
07-03-2010, 04:39 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
5. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
6. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
7. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
8. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
9. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
10. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Benny Profane
07-06-2010, 02:22 PM
1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
7. Mysteries - Hamsun
8. Beloved - Morrison
9. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
10. Red Harvest - Hammett


1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
8. Mysteries - Hamsun
9. Beloved - Morrison
10. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
10. Red Harvest - Hammett

Dead & Messed Up
07-07-2010, 06:41 PM
01. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
02. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
06. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
07. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
08. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
09. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
10. Beowulf (Tr. R. K. Goodwin, 1992)

11. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
12. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Derek
07-10-2010, 03:35 AM
1a) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10
1b) We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10
3) The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
4) Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
5) Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) 8.0
6) The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
7) Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0
8) Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5
9) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
10) The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0

My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5


Nice.

Both are honestly among the best books I've ever read. C&P has more psychological depth and insight than I thought possible and We's language is purely electric. Both books are incredibly invigorating, but for vastly different reasons.

ContinentalOp
07-10-2010, 07:21 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith- 9.5
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald- 9
3. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman- 9
4. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith- 8.5
5. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith- 8
6. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald- 7.5
7. Under the Dome by Stephen King- 7.5
8. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith- 7.5
9. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald- 7
10. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- 7



11. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz- 7
12. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith- 6.5
13. Monster Nation by David Wellington- 5.5
14. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block- 5

Melville
07-12-2010, 05:17 AM
Update to mark 35 books read:

1. The Unnamable, Beckett - 10
2. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy, Beckett - 10
4. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
5. Malone Dies, Beckett - 9
6. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier - 8.5
7. Summer Rain, Duras - 8.5
8. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
9. Story of the Eye, Bataille [reread] - 8.5
10. The End of the Affair, Greene - 8
11. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
12. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
13. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
14. Solaris, Lem - 8
15. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
16. Correction, Bernhard - 7.5
17. Billy Budd and Other Stories, Melville - 7.5
18. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
19. At Swim-Two-Birds, O'Brien - 7
20. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
21. Basic Writings, Heidegger - 6.5
22. Go Down, Moses, Faulkner - 6.5
23. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6.5
24. Emily L., Duras - 6.5
25. Strait is the Gate, Gide - 6.5
26. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Ballard - 6
27. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
28. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
29. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
30. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
31. Twelfth Night, Shakespeare - 4.5
32. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
33. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4.5
34. Brideshead Revisited, Waugh - 3.5
35. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. Buddy Does Seattle, Bagge - 8
7. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 7.5
8. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
9. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
10. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
11. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
12. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
13. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
14. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
15. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
16. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
17. MW, Osama Tezuka - 5.5
18. Explainers, Feiffer - 5.5
19. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976, Schulz - 5
20. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5
21. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
22. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
23. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4
24. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
25. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Moore & Swan - 3
26. Promethea: Book 3, Moore & Williams - 1

Kurosawa Fan
07-12-2010, 04:37 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
5. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
6. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
7. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
8. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
9. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
10. The Book of Basketball - Simmons

1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini


1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
5. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
6. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Walter
7. Escape from the Deep - Kershaw
8. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
9. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
10. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh

11. The Book of Basketball - Simmons
1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

monolith94
07-15-2010, 01:14 AM
Well, I finally finished every single Father Brown short story. Oh, what a journey that was.

Kurosawa Fan
07-15-2010, 01:27 AM
Well, I finally finished every single Father Brown short story. Oh, what a journey that was.

Was it worth it?

monolith94
07-16-2010, 01:35 AM
Over all, yes. Obviously, some were better than others, but when I wasn't enjoying them on an entertainment level, I was feeling fullfilled in a lit-major completist sense. A lot of casual racism and conservative ideas of the time conveyed through the detective genre. Some of the stories were genuinely good though, and the style was often well-done. Chesterton has a nice nack for setting description, when he tries.

Benny Profane
07-30-2010, 01:21 PM
1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
8. Mysteries - Hamsun
9. Beloved - Morrison
10. Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
10. Red Harvest - Hammett


1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
8. Mysteries - Hamsun
9. Molloy - Beckett
10. Beloved - Morrison


The Moviegoer - Percy
Vile Bodies - Waugh
Why Orwell Matters - Hitchens
Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits - Jacobs
Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
Red Harvest - Hammett
The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
White Teeth - Smith

Kurosawa Fan
07-30-2010, 01:28 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
3. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
4. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
6. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
7. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
8. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
9. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
10. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend

11. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
12. The Book of Basketball - Simmons
1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

lovejuice
07-30-2010, 02:01 PM
I'm such a poor reader this year. Then again, I finished The Phenomenology of Spirit. That should count for something. Damn it!

Benny Profane
08-01-2010, 02:51 PM
1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
8. Mysteries - Hamsun
9. Molloy - Beckett
10. Beloved - Morrison


1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy
8. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
9. Mysteries - Hamsun
10. Molloy - Beckett



Beloeved - Morrison
The Moviegoer - Percy
Vile Bodies - Waugh
Why Orwell Matters - Hitchens
Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits - Jacobs
Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
Red Harvest - Hammett
The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
White Teeth - Smith

Kurosawa Fan
08-01-2010, 03:55 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
3. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
4. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
6. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
7. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
8. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
9. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
10. The Lover - Marguerite Duras


11. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
12. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
13. The Book of Basketball - Simmons
1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

megladon8
08-01-2010, 06:25 PM
KF, I really cannot say enough how thrilled I am that you enjoyed "A Game of Thrones".

That's so frickin' cool.

Hugh_Grant
08-03-2010, 11:41 PM
1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
3. House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe--Christina Lamb
4. Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl -- Stacey O'Brien
5. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
6. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
7. A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines --Anthony Bourdain
8. The Zero--Jess Walter
9. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
10. Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster --Svetlana Alexievich
11. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith

Derek
08-04-2010, 12:08 AM
1a. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10.0
1b. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10.0
3. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri) 9.0
4. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
5. Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
6. The Paradiso (Dante Alighieri) 8.0
7. Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) 8.0
8. The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
9. Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0
10. Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5

The Purgatorio (Dante Alighieri) 7.5
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0
My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5

Benny Profane
08-04-2010, 12:16 AM
8. The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
9. Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0
10. Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5




Nice. Say something about these 3 if you get a chance.

baby doll
08-04-2010, 02:37 AM
Fiction:
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garc*a Márquez, 1967)
2. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
3. V. (Thomas Pynchon, 1963)
4. Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee, 1999)
5. Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov, 1935-36)

Non-Fiction:
1. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (David Bordwell, 2006)
2.
3.
4.
5.

Duncan
08-04-2010, 02:41 AM
4. Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov, 1939)

Great title for a novel.

baby doll
08-04-2010, 02:44 AM
Great title for a novel.And the book part isn't bad either, although I got the date wrong.

Duncan
08-04-2010, 02:52 AM
And the book part isn't bad either, although I got the date wrong.

I'll have to give it a read. Lolita was great, and Pale Fire a little less so, but pretty good.

baby doll
08-04-2010, 02:53 AM
I'll have to give it a read. Lolita was great, and Pale Fire a little less so, but pretty good.I read Lolita like eight years ago, so I think I'm about due for a re-read.

baby doll
08-04-2010, 02:55 AM
P.S., Don't look at the synopsis on the back (the Vintage paperback edition), because it gives away the ending.

ContinentalOp
08-10-2010, 03:54 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith- 9.5
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald- 9
3. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman- 9
4. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith- 8.5
5. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith- 8
6. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald- 7.5
7. Under the Dome by Stephen King- 7.5
8. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith- 7.5
9. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne- 7.5
10. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald- 7



11. The Walking Dead Vol. 12: Life Among Them- 7
12. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- 7
13. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz- 7
14. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith- 6.5
15. Monster Nation by David Wellington- 5.5
16. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block- 5

Mysterious Dude
08-11-2010, 02:31 PM
1. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
2. Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote)
3. The Plague (Camus)
4. Naked Lunch (Burroughs)
5. July's People (Gordimer)
6. Beasts of No Nation (Iweala)
7. Song for Night (Abani)
8. Don Quixote (Cervantes) [started October 2009, finished January]
9. Everything Is Illuminated (Foer)
10. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers)

Spaceman Spiff
08-11-2010, 03:24 PM
And I'm 700 pages into the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, but I won't add it to my list until I finish all six.

How's Swann's Way?

Kudos on the Marquez being number 1. Fantastic book that has got a bit of an unfair backlash recently.

megladon8
08-14-2010, 11:45 PM
1.) "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon
2.) "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy
3.) "Shambling Towards Hiroshima" by James Morrow
4.) "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore
5.) "No Great Mischief" by Alistair MacLeod
6.) "Hater" by David Moody"
...


Are we including comic books or is this strictly prose?

baby doll
08-15-2010, 07:36 AM
How's Swann's Way?

Kudos on the Marquez being number 1. Fantastic book that has got a bit of an unfair backlash recently.I adored it. Three volumes down and it's still my favorite, largely because it was my first encounter with Proust. The next two maintain an extremely high level of quality, but they lack the shock of the new.

Melville
08-23-2010, 02:11 AM
Update:


1. The Unnamable, Beckett - 10
2. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy, Beckett - 10
4. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
5. Malone Dies, Beckett - 9
6. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier - 8.5
7. Summer Rain, Duras - 8.5
8. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
9. Story of the Eye, Bataille [reread] - 8.5
10. The End of the Affair, Greene - 8
11. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
12. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
13. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
14. Solaris, Lem - 8
15. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
16. Correction, Bernhard - 7.5
17. Billy Budd and Other Stories, Melville - 7.5
18. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
19. Vermillion Sands, Ballard - 7
20. At Swim-Two-Birds, O'Brien - 7
21. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
22. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos - 7
23. The Storyteller, Anthony Minghella - 7
24. Basic Writings, Heidegger - 6.5
25. Go Down, Moses, Faulkner - 6.5
26. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6.5
27. Emily L., Duras - 6.5
28. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace - 6.5
29. Strait is the Gate, Gide - 6.5
30. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Ballard - 6
31. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
32. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
33. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
34. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
35. Twelfth Night, Shakespeare - 4.5
36. Maldoror, Lautréamont - 4.5
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
38. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4.5
39. Brideshead Revisited, Waugh - 3.5
40. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. Buddy Does Seattle, Bagge - 8
7. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 7.5
8. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
9. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
10. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
11. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
12. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
13. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
14. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
15. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
16. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
17. MW, Osama Tezuka - 5.5
18. Explainers, Feiffer - 5.5
19. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976, Schulz - 5
20. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5
21. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
22. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
23. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4
24. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
25. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Moore & Swan - 3
26. Promethea: Book 3, Moore & Williams - 1

Duncan
08-23-2010, 05:30 AM
Did you ever write anything on Infinite Jest, Melville?

Milky Joe
08-23-2010, 05:34 AM
I didn't want to be the one to ask him. I don't believe he did.

Benny Profane
08-23-2010, 12:46 PM
I'm about 30 pages into The Unnameable. I'd say it's about 25% unreadable gibberish so far. Talk about a frustrating narrator, geez.

Kurosawa Fan
08-25-2010, 08:31 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
3. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
4. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
6. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
7. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
8. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
9. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
10. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver



11. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
12. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
13. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
14. The Book of Basketball - Simmons
1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Melville
08-26-2010, 12:33 AM
Did you ever write anything on Infinite Jest, Melville?
Nah. I usually can't be bothered to write anything these days. In brief, I admired it more than I liked it. In particular, I liked the way it uses its prose to evoke and reify its core understanding of life. It presents life as a struggle under an immense weight of information, but information in a large sense: not just facts, concepts, and so on, but events, perceptions, objects, relationships, habits, memories, and thoughts. Its style is well suited to this: a ceaseless mass of details, information atop information, endnotes to endnotes, stories upon stories, convoluted sentences of purposefully awkward prose, technical jargon and slang. Its characters are burdened by this mass, some more than others. Its first chapter is about a character unable to talk, unable to control his engagement with the world at all, because he’s broken and swarmed by this mass. The rest of the book gives the impression that it will lead back to that scene, but it never quite gets there, because there always remains an uncountable infinity of stuff in the way—life is the infinite jest. Most of the characters try to escape it through drugs, and the book dwells at length on the extreme limits of their misery, the crushing weight of the world around them, the grotesque tales that make up their worst experiences. Other characters adopt an ironic stance, distancing themselves from life by making light of it, treating the information only as information, as something to be played with. Some characters do both. Likewise, the prose is simultaneously deeply ironic and even more deeply earnest; there’s a sad futility to its ironic humor, to its convoluted sentences and awkwardness (e.g., its recurrent use of multiple contiguous conjunctions such as “and but though”).

But for me, this whole approach, the mass of ceaseless details, made the book extremely tedious at times—it's 483,994 words, and I felt every one of them. I loved portions of it, primarily those detailing the addicts’ tales of despair, where the emotional weight of the details is made palpable. But a lot of the scenes just keep going and going with little to maintain my interest. That’s especially true of many scenes at the tennis academy, where the endless details felt less purposeful, less emotional, more inclined toward an irony I often found dull, and detailing teen male interactions and sports, which aren’t subjects I care to read endless details about. (But conversely, a lot of the scenes with the addicts are dull, and a lot of the scenes at the academy are great, especially the interactions between Hal and his brothers, most especially his grotesquely (the book really is big on grotesques) disabled brother Mario, who, unlike everybody else, takes life as it comes, but who's never made into a caricature of acceptance.) And the whole subplot dealing with Quebecois wheelchair assassins felt extraneous; perhaps because it had relatively little emotion and its humor fell flat for me, every scene in that subplot felt like a slog. Actually, all the political stuff I could have done without.

So, yeah, I appreciated a lot of what it does, but it didn’t really work as well for me as I would have liked.

Kurosawa Fan
08-26-2010, 01:55 PM
Forgot about Little Green Men. Which is indicative of my feelings about the book.

1. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
2. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
3. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
4. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
6. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
7. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
8. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
9. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
10. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver

11. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
12. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
13. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
14. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
15. The Book of Basketball - Simmons
1,000. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

ContinentalOp
08-28-2010, 05:10 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith- 9.5
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald- 9
3. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith- 9
4. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman- 9
5. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith- 8.5
6. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith- 8
7. The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames- 8
8. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald- 7.5
9. Under the Dome by Stephen King- 7.5
10. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith- 7.5



11. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne- 7.5
12. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald- 7
13. The Walking Dead Vol. 12: Life Among Them- 7
14. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- 7
15. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz- 7
16. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith- 6.5
17. Monster Nation by David Wellington- 5.5
18. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block- 5

Milky Joe
08-28-2010, 05:33 AM
Likewise, the prose is simultaneously deeply ironic and even more deeply earnest; there’s a sad futility to its ironic humor, to its convoluted sentences and awkwardness (e.g., its recurrent use of multiple contiguous conjunctions such as “and but though”).

I really like this. It's a good defense of the book against those who criticize it for using the same type of ironic humor that Wallace railed against in "E Unibus Pluram."

Sounds like you read the book properly, carefully. I expected nothing less. I would only say that, in what is perhaps the novel's ultimate jest, it's a book meant to be read more than once, and I would advise anyone who read it once and felt as you did--that parts of it are tedious, difficult to get through, seemingly pointless--to, at some point, revisit it. It really does get better.

You mentioned that you found the subplot with the Wheelchair Assassins to be a slog. Does that include the scene where they kill Lucien Antitoi? Because that's one of the more amazing scenes in the book, I feel (and contains the book's longest sentence), and structurally, it's sort of massively important. In short, the opposite of a slog. Yet I didn't even remember reading it on my first go-through. I think on the first read one can easily feel overwhelmed by the information overload--and I imagine this is intentional--and the natural outcome of this is that some information gets sort of filtered out by the brain as being tedious or pointless, when really there is nothing in the book that can be genuinely called such.

EvilShoe
08-28-2010, 11:24 AM
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Perfume - Patrick Süskind
11. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
13. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
14. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
15. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
16. The Elementary Particles - Michel Houellebecq
17. Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg
18. Glamorama - Bret Easton Ellis
19. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
20. Atonement - Ian McEwan
21. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
22. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
23. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
24. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
25. Once There Was a War - John Steinbeck
26. The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis
27. Roger's Version - John Updike
28. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole
29. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

Hugh_Grant
08-28-2010, 01:31 PM
1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe -- Douglas Rogers
3. Half of a Yellow Sun-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
5. House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe--Christina Lamb
6. The Night of the Gun -- David Carr
7. Woman in the Dunes -- Kōbō Abe
8. One Day -- David Nicholls
9. Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl -- Stacey O'Brien
10. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith


11. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
12. A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines --Anthony Bourdain
13. The Zero--Jess Walter
14. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
15. Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster --Svetlana Alexievich
16. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith
17. Homer and Langley -- E.L. Doctorow
18. Medium Raw--Anthony Bourdain
19. The Good Doctor - Damon Galgut
20. The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef--Marco Pierre White

Derek
08-30-2010, 03:46 AM
1a. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10.0
1b. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10.0
3. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri) 9.0
4. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
5. Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
6. The Zero (Jess Walter) 8.0
7. The Paradiso (Dante Alighieri) 8.0
8. Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) 8.0
9. The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
10. Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0

Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5
The Purgatorio (Dante Alighieri) 7.5
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0
My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5
Malloy (Beckett) 5.0

Re: Malloy, I'm perfectly willing to take the blame on this one. I found it almost completely impenetrable and could never really get a handle on what Beckett was going for, though it's clearly very well-written. Sorry MilkyJoe...I still love DFW! :)

On the other hand, The Zero was pretty impressive. It never quite crystallized like I was hoping, but it was still a very entertaining and intelligent examination of post-9/11 hysteria, paranoia and our wounded collective unconscious.


[LIST=1]
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Thoughts? I've been wanting to read this for a while.


Nice. Say something about these 3 if you get a chance.

Better late than never...Ham on Rye had a Hemingway-like concision and directness to it's prose that was so remarkably suited its protagonist, a no-nonsense punchiness that is in-line with the constant jabs life takes at him. One of the more uncompromising coming-of-age stories I've read.

Herzog took me a while to get into. I wonder if reading it again, I'd be better able to put the first half into context, but the second half more than redeemed it. You or someone else mentioned before that it's not your typical midlife crisis and I couldn't agree more. Once he got to the cabin, it really started to peak.

The Savage Detectives was a tough read, especially once you get the draaastic shift 150 pages in. At first I was disappointed since I was so engaged with Juan Garcia's story, but after another hundred pages, I really began to appreciate the broadened scope Bolano presented. A very exhaustive and fascinating representation of a generation of poets.

MacGuffin
08-30-2010, 03:48 AM
Thoughts? I've been wanting to read this for a while.


Then do it. It's one of the coolest books ever.

Derek
08-30-2010, 04:11 AM
Then do it. It's one of the coolest books ever.

It'll be in my next Amazon order.

MacGuffin
08-30-2010, 04:23 AM
It'll be in my next Amazon order.

Nice. I think you'll really enjoy it.

EvilShoe
08-30-2010, 08:26 AM
Agreed with MacGuffin. Amazing the way the book is structured, and how it rises far above being gimmicky.

dreamdead
08-30-2010, 03:45 PM
Updated:

1. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
2. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
3. A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
4. Beloved, Toni Morrison
5. The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt
6. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
8. Pembroke, Mary Wilkins Freeman
9. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer



11. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
12. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
13. Cane, Jean Toomer
14. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
15. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
16. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
17. Daisy Miller, Henry James
18. McTeague, Frank Norris

megladon8
08-31-2010, 01:12 AM
Updated...

1.) "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon
2.) "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy
3.) "Shambling Towards Hiroshima" by James Morrow
4.) "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book" by Gerard Jones
5.) "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore
6.) "No Great Mischief" by Alistair MacLeod
7.) "Hater" by David Moody
8.) "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest
9.) "The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury
10.) "God, Jr." by Dennis Cooper


Can't wait to actually have 10 entries on my list :lol:

baby doll
09-01-2010, 07:34 AM
Fiction:
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garc*a Márquez, 1967)
2. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
3. V. (Thomas Pynchon, 1963)
4. Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee, 1999)
5. Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov, 1935-36)

Non-Fiction:
1. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (David Bordwell, 2006)
2.
3.
4.
5.Updated for the end of August. That's out of sixteen books I've read in total, not including three volumes of Proust.

megladon8
09-03-2010, 03:30 AM
I have to ask about "House of Leaves" - I've had it on my shelf for about 5 years now and have attempted it a few times, but have never been able to get more than a hundred pages or so in.

How do you read this book??

I've read where people have said it's meant to be "explored" the same way that the characters explore the titular house...but what does that mean?? Is it not meant to be read linearly? Do I just turn to any random page and start from there, and jump back and forth?

How about the sections with backwards text, or text in different patterns, or gibberish?

Apparently when you "get" how to read it, it's one of the most vibrant horror novels of...well...ever, so say some of its fans.

Melville
10-01-2010, 11:30 PM
Update at three-quarters mark:

1. The Unnamable, Beckett - 10
2. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy, Beckett - 10
4. Blue Eyes, Black Hair, Duras - 9
5. Malone Dies, Beckett - 9
6. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier - 8.5
7. Summer Rain, Duras - 8.5
8. Dance of Death, Strindberg - 8.5
9. Story of the Eye, Bataille [reread] - 8.5
10. The End of the Affair, Greene - 8
11. The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard - 8
12. 100 Selected Poems, E.E. Cummings - 8
13. The Malady of Death, Duras - 8
14. The Lankavatara Sutra, Anonymous - 8
15. Solaris, Lem - 8
16. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
17. Correction, Bernhard - 7.5
18. Billy Budd and Other Stories, Melville - 7.5
19. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard - 7.5
20. Vermillion Sands, Ballard - 7
21. At Swim-Two-Birds, O'Brien - 7
22. The Long Goodbye, Chandler - 7
23. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos - 7
24. The Storyteller, Anthony Minghella - 7
25. Basic Writings, Heidegger - 6.5
26. Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer - 6.5
27. Go Down, Moses, Faulkner - 6.5
28. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, Kingsland (translator) - 6.5
29. Emily L., Duras - 6.5
30. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace - 6.5
31. Strait is the Gate, Gide - 6.5
32. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Beckett - 6
33. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Ballard - 6
34. Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare - 6
35. The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran - 5.5
36. The Painted Bird, Kosinski - 5.5
37. Moderato Cantabile, Duras - 5
38. Valis, Philip K. Dick - 5
39. Twelfth Night, Shakespeare - 4.5
40. Maldoror, Lautréamont - 4.5
41. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy - 4.5
42. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston - 4
43. Don Pablos the Swindler, Francisco de Quevedo - 4
44. Brideshead Revisited, Waugh - 3.5
45. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen, Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool, Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There, Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show, Al Columbia - 8
6. Buddy Does Seattle, Bagge - 8
7. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974, Schulz - 7.5
8. Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti - 7
9. Criminal (deluxe edition), Brubaker & Phillips - 7
10. The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm - 7
11. Ultra Gash Inferno, Maruo - 6.5
12. Lullabies from Hell, Hino - 6.5
13. It Was the War of the Trenches, Tardi - 6
14. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, Delisle - 6
15. Fun Home, Bechdel - 6
16. A Contract with God, Eisner - 6
17. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker - 6
18. MW, Osama Tezuka - 5.5
19. Explainers, Feiffer - 5.5
20. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976, Schulz - 5
21. Child of Palestine, Naji al-Ali - 5
22. In Pictopia! Moore & Simpson - 5
23. Kick-Ass, Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
24. Uzumaki Vol. 1, Ito - 4
25. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
26. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Moore & Swan - 3
27. Promethea: Book 3, Moore & Williams - 1

Milky Joe
10-02-2010, 01:05 AM
38. Valis, Philip K. Dick - 5

Me no comprehende.

Duncan
10-02-2010, 01:42 AM
3/4 Update:

1. The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. by Robert Fagles)
2. Stoner (John Williams)
3. Sixty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
4. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)
5. Warlock (Oakley Hall)
6. The Human Stain (Phillip Roth)
7. 2666 (Roberto Bolano)
8. The Interrogation (J.M.G. Le Clezio)
9. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
10. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)

Excellent:

Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard)
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
Gargoyles (Thomas Bernhard)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
The Bell Jar (Silvia Plath)
The Golden Mean (Annabel Lyon)
Malone Dies (Samuel Beckett)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

Very good:

Gertrude (Hermann Hesse)
Mother Courage and her Children (Bertoldt Brecht) [play]
City of Glass (Paul Auster)
Life and Times of Michael K (J. M. Coetzee)
The Sickness Unto Death (Soren Kierkegaard)
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

Pretty good:

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
The Colossus (Sylvia Plath) [poetry]
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Blood Wedding (Federico Garcia Lorca) [play]

Alright:

The Collector (John Fowles)
Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Luigi Pirandello) [play]
Chimera (John Barth)

Disliked:

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)
Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) [play]
De Niro's Game (Rawi Hage)
The Odes of Horace (Umm...Horace)
The Inferno (Dante)
Runaway (Alice Munro)
The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

Benny Profane
10-02-2010, 02:27 AM
3/4 Update:



Disliked:


Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

Our tastes are pretty similar, so the fact that this is the worst book you've read this year just baffles me. I can maybe understand not loving it, but intense dislike is just beyond my comprehension.

Melville
10-02-2010, 06:46 PM
Me no comprehende.
I thought the first half was great and the second half was awful. I loved it while it was about Horselover Fat's mental disintegration, the way he apotheosized the tragic events of his life into a bizarre cosmological scheme. The humor, pathos, and ingenuous struggle for understanding were great. But once it started to literalize everything, from the Horselover Fat/Philip K. Dick split to the aforesaid cosmological scheme, it devolved into obnoxious, half-assed spiritual nonsense. Also, Dick's prose is extremely clunky and pedestrian, which in some sense works with the narrative and the ingenuous, struggling-to-make-sense-of-it-all everyman protagonist, but I thought it made the second half's spiritual discoveries seem even more half-assed.



Ulysses (James Joyce)
The Sickness Unto Death (Soren Kierkegaard)

Thoughts?

megladon8
10-02-2010, 11:25 PM
Anyone here read "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver?

Duncan
10-02-2010, 11:49 PM
Our tastes are pretty similar, so the fact that this is the worst book you've read this year just baffles me. I can maybe understand not loving it, but intense dislike is just beyond my comprehension.

I found Rabbit a repellent character; a whiny, entitled, self-righteous, misogynist, egoist, mouth rapist, cunt of a motherfucker who gave no indications of feelings like empathy or compassion, seemed not to understand that others can be hurt, have emotions, and seemed, perhaps most childishly, to believe that getting whatever you want is the key to escaping despair. Which is all fine, really. I'm OK with a protagonist being all of these things. But what bothered me is that Updike seemed to believe all these things as well. Like, this was actually the philosophy he was arguing for. Well, that I'm not OK with, and the whole thing just felt like this infuriating exercise in all the worst tendencies of male, WASP self-pity and self-aggrandizement.

Also, his descriptions, though beautiful, are belaboured into irritating pointlessness.


Thoughts?

I knew going in that The Sickness Unto Death was a Christian book, but I was planning to read it secularly and just extract what I wanted. Turns out you can't really do that because its ideas are so deeply rooted in Christianity, but there's still a lot of really interesting stuff in there. His explanations of the different types of despair, his examples of people tying themselves into anxious knots, his idea of the self existing as a tension between finite and infinite. Ultimately, I just couldn't get down with his idea that overcoming despair requires belief in an afterlife, but I think if you consider other infinites, like a "soul" or something, then maybe you can adapt some of what he says. Not as much irony or humour as his other books.

Just finished Ulysses a couple days ago. Some parts were genuinely irritating, not to mention confusing. The part I took a break at was, apparently, this section where he has 19 different short stories happening, and, honestly, I had no idea what was going on. I had to read wikipedia after to catch up. But on the other hand, it's incredibly beautiful at times, and I love that the last third or so is just a couple of guys stumbling home drunk. The final monologue really humanized what was occasionally a pretty abstruse book to me, and I feel like, behind all the linguistic gymnastics, there's a great current of sympathy running through the book for people on their wandering, cheating, hoping, farting, masturbating, longing, striving, idealizing ways. It also feels amazingly un-dated in its politics and dealings with sex and race.

megladon8
10-02-2010, 11:54 PM
Duncan, I will say that your assessment of "The Blind Assassin" is pretty much spot on.

Duncan
10-03-2010, 12:37 AM
Duncan, I will say that your assessment of "The Blind Assassin" is pretty much spot on.

Yeah, it's one of those books where I truly can't see what people love about it.

megladon8
10-03-2010, 12:53 AM
Yeah, it's one of those books where I truly can't see what people love about it.


Replace "it's one of those books" with "she's one of those authors".

I don't get what is apparently so brilliant about Atwood.

Dead & Messed Up
10-03-2010, 05:09 AM
01. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
02. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
06. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
07. Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, 2007)
08. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
09. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
10. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)

11. Beowulf (Tr. R. K. Goodwin, 1992)
12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
13. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Benny Profane
10-04-2010, 08:05 PM
I found Rabbit a repellent character; a whiny, entitled, self-righteous, misogynist, egoist, mouth rapist, cunt of a motherfucker who gave no indications of feelings like empathy or compassion, seemed not to understand that others can be hurt, have emotions, and seemed, perhaps most childishly, to believe that getting whatever you want is the key to escaping despair. Which is all fine, really. I'm OK with a protagonist being all of these things. But what bothered me is that Updike seemed to believe all these things as well. Like, this was actually the philosophy he was arguing for. Well, that I'm not OK with, and the whole thing just felt like this infuriating exercise in all the worst tendencies of male, WASP self-pity and self-aggrandizement.







I totally see it different. I always thought Updike wanted you to see Rabbit as an asshole from an asshole's (Rabbit's) point of view. I just see him as a blue-collar anti-hero who makes mistakes but isn't all bad.

I know a lot of other people here have read the book so I'm curious on their take.

Kurosawa Fan
10-04-2010, 09:31 PM
My reaction to Rabbit, Run, and Rabbit himself, is here (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=97115&highlight=rabbit#post97115). Plus, the conversation is continued between you and I, Benny, a bit further down that page.

megladon8
10-04-2010, 09:33 PM
I actually have an unread John Updike novel on my shelf - "The Centaur".

I bought it used at the library a few years back, for 25 cents.

Is it a recommended first Updike read?

Milky Joe
10-06-2010, 02:34 AM
David Foster Wallace said that's one of Updike's best books. I have it too, but unread.

Benny Profane
10-11-2010, 01:03 PM
1. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
2. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
3. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
4. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
5. Nine Stories - Salinger
6. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
7. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy
8. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
9. Mysteries - Hamsun
10. Molloy - Beckett


1. The Corrections - Franzen
2. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
3. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
4. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
5. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
6. Nine Stories - Salinger
7. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
8. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy
9. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
10. Mysteries - Hamsun



Molloy - Beckett
Beloved - Morrison
But Beautiful - Dyer
The Moviegoer - Percy
Vile Bodies - Waugh
Why Orwell Matters - Hitchens
Malone Dies - Beckett
Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits - Jacobs
Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
Red Harvest - Hammett
The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
White Teeth - Smith
The Art of Racing in the Rain - Stein

Melville
10-23-2010, 05:42 AM
Update to mark reaching my goal of 52 books for the year, and to advertise the awesome that is Beckett:

1. The Unnamable by Beckett - 10
2. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy by Beckett - 10
4. First Love and Other Shorts by Beckett - 9.5
5. Malone Dies by Beckett - 9
6. Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras - 9
7. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier - 8.5
8. Summer Rain by Duras - 8.5
9. Dance of Death by Strindberg [play] - 8.5
10. Story of the Eye by Bataille [reread] - 8.5
11. The Soldier and Death by Arthur Ransome [short story] - 8.5
12. Pedro Paramo by Rulfo - 8
13. The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard - 8
14. The End of the Affair by Greene - 8
15. 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings - 8
16. The Malady of Death by Duras - 8
17. The Lankavatara Sutra by Anonymous - 8
18. Solaris by Lem - 8
19. A Sentimental Journey by Sterne - 8
20. Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
21. Correction by Bernhard - 7.5
22. Selected Tales by Brothers Grimm and David Luke (translator) - 7.5
23. Billy Budd and Other Stories by Melville - 7.5
24. The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard - 7.5
25. Vermillion Sands by Ballard - 7
26. At Swim-Two-Birds by O'Brien - 7
27. The Long Goodbye by Chandler - 7
28. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos - 7
29. Basic Writings by Heidegger - 6.5
30. Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 6.5
31. The Storyteller by Anthony Minghella - 6.5
32. Go Down, Moses by Faulkner - 6.5
33. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - 6.5
34. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by Kingsland (translator) - 6
35. Emily L. by Duras - 6
36. Strait is the Gate by Gide - 6
37. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho by Beckett - 6
38. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard by Ballard - 6
39. Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare [play] - 5.5
40. The Trouble with Being Born by Cioran - 5.5
41. The Painted Bird by Kosinski - 5.5
42. Moderato Cantabile by Duras - 5
43. Valis by Philip K. Dick - 5
44. Twelfth Night by Shakespeare [play] - 4.5
45. Maldoror by Lautréamont - 4.5
46. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
47. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Hardy - 4
48. Don Pablos the Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo - 4
49. Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome - 3.5
50. Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - 3.5
51. Emily of New Moon by LM Montgomery - 2.5
52. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen by Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool by Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There by Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show by Al Columbia - 8
6. Buddy Does Seattle by Bagge - 8
7. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974 by Schulz - 7.5
8. Misery Loves Comedy by Brunetti - 7
9. Criminal (deluxe edition) by Brubaker & Phillips - 7
10. The Golem's Mighty Swing by Sturm - 7
11. Ultra Gash Inferno by Maruo - 6.5
12. Lullabies from Hell by Hino - 6.5
13. It Was the War of the Trenches by Tardi - 6
14. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea by Delisle - 6
15. Fun Home by Bechdel - 6
16. A Contract with God by Eisner - 6
17. Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker - 6
18. MW by Osama Tezuka - 5.5
19. Explainers by Feiffer - 5.5
20. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976 by Schulz - 5
21. Child of Palestine by Naji al-Ali - 5
22. In Pictopia! by Moore & Simpson - 5
23. Kick-Ass by Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
24. Uzumaki Vol. 1 by Ito - 4
25. A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
26. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Moore & Swan - 3
27. Promethea Book 3 by Moore & Williams - 1

endingcredits
10-23-2010, 05:42 PM
Update to mark reaching my goal of 52 books for the year.

Awesome list. The 6.5 for Gimpel rustles my jimmies a bit, however.

Melville
10-23-2010, 06:30 PM
Awesome list. The 6.5 for Gimpel rustles my jimmies a bit, however.
I loved the title story, with its guileless character and prose, and the way it used them to humorously explore the relationship between religious faith and blind love (which made for an interesting comparison with End of the Affair and Strait is the Gait). And the one about the fire was almost as great. But the others lacked a compelling core for me.

Raiders
10-23-2010, 07:29 PM
Your Twelfth Night rating is just... ew.

Melville
10-23-2010, 09:10 PM
Your Twelfth Night rating is just... ew.
I dunno. It felt slight to the point of nonexistence. And the different narrative threads didn't tie together in any interesting or even appropriately amusing way.

Kurosawa Fan
10-30-2010, 02:01 AM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
3. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
4. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
5. Antigone - Sophocles
6. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
8. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
9. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
10. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw


11. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
12. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
13. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
14. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
15. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
16. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
17. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
18. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Lazlo
10-31-2010, 03:10 AM
1. L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy (re-read)
2. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
3. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
4. A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

I think that's it.... I'm a slow reader. About to start Team of Rivals. See you in six-seven months.

endingcredits
10-31-2010, 04:44 PM
1. Hunger, K. Hamsun[10/10]
2. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer [10/10]
3. The Castle, Kafka [9/10]
4. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B Singer [9/10]
5. Harmonium, W. Stevens [8/10]
6. Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky [7/10]
7. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron [6/10]
8. The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick [6/10]
9. VALIS, P.K Dick [4/10]
10. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams [4/10]


Comics:
1. Jimmy Corrigan, C. Ware [10/10]
2. Quimby the Mouse, C. Ware [10/10]
3. Acme Novelty Library Annual Report to Shareholders, C. Ware [10/10]
4. Acme Novelty Library #19, C. Ware [10/10]
5. The Biological Show #0, A. Columbia [9/10]
6. Black Hole, C. Burns [9/10]
7. Acme Novelty Library #17, C. Ware [8/10] (<-- bee cartoon is the deciding factor here)
8. Acme Novelty Library #16, C. Ware [8/10]
9. Criminal, E Brubaker S. Phillips [8/10]
10. Acme Novelty Library #18, C. Ware [7/10]

Kurosawa Fan
11-04-2010, 02:41 AM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
3. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
4. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
5. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
6. Antigone - Sophocles
7. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
8. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
9. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
10. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter


11. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
12. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
13. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
14. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
15. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
16. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
17. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
18. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
19. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

ContinentalOp
11-04-2010, 05:26 AM
Reached my goal. Everything else is icing on the cake.

1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith- 9.5
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald- 9
3. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler- 9
4. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith- 9
5. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman- 9
6. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith- 8.5
7. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith- 8
8. The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames- 8
9. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald- 7.5
10. Unlikely by Jeffrey Brown- 7.5




11. Under the Dome by Stephen King- 7.5
12. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith- 7.5
13. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne- 7.5
14. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald- 7
15. The Walking Dead Vol. 12: Life Among Them- 7
16. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- 7
17. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz- 7
18. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith- 6.5
19. Monster Nation by David Wellington- 5.5
20. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block- 5

endingcredits
11-08-2010, 03:29 AM
Updated list:
1. Hunger, K. Hamsun - 10
2. The Dance of Death, A. Strindberg - 10
3. Pan, K. Hamsun - 10
4. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer - 10
5. The Castle, F. Kafka - 9
6. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B. Singer 9
7. Harmonium, W. Stevens - 8
8. Sculpting in Time, A. Tarkovsky - 7
9. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron - 6
10. The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick - 6

Milky Joe
11-08-2010, 05:04 AM
1. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
2. Ratner's Star by Don DeLillo
3. The Trial by Franz Kafka
4. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
5. The Names by Don DeLillo
6. The Concept of Anxiety by Søren Kierkegaard
7. The Concept of Irony by Søren Kierkegaard
8. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
9. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
0. We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick

Kurosawa Fan
11-22-2010, 12:05 AM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
4. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
5. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
7. Antigone - Sophocles
8. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
9. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
10. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy


11. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
12. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
13. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
14. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
15. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
16. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
17. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
18. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
19. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
20. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Dead & Messed Up
11-22-2010, 06:29 AM
01. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
02. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
06. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
07. Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, 2007)
08. Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1982)
09. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
10. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
11. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
13. Beowulf (Tr. R. K. Goodwin, 1992)
14. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

endingcredits
11-30-2010, 03:40 AM
Update:
1. Hunger, K. Hamsun - 10
2. The Dance of Death, A. Strindberg - 10
3. Pan, K. Hamsun - 10
4. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer - 10
5. Victoria, K. Hamsun - 9.5
6. The Castle, F. Kafka - 9
7. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B. Singer 9
8. Harmonium, W. Stevens - 8
9. Sculpting in Time, A. Tarkovsky - 7
10. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron - 6

Kurosawa Fan
12-04-2010, 12:58 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
4. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
5. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
7. Antigone - Sophocles
8. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
9. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
10. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy


11. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
12. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
13. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
14. The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
15. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
16. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
17. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
18. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
19. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
20. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
21. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Hugh_Grant
12-05-2010, 01:36 PM
Up to twenty-five...

1. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa -- Peter Godwin
2. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe -- Douglas Rogers
3. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade -- Justin Spring
4. Half of a Yellow Sun-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier --Alexandra Fuller
6. House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe--Christina Lamb
7. The Night of the Gun -- David Carr
8. Woman in the Dunes -- Kōbō Abe
9. One Day -- David Nicholls
10. Empire Falls -- Richard Russo

11. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances -- Alexander McCall Smith
12. Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl -- Stacey O'Brien
13. Portuguese Irregular Verbs --Alexander McCall Smith
14. A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines --Anthony Bourdain
15. The Zero--Jess Walter
16. After the Wall (Zonenkinder) -- Jana Hensel
17. Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster --Svetlana Alexievich
18. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs -- Alexander McCall Smith
19. How to Read the Air -- Dinaw Mengestu
20. Homer and Langley -- E.L. Doctorow
21. Medium Raw--Anthony Bourdain
22. Lunch in Paris -- Elizabeth Bard
23. Regeneration -- Pat Barker
24. The Good Doctor - Damon Galgut
25. The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef--Marco Pierre White

endingcredits
12-14-2010, 12:18 AM
Update:
1. Mysteries, K. Hamsun - 10
2. Hunger, K. Hamsun - 10
3. The Dance of Death, A. Strindberg - 10
4. Pan, K. Hamsun - 10
5. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer - 10
6. Victoria, K. Hamsun - 9.5
7. The Castle, F. Kafka - 9
8. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B. Singer 9
9. Growth of the Soil, K. Hamsun - 8.5
10. Harmonium, W. Stevens - 8

Comics:
1. Jimmy Corrigan, C. Ware - 10
2. Quimby the Mouse, C. Ware - 10
3. Acme Novelty Library Annual Report to Shareholders, C. Ware - 10
4. Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days - 10
5. Acme Novelty Library #19, C. Ware 10
6. From Hell, A. Moore - 10
7. The Biological Show #0, A. Columbia 9
8. Black Hole, C. Burns 9
9. Acme Novelty Library #17, C. Ware 8 (<-- bee cartoon is the deciding factor here)
10. Acme Novelty Library #16, C. Ware - 8

dreamdead
12-14-2010, 02:42 AM
Updated:

1. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
2. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
3. A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
4. Beloved, Toni Morrison
5. The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt
6. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
8. Pembroke, Mary Wilkins Freeman
9. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer



11. Point Omega, Don DeLillo
12. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
13. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
14. Cane, Jean Toomer
15. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
16. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
17. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
18. Daisy Miller, Henry James
19. McTeague, Frank Norris

ContinentalOp
12-14-2010, 04:21 AM
1. Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith- 9.5
2. Black Money by Ross MacDonald- 9
3. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler- 9
4. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith- 9
5. The Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman- 9
6. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith- 8.5
7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler- 8
8. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith- 8
9. The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames- 8
10. The Walking Dead Vol. 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman- 8



11. The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald- 7.5
12. Unlikely by Jeffrey Brown- 7.5
13. Under the Dome by Stephen King- 7.5
14. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith- 7.5
15. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne- 7.5
16. The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald- 7
17. The Walking Dead Vol. 12: Life Among Them by Robert Kirkman- 7
18. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- 7
19. The Good Guy by Dean Koontz- 7
20. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith- 6.5
21. Monster Nation by David Wellington- 5.5
22. Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block- 5

Derek
12-14-2010, 04:45 AM
1a. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10.0
1b. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10.0
3. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri) 9.0
4. JR (William Gaddis) 8.5
5. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
6. Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
7. Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) 8.0
8. The Paradiso (Dante Alighieri) 8.0
9. The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0
10. Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0

Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5
The Purgatorio (Dante Alighieri) 7.5
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0
My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5

Duncan
12-14-2010, 05:05 AM
4. JR (William Gaddis) 8.5


Cool. Any thoughts?

Benny Profane
12-16-2010, 01:00 PM
1. The Corrections - Franzen
2. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
3. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
4. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
5. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
6. Nine Stories - Salinger
7. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
8. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy
9. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
10. Mysteries - Hamsun


1. The Corrections - Franzen
2. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
3. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
4. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
5. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
6. Nine Stories - Salinger
7. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
8. Under the Volcano - Lowry
9. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy
10. Pale Blue Dot - Sagan




Mysteries - Hamsun
Molloy - Beckett
Beloved - Morrison
Chronic City - Lethem
But Beautiful - Dyer
The Moviegoer - Percy
Vile Bodies - Waugh
Marry Me: A Romance - Updike
Why Orwell Matters - Hitchens
Malone Dies - Beckett
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Eggers
Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits - Jacobs
Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
Red Harvest - Hammett
The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
White Teeth - Smith
The Art of Racing in the Rain - Stein

Dead & Messed Up
12-26-2010, 03:10 AM
01. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
02. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
05. Tristan & Iseult (Tr. Joseph Bedier, 1900)
06. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
07. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
08. Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, 2007)
09. Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1982)
10. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
11. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
12. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
13. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
14. Beowulf (Tr. R. K. Goodwin, 1992)
15. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Melville
12-26-2010, 04:58 AM
Seems unlikely that I'll finish another book before the new year arrives, so here's my final list. I didn't read either of the books I intended to (Finnegans Wake and Phenomenology of Spirit), but such is the fate of the lazy man.


1. The Unnamable by Beckett - 10
2. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - 10
3. Molloy by Beckett - 10
4. First Love and Other Shorts by Beckett - 9.5
5. Malone Dies by Beckett - 9
6. Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras - 9
7. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier - 8.5
8. Summer Rain by Duras - 8.5
9. Dance of Death by Strindberg [play] - 8.5
10. Story of the Eye by Bataille [reread] - 8.5
11. The Soldier and Death by Arthur Ransome [short story] - 8.5
12. Pedro Paramo by Rulfo - 8
13. The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard - 8
14. The End of the Affair by Greene - 8
15. Repetition by Kierkegaard - 8
16. 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings - 8
17. The Malady of Death by Duras - 8
18. The Lankavatara Sutra by Anonymous - 8
19. Solaris by Lem - 8
20. A Sentimental Journey by Sterne - 8
21. Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke - 8
22. Correction by Bernhard - 7.5
23. The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 by Beckett - 7.5
24. Selected Tales by Brothers Grimm and David Luke (translator) - 7.5
25. Billy Budd and Other Stories by Melville - 7.5
26. The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard - 7.5
27. Vermillion Sands by Ballard - 7
28. At Swim-Two-Birds by O'Brien - 7
29. The Long Goodbye by Chandler - 7
30. The Holy Terrors by Cocteau - 7
31. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos - 7
32. Basic Writings by Heidegger - 6.5
33. Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 6.5
34. The Storyteller by Anthony Minghella - 6.5
35. Go Down, Moses by Faulkner - 6.5
36. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - 6.5
37. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by Kingsland (translator) - 6
38. Emily L. by Duras - 6
39. Strait is the Gate by Gide - 6
40. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho by Beckett - 6
41. Erotism: Death & Sensuality by Bataille - 6
42. Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau - 6
43. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard by Ballard - 6
44. Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare [play] - 5.5
45. The Trouble with Being Born by Cioran - 5.5
46. The Painted Bird by Kosinski - 5.5
47. Moderato Cantabile by Duras - 5
48. Valis by Philip K. Dick - 5
49. Twelfth Night by Shakespeare [play] - 4.5
50. Maldoror by Lautréamont - 4.5
51. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - 4.5
52. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Hardy - 4
53. Don Pablos the Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo - 4
54. Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome - 3.5
55. Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - 3.5
56. Story of O by Pauline Réage - 3
57. Emily of New Moon by LM Montgomery - 2.5
58. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - 2
59. Her by Ferlinghetti - 1

May as well make a list of comics too.

1. Pim & Francie: the Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia - 8.5
2. The Night Kitchen by Sendak - 8.5
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool by Al Columbia - 8
4. You Are There by Tardi & Forest - 8
5. The Biologic Show by Al Columbia - 8
6. Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware - 8
7. Buddy Does Seattle by Bagge - 8
8. The Complete Peanuts, 1973-1974 by Schulz - 7.5
9. Misery Loves Comedy by Brunetti - 7
10. Criminal (deluxe edition) by Brubaker & Phillips - 7
11. The Golem's Mighty Swing by Sturm - 7
12. Ultra Gash Inferno by Maruo - 6.5
13. Lullabies from Hell by Hino - 6.5
14. It Was the War of the Trenches by Tardi - 6
15. Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea by Delisle - 6
16. Fun Home by Bechdel - 6
17. A Contract with God by Eisner - 6
18. Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker - 6
19. MW by Osama Tezuka - 5.5
20. Explainers by Feiffer - 5.5
21. The Complete Peanuts, 1975-1976 by Schulz - 5
22. Child of Palestine by Naji al-Ali - 5
23. In Pictopia! by Moore & Simpson - 5
24. Kick-Ass by Millar & Romita jr. - 4.5
25. Uzumaki Vol. 1 by Ito - 4
26. A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 3.5
27. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Moore & Swan - 3
28. Promethea Book 3 by Moore & Williams - 1

ledfloyd
12-26-2010, 07:16 AM
but such is the fate of the lazy man.
you read twice as many books as i did this year. :P

Melville
12-26-2010, 07:52 AM
you read twice as many books as i did this year. :P
My list looks longer than it is; it's bloated by short books. It's also bloated by four months of unemployment and another eight of not working very hard.

Raiders
12-27-2010, 02:16 AM
I basically read good-to-great books this year. Only the last few in the spoiler tags were disappointing.

1. 2666 (Bolano)
2. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW (Pynchon)
3. REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (McCullers)
4. ROUSE UP O YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE! (Oe)
5. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY (Chabon)
6. OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS (Capote)
7. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES (Toole)
8. THE CORRECTIONS (Franzen)
9. AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH (Marquez)
10. THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES [Play] (Guare)

11. THE DROWNED WORLD (Ballard)
12. THE NIGHT OF THE GUN (Carr)
13. THE WINTER'S TALE [Play] (Shakespeare)
14. LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY [Play] (Guare)
15. A MERCY (Morrison)
16. SOLAR (McEwan)
17. MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (Vidal)

lovejuice
12-27-2010, 01:46 PM
Top ten books. (Fiction and Non-fiction)

1. Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit"
2. Greene's "Doctor Fischer of Geneva"
3. Davies's "What's Bred in the Bone"
4. Hemingway's "The Sun also Rises"
5. Greene's "Monsignor Quixote"
6. Zizek's "The Obscure Object of Ideology"
7. Martinez's "The Oxford Murders"
8. Greene's "The Quiet American"
9. Dinesens' "Seven Gothic Tales"
10. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man"

Other titles read are in the spoiler tag. * means second reading.

Fiction

Tolkien's "Roverandom"
Musil's "The Man without Qualities"
Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia"
Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"
Mann's "Royal Highness"
Moravia's "The Conformist"
Du Maurier's "Don't Look Now"
Russel's "The Sparrow"
Gadda's "That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana"
Proust's "Swann's Way"
James's "The Haunted Dolls' House and other Stories"
Sartre's "Intimacy"
Greene's "The Comedians"
Murakami's "The Second Bakery Attack"
Haldeman's "Old Twentieth"
Shea and R. A. Wilson's "The Eye in the Pyramid"
Collin's "Sailing Alone Around the Room"
Haggard's "She"
Albee's "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Non-fiction

Merleau-Ponty's "The World of Perception"
Nitschze's "The Birth of Tragedy"
Heidegger's "Poetry, Language, and Thought"*
Marchiavelli's "The Prince"
Taylor's "Hegel and Modern Society"
Frye's "The Educated Imagination"
Lukacs's "History and Class Consciousness"
Bergson's "Laughter"
Weil's "Gravity and Grace"
Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction"
Rosenfield's "The Strange, Familiar and Forgotten"
Dennett's "Freedom Evolves"
Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" *
Morgenroth's "Speaking of Dance"
Graham's "Philosophy of the Arts"
Meredith's "An Essay on Comedy"
Althusser's "For Marx" *
Peleggi's "The Politics of Ruins and the Business of Nostalgia"
Plato's "Symposium"
Zimbardo's "The Lucifer Effect"
Saltzman's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet"
Virilio's "Art and Fear"
Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge"
Cohen's "Jokes"
Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos"
Montaigne's "Essays"
Williams's "Marxism and Literature" *
Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language"
Krutch's "Modernism in Modern Drama"
Empson's "7 Types of Ambiguity"
Jameson's "The Political Unconscious"
Brisson's "How Philosophers Saved Myths"
Jameson's "The Hegel Variations"
Lukacs's "The Historical Novel"*
Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live by"
Sartre's "What is Literature?"*

Art Book

Erben's "Miro"
Elger's "Dadaism"
Holzhey's "De Chirico"
Humphreys's "Futurism"
Gablik's "Magritte"
Klingsohr-leroy's "Dadaism"'
Descharnes's "Dali"
Wolf's "Salvador Dali"

endingcredits
12-27-2010, 02:55 PM
1. Mysteries, K. Hamsun - 10
2. Hunger, K. Hamsun - 10
3. The Dance of Death, A. Strindberg - 10
4. Pan, K. Hamsun - 10
5. The Father, A. Strindberg - 10
6. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer - 10
7. Miss Julie, A. Strindberg - 9.5
8. Victoria, K. Hamsun - 9.5
9. A Dream Play, A. Strindberg - 9
10. The Castle, F. Kafka - 9

11. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B. Singer - 9
12. Growth of the Soil, K. Hamsun - 8.5
13. Harmonium, W. Stevens - 8
14. Sculpting in Time, A. Tarkovsky - 7
15. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron - 6
16. The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick - 6
17. VALIS, P.K Dick - 4
18. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams - 4
19. Legs, W. Kennedy - 3


Re-reads:
1. Notes From the Underground, Dostoevsky - 10
2. Walden, Thoreau - 10
3. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Works - 10
4. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche - 9
5. Hamlet, Shakespeare - 9
6. Sirens of Titan - Vonnegut - 5
7. Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut - 3

EvilShoe
12-27-2010, 03:08 PM
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald11. Perfume - Patrick Süskind
12. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
13. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
15. The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
16. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
17. The Defense - Vladimir Nabokov
18. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
19. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
20. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
21. The Elementary Particles - Michel Houellebecq
22. Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg
23. Glamorama - Bret Easton Ellis
24. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
25. Atonement - Ian McEwan
26. Chess Story - Stefan Zweig
27. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
28. No Exit and Three Other Plays - Jean-Paul Sartre
29. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
30. Replay - Ken Grimwood
31. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
32. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
33. By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolano
34. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
35. Once There Was a War - John Steinbeck
36. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
37. The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis
38. Roger's Version - John Updike
39. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole
40. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

Mysterious Dude
12-27-2010, 06:48 PM
1. As I Lay Dying (1930, Faulkner)
2. We (1924, Zamyatin)
3. Say You're One of Them (2008, Akpan)
4. Molloy (1951, Beckett)
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971, Thompson)
6. Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948, Capote)
7. Beasts of No Nation (2005, Iweala)
8. The Plague (1947, Camus)
9. Naked Lunch (1959, Burroughs)
10. July's People (1981, Gordimer)
11. Treasure Island (1883, Stevenson)
12. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000, Eggers)
13. Requiem for a Dream (1978, Selby)
14. Don Quixote (1605/1615, Cervantes)
15. Song for Night (2007, Abani)
16. At Swim-Two-Birds (1939, O’Brien)
17. Penrod (1918, Tarkington)
18. The Turn of the Screw (1898, James)
19. The City and the Pillar (1948, Vidal)
20. Everything Is Illuminated (2002, Foer)
21. Allah Is Not Obliged (2000, Kourouma)
22. Songmaster (1980, Card)
23. The Rebels' Hour (2008, Joris)
24. A Farewell to Arms (1929, Hemingway)
25. The Outsiders (1967, Hinton)
26. A Life Full of Holes (1964, Charhadi)
27. The Swiss Family Robinson (1812, Wyss)

Duncan
12-27-2010, 07:47 PM
1. The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. by Robert Fagles)
2. 2666 (Roberto Bolano)
3. Stoner (John Williams)
4. Sixty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
5. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)
6. The Human Stain (Phillip Roth)
7. The Interrogation (J.M.G. Le Clezio)
8. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
9. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Malcolm Lowry)
10. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)

Great:
Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
Warlock (Oakley Hall)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard)
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
Gargoyles (Thomas Bernhard)
Tinkers (Paul Harding)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Hunger (Knut Hamsun)
The Bell Jar (Silvia Plath)
Malone Dies (Samuel Beckett)

Very Good:
The Golden Mean (Annabel Lyon)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Ilustrado (Miguel Syjuco)
Gertrude (Hermann Hesse)
Mother Courage and her Children (Bertoldt Brecht) [play]
City of Glass (Paul Auster)
Life and Times of Michael K (J. M. Coetzee)
The Sentimentalists (Johanna Skibsrud)
The Sickness Unto Death (Soren Kierkegaard)

Good:
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
The Colossus (Sylvia Plath) [poetry]
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Blood Wedding (Federico Garcia Lorca) [play]

Ambivalent:
The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
The Collector (John Fowles)
Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Luigi Pirandello) [play]
Chimera (John Barth)
A Night at the Movies (Robert Coover)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)

Did not like:
Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) [play]
De Niro's Game (Rawi Hage)
The Odes of Horace (Umm...Horace)
The Inferno (Dante)
Runaway (Alice Munro)
The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

D_Davis
12-27-2010, 10:43 PM
My list looks longer than it is; it's bloated by short books.

Short books rule, long books drool.

D_Davis
12-27-2010, 10:47 PM
Didn't read a ton this year....kind of just grazed on a number of things, and mainly read short stories from here and there.

However, John Dies at the End is easily the best thing I read all year. Highly recommended to fans of gonzo fiction, horror, comedy, and genre literature who appreciate finely crafted prose, an irreverent sense of humor, and some genuinely creepy, and not mention highly memorable, moments.

Read it before the movie becomes a huge hit, because I have a feeling it will.

Melville
12-27-2010, 11:54 PM
Short books rule, long books drool.
Yeah, though most of my favorite books are long, I'm increasingly partial to short ones. I often find that everything except narrative points is already accomplished well before a long book ends.

Kurosawa Fan
12-30-2010, 11:38 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
4. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
5. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
7. Antigone - Sophocles
8. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
9. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer



11. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
12. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
13. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
14. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
15. The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
16. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
17. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
18. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
19. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
20. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
21. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
22. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

megladon8
12-31-2010, 02:31 AM
1.) "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon
2.) "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy
3.) "Shambling Towards Hiroshima" by James Morrow
4.) "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book" by Gerard Jones
5.) "John Dies at the End" by David Wong
6.) "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore
7.) "No Great Mischief" by Alistair MacLeod
8.) "Hater" by David Moody
9.) "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest
10.) "The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury


11.) "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest
12.) "God, Jr." by Dennis Cooper
13.) ...

Kurosawa Fan
12-31-2010, 05:41 PM
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
4. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
5. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
7. Antigone - Sophocles
8. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
9. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
10. Coraline - Neil Gaiman


11. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
12. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
13. The Financial Lives of the Poets - Jess Walter
14. Escape from the Deep - Alex Kershaw
15. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
16. The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
17. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
18. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
19. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
20. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma - Camilla Townsend
21. Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - Nina Burleigh
22. The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons
23. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini


Well, that's my last update for the year. That's the fewest number of books I've read in the last five years, I believe. Stupid school. Oh well.

I'll be kicking off 2011 with my first Kafka novel.

megladon8
12-31-2010, 08:50 PM
I'm glad you enjoyed "Coraline", KF.

I liked it a lot. I like some (though far from all) of Gaiman's work.

Have you seen the movie?

Kurosawa Fan
12-31-2010, 11:42 PM
I'm glad you enjoyed "Coraline", KF.

I liked it a lot. I like some (though far from all) of Gaiman's work.

Have you seen the movie?

Yes I have. I liked it quite a bit, but the book blew it away. Far creepier, and some beautiful prose, which I wasn't expecting from a "kids" book.

Hugh_Grant
12-31-2010, 11:47 PM
I'll be kicking off 2011 with my first Kafka novel.

Woo hoo! Enjoy.

I had a goal to read twenty-five books this year, and I was able to read that many, so I'm happy.

megladon8
01-01-2011, 02:18 AM
Yes I have. I liked it quite a bit, but the book blew it away. Far creepier, and some beautiful prose, which I wasn't expecting from a "kids" book.


I hope Space Oddity doesn't hear you say that :lol:

dreamdead
01-01-2011, 03:16 AM
Finished up book 20 for this year just in time.

Updated:

1. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
2. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
3. A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
4. Beloved, Toni Morrison
5. The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt
6. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
8. Pembroke, Mary Wilkins Freeman
9. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer



11. Point Omega, Don DeLillo
12. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
13. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
14. The Writing on the Wall, Lynne Sharon Schwartz
15. Cane, Jean Toomer
16. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
17. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
18. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
19. Daisy Miller, Henry James
20. McTeague, Frank Norris

Not bad, given that this is my highest reading total since undergrad days. Have high hopes to beat this for next year, though.

Dead & Messed Up
01-02-2011, 06:00 PM
01. Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, 1968)
02. The Dhammapada (Tr. Gil Fronsdal, 2005)
03. Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)
04. A Dictionary of Angels (Gustav Davidson, 1967)
05. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2008)
06. Tristan & Iseult (Tr. Joseph Bedier, 1900)
07. Teatro Grottesco (Thomas Ligotti, 2006)
08. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
09. Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, 2007)
10. A Catalogue of Angels (Vinita Hampton Wright, 2006)

11. Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1982)
12. The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 - 11 (Robert Kirkman, 2003)
13. The History of the Devil (Clive Barker, 1980)
14. Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman, 2006)
15. Angels A to Z (James R. Lewis et al, 1996)
16. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick, 1968)
17. Beowulf (Tr. R. K. Goodwin, 1992)
18. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974)

Very happy. More than I expected to read this year. I think the thread was a good motivator. Also, I liked all of these except maybe the last two, and the problem with Beowulf was most likely its bland translation.

Derek
01-08-2011, 10:08 PM
One last addition that I finished in December:

1a. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 10.0
1b. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 10.0
3. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) 9.5
4. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri) 9.0
5. JR (William Gaddis) 8.5
6. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (J.G. Ballard) 8.5
7. Oblivion: Stories (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
8. Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) 8.0
9. The Paradiso (Dante Alighieri) 8.0
10. The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) 8.0

The Zero (Jess Walter) 8.0
Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski) 8.0
Herzog (Saul Bellow) 7.5
The Purgatorio (Dante Alighieri) 7.5
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick) 7.0
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 7.0
My Education (William S. Burroughs) 6.0
In Our Time (Hemingway) 5.5

Loved loved loved The Corrections - hilarious and terrifying, slowly peeling the layers of a typical dysfunctional American family revealing, with a wonderful blend of pathos, psychological acuity and humor the depths of the insecurities and idiosyncracies that lies beneath.


Cool. Any thoughts?

Bast is a great protagonist and it´s when the book focuses on him and/or JR that it really soars. It´s a bit of a chore to get through, but I don´t mean that as a bad thing and its overwhelming, almost taxing nature, lends itself perfectly to the saturated, hyperactive and all-consuming world of money and technology. It certainly helps that it´s really, really funny.

Benny Profane
01-10-2011, 02:16 PM
Loved loved loved The Corrections - hilarious and terrifying, slowly peeling the layers of a typical dysfunctional American family revealing, with a wonderful blend of pathos, psychological acuity and humor the depths of the insecurities and idiosyncracies that lies beneath.



Bast is a great protagonist and it´s when the book focuses on him and/or JR that it really soars. It´s a bit of a chore to get through, but I don´t mean that as a bad thing and its overwhelming, almost taxing nature, lends itself perfectly to the saturated, hyperactive and all-consuming world of money and technology. It certainly helps that it´s really, really funny.


I commend you on your excellent taste. I was going to read Freedom when it came to paperback but I really don't know if I can wait that long.

Benny Profane
01-10-2011, 02:20 PM
My final list:


1. The Corrections - Franzen
2. The Sot-weed Factor - Barth
3. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Wright
4. The Naked and the Dead - Mailer
5. Venus Drive - Lipsyte
6. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
7. Nine Stories - Salinger
8. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Calvino
9. Under the Volcano - Lowry
10. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It - Meloy

Pale Blue Dot - Sagan
Mysteries - Hamsun
Molloy - Beckett
Beloved - Morrison
Chronic City - Lethem
But Beautiful - Dyer
The Moviegoer - Percy
Vile Bodies - Waugh
Marry Me: A Romance - Updike
Why Orwell Matters - Hitchens
Malone Dies - Beckett
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Eggers
Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits - Jacobs
Of Love and Other Demons - Marquez
Red Harvest - Hammett
The Blood Oranges - Hawkes
White Teeth - Smith
The Art of Racing in the Rain - Stein


28 books is a lot more than I expected in a year in which I had a newborn. There aren't any "all-timers" on that list but lots of really good ones. Only the last two I did not enjoy at all. I really can't wait to read more Sam Lipsyte. He's like Bukowski but with more florid stylings.

Kurosawa Fan
01-10-2011, 02:29 PM
I really can't wait to read more Sam Lipsyte. He's like Bukowski but with more florid stylings.

Yes please.