Top 10 Books First Read During 2011

[Melville]

1. Notes from Underground (1864, Dostoyevsky)
2. Hunger (1890, Hamsun)
Nice. Based on those rankings, I've added Dream Story and Moravagine to my to-read list. L'Enfant sounds good too.

[Raiders]

Nice. Based on those rankings, I've added Dream Story and Moravagine to my to-read list. L'Enfant sounds good too.

Weren't you the one who promised to check out Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry? Someone else around here must read that book, dammit.

[Melville]

Weren't you the one who promised to check out Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry? Someone else around here must read that book, dammit.
Yeah, that was me. It's on my to-read list. I haven't got a copy of it yet, since I didn't want to buy any books until after getting to England. I'll put it in my first order of books from Amazon.co.uk.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Weren't you the one who promised to check out Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry? Someone else around here must read that book, dammit.

Hey, I'm reading Nip the Buds! Someone took your recommendation. They didn't have The Silent Cry, otherwise I would have bought that.

[Mara]

I didn't track what books I read this year. Obviously. But, in a year with some really great contenders, I think my #1 would be Crime and Punishment.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
2. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4. Light in August by William Faulkner
5. The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht
6. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
7. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
8. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger


11. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
12. Angels in America by Tony Kushner
13. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
14. The Dead by James Joyce
15. Volpone by Ben Jonson
16. Incorruptible by Michael Hollinger
17. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
18. The Unknown American Revolution by Gary B. Nash
19. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
20. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
21. Trifles by Susan Glaspell
22. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
23. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
24. The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
25. The Library Window by Margaret Oliphant
26. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
27. A Number by Caryl Churchill
28. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah by Richard Burton
29. Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw
30. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
31. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
32. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown
33. The Faerie Queene (Book One) by Edmund Spencer
34. Live From New York by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller
35. The Tale of Despereaux by Kate Dicamillo
36. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
37. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
38. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
39. A Respectable Army by James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender
40. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
42. The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
43. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
44. Beowulf by Unknown
45. The American Revolution: A History by Gordon Wood
46. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris
47. Everyman by Unknown
48. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Crap. That's probably my last update. I've always wanted to average a book a week. I can't imagine reading more than this in years to come, so it looks like this will more than likely be as close as I get.

Raiders, Oe was as good as you claimed. Other than the issue I had with his unrelenting focus on genitalia, which fits in with the grotesque ambience of the novel but still made me uncomfortable considering we're dealing with children, it was a pretty brilliant, relentlessly bleak allegory of Japanese pre-war politics. I was very impressed, and will order The Silent Cry the next time I purchase anything from B&N or Amazon. Thanks for bringing him to my attention.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Masterpiece Great Good Mixed Bad Awful Craptacular

Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
The Bhagavad-Gita (tr. Eknath Easwaren)
The King in Yellow (Robert Chambers)
The Maker of Gargoyles and Other Stories (Clark Ashton Smith)
Inferno (Dante [tr. Longfellow])
Dinosaur Lives (John Horner & Edwin Dobb) (nf)
The Colorado Kid (Stephen King)
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories (ed. Al Sarrantonio et al)
Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman)
A Catalogue of Angels (Vanita Hampton Wright) (nf)
Sandman, Vol 1 (Neil Gaiman)
Y: The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughan)
The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins) (nf)
Islam: Faith and History (Mahmoud M. Ayoub) (nf)
Witchcraft: A Secret History (Michael Streeter) (nf)
The Walking Dead, Volumes 12-14 (Robert Kirkman)

I wanted to read twenty this year. Didn't quite make it. Very happy I finished Paradise Lost and the Gita, and still surprised by how affected I was by Stranger.

[Derek]

1) Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion) 9.0
2) Hunger (Knut Hamsun) 9.0
3) Hopscotch (Julio Cortozar) 8.5
4) The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) 8.5
5) Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 8.5
6) A Storm of Swords (George R. R. Martin) 8.5
7) The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood) 8.0
8) Pan (Knut Hamsun) 8.0
9) The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) 8.0
10) A Clash of Kings (George R. R. Martin) 7.5

11) Death in Venice (Thomas Mann) 7.5
12) A Game of Thrones (George R. R. Martin) 7.5
13) Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Gilles Deleuze) 7.5
14) A Passage to India (E.M. Forster) 7.5
15) Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell) 7.0
16) Discovering Orson Welles (Jonathan Rosenbaum) 7.0
17) Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence) 7.0
18) A Feast for Crows (George R. R. Martin) 7.0
19) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami) 5.5
20) Raising Kane (Pauline Kael) 3.0

[ContinentalOp]

1. The Two-Bear Mambo by Joe R. Lansdale- 9.5
2. Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale- 9.5
3. A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson- 9
4. The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark- 9
5. Bad Chili by Joe R. Lansdale- 9
6. Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale- 9
7. Nick's Trip by George P. Pelecanos- 8.5
8. The Hunter by Richard Stark- 8
9. Right as Rain by George P. Pelecanos- 8
10. Hard Revolution by George P. Pelecanos- 8

11. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson- 8
12. The Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith- 8
13. Captains Outrageous by Joe R. Lansdale- 8
14. The Outfit by Richard Stark- 7.5
15. The Walking Dead: Vol. 14 by Robert Kirkman- 7.5
16. The Double Life is Twice as Good by Jonathan Ames- 7.5
17. A Time of Predators by Joe Gores- 7
18. The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith- 7
19. A Firing Offense by George P. Pelecanos- 6.5
20. Chew: Taster's Choice by John Layman- 6.5
21. King's Ransom by Ed McBain- 6.5
22. You Have Killed Me by Jamie S. Rich- 4.5

Okay, that's about it.

[Melville]

1) Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion) 9.0
2) Hunger (Knut Hamsun) 9.0
3) Hopscotch (Julio Cortozar) 8.5
4) The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) 8.5
5) Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 8.5
6) A Storm of Swords (George R. R. Martin) 8.5
7) The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood) 8.0
8) Pan (Knut Hamsun) 8.0
9) The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) 8.0
10) A Clash of Kings (George R. R. Martin) 7.5
Thoughts on the Song of Ice and Fire books? I'm always hearing how great they are, but their length puts me off reading them.

[Qrazy]

Thoughts on the Song of Ice and Fire books? I'm always hearing how great they are, but their length puts me off reading them.

They are not good. You won't like them. I'd stake my life on it.

The HBO series is fun though.

[Derek]

They are not good. You won't like them. I'd stake my life on it.

I agree with the last 2 sentences, but obviously not the first. However, I'm not the least bit surprised you'd spend hours upon hours reading something you dislike.

Martin's prose is often pedestrian, but personally, I'd never turn to genre fiction (and I don't too often) for great prose. Evenso, his writing actually gets better as the series progresses. What he does do well is story and world-building through the POVs of many different characters and he's more often than not, effective at inhabiting these various, wildly different people and conveying their perspective on things. As for his tendency to torture his characters, he pretty much does, but usually in interesting, rather than purely masochistic ways, forcing them to recreate their identity without people, traits or dreams that once defined them.

He also has a wonderfully sly way of allowing momentous events to occur, almost without your noticing them until after a few paragraphs of description. They are sudden and unexpected, but worked organically into the fabric of the story. What I most enjoy, particularly in the second half of book 2 and most of book 3, is how both the muddy history and potential future of this world unfold together, handled with a surprising degree of subtlety and ambiguity, yet still suggesting fully formed objective reality left just outside the reader's grasp.

The 4th book spends much of its time spinning its wheels, but it focused on two of my favorite characters so I still enjoyed it. I haven't heard great things about the 5th book - it seems like he didn't want to push the story too close to its conclusion, which would be fine if he didn't plan to finish this thing in 7 books. I don't see how that's a possibility without rushing it.

[Duncan]

1. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
2. Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
3. Underworld, Don DeLillo
4. Youth, J.M. Coetzee
5. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
6. The Rebel, Albert Camus
7. Pantagruel, Rabelais
8. Paradise Lost, John Milton
9. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
10. The First Man, Albert Camus

Really enjoyed:
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler
A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
Point Omega, Don DeLillo
Boyhood, J.M. Coetzee
The War of the End of the World, Mario Vargas Llosa
If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino
The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes
1984, George Orwell
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Fall, Albert Camus
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
Omensetter's Luck, William H. Gass
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre
selected poems of e.e. cummings, E.E. Cummings
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey

Some mixed feelings on:
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
Foe, JM Coetzee
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard
Nemesis, Philip Roth
Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O'Hara
Old Goriot, Honore de Balzac
The Night Before Christmas, Nikolai Gogol

Still alright:
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
The Ghost Sonata, August Strindberg
Love and Summer, William Trevor
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Cannibal, John Hawkes
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Disliked:
The Golden Bowl, Henry James (gave up)
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Humbling, Phillip Roth
Stories, Anton Chekhov
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

[Duncan]

Melville, boo on that Under the Volcano score. Thoughts anywhere?

[Qrazy]

I agree with the last 2 sentences, but obviously not the first. However, I'm not the least bit surprised you'd spend hours upon hours reading something you dislike.


I didn't say they're bad. I said they aren't good. I enjoy the narrative.

I actually find his world building to be fairly bad though compared to many fantasy writers. The story is engaging.

[D_Davis]

My final top 10, with the rest in order (grouped) of how I rated them on Goodreads. All-in-all, it was a great year for reading.


1. Lonesome Dove McMurtry, Larry
2. Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Erdelac, Edward M.
2. Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Erdelac, Edward M.
3. Who Fears the Devil Wellman, Manly Wade
4. Ice Trilogy Sorokin, Vladimir
5. The Circus of Dr. Lao Finney, Charles G.
6. The Comforters Spark, Muriel
7. The Gods of Pegana Dunsany, Lord
8. The Great Lover Cisco, Michael
9. Crazy Blatty, William Peter
10. Vanilla Ride Lansdale, Joe R.


5-star books

Dark Souls The Official Guide Press, Future
At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft, H.P.
Chasing the Dragon Kaufmann, Nicholas
Strangers on the Heights Wellman, Manly Wade
The Lost and the Lurking Wellman, Manly Wade
Elric of Melniboné (Elric, #1) Moorcock, Michael
Kingdom Come Ballard, J.G.
The Man Who Never Missed (Matador, #1) Perry, Steve
All You Need Is Kill Sakurazaka, Hiroshi
Kid Beowulf and the Blood-Bound Oath Fajardo, Alexis E
New Noir Shirley, John
Version 43 Palmer, Philip
The Exorcist Blatty, William Peter
PLACES WHERE I'VE DONE TIME Saroyan, William

4-star books

Death Mask and Eulogy, a Novelette McDermott, J.M.
Every Shallow Cut Piccirilli, Tom *
1Q84 Murakami, Haruki
11/22/63 King, Stephen
The Snobs (Pocket Penguin 70's #36) Spark, Muriel
The Ghosts of Manacle Finney, Charles G.
The Moon Pool Merritt, A.
The Right Hand of Doom Howard, Robert E.
The Fox Woman and Other Stories Merritt, A.
The Hounds of Tindalos Long, Frank Belknap
The Beyonders Wellman, Manly Wade
Hyenas Lansdale, Joe R.
Dread Island Lansdale, Joe R.
Never Knew Another (Dogsland Trilogy #1) McDermott, J.M.

3-star books

Queue Sorokin, Vladimir
Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty? McGrath, Alister E.
Worse Than Myself Golaski, Adam
Hanging Woman Creek L'Amour, Louis
The Year Of Our War (Fourlands, #1) Swainston, Steph
What's Become of Screwloose? and Other Inquiries Goulart, Ron
The Planet Buyer Smith, Cordwainer
Lilith: A Romance MacDonald, George
The Thief of Broken Toys Lebbon, Tim
The Solar Invasion Wellman, Manly Wade
Tinkers Harding, Paul
Ubik: The Screenplay Dick, Philip K.
All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky Lansdale, Joe R.
Towing Jehovah (Godhead, #1) Morrow, James K.
Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season Partridge, Norman
The Narrator Cisco, Michael
Dimiter Blatty, William Peter

2-star books

Kwaidan Hearn, Lafcadio
The Horror from the Hills Long, Frank Belknap
The Artificial Kid Sterling, Bruce
Mathematicians in Love Rucker, Rudy
Hello America Ballard, J.G.
Red Claw Palmer, Philip
Playing for Thrills Shuo, Wang
ZOO Otsuichi

1-star books/couldn't finish

Past the End of the Pavement Finney, Charles G.
Mardock Scramble Ubukata, Tow
Tales of Pirx the Pilot Lem, Stanisław
Armor Steakley, John

[Qrazy]

Tales of Pirx the Pilot made for a pretty shitty movie, not surprised the book isn't much better.

[D_Davis]

Tales of Pirx the Pilot made for a pretty shitty movie, not surprised the book isn't much better.

One of the dullest books I read all year - can't imagine watching it. Is it a Polish film?

[ledfloyd]

such a lazy reading year for me. lots of rereads too.

1. The Master and the Margarita
2. Dead Souls
3. Room
4. The Pale King
5. Geek Love
6. A Game of Thrones
7. Speak, Memory
8. Madame Bovary
9. The Brothers Karamazov
10. A Visit from the Goon Squad

literally all the fiction i read for the first time this year. none of them were abjectly awful, so there's that.

[Qrazy]

One of the dullest books I read all year - can't imagine watching it. Is it a Polish film?

Yes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080010/

I will say one thing though, it was made before Blade Runner so it has the originality factor going for it.

[D_Davis]

Yes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080010/

I will say one thing though, it was made before Blade Runner so it has the originality factor going for it.

I think the books (Pirx and Do Androids...?) both came out in 1968.

I was absolutely shocked to discover the the Pirx stories are among Lem's most popular, well-loved, and most read. I can't fathom why.

[Benny Profane]

A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter



Thoughts on this? I might finish it tonight.

[Melville]

They are not good. You won't like them. I'd stake my life on it.

Martin's prose is often pedestrian
History being revealed backwards and forwards sounds interesting, but yeah, I read the first page on Amazon, and it's safe to say these books aren't for me.


Melville, boo on that Under the Volcano score. Thoughts anywhere?
While the narrative—a man destroying himself with alcohol and despair after splitting with his unfaithful wife, even (and especially) after she comes back to him—is relevant to my interests, the style is irksome. It prefigures a common type of very writerly prose I really dislike in contemporary literature: a self-aware tone seeming to constantly strive for cleverness, laden with flowery similes and pithy comments or pat metaphors about the characters (or worse, people in general). Some of it works, but I can't abide it in general. Likewise, much of the characterization felt contrived in a self-aware way, particularly in the wife's thoughts (her soft-hued dreams of marital rejuvenation especially), which seemed largely shorthand for conveying a stereotypical feminine mindset, but also in the knowing tone of the stories of a young man's foiled, naive dreams of romanticized politics, romanticized musicianship, and romanticized hardships in the merchant marine. The protagonist was better, with his mix of self-possessed poise and ridiculousness, concern and self-absorption, grandiose spiritual and philosophical muddles that serve to help him escape from the immediate world and, of course, his radical self-destructiveness. His letter of abject brokenness that goes purposely unsent also nicely sets up his closed-off, miserable trajectory for the rest of the book and leaves a painful undertone to linger during later moments that are primarily humorous (even if pretty much all the humor involving him felt overworked and flat to me). His drunken outburst toward the end, in which he declares that his wife had no right to say it isn't too late for him to turn things around, is also great. Though the ending seems to undercut his path to self-destruction by throwing in some crooked cops to do the job.

Thoughts on End of the Affair and Wide Sargasso Sea?

[TGM]

The Game of Thrones series finally got me back into reading last year after several years of, well, not reading! So I didn't read too many books last year, pretty much just the first three GoT books and the first two books in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, as far as novels are concerned. But I can definitely see myself reading quite a few in the upcoming year. In any event, of the very few that I did read, here's how I'd rank them:

1. A Storm of Swords
2. Behemoth
-
3. A Game of Thrones
4. A Clash of Kings
5. Leviathan

[Duncan]

Though the ending seems to undercut his path to self-destruction by throwing in some crooked cops to do the job.

I read it as more of a suicidal gesture. He knew how his options would play out, and he chose the one where he'd end up dead.
Thoughts on End of the Affair and Wide Sargasso Sea?

I liked the first part of The End of the Affair - so bitter - but then it started getting all Catholic and I figured it was going the way of Brideshead Revisited, which it did and that's a shame. Where it really lost me was on the second last page when it seems he begins to believe in God because of a few coincidences. I couldn't believe how weak an argument it was. Loved how cruel he was to some of the secondary characters though, like when he tells the PI that Galahad discovered the holy grail, not Lancelot. Most true moment in the book for me was after he's come to realize her vow and reasoning, but decides that if she had really loved him like she used to then she would have broken off her fingernails trying to lift that door off of him.

Wide Sargasso Sea was like the coldest, most controlled fever dream ever. The whole thing felt like an academic exercise in post-colonial literary theory to me. Only parts I really liked were when the parrot dies, when her friend hits her with a rock as a child, and that dream at the end.

[Boner M]

Excluding film books:

1. Bolano - 2666
2. Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
3. Borges - Fictions
4. Bukowski - Women
5. Auster - Leviathan

...which looks pretty dismal, but for the fact that I read the last four over 2 weeks which is superhuman by my standards. First two are ones for the personal canon, enjoyed the other 3 to varying degrees. Hope this sudden burst of reading bodes well for 2012.

[Melville]

I read it as more of a suicidal gesture. He knew how his options would play out, and he chose the one where he'd end up dead.
Definitely he had given up on life and embraced a non-existence in the form of delirium, but the sequence of events with the crooked cop felt very contrived to me, like Lowry knew it had to be a bad end for him and so inserted a few plot points earlier in the story to enable that end.


I liked the first part of The End of the Affair - so bitter - but then it started getting all Catholic and I figured it was going the way of Brideshead Revisited, which it did and that's a shame. Where it really lost me was on the second last page when it seems he begins to believe in God because of a few coincidences. I couldn't believe how weak an argument it was.
I love the bitterness, but it getting all Catholic was what I found most interesting. While the coincidences weigh on him, he makes clear that he falls into religious belief in an irrational way beyond his control. The parallel it draws between falling into love and falling into belief made the latter very powerful and understandable to me. And I thought it did a much better job than Brideshead Revisited because it observed the nuances of the romantic relationship, and the parallel nuances of his developing religious feelings, very well; while in Brideshead the characters and their relationship were undeveloped, and the religious conversion happened suddenly at the very end. More here: http://match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=312689#post31 2689


Wide Sargasso Sea was like the coldest, most controlled fever dream ever. The whole thing felt like an academic exercise in post-colonial literary theory to me. Only parts I really liked were when the parrot dies, when her friend hits her with a rock as a child, and that dream at the end.
Huh. Totally different experience than mine. I remember it being a very feverish fever dream. I mostly responded to how it tied that mood to the tropical setting and used the atmosphere to present love (or at least a romantic situation) as a kind of master-slave dialectic in which the protagonist is completely overwhelmed and crushed by the force of Rochester's existence. That obviously works with the post-colonial stuff, but I'm less interested in that.

[Melville]

First two are ones for the personal canon, enjoyed the other 3 to varying degrees.
Thoughts on Fictions? It's definitely in my personal canon. Tlon, Uqbar, etc. = best short story ever.

[dreamdead]

Excluding film books:

1. Bolano - 2666
2. Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
3. Borges - Fictions
4. Bukowski - Women
5. Auster - Leviathan


Thoughts on the Auster novel? It's been a few years, but I remember thinking that it was among his better texts, on par with the New York Trilogy and The Book of Illusions... I really liked how it explored concepts of terrorism and state resistance.

[Boner M]

Thoughts on Fictions? It's definitely in my personal canon. Tlon, Uqbar, etc. = best short story ever.
I've enjoyed Borges by proxy in so many films/books/music that bears his influence, so it was great to go straight to the source. My complaint is that Tlon et al got my hopes up ridiculously high and few of the subsequent stories came close to matching it, except for The Lottery & The South (the latter captures post-malady melancholy eerily well). A few stories I can barely remember, and I skipped a few of the overtly intertextual ones. Overall, pretty damn good though. I read it as part of the 'Collected Fictions' - any other non-Fictions the stories that you can steer me toward?


Thoughts on the Auster novel? It's been a few years, but I remember thinking that it was among his better texts, on par with the New York Trilogy and The Book of Illusions... I really liked how it explored concepts of terrorism and state resistance.
The stilted dialogue took a while to get used to (can really only justify it as being of a piece with the somewhat deliberate rudimentariness of the presentation), and the coincidence that the Lillian/Sachs relationship hinges on was a bit hard-to-swallow, but thematically it's well-realised and the female characters were particularly vivid. New York Trilogy up next.

[ThePlashyBubbler]

I find it really difficult to rank books for some reason, but here was my final reading list in the order I read them. Waaaay short of my goal of 52, but this year I shall do it!


The Book of Illusions (Paul Auster)
VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Steve Tomasula)
A Clash of Kings (George R.R. Martin)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov)
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
Contact (Carl Sagan)
A Storm of Swords (George R.R. Martin)
Garbage (A.R. Ammons)
Amsterdam (Ian McEwan)
Drown (Junot Diaz)
Portnoy’s Complaint (Philip Roth)
The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
A Feast for Crows (George R.R. Martin)
Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
A Dance With Dragons (George R.R. Martin)
Antwerp (Roberto Bolano)
Underworld (Don Delillo)
The Life and Times of Michael K (J.M. Coetzee)
Junky (William Burroughs)
The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West)
Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion)
The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac)
Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
Hunger (Knut Hamsun)
Candide (Voltaire)
Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor)
Mr. Peanut (Adam Ross)
No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July)
A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh)
Three And Out (John U. Bacon)

[TGM]

^ You really thought A Clash of Kings was better than A Storm of Swords?

[Kurosawa Fan]

^ You really thought A Clash of Kings was better than A Storm of Swords?

He stated above the list that it's in the order he read them because he had a hard time ranking them.

[TGM]

He stated above the list that it's in the order he read them because he had a hard time ranking them.

Ah, whoops! Glanced over that part! :P

[ThePlashyBubbler]

Haha, yeah, what KF said. But if I were to rank the SOIAF books (something a bit more manageable), it'd probably be:

1. Storm of Swords
2. Game of Thrones
3. Dance With Dragons
4. Clash of Kings
5. Feast For Crows

Swords really is a stunning culmination of everything up to that point, some crazy runs of intense chapters.