Top 10 Books First Read in 2014

[Benny Profane]

1. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
2. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[megladon8]

Need to get back into reading soon. I ended up dropping off at the end of last year and not hitting my goal of 30 books for the year.

I am about 1/2 way through "The Shining", then would like to follow it up right away with "Doctor Sleep".

I also have an interesting looking/sounded memoir of a porn star, called "Girlvert".

[ThePlashyBubbler]

1. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
2. The Wes Anderson Collection, Matt Zoller Seitz
3. Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, John U. Bacon

[Mara]

Eh I might actually do this for once. Can't hurt, right?

1. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
2. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
3. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
5. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
6. Vicious by V. E. Schwab
7. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (graphic novel)
8. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick
9. Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
10. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

The Rest:
Too boring to renumber, but they are in order.
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Leviathan by Scott Westfeld (also read the two sequels; would rank same)
Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreund
I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader
My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry
Three Shadows by Cyril Pendrosa (graphic novel)
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Cherry Money Baby by John M. Cusick
Shadows by Robin McKinley
***This is the line between good and bad
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins


DNF list:
Icons by Margaret Stohl: derivative; boring

[D_Davis]

Jesus christ you guys read fast. 4 books in a week?

At my fastest, I can sometimes read 2 books a week.

[Mara]

I think at least one of those I started before the new year. But I'm zipping through another book while trying to defrost my pipes, so...

[Mara]

Do you guys still include books you don't finish? I usually have a handful of those, and it gives an accurate feel for which books were really bad.

[D_Davis]

I've discovered that my optimum enjoyment in reading comes from reading one book a week. Any quicker, and I don't feel like I'm properly digesting and thinking about what I'm reading, and any longer it becomes a slog. There are, of course, exceptions to this.

[kuehnepips]

1. Magical Mystery - Sven Regener
2. Doctor Sleep - Stephen King

[kuehnepips]

Do you guys still include books you don't finish? I don't,

[dreamdead]

So far:

1. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
2. Alice Munro's Open Secrets: Stories
3. Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness: Stories
4. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
5. Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette
6. Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge
7. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

[Our Aurora]

1. Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
2. Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
3. Looking for Alaska - John Green


Powerful, concise (even at almost 600 pages), fair biography about an eccentric person full of contrasts. So much to admire and dislike about Jobs. His obsessive perfectionism, his cruelty, his spiritual enlightenment, his single-mindedness, his ability to bend reality to suit his needs. Just an incredible portrait and told in an elegant, simplistic style that Jobs would truly appreciate. Highly recommend.

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
4. Looking for Alaska - John Green


A much better mix of high concept ideas and linear plot than Inherent Vice. The internet and its role in modern society combined with the events surrounding 9/11 is a perfect place for Pynchon's trademark theme of paranoia. Ultimately I can draw a parallel between this Mason & Dixon, as well, which was a story about exploration and triangulating the unknown into fully developed realms. Set in 2001, the internet was still a fairly unknown entity, and Pynchon's DeepArcher (read: Departure) creation about the unexplored, encrypted parts of the deep web are beautifully realized. And their quick, inevitable commercialization signifies how much faster events happen than back in colonial times. Aside from some minor characters like Russian mobsters appearing in what are supposed to be important emotional moments that felt out of place, I don't really have much negative to say about it. Really fun, insightful, and at times haunting novel.

[dreamdead]

Yeah, the navigation of the web and its mysteries, as well as the study of how fringe organizations try to mobilize exposure of scandalous events, were all well explored by Pynchon. Some of the foreboding (noses sniffing out incoming fear) was a nice touch, and almost everything with Maxine's dealing with her ex-husband and children connect Pynchon's themes to basic struggles of re-connection and family after the disaster, in ways that comment upon that adoption of ideology, but still suggest what is frayed and hesitant in such reconciliation. Still not sure if I like how indifferently Maxine is to transgressive sexuality--treading a close line between rape and consenuality--all in the name of learning more about the mystery, but that's really my biggest complaint.

Really want to read Mason and Dixon after this--this was such a reminder of his talents, since I hadn't read his prose since 2004.

[Our Aurora]

1. Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
2. The Crazed - Ha Jin
3. Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
4. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
5. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
4. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
5. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
6. Looking for Alaska - John Green


John Fante is criminally underdiscussed. He's kind of a cross between Knut Hamsun and Bukowski. He writes very defiant, self-aware narration about misfit characters that can't escape their own fantasies. There is a tone of amusing desperation, confusion, and yearning. Just a great literary voice.

[ledfloyd]

Fiction
1. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
2. Night Film - Marisha Pessl
3. NW - Zadie Smith

Non-Fiction (Primarily Econ/Social Science books)
1. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
2. The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
3. The Worldly Philosophers - Robert Heilbronner
4. Think Like a Freak - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
5. Superfreakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
6. Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes - Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich
7. Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
8. Triumph of the City - Ed Glaeser

[Kurosawa Fan]

I need to keep up this year.

1. The Halloween Tree - Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Gone Girl - Flynn

[ThePlashyBubbler]

1. The Lost Scrapbook (Evan Dara)
2. Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (Javier Marias)
3. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
4. Lookout Cartridge (Joseph McElroy)
5. The Wes Anderson Collection (Matt Zoller Seitz)
6. Dublinesque (Enrique Vila-Matas)
7. Fourth and Long (John U. Bacon)

[D_Davis]

1. The Halloween Tree - Bradbury


I like this. Been thinking about re-reading Dandelion Wine this year, along with more Bradbury.

[dreamdead]

Finally to ten fiction books.

1. Amy Waldman's The Submission
2. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
3. Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories
4. Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories
5. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
6. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette
7. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
8. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
9. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
10. Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge
11. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

Nonfiction:
1. Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a Child I Read Books
2. David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
3. Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: An Introduction

[baby doll]

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)Here's where it stands at the beginning of April.

I enjoyed Arrow of God more than Things Fall Apart I think in part because I didn't know anything about the culture he's writing about so it took me a while to find my bearings. If the Munro stories are representative of her talent she's clearly a minor master, but there's something vaguely provincial about how all these stories are about white chicks living in British Colombia or Ontario, usually during the years immediately after World War II (that is, before the country started getting browner). I mean, come on girl, there's a whole world out there! Pnin is pretty minor alongside Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and of course Lolita, but it's still amusing.

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
4. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
5. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
6. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
7. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[D_Davis]

3. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry


Utterly amazing. One of my all-time favorites.

[Benny Profane]

Jacy Farrow is an evil bitch.
Agreed. Amazing book.

[D_Davis]

Jacy Farrow is an evil bitch.
Agreed. Amazing book.

Sam the Lion. Love that guy.

Some of the most petty and selfish characters I've encountered.

[Mysterious Dude]

1. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, John Kennedy Toole)
2. The Tin Drum (1959, Günter Grass)
3. Room (2010, Emma Donoghue)
4. Madame Bovary (1856, Gustave Flaubert)
5. The Big Sleep (1939, Raymond Chandler)
6. Ferdydurke (1937, Witold Gombrowicz)
7. Out Stealing Horses (2003, Per Petterson)
8. The Dead Father (1975, Donald Barthelme)

[Benny Profane]

Sam the Lion. Love that guy.

Some of the most petty and selfish characters I've encountered.


Bored people obsessed with sex. Very convincingly told.

[D_Davis]

I really want to get around to reading the follow ups, just to see how these characters progressed through their lives.

And I want to read the follow up to Terms of Endearment.

Basically, I just want to read everything McMurtry has done eventually.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I really need to get on the ball.

Fiction
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
Comics
The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)

[Melville]

1. Sisters by a River (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 9
2. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome, 1889) - 8.5
3. The Vet's Daughter (Barbara Comyns, 1959) - 8.5
4. Austerlitz (WG Sebald, 2001) - 7
5. Who was Changed and Who was Dead (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 6.5
6. Some Prefer Nettles (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1928) - 6.5

[quido8_5]

Bored people obsessed with sex. Very convincingly told.

Otherwise known as teenagers. And :cringe: widowers?

I've never read the book, but the movie kind of changed my life when I watched it back in the day. I may try this out after I finish the behemoth that is Infinite Jest.

So far (and I wish I had more time to read, but oh well):

Fiction
1. Howard's End by E.M. Foster
2. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Non-Fiction
1. Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow by David Kahneman
3. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Tatum
4. Community by Peter Block
5. NurtureShock by Po Bronson


I'm about a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest and 1/3 of the way through The Power Broker. It's looking like both are going to top out my lists and I have a hard time imagining a fiction or non-fiction book that will displace either of them this year. Apart from the fact that it might very well take me the entire summer to get through them.

[Our Aurora]

1. Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
2. The Crazed - Ha Jin
3. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
4. Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee

[baby doll]

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)Updated for the end of April.

[Mysterious Dude]

I've read ten books!

1. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, John Kennedy Toole)
2. The Tin Drum (1959, Günter Grass)
3. Room (2010, Emma Donoghue)
4. Ironweed (1983, William Kennedy)
5. Madame Bovary (1856, Gustave Flaubert)
6. The Big Sleep (1939, Raymond Chandler)
7. The Elementary Particles (1998, Michel Houellebecq)
8. Ferdydurke (1937, Witold Gombrowicz)
9. Out Stealing Horses (2003, Per Petterson)
10. The Dead Father (1975, Donald Barthelme)

I'm keeping a pretty good pace for the year, despite some longer books. I'm starting Catch-22 now.

[Benny Profane]

1. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, John Kennedy Toole)




Damn right.

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
4. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
5. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
6. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
7. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
8. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[dreamdead]

1. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
2. Amy Waldman’s The Submission
3. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
4. Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
5. Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories
6. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
7. Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories
8. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
9. Teju Cole’s Open City
10. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette

11. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
12. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
13. Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country: Stories
14. Yiyun Li's Kinder than Solitude
15. Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz: Stories
16. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
17. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
18. Toni Morrison’s Home
19. Nami Mun's Miles from Nowhere
20. Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge
21. Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor
22. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
Comics
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)

[Mara]

1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
2. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
3. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
4. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
6. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
7. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
8. Vicious by V. E. Schwab
9. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (graphic novel)
10. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick


The Rest:
Too boring to renumber, but they are in order.
Cress by Marissa Meyer
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
***This is the line between very good and good
Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Half Bad by Sally Green
Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Remarkable by Lizzie K. Foley
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Leviathan by Scott Westfeld (also read the two sequels; would rank same)
Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreund
The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
***This is the line between good and mediocre
I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader
My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry
Three Shadows by Cyril Pendrosa (graphic novel)
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Cherry Money Baby by John M. Cusick
Shadows by Robin McKinley
***This is the line between mediocre and bad
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

[dreamdead]

Mara, have you read Marie Lu's Legend, or, for that matter, any teen fiction by Asian American writers that you found especially good? I'm not the biggest fan of the more pedestrian and derivative works of teen dystopia, but I'd be interested in learning about fiction that approaches concepts of race and ethnicity within the wide umbrella if interesting things are being done with it.

Also, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was lovely. I think I liked Rowell's Eleanor and Park more, but lovely all the same.

[Mara]

Mara, have you read Marie Lu's Legend, or, for that matter, any teen fiction by Asian American writers that you found especially good? I'm not the biggest fan of the more pedestrian and derivative works of teen dystopia, but I'd be interested in learning about fiction that approaches concepts of race and ethnicity within the wide umbrella if interesting things are being done with it.

Legend was stinking awful. "Pedestrian and derivative" would describe it perfectly, but you could add "unbelievable and ridiculous." Please don't bother.

Off the top of my head, I can recommend Malinda Lo. The only book I've read by her is Adaptation, which was good fun, in a global-crisis, X-Files, government-conspiracy kind of way. She doesn't really dwell on race very much in the book (the heroine is white, one of her love interests is Asian) but Lo is homosexual and she delves deeply into sexual identity in the book. Her main character falls for people of both sexes during the course of the novel, and Lo doesn't shy away from examining that pretty minutely.

She might have other books that deal with race more centrally.


Also, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was lovely. I think I liked Rowell's Eleanor and Park more, but lovely all the same.

Agreed and agreed.

[Melville]

1. Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807) - 9.5
2. Sisters by a River (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 9
3. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome, 1889) - 8.5
4. The Vet's Daughter (Barbara Comyns, 1959) - 8.5
5. Austerlitz (WG Sebald, 2001) - 7
6. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) - 7
7. Who was Changed and Who was Dead (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 6.5
8. Some Prefer Nettles (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1928) - 6.5
9. Tintin in Tibet (Herge, 1959) [comic] - 3.5

I've been reading the Hegel since the autumn of 2004. Even with all the needlessly obtuse prose, it was worth it.

[baby doll]

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)Updated for the end of May. Total number of books read: Twelve.

[ThePlashyBubbler]

9. Tintin in Tibet (Herge, 1959) [comic] - 3.5


:evil:

[baby doll]

:evil:I'm not surprised, given that Melville considers Tibet to be part of China's historic territory.

[Melville]

:evil:
Too much text for my taste. Also goofiness.


I'm not surprised, given that Melville considers Tibet to be part of China's historic territory.
Haha.

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
3. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
4. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
5. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
6. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
7. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
8. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
9. Looking for Alaska - John Green


Gonna read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie next just because Gaddis has some bitter vendetta against it. It's one of the most famous books ever written. Want to see what the fuss is about.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992)
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Strange Things and Stranger Places (Ramsey Campbell, 1993)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt (tr. Manfred Lurker, 1972)
Comics
Batman: Arkham Asylum... (Morrison et al, 1989)
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)
The Dark Man (King & Chadbourne, 2013)

[ContinentalOp]

Not going to meet my 25 book goal. Kind of going Joe Lansdale crazy as well.
1. Hyenas by Joe Lansdale
2. Cold in July by Joe Lansdale
3. Firebreak by Richard Stark
4. Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale
5. The Drive-In by Joe Lansdale
6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Shogun - James Clavell
4. Gone Girl - Flynn

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
3. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
4. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
5. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
6. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
7. Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo
8. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
9. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
10. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
3. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
4. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
5. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
6. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
7. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
8. Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo
9. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
10. The Art of War - Sun Tzu


Looking for Alaska - John Green

[baby doll]

Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)At the half-way point, Jane Eyre is the book to beat. Total number of books read: Fourteen and a half counting Don Quixote as two books written ten years apart and Borges' Labyrinths as one half since some of the stories were already familiar to me.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992)
Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill, 2007)
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Strange Things and Stranger Places(Ramsey Campbell, 1993)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt (tr. Manfred Lurker, 1972)
Comics
Batman: Arkham Asylum... (Morrison et al, 1989)
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
Animal Man (Morrison et al, 1988)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Kid Eternity (Morrison et al, 1991)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)
The Dark Man (King & Chadbourne, 2013)

[dreamdead]

Update:

1. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
2. Amy Waldman’s The Submission
3. Marilynne Robinson’s Home
4. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
5. Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
6. Phil Klay’s Redeployment: Stories
7. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
8. Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories
9. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
10. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World
11. Teju Cole’s Open City
12. Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories
13. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
14. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette
15. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
16. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
17. Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country: Stories
18. John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown
19. Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box
20. John Dos Passos’s Adventures of a Young Man
21. Yiyun Li’s Kinder than Solitude
22. Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz: Stories
23. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
24. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
25. Toni Morrison’s Home
26. Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe, I Love You
27. Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere
28. John Dos Passos’s Number One
29. Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge: Stories
30. Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor
31. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man


Nonfiction (best to worst):
Kirk W. Johnson’s To Be a Friend is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis American Left Behind
Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a Child I Read Books
Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: An Introduction
David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[megladon8]

1.) Jack Glass (Adam Roberts, 2011)
2.) Girlvert (Oriana Small, 2011)
...

[TGM]

1. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
2. The Crane Wife - Patrick Ness
3. Paper Towns - John Green
4. The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
5. The Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck
6. Ascent - Jory Burks

Now reading: Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

[Melville]

1. Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807) - 9.5
2. Sisters by a River (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 9
3. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome, 1889) - 8.5
4. The Vet's Daughter (Barbara Comyns, 1959) - 8.5
5. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Raymond Carver, 1988) - 8.5
6. Austerlitz (WG Sebald, 2001) - 7
7. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) - 7
8. Who was Changed and Who was Dead (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 6.5
9. The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe, 1962) - 6.5
10. Hellboy in Hell, Vol. 1: The Descent (Mike Mignola, 2014) [comic] - 6.5
11. Some Prefer Nettles (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1928) - 6.5
12. Tintin in Tibet (Herge, 1959) [comic] - 3.5

The Carver collection was a mix, but some of the more minimalist, Lish-edited stories were among the best things I've ever read. Stories like `Why Don’t You Dance?’ and `Gazebo’ were beautiful, hard-edged yet sentimental depictions of longing, regret, self-destruction, and the stifling collapse of relationships.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004)
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992)
Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill, 2007)
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Strange Things and Stranger Places(Ramsey Campbell, 1993)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt (tr. Manfred Lurker, 1972)
Comics
Batman: Arkham Asylum... (Morrison et al, 1989)
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
We3 (Morrison et al, 2004)
Animal Man (Morrison et al, 1988)
Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 (Ellis et al, 1997)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Kid Eternity (Morrison et al, 1991)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)
The Dark Man (King & Chadbourne, 2013)

[Mara]

1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
2. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
3. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
5. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
7. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
8. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater & Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
9. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
10. Vicious by V. E. Schwab

The Rest:
Too boring to renumber, but they are in order.
Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (graphic novel)
Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick
Cress by Marissa Meyer
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
***This is the line between very good and good
Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Vessel by Sarah Beth Durst
Small Damages by Beth Kephart
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
The Quick by Lauren Owen
Half Bad by Sally Green
Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Guy in Real Life by Steve Brezenoff
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys
The Unbound by Victoria Schwab
Exquisite Captive by Heather Demetrios
War of the Seasons: The Human by Janine K. Spendlove
Remarkable by Lizzie K. Foley
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Perfect Ruin by Lauren Destefano
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Leviathan by Scott Westfeld (also read the two sequels; would rank same)
Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreud
Siege and Storm & Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
The Falconer by Elizabeth May
The Ruining by Anna Collomore
The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
***This is the line between good and mediocre
White Cat by Holly Black
I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
Star Cursed by Jessica Spotswood
Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader
My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry
Three Shadows by Cyril Pendrosa (graphic novel)
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Cherry Money Baby by John M. Cusick
Shadows by Robin McKinley
***This is the line between mediocre and bad
A Wounded Name by Dot Hutchinson
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

[D_Davis]

1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente


Have you read anything else by Valente?

She's pretty much the reigning queen of Weird Fiction. I HIGHLY, HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams. While the original is OOP and very expensive, it has been collected in an incredible anthology (which I plan to read all of, soon), called Myths of Origin.

Yume No Hon is up there with the Last Dragon as one of the single greatest works of fantastic fiction I know of. Just a tremendous example of expertly written, poetic, surreal, and alluring story telling.

I am eternally grateful for discovering her via Jeff Vandermeer's blog and writing.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Shogun - James Clavell
4. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
5. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby

[megladon8]

1.) Jack Glass (Adam Roberts, 2011)
2.) Girlvert (Oriana Small, 2011)
3.) Long Lost Dog Of It (Michael Kazepis, 2014)
...

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)Updated for the end of July-beginning of August. Total number of books read: seventeen and a half.

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
3. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
4. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
5. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
6. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
7. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
8. Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo
9. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
10. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight McDonald



The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Looking for Alaska - John Green

Dwight McDonald was a literary and culture critic who wrote mostly scathing, negative essays about the death of high culture as a result of capitalism and the rise of the middle class. This is a very good collection, especially the title piece. Obnoxious culture snobs will really like this one :)

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4. Shogun - James Clavell
5. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
6. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby

[dreamdead]

10. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight McDonald

Dwight McDonald was a literary and culture critic who wrote mostly scathing, negative essays about the death of high culture as a result of capitalism and the rise of the middle class. This is a very good collection, especially the title piece. Obnoxious culture snobs will really like this one :)

Thanks for commenting on this. I'd never heard of McDonald before but really enjoyed how he approached his thesis; it aligns with other literary commentary that's gained press in the past decade or so (Franzen's "Why Bother?" and Ruth Graham's recent "Against YA (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_em barrassed_to_read_children_s_b ooks.html)"), and his assessment of how otherwise average literature of his day succumbs, via bad writing, to overbearing cliche and lack of nuance was fascinating. I skim-read his James Agee and Hemingway articles, but I'm not otherwise interested in his topics. Would have loved to see him study other Modernist and Realist writers...

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Story story collections:
The Death of Ivan Illych and Other Stories (Leo Tolstoy, 1859-95)
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)Updated for the end of August. Total number of books read: twenty and a half.

[quido8_5]

Updated for the end of August. Total number of books read: twenty and a half.

Nice. So glad to see Death of Ivan Illyich on there. For a time it was my favorite Tolstoy, which is saying a whole, whole lot. Probably need to revisit it. What did you think?

On a related note, what other stories did you read? Happily Ever After I thought was brilliant, a bitterly realistic depiction of love.

[baby doll]

Nice. So glad to see Death of Ivan Illyich on there. For a time it was my favorite Tolstoy, which is saying a whole, whole lot. Probably need to revisit it. What did you think?

On a related note, what other stories did you read? Happily Ever After I thought was brilliant, a bitterly realistic depiction of love.The other stories were "Family Happiness," "The Kreutzer Sonata," and "Master and Man." I thought the first section of "Family Happiness" dragged a bit, though it got more interesting once the troubles started, and I struggled to get interested in "The Kreutzer Sontata" and "Master and Man" to little avail. In the former, the story is merely an illustration of the narrator's eccentric views on human sexuality (which I only subsequently learned that Tolstoy shared), and the latter only became compelling for me once the characters got trapped in the snow. I found "The Death of Ivan Illych" more interesting and the character's last-minute redemption is more convincing than in "Master and Man," but on the whole, it would appear that becoming a crazy religious fanatic had a largely negative effect on Tolstoy's art.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4. Shogun - James Clavell
5. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
6. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
7. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby

[Melville]

1. Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807) - 9.5
2. Sisters by a River (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 9
3. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome, 1889) - 8.5
4. The Vet's Daughter (Barbara Comyns, 1959) - 8.5
5. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Raymond Carver, 1988) - 8.5
6. Zeno's Conscience (Italo Svevo, 1923) - 8
7. Sixty Stories (Barthelme, 1981) - 8
8. Austerlitz (WG Sebald, 2001) - 7
9. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) - 7
10. Who was Changed and Who was Dead (Barbara Comyns, 1954) - 6.5
11. The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe, 1962) - 6.5
12. Hellboy in Hell, Vol. 1: The Descent (Mike Mignola, 2014) [comic] - 6.5
13. Some Prefer Nettles (Junichiro Tanizaki, 1928) - 6.5
14. Tintin in Tibet (Herge, 1959) [comic] - 3.5

Barthelme's "Balloon" is one of the greats. A brilliant little story of a world transformed.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Richard Matheson, 1956)
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992)
Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill, 2007)
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Strange Things and Stranger Places (Ramsey Campbell, 1993)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt (tr. Manfred Lurker, 1972)
Comics
Batman: Arkham Asylum... (Morrison et al, 1989)
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Saga of the Swamp Thing (Alan Moore et al, 1984)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
We3 (Morrison et al, 2004)
Animal Man (Morrison et al, 1988)
Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 (Ellis et al, 1997)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Kid Eternity (Morrison et al, 1991)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)
The Dark Man (King & Chadbourne, 2013)

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
3. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
4. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
5. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
6. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
7. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
8. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
9. Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo
10. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante





Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight McDonald
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Looking for Alaska - John Green

[ContinentalOp]

1. Hyenas by Joe Lansdale
2. Cold in July by Joe Lansdale
*3. The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale
4. Firebreak by Richard Stark
*5. The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith
6. Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale
7. The Drive-In by Joe Lansdale
*8. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by PD James
9. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

[Mysterious Dude]

1. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, John Kennedy Toole)
2. The Tin Drum (1959, Günter Grass)
3. The Painted Bird (1965, Jerzy Kosinski)
4. A Tale of Two Cities (1859, Charles Dickens)
5. Room (2010, Emma Donoghue)
6. A School for Fools (1976, Sasha Sokolov)
7. Catch-22 (1961, Joseph Heller)
8. The Power and the Glory (1940, Graham Greene)
9. Wise Blood (1952, Flannery O'Connor)
10. Pale Fire (1962, Vladimir Nabokov)

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Strait Is the Gate (André Gide, 1909)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)Updated for the end of September/beginning of October. Total number of books read: Twenty-four, counting The Complete Cosmicomics as two and a half: the original Cosmicomics (1965, twelve stories) and Time and the Hunter (1967, eleven stories), plus eight more from World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories (1968), two from Cosmicomics Old and New (1984), and an alternate version of one of the '68 stories.

I was tempted to include just the '65 stories on my list as most (but not all) of those in Time and the Hunter aren't really stories so much as descriptions of static situations that bring the book to a dead halt, but there are also some pretty delightful ones in there as well (such as "The Origin of Birds"), and "Solar Storm" from World Memory... may be my favorite of all the Cosmicomic stories. (It's definitely in the top five.)

Robert McKee's Story is compulsively readable and there's a good bit of practical advise in there once you get past all his broad generalizations. At one point he claims that Hollywood movies dominate the world market because there haven't been any interesting European films since the early '80s when Bergman retired, but while it's entirely possible that he likes La Promesse less than I do, the fact that he mentions it at all in a book written in 1998, even in passing, suggests that he sees too many non-American movies to believe such nonsense.

A few other points on Story: I simply can't get on board with his claim that symbolism only works when the viewer doesn't notice it, which strikes me as vaguely mystical. (Does his awareness the symbolism in Les Diaboliques and The Terminator ruin those movies for him, and how precisely are those movies different from Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Piano, which he chides for their overbearing symbolism?) Also, the assumption that European funding agencies are pretentious and that real filmmakers work in the commercial mainstream is an ideological bias that McKee never examines. And finally, for someone who literally declares war on clichés, he sure loves the term "café criticism," which appears no fewer than three times in the book.

Inherent Vice is easily the weakest of the four Thomas Pynchon novels I've read (the others are V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, and I have Against the Day and The Bleeding Edge on my shelf). As a Pynchon novel, it's never as wild and weird as the best sections of V. and Gravity's Rainbow, and as a straightforward detective story, I can't say that I was ever very curious about what happened to the missing developer and ex-girlfriend or who shot the former's bodyguard, and there are way too many characters for me to keep track of them all.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4. Bird Box - Josh Malerman
5. Shogun - James Clavell
6. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
7. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
8. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby

[Benny Profane]

1. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
2. Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
3. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
4. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
5. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
6. Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
7. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
8. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
9. Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo
10. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante





Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight McDonald
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Looking for Alaska - John Green

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)Updated for the end of October. Total number of books read: twenty-seven.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4. Bird Box - Josh Malerman
5. Shogun - James Clavell
6. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
7. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
8. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby
9. Pet Sematary - Stephen King

[dreamdead]

1. Octavia Butler’s Kindred
2. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
3. Amy Waldman’s The Submission
4. John Okada’s No-No Boy
5. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
6. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
7. Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
8. Phil Klay’s Redeployment: Stories
9. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
10. Stuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern: Stories
11. Marilynne Robinson’s Home
12. Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories
13. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
14. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World
15. Teju Cole’s Open City
16. Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories
17. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
18. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette
19. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
20. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
21. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon
22. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
23. Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
24. Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country: Stories
25. John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown
26. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation
27. Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box
28. John Dos Passos’s The Grand Design
29. John Dos Passos’s Adventures of a Young Man
30. Yiyun Li’s Kinder than Solitude
31. Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz: Stories
32. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
33. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
34. Toni Morrison’s Home
35. Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe, I Love You
36. Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere
37. John Dos Passos’s Number One
38. Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge: Stories
39. Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor
40. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

Nonfiction
1. Kirk W. Johnson’s To Be a Friend is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis American Left Behind
2. Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a Child I Read Books
3. Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: An Introduction
4. David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4. Bird Box - Josh Malerman
5. Shogun - James Clavell
6. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
7. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
8. Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby
9. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls - David Sedaris
10. Pet Sematary - Stephen King

I am absolutely embarrassed that it took me this long to get to 10 books this year.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Fiction
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Richard Matheson, 1956)
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (HG Wells, 1896)
Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill, 2007)
Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson, 2011)
Strange Things and Stranger Places (Ramsey Campbell, 1993)
Non-Fiction
Zombie Makers (Rebecca Johnson, 2013)
The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt (tr. Manfred Lurker, 1972)
Comics
Batman: Arkham Asylum... (Morrison et al, 1989)
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Frank Miller, 1992)
Saga of the Swamp Thing (Alan Moore et al, 1984)
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Frank Miller, 1996)
We3 (Morrison et al, 2004)
Animal Man (Morrison et al, 1988)
Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 (Ellis et al, 1997)
Batman: Mad Love and others (Dini et al, 1994)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Frank Miller, 1995)
Batman: The Man Who Laughs (Brubaker et al, 2005)
Kid Eternity (Morrison et al, 1991)
Hellboy: Strange Places (Mike Mignola, 2002)
The Death of Superman (Jurgens et al, 1992)
Sin City: Family Values (Frank Miller, 1997)
The Dark Man (King & Chadbourne, 2013)

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
Miami Blues (Charles Willeford, 1984)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)End of November. Total number of books read: Thirty-two.

[ContinentalOp]

1. Hyenas by Joe Lansdale
2. Cold in July by Joe Lansdale
3. The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale
4. Firebreak by Richard Stark
5. The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
6. The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith
7. Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale
8. The Drive-In by Joe Lansdale
9. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by PD James
10. Shoedog by George Pelecanos
11. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
12. The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow

[Mara]

Hmm. Finally did a count and I'm at sixty books for the year. That's pretty good. Looking over my list, though, I think I will rearrange the numbering a bit before finalizing for the year. Some books have not sat as well... or have sat better... than expected. I think I'll do a postmortem roundup some time in January with a little more insight into why things got ranked where.

[baby doll]

Novels:
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)
Story story collections:
Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)
Non-fiction:
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)Updated for the end of the year, since I'm not likely to read anything over the next two weeks. Total number of books read: thirty-three.

[Mara]

1. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
2. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
3. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
5. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
7. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater & Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
8. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
9. Vicious by V. E. Schwab
10. Landline by Rainbow Rowell

The Rest:
Too boring to renumber, but they are in order.
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (graphic novel)
Cress by Marissa Meyer
Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
***This is the line between very good and good
Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Vessel by Sarah Beth Durst
Small Damages by Beth Kephart
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick
The Quick by Lauren Owen
Half Bad by Sally Green
Guy in Real Life by Steve Brezenoff
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys
The Unbound by Victoria Schwab
My True Love Gave to Me, Stephanie Perkins, ed.
Exquisite Captive by Heather Demetrios
War of the Seasons: The Human by Janine K. Spendlove
Remarkable by Lizzie K. Foley
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Perfect Ruin by Lauren Destefano
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Leviathan by Scott Westfeld (also read the two sequels; would rank same)
Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreud
Siege and Storm & Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
The Falconer by Elizabeth May
The Ruining by Anna Collomore
The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
***This is the line between good and mediocre
White Cat by Holly Black
I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
Star Cursed by Jessica Spotswood
Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader
My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry
Three Shadows by Cyril Pendrosa (graphic novel)
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Cherry Money Baby by John M. Cusick
Shadows by Robin McKinley
***This is the line between mediocre and bad
A Wounded Name by Dot Hutchinson
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

I have revised my list based on where the books "settled"-- sliding up or down depending on how I feel weeks (or months) after finishing it. A breakdown of the numbers:

Total books read this year: 64
Very Good: 26%
Good: 51%
Mediocre: 15%
Bad: 8%

That makes sense, as I am less likely to finish a book that ranks as mediocre or bad.

Young Adult Fiction: 67%
Adult Fiction: 24%
Middle-Grade Fiction: 6%
Non-Fiction: 3%

I guess I didn't count anything I read below middle-grade fiction, although I totally read some killer picture books this year with my niece and nephew.

This breakdown also makes sense, as I consider keeping up with young adult fiction part of my job as a writer. Plus I really enjoy some of what is being down in young adult fiction right now, which is being much riskier and attracting more unusual viewpoints than traditional adult publishing currently is.

Books I Didn't Remember Reading Without Thinking About It For Awhile: 4

Book that slid furthest down the scale weeks after having read it: Landline by Rainbow Rowell. I still think it is a good book, but I think I was giving her points for how much I like her, and less how much I liked the book.

Book that jumped up the list at the end-of-the-year review: Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith. This weird, wonderful book was pretty upsetting to me right after I finished it and I think it affected my placement. It is a humorous young adult novel about a sexually confused and frustrated teenage boy who accidentally ends the world by letting loose an army of murderous, six-foot tall insects. It's very funny. There are graphic scenes of humans being devoured bite by bite. It's... very funny. I'm not averse to dark humor, but this book was pitch black. In retrospect, I kind of loved it.

Most disappointing book I read this year: The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani. I heard such good things about this middle grade book, and the premise sounded so delightful, that I asked for a physical copy for Christmas last year without reading it first. (I have very much moved away from owning books these days. I'm a library gal.) And it was a freaking mess. Narratively it made no sense, and it was sloppy on characterization, motivation, and drive. I gave it away two days after finishing it.

Worst book I read this year: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins.

Why did I read this book? Well, I know why. Stephanie Perkins is kind of a big deal in young adult fiction right now, and this is the first book in a series that is passionately loved by some people I respect (critics, editors, other writers, etc.) The cover and title looked like utter nonsense, so I didn't have huge expectations going in, but this book blew me away. BLEW ME AWAY WITH BADNESS.

Why did I finish this book? Well, I actually got it on CD, when I was still car-commuting pretty far with my last job. I was also living with two-roommates-ago, my very dear friend. Anyway, I was hate-reading it (or hate-listening-to-it?) and was so frustrated every day that I would come in and rant to my roommate about how absolutely horrible it was. My roommate thought this was funny and pretty much egged me into telling her the book piece by piece as I went through it. I hated it so passionately that it became its own form of entertainment.

(Side note: completely coincidentally this friend texted me while I was typing this out. I asked if she remembered my response to this book and she wrote "HAHAHAHAHAHA.")

Why did I hate it? I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. I know there are a lot of people in the world (and on MC) that sneer at young adult literature, and I would passionately argue that is wrong for plenty of reasons. Well, if you asked those sneering people what they dislike about young adult literature, I assure you, this is the book that they would describe.

It is completely moronic. It is a book about young girls that somehow seems to really hate young girls. It has some fantasy-level premise (a girl who is somehow really rich and not rich at all is sent off to boarding school in Paris against her will; she bitches about it for ages) and is a love story between the most irritating, selfish, whiny, and least self-aware couple of all time. The hero (named Etienne St. Clair... I repeat, Etienne St. Clair) is a total asshole who refuses to break up with his long-term girlfriend while supposedly falling in love with our heroine, including active seduction techniques like... I don't know, sleeping in her bed for weeks at a time, while just agonizing over how impossible this situation is. To clarify: the hero's entire plot conflict could be resolved by breaking up with his high-school girlfriend. A thirty-second conversation could resolve this plot. Meanwhile, the heroine is in agony because she doesn't know if he liiiiiiikes her or not. All the bed-sleeping and endless conversations and romantic dating were so confuuuuuuuusing to her.

There is also a strong subplot of girls being total jerks to their female friends. As we all know, women are only friends with other women to backstab them and steal their menfolk, right? Right? I HATE YOU, BOOK.

If you finished that rant you get 100 internet dollars.

In conclusion, you should read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making because it is good.

[Mara]

As a bonus, here are actual reviews from Goodreads of Anna and the French Kiss, AKA The Worst Book Ever.


372 pages of reading bliss and pure perfection :)


St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. St. Clair. ST. CLAIR!!!!

Can’t I just fill this review with his name instead of explaining how much I effing LOVED this book and trying to describe in vivid detail how beautiful and amazing and gorgeous and sexy and adorable and cute and sweet and perfect and totally smoking HAWT St. Clair is?

Asdfghjkl <--- this is me being speechless. I just…I loved, loved, LOVED this book. I’m positively utterly, totally, absolutely completely, undeniably IN LOVE with this book. Just thinking about it makes me giddy. Seriously. It makes me wonder “why don’t my parents send me to France?! I want to find my own Etienne, dammit!” Sigh. Just thinking his name makes me swoon.

This review goes on for about 16 more paragraphs.


When I was four, I fell off a tree. I hit the ground face first. What I didn't know was that there was a very small, sharp root sticking out of the ground at the base of the tree. It went through my cheek. I went to the ER but had to wait until 2am because it was a busy night. I sat there for hours in that ER with a hole in my cheek. When the doctor finally saw me he thought that since it was a busy night and there were so many people in the ER that he would just sew up my cheek without having to wait for an anesthetic. And he did. He sewed my cheek back together with no pain relief. I have never experienced pain like that again in my life. Until now. Anna and the French Kiss was more painful than that night in hospital. It is a lifeless, desolate, lump of a novel. Its only purpose in this world is as a gauge by which we measure bad novels.


There were many things I wanted to do to Anna Oliphant throughout this book. Some of them involve a bottle of choloroform, a shovel, and an unmarked grave. Mostly, I just want to bring Anna in front of the US Congress as an example of how the US educational system has grievously failed our students. To be frank, Anna Oliphant is a motherfucking idiot.


How to describe Anna and the French Kiss?
Anna and the French Kiss is flawless.
Its pages are insured for $10,000 dollars.
It does car commercials...In France.
Its favorite director is Sofia Coppola.
One time, Anna and the French Kiss met John Green, and he told it that it was pretty.
One time, it punched worldsuck in the face...It was awesome.

In a word, it is... divisive.

[D_Davis]

The two best books I read this year:

1. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruko Murakami - a sad and surreal look at life during the 30-somethings. The main character suffers from a lack of identity and a loss of friendship, and experiences some bizarre, weird, mundane, and emotional things while trying to figure his life out. Very good. But if you don't like Murakami, stay away. It's so Murakamiesque it hurts.

2. Revival, by Stephen King - a Lovecraftian tale with a heart, and one of the bleakest endings I've ever read.

[Mysterious Dude]

Somewhat disappointing year, the last three months especially. I was hoping to read more books. The top 10 is solid, though it hasn't changed since I last posted it in September.

1. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, John Kennedy Toole)
2. The Tin Drum (1959, Günter Grass)
3. The Painted Bird (1965, Jerzy Kosinski)
4. A Tale of Two Cities (1859, Charles Dickens)
5. Room (2010, Emma Donoghue)
6. A School for Fools (1976, Sasha Sokolov)
7. Catch-22 (1961, Joseph Heller)
8. The Power and the Glory (1940, Graham Greene)
9. Wise Blood (1952, Flannery O'Connor)
10. Pale Fire (1962, Vladimir Nabokov)

11. Listen to the Silence (1969, David W. Elliott)
12. Ironweed (1983, William Kennedy)
13. The 42nd Parallel (1930, John Dos Passos)
14. Madame Bovary (1856, Gustave Flaubert)
15. The Big Sleep (1939, Raymond Chandler)
16. The Counterfeiters (1925, André Gide)
17. FerdyDurke (1937, Witold Gombrowicz)
18. Out Stealing Horses (2003, Per Petterson)
19. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, Rainer Maria Rilke)
20. Invisible Cities (1972, Italo Calvino)
21. The Elementary Particles (1998, Michel Houellebecq)
22. The Dead Father (1975, Donald Barthelme)