Books you read in '08

[Melville]

There's no way I'm going to finish another book this year, so I say the time for this thread has arrived. Here's my list, with attendant ratings:

1. The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar - 8.5
2. Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles - 6.5
3. In a Budding Grove by Proust - 8
4. Buddhist Wisdom (Diamond & Heart Sutras w/commentaries by Edward Conze) - 9.5
5. Poetics by Aristotle - 6.5
6. The Dhammapada - 7.5
7. Buddhist Scriptures (edited by Conze) - 9
8. Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (edited by E. A. Burtt) - 9.5
9. The Awakening of Faith by Asvaghosa - 7.5
10. Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Nagarjuna w/commentary by Garfield - 9
11. Narcissus and Goldmund by Hesse - 4
12. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick - 6
13. The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Tutuola - 7.5
14. Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche - 8.5
15. Critique of Pure Reason by Kant - 10
16. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes - 7
17. Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu - 4
18. Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown - 7.5
19. Confessions of a Justified Sinner by Hogg - 9
20. Analects by Confucius - 5.5
21. Danton's Death by Buchner - 9
22. Woyzeck by Buchner - 7
23. The Gossamer Years (translated by Seidensticker) - 6
24. Confessions by St. Augustine - 7
25. Chimera by Barth - 6.5
26. The Goblin Market by Rossetti - 7
27. Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky - 6.5

Books I read a significant portion of but haven't finished:

Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Ideas by Husserl
The Book of Chuang Tzu

Book I had previously read a significant portion of, and which I read another significant portion of this year, but that I still haven't finished:

Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel

[Malickfan]

Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti by Stephen Graham Jones
Blood Meridian by McCarthy
Serpent Box by Vincent Carrella
Twilight by William Gay
Zeroville by Steve Erickson

[EvilShoe]

1. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
2. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
3. Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
4. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
5. The World According to Garp - John Irving
6. Factotum - Charles Bukowski
7. Planet of the Apes - Pierre Boulle
8. The Day of the Locust - Nathaniel West
9. Post Office: a Novel - Charles Bukowski
10. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
11. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
12. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Winston*]

1. I am Legend (Matheson)
2. Post Office (Bukowski)
3. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (H. Murakami)
5. A Game of Thrones (Martin)
6. The Stars My Destination (Bester)
7. A Clash of Kings (Martin)
8. A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)
9. Sharp Teeth (Barlow)
10. The Trial (Kafka)
11. Enduring Love (McEwan)
12. Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut)
13. Orlando (Woolf)
14. Half the Blood of Brooklyn (Huston
15. A Storm of Swords (Martin)
16. Cloud Atlas (Mitchell)
17. A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller, Jr.)
18. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon)
19. The Demolished Man (Bester)
20. Vernon God Little (Pierre)
21. After Dark (Murakami)
22. The Cosmic Puppets (Dick)
23. The Master and Margarita (Bulgagov)
24. Rabbit, Run (Updike)
25. Flow my Tears, The Policeman said (Dick)
26. Lamb, the Gospel according to Biff, Christs Childhood pal (Moore)
27. Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
28. American Gods (Gaiman)
29. Chronicles Vol 1(Bob Dylan)
30. Freakonomics
31. In the Miso Soup (R. Murakami)
32. Every Last Drop (Huston)
33. The Cement Garden (McEwan)
34. The Black Dahlia (Ellroy)

[EvilShoe]

Fuck you Winston*.
This isn't a contest.

[Melville]

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Thoughts? Best book ever or second best book ever?

[Winston*]

Fuck you Winston*.
This isn't a contest.

If it was KF would be beating me and I can't allow that. Also, D_Davis would probably be ruling us all.

[Melville]

If it was KF would be beating me and I can't allow that. Also, D_Davis would probably be ruling us all.

And if SpaceOddity or lovejuice (what ever happened to him?) post their lists, even Davis will look like an amateur.

[Winston*]

And if SpaceOddity or lovejuice (what ever happened to him?) post their lists, even Davis will look like an amateur.

And if Reado the novel reading dog signs up and posts his list, then God save us all.

[Melville]

And if Reado the novel reading dog signs up and posts his list, then God save us all.

Now you're just talking crazy.

[Benny Profane]

The Supreme:

1. Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
2. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
3. Rabbit at Rest - John Updike

The Great:

4. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
5. Ask the Dust - John Fante

The Very Good:

6. Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer - James Swanson
7. The Trial - Franz Kafka
8. Native Son - Richard Wright
9. In the Heart of the Sea - Nathaniel Philbrick
10. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
11. Little Green Men - Christopher Buckley
12. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

The Good:

13. On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
14. Over the Edge of the World - Laurence Bergreen
15. Disgrace - JM Coetzee
16. Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dicl
18. Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje
19. American Lightning - Howard Blum

The Just OK:

20. The Waves - Virginia Woolf
21. Ted Williams Biography - Leigh Montville
22. Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
23. A Happy Death - Albert Camus
24. Times Arrow - Martin Amis
25. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

The Bad:

26. The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
27. Torture Garden - Octave Mirbeau
28. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami


I think that's everything.

[EvilShoe]

I thought all Davis did was buy books? Hm.

As for Karamazov: it became an instant favorite. I had already read (and loved) Crime and Punishment, but Karamazov is in a league of its own. I did take a break however after the first 100 pages. Wasn't too fond of those (although they do work, in hindsight). Came back to the book after a month, and read the rest in an equal amount of time.

[Mysterious Dude]

A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) ***½
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) **½
The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) ***½
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) ***½
Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) ***½
Dead Souls (Gogol) ****
Slan (Vogt) **½
Blood Meridian (McCarthy) **
Dream of the Red Chamber (abridged) (Xueqin) ***
Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (Hogg) ****
Frankenstein (Shelley) ****
A Voyage to the Moon (Bergerac) ***
Jude the Obscure (Hardy) ***
Kokoro (Soseki) ***½
Kim (Kipling) ***
Tom Brown's Schooldays (Hughes) **½
A World Out of Time (Niven) **½

Interesting side note: A World Out of Time is the first novel I've ever read from the 1970's.

[ledfloyd]

i really need to keep track of these things. i think the best book i read was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

[Raiders]

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann [9.5]
Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks [8.5]
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury [8.0]
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter [8.0]
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann [7.5]
Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville [7.5]
The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan [7.0]
Pincher Martin, William Golding [7.0]
The Great American Novel, Philip Roth [6.0]
Across the River and Into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway [5.5]
Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard [4.0]

I also read a couple short story compilations. Notably David Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim which, as all Sedaris, was uneven but entertaining.

Without a doubt, the slimmest year in a long, long time.

[Melville]

As for Karamazov: it became an instant favorite. I had already read (and loved) Crime and Punishment, but Karamazov is in a league of its own. I did take a break however after the first 100 pages. Wasn't too fond of those (although they do work, in hindsight). Came back to the book after a month, and read the rest in an equal amount of time.

Yeah, I actually took a year-long break after the first 70 or so pages. The whole book is very oddly structured. It's like a bunch of different episodes that comment on one another. The first part doesn't really work that well until you see how the depiction of the monastery relates to the rest of the book.

[Ezee E]

The Road
Suttree
David Copperfield
Various books on travelling in Rome/Italy
Haunted
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Playing with the Enemy
Dark Harvest
The Zero
Watchmen
Rant Casey: An Oral Biography
Ebert on Scorsese
Blood Meridian
Shutter Island

Not bad for myself. No particular ratings or anything.

[Boner M]

Epic-failed at reading this year. I probably purchased more than I read.

Robert Bresson – Notes on Cinematography
Manny Farber – Negative Space
Jim Thompson – A Hell of a Woman
Albert Camus – The Outsider
Jonathan Rosenbaum & Adrian Martin – Movie Mutations
Kobo Abe – Beyond the Curve
Don DeLillo – White Noise
Kent Jones – Physical Evidence

[Melville]

I probably purchased more than I read.

I do that every year. Almost every wall in my apartment has a bookshelf against it.

[Stay Puft]

Epic-failed at reading this year.

Ditto. I didn't get much reading done, and with going back to school full time I tended to not finish most of what I started or I just read specific chunks of books and then had to put them aside. I took a couple drama classes at the beginning of the year, though, so I was also studying a few plays.

Books I read:
Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer (James Swanson)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
Identity Crisis (Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Bair)
On the Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Kant's Critical Philosophy (Gilles Deleuze)
The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 (Michel Foucault) [read this last year, too]
Being and Time (Martin Heidegger) [that occupied me for a couple months]
The Politics of Aesthetics (Jacques Ranciere)
Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (Jean-Luc Nancy)

Plays I studied:
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Othello (William Shakespeare)
King Lear (William Shakespeare)
The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)
The Revenger's Tragedy (Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton[?])
The White Devil (John Webster)
The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley)
Major Barbara (Bernard Shaw)
The Playboy of the Western World (J. M. Synge)
Riders to Sea (J. M. Synge)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee)

And I won't bother listing the stuff I only read parts of and put aside.

Slan (Vogt) **½

Ha! When I got to the part wherein the girl suddenly confesses love and throws herself at the hero and then goes to the kitchen and gets shot by the bad guy, I knew I was in for... well, an awesomely awful book.

[Melville]

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
Being and Time (Martin Heidegger)

Nice. Two of my favorites. Genealogy of Morals is good too.

Kant's Critical Philosophy (Gilles Deleuze)

How is this?

[thefourthwall]

The Bad:

26. The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

Uh-oh. Why? My book club is going to be reading this soon.

[Benny Profane]

Uh-oh. Why? My book club is going to be reading this soon.

I found it utterly preposterous. The ending was very anti-climactic and predictable. It felt like I was reading a movie script.

[Kurosawa Fan]

The Zero– Jess Walter

Bridge to Terabithia – Katherine Paterson

Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

A Death in the Family – James Agee

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America – Joe Posnanski

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer – James L. Swanson

The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fforde

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Puckoon – Spike Milligan

A Happy Death – Albert Camus

God Save the Fan – Will Leitch

Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

Beloved – Toni Morrison

The End of the Affair – Graham Greene

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – David Eggers

When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris

The Black Echo – Michael Connelly

The Devil in the White City – Eric Larson

The Film Club – David Gilmour

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

Rabbit, Run – John Updike

Charity Girl – Michael Lowenthal

The Quiet American – Graham Greene

The Time-Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

Take the Cannoli – Sarah Vowell

Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor

It – Stephen King

The Thirteen Clocks – James Thurber

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum

Daisy Miller – Henry James

Our Town – Thornton Wilder

Good-bye – Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Copy and pasted from Word. Red are those that I loved. I would rank them, but I'm far too lazy. I wanted to hit 40, but unless I read something really short in the next two days, I'll end at 39. Bummer.

[bac0n]

I read more this year than I usually do. Which speaks more to how bad the other years were than how good this year was...

* What to Drink with What You Eat (Dornenburg/Page)
* The Road (McCarthy)
* No Country For Old Men (McCarthy)
* At The Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft)
* Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons)
* Lots of Totally Awesome Green Lantern Comic Books (Johns, et al)
* Lots of Totally Awesome Avengers Comic Books (Bendis, et al)