Top 10 Books First Read During 2010

[Melville]

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

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

]

May as well make a list of comics too.

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

]

[ledfloyd]

but such is the fate of the lazy man.

you read twice as many books as i did this year. :P

[Melville]

you read twice as many books as i did this year. :P

My list looks longer than it is; it's bloated by short books. It's also bloated by four months of unemployment and another eight of not working very hard.

[Raiders]

I basically read good-to-great books this year. Only the last few in the spoiler tags were disappointing.

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

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

]

[lovejuice]

Top ten books. (Fiction and Non-fiction)

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

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

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Fiction

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

Non-fiction

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

Art Book

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

]

[endingcredits]

1. Mysteries, K. Hamsun - 10
2. Hunger, K. Hamsun - 10
3. The Dance of Death, A. Strindberg - 10
4. Pan, K. Hamsun - 10
5. The Father, A. Strindberg - 10
6. Gimpel the Fool, I.B Singer - 10
7. Miss Julie, A. Strindberg - 9.5
8. Victoria, K. Hamsun - 9.5
9. A Dream Play, A. Strindberg - 9
10. The Castle, F. Kafka - 9
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11. Shadows on the Hudson, I.B. Singer - 9
12. Growth of the Soil, K. Hamsun - 8.5
13. Harmonium, W. Stevens - 8
14. Sculpting in Time, A. Tarkovsky - 7
15. Lie Down in Darkness, W. Styron - 6
16. The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick - 6
17. VALIS, P.K Dick - 4
18. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams - 4
19. Legs, W. Kennedy - 3


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

]

[EvilShoe]

1. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
3. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
4. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
6. The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
7. Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
8. The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
9. Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
10. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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11. Perfume - Patrick Süskind
12. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
13. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
15. The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
16. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
17. The Defense - Vladimir Nabokov
18. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
19. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
20. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
21. The Elementary Particles - Michel Houellebecq
22. Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg
23. Glamorama - Bret Easton Ellis
24. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
25. Atonement - Ian McEwan
26. Chess Story - Stefan Zweig
27. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
28. No Exit and Three Other Plays - Jean-Paul Sartre
29. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
30. Replay - Ken Grimwood
31. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
32. The Master and Margherita - Mikhail Bulgakov
33. By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolano
34. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
35. Once There Was a War - John Steinbeck
36. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
37. The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis
38. Roger's Version - John Updike
39. The Neon Bible - John Kennedy Toole
40. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

]

[Mysterious Dude]

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

[Duncan]

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

[

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

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

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

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

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

]

[D_Davis]

My list looks longer than it is; it's bloated by short books.

Short books rule, long books drool.

[D_Davis]

Didn't read a ton this year....kind of just grazed on a number of things, and mainly read short stories from here and there.

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

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

[Melville]

Short books rule, long books drool.

Yeah, though most of my favorite books are long, I'm increasingly partial to short ones. I often find that everything except narrative points is already accomplished well before a long book ends.

[Kurosawa Fan]

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


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

]

[megladon8]

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


[

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

]

[Kurosawa Fan]

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

[

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

]


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

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

[megladon8]

I'm glad you enjoyed "Coraline", KF.

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

Have you seen the movie?

[Kurosawa Fan]

I'm glad you enjoyed "Coraline", KF.

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

Have you seen the movie?

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

[Hugh_Grant]

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

Woo hoo! Enjoy.

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

[megladon8]

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

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

[dreamdead]

Finished up book 20 for this year just in time.

Updated:

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

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

]

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

[Dead & Messed Up]

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

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

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

[Derek]

One last addition that I finished in December:

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

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

]

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

Cool. Any thoughts?

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

[Benny Profane]

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



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

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

[Benny Profane]

My final list:


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

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


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

[Kurosawa Fan]

I really can't wait to read more Sam Lipsyte. He's like Bukowski but with more florid stylings.

Yes please.