Top 10 Books First Read During 2011

[endingcredits]

1. The Ghost Sonata, A. Strindberg [play] - 7
2. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, D. Grann - 6

[megladon8]

You've already read a book a day?

[Mysterious Dude]

Ghost Sonata is a play; probably didn't take that long to read. Good play, too.

I bet he started Lost City of Z before new year's day.

[Duncan]

1. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
2. Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
3. Underworld, Don DeLillo
4. Youth, J.M. Coetzee
5. The War of the End of the World, Mario Vargas Llosa
6. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
7. The Rebel, Albert Camus
8. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
9. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
10. Pantagruel, Rabelais

[

Show Spoiler

Others in order of preference, more or less:
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler
A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
The First Man, Albert Camus
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Point Omega, Don DeLillo
Boyhood, J.M. Coetzee
If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino
The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes
1984, George Orwell
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Fall, Albert Camus
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter
Omensetter's Luck, William H. Gass
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre
selected poems of e.e. cummings, E.E. Cummings
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
Foe, JM Coetzee
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard
Nemesis, Philip Roth
Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O'Hara
Old Goriot, Honore de Balzac
The Night Before Christmas, Nikolai Gogol
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
The Ghost Sonata, August Strindberg
Love and Summer, William Trevor
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Cannibal, John Hawkes
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Golden Bowl, Henry James (gave up)
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Humbling, Phillip Roth
Stories, Anton Chekhov
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

]

[lovejuice]

1. A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)

Is it good? I have it on my book shelf.

[Duncan]

Is it good? I have it on my book shelf.

There's good and bad. I thought the first half was amazing. It's hard not to be impressed by Naipaul's writing. He just exudes control. The prose isn't flashy, but it's precise, polished and exhaustively illuminating of a time and place. I'd actually be interested in your opinion on his politics, because as a guilt-tripping white, westerner, some of his ideas grind, or are at least contrary to PC liberalism. But it's totally refreshing to have some of these issues discussed in an unembarrassed way.

It lost me a bit in the second half. He structures it sort of from the ground up, so he begins with characters literally straight out of the bush, the town in shambles post-rebellion. But he needs a device to give his narrator access to the higher echelons, so Naipaul has him have an affair with a top official's wife. I didn't find anything about it very convincing, and I found parts of it borderline misogynist. ("Women are stupid. But if women weren't stupid the world wouldn't go round," said by a character, so not directly attributable to Naipaul's views. But it's just sort of accepted without comment. I don't know.) And I just don't understand the psychology of the affair at all.

That said, I'd definitely recommend it. There's a lot to be impressed by, and it's obvious that you're dealing with an intense, insightful intellect.

[endingcredits]

You've already read a book a day?

Lost City of Z was a rollover from 2010. This new book I'm working through, The Faculty Of Useless Knowledge by Dombrovsky, won't be complete for a while. Its Joycean in style but has more intricate chronological structure, a preoccupation with time, and the gulag.

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Metamorphosis by Kafka

[dreamdead]

1. Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
2. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

[Benny Profane]

1. Junky - William Burroughs
2. The Lost City of Z - David Grann

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
2. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[Melville]

1. The Foundations of Arithmetic, Frege - 8.5
2. Weathercraft, Jim Woodring [graphic novel] - 8.5
3. Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty - 8
4. The Petty Demon, Sologub - 8
5. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume - 7.5
6. The Devils, Dostoevsky - 7.5
7. Nostromo, Conrad - 7
8. Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway [short story] - 7
9. Quadraturin, Krzhizhanovsky [short story] - 7
10. Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre [essay] - 6.5
11. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson [short story] - 6.5
12. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Abridged), Locke - 6
13. A Rose for Emily, Faulkner [short story] - 6
14. Endgame, Beckett [play] - 6
15. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene - 6
16. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre - 5.5
17. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry - 5.5
18. Ethics, Spinoza - 5
19. Oblomov, Goncharov - 4.5
20. Walden, Thoreau - 4.5
21. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes - 4
22. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley - 3
23. A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett - 3
24. The Stars My Destination, Bester - 1
25. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling - 1

[megladon8]

1.) "The Plucker" by Brom - 3.5

[Duncan]

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling - 1

Good start.

[Melville]

Good start.

Yeah, every book I read for the rest of the year will benefit from not being Harry Potter. It was surprisingly awful. And in unexpected ways, too.

[endingcredits]

Yeah, every book I read for the rest of the year will benefit from not being Harry Potter. It was surprisingly awful. And in unexpected ways, too.

I expected to hate it and did.

[megladon8]

I was always under the impression that the "Harry Potter" books were actually supposed to be quite good.

I've heard and read many serious readers saying that Rowling is a pretty decent writer.

[Duncan]

I read it around the time they were first getting popular--maybe when the second book was released--and remember thinking it was alright, but not good enough to continue with the series. Would have been about 13 or 14 at the time.

[D_Davis]

I read the first couple, and they were OK. Had I been younger, I would've dug the hell out of them, that's a fact.

In terms of writing and craft, I'd rank them along side those Redwall books.

[endingcredits]

1. The Ghost Sonata, A. Strindberg [play] - 7
2. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, D. Grann - 6

Comics:
1. Berlin: City of Smoke, Book Two, J. Lutes - 7.5
2. Berlin: City of Stones, Book One, J. Lutes - 6

[Duncan]

In terms of writing and craft, I'd rank them along side those Redwall books.

Now those I was young enough to love. Must have read like 10 of them.

[D_Davis]

Now those I was young enough to love. Must have read like 10 of them.

I liked those a lot too when I was younger.

I was shocked to recently find out that the series has kept going, and going, AND GOING.

Good god, there are like 20 damn books now.

[megladon8]

When I was a kid the series' I loved were books like "The Hardy Boys" and stuff like that.

My dad passed all of his original printings of those down to my brother and I.

I never read "Redwall". When I got into fantasy around the age of 10-12, I was reading stuff like "Dragonlance" and "Forgotten Realms".

I also liked some Anne McCaffrey (sp?) stuff.

[Kurosawa Fan]

The Harry Potter story is fun to follow along, but the books aren't particularly well-written.

[Chac Mool]

1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
2. Under Heaven (Guy Gavriel Kay)