Books you read this year

[Melville]

Following Thirdy's suggestion in another thread, here are all the books I finished this year, with ratings out of 10:

1. Mysteries (Knut Hamsun) - 9
2. Being & Time (Heidegger) - 10
3. The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus) - 7.5
4. Story of the Eye (Bataille) - 8
5. Aurelia (Nerval) - 7
6. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (Foucault) - 7.5
7. Dead Souls (Gogol) - 8 for the first half, 3 for the second half
8. The Aeneid (Virgil) - 10
9. The Robbers (Schiller) - 6.5
10. Knowledge of Meaning (Larson and Segal) - 2.5
11. The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene) - 8
12. The Idiot (Dostoevsky) - 9
13. Fathers & Sons (Turgenev) - 6
14. The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) - 6.5
15. Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer) - 5
16. Hymns to the Night (Novalis) - 6
17. The Love Suicides at Amijima (Chikamatsu Monzaemon) - 8.5
18. Account of My Hut (Kamo Chomei) - 10
19. Beowulf (Anonymous) - 7
20. The Children of Hurin (Tolkien) - 9
21. Historia Calamitatum and Personal Letters (Abelard and Heloise) - 6
22. Temple of the Gold Pavillion (Mishima) - 9.5
23. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (Anonymous) - 6.5
24. Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) - 7.5
25. Of Grammatology (Derrida) - 9
26. The City of the Sun (Tomasso Campanella) - 4
27. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) - 9
28. Swann’s Way (Proust) - 9.5
29. City of the Dreadful Night (James Thomson) - 7
30. Antigone (Sophocles) - 8
31. Ethics of Ambiguity (Simone de Beauvoir) - 7
32. Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) - 7
33. A Hero of Our Time (Lermontov) - 8
34. Eugene Onegin (Pushkin) -10
35. Atonement (McEwan) - 6
36. Travel Writings (Basho) - 7
37. Being and Nothingness (Sartre) - 10
38. Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) - 6

[Ezee E]

If a book doesn't get past a 6 for me, I probably won't finish it.

Books that I know I finished this year, or rather ones that were in the past quarter of the year as I don't really keep track of these things:
The Exorcist
No Country For Old Men
Candy Girl
I Am Legend
The Lovely Bones
Haunted

I swear there's at least two others. I'll add The Road to that list too in a week or so.

[Benny Profane]

Following Thirdy's suggestion in another thread, here are all the books I finished this year, with ratings out of 10:


7. Dead Souls (Gogol) - 8 for the first half, 3 for the second half
14. The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) - 6.5
32. Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) - 7
35. Atonement (McEwan) - 6

Agreed on Dead Souls, though my low rating is mostly because it's so incomplete. But I'd like to know why the "low" scores on the other three, when you get a chance.

[Raiders]

Road, The (McCarthy) 91
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The (Murakami) 65
March, The (Doctorow) 83
Suttree (McCarthy) 87
Comfort of Strangers, The (McEwan) 69
Lullaby (Palahniuk) 42
Autumn of the Patriarch, The (Marquez) 94
Lovely Bones, The (Sebold) 70
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (Oe) 85
Jazz (Morrison) 77
Golden Age, The (Vidal) 39
Waves, The (Woolf) 62
Candide (Voltaire) 81

There were a couple more I started and didn't finish and probably one or two I read and am forgetting.

These are also just the first time reads. I re-read a couple of books as well.

[Ezee E]

Ah, that's right. I read "Haunted" by Palahniuk and thought it was a writer trying to be Palahniuk pretty much. Also read "I Am Legend" and "The Lovely Bones"

[Benny Profane]

The Great

1. The Road -- Cormac McCarthy
2. Darkness at Noon -- Arthur Koestler
3. V. -- Thomas Pynchon
4. The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Devil in the White City -- Erik Larson
6. Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
7. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Very Good

8. The Plague -- Albert Camus
9. Going to Meet the Man -- James Baldwin
10. Under the Banner of Heaven -- Jon Krakauer
11. A Handful of Dust -- Evelyn Waugh
12. The Crying of Lot 49 -- Thomas Pynchon

The Good

13. Henderson the Rain King -- Saul Bellow
14. No Country for Old Men -- Cormac McCarthy
15. Vineland -- Thomas Pynchon
16. Rabbit is Rich -- John Updike
17. Factotum -- Charles Bukowski
18. The Sportswriter -- Richard Ford
19. The Blind Side -- Michael Lewis
20. Candide -- Voltaire

The Somewhat Decent

21. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -- Robert Heinlein
22. Good to Great -- Jim Collins
23. Blink -- Malcolm Gladwell
24. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol




I can't say I read a bad book all year. All in all this has been a truly spectacular year for me, reading-wise.

[Duncan]

In no particular order:

The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
Fear and Trembling - Kierkegaard
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
The Odyssey - Homer
The Koran - An illiterate dude's followers
No God but God - Aslan
Cat's Cradle - Vonnegut
Steppenwolf - Hesse
Herzog - Bellow
Faust - Goethe
Dubliners - Joyce
Life of Pi - Martel
Screened Out - Baudrillard
Dharma Bums - Kerouac
Some book of poems - Ginsberg
Book of Longing - Cohen
The Children of Hurin - Tolkien
Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky
Moby Dick - Melville
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll
Nietzsche reader - Nietzsche
Civilization and its Discontents - Freud
Heretics of Dune - Herbert
Anil's Ghost - Ondaatje
Walden - Thoreau
A Universal History of Iniquity - Borges
Ficciones - Borges
Dreamtigers - Borges
The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
Sculpting in Time - Tarkovsky

There are definitely a few more lying around my dorm room down in New York that I'm just forgetting at the moment. Edit: Like the Borges stuff I just added. Edit2: And now the Ishiguro.

[Duncan]

Hmm, so I guess that's only about a book every two weeks. Not very good. It's been a busy year though.

[Thirdy]

In no particular order (English titles where available):

Books read in 2007

1. The Children of H̼rin РJ. R. R. Tolkien
2. Camino del Sur РC̩sar Vidal
3. El s̩ptimo velo РJuan Manuel de Prada
4. The Sea – John Banville
5. Travels in the Scriptorium – Paul Auster
6. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
7. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
8. Leviathan – Paul Auster
9. Ocean Sea – Alessandro Baricco
10. When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro
11. Le Cimetière marin - Paul Valéry
12. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
13. Herzog – Saul Bellow
14. The Guiltess – Hermann Broch
15. Agnes Grey РCharlotte Br̦nte
16. Schopenhauer’s Telescope – Gerard Donovan
17. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
18. The Plague – Albert Camus
19. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
20. La ciudad y los perros – Mario Vargas Llosa
21. Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse
22. The World According to Garp – John Irving
23. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
24. The Great Gatsby (2nd) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
25. The Bell Jar (2nd) – Sylvia Plath
26. The Go-Between – L. P Hartley
27. Dubliners – James Joyce
28. Cat’s Cradle (2nd) – Kurt Vonnegut
29. Orlando (2nd) – Virginia Woolf
30. The Neon Bible – John Kennedy Toole
31. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
32. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
33. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel GarcÃ*a Márquez)
34. Niebla – Miguel de Unamuno
35. Elephant and Other Stories – Raymond Carver
36. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
37. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
38. The Interpretation of Murder – Jed Rubenfeld
39. Answered Prayers – Truman Capote
40. Other Voices, Other Rooms – Truman Capote
41. The Years – Virginia Woolf
42. GreguerÃ*as – Ramón Gómez de la Serna
43. El caballero del hongo gris - Ramón Gómez de la Serna
44. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
45. The Moviegoer – Walter Percy
46. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
47. Independence Day – Richard Ford
48. Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig
49. Letter from an Unknown Woman – Stefan Zweig
50. Las ratas – Miguel Delibes
51. The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life - Armand M. Nicholi
52. Atonement (2nd) – Ian McEwan
53. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
54. They Came Like Swallows – William Maxwell
55. Don’t Call It Night – Amos Oz
56. The Life of Hunger - Amélie Nothomb
57. The Character of Rain - Amélie Nothomb
58. Fatelessness – Imre Kertesz
59. La lluvia amarilla – Julio Llamazares
60. Bestiario – Julio Cortázar

[Thirdy]

Waves, The (Woolf) 62

Please explain the rating. This is probably my favourite book of all time.

[lovejuice]

The Somewhat Decent

21. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -- Robert Heinlein
24. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol

i'm curious about these two entries. care to offer your thought.

Gogol is the father of socialist realism in literature which, in my book, equals shit. but since he's most revered, i always want to check his work out. (perhaps only so i can pan down the whole movement.)

i feel somewhat responsible for MOON since i remember i'm the one who recommend it to you.

[Melville]

Agreed on Dead Souls, though my low rating is mostly because it's so incomplete. But I'd like to know why the "low" scores on the other three, when you get a chance.

Yeah, my rating for Dead Souls is entirely due to its incompleteness. The Master and Margarita was amusing, but its satire didn't have much weight. I think I must have missed some essential feature of it, since I wasn't really sure what it was saying about Jesus and Pontius Pilate. Remains of the Day seemed a bit too obvious in its technique. If the story is going to be told through subtext, I don't think the subtext should be so blatant. Atonement was too drawn out, its characters seemed too much to be serving purely literary purposes, and it didn't have much to say that interested me.

However, as you implied, I actually gave all of these books positive scores. I didn't really dislike any of them.

Gogol is the father of socialist realism in literature which, in my book, equals shit. but since he's most revered, i always want to check his work out. (perhaps only so i can pan down the whole movement.)

I have never heard him referred to in that way. His work is mostly absurd comedy consisting of layers of irony and satire. He was a major influence on Dostoevsky, who's dark humor is very similar to his. I think my favorite thing by him is his short story The Nose. Dead Souls is terrific as long as you stop with the first part.

[lovejuice]

I have never heard him referred to in that way. His work is mostly absurd comedy consisting of layers of irony and satire. He was a major influence on Dostoevsky, who's dark humor is very similar to his. I think my favorite thing by him is his short story The Nose. Dead Souls is terrific as long as you stop with the first part.

yeah. i'm think of Maxim Gorky. :frustrated: sometimes it's kinda hard to keep all those names straight in your head.

[Kurosawa Fan]

I'll post my list either tonight or tomorrow. It's on my laptop, which I usually only use at work.

[lovejuice]

i'll do favorite book(s) from each month.

jan: "cosmicomic" with "i, claudius" comes very close second.

feb: tennessee williams' memoirs

mar: foucaults's "discipline & punish"

apr: hemingway's "the first forty-nine stories"

may: thebes at war

june: three ways tie among "the power and the glory", "darkness at noon", and "what we talk about when we talk about love"

july: roberston davie's "high spirits"

aug: the remains of the days

sep: the adventures of augie march

oct: the tale of two cities

nov: kiss of the spider woman and two other plays

dec: derrida's "the politics of friendship"

[Melville]

yeah. i'm think of Maxim Gorky. :frustrated: sometimes it's kinda hard to keep all those names straight in your head.

Well, I have heard Gogol referred to as the father of social realism, so calling him the father of socialist realism sounded somewhat plausible. But Gorky makes much more sense.

[Qrazy]

yeah. i'm think of Maxim Gorky. :frustrated: sometimes it's kinda hard to keep all those names straight in your head.

You fail at life. Your PhD and massive reading lists are now worth nothing. Better luck next incarnation.

[transmogrifier]

Off the top of my head:

The Road - 6
The Kite Runner - 6
Into the Wild - 8
Into Thin Air - 8.5
The God Delusion - 8
Director's Cut - 3

[Mysterious Dude]

The Epic of Gilgamesh ***
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater **½
The Scarlet Letter ***
The Trial ***
Death Comes for the Archbishop **
The Stranger ****
Invisible Man ***½
Lord of the Flies ****
Things Fall Apart ****
A Long Way Gone ****

More books than I've ever read in a year, I'm sure. I expect to do even better next year.

I may finish Heart of Darkness before the year is out, as well.

[Wryan]

In "honor" of Beowulf coming to the big screen this past year, I'd suggest John Gardner's Grendel to all of you if you haven't read it and especially if you've read Beowulf. It's such a slick work. Pretty potent at times. Especially an Unferth scene that comes outta nowhere and cracks you across the face.

[transmogrifier]

Now that I'm home, a fuller list, now that I can see my bookshelf:

Fiction:
The March - 8
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - 8
The Big Sleep - 7.5
A Scanner Darkly - 7
The Road - 6
The Kite Runner - 6
Little Children - 5.5
The Director's Cut - 3

Non-Fiction:
Consilience - 7.5
Into the Wild - 8
Into Thin Air - 8.5
The God Delusion - 8
Cosmos - 9
Blink - 7.5
Undercover Economist - 8
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors - 7.5
The Blind Watchmaker - 7.5
Constants of Nature - can't remember
How to Dunk a Donut - 8
The Tipping Point - 8.5
Broca's Brain - 7.5

[Benny Profane]

i feel somewhat responsible for MOON since i remember i'm the one who recommend it to you.

I really don't remember too much about it, other than I felt it was a little over-detailed, and the ending was somewhat abrupt. It's not that I didn't like the book, it's just not one of the best I read this year. I would recommend it to any fan of science-fiction, most definitely.

[Sycophant]

By far the best thing I read this year was Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events saga. It's just about the best thing I've ever read.

What I read this year (none of which I disliked):

All 13 books of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
The Golden Compass/Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
An Insider's View of Mormon Origins by Grant H. Palmer
The Trial by Franz Kafka
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Uh... I'll add more if I remember them. I know I actuallky read a good deal more than this.

[Fezzik]

I really haven't read that many books this year, considering my past years, but...

Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis) [2nd] - 95
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling) -85
A Clash of Kings (Martin) - 85
A Storm of Swords (Martin) - 98
A Feast for Crows (Martin) - 80
Beach Music (Conroy) [4th] - 98
Wicked (Maguire) - 90

...lots of popular lit there. Ah well, I am who I am

(and yes, I'm a Conroy fanboy)

[Stay Puft]

Being a full time student means reading lists pouring out of every orifice, so most of this was for school, including a class in popular fiction which was lame.

Utopia (Thomas More)
The Unfortunate Traveller (Thomas Nashe)
Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (John Lyly)
A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid)
The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)
The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault)
Theories of Popular Culture (Dominic Strinati)
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
Star (Danielle Steel)
A Million Little Pieces (James Frey)
Blood Shot (Sara Paretsky)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)
Death of a Transvestite (Ed Wood)
Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons)
Bone (Jeff Smith)
Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
Venus in Furs (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch)
Justine (Marquis de Sade)

And more textbooks and course packages and essay collections (etc.) than you can shake a stick at - assuming you are prone to shaking sticks at things.

As usual, I hardly got around to much of what I had wanted or planned, but then reading the entire run of Bone over the summer is enough to satiate.