Books you read this year

[dreamdead]

Discounting a bucketload of 17th century plays, this year's reading was impressively small:

Atonement (McEwan) ****
A Personal Matter (Oe) *** 1/2
Dispatches (Herr) ***

I'm assuming that one of the grad classes in the next year will be a seminar class, so hopefully things will improve. Similarly, The Road and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber will be read early next year since I'm teaching them.

[jesse]

I looked at my list for this year and my heart sank--by far the smallest amount of books read since I started keeping track in college. :cry:

*also eagerly awaits SpaceOddity's list*

[ledfloyd]

I loved The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon. Atonement was really good. I can't remember if I read anything else I really loved this year. I reread a ton of books. I think I read the Road last year.

[lovejuice]

*also eagerly awaits SpaceOddity's list*

indeed. i feel like i'm attending 18th century french ball where we flaunt reading lists and Space is some sorta Madame de Pompadour.

[SpaceOddity]

indeed. i feel like i'm attending 18th century french ball where we flaunt reading lists and Space is some sorta Madame de Pompadour.

*hates that bitch*

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ppGWrzJ0yBI

*rests case*

[Lucky]

This was not a good reading year for me.

Il Visconte Dimezzato - Italo Calvino
Stardust - Neil Gaiman
The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis - Ugo Foscolo
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
Fifth Business - Robertson Davies

[Kurosawa Fan]

My list, a bit disappointing at only 26:

The Best:

1. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
2. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
3. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
4. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
5. No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
6. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Night Gardener - George Pelecanos

The Great:

8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
9. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
10. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
11. Death Be Not Proud – John Gunther
12. Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero – David Maraniss
13. Post Office – Charles Bukowski
14. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
15. About a Boy – Nick Hornby
16. The Stranger – Albert Camus

The Good

17. Beasts of No Nation - Uzodinma Iweala
18. Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
19. I Love You, Beth Cooper – Larry Doyle
20. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
21. City of Bones - Michael Connelly

The Meh

22. A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
23. Killing Floor – Lee Child
24. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

The Ugly

25. The Ruins – Scott Smith
26. Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay

[Raiders]

The Ugly

25. The Ruins – Scott Smith

Man, the second half of that book must really suck. I remember you saying some good things about it for a while.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Man, the second half of that book must really suck. I remember you saying some good things about it for a while.

It's down there mainly for wasted potential. It could have been fantastic, but it's so needlessly drawn out that it becomes insufferable at points, and feels way too repetitive. It has some brilliant moments, but overall it was a severe disappointment. It's a shame too, because A Simple Plan was wonderful. The Ruins could make a great 90 minute film, though the trailer for the film looks pretty terrible.

[origami_mustache]

I need to read more...

Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman
Haunted
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Less Than Zero

[SpaceOddity]

I read less every year, too. Alas.

Isabel Allende - Eva Luna
Anne Bronte - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Isabel Allende - The Stories of Eva Luna
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus
Edith Wharton - The Glimpses of the Moon
Isabelle Allende - Daughter of Fortune
Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown
Helene Grimaud - Wild Harmonies
Robertson Davies - Fifth Business
Andrei Makine - A Life's Music
Isabel Allende - Portrait in Sepia
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Rebecca West - Harriet Hume
Salman Rushdie - The Ground Beneath her Feet
Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
Robertson Davies - Murther & Walking Spirits
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
William Goldman - The Princess Bride
Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels
Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed
Robertson Davies - What's Bred in the Bone
C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man
Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
Rebecca West - Henry James
Henry James - The Aspern Papers
Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Venus in Furs
Turgenev - First Love
Henry James - The Altar of the Dead
Jeanette Winterson - The Passion
Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone
Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means
Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet (re-read)
Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry
Angela Carter - The Magic Toyshop
Isak Dinesen - Winter's Tales
Isak Dinesen - Ancedotes of Destiny
Carson McCullers - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Edith Wharton - Summer
Flaubert - A Simple Heart
Iris Murdoch - The Time of the Angels
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Rebecca West - The Birds fall Down
Isak Dinesen - Ehrengard
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Salman Rushdie - The Moor's Last Sigh
Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Windy Poplars
Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe
Philip Pullman - Northern Lights
Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife
Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned
Martin Amis - Money
Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
J.G. Ballard - Vermilion Sands
Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Jeanette Winterson - Written on the Body
Scarlett Thomas - The End of Mr. Y
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud a Solitude
Jeanette Winterson - The Powerbook
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Dante - Inferno
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818 text)
Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
Richard Matheson - I am Legend
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
Martin Amis - Time's Arrow
Philip K. Dick - Valis
Dickens - Great Expectations (re-read)
Daphne du Maurier - Frenchman's Creek
Chekhov - About Love and Other Stories
Daphne du Maurier - Jamaica Inn
Iris Murdoch - The Unicorn
Jean Cocteau - Les Enfants Terribles
Euripides - Medea
Iris Murdoch - The Bell
Euripides - Hecabe
Zola - La Bete Humaine
Euripides - Electra
Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers
Euripides - The Trojan Women
Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
Nicholas Meyer - The Seven Percent Solution
Graham Greene - The Quiet American
Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton
Euripides - Heracles
Knut Hamsun - Pan
Andrew Lang - The Pink Fairy Book
George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
J.G. Ballard - The Day of Forever
Dickens - Bleak House

[Thirdy]

Most impressive, as always. Congratulations.

[Boner M]

Pretty tiny list, as usual.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road
James Joyce - Dubliners
Kenneth Anger - Hollywood Babylon
Jonathan Rosenbaum - Movie Wars
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony
Charles Bukowski - Post Office
Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Raymond Carver - Short Cuts
Charles Bukowski - Ham on Rye

Also read half of Blood Meridian and Kafka on the Shore, but got sidetracked with each (former I got tired of, KOTS I just didn't continue with for no apparent reason, since I liked it well enough).

[SpaceOddity]

Most impressive, as always. Congratulations.

Thanks.

My most loved was Notre-Dame and most loathed was Tom Jones.

[jesse]

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned

I didn't know you had read this... what did you think?

I've gotten about 2/3 through, put it down and never picked it up again. Two times actually, about a year apart.

And yes, impressive as always. My half of the bargain will be up tonight.

[SpaceOddity]

I didn't know you had read this... what did you think?

I've gotten about 2/3 through, put it down and never picked it up again. Two times actually, about a year apart.

And yes, impressive as always. My half of the bargain will be up tonight.

Oh, I preferred it to Gatsby and Tender. Yay for grey-eyed heroines. I liked Gloria...

"Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I..."

"Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants."


*awaits your list*

[Thirdy]

Tender is the Night is my favourite Fitzgerald. Heartbreaking and beautiful.

[ledfloyd]

i think i read tender as the night this year. i love it either way. "i know myself, but that is all." is one of the greatest last lines ever. perhaps THE greatest.

maybe this year i'll keep track of all the books i read for a change.

[jesse]

Oh, I preferred it to Gatsby and Tender. Yay for grey-eyed heroines. I liked Gloria...

Well then I'll have to give it another shot...

[jesse]

The bad: this is the smallest number of books read since I started keeping track in college. And I probably never started and never finished so many books either as I did this last year.

The good: I did read more the theory this year than I have since I finished school.

New books read. Favorites get a star.

The Western Canon - Harold Bloom*
Decreation - Anne Carson*
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
Why Read the Classics? - Italo Calvino
Inferno - Dante* (first time in its entirety)
Les Grandes Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
Emma - Jane Austen*
Medea - Euripides
Gilgamesh - Unknown
Oedipus Rex - Sophocles

Revisiting old favorites:

The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Books I started and never finished, that I remember offhand:

She Came to Stay - Simone de Beauvoir
Wuthering Heights - Charlotte Bronte
Men in the Off Hours - Anne Carson
After Theory - Terry Eagleton
Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman - Ruth Gruber

[Acapelli]

Prepare for a very tiny list.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (McNeil & McCain)
Franny and Zooey (Salinger)
Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)
Shopgirl (Martin)
A Long Way Down (Hornby)
The Areas of My Expertise (Hodgman)
Box Office Poison (Robinson)
Naked (Sedaris)

Didn't finish (but will eventually):
Infinite Jest (Wallace)
Breakfast on Pluto (McCabe)

[SpaceOddity]

Books I started and never finished, that I remember offhand:
Wuthering Heights

*scowls*

[monolith94]

Venus in Furs (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch)

Hey, I read this in 2007 too! What'd you think?

[monolith94]

38. Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) - 6

The idea of rating a text like this strikes me as, frankly, bizzare and reductionist. It's strange that I can feel so at ease rating films, but the idea of rating books fills me with disgust.

For the record, I'd give this one a 10, and beg to disagree with you. I mean, would you assign a number grade to The Koran? The Bible? The Zohar?

[Milky Joe]

The idea of rating a text like this strikes me as, frankly, bizzare and reductionist. It's strange that I can feel so at ease rating films, but the idea of rating books fills me with disgust.

For the record, I'd give this one a 10, and beg to disagree with you. I mean, would you assign a number grade to The Koran? The Bible? The Zohar?

Ha... yeah I'd give the Bible maybe a 4. Too convoluted... too... preachy, ya know?