Top 10 Books First Read During 2012

[Dukefrukem]

Anyone read Dust Lands?

[D_Davis]

I doubt I'll finished another new book this year (just started my first re-read of King's It), so here are my top 10 books first read in 2012:

1. The Queen's Gambit, by Walter Tevis
2. Comanche Moon, by Larry McMurtry
3. Celebrant, by Michael Cisco
4. Devil Red, by Joe R. Lansdale
5. Dead Man's Walk, by Larry McMurtry
6. The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry
7. Matadora, by Steve Perry
8. In Other Worlds, by A.A. Attanasio
9. When We Were Executioners, by J.M. McDermott
10. The Big Blowdown, by George Pelecanos

Looks like McMurtry is the big winner this year.

[ContinentalOp]

1. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett- 10
2. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris- 9
3. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain- 9
4. The Chill by Ross MacDonald- 9
5. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman- 9
6. Vanilla Ride by Joe R. Lansdale- 8.5
7. Double Indemnity by James M. Cain- 8
8. Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith- 8
9. Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go by George Pelecanos- 7.5
10. What It Was by George Pelecanos- 7.5

Want to mix it up more next year. My family enabled my crime novel obsession though this Christmas. Got another Lansdale and a Chester Himes to read.

[D_Davis]

6. Vanilla Ride by Joe R. Lansdale- 8.5

This might be my favorite Hap and Leonard novel.

So good. One of Lansdale's strongest novels. It's so concise, and tight.

[dreamdead]

This finishes up this year. Hopefully I'll continue to average 40 or so next year...

1. E. M. Forster’s Howards End
2. J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
3. Graham Greene’ The Power and the Glory
4. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
5. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
6. Stephen King’s The Stand
7. Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls
8. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
9. Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist
10. Don DeLillo’s The Names
[

Show Spoiler

11. H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness
12. Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder
13. Don Lee’s The Collective
14. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
15. Mat Johnson’s Pym
16. C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce
17. Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
18. John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers
19. John Updike’s Rabbit Run
20. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
21. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
22. John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
23. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
24. Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
25. Stephen King’s 11/22/63
26. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher and the Rye
27. Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels
28. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night
29. Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams
30. Stephen King's The Shining
31. Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue
32. Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered
33. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach
34. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
35. Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country
36. James Wood’s How Fiction Works
37. Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Five Other Stories
38. Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
39. Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons
40. Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets
41. Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro
42. James Andrew Miller and Tom Schales’s These Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN

]

[Melville]

Final list for the year:

1. The Trumpets They Play! (Al Columbia, 1998) [comic] - 9.5
2. The Silent Cry (Kenzaburo Oe, 1967) - 9
3. Under the Autumn Star (Hamsun, 1906) - 8.5
4. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima, 1963) - 8.5
5. On the Road (Kerouac, 1957) - 8.5
6. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard, 1982) - 8
7. A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (Hamsun, 1909) - 8
8. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, 1847) [reread] - 8
9. The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006) - 7.5
10. Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (trans. Schmidt, 1868-1900) - 7.5
11. Struwwelpeter: Fearful Stories & Vile Pictures to Instruct Good Little Folks (Heinrich Hoffmann, 1845) [picture book] - 7.5
12. The Complete Stories (Kafka, 1909-24)
    
    • overall - 7
    • The Metamorphosis [reread] - 10
13. Tales of Love and Loss (Hamsun, 1895-1905) - 7
14. A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor, 1953) [short story] - 7
15. Early/Socratic Dialogues (Plato, c. 399-387 BC)
    
    • Apology [reread] - 7.5
    • Crito [reread] - 7.5
    • Euthyphro [reread] - 7
    • Gorgias - 5
16. Paying For It (Chester Brown, 2011) [comic] - 7
17. Middle and Late Dialogues (Plato, c. 380-347 BC)
    
    • Theatetus - 7
    • Parmenides - 6.5
18. Murphy (Beckett, 1938) - 6.5
19. Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1615) - 6.5
20. Building Stories (Chris Ware, 2012) [comic] - 6.5
21. Congress of the Animals (Jim Woodring, 2011) [comic] - 6
22. The Essential Tales of Chekhov (Chekhov, 1886-1899) - 6
23. Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953) - 5.5
24. Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor, 1952) - 5.5
25. The Queen of Spades (Pushkin, 1834) [short story] - 5.5
26. (32) Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe, 1835-49)
    
    • overall - 5
    • The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, The Black Cat, some others - great
27. The Corrections (Franzen, 2001) - 5
28. Paradise Lost (Milton, 1674) - 4.5
29. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847) - 4
30. Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle, c. 340BC) - 4
31. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886) - 4
32. The Republic (Plato, c. 380BC) - 3

[TGM]

1. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
2. Misery - Stephen King
3. The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness
4. On Writing - Stephen King
5. Goliath - Scott Westerfeld
6. The Gods of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
7. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
8. Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness
9. The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness
10. 1984 - George Orwell

11. The Warlord of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
12. A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin
13. A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
14. The Neon Rain - James Lee Burke
15. Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green and David Levithan
16. A Feast For Crows - George R.R. Martin
17. Peter Pan in Scarlet - Geraldine McCaughrean
18. Animal Farm - George Orwell

And that's gonna do it for this year!

[ContinentalOp]

This might be my favorite Hap and Leonard novel.

So good. One of Lansdale's strongest novels. It's so concise, and tight.

Leonard Pine would have a field day with your last sentence. I liked it a ton. Started off with a lot of fan serving but ended up being one of Lansdale's strongest H&L tales. Read it with a lot of jealous hate because I've been trying to write an action story and I know I could never write such cohesive, vivid and frenetic action scenes. I also liked how the story takes a very nice, though not unexpected, change of direction towards the end. It seems like a reworking of Captains Outrageous, improving upon it with a better plot and better antagonists. Still thinking about that scene[

Show Spoiler

where they lose the boat, find the kids and rumble with the Big Guy.

]

[Derek]

Final list

1) The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles) 9.5
2) Ubik (Philip K. Dick) 9.0
3) The Silent Cry (Kenzaburo Oe) 8.5
4) The Pale King (David Foster Wallace) 8.5
5) 2666 (Roberto Bolano) 8.5
6) The Republic (Plato) 8.5
7) The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler) 8.0
8) Hitchcock/Truffaut (Francois Truffaut) 8.0
9) Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) 8.0
10) Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) 8.0

11) Light Years (James Salter) 7.5
12) Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) 7.5
13) Fear & Trembling (Soren Kierkegaard) 7.5
14) Death in the Andes (Mario Vargas Llosa) 7.5
15) Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon) 7.5
16) Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) 7.0
17) Neuromancer (William Gibson) 7.0
18) The Optimist's Daughter (Eudora Welty) 7.0
19) Apology (Plato) 7.0
20) Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabakov) 7.0

21) The Symposium (Plato) 7.0
22) The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion) 7.0
23) Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 7.0
24) Life of Pi (Yann Martel) 6.5
25) Angelmaker (Nick Harkaway) 6.5
26) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick) 6.5
27) Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) 6.0
28) A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway) 6.0
29) Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry) 5.5
30) The Half-Made World (Felix Gilman) 5.5

31) A Dance With Dragons (George R.R. Martin) 5.5
32) The Contortionist's Handbook (Craig Clevenger) 5.5
33) Miami (Joan Didion) 4.5

Rereads:

Franny & Zooey (JD Salinger) 10

[kopello]

1. The Illustrated Man (Bradbury)
2. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Hoffer)
3. American Gods (Gaiman)
4. A High Wind in Jamaica (Hughes)
5. The Warrior Diet (Hofmekler)
6. The Revolution: A Manifesto (Paul)
7. Ragtime (Doctorow)
8. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (DiLorenzo)
9. The Pale King (Wallace)
10. My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Titone)
[

Show Spoiler

11. The Fountainhead (Rand)
12. The Man in the High Castle (Dick)
13. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
14. Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Scheuer)
15. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
16. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
17. End the Fed (Paul)
18. Shambling Toward's Hiroshima (Morrow)
19. Ghost World (Clowes)
20. The Film Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Filmological Knowledge (Kamp)
21. Bosnian Flat Dog (Andersson)

]

[Mysterious Dude]

Every book I read in 2012.

1. Our Lady of the Flowers (1943, Jean Genet)
2. Les Misérables (1862, Victor Hugo)
3. Crime and Punishment (1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
4. Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964, Hubert Selby, Jr.)
5. Flowers for Algernon (1966, Daniel Keyes)
6. Malone Dies (1951, Samuel Beckett)
7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929, Erich Maria Remarque)
8. The Forever War (1974, Joe Haldeman)
9. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965, Philip K. Dick)
10. Carry Me Down (2006, M. J. Hyland)
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, Gabriel GarcÃ*a Márquez)
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960, Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
13. Childhood’s End (1953, Arthur C. Clarke)
14. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, Ursula K. Le Guin)
15. The Unnamable (1953, Samuel Beckett)
16. À rebours (1884, Joris-Karl Huysmans)
17. Neuromancer (1984, William Gibson)
18. Foundation (1951, Isaac Asimov)
19. Under the Volcano (1947, Malcolm Lowry)

I probably could have read more, if not for Les Mis, but it was worth it.

[TGM]

I probably could have read more, if not for Les Mis, but it was worth it.

I definitely could have read more if it weren't for those last two Game of Thrones books, but... no, they totally weren't worth it.

[D_Davis]

I definitely could have read more if it weren't for those last two Game of Thrones books, but... no, they totally weren't worth it.

I gave up on those after the 100 pages of the first volume.
Totally not my kind of fantasy.

[SpaceOddity]

Last year's first reads (not in liking order):

Isabel Allende – Paula
Sarashina – As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams
Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland’s Daughter
Winifred Holtby – South Riding
Murasaki – The Diary of Lady Murasaki
Susannah Clapp – A Card from Angela Carter
Stella Tillyard – Aristocrats
Millen Brand – The Outward Room
Tatyana Tolstaya – White Walls: Collected Stories
Pavol Dobinsky – Slovak Stories for Young and Old
Ruth Elwin Harris – The Silent Shore
Ruth Elwin Harris – The Beckoning Hills
Ruth Elwin Harris – The Dividing Sea
Ruth Elwin Harris – Gwens’ Story
Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House
J.L. Carr – A Month in the Country
Ford Maddox Ford – The Good Soldier
George Orwell – Coming up for Air
Eva Ibbotson – The Star of Kazan
David Almond – My Name is Mina
Jo Walton – Among Others
Zola – The Dream
Carol Shields – Swann
Edna O’Brien – The Country Girls
Edna O’Brien – Girl with Green Eyes
Edna O’Brien – Girls in their Married Bliss
Eowyn Ivey – The Snow Child
Patty Dann – Mermaids
Laurie Lee – Cider with Rosie
Muriel Spark – The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Sarah Waters – The Night Watch
Elizabeth McCracken – The Giant House
Judith Schalansky – Atlas of Remote Islands
Philip Reeve – Fever Crumb
Philip Reeve – A Web of Air
Philip Peeve – Scrivener’s Moon
Shirley Jackson – The Lottery and Other Stories
Sigrid Undset – Gunnar’s Daughter
Sylvia Townsend Warner- Lolly Willowes
Arthur Conan Doyle – Hound of the Baskervilles
Noel Streatfeild – Saplings
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
Elizabeth von Armin – All the Dogs of my Life
W. Somerset Maugham – The Painted Veil
Iris Murdoch – A Severed Head
Sarah Winman – When God was a Rabbit
A.S. Byatt – Ragnarok
Tatyana Tolstaya – The Slynx
Dostoyevsky – Netochka Nezvanova
Elizabeth Bowen – The House in Paris
Grace McCleen – The Land of Decoration
Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Aurora Floyd
Nell Leyshon – The Colour of Milk
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky – Memories of the Future
Alan Hollinghurst – The Stranger’s Child
Patrick Ness – A Monster Calls
Isabel Allende – Ines of my Soul
Edward Carey – Observatory Mansions
Susan Fletcher – Witch Light
George Eliot – Scenes of Clerical Life
Sarah Waters – Tipping the Velvet
Caitlin Moran – How to be a Woman
Jeanette Winterson – The Daylight Gate
Theophile Gautier – My Phantoms
Karen Thompson Walker – The Age of Miracles
Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections
Flaubert – Sentimental Education
Jena Webster – Dear Enemy
Marguerite de Navarre – The Heptameron
Sheri Reynolds – A Gracious Plenty
Michael Ende- The Neverending Story
Seven Viking Romances
Ford Maddox Ford – Parade’s End
Emily Bronte – Poems of Solitude
Roald Dahl – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More
Zola – The Ladies’ Paradise
Chekhov – The Shooting Party
Philip Pullman – Grim Tales for Young and Old
Amy Tan – The Joy Luck Club
Elizabeth Hay – A Student of Weather
Zitkala-Sa – American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings
Rustaveli – The Knight in Panther’s Skin
Maupassant – A Woman’s Life
John Christopher – The Death of Grass
Elizabeth Anna Hart – The Runaway
Mark Forsyth – The Horologicon
Yukio Mishima – Spring Snow
Irene Nemirovsky – Jezebel
Rumer Godden – An Episode of Sparrows
Charlotte Dacre – Zofloya: or The Moor
Irene Nemirovsky – Fire in the Blood
Tolstoy – Hadji Murat
Michael Chabon – Wonder Boys
Sara Maitland – Gossip from the Forest
Yeats – Irish Folk and Fairytales
Louise Erdrich – Love Medicine
Helen Cresswell – Moondial