Top 10 Books First Read in 2014

[Benny Profane]

1. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
2. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[megladon8]

Need to get back into reading soon. I ended up dropping off at the end of last year and not hitting my goal of 30 books for the year.

I am about 1/2 way through "The Shining", then would like to follow it up right away with "Doctor Sleep".

I also have an interesting looking/sounded memoir of a porn star, called "Girlvert".

[ThePlashyBubbler]

1. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
2. The Wes Anderson Collection, Matt Zoller Seitz
3. Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, John U. Bacon

[Mara]

Eh I might actually do this for once. Can't hurt, right?

1. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
2. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
3. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
5. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater
6. Vicious by V. E. Schwab
7. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (graphic novel)
8. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick
9. Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
10. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

The Rest:
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Too boring to renumber, but they are in order.
Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood
Leviathan by Scott Westfeld (also read the two sequels; would rank same)
Across a Star-Swept Sea by Diana Peterfreund
I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader
My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry
Three Shadows by Cyril Pendrosa (graphic novel)
Plain Kate by Erin Bow
Cherry Money Baby by John M. Cusick
Shadows by Robin McKinley
***This is the line between good and bad
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

]


DNF list:
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Icons by Margaret Stohl: derivative; boring

]

[D_Davis]

Jesus christ you guys read fast. 4 books in a week?

At my fastest, I can sometimes read 2 books a week.

[Mara]

I think at least one of those I started before the new year. But I'm zipping through another book while trying to defrost my pipes, so...

[Mara]

Do you guys still include books you don't finish? I usually have a handful of those, and it gives an accurate feel for which books were really bad.

[D_Davis]

I've discovered that my optimum enjoyment in reading comes from reading one book a week. Any quicker, and I don't feel like I'm properly digesting and thinking about what I'm reading, and any longer it becomes a slog. There are, of course, exceptions to this.

[kuehnepips]

1. Magical Mystery - Sven Regener
2. Doctor Sleep - Stephen King

[kuehnepips]

Do you guys still include books you don't finish?

I don't,

[dreamdead]

So far:

1. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
2. Alice Munro's Open Secrets: Stories
3. Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness: Stories
4. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
5. Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette
6. Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge
7. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

[Our Aurora]

1. Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
2. Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
3. Looking for Alaska - John Green


Powerful, concise (even at almost 600 pages), fair biography about an eccentric person full of contrasts. So much to admire and dislike about Jobs. His obsessive perfectionism, his cruelty, his spiritual enlightenment, his single-mindedness, his ability to bend reality to suit his needs. Just an incredible portrait and told in an elegant, simplistic style that Jobs would truly appreciate. Highly recommend.

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605/15)
• Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818)
• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
• The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
• A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)
• Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
• Howards End (E.M. Forster, 1910)
• Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
• American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)

Story story collections:

• Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], 1934)
• Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges, 1962)*
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction (J.D. Salinger, 1963)
• The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino, 1965-84)
• The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)

Non-fiction:

• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Roland Barthes, 1980)
• Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee, 1998)

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
4. Looking for Alaska - John Green


A much better mix of high concept ideas and linear plot than Inherent Vice. The internet and its role in modern society combined with the events surrounding 9/11 is a perfect place for Pynchon's trademark theme of paranoia. Ultimately I can draw a parallel between this Mason & Dixon, as well, which was a story about exploration and triangulating the unknown into fully developed realms. Set in 2001, the internet was still a fairly unknown entity, and Pynchon's DeepArcher (read: Departure) creation about the unexplored, encrypted parts of the deep web are beautifully realized. And their quick, inevitable commercialization signifies how much faster events happen than back in colonial times. Aside from some minor characters like Russian mobsters appearing in what are supposed to be important emotional moments that felt out of place, I don't really have much negative to say about it. Really fun, insightful, and at times haunting novel.

[dreamdead]

Yeah, the navigation of the web and its mysteries, as well as the study of how fringe organizations try to mobilize exposure of scandalous events, were all well explored by Pynchon. Some of the foreboding (noses sniffing out incoming fear) was a nice touch, and almost everything with Maxine's dealing with her ex-husband and children connect Pynchon's themes to basic struggles of re-connection and family after the disaster, in ways that comment upon that adoption of ideology, but still suggest what is frayed and hesitant in such reconciliation. Still not sure if I like how indifferently Maxine is to transgressive sexuality--treading a close line between rape and consenuality--all in the name of learning more about the mystery, but that's really my biggest complaint.

Really want to read Mason and Dixon after this--this was such a reminder of his talents, since I hadn't read his prose since 2004.

[Our Aurora]

1. Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
2. The Crazed - Ha Jin
3. Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
4. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
5. Looking for Alaska - John Green

[Benny Profane]

1. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
2. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
3. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
4. The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
5. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
6. Looking for Alaska - John Green


John Fante is criminally underdiscussed. He's kind of a cross between Knut Hamsun and Bukowski. He writes very defiant, self-aware narration about misfit characters that can't escape their own fantasies. There is a tone of amusing desperation, confusion, and yearning. Just a great literary voice.

[ledfloyd]

Fiction
1. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
2. Night Film - Marisha Pessl
3. NW - Zadie Smith

Non-Fiction (Primarily Econ/Social Science books)
1. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
2. The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
3. The Worldly Philosophers - Robert Heilbronner
4. Think Like a Freak - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
5. Superfreakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
6. Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes - Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich
7. Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
8. Triumph of the City - Ed Glaeser

[Kurosawa Fan]

I need to keep up this year.

1. The Halloween Tree - Bradbury
2. Othello - Shakespeare
3. Gone Girl - Flynn

[ThePlashyBubbler]

1. The Lost Scrapbook (Evan Dara)
2. Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (Javier Marias)
3. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
4. Lookout Cartridge (Joseph McElroy)
5. The Wes Anderson Collection (Matt Zoller Seitz)
6. Dublinesque (Enrique Vila-Matas)
7. Fourth and Long (John U. Bacon)

[D_Davis]

1. The Halloween Tree - Bradbury

I like this. Been thinking about re-reading Dandelion Wine this year, along with more Bradbury.

[dreamdead]

Finally to ten fiction books.

1. Amy Waldman's The Submission
2. Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth: Stories
3. Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories
4. Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories
5. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
6. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette
7. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
8. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
9. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
10. Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge
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11. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

]

Nonfiction:
1. Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a Child I Read Books
2. David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
3. Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: An Introduction

[baby doll]

• The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
• Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957)
• Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964/74)
• Narration in the Fiction Film (David Bordwell, 1985)
• The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro, 1998)

Here's where it stands at the beginning of April.

I enjoyed Arrow of God more than Things Fall Apart I think in part because I didn't know anything about the culture he's writing about so it took me a while to find my bearings. If the Munro stories are representative of her talent she's clearly a minor master, but there's something vaguely provincial about how all these stories are about white chicks living in British Colombia or Ontario, usually during the years immediately after World War II (that is, before the country started getting browner). I mean, come on girl, there's a whole world out there! Pnin is pretty minor alongside Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and of course Lolita, but it's still amusing.