Top 10 Books First Read in 2015

[ledfloyd]

1. The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
2. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
3. Dune - Frank Herbert
4. In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan
5. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
6. Trout Fishing in America - Richard Brautigan
7. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
9. Foundation - Isaac Asimov
10. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

[dreamdead]

Novels:
1. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
2. Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sowers
3. Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories
4. Marilynne Robinson’s Lila
5. Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue
6. Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt
7. Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California
8. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man
9. Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety
10. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea
11. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
12. Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling
13. Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train

Nonfiction:
Cyrus Patell’s Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late-Twentieth Century
Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education
Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter
Peter Enns’s The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It
Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time
Stephen Apkon’s The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

Plays:
David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls
David Henry Hwang's Trying to Find Chinatown: Selected Plays
Patrick Wang’s The Monologue Plays

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
• North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
• The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1934)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1971)

Short story collections:

• The Girl With the Golden Eyes and Other Stories (Honoré de Balzac, 1831-35)
• Death in Venice and Other Stories (Thomas Mann, 1897-1912)
• The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1934-50)
• My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (Georges Bataille, 1941-67)
• Collected Stories (Saul Bellow, 1951-95)

Plays:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare, 1595 or '96)

Non-fiction:

• The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (David Bordwell, 1981)
• More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts [Updated and Expanded Edition] (James Naremore, 1998/2008)
• Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Kristin Thompson, 1999)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens, 2001)
• Rio Bravo (Robin Wood, 2003)

[

Show Spoiler

I also read:

• Tao Té Ching [R.B. Blakney translation] (Lao Tzu, pretty fucking old)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945/59)
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
• No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe, 1960)
• The Hunter (Donald Westlake [as Richard Stark], 1962)
• Theory of Film Practice (Noël Burch, 1969/73)
• The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Susan Sontag, 1992)
• Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, 1993)
• Making Movies (Sidney Lumet, 1995)

]

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
• North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
• The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1934)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1971)

Short story collections:

• The Girl With the Golden Eyes and Other Stories (Honoré de Balzac, 1831-35)
• Death in Venice and Other Stories (Thomas Mann, 1897-1912)
• The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1934-50)
• My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (Georges Bataille, 1941-67)
• Collected Stories (Saul Bellow, 1951-95)

Plays:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare, 1595 or '96)

Non-fiction:

• The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (David Bordwell, 1981)
• More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts [Updated and Expanded Edition] (James Naremore, 1998/2008)
• Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Kristin Thompson, 1999)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens, 2001)
• Rio Bravo (Robin Wood, 2003)

[

Show Spoiler

I also read:

• Tao Té Ching [R.B. Blakney translation] (Lao Tzu, pretty fucking old)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
• The Film Sense (Sergei Eisenstein, 1942)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945/59)
• The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith, 1951)
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
• No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe, 1960)
• The Hunter (Donald Westlake [as Richard Stark], 1962)
• Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)
• Theory of Film Practice (Noël Burch, 1969/73)
• The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Susan Sontag, 1992)
• Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, 1993)
• Making Movies (Sidney Lumet, 1995)

]

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
• North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
• The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1934)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1971)
• Grimus (Salman Rushdie, 1975)

Short story collections:

• The Girl With the Golden Eyes and Other Stories (Honoré de Balzac, 1831-35)
• Death in Venice and Other Stories (Thomas Mann, 1897-1912)
• The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1934-50)
• My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (Georges Bataille, 1941-67)
• Collected Stories (Saul Bellow, 1951-95)

Plays:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare, 1595 or '96)

Non-fiction:

• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, 1988/2002)
• More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts [Updated and Expanded Edition] (James Naremore, 1998/2008)
• Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Kristin Thompson, 1999)
• Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Ray Carney, 2001)
• Rio Bravo (Robin Wood, 2003)

[

Show Spoiler

I also read:

• Tao Té Ching [R.B. Blakney translation] (Lao Tzu, pretty fucking old)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937)
• The Film Sense (Sergei Eisenstein, 1942)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945/59)
• The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith, 1951)
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
• No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe, 1960)
• The Hunter (Donald Westlake [as Richard Stark], 1962)
• Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)
• Theory of Film Practice (Noël Burch, 1969/73)
• The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (David Bordwell, 1981)
• The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Susan Sontag, 1992)
• Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, 1993)
• Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Stig Björkman, 1993)
• Making Movies (Sidney Lumet, 1995)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens, 2001)

]

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
• North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
• The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1934)
• The Hunter (Donald Westlake [as Richard Stark], 1962)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1971)

Short story collections:

• The Girl With the Golden Eyes and Other Stories (Honoré de Balzac, 1831-35)
• Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (Herman Melville, 1853-1924)
• The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1934-50)
• My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (Georges Bataille, 1941-67)
• Collected Stories (Saul Bellow, 1951-95)

Plays:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare, 1595 or '96)
• Miss Julie and Other Plays (August Strindberg, 1887-1907)

Non-fiction:

• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, 1988/2002)
• On the History of Film Style (David Bordwell, 1997)
• More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (James Naremore, 1998/2008)
• Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Kristin Thompson, 1999)
• Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Ray Carney, 2001)

[

Show Spoiler

I also read:

• Tao Té Ching [R.B. Blakney translation] (Lao Tzu, pretty fucking old)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
• Death in Venice and Other Stories (Thomas Mann, 1897-1912)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937)
• The Film Sense (Sergei Eisenstein, 1942)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945/59)
• The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith, 1951)
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
• No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe, 1960)
• Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)
• The Deep Blue Good-by (John D. MacDonald, 1964)
• Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Peter Wollen, 1969/72)
• Theory of Film Practice (Noël Burch, 1969/73)
• Grimus (Salman Rushdie, 1975)
• The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (David Bordwell, 1981)
• The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Susan Sontag, 1992)
• Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, 1993)
• Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Stig Björkman, 1993)
• Making Movies (Sidney Lumet, 1995)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens, 2001)
• Rio Bravo (Robin Wood, 2003)

]

[ledfloyd]

1. The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon
3. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
4. Dune - Frank Herbert
5. In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan
6. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
7. Trout Fishing in America - Richard Brautigan
8. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut
9. Summer Knight - Jim Butcher
10. Foundation - Isaac Asimov

[D_Davis]

1. The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon
3. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
4. Dune - Frank Herbert

Damn. That's a top 4 that'll be tough to beat.

[Mysterious Dude]

1. Germinal (1885, Émile Zola)
2. In Cold Blood (1966, Truman Capote)
3. Native Son (1940, Richard Wright)
4. Bastard Out of Carolina (1992, Dorothy Allison)
5. Rite of Passage (1968, Alexei Panshin)
6. The House on the Borderland (1908, William Hope Hodgson)
7. The Torture Garden (1899, Octave Mirbeau)
8. Bel Canto (2001, Ann Patchett)
9. Moby Dick (1851, Herman Melville)
10. The Wild Boys (1969, William S. Burroughs)

11. Sans Famille (1878, Hector Malot)
12. Man Plus (1976, Frederik Pohl)
13. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956, João Guimarães Rosa)
14. Swamplandia! (2011, Karen Russell)
15. Mother (1906, Maxim Gorky)
16. Peter Pan (1911, J.M. Barrie)

The ones at the bottom aren't all that bad, really.

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851)
• North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
• The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1934)
• The Hunter (Donald Westlake [as Richard Stark], 1962)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins, 1971)

Short story collections:

• The Girl With the Golden Eyes and Other Stories (Honoré de Balzac, 1831-35)
• Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (Herman Melville, 1853-1924)
• The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1934-50)
• The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1946-52)
• Collected Stories (Saul Bellow, 1951-95)

Plays:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare, 1595 or '96)
• Miss Julie and Other Plays (August Strindberg, 1887-1907)

Non-fiction:

• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, 1988/2002)
• On the History of Film Style (David Bordwell, 1997)
• More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (James Naremore, 1998/2008)
• Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Kristin Thompson, 1999)
• Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Ray Carney, 2001)

[

Show Spoiler

I also read:

• Tao Té Ching [R.B. Blakney translation] (Lao Tzu, pretty fucking old)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
• Death in Venice and Other Stories (Thomas Mann, 1897-1912)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937)
• My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (Georges Bataille, 1941-67)
• The Film Sense (Sergei Eisenstein, 1942)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945/59)
• The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith, 1951)
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
• No Longer at Ease (Chinua Achebe, 1960)
• Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)
• The Deep Blue Good-by (John D. MacDonald, 1964)
• Films and Feelings (Raymond Durgnat, 1967)
• Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Peter Wollen, 1969/72)
• Theory of Film Practice (Noël Burch, 1969/73)
• Grimus (Salman Rushdie, 1975)
• The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (David Bordwell, 1981)
• Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Michel Chion, 1990)
• The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Susan Sontag, 1992)
• Brainquake (Samuel Fuller, 1993)
• Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Stig Björkman, 1993)
• Making Movies (Sidney Lumet, 1995)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens, 2001)
• Rio Bravo (Robin Wood, 2003)
• Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, 2008)

]

[dreamdead]

Everything but comics read in 2015:

Novels:
1. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
2. Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sowers
3. Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories
4. David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
5. Marilynne Robinson’s Lila
6. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout
7. Zadie Smith’s NW
8. Nam Le’s The Boat: Stories
9. Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue
10. Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (Carol)
11. Yuichi Seirai’s Ground Zero: Nagasaki
12. Thomas Sweterlisch’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow
13. Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California
14. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man
15. Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety
16. Margaret Atwood’s The Stone Mattress: Stories
17. Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles: Stories
18. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea
19. Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last
20. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
21. Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling
22. Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660
23. Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train

Nonfiction:
Cyrus Patell’s Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late-Twentieth Century
Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education
Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter
Peter Enns’s The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It
Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time
Stephen Apkon’s The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

Plays:
David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls
Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & the What
Lucas Hnath’s The Christians
David Henry Hwang’s Trying to Find Chinatown: Selected Plays
Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand
Patrick Wang’s The Monologue Plays