Another year is here, so it must be time for another Reading Resolution. You might remember last year's resolution, which I bombed.
That, however, is okay. This is less a "to do" list than it is a guiding hand. I aim to read these 80, but, if I don't, life will go on. And if something else catches my fancy this year, I plan to read it without feeling the pangs of guilt I felt last year.
Have you read any of these? Any recommendations?
That, however, is okay. This is less a "to do" list than it is a guiding hand. I aim to read these 80, but, if I don't, life will go on. And if something else catches my fancy this year, I plan to read it without feeling the pangs of guilt I felt last year.
Have you read any of these? Any recommendations?
Ahmed, The Land of Invisible Women
Avant, If God were Real
Balzac, Cousin Bette
Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece
Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Barry, The Secret Scripture
Bolano, The Savage Detectives
Buckley, Boomsday
Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Chevalier, Burning Bright
Conescu, Being Written
Connolly, Nocturnes
Cox, The Meaning of Night
Daniels, Futureproof
Davis, The Thin Place
Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney
Dick, Now Wait for Last Year
Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes
Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Eliot, The Lifted Veil
Eliot, Brother Jacob
Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Herbert, The White Plague
Hickey, The Painted Kiss
Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
Hugo, Les Miserables
Keret, The Girl on the Fridge
King, Under the Dome
Langan, The Keeper
Levine, Illegal
Listfield, Best Intentions
Maazel, Last Last Chance
MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
MacLean, Why the Long Face?
Mann, Death in Venice
McCabe, The Butcher Boy
Meek, The People's Act of Love
Oates, Because it is Bitter, and Because it is my Heart
Oates, Little Bird of Heaven
Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
O'Connor, Wise Blood
Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl
Parker, Ovenman
Pattillo, Mr. Darcy Broke my Heart
Peace, Tokyo Year Zero
Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Picardie, Daphne
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Powers, The Echo Maker
Powers, Generosity
Preston, The Monster of Florence
Price, Clockers
Pyncheon, V
Radcliffe, The Italian
Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Rice, Blood and Gold
Russell, St. Lucy's Home
Straub, Ghost Story
Stross, Accelerando
Svoboda, Trailer Girl
Teuthold, The Necromancer
Thomson, Soft
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Trollope, Barchester Towers
Wallace, Oblivion
Watts, Blindsight
Wellington, Monster Island
Wharton, The House of Mirth
Wharton, The Buccaneers
White, The Aunt's Story
White, Voss
Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
Zweig, Beware of Pity
TOTAL = 80
TOTAL READ = 5
Avant, If God were Real
Balzac, Cousin Bette
Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece
Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Barry, The Secret Scripture
Bolano, The Savage Detectives
Buckley, Boomsday
Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Chevalier, Burning Bright
Conescu, Being Written
Connolly, Nocturnes
Cox, The Meaning of Night
Daniels, Futureproof
Davis, The Thin Place
Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney
Dick, Now Wait for Last Year
Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes
Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Eliot, The Lifted Veil
Eliot, Brother Jacob
Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Herbert, The White Plague
Hickey, The Painted Kiss
Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
Hugo, Les Miserables
Keret, The Girl on the Fridge
King, Under the Dome
Langan, The Keeper
Levine, Illegal
Listfield, Best Intentions
Maazel, Last Last Chance
MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
MacLean, Why the Long Face?
Mann, Death in Venice
McCabe, The Butcher Boy
Meek, The People's Act of Love
Oates, Because it is Bitter, and Because it is my Heart
Oates, Little Bird of Heaven
Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
O'Connor, Wise Blood
Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl
Parker, Ovenman
Pattillo, Mr. Darcy Broke my Heart
Peace, Tokyo Year Zero
Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Picardie, Daphne
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Powers, The Echo Maker
Powers, Generosity
Preston, The Monster of Florence
Price, Clockers
Pyncheon, V
Radcliffe, The Italian
Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Rice, Blood and Gold
Russell, St. Lucy's Home
Straub, Ghost Story
Stross, Accelerando
Svoboda, Trailer Girl
Teuthold, The Necromancer
Thomson, Soft
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Trollope, Barchester Towers
Wallace, Oblivion
Watts, Blindsight
Wellington, Monster Island
Wharton, The House of Mirth
Wharton, The Buccaneers
White, The Aunt's Story
White, Voss
Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
Zweig, Beware of Pity
TOTAL = 80
TOTAL READ = 5
13 comments:
Oh, you are going to LOVE We Were the Mulvaneys. That book broke my heart.
Looking forward to reading more--I've always wanted to read Cousin Bette.
Happy new year!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Shadow of the Wind are both absolutely amazing; I couldn't put them down. Under the Dome was pretty much what you would expect from King; similar ideas to many of his other novels and a disappointing ending but still relatively entertaining. I seond We Were the Mulvaneys - I'm not a huges Oates fan, but I quite enjoyed that novel. Also, this might just be me but I'd take Tolstoy over Dostoevky any day. As far as War and Peace, it really depends on your edition - a friend of mine had a different edition than I did that ended when the story did while mine had another fifty pages talking about whether human actions make a difference or is history is already predetermined by greater actions. After 1400 pages of novel, I could have passed on the philosophy discussion.
I would highly recommend both Connolly's Nocturnes and MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees. Both are excellent reads. Good luck in the coming year!
The Secret Scriptures is beautifully written. I haven't read Daniel Deronda but the movie is fabulous. The House of Mirth is a favorite of mine but the Buccaneers was disappointing. Absolutely do not watch the movie of the Buccaneers before reading the book. They are quite a bit different. Some of the books you listed I would read for the title alone.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is a great read, an emotional rollercoaster which had me in tears when I first read it.
Barchester Towers is great fun, and Voss is a difficult but rewarding read.
I've read and liked a number of these (and there's one on your list I see I have to read, The Necromancer), but my favorite of the past few years is Buckley's Boomsday. It is a wonderful book. Read it soon!
Fall On Your Knees was beautiful and wretched and made me weep like a slightly-less-big-than-I-am girl. In the Land of Invisible Women made me weep because I will never get those hours back. Rantier thoughts plus hilARious quotes on that one here:
http://booksidoneread.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-land-of-invisible-women-female.html
I cannot recommend Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita highly enough. It's quite simply the best book I've ever read.
Anna Karenina, Shadow of the Wind, The Echo Maker, Fall on Your Knees, and The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay are all fantastic books. Just those alone would be a spectacular reading year, which I wish you in '10.
The Secret Scripture, Les Miserables, Fall On Your Knees, and The Echo Maker, Death in Venice,The People's Act of Love-don't miss those. My brief review (I don't like giving away too many details,) and several other's opinions of The Echo Maker are here if it interests you:
http://freshinkbooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/echo-maker-by-richard-powers.html
I look forward to your thoughts on those you read.
Great blog you have here, I've book marked you (my google follower only allows me 300 so it's full). So I'll be back to look around again. happy reading in 2010.
I thought The Savage Detectives was excellent but it's not for the faint of heart. I wish I hadn't waited as long as I did to read Don Quixote; it was that good. Kavalier & Clay was pretty good too. I thought Twilight of the Superheroes was going to be better. I think The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy's best, but that's just me. Read the unabridged version of Les Miserables; it would be a shame to miss a single word of that story. Oates' Because It Is Bitter... is one of her best and I liked it better than We Were the Mulvaneys (though that was a good one as well). The Zen book made an impression on me that still resonates. Hated Anna Karenina but loved War and Peace.
I would recommend Some Fun: Stories and a Novella by Antonya Nelso. They were great as were the ones in Say You Are Not One of Them by Uwem Akpan. It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini was an outstanding young adult novel. I finally got around to Night by Elie Wiesel and couldn't put it down. 2666 by Bolano was even better than The Savage Detectives. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause by Tom Gjelten was fascinating and the most enjoyable nonfiction read of the year for me. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman was just fun.
Oh, that reminds me: don't miss Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters or the more impressive Magic for Beginners also by her. I liked The Boat by Nam Le as well as The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. I resisted reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for a long time and it was quite enjoyable; the follow-up book of short stories by her was not so good. I loved Ben Okri's The Famished Road but I can see where it would not appeal to many. Falling Man by Don DeLillo was my first by this author but it won't be my last. Snow by Orhan Pamuk had a Russian feel to it that I liked.
Okay, I'm out of control here. I will end by saying that if you haven't read The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector then you are missing of the the great novels of the past century.
Definitely read The Shadow of the Wind.
I also second (or is it third?) Fall On Your Knees, although it's been many years since I read it.
I read Monsters of Templeton and really enjoyed it. My comments are here if you're interested.
Of the contemporary novels, I really liked Shadow of the Wind and Kavalier & Clay. For the classics I highly recommend House of Mirth, it's the book that made me love Wharton. The Buccaneers is also good but she died before finishing it, so someone else wrote the ending and it's not as good. I've read War & Peace and Anna Karenina, not my favorites.
I have not actually read Mayor of Casterbridge or Death Comes for the Archbishop but I have heard great things about both. I've read Trollope but not Barchester Towers, also heard great things about it.
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