Out of all the books you've read this year, which ones are your favorites?
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Books you've read this year
Out of all the books you've read this year, which ones are your favorites?
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Pale Fire, with Blinding or Moving Parts being number 2
I also enjoyed Pale Fire, it's the first work of Nabokov I've read.
Can you share the author for the other two?
>The plot of The Ball and the Cross chronicles a hot dispute between two Scotsmen, one a devout but naive Roman Catholic, the other a zealous but naive atheist. Their fanatically held opinions—leading to a duel that is proposed but never fought—inspire a host of comic adventures whose allegorical levels vigorously explore the debate between theism and atheism.
Sounds very intriguing, thank you anon!
That's a very interesting take on the Bible, anon.
>Ringworld
That's a classic.
What do you think of Crichton?
Seems like a short, easy read. If I can find it in italian I'll definitely read it. Thanks, anon!
>Crichton
I mean, just look at how many of his books were adapted to movies that are still considered classics to this day.
Cartarescu for Blinding and Magdalena Tulli for Moving Parts
Thank you
The Ball and Cross was my favourite.
I actually read the Bible for the first time. Reading it without biases as I haven't been to an actual church since the 90's, and I actually do think it can help teach lessons for life, as long as you don't take it to extremes like some people in the middle east or from Westboro Baptist have. Also I think the book is trying to teach stuff about the world, but using metaphors, but those metaphors have been muddled from 2000 years of bad translations and translator biases changing the meaning. For example, "Let there be Light" could be a primitive explanation of the big bang, and 7 days (or 7 billion years) later, when the first animals walked the earth.
I read the Superman omnibus vol. 1. Can never go wrong with the OG Superman. The stories are very simplistic, but I don't think that hurts it, as its one of the very first stepping stones on which the entire comic book industry was built.
Got some simple books on geology recently. Simple pocket guides for rock hunting. It's a fun harmless hobby that gets me out doors and whatnot.
Also got really into reading some old scifi novels like Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama. I really like the way older scifi novels read. Nowadays modern scifi is filled with nonsens scifi mumbo jumbo word vomit that don't really mean anything, but sounds impressive, meanwhile, scifi stories from back in the day are really trying to explain really far out ideas using the limited vocabulary available at the time. So you get introduced to some really cool concepts and ideas, nothing like modern scifi which is all some variation of star wars or star trek knockoff with badguy of the week and the same spaceship laser fights over and over.
Sweet days of discipline right now
Calasso gay?
No but I learned of him after I finished the book and was reading up on Fleur Jaeggy, definitely want to read him soon.
Renegades was my favorite this year.
>Elric of Melniboné
What did you think of it? I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
The sound and the fury and Hamlet. Recommend me short books. I think I'm done with Faulkner.
Lermontov - A Hero Of Our Time. Severely underrated.
will check it out
I've only read 6, of which I loved Mason and Dixon the most. The liveliness of the language, the humour, made me order Gravity's Rainbow straightaway.
I'm currently a third into Gaddis' The Recognitions and I already know it will end up in my top 5, if not higher. I've never read a book with such ambition and skill. Wish it was posted more often.
haven't read Gravity's Rainbow yet but I've heard it doesn't have as much soul as M&D, which kind of put me off reading it for a while. I'd be interested in hearing other anons thoughts on this.
I read all 18 books in the Dresden files and indistractible. I’m an avid reader but only the pulpiest bullshit I can find.
I've been slacking this year.
>Republic by Plato
What do you want me to say? It was fine. I think in a modern context, it has plenty of good wisdom, but it clearly is a product of its time as well.
>My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
One of those books I got when I was younger and never ended up reading (Funny enough, I got it for a high school assignment and just lied that I read it). Very clearly made for normies, but there's some depth to read into if you care to. Wish I read it when I was younger, because I would've really dug it, but reading it now, it's alright.
>American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
I hate this book. I understand that the point of it is to be incredibly boring, grating, and annoying, but it just didn't engage me whatsoever. Even the gore put me to sleep. I certainly got some black comedy out of it, but it's just so long and drawn out that it's excessively difficult to pay attention to.
>Watership Down by Richard Adams
Really enjoyable. Not much super important or deep to read in it; it's a very surface level kind of story but that doesn't mean it's bad. It reminds me of ancient myths. Easily my favorite of this set, very hard to surpass the line "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you."
Currently reading Gravity's Rainbow.
I've been trying to get back into reading. Read Pale Fire which I absolutely adored, then started Wuthering Heights which I've kind of been slacking on, it's kind of a dry start
Started the Bible as well
I found Wuthering Heights got a lot better the further on I read, so if you push through a little bit more you may start to enjoy it.
i honestly didn't enjoy the sorrows of young werther all too much, it just kind of dragged on and compared to excerpts i've seen from faust it seems pretty sub-par. mishima blew me away as usual though - loved the temple of the golden pavilion and i will be doing my best to finish the sea of fertility asap
Is Stendhal good? I've read the first chapter and found the prose rather sterile.
What’s the book to the right of Werther?
poetry book by dasha nekrasova, don't bother lmao
I love werther, but I love Faust more. They're very different books so I could see you still enjoying Faust immensely. Well Part 2 is radically different at least.
Stendahl is excellent, I don't see him in the other pic you're replying to, but the text is small and I might just be unable to read it. Id suggest starting with Charterhouse
Oh I think I mistook the cover of Young Werther for Stendhal's The Red and The Black. The colours are similar.
hi isao i loved you in runaway horses
Is platform worth picking up? I really enjoyed atomized
Favorites:
1. Histories, Herodotus.
2. The First Philosophers, Waterfield.
3. Ficciones, Borges.
which would you say is the story from ficciones? I'd say Las ruinas circulares, El sur and then probably La biblioteca de Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
My favorite ones were: La forma de la espada, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, El acercamiento a Almotásim.
Hard to say because really they're all good.
is it true that Edith Hamilton's Mythology is quite shit and too shallow?
No. I guess some people don't like it because it's written and structured like an encyclopedia, and because it's written in a very simple style, as it was intended to be read by high schoolers.
It's excellent and all you need outside of actually reading Homer.
1. Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
2. The Counsellor by Cormac McCarthy
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
4. All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
5. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
6. Anabasis by Xenophon (translated by Carleton Brownson)
7. Egil's Saga by Unknown Icelander (translated by Bernard Scudder)
8. Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone By Madison Smartt Bell
9. Death on the Installment Plan by Louis Ferdinand Celine
10. The Plague by Albert Camus
11. Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq
12. Funeral Games by Mary Renault
13. The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima
14. Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell
15. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Favorites so far
Anabasis
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Death on the Installment Plan
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
I’ve been on a ‘start with the Greeks’ kick ever since I read The Iliad last year and I picked up Anabasis because it made IQfy‘s top 100 last year. I really enjoyed that.
I also really enjoyed For Whom the Bell Tolls. The love story was a little cringey at times but so many great scenes.
I nearly got filtered by Death on the Installment plan. I was growing weary of the tirades of pessimism and misanthropy. I wasn’t even enjoying the scenes of lewdness because they inevitably became sordid and depressing as well. It turned around for me once he got the job with the scientist/charlatan/publisher/farmer and I got emotionally involved with the story again. The ending somehow surprisingly moved me.
I just finished up Mani by Paddy Fermor. I’m stealing a line from somebody (not sure where I saw somebody say it. Could be here, or Reddit or a Goodreads or Amazon review.) Anyway to quote someone else, I wish I discovered Paddy Leigh Fermor’s books when I was 20 instead of Kerouac and Burroughs. Now Fermor enjoyed travel and wine and chasing tail like Kerouac but he also knew foreign languages and history and art history. Kerouac was a philistine in comparison. But I am glad I did discover Fermor even if it is a little later than I would have liked. It made me want to visit Greece and hike up hills to see mosaics in Monasteries then go drink retsina or oozou with some village shepherds or fishermen
review
The Relic, by Eça de Queiroz (in PT)
The Age of Fable, by Thomas Bulfinch (in PT)
I'm slow, kek
Not counting rereads, from the past few months I really got into Williams. Favorites are Spring and All, and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. I was finally able to appreciate DH Lawrence’s poetry. Especially Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. I really liked Ford Maddox Ford’s The March of Literature, which is pretty much just a history book of literature. Even though they were tedious at times I liked what Frazer and Jung are about. Got into Dickens (GE, BH, ATOTC). Went through a Henry James month as well
I just finished Antkind by Charlie Kaufman. Honestly really brilliant stuff. It's probably the funniest book I've ever read, up there with A Confederacy of Dunces
I read flowers for algernon and don’t understand how he didn’t get nobel even he was israeli. Very good
I've read 6 books
>hollbecqs Seratonin
>Celine's death in dividends
>Jung Chang wild swans
>John Toland's hitler biography
>Hamsuns Hunger
>Woolf to the lighthouse
bad reading year for me, cant focus well
Thoughts on Serotonin?
its great, I loved all the descriptions of how hopeless MC felt at every step of the way and just gradually lost more and more desire to do anything
I was also unaware of the whole farmer subplot before reading it so I got nice experience of reading about it as it was dominant story in the news at the time
I haven't read any books this year.
Why?
I just finished Babel. I liked it until I realized every white character in it was evil.