/lit/ - Literature

I tried a similar thing a few years ago. I managed to stay on schedule for quite a while. But ended up with 30-40 books.

I might do this casually. Set the goal for 52, at least. If life interferes, so be it. I'm not going to plan each and every book, but I've got a pretty sizable reading list so I won't be running short any time soon. I always want to read short books after long ones and vice versa anyway. It's so refreshing to go from one to the other.

What does everyone plan to start with?

Been meaning to read this for years. Will start the year with it.

>mfw this people think 52 books yearly is a hardcore

>>1385498
>mfw that's wrong

Ah, good. Definitely partaking in this. I could do with some motivation to get off the internet and read more ...

Does research count? If so, I'm at least down 258 books this year already, not including those I read outside of work...

I've read that much since October.

Here's what I'm starting with. (4 of hearts)

GLAD TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS, BUT WILL ONLY BE READING CLASSICS OF CHOICE.

>>1385546
You do realize how pointless that is, seeing as the human brain can't hold that much information, right?

>>1385571
>implying there are no classics from post-WWII

>>1385577
I SHALL USE MY OWN TERM OF CLASSICS FOR MY OWN USE.

FUCK YEAH, HALFWAY THROUGH WAR AND PEACE. PUMPING THROUGH THIS FUCKER.

>>1385573
niggayoujustwentfullretard.jpg

>>1385573
Maybe yours can't

>>1385582
no u

>>1385577
Half a dozen at most

I READ A BIT OF POST WW II, I RECENTLY READ SOME KAWABATA AND LIFE AND FATE.

>>1385596
I REFUSE TO LIVE IN A POST-HIROSHIMA WORLD

>>1385604
THERES SO MUCH QUALITY PRE WW-II WORKS THAT I WILL NEVER READ THEM ALL, SO WHY ADD MORE SHIT TO IT?

>>1385619
you say that as if Ada or Ador isn't one of the greatest novels ever written in english language. Pynchon can do toilet jokes.

but idk i guess it's cool to be at the whim of translators efforts & periods that are harder to relate too.

>>1385632
SOME OF WHAT I READ WAS AUTHORED IN ENGLISH BRO. MOST OF THE TRANSLATIONS I READ ARE MODERN AS WELL.

YEAH, FUCK YEAH

>>1385582
>>1385585
>derp how does i neurology?

miracle bump

>>1385399

>52 books in a year
>challenge

Not with the shit people read around here.

I did this this year, hit my 55th book the other week. I love the idea. Are we using this thread to list some books we plan on reading, or what?

Well I got really bored and made my list. Aces are free, and the order is loosely arranged by the length of the book.

Spades (Japanese lit):
2 = A Personal Matter
3 = The Setting Sun
4 = Diary of a Mad Old Man
5 = Confessions of a Mask
6 = The Waiting Years
7 = Sanshiro
8 = The Samurai
9 = The Sound of the Mountain
10 = The Pillow Book
Jack = The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Queen = I Am a Cat
King = The Tale of Genji

Diamonds (Russian lit):
2 = Notes From Underground
3 = Fathers and Sons
4 = A Hero of Our Time
5 = One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
6 = We
7 = Eugene Onegin
8 = The Master and the Margarita
9 = Ada, or Ardor
10 = Doctor Zhivago
Jack = Life and Fate
Queen = Anna Karenina
King = Crime and Punishment

Clubs (genre stuff):
2 = The Martian Chronicles
3 = Solaris
4 = 1984
5 = A Scanner Darkly
6 = Never Let Me Go
7 = The Left Hand of Darkness
8 = Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
9 = The Sirens of Titan
10 = The Worm Ouroboros
Jack = Dune
Queen = A Game of Thrones
King = The Gormenghast Trilogy

>>1387914
Hearts (other stuff):
2 = The Hour of the Star
3 = Siddhartha
4 = The Plague
5 = Franny and Zooey
6 = If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
7 = Madame Bovary
8 = Moon Palace
9 = The Toilers of the Sea
10 = The Magus
Jack = 2666
Queen = Remembrance of Things Past volume 1
King = Infinite Jest

anyone else willing to post their list?

>>1387976
Diamonds are free. I'm going to get clubbed to death.

Clubs (Bricks)
Ace: Don DeLillo - Underworld
Two: Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March
Three: Joseph McElroy - Women and Men
Four: Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Five: Vladimir Nabokov - Ada
Six: Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
Seven: Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Eight: Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Nine: Andrei Platonov - The Foundation Pit
Ten: Roberto Bolaño - 2666
Jack: William Gaddis - J R
Queen: James Joyce - Ulysses
King: David Foster Wallace - The Pale King

Hearts (Women)
Ace: Elizabeth Bowen - The Death of the Heart
Two: Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Three: Susan Minot - Evening
Four: Christina Steadman - The Man Who Loved Children
Five: Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
Six: Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
Seven: Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Eight: Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin
Nine: Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince
Ten: Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Jack: A.S. Byatt - Possession
Queen: Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
King: Zadie Smith - White Teeth

Spades (Non sequitur)
Ace: Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Two: Kobo Abe - The Ruined Map
Three: Paul Harding - Tinkers
Four: Henry James - Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction
Five: Johnathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City
Six: J.G. Ballard - Empire of the Sun
Seven: George Saunders - CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Eight: John Fowles - A Maggot
Nine: Alain Robbe-Grillet - The Voyeur
Ten: Martin Amis - London Fields
Jack: Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Queen: Gina Barriault - Women in Their Beds
King: Patrick White - Voss

>>1387915
>The Plague
>Franny and Zooey
same except im doing steppenwolf & maybe demian instead of that hesse book you're reading.

I'm honestly going to try for 100 books next year. I can average about a book every 2 days depending on the length, so I think it's a reasonable task. 2 books a week should be no problem, the only thing I can think of is trying to come up with 100 books to read. I'll probably do some rereads of books that I really enjoy.

>>1388429
I'll probably be going for 100 this year as well, since I pulled off 52 pretty easy. I made my list as more of a base. Like those are the ones I MUST read, and then I have 50 or so other ones as I feel like it.

I've done this for the last 2 years. 54 books last year, 76 books this year. The books I've read this year are in the picture. I'm going to try and read 52 books next year, but I actually want to maybe read 100. I don't know. Reading 2 books a week, every week for a year, is pretty hard.

>>1388845
Have you planned out any of the ones you might be reading next year?

>>1387826
>>1387914
>>1387915
Here my list from this year. I pretty much did no longer books, which I'm definitely going to try and correct next year.

Yeah, I'm working on a list. Like the 2010 list, I'm adding to it as I go, and making revisions. I've got about a dozen books so far. I'm going to be focusing on fairly modern books next year, I think. 1900 - 2011. Older books don't appeal to me so much, anymore. I expect I'll mostly be reading literary fiction, bildungsromans, and chick lit. Very little (if any) sci-fi, fantasy, comedy or historical fiction.

The Happy Prince is a great story, I used to listen to an audio book of it all the time, as a child. I didn't know Oscar Wilde wrote it. Are their any limits to that man's talents?

I had a reading goal and didn't reach it. If you do things with that kind of motivation, fine, but it doesn't really help me. Reading is an enjoyment and I'd rather not make it work to fulfill some deadline, or not be able to read what I want on a whim.

>>1385399
I'm not a great reader, so I've only got 14 books set out for the year, which I probably wont even finish them off. I'm also splitting them between easy fiction and fiction for thought.

Norwegien Wood - Murakami
Notes From The Underground - Dostoyevsky
Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis
2666 - Boleno
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey
Nausea - Sartre
Naked Lunch - Burroughs
The Dubliners - Joyce
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
Petersburg - Bely
On The Road - Kerouac
Poet in New York - Lorca
Dracula - Stoker
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

>>1388967
>>mfw The Dubliners

I've made a list for the first ten weeks of 2011. Like 3 of the books are placeholders so I can easily switch for something else. I'm excited though. I've committed myself to rereading LoTR, which I've been putting off for years.

bumping for quality of idea

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I need some clarification. The point would be to draw a random card at the beginning of each week, right? Or do you have to read them in some sort of order?

I started mine in November (there was a thread about it, but little interest was generated) and I'm 7 books in and working on number 8 already. It's tough, but fun so far.

I don't see the point. Reading should be enjoyable, and my life has enough stress in it already without making a fun and enlightening hobby into a chore.

>>1389418
I'm doing that, but I think OP left it a bit open to personal interpretation. But I'm just drawing whenever I finish one.

>>1389440
This approach can be enjoyable too. It's just not for you. No worries!

>>1385498

52 books a year is like minimum. I have read 110 so far this year as well as lots of plays and short stories.

bump

i like this idea - i never feel i read enough because i'm lazy about it...really enjoy a good book when i'm into one, but when tired after work or something it's all too easy to just put on episodes of tv shows instead. i think having some kind of framework like this would help me read a lot more. i'll probably have to add to the list as i go though, i doubt i could think of 52 books i want to read right now.
i'm in - i'm gonna give it a shot

bump

This is fucking stupid. Nothing is accomplished by reading a book, and forcing yourself through one a week is going to dampen your perception and appreciation of a book. One a month would even be too much. You need to give yourself time to mull a work over, to replay events in your head and, ask yourself what the work might be trying to say.

I have a better challenge.

Read one book next year. Just one. You can read it multiple times if you like.

you guys need lives

bmp

>>1391843
Confirmed for slow reading nigger. A month to read a book? Get out.

So let me get this straight–first of all this will be my first year attempting this challenge–but how exactly do you pick what book you will read which week? You assign a book to a specific card, but do you draw at random? Or do you go in order from suit?

And I've never understood what's meant by saying something is "free" when pertaining to cards.

>>1389522

I'm really curious how do you guys have time to read this much? I'm in college and I can barely fit a book in a month because of all the college reading I have to do, and it's really hard to express the amount of reading I do in terms of books, because I read a lot of articles and textbooks.

BUT I really want to start reading more I just can never find the time.

>>1393051
>>1391843

I see what you did there. You're probably talking about close reading, whilst close reading is fun, it's hard to find motivation or direction to do that when you're not studying literature in a classroom setting.

You can think about a book and ponder about it's message/ philosophy but to really explore it requires you to write about it on paper in a coherent structured manner, aka the essay.

52 books in a year sounds doable even for a busy college student. That's 1 book per week.

Though if you're a slow reader like I am and soak in each and every word and think about what you've read after every chapter then I would shoot for 30-40 first and really find an appreciation for the books you are reading of course this means you have to selective. Forget New York best sellers list, go for literature that really matters,

I've read 80 books this year
soon to finish my 81st
feels good man

i am going to participate. i am mainly going to read classics however i want to read the bible too. i am an atheist, but want to be able to have a better understanding of what they believe in. thats why i want to read it.

anyways can i consider like every 250 pages a book, when reading the bible?

Here's my list I compiled last night:

1. Moby Dick
2. House of Leaves
3. The Stranger
4. 2666
5. Fahrenheit 451
6. Ficciones
7. The Yiddish Policeman's Union
8. The Alchemist
9. Crime and Punishment
10. The Count of Monte Cristo
11. Focault's Pendulum
12. The Sound and the Fury
13. The Magus
14. Alas, Babylon
15. Grendel
16. Catch-22
17. The Old Man and the Sea
18. Infinite Jest
19. Ulysses
20. Brave New World
21. The Trial
22. On the Road
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude
24. Blood Meridian
25. The Road
26. Utopia
27. Kafka on the Shore
28. Lolita
29. Animal Farm
30. Fight Club
31. The Gods Themselves
32. The Satanic Verses
33. The Catcher in the Rye
34. East of Eden
35. A Confederacy of Dunces
36. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
37. Slaughter-House Five
38. Cat's Cradle
39. The Sun Also Rises
40. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
41. The God Delusion
42. A Brief History of Time
43. The Picture of Dorian Gray
44. American Gods
45. The Martian Chronicles
46. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
47. Neuromancer
48. Stranger in a Strange Land
49. Dune
50. Perdido Street Station
51. Hyperion
52. Snow Crash

List isn't completely final and I'm still working out exactly where to place them on what card/suit and how I'm going to go about picking them weekly.

>mfw i realised these niggers gonna make such worthless threads every week throughout the year posting their stupid "results" and "stats"

Darn .

>>1394549
Better than the normal faggotry in /lit/

People will be ACTUALLY READING and talking about it.

>>1393758
>anyways can i consider like every 250 pages a book, when reading the bible?
Sure, if you give up considering all those Dr Seuss and Kurt Vonnegut Jr books you're planning on reading as complete separate works.

bumpin in hope of all the reading that'll get done this year

>>1387914
>>1387915
Got all the cover pictures resized and ready to print off now, just need some printer paper of a little thicker consistency to print them out on. I'll then put the suit and numbers on the back of them. Think I'll be using them as bookmarks as well.

>>1387914
>>1387915
Got all the cover pictures resized and ready to print off now, just need some printer paper of a little thicker consistency to print them out on. I'll then put the suit and numbers on the back of them. Think I'll be using them as bookmarks as well.

Challenge accepted. Preparing a list now.

you people need to get jobs and if you already have a job quit your job and look for a job that isn't part-time

>>1396449
im in college, wanna fight bout it

>>1396452

since you're still in school you've probably never experienced a real fight, so yes, i will teach you what it means to fight, i will leave you crippled so that you have an excuse to read books

Awesome, I'll definitely partake. I've got a big pile of books I've been buying faster than I've been reading, so this will be a great way to get through them all; I'll just read one a week.

>>1396449
I have a job, I just happen to not do much. I'm tech support and most days nothing goes wrong, so I have plenty of time to read.

On Goodreads.com there are people that claim to have read more than two thousand books this year. How is that even possible, I wonder.

>>1396459
It's more likely that they just entered all their books into Goodreads this year, making it seem like they read them all this year. But it would be possible, if all you did was read. A 200 page novel would take me maybe 3 hours, so you could get through 4 of those a day. They may also be counting short stories as separate works, which would increase the number greatly.

>>1396459
I dunno man, my internet went out for a couple of days and I got through five books (and I read fairly slow). I'm sure it can be done.

>>1396440
>>1396440

1. My Autobiography - Benito Mussolini
2. Generation X - Douglas Coupland
3. Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
4. Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche
5. The Dig - Alan Dean Foster
6. Jennifer Government - Max Barry
7. The Thatcher Revolution - Earl A. Reitan
8. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
9. The Assassini - Thomas Gifford
10. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule

11. The Revolt of the Masses - Ortega y Gasset
12. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
13. Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
14. On Photography - Susan Sontag
15. Junky - William S. Burroughs
16. Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
17. Perestroika - Mikhail Gorbachev
18. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. Douglas Coupland - Microserfs
20. The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf

21. The 7th Guest - Matthew J. Costello/Craig Shaw Gardner
22. Orthodoxy - G. H. Chesterton
23. Woodrow Wilson - H. W. Brands
24. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
25. Female Chauvinist Pigs - Ariel Levy
26. Social Darwinism in American Thought - Richard Hofstader
27. Post-Capitalism Society - Peter Drucker
28. George H. W. Bush - Timothy Naftali
29. The King of Madison Avenue - Kenneth Roman
30. PopCo. - Scarlett Thomas

31. Foundation - Issaac Asimov *
32. Twilight - Stephanie Meyer *
33. Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within - Jane Jensen
34. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger *
35. Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography - Daniel Tanguay
36. Terror and Liberalism - Paul Berman
37. Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
38. The Turning Point - Nikolai Shmelev & Vladimir Popov
39. The Warhol Economy - Liz Currid
40. Chuck Amuck - Chuck Jones

Twelve wildcards.

Let's fucking do this.

>>1396472

>1. My Autobiography - Benito Mussolini
>My Autobiography

>>1396472
Your list is perfect, your taste, impeccable.

>>1396464
>>1396471
http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3399668?shelf=read

Check John's list. What he reads most is 32-page illustration books...
The only legit reader is Darcy, #6, although I didn't check all of her books.

>>1396487
There's nothing wrong about that.

>>1396487

I've been wanting to read that for a while. I am Italian and I have some family and friends so I think it's important, plus it's not too long. Otherwise, I would have read some John Keegan take on the Second World War.

>>1396578

I was hoping /lit/ might have a list of essentials of which I could choose 52 from?

And yeah I'm new here, first time posting on /lit/ in fact.

Wouldn't it be better to try count the number or pages rather than the books read? 500 pages a week for a total of 26,000.

>>1397197
500 pages a week? I feel bad because I take about 25 hours to read 500 pages, and considering I can only get about 2 hours reading a day, it takes more than a week.

Fuck you guys for making me feel insecure about mu reading skills.

Wouldn't it be better to go by the number of pages rather than the number of books? 500 pages a week for a total of 26,000.

>>1397201
I came up with that number because it's the average length of the novels I have read this year.

If you have a more appropriate number place share with the class.

>>1397206
No, the number is fine. Most people can do that in a week, I was just self-centeredly telling how I am unable to do said number.

>>1397226
This year was kind of weird for me. I started reading about June 1, and am sitting on 39 ~700 page novels atm. Gunslinger will be my 40th.

New Years resolution is simply to beat that.

I like this idea. I was already planning to read a book every week or so and the shuffled deck idea, to me, is perfect.

Will post list later.

>>1396620
If you haven't found the answer yet, check out http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading

>>1396533
Oh, right, and I completely forgot about manga. That guy in the #1 spot I bet is mostly manga, which takes 30 minutes to get through per volume generally.

Four day old thread? How could I not bump?

Alright, here's my list. Feel free to look upon it with scorn/ignore it.

(Clubs- Classic/High School Lit)
(2) Death in Venice- Thomas Mann
(3) The Metamorphosis- Franz Kafka
(4) Night- Eli Wiesel
(5) A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(6) Nine Stories- J.D. Salinger
(7) Lord of the Flies- William Golding
(8) The Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon
(9) Steppenwolf- Hermann Hesse
(10) The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath
(Jack) The Trial- Franz Kafka
(Queen) Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
(King) Dubliners- James Joyce

(Hearts- Genre stuff)
(2) Harrison Bergeron- Kurt Vonnegut
(3) Flatland- Edwin Abbott Abbott
(4) Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
(5) The Golden Compass- Philip Pullman
(6) The Gunslinger- Stephen King
(7) I, Robot- Issac Asimov
(8) The Atrocity Archives- Charles Stross
(9) World War Z- Max Brooks
(10) Pattern Recognition- William Gibson
(Jack) Snow Crash- Neal Stephenson
(Queen) The Left Hand of Darkness- Ursula K. LeGuin
(King) Stranger in a Strange Land

(Diamond- Non fiction)
(2) Minds, Brains and Science- John Searle
(3) A Brief History of Time- Stephen Hawking
(4) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind- Shunryu Suzuki
(5) An Anthropologist on Mars- Oliver Sacks
(6) Society of Mind- Marvin Minsky
(7) Iron and Silk- Mark Saltzman
(8) The Devil in the White City- Erik Larson
(9) A Short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson
(10) How the Mind Works- Steven Pinker
(Jack) Freedom Evolves- Daniel C. Dennett
(Queen) Walden- Henry David Thoreau
(King) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire- Gerald M. Edelman

(Spades- Miscellaneous)
(2) Four Quartets- T.S. Eliot
(3) The Wasteland- T.S. Eliot
(4) The Lottery- Shirley Jackson
(5) The Prophet- Kahlil Gibran
(6) Maus I, II- Art Spiegelman
(7) Einstein's Dreams- Alan Lightman
(8) Portnoy's Complaint- Philip Roth
(9) The Namesake- Jhumpa Lahiri
(10) Kafka on the Shore- Haruki Murakami
(Jack) House of Leaves- Mark Z. Danielewski
(Queen) 100 Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Five wild cards in total.

Recaptcha- lordship's inecknor

I'm a French speaker. All of those are going to be read in French. Sorry for the mistranlsations or the non-translations, I did the best I could.

1. Le compagnon de voyage - Curzio Malaparte
2. Les Bienveillantes - Jonathan Littell
3. Ivan Denissovitch - Alekzandr Solzenitsyn
4. Voyage au bout de la nuit - L-F Céline
5. Crime and Punishment - Fiodor Dostoevsky
6. The Possessed - Fiodor Dostoevsky
7. House of Dolls - Henrik Ibsen
8. Tonio Kröger - Thomas Mann
9. Faust I and II - Goethe
10. The Adolescent - Dostoevsky
11. The House of the Dead - Dostoevsky
12. Anna Karenina - Tosltoï
13. The Gambler - Dostoevsky
14. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
15. Le Testament français - Andrei Makine
16. Metamorphoses - Ovid
17. The Double: A Petersburg Poem - Dostoevsky
18. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics - Mikhail Bakhtin
19. War and Peace - Tolstoï
20. Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais
21. An Hero of our Time - Lermontov
22. Du côté de chez Swann - Proust
23. The Odyssey - Homère
24. Antigone - Sophocles
25. Death of Ivan Illitch - Tosltoï
26. Three Deaths - Tolstoï
27. Master and Servant - Tolstoï
28. Hamlet - Shakespeare
29. Othello - Shakespeare
30. Macbeth - Shakespeare
31. Platonov - Tchekov
32. Ivanov - Tchekov
33. The Seagull - Tchekov
34. Three Sisters - Tchekov
35. Le rouge et le noir - Stendhal
36. The Possibilites of an Island - Michel Houellebecq
37. Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
38. Le médecin malgré lui - Molière
39. The Dark Alleys - Bounin
40 to 52. Jokers

If you people got recommendations based on this list, I'm openned to them.

Bump for more lists.

>>1387914
>>1387915
Finished making my cards! Gonna be using them as mini-bookmarks probably, though I still need to put the suit and numbers on the back.

Not quite 52 but a respectable enough list nonetheless.

http://www.xomba.com/50_must_read_classics_modern_renaissance_man

>>1400353
You could have just used an actual deck of cards, ya know. And used the cards for bookmarks.

How long did that take? lol

>>1402498
But I wanted them to be representative of the books I was reading, with the little covers and everything.

And maybe 1 hour, tops. The longest part was cutting them out.