/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2291059]

So, what's your final reading tally for 2011? I read:
Dubliners - Joyce
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
The Cossacks - Tolstoy
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
Petersburg - Andrei Bely
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
Farenheit 451 - Bradbury
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzenhitsyn
Gulliver's Travels - Swift
Candide - Voltaire
Ward No. 6 - Chekhov
The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy

Pic not really related

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2291280]

*Thomas Paine and the Promise of America - Kaye (80% read in Jan. '11)
*Common Sense/Agrarian Justice - Paine
*Rights of Man - Paine
*1848 - Rapport
*The Second Bill of Rights - Sunstein
*Sailing from Byzantium - Wells
*1453 - Crowley
*Homage to Catalonia - Orwell
*The Basque History of the World - Kurlansky
*A Very Short Introduction: Tocqueville - Mansfield
*A Very Short Introduction: Anarchism - Ward
*The Trial of Henry Kissinger - Hitchens
*All Things Shining - Dreyfus & Kelly
*Letters to a Young Contrarian - Hitchens
Permanently Blue - Loewe
The End of War - Capt. Chappell
*The Odyssey - Homer w/ Fagles trans. (60% read in Dec. '11)

17 books is a personal best. The previous year I read about five with many magazines and newspapers taking up my time.
But last night I took a moment to assess the progress. I still have 32 books left, only 10 of which are fiction, and there's still a dozen or so I want.
Pic thrillingly related!

[*=Recommended]

[Anonymous No.2291302]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Nonexisting Knight by Italo Calvino
The Separate Rose and
The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda
Three short stories by Hemmingway
Short stories by Karamzin, Gogol, Dostoevsky.

Half the way through:

A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson
Imagination by Sartre
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce

Barely started:

Lolita by Nabokov
Brave New Wolrd by Huxley (I hated it, to be honest, I hold no intention to continue)
Ars Poetica by Aristotle

That's it I guess, I don't recall anything substantial enough to be listed. I'm a horrible reader in the sense that books don't hold me as they should. Even when I like them, I feel a need to move to the next one.

[Anonymous No.2291313]

Dune by Frank Herbert
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
Children Of Dune by Frank Herbert
Star Trek The Motion Picture by Gene Roddenberry
Star Trek 2 The Wrath Of Kahn by Vonda McIntyre
Star Trek The Return by William Shatner
Star Trek Crossover by Michael Jan Friedman
Beam Me Up Scotty by James Doohan
The Captains Daughter by Peter David
Star Trek Movie Memories by William Shatner
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwll
I Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

[Anonymous No.2291364]

[Anonymous No.2291371]

Hell if I remember.

[Anonymous No.2291492]

In approximate chronological order:

A Crown of Swords - Robert Jordan
A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin
Mindscan - Robert J. Sawyer
A Clash of Kings - George R.R. Martin
Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
A Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
A Dance with Dragons - George R.R. Martin
Flashforward - Robert J. Sawyer
1632 - Eric Flint
1633 - Eric Flint and David Weber
1634: The Baltic War - Eric Flint and David Weber
The Dragonbone Chair - Tad Williams
The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Stone of Farewell - Tad Williams

[Anonymous No.2291514]

Rasputin: The Last Word - Edvard Radzinsky
Malcolm X's Autobiography - Alex Haley and Malcolm X
The Russian Court at Sea - Frances Welch
L'Etranger - Albert Camus
Othello - Shakespeare
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Translations - Brian Friel
Exile and the Kingdom - Albert Camus
Lithops, Flowering Stones - Desmond T. Cole
The Virgin and the Gipsy - D.H. Lawrence
A History of Nigeria - Toyin and Falola
Afgantsy - Rodric Braithwaite
The Safety of Objects - A.M. Holmes
Atonement - Ian McEwan

[Anonymous No.2291524]

A Dance with Dragons- Maritn
Hunger Games-Collins
Catching Fire - Collins
Omen Machine -Goodkind
Atlas Shrugged -Rand
The Law of Nines -Goodkind
The Essence of Happines: A guidebook for living -Dalai Lama
The Prince -Machiavelli
The Dialogues of Plato
Meditations on First Philosophy -Descartes
1984 -Orwell

[Anonymous No.2291538]

The Adventures of Huck Finn Mark Twain
No Country For Old Men Cormac McCarthy
The Road Cormac Mcarthy
The Turn of The Screw – Henry James
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym – Edgar Allen Poe
Wiseblood – Flannery O’Connor
The Violent Bear It Away – Flannery O’Connor
The Heart of Darkness – Joesph Conrad
Beowulf - ?
Utopia – Sir Thomas More
The Portrait of Lady – Henry James
O Pioneers! – Willa Cather
Black Boy – Richard Wright
Blood Meridian – Cormac Mfer McCarthy
The Marrow of Tradition – Charles Chesnutt
Sir Gawain and The Green Night - ?
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Maggie: Girl of the Streets – Stephen Crane
King Lear - Shakespeare
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Comedy of The Errors- Shakespeare
Richard The III- Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing- Shakespeare
The Castle of Otranto- Horace Walpole
Titus Andronicus- Shakespeare
Othello- Shakespeare- Shakespeare
Measure for Measure- Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale- Shakespeare
The Tempest- Shakespeare
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Willa Cather - My Antonia

currently reading:
Frank Norris - McTeague
Homer - Iliad (Lattimore translation)

[Anonymous No.2291551]

Dubliners
Finnegan's Wake
As I Lay Dying
Madame Bovary
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Kafka on the Shore
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (what can I say, he writes a good page turner)
Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights
Sweet Thursday
The Waste Land (maybe four or five times)
Darkness Visible


ugh, work takes a lot of time out of my life

[Anonymous No.2291580]

The Myth of Sysiphus - Camus
La Muerte y la Doncella - Jew
Kapo - Jew
Atemschaukel - Herta Müller
Tractatus Philosophicus - Motherfucking Wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.2291593]

Actually maybe I'll take some time today to plan out reading for this year.

But sometimes it's more fun if you just go one book at a time without making a list...

[Anonymous No.2291595]

Wow...you guys are fucking amateurs, I thought this was like a very serious literature forum. I read what some of you read in a month or two...and I'm not even that serious of a reader.

[Anonymous No.2291602]

>>2291595
>very serious forum
>4chan

[Anonymous No.2291605]

I read 70 books in 2011, a healthy mix of high and low brow, but I'm not listing them

[Anonymous No.2291606]

I couldn't possibly keep a list of what I knock back in a year. Admire the organizational skills of some here, I guess.

(I tried one year and gave up around May.)

[Anonymous No.2291608]

>>2291595
>implying professional readers

[Anonymous No.2291607]

Eksile - Jakob Ejersbo
Liberty - Jakob Ejersbo
Revolution - Jakob Ejersbo
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Stand - Stephen King
While We Were Dreaming - Clemens Meyer
Animal's People - Indra Sinha
Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer - Chris Salewicz
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
We, The Drowned - Carsten Jensen

[Anonymous No.2291610]

>>2291364

I like this one a lot. Could you give me a top-5? Exclude isoiaf because I've read that already.

[Anonymous No.2291614]

Can't remember, hell I can barely remember my A-level work which took up the first third of the year.

[Anonymous No.2291627]

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace
some Psych novelization
Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer
Hiroshima - John Hersey
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
Boomerang - Michael Lewis
The Actual - Saul Bellow
The Metamorphosis & Other Stories - Franz Kafka
The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Lawrence Sterne
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - B. Frank
Utopia - Thomas More
Macbeth - Shakespeare
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Look At The Birdie - Vonnegut
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
The Trial & Death of Socrates - Plato
Dao De Jing - ???
Storm of Steel - Junger
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
The Bedwetter - Sarah Silverman
The Is A Book - Dimitri Martin
Free-Range Chickens - Simon Rich
The Manual of Detection - Jedidiah Berry


That's all I remember.

[Anonymous No.2291628]

>>2291595
>everybody else is amateurs

So people pay you to read books, then?

Reading is a hobby and most people have multiple hobbies.

[Anonymous No.2291633]

>>2291610
Hard to make a top 5 but I'll try.

In no particular order
The Stranger by Camus
Beyond Sleep by Willem Frederik Hermans
Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

And lets do a split for the last position between 'Wasp', 'Lies of Locke Lamora', 'Candide', 'Call of the Wild' and 'To Your Scattered Bodies Go'.

I thought ASOIAF got pretty boring past the first three books.

[Anonymous No.2291653]

I read a few but the one that I am most proud of is

A people's Tragedy by Orlando Figes

It's a fucking goliath.

Took me 2 weeks of 6hrs reading a day to get through it

[Anonymous No.2291671]

>>2291633

Awesome, thanks. I actually have Leviathan Wakes unread on my shelf.

[Anonymous No.2291722]

These 166 books. Was planning to read two more but I ended up being drunk most of the past two days.

I found tons of favorites this year - Kornel Esti, The Hearing Trumpet, The Summer Book, Today I Wrote Nothing, Too Loud a Solitude, Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies, everything by Kenji Miyazawa and Izumi Kyoka and Akutagawa.

I'm currently reading on Siddhartha, The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho, so one of those should be my first book read of 2012.

[Anonymous No.2291765]

>>2291059

I can see why...most of those books are under a 100 pages. Try reading REAL books next time little guy.

>>2291608
>>2291628

Yeah...you guys are retards. How is it hard to read a 200-300 page book once week? Some of these people haven't even read 20 books this year. Fifty-two books of that size isn't even hard, I'd expect two-three times that to be read in a year by someone who is even semi-serious about reading. Inb4 DURR BUT WE'RE NOT SERIOUS DURR

Also, for the record, I go to university full time at 14-18 credits/semester. Volunteer in a hospital and a lab. I also take piano lessons and record my own music. My fucking point isn't to spell out my life, but that I have shit to do too and I'm not paid to read. So fuck you.

[Anonymous No.2291767]

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
The Castle - Kafka
Lolita - Nabokov.
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Let us Now Praise Famous Men - James Agee
Bastard out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison
Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Rumi: The Fire of Love - Nahal Tajadod
The Ground Beneath her Feet - Salman Rushdie
Diary of a Snail - Gunter Grass
The Ways of White People - Langston Hughes

[Anonymous No.2291773]

>>2291765
>complain if other people read less books than you
>complain if other people read more books than you

Autism.

[Anonymous No.2291794]

>>2291773
Where did he complain about people reading more?

[Anonymous No.2291798]

>>2291773

Holy shit you're retarded. How did you even come to that conclusion?

[Anonymous No.2291799]

>>2291765
How's that non-existent social life going?

[Anonymous No.2291818]

>>2291799

Argumentum ad hominem, also ad absurdum

How's it feel like reading 20 pages/hour? Fucking downie.

[Anonymous No.2291841]

On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks - Jack Kerouac
Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
Factotum - Charles Bukowski
The Island - Aldous Huxley
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Let The Great World Spin - Colum McCann
On the Genealogy of Morality - Fredrich Nietzsche
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Rum Diary - Hunter Thompson
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter Thompson
Tweak - Nic Sheff
Beautiful Boy - David Sheff
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Junkie - William Burroughs
The Soft Machine - William Burroughs

[Anonymous No.2291850]

>>2291818
>accusing someone of Argumentum ad hominem et ad absurdum and doing the same in the following sentence

[Anonymous No.2291860]

>>2291850

False, people's lack of reading and slow reading rates is central to the argument, so it's fair game. My social life has nothing to do with the argument, instead attacking the speaker, hence ad hominem.

[Anonymous No.2291874]

>>2291722
Death of a Salesman isn't a book you fucking illiterate

[Anonymous No.2291884]

>>2291860
People's ammount of time for reading higly correlates to the ammount of free time for themselves they have in general, and social life -or lack thereof- plays a huge part on that, since it takes up a lot of time that could've been spent reading.

Now, if you're putting down other people for their lack of reading, which was pretty much uncalled for, I think it's fair that they should put you down in the area you yourself are lacking on.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2291894]

>>2291860
I'm not following this, but I'd just like to come out in defense of "slow readers"
If I had no job, I estimate that I'd have knocked out 4x the amount of books I did. But besides that, I stop and ponder a lot of these subjects I get into, and on top of that my mind wanders into ideas for stories and such. These are all a part of why I read in the first place.

I'm not knocking speedier readers of course

[Anonymous No.2291903]

>>2291874
>>2291874

Yes it is you tard

[Anonymous No.2291913]

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5142765-matthew?read_at=2011

[Anonymous No.2291925]

Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Cities of the Red Night, William Burroughs
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
How Marxism Works, Chris Harmin
Arc of Justice, Kevin Boyle
In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizakio
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
American China Town, Boonie Tsu
Have Gun Will Travel, Ronin Ro
The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy
States of Desire, Edmund White
Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
Food Rules, Michal Pollan
The Man who Sold the World, William Klienecht
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
Africa’s Turn, Edward Miguel
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs
America, Jean Baudrillard

[Anonymous No.2291930]

>>2291874

Yeah it is, it's just not a novel.

Hey, look at my pic, it's a fucking book.

[Anonymous No.2291943]

>>2291913
>read 231 books in a year
>over 100 of which are less than 120 pages

[Anonymous No.2291955]

>>2291943

And? It's a record of everything I read. Some are novelettes/short stories, plays, and a few poems. Am I not suppose to read short stories, novelettes, plays and poems?

[Anonymous No.2292170]

>>2291903
Death of a Salesman is a 1949 play

Get a grip on yourself dumbfuck

[Anonymous No.2292314]

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Notes from Underground - Dostoyevsky
1984 - George Orwell
Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise - Fitzgerald
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Nine Stories - Salinger
Franny and Zooey - Salinger
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Basic Eight - Daniel Handler
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Picasso's War - Russell Martin
Everything is Illuminated - J.S. Foer
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

pretty entry-level stuff. I've always enjoyed reading, but have just now become dedicated to it.

[Anonymous No.2292322]

I really don't know. I read at least seventy books this year so I couldn't possibly name them all from memory.

[Anonymous No.2292342]

I only read one book but I enjoyed it. Don Quixote