TOP 3 BOOKS IN 2017

MacDonald - The Culture of Critique
Schmitt - On Dictatorship
Hubbard - Dianetics

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe
Siddartha, Hesse
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, Gadda

- The subtle art of not giving a f**k
- The art of the argument
- Something by Zizek or some feminist

The most patrician post yet

I haven't been reading much besides puzzle/textbooks this year ):
If I had to pick 3 nonschool/puzzle books with actual writing
1. The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality
2. The Planiverse
3. Euler's Gem

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley
Amongst Women - John McGahern

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Grapes of Wrath
Mythology - Edith Hamilton

Yes, I know. I'm new to read.

1. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
2. when I reread Gravity's Rainbow
3. I am reading Frankenstein, and enjoying it a lot

1: crime and punishment
2: the picture of dorian gray
3:one day in the life of ivan denisovich

that's all i've read so far this year.

Tough one, OP. I think I'll have to go with Idylls of the King, Washington: A Life, and The Sickness Unto Death if I ignore re-reads.

started ulysses last year but finished beginning of january, so
>ulysses
>moby dick
>grande sertão: veredas (devil to pay in the backlands)

>grande sertão: veredas (devil to pay in the backlands)
nice

Debord - Society of the Spectacle
Kierkegaard - Either/Or
Gabel - La Fausse Conscience

The last title is what Deleuze and Guattari stole most of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus from Notable mentions include: Invitation to a Beheading, The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot.

>The last title is what Deleuze and Guattari stole most of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus from
explain

>Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
>The Waves by Woolf
>Giovanni's Room by Baldwin
honorable mention to Salinger's Franny and Zooey

John Williams - Stoner
G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
Homer - Iliad

1. moby dick
2. the castle
3. libra

1. Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner
2. Hopscotch, Cortazar
3. Ulysses, Joyce

William Gass - The Tunnel
Donald Ray Pollock - The Devil All the Time
Norm MacDonald - Based on a True Story

but i'm currently reading jr by gaddis and, 300 pages in, i think it'll kick gass off the list

Omensetter's luck
Seiobo there below
Infinite Jest.

Job - Joseph Roth
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
The Master and Margharita - Bulgakov
Bonus: Tolkien

Not spectacular, I know.

>grande sertão: veredas
Sounds very interesting. Are you Brazilian? Do you think it's true that most of the book's spirit is lost in translation?

That would be a bit much to hash out on here, but maybe Debord's take on it will give you a bit of insight:

"The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia, established by Gabel must be placed in this economic process of materialization of ideology. Society has become what ideology already was. The removal of praxis and the anti-dialectical false consciousness which accompanies it are imposed during every house of daily life subjected to the spectacle; this must be understood as a systematic organization of the "failure of the faculty of encounter" and as its replacement by a hallucinatory social fact: the false consciousness of encounter, the "illusion of encounter." In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality. Ideology is at home; separation has built its world."

There are too many individual concepts that Deleuze and Guattari "borrowed" from Gabel to make a complete list in this context.

Also Debord >>>> D&G every time. He wrote in a hundred pages what took them a thousand.

they aren't even similar thinkers

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
In Search of Lost Time by Proust
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov

Who is it that is always talking about Veeky Forums books if ya'll are just reading them for the first time?

WHO WAS PHONE?

I don't understand.

1. Seiobo There Below - Laszlo Krasznahorkai
2. Correction - Thomas Bernhard
3. The Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald

1) The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

2) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

3) Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss

3 anons have picked krazsnahorkai as their #1. 3 different books as well.

Is Seiobo There Below any good? Think its the only one of his major books that I havent read.

Thou shalt know your meme, user...

>thy

Right, but I was also hinting at a certain website...

oh

Dude, I don't remember what I read last month. Do you expect me to remember what I read the whole year?

>doesnt know petersburg, tristam shandy, baudrillard or deleuze and guattari
>calls other choices "shit"
>he choses entry level litcore

leave

They both stem from Gabel and were looking to discuss the same principle - just because D&G were closely identified as poststructuralists that doesn't change the fact that they both function within the same tradition.

yes I am brazilian. I've read a few pages of a translation I've found online, obviously it isn't the same thing, there are quite a bit of "slangs" from colloquial language used in the north of brazil and a bit of the prose quality is lost, but I believe it is still a great book and well worth to read even translated if you are interested in it. its about 600 pages of monologue, without chapters. an amazing work, my favorite brazilian novel and one of the most important works of modernism in brazil

Am I the only person who thinks Ivan Denisovich reads like it is describing an American middle/high school? Especially the checking the temperature and hoping for a snow day. I read it my freshman year of high school and it was too relatable to me. Then again that was 6 years ago (Jesus Christ) so I could be misremembering or just have been an edge lord back then.

The only book I read this year was The Bell Curve, and it was pretty good. Very informative.

A Bend in the River - Naipul
Laurus - Vodolazkin
Dark Money - Mayer

You're an embarrassment.

Women and Men - Joseph McElroy
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

Might replace one of those with The Magic Mountain, but I can't decide which.

The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow - George R.R. Martin
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams

Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus
Hesse - Sidhartha
Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

Gilgamesh
La vida es sueño
The Savage Detectives

John Crowley - Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
Francois Mauriac - The Knot of Vipers
Antonio Lobo Antunes - The Land at the End of the World

1. The Lord of The Rings
2. A Song of Ice and Fire
3. Harry Pottor

now THIS is bait

...

Okay thanks! Will definitely check it out.

Good taste

>Lowry
My nig, I loved the chapter where Hugh was on the boat being a faggot

thanks fellows, this year was definitely the best one literature wise, some really great books.

honourable mentions: aeschylus' and sophocles' complete plays, the lusiads by camões, os sertões by euclides da cunha, book of disquiet and infinte jest

I just read an interview with a woman (australian but raised in brazil) that started translating it to english, the initial 'contract' to finish the translation is 3 years, and confirming what I said, for her, the most diffcult aspect of it is translating the colloquial portuguese that people speak in the north of brazil, because there is no equivalent in english. It would be logical to compare to that of rednecks, but that would make it seem like the novel was set in the US, so she has basically to re-create in english the words/neologisms Guimarães Rosa used in portuguese.

for instance, the first word of the novel is Nonada, which doesn't exist. 'No' could mean 'In' something, like 'no carro' = 'in the car', and 'Nada' means 'Nothing'. The book is full of little words like that, so I can imagine the challenge that is to translate it. She decided to go with 'Nonought'.

it is interesting that Guimarães could speak about 10 languages, and in the german and spanish translations, he actively helped the guys that were translating it, and he was very happy with the spanish translation.

A Sportsman’s Sketches
Dead Souls
Revolutionary Road

Moby Dick
Kaputt (by Malaparte)
Labyrinths (Borges)

>it is interesting that Guimarães could speak about 10 languages, and in the german and spanish translations
Good to know, since I will read it German. I just learned that his book is compared to Berlin Alexanderplatz in term of style, so I can absolutly relate to the difficulties of translating this kind of literature. When I read Berlin Alexanderplatz I was always wondering how tf one would translate certain passages.

ahhhh thats very nice man. thought you were reading it in eglish. that woman in the interview made a critic about the english translation, that it successfully translated the story behind it but failed a bit translating the culture of where it takes place.

also, since you are german, Im gonna link thid interview which is one of the very few apparitions of Rosa in video youtu.be/ndsNFE6SP68

he was also a diplomat and stood in Hamburg as a counsel.

Spinoza's Ethics
Swann's Way
The Gulag Archipelago V1

Basically every book I have read this year has been excellent.

Then you are either not reading enough or making very safe choices.

Stoner — Williams
The Nigger of Narcissus — Conrad
Pitäjän pienempiä — Kilpi

I read all of these before summer, but nothing so far has topped them.

>but failed a bit translating the culture
That's probably a general problem in translating. You have to make a choice on what aspect you concentrate on and what aspect you neglect. But it's usually impossible to satisfy all demands (see the fights here on Veeky Forums over what is the "best" translation of a certain book).
For example, there are two German translations of LotR. The first one from the 60s did not try to translate all the different nuances in speech of the different peoples in the book. The second translation from 2000 tried to be better on this aspect but was generaly shunned because Sam speaking like a 90s German working class guy was just too odd.
Anyway, thanks again for the answers.

yes, that is true about translations. godspeed user.

if you would be so kind to talk a bit about Berlin Alexanderplatz I would be very grateful too. do you like it? I've been missing some german literature lately

Sure, why not. I ultimatly liked it very much though it took naturally much getting use to . The inner monologue bits were sometimes a chore, it generally gave the book a more interesting atmosphere. The descriptions of Weimar Berlin and the political and social circumstances and how they affected the everymans life are outstanding.
A friend of mine said he didn't like the book because he thought Döblin plagiarized Joyce' Ulysses (at least the style), but since I havn't read Ulysses I don't know how true this is.

hmmm very interesting. you may have sold it to me. will look into it, thanks

>Anna Karenina
>Don Quijote
>The Unknown Soldier

Augustus - John Williams
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

ok here ya go:
1.) as i lay dying
2.) short stories of gabriel g marquez
3.) picture of dorian gray

all were fun reads. not too challenging except for marquez. and rewarding

was going to buy the tunnel because i love hearing the guy speak and the subject matter seems beautiful and disurbing. but it's intimidating. honest thoughts on quality vs. difficulty? :/

found one boys

i have the picture of dorian grey, i was thinking ill probably never read it is it actually any good? also are you a chick

The Little Buddhist Monk/The Proof by Cesar Aira
Sentimental Education by Flaubert
Katalin Street by Magda Szabo

Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney

Only read two and a half books so I have no choice in the matter

Atomized (my high school teacher gave it to me as a graduation gift. She gave other students huckleberry fin and other normal books. Just WHAT did she mean by this? Quite worried )
Grapes of Wrath (beautiful descriptions of people and nature.)
Tin Drum (basically manlets are strange people)

>Atomized
she wants your degenerate D.
She's the female equivalent of the teacher Bruno, I bet.

Spellman - Four Lives in the Bebop Business
Marechera- Black Sunlight
Reed- Flight to Canada

Stoner
The picture of Dorian Gray
The Great Gatsby

Started reading this spring

were you the guy from the other thread who got btfo:d and didn't respond

Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler
The Jews and their lies - Martin Luther
The Bell Curve - Richard J. Herrnstein
The Bible - God

Book of the New Sun
Grendel
Beowulf

topkek

batman the long halloween
hatchet

The Idiot
Les Miserables
Tristram Shandy

That's a good start

>Spinoza's Ethics

you are fag and this is not a real book

>no rosen in this thread
Dropped my laptop

I've only read four books this year because one of them was super fucking long. Them being:

>Arno Schmidt - Zettels Traum (started on January 2nd, finished it two weeks ago, read (with a few exceptions) every day)
>Stephen King - The Dark Half
>Stephen King - Cujo
>Thomas Bernhard - Frost

I've only read four books this year because one of them was super fucking long. Them being:

>Arno Schmidt - Zettels Traum (started on January 2nd, finished it two weeks ago, read (with a few exceptions) every day)
>Stephen King - The Dark Half
>Stephen King - Cujo
>Thomas Bernhard - Frost

read the two Kings in August during two long flights because I couldn't take Zettels Traum with me