What You've Read This Year

As 2016 draws to a close, share your recommended reads.

>Strong recommend
- “Kubrick” - Michael Herr
- “Hemingway in Love” - A.E Hochtner
- “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” - Alex Haley
- “When Breath Becomes Air” - Paul Kalanithi
- “By Any Means Necessary” - Spike Lee

>Recommend
- “Born Standing Up” - Steve Martin
- “Art Life and the Other Thing” - Ashleigh Wilson
- “Stanley Kubrick” - Vincent LoBrutto

>Don’t Recommend
- “Popism” - Andy Warhol
- “Essays in Love” - Alain De Botton

I'm on a non-fiction binge at the moment.

>Strongly recommended
The Iliad, by Homer
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet

>Recommend
The Setting Sun, by Osamu Dazai
The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq
Augustus, by John Williams
The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai

>Don't recommend
Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis
Marthe, by J-K. Huysmans

Nice year. Not very productive, but filled with good literary experiences.

>The Iliad, by Homer

Wow you're a brave one

>Strong Recommend
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Yukio Mishima - Temple of the Golden Pavilion
William Gass - The Tunnel

>Recommend
Phil Larkin - Jill
Han Kang - The Vegetarian

>Don't Recommend
Michel Houellebecq - The Elementary Particles
Herman Hesse - Siddhartha

>Strong recommend
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi
The Tanners by Robert Walser
The Robber by Robert Walser
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards

>Recommend
Selected Poems, 1923-1958 by E.E. Cummings
The Islandman by Tomas O'Crohan
Men in Prison by Victor Serge
Imperium by Ryszard Kapucinski
How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K Chesterton
Maxims by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

>Do not recommend
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

also mfw did not reach my goal of 40 books this year

Alright OP, I'll bite.

>Strongly Recommend
Pale Fire - by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera - by G.G. Marquez
Impatience of the Heart (Beware of Pity) - by Stefan Zweig
Fictions - by Jorge Luis Borges
Notes from Underground - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays - by G.K. Chesterton
How Green Was My Valley - by Richard Llewellyn
A Temple of Texts - by William H. Gass

>Recommend
A High Wind in Jamaica - by Richard Hughes
Revolutionary Russia 1891 - 1991 - by Orlando Figes
Invisible Man - by Ralph Ellison
Antony and Cleopatra - by William Shakespeare
Subtly Worded - by Teffi
Jakob von Gunten - by Robert Walser

Pretty basic recommendations, but I very much enjoyed all of them.

Strongly Recommend
>Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
>As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
>To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
>Dispatches, Michael Herr
>Republic, Plato
>The Origins of the Political Order, Francis Fukuyama
Recommend
>A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
>Dune, Frank Herbert
>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
>Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
>The Quiet American, Graham Greene
>Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
>SPQR, Mary Beard
>A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R. R. Martin
Do Not Recommend
>Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
>Dreams/Arteries, Phinder Dulai

>Larkin Jill

how sexy and/or depressing is this out of 10? Because if it scores highly I want ot read it

It's quite depressing. A rather flawed book, but it skirts by on premise and feels alone.

It's also quite interesting what it gets away with, and the themes of loneliness and reconstruction that it tackles, considering it came out in 1946.

strong recommend

Skylark
Journey to the End of the Night
V
Sabbath's Theater

Recommend
Man's Fate
The Easter Parade
Lanark
Love in a Dry Season
A Brief History of 7 Killings
To the Finland Station

Don't Recommend
The Recognitions (fuck you Veeky Forums memesters)
The Lime Twig (fuck you Veeky Forums memesters)
Beneath the Wheel
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The City of Dreadful Night
This is the Ritual
A Burnt Out Case
Là-bas
The Pigeon
The Fall of Paris

>Strongly Recommend

My Ántonia, by Willa Cather
Warlock, by Oakley Hall
At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill

>Recommend

Butcher's Crossing, by John Williams
We the Animals, by Justin Torres
The Confusions of Young Törless, by Robert Musil

>Don't Recommend
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Who Killed Palomino Molero?, by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

How is it flawed? Just poorly written, no flow, etc? Because I'd heard of it months ago and thought it sounded like something that would resonate with me, even though more recently I've tried to stay away from writers as jaded as Larkin

STILL
TIME
!

Next I'm gonna read Speak, Memory by Nabokov and Just So Stories by Kipling.

I expect them to be really good.

>manga version of scarlet letter

A bit poorly written, kind of waffles a bit. There are large sections where not much is happening. Larkin wrote it when he was 18 or something, so he hadn't yet refined his writing.

I read the original a couple of years back. The manga version I read on a thread on /a/. It was actually pretty well done, and after reading it I wanted to read again Hawthorne's original, since in my first read I didn't like it, but that's because I was too young a reader to appreciate it.

That version was a light read and, as I said, pretty well done. And since I spent like an hour reading it and lurking that thread, I thought, what the hell, I'll just include it since I read the whole thing.

Why didnt you like hundred years of solitude?

I was absolutely loving it until about half way through, when I started losing track of all the characters and what was happening in the story. I reached until about 3/4 through but I just couldn't do it anymore. I had no idea what was happening, I wasn't enjoying any of it, and the prose of so exhausting that I couldn't be bothered to finish it, no matter how good the ending might have been.

I don't think it's a bad book, I wouldn't have enjoyed the beginning so much otherwise. But I just couldn't get back into it at that point.

for you

>Strongly Recommend
Paradise Lost-Milton
Infinite Jest-Wallace
Blood Meridian-McCarthy
The Republic-Plato
The Sound and The Fury-Faulkner

>Recommend
Gravity's Rainbow-Pynchon
The Plague-Camus
Wuthering Heights-Bronte
Consider the Lobster-Wallace

>Don't Recommend
The Pale King-Wallace
The Stand-King

Pretty meme year but I'm new to Veeky Forums so pls no bully

Ill stick to just literature for this, though I've read some incredible non-fiction as well:

>strong recomendation
Oblomov -- Translated by Marian Schwartz
Pride and Prejudice
Stoner
The Karamazov Brothers -- Avsey

>recommended
Sense and sensibility
Butcher's Crossing
Falling Man

>not recommended
Mother Night
The Chrysalids
White Noise

well meme'd, my friend

*tips fedora*

>Who Killed Palomino Molero?, by Mario Vargas Llosa

Why not?

>Strongly Recommend
>Skylark
My boys

I think you're the first person I've seen to not recommend White Noise

> Strong Recommend

- "Goedel, Escher, Bach" - Douglas Hofstader

>Recommend
VALIS - Philip K Dick

>norecommend

"The Handmaids Tale" - Margaret Atwood

Fuck off pale king is great

Slow start this year.

Strong Recommend
~Warlock - Oakley Hall

Recommend
~Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig
~This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz

Nonrecommend
~Whatever - Michel Houellebecq

>read this fucking book now
Suttree
Arcadia (Stoppard)
And quiet flows the don
>recommended
This book will save your life
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid
Master and Margarita

Everything else was low level desu whanau

>Strongly
The Greeks by the Greeks
Holy Bibble by the LORD your God

>Mildly
Hungry by Hanson
Journey to the End of the Rainbow by Docteur Destouches
The Heart of the Darkness by Josef Konrad Pilsudski
The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Death of Hadji Murad, The Death of Anna Karenina by Count Maglev
The Complete Poetry of Rudyard Kipling by the author himself
The ABC of Reading by Ezequiel Reichsmark
The Compete Poetry of W. B. Yeast
Till I End My Song by Harry Bloom

>Not really
Anything by Vila-Matas
The Trouble with Being Me by Cioran
Just So-So Stories by Itzak Dinesen

>Strong recommended
- Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
- Death of Ivan Iliych and Other Stories (Oxford) - Tolstoy
- Mythology - Edith Hamilton
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Sound of Waves - Mishima

>Recommended
- Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
- The Quiet American - Graham Greene
- On the Road - Jack Kerouac
- The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain
- Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Mishima
- The Trial - Kafka

>Do not recommended
- A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
- The Road - Cormac McCarthy
- Pride and Prejudice - Austen
- Storm of Steel - Ernst Junger
- Cat's Cradle - Vonnegut

Strongly recommended:

Mysteries - Hamsun
Hunger - Hamsun
Pan - Hamsun
Growth of the Soil - Hamsun
Havoc - Tom Kristensen
Lucky-Per - Henrik Pontoppidan
King Lear - Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida - Shakespeare
Much Ado about Nothing - Shakespeare
Hero of Our Time - Lermontov

Recommended

My Struggle - Knausgård (book 2, 5 and 6 are the best, 1 is very good, 3 and 4 are lackluster)
The Kreutzer Sonata - Tolstoy
Sketches from Sevastopol - Tolstoy
The Fall of the King - Jensen
The Inspector - Gogol
Victoria - Hamsun
Dreamers - Hamsun

Not recommended:

The Red Pony - Steinbeck
Betwixt and Between - Camus
Miss Marie Grubbe - Jacobsen

I also think it's worthless garbage.

Here's the list of what I read this year
>would recommend, fantastic works
The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc
Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A History of Philosophy Vol 1 by Frederick Charles Copleston
A History of Philosophy 2 by Frederick Charles Copleston
On Blue's Waters by Gene Wolfe
Kiku's Prayer by Shūsaku Endō
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
God, Philosophy, Universities by Alasdair MacIntyre
An Essay On the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Newman
Behold the Pierced One by Pope Benedict XVI
Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe
The Categories by Aristotle
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
Innocents Aboard by Gene Wolfe
Locke by Edward Feser
Utopia by Thomas More
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Heretics by G.K. Chesterton
In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe
Dubliners by James Joyce
Philosophy of Mind by Edward Feser
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Aquinas by Edward Feser
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
How to Run a Country by Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Jews by Hilaire Belloc
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
Napolean Of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Selections from the Writings of Cicero by Marcus Tullius Cicero

cont.
>pretty good, but for this or that reason were not amazing, or are simply entertaining
This Immortal by Roger Zelazny
The Weird of the White Wolf by Michael Moorcock
The Spiritual Doctrine Of Father Louis Lallemant
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K.
Dick Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Tasks of Philosophy, Volume 1 by Alasdair MacIntyre
Ethics by Peter Kreeft
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Short Stories of G.K. Chesterton
The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny
The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny
The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick
The Land Across by Gene Wolfe
The Platonic Tradition by Peter Kreeft
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Jack Vance Treasury by Jack Vance
The Dialectics of Secularization by Pope Benedict XVI
Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock
Considerations on France by Joseph de Maistre
Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics by Edward Feser
Cratylus by Plato
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas by Peter Kreeft
The Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Fathers by Pope Benedict XVI
Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila
Crito by Plato
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger
The Golden Age by John C. Wright
The French Revolution by Hilaire Belloc
The Aeneid by Virgil
>mediocrety or trash, depending on the work
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Sabriel by Garth Nix
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright
Many Religions One Covenant by Pope Benedict XVI
The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

There didn't seem to me much to it. Just an average crime story. I was expecting a bit more thematically, but there was only some half-hearted race stuff.

I do plan on checking out some of his more acclaimed work.

How many times did you read Gulag Archipeligo?

Once, it's 3 volumes.

Hungarian lit is the best lit

I was busy making art and not being Veeky Forums no bully

>recommended
Infinite Jest
Pale King
1984
Master and Margarita
Portrait of The Artist

>Sure go ahead and read it
Arcadia
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Stranger
Slaughterhouse Five

Raising this city

Why did you have trouble remember the characters? I've seen this as a common criticism but it's one I never understand. There are multiple characters with very similar names but they never really seem to exist within the book at the same time.

>whanau
Kia ora bro

>Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
I read it recently. I wasn't expecting much form it but I really liked it. I found it funny when these moments that removed from the larger context could have been mistaken for Faulkner. Sadly I didn't find any moments like that in Huck Finn.

>Strongly Recommend
Gaddis - Agapē agape
Inoue - The Counterfiter and other Stories
Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Pushkin - The Complete Prose Works

>Recommend
Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon

>Why did I read this?
Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness
Wallace - Infinite Jest

>>read
Dear Life - Munro
The Pillowman - M. McDonagh
The Lt. Of Inishmire - M. McDonagh
Married Life - Tessa Hadley
Beverly - Nick Drnaso
Julius Caesar
Midsummer
R & J
Othello
Sunstroke and Other Stories - Hadley
Howards End* - EM Forster
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - W. Tower
Midair - Frank Conroy
Killing and Dying - Adrian Tomine
The scripts for the promotional videos for Overwatch
There’s Something I Want You to Do - Charles Baxter
Where I’m Calling From* - Raymond Carver


>>garbage
Emerald City* - J. Egan
Aerograms* - Tania James
Carbide Tipped Pens*
Fates and Furies* - L. Groff
Delicate Edible Birds* - L. Groff
A Doubter’s Almanac* - Canin
Redeployment - Phil Klay
O. Henry Prize Stories 2015*
Women with Men - Richard Ford
The Brink - Austin Bunn
Microserfs* - Coupland
Oblivion - DFW
Fortune Smiles - Adam Johnson

>strong recommendation
Kawamata Chiaki - Death Sentences
Don Delillo - White Noise
Roland Barthes - Writing Degree Zero
Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest

>recommended
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland
Gary Snyder - Mountains and Rivers Without End
Joan Didion - The White Album
Chuck Klosterman - But what if we're wrong?

>not recommended
Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station
Tim Harford - Undercover Economics

What was wrong with Microserfs? I got that ready in my stack to read

I'd like to bump this, if only because being able to read people's recommendations and spot things I've either liked or disliked in their lists has been a brilliant indication of what I might like to read in the future.

>Strong rec
Moby-Dick
World as Will and Representation by Ol' Shopey
Everything by Marx & Engels
Marxism and Philosophy by Antonio Labriola
Everything by Luxemburg
Everything pre-1910 by Karl Kautsky
Everything by Lenin
Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács
Everything by Amadeo Bordiga
Everything by Onorato Damen
The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell

>Rec
Phenomenology of Spirit by Heggle
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon
Lenin as Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek
On the Foundations of Leninism by Joseph Stalin
On Practise by Mao Zedong

>Shit
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by William Godwin
What is Property by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Everything else by Anton Pannekoek
The Preconditions of Socialism by Eduard Bernstein
Everything by Trotsky
Everything by Neetshee
Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset


Been busy this year.

Cool that you read this much and all but why the fuck did you bother typing all that out?

Copy paste from goodreads mate. My autism does not go so deep.

Bloat. It was an 11000-word essay on employee culture padded into a novel. Ymmv, I thought Gen X was fun but similarly anti-novelistic