How much did you read this year?

How much did you read this year?

What were the best and worst books you read?

Did you have a goal, and did you reach it?

What are you planning to read next year?

20 books.

Top three:
>The Brothers Karamazov.
>Infinite Jest.
>War and Peace.

Worst book (by far):
>Farenheit 451.

Absolute motherfucking TRASH.

Yes, reached goal.

Next year I want to read about 35.

Next year TBR off top of head:
>Journey to the End of the Night
>Lolita
>Madame Bovary
>Blood Meridian
>Anna Karenina
>Resurrection (by Tolstoy)
>Mrs Dalloway
>Swann's Way
>Finish reading J R after I dropped it a couple months ago

Meme-level:
>Gravity's Rainbow.

>How much did you read this year?
Currently on my tenth book. I know that's shit progress, but in my defense I didn't start until march.

>What were the best and worst books you read?
Best was probably Anna Karenina. I think about infinite jest a lot more though.

I haven't finished it yet, so I don't want to prejudge, but Kafka on the Shore is looking to be my weakest read this year. It's enjoyable to read, but the story at times seems a bit clunky and a little to convenient. Also the prose isn't to great at times, even when considering that it's a translation.

>Did you have a goal, and did you reach it?

Just got back into reading so I started small at 10 books. Still have about 100 pages to go on Kafka, but plenty of time. Tfw I know I'm not gonna make it.

>What are you planning to read next year?

Also working on the Pale King and The Penguin History of the World

Some russian literature like brothers k and W&P. More contemporary american stuff like blood meridian and underworld. I've been eyeing that anthology of english poetry that harold bloom put out.

>I didn't like F451

kek

I think I read 18, but one was War and Peace and another was IJ. If I can keep this up for next year I will be happy.

GR was actually good though

My goal was 100 pages per day, I managed ~85. I'll try for 100 again in 2017.

Started with the Greeks but got side-tracked a bit. Read all of Shakespeare which was great. Boswell, The Waves, Hadji Murat, Lolita, Book of Disquiet were the biggest highlights.

Next year I'm gonna continue with the Greeks, hopefully manage to reach the Romans. I also want to read some epic poetry...

Also, despite reading quite a lot, the net change in my wishlist was about +300 books.

I'll post my ratings (note they're not comparable across genres/authors):

>POETRY

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. 4/5
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses 5/5
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell 1.5/5
Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat 2/5
Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe 4/5
Hesiod, Theogony 2/5
Hesiod, Works and Days 2/5
Homer, Iliad 5/5
Homer, Odyssey 3.5/5
John Keats, The Complete Poems 3.5/5
Omar Khayyam & Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omay Kayyam 4.5/5
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol 4/5
William Blake, America a Prophecy 3/5
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence 5/5
William Blake, Europe a Prophecy 2.5/5
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience 4.5/5
William Blake, The Book of Thel 3/5
William Blake, The Book of Urizen 3.5/5
William Blake, The Gates of Paradise 2/5
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5/5
William Blake, The Song of Los 2/5
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, Sonnets (Shakespeare) 5/5
William Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece 3/5
William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (Poem) 3.5/5
Batrachomyomachia 2/5
Greek Lyric 3/5
Homeric Hymns 2.5/5

>FICTION

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 4/5
Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon 1.5/5
Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story: A Memoir 3/5
Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat 5/5
Leo Tolstoy, Sevastopol Stories 3.5/5
Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks 4/5
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita 5/5
William S. Burroughs, Junky 3.5/5
Don DeLillo, Zero K 3/5
J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition 3.5/5
Japser Fforde, The Eyre Affair 2.5/5
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age 2/5
Paul Auster, Oracle Night 2/5
Michel Houellebecq, Submission 3.5/5
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 5/5
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours 4/5
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day 4.5/5
Don DeLillo, Point Omega 3.5/5
Italo Calvino, The Non-Existent Knight 3/5
Italo Calvino, Baron in the Trees 3.5/5
Italo Calvino, The Cloven Viscount 3/5
Virginia Woolf, The Waves 5/5
William Gaddis, The Recognitions 4/5
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet 5/5

>PLAYS

John Fletcher & William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (Play) 2/5
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot 4.5/5
Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore 3.5/5
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (Play) 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 4/5
William Shakespeare, As You Like It 3/5
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus 4.5/5
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, Hamlet 5/5
William Shakespeare, Henry IV (Play) 5/5
William Shakespeare, Henry V (Play) 4/5
William Shakespeare, Henry VI (Play) 3/5
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Play) 4.5/5
William Shakespeare, King John 2/5
William Shakespeare, King Lear 5/5
William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, Macbeth 5/5
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure 3/5
William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing 4.5/5
William Shakespeare, Othello 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre 3/5
William Shakespeare, Richard III (Play) 4.5/5
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew 2/5
William Shakespeare, The Tempest 4/5
William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.5/5
William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen 3/5
William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale 3/5
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 2/5
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 3.5/5
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 1.5/5
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 3.5/5

>SHORT STORIES

Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God 4/5
Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice 4.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, MS. Found in a Bottle 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado 4.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher 4.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold Bug 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Island of the Fay 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue 4/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter 4/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Spectacles 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart 4/5
Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson 4/5
H. P. Lovecraft, A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson 4/5
Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales 3.5/5
Robert A. Heinlein, All You Zombies 3.5/5
William Gibson, Hinterlands 4/5

>NON-FICTION

Harold Clarke Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare 5/5
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human 3/5
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All 4.5/5
Mark van Doren, Shakespeare 3/5
Richard McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates 4.5/5
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays 2/5
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence 4.5/5
Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle 3.5/5
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn 4/5
Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition 2/5
Sarah B. Pomeroy, A Brief History of Ancient Greece 3.5/5
Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours 0.5/5
Howard W. Clarke, Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Odyssey 3/5
Jasper Griffin, Homer, The Odyssey (Landmarks of World Literature) 3.5/5
Peter Jones, Homer's Odyssey: A Commentary based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore 4/5
Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad 4/5
Robert Fowler, The Cambridge Companion to Homer 2.5/5
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational 5/5
John Wright, Essays on the "Iliad": Selected Modern Criticism 4/5
Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections 5/5
George Steiner & Robert Fagles, Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays 4.5/5
Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's "Iliad" 3/5
Ian Morros & Barry Powell, A New Companion to Homer 3.5/5
Malcolm M. Willcock, A Companion to the Iliad: Based on the Translation by Richmond Lattimore 4/5
Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus 3.5/5
G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer 4.5/5
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy 4/5
Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes 2.5/5
Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own 4/5
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson 5/5
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 2.5/5
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Ancient World 4/5

>ESSAYS/ARTICLES/ETC (only those rated >= 3.5)

E. J. Chaisson, Energy Rate Density as a Complexity Metric and Evolutionary Driver 5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem 3.5/5
Edgar Allan Poe, Instinct vs Reason -- A Black Cat 3.5/5
Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer's Contest 4.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Essay) 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, A Plea for Prohibition 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, Babies and Distributism 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, May Queen of Scots (Essay) 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, On a Humiliating Heresy 5/5
G. K. Chesterton, On Being Moved 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, On Jane Austen in the General Election 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, On Original Sin 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, On the Return of the Barbarian 5/5
G. K. Chesterton, On Turnpikes and Medievalism 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Book of Job (Essay) 5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Common Man 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Drift From Domesticity 5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Mad Official 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Mystery of the Mystics 5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Orthodoxy of Hamlet 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Pickwick Papers (Essay) 4/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Spice of Life 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, The Surrender upon Sex 3.5/5
G. K. Chesterton, Tolerating Other Religions 4/5
George Santayana, A General Confession 4/5
George Santayana, Philosophical Heresy 4/5
Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus ???/5
Manuel De Landa, Meshworks, Hierarchies and Interfaces 3.5/5
Nick Land, Art as insurrection: the question of aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche 3.5/5
Nick Land, Critique of Transcendental Miserablism 4/5
Nick Land, Meltdown (Essay) 5/5
Nick Land, Qabbala 101 ?/5
Nick Land, Reality Rules 4.5/5
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist 5/5
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying 4/5
Paul Graham, What You Can't Say 4.5/5
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men 5/5
Sascha O. Becker et al., Causes and Consequences of the Protestant Reformation 5/5
Thomas Carlyle, Boswell's Life of Johnson (Essay) /5
Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism 4.5/5
George Santayana, The Poetry of Barbarism 4/5

128 books. My favorite was probably the Book of Disquiet since I think about it the most. Didn't have any reading goals, never do. Gonna start off next year getting into some twentieth century german fiction and see where I go from there.

>he didn't start with the greeks

I know i will read more next year. I just got a paperwhite kindle for christmas and i'm already on a few books. I have read more this year than before anyway.

One of my goals is to finish Crime and Punishment, to finally get to the bottom and see if i like it.
I want to read David Cronenberg's book, some poems, Kafka's "Amerika", some Heisenberg and Spinoza, Don Quichotte, i want to read again some Voltaire...

I read 30 books. Almost all of them in the second half of the year when I got more into reading.

My goal was 15.

My goal for next year is the same as for this one: To read some more popular classics.

My favourites this year:
>Roadside picnic
>Siddhartha
>Steppenwolf
>1984
>The years of rice and salt

Least liked
>The Stand

This year I read

The catcher in the rye
The picture of dorian grey
The Wasp Factory
Siddhartha
1984
The Trial
Junky
In The Miso Soup
The Metamorphosis
La Bas by JK Huysmans (fucking awful book)
The Bell Jar
The Stranger

Only one I didn't read completely was La Bas.

Next year I plan to read

Crime and punishment (which I already started)
Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
The Sound and the Fury
E=Mc2 by David Bodanis (a biography of the equation which covers the lives and and experiments of the scientists who influenced einstein, einstein himself, and the ways his equations shaped the world past einstein's life)
Economics in one lesson

And many more which I will leave up to my whim.

Have you read "A rebours" before La Bas? And if so, how is it in comparison?

I read about 11,000 pages this year. ~35 books.

This past year I read 1.9 million words of fictional works (books, short stories, and plays).

Yeah I read a little bit of it. It's kind of boring to read, honestly. I mean, I thought that the concept was cool, basically making a story out of a guy who does nothing but isolate himself inside his house. I thought that it would be more philosophical, like more of a stream of consciousness psychological trip through stream of consciousness writing. Instead I found that it was mostly this obsessive compulsive guy's musings about all the stuff he buys to furnish his house with. It's gaudy, unnecessary, and the writing style, at least for me, was very dense and hard to wade through. There's lots of archaic words and references to things which I have no knowledge of, like when he spends a whole chapter talking about his taste in books, he just goes on about artists I've never heard and honestly it's just exhausting.

Yeah i had the same feeling. It's this idea of some high brow culture that inspired Oscar Wilde for Dorian Gray, but in the end you realise this guy can't live a normal life without being intoxicated with references and dwell on sophisticated matters.

I started with the greeks unironically
A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture- Sarah B. Pomeroy
Berlin: The Downfall 1945 Antony "Beaver" Beevor
Ardistan and Dschnnistan, part 1
The Man Outside
ALESIA 52 BC- Nic Fields
Fight Club- Chuck Palahniuk
The Gambler- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And many short stories
The Wendigo- Algernon Blackwood
Songs of Innocence and of Experience- William Blake
Perpetual peace- Immanuel Kant
Beowulf- Anonymous (Seamus Heaney)
Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?- Immanuel Kant
Jorge Amado
That's the most of it. I am ok with this. I was busy with studies and summer

I read lots, and lots of great books. Read (and re-read some of) all of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The Three Theban plays and Oresteia are wonderful. Sophocles' Ajax was also great, which I plan to re-read very soon. The Iliad and Odyssey were probably my two favorites for the year. Right after reading them I only had lukewarm feelings towards them, but as time went on I found that just on reflection there was a lot more in those poems than I thought, and since then I've been reading some essays and books that discuss the texts, and so am excited to re-read them in a month or two.
Fathers and Sons was wonderful. I re-read Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and intend to re-read The Brothers Karamazov soon.
Paradise Lost had some beautiful poetry in it, but I have to confess that aside from that I didn't enjoy it too much. I want to re-read it in a while after reading some more poetry and becoming a more experienced reader. It dragged on around book 8 or 9 and I was just waiting for it to be over, so next time I read it I think I'll take it much slower.
I read the entire Bible, minus some Psalms and Proverbs. Took about a month and a half and was extremely laborious, but I think it was worth it just to get a greater understanding of allusions in literature. I didn't like the text itself but am still glad I read it.
Metamorphoses was very good, and am looking forward to re-reading it in a while. Aside from Ovid, I read The Aeneid but didn't care for it; it just felt artificial compared to the naturalness of the Iliad & Odyssey, and the characters are very bland. My opinion is that Virgil either didn't understand or wasn't capable of recreating in his own words what makes Homer so great, which is, among other things, having his characters actually talk things out.
Works of Love by Kierkegaard was good, and definitely deserves another reading this upcoming year. I remember being unhappy with the second half, though. The first with him analyzing "you shall love your neighbor" with emphasis on each word and seeing what that means was great. Fear and Trembling was even better, and I think I understood it well. I think the translation I read was by Hong, but the prose in it was absolutely beautiful.
I read lots of Shakespeare in chronological order, minus the history plays (which I want to read in order of their occurring in time, rather than when they were published). Some were ok. The last one I read was Julius Caesar which I liked a lot. I didn't care for much else, though, aside from Romeo and Juliet which I thought had great poetry in it. Most of what else I read were his lesser comedies and tragedies, but unfortunately I didn't like A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is generally adored.
Currently reading War and Peace and will finish it in three or four days. I'm not really a fan of Tolstoy in general, but I'm enjoying it so far. Not a great book for me, but it's not bad, and is worth the time at least.

>I literally read nothing this year: the post

define nothing

the absence of books

Ok i'll bite. What do you suggest I do? Just increase the amount of books or are you angry there are no Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings books in that list?

Shakespeare, like Homer, benefits immensely from reflection and reading some criticism.

Agreed, I felt that way. Some books I read and can't really feel like there's anything more to them than what I got out of it, but in Shakespeare's case (as in Homer's) I feel that there's more. I'm hoping there is, anyway. I at least owe reading Hamlet, Othello, etc. I'll probably pick up a Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare at some point and see if that helps.

I read 45-50 books.

Best: Lolita
Worst: Naked Lunch

I'm starting with the Greeks on Jan. 1

Best: Platform
Infinite Jest (second half)
Slaughterhouse 5

Worst: short story book by local Chilean woman. Never again, fucking publicity

Just started again, after almost 8 years without reading anything that wasn't academic.

Best: El Llano en Llamas
Worst: Karp's Cell and Molecular Biology

Best - Fear and Loathing '72, given the kind of year it was. Worst was the Age of Innocence. No reading goals in terms of quantity. Next year I'd like to read more surrealism, more essays, maybe give a few contemporary writers a shot. And more short story collections.

>starting with the Greeks

About 60 books, though id have a hard time remembering them all without going through my shelves

...

Have you ever considered just watching porn?

much better read

Read 82 Books

Worst : Queen of Fire - Anthony Ryan
Best : If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
Goal for 2017 : to read at least 100 books

Well when you read that much pleb shit it should be easy.