Books read 2016

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2016
- Dubliners
- V.
- A Cup of Rage
- Brideshead Revisited
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Notes From Underground
- Hamlet
- Speedboat
- Othello
- Ulysses

>James Joyce - Dubliners
Fantastic, though less good when it was too political (i.e. Ivy Day in the Committee Room). Introduced me to the picturesque prose that Joyce can write - especially in the end of The Dead - which I was later to be inundated with.
>Thomas Pynchon - V
Perhaps I am miserable, but this was the first book I have laughed out loud to. I loved it for the sense of scale it holds; each character and setting has a huge amount of history and theme alongside it, and I feel like each major character in V could have at least one great novel written about them.
>Raduan Nassar - A Cup of Rage
Only 45 pages but very good. Sort of modernist, I suppose, in that each chapter was one flowing sentence. The book was at its best when exploring the common concepts of humanity like anger and sexuality - to be fair, this was most of the book.
>Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
Didn't like the seemingly forced nature of the ending but the book was incredibly comfy to read and revealed the lifestyles of a certain demographic, in much the same way a novel like The Great Gatsby does. And, other than at the ending, I liked the main character quite a lot.
>James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Certainly one of the best novels I've ever read, the growing complexity of the prose was fascinating but luckily not too challenging. I appreciated the inclusion of philosophical thought into the novel without compromising the realistic depiction of Stephen.
>Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground
Morose, miserable, and absolute fantastic. Obviously, being Dostoevsky, he didn't really need to fear, but having the first half of the whole novella being a soliloquy of sorts, without narrative or setting, is quite a risk and it's pulled of remarkably well. The author creates a relationship between the Underground Man and the reader that is complicated and untrusting, at least in my experience.
>William Shakespeare - Hamlet
The greatest character in all literature I have read, without a shadow of a doubt. I could read this play a thousand times over and still question the motives and thoughts of all the characters until the day I die. I just wish I could go and see it performed somewhere, but there's no availability right now.
>Renata Adler - Speedboat
Definitely interesting and worthwhile in its quasi-episodic, "snapshot" style of writing, but the pace of the novel that the title hints at is almost too fast and I felt that I wasn't given enough content to pick up the normal ideas I'd be able to take from a book - character, themes, etc.

>William Shakespeare - Othello
I can't talk about Shakespeare's great plays without writing in the superlative, so I'll shamelessly say that this is the most tragic literature I have read. The character of Iago is, to me, second only to Hamlet and the performance I saw was stunning, with a depiction of the final scene that was genuinely hard to watch at times. Another essential.
>Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
Didn't think I'd like Hemingway's prose style but it works fantastically, the dialogue and actions of his characters describe them so well that he barely needs to use a single adjective. The ideas that Hemingway was trying to put across were really easy to pick up on, which I liked. As well as that, I don't think I'll ever dislike Paris as a setting for a novel or film.
>James Joyce - Ulysses
I only finished it today so it's not easy to talk about in depth, but the technique with which this book was written means it is very inconsistent in quality - saying that, it is never bad, and the best chapters (Nausicaa, Ithaca, Proteus) really do come across to me as deep enough to read and discuss many many times.

Oh btw if anyone else has read one of these books recently and wants to discuss it I'd be up for that.

In 2017 I plan to read, amongst other things:
Aristotle - Poetics
>Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
>Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
>Karl Ove Knausgaard - A Death in the Family
>Don Delillo - White Noise
>Emile Zola - Therese Raquin

>The Old Man and the Sea
>Slaughterhouse Five
>Morning Star
>Hard Rain Falling
>Elric of Melnibone
>A Brief History of Seven Killings
>Perfume: Story of a Murderer
>Watership Down
>Franny and Zooey
>Good Omens
>The Sirens of Titan
>The Big Sleep
>As I Lay Dying
>A Visit from the Goon Squad
>Crime and Punishment
>The Girl Next Door
>Salem's Lot
>Summer of Night
>Lies of Locke Lamora

Summer of Night, As I Lay Dying and Franny and Zooey were my favorites.

In total, my reading this year was filled with more disappointment than it was enjoyment. I need be better at selecting books.

The KJ bible is 80 books though

Yeah that took me a long time but still I wasted too much time on video games which I won't do next year, I've uninstalled all that trash.

I loved Beowulf. I guess I should have said that 'honorable mention' meant 4 or 4.5 stars.

No Longer Human really just didn't work for me. If you've not read it, it's about a man who fakes his way through life, feeling utterly disconnected from the rest of humanity. I can appreciate that, but it was just too much. In conversations here, I gather that I'm not supposed to relate to him at all, but rather appreciate it in other ways, but exactly what those ways are were somewhat vague to me. I think that's utter bullshit. I just didn't care. You may as well write a book about a robot and how depressed he is that he's not human. If there were themes that I was supposed to walk away with, they went right over my head. Honestly, I think this board's obsession with this book is based solely on >>/r9k/ kids and other 'disaffected' youths who need to have an edgy and cool Japanese book that tells them they're not alone. My 2 cents.

On the other hand, I also listed Dazai's The Setting Sun in honorable mentions. Others here had recommended it even if I hated No Longer Human. I'm really glad I read it. It's about the decay of Japanese aristocracy after the war, and I found it to have powerful imagery.

As far as contemporary unknowns, I feel like I don't read enough modern literature. Most of the contemporary stuff is non-fiction, and why I read modern non-fiction should be obvious. An overwhelming majority of the fiction, however, I feel is neither contemporary nor unknown (at least not on these boards).

Well, I was tempted to give Richard II 5 stars as well. For me, the humor of Henry IV took a while to work, because as you may agree it clashes with the much more serious tone of the rest of the work and its predecessor, but once it got going, I absolutely loved it. Further, I found Henry's slow realization that Hotspur was to him what he himself was to Richard.

In both plays, I found myself writing down numerous quotes that resonated with me. Truly wonderful plays. It had been a while since I'd read Shakespeare, but it reminded me why many would call him the greatest.

>Temple of the Golden Pavilion
pretty cozy atmosphere and prose, I'll probably read more Mishima
>The Plague
very disappionting after reading The Stranger, just felt it was predictable and dry
>The Little Prince
good children's book that can also be enjoyed as an adult; reminds me of Wind in the Willows that way
>Under the Jaguar Sun
fun quick couple of stories, feels like a Calvino deleted scenes reel
>Nonexistent Knight & Cloven Viscount
like Jaguar Sun but a bit more fleshed out, both a little cheesy imo
>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
the childhood parts were superb but once the Irish politics and Catholic guilt came in I lost interest
>Love in the Time of Cholera
beautiful characters and story but doesn't hold up to 100 Years of Solitude
>All the Pretty Horses
awesome prose, but goddamn there's a lot of horse talk
>Dubliners
the better Joyce book I read this year, loved how concise and meaningful each vingette felt
>The Waves
mad comfy albeit a bit tedious
>Ficciones
contains some of my now favorite short stories of all time
>Bleeding Edge
surprisingly good for Pynchon-lite, better than Inherent Vice but still doesn't touch V.
>Suttree
Goddamn amazing, probably changed the way I'll write for the rest of my life
>I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Ellison is a worthless hack
>The Hobbit
read for nostalgia, just as fun as I recall
>The Road
powerful and original yet easy. makes sense it won the pulitzer
>The Sound and the Fury
kind of just pissed me off
>Catch-22
one of the funniest books I've read, has worth outside of humor as well
>Gravity's Rainbow
felt like a 12 hour Wikipedia-related-page-rabbithole. Some incredible parts with lots of worthless lore thrown in.
>Child of God
smut. fun smut.
>Outer Dark
good but there's better McCarthy elsewhere. only for fans of his.
>East of Eden
probably the best Steinbeck I have or ever will read
>The Orchard Keeper
worst McCarthy book
>The Crossing
greatest of the trilogy by far
>Cities of the Plain
was getting a little tired of McCarthy by this point. Still an enjoyable conclusion to the trilogy.
>Notes from Underground
pretty good, not sure if it was the best intro to Dost
>The Metamorphosis
very good, demands multiple reads
>The Catcher in the Rye
felt like more of a practice in aesthetics than anything else. still pretty good.
>Alice in Wonderland
meh. kind of ended the year on a low note with this haha

FAVORITES: Suttree, Dubliners, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Crossing, The Road, Catch-22
DISAPPOINTMENTS: The Plague, Sound and the Fury, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

>why don't we have tons of these threads already?
look at the catalog you retard

whoa didn't know this existed

- Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson

-London for Immigrant suckers, Kolya S. (Unexpected hidden gem, the best of 2016)

- Sudden death, Alvar Enrique ( Maybe not 5/5 but I liked it)

Landscape painted with tea ( difficult but interesting)

In 2016:
>Infinite Jest - 4/5 stars, first actual fiction book I read since core requirements in college. Didn't read it for the prose though, wasn't conscious of this at the time.
>Letters From a Stoic by Seneca - 5/5 stars, insanely smart, I read one of his letters every few days
>Siddhartha - 5/5, changed my life. Got into the whole zen/meditation thing from it and it helped me overcome some existential unease.
>Zen Mind: Beginner's Mind by Suzuki - 5/5, brilliant book, makes zen so simple and easy and enlightenment is much simpler than you realize.
>The Way of Zen by Alan Watts - 3/5, only because it was so dry that I got bored of it and read Zen Mind instead.
>Kafka's complete works - 5/5, awesome
>Crime & Punishment - 5/5, I looked for how Dostoevski makes me feel the emotions he is trying to make the reader feel and he does this very well.
>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - 5/5, first book reading for the prose, and it was truly an enlightening experience. It made me want to get into writing.
>Dubliners - same as Portrait but not as good, but maybe because I read it after Portrait, idk
>Ficciones by Borges - 4/5

Reading in 2017:
>Ulysses
>War & Peace
>The Odyssey
>In Search of Lost Time
>Poetry, trying to get into it in general, may start with Wilde or Yeats but I haven't researched it much
>Some key works from a lot of other famous writers, just to get a holistic understanding of writing/literature and see what I like

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.