What books did you finish in January? Which one was your favourite and why? Which one was the worst and why?
This is my list:
>Sun and Steel (Mishima) >¡Qué Vergüenza! (Paulina Flores) >The Kreutzer Sonata (Leo Tolstoy) >Antes del Fin (Ernesto Sabato) >Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville) >My Struggle #4 (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
My favourite is Antes del Fin ("Before the End"), the memoirs of Sabato. Just a book full of ideas, angst and, at the same time, hope, Interesting to read the last thoughts of a dying man.
I didn´t really like Bartleby. It was a disappointment. Perhaps I was hoping for something more. Perhaps I didn´t get it. Beautifully written, but kind of pointless.
Joseph Hernandez
>Winesburg, Ohio >The Aleph >A Good Man is Hard to Find >The Idiot
mostly cleaning up last month's reads
Winesburg, Ohio was probably my favorite, but A Good Man and The Aleph come damn close to it. comfiest book I've ever read, the themes were varied and characters were well developed. It deserves its title of "America's Dubliners", I'll probably reread it more than once.
Honestly my least favorite was The Idiot. It was twice as long as it needed to be. The parts that I considered invaluable were spread through way too much plot fluff; Dostoyevsky kept reiterating himself and digressing, losing my attention. That being said, Avsey's translation is top notch.
Ryan Kelly
>ya. i could kill you with this book. nothing personal.
Levi James
refer to
Luis Ross
Book of the New Sun 2-4, Wolfe Poetics, Aristotle Cosmos, Gombrowicz How It Is, Beckett Steppenwolf, Hesse War and Peace, Tolstoy The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, Borges which turns out is completely different from The Aleph and Other Stories
I loved Cosmos, How It Is, and War and Peace. A good month.
Jason Perez
I only managed to read Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad, but, man, what a read. Also, RIP Hektor. You were the man.
Wyatt Wright
The Winter’s Tale The Emigrants Elegy Afghanistan: A Lexicon Standoff (David Rivard) Richard II The Real Inspector Hound Translation (Brian Friel) When My Brother Was an Aztec Henry IV Part One Illuminations (Walter Benjamin) Terra Nova Homesick for another Planet The Widening Spell of the Leaves Idaho
Trying to get through the Henriad. It's actually quite excellent I just don't look forward to it as I do as much as others in his oeuvre.
A lot of poetry and plays in that list, only a couple of novels. I 100,000% recommend Larry Levis. I have completely fallen in love with his poetry, it is stunning.
Jeremiah Long
oh shit, Henry IV Part Two is on there I forgot where though, I think after Illuminations
Oliver Ortiz
How much time do you read per day?
Jose Carter
Aleph is great. Some of my favourite borges stories (Immortal, Deutches Requiem) are there.
Ryder Rivera
>Lolita >El Cantar del Mio Cid >The Wise Man's Fear
Ayden Clark
Imre Kertész - Fatelessness Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum Leo Tolstoy - Three Deaths, The Death of Ivan Ilych, After the Dance Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet Nelson Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom Rudyard Kipling - The Man Who Would Be King Leo Tolstoy - Reread 2/3 of Anna Karenina
Nicholas Lee
>The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, Borges which turns out is completely different from The Aleph and Other Stories What was included in the 1933-1969 version?
>If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, Calvino >Why read the classics?, Calvino >Travels In Hyperreality, Eco >How to travel with salmon, Eco >Book of Sand, Borges
Book of Sand was probably the best read this month. An incredibly pleasant surprise after I was disappointed with Brodie's Report. Book of Sand is possibly my favourite Borges collection now. The high points of Eco's essays are fantastic too. Some very funny stuff in there. Looking forward to reading more of Calvino's essays. There were fantastic insights in Why read the classics? but a few of the books discussed were a little too obscure for me and difficult to follow having not read them.
Jackson Ortiz
Underworld Pretentiousness: Why It Matters HHhH Submission Barabbas Collected Short Stories by Stefan Zweig A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing
Best was no doubt HHhH, was completely in love with the author's deconstruction of the historical novel.
Worst was A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing which turned out to be a lot less interesting than I thought it would be. It's basically just "misery lit" written in stream-of-consciousness.
Grayson Taylor
A shitload of little Archimedean mathematical proofs Irving Fisher's Theory of Interest Charles Dodgson's (Lewis Carroll) Euclid and His Modern Rivals
I didn't have a 'favorite' they were all good reads from an informational perspective. Euclid and His Modern Rivals was pretty clever though, told in a play style, Shakespeare-like.
Daniel King
Tours of Duty.
Never have a collection of Nam memoirs could both make me laugh and bring out the waterworks in just one book.
Xavier Sullivan
Sakutaro Hagiwara, Cat Town Andre Breton, Nadja Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye Ogura Hyakunin Isshu Charles Baudelaire Flowers of Evil
Favourite: Flowers of Evil, some of the works in it just resonated so perfectly.
Worst: Nadja, Simply because I don't think I really get it. I'm gonna definitely re read though.
Help Veeky Forums
Kokoro or Count of Monte Cristo next?
Ryder Morgan
>Kokoro or Count of Monte Cristo next?
monte cristo. drop the aesthetics chasing and be a plotpleb for a bit. change it up.
Andrew Torres
>The Sellout >Brave New World >Hologram for the King >Cat's Cradle >Ham On Rye
Really liked The Sellout, found the rest pretty meh.
Tyler Sanchez
Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Been a slow month as I've recently become a parent and some of my usual reading time is taken up by my fortnightly Private Eye. I'm reading Tigana now as a bit of light relief. It'll likely take me all of February.
Parker Wood
>Legend of the Galactic Heroes Volume III Was pretty good,eagerly waiting for the next one
>Nothing by Janne Teller Interesting read.Pretty varied themes. Liked the puppet play version too.
>Tao Te Ching James Legge's translation is a mixed bag but the notes were interesting
>Voyage to Faremido Great Sci-fi novel from the WWI era.
>Book of Odes by Confucius Pretty poems. Interesting to see how he selected them based on morals
>Circle of Chalk First chinese play I have read Pretty comfy read honestly.
Out of the bunch I would say LoGH was the best followed closely by the Book of Odes and Nothing.
Aiden Campbell
I'm unemployed and I'm living with my parents after having graduated, so, as much as I want. I don't do much other than that other than some gigs around town and auditing a creative writing class.
Yo, I'll check him out
Gabriel Johnson
>What was included in the 1933-1969 version? It's just a greatest hits collection of stories from I guess when he wasn't as famous in the the US and just bringing translations over. This one's weird because Borges himself collaborated on the translation to make it less of a strict word by word translation and closer to an English adaptation. As a result it reads a whole lot more plainly, with more simple words being used and though it's interesting it also comes out inferior to other ones out there. There's also an autobiographical essay which is good but nothing really special, and commentary by Borges about each of the stories. It has The Aleph, Streetcorner Man, Approach to al-Muʻtasim, The Circular Ruins, Death and the Compass, The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874), Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths, The Dead Man, The Other Death, Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari Dead in his Labyrinth, Man on the Threshold, The Challenge, The Captive, Borges and Myself, The Maker, The Intruder, The Immortals, The Meeting, Pedro Salvadores, and Rosendo's Tale. It's long out of print so I don't think it's worth going out of your way for it, I just grabbed it from a library thinking it was The Aleph which it isn't. But Borges is Borges so it's still good.
Xavier Russell
>This one's weird because Borges himself collaborated on the translation Is it translated with di Giovanni? Been meaning to track down his translation of Book of Sand since many people reckon his superior to the Hurley translations currently in print.
Jason Edwards
Yes it is. No it's not superior at all. It sucks that unique mystical and academic feeling of the writing in favor of plain language. As a result some of the weaker stories don't have the extra boost that atmosphere would have given. It's not bad by any means, but it's not worth tracking down.
Xavier Wright
Thanks for the insights, user. Maybe I'll try comparing translations at some point in the future, but I'll set that back behind a few more obscure Borges books I want to find first.
Pic related are on the reading pile for this month.
Brandon Perry
Also I'll add I don't think I've ever read Hurley, just stuff by Kerrigan and the others. So it's still totally possible di Giovanni is way better.
Sebastian Garcia
Ah, I've not read Kerrigan's translation of Fictions. It's another one I'd like to compare actually as di Giovanni didn't release a translation of it (only as a pdf on his website recently). Yates and Irby's Labyrinths was my gateway to Borges and it's what I mostly return to.
Owen Campbell
>Winesburg, Ohio
How is this book not on the depressing list? It felt a sad read "Hands" was my favourite and also the saddest.
Colton Gray
>Heart of Darkness >The Double >Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Was hoping to get both Les Misreables and 2666 finished for the last week but I guess I'll finish them this week. I'd say The Double was my favourite out of the lot due to how different it was from Dostoyevsky's other novels, feels like it could've been a Kafka story.