What have you read so far this year?

>Ancient Gonzo Wisdom by Hunter S. Thompson
>East of Eden by John Steinbeck
>On Revolution by Hannah Arendt
>The Second Generation by Weis & Hickman
>Evil in Modern Thought by Susan B. Neiman
>Dragons in Summer Flame by Weis & Hickman
>Rebel Dream by Aaron Allston
>Light in August by William Faulkner
>Rebel Stand by Aaron Allston
>The Demon Lover by Robin Morgan
>The Plague by Albert Camus
>Revival by Stephen King
>Under the Dome by Stephen King
>A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
>Desperation by Stephen King
>The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
>Skeleton Crew by Stephen King
>Runoff by Clay Matthews
>Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
>Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless by Matt Hart
>Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
>Jacob, Menahem, & Mimoun by Marcel Benabou
>All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
>Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
>A Case of Need by Michael Crichton
>Love and Other Hungers by Sarah O'dell Underwood
>Looking Awry by Slavoj Zizek
>Interrogating the Real by Slavoj Zizek

All the King's Men is probably the best thing I've read so far this year. Really stellar book.

i read the idiot in garnet bc that's what was available. it's hard for me to say whether i liked the translation, i'm having a couple friends read it in different translations (one k&p, one someone much less famous) so we can all compare our experiences

i loooooooved all the king's men. actually grew up in the neighborhood where huey p. long kept his house for his mistresses

the town gov was trying to make it a thing to nickname that house "the governor's mansion"..... but everyone called it the whorehouse

it was a library book so i can't be totally sure about this, but my reading notebook says the translators were macfarlane and arup. so probs the oxford.

i thought the intro provided good social context, but no huge insights.

the translations were noticeably midcentury-y in feel, you know what i mean? like nora and hedda were contemporary with the feminine mystique. small amounts of cutesy midcentury slang.

(if ibsen's work had to be inflected with the times of the translator, midcentury honestly works really well.)

but overall highly highly readable and enjoyable.

>>Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless by Matt Hart

i like the title, tell me about the book?

war and peace is baller and hilarious. there's an incredible soviet miniseries of it, as a reward when you're done reading the book

It was really phenomenal. I read the "corrected" edition which undoes some of the editorial changes made to the original manuscript. I wasn't aware that it was somewhat controversial, but I think I'm glad I read that particular edition.

It is a collection of poetry by Matt Hart, who is one of the most phenomenal poets working today. It also has an accompanying cd which puts some of the poem to music with his punk band travel. Look up some videos of him reading on YouTube. I've been fortunate enough to see him read on two separate occasions and it is fucking powerful. I actually introduced him at a reading given at my undergrad institution.

Thanks, man. I am actually planning to buy that edition since it's rather unexpensive.

I just realized I used the word phenomenal redundantly, I'm a little drunk but don't let that detract from how sincerely I am praising both All the King's Men and Matt Hart.

sorry to be a prick, but it's inexpensive

if being drunk meant you couldn't talk about literature, we wouldn't have anyone to listen to

You are absolutely right. I always get it wrong. Thanks for correcting me.

Going real slow this month, totally fucked up the pace I was moving at. Just been a little complacent and depressed but I think things are gonna get back on track soon

Here we are:

**jan**
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)
Henry IV Part Two
Terra Nova
Homesick for Another Planet
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
Idaho
**feb**
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
Bluets
McGlue
Portrait of the Alcoholic
Stag’s Leap
Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems
Henry V
The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)
Lincoln in the Bardo
Fortune Smiles
Salt.(nayyirah waheed)
Of Gravity and Angels (Jane Hirshfield)
Bone (Yrsa Daley Ward)
Too Loud a Solitude
**march**
Faith Healer
The Dead and the Living
The Argonauts
King Henry VI Part One
From Now On: New and Selected Poems (Clarence Major)
The Gold Cell
The Dollmaker’s Ghost
King Henry VI Part Two
Bringing Down the Shovel
Tracer (Frederick Barthelme)
King Henry VI, Part Three
The Oblivion Seekers
Alan Dugan New and Collected Poems, 1961-1983
Dark Money
Crimes of the Heart
**april**
Satan Says
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
Richard III
The Father
The Crucible
One Secret Thing
Beowulf
Bob the Gambler
The White Hotel
The Flick (reread)
A Confederacy of Dunces
Titus Andronicus
Speedboat
**may**
The Comedy of Errors
The Aliens (Annie Baker)
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days on the War on Drugs
Love Labour’s Lost
Measure for Measure
Cat Town (Sakutaro Hagiwara)
Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Waveland
John (Annie Baker)
The Vermont Plays
A High Wind in Jamaica
Third and Oak: The Laundromat
**june**
Moon Deluxe

Ulysses
The magic mountain
Life and faith (Grossman)
Lt. Colonel de Maumort (Du Gard)
The Tunnel (Gass)
The divine monster ( Lanoye)
Black tears (Lanoye)
If the heart could think it stood still (Pessoa, collected aphorisms)
Either/Or
Currently reading:
Don Quixote

1. The Bishop and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
2. Image and Idea by Phillip Rahv
3. A Sportsman’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev
4. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
5. The Trial by Franz Kafka
6. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
7. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
8. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

currently reading Warlock by Oakley Hall

damn son

along w the books in this post, i just read elena ferrante's my brilliant friend

1. All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)
2. Ham on Rye (Bukowski)
3. Factotum (Bukowski)
4. Women (Bukowski)
5. Hollywood (Bukowski)
6. Pulp (Bukowski)
7. Trainspotting (Welsh)
8. Naked Lunch (Burroughs)
9.Porno (Welsh)
10. A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
11. Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)

Between books right now but I've been off and on with Infinite Jest

The Stranger by Camoo
The Underground Man by Dostoyevski

I am reading the Brothers Karamazov. Yes, I am a slow reader.

not that these aren't good books, but this is a very one-note list. . .

there's nothing wrong with reading slowly as long as you read!

i think im a fast reader, but anyone who prides themself on their reading just bc they do it fast is an idiot. there's a lot more to reading than skill and there's a lot more to reading-skill than just speed. it's about what you get out of the book

I can't remember.

I'm surprised Fear and Loathing isn't on this list.

I love artichokes.

or fight club

consider keeping a reading notebook where you jot down your thoughts about the books you read

Possession - A.S. Byatt
From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 - Jorie Graham
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays - Albert Camus
Vita Nuova (Rosetti trans.) - Dante
Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe
On Being Ill - Virginia Woolf
Collected Poems - Jorge Luis Borges
Four Reincarnations - Max Ritvo
The Book of Frank - CAConrad
The Divine Comedy (Musa trans.)
A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat - Rimbaud
The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield
Consider the Lobster - DFW
The Romantic Dogs - Roberto Bolano
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Varieties of Disturbance - Lydia Davis
Olio - Tyehimba Jess
The Wasteland and Other Poems - John Beer
The End of the Alphabet - Claudia Rankine
Don't Let Me Be Lonely - Claudia Rankine
Look - Solmaz Sharif
The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) - Samuel Beckett
Voyage of the Sable Venus - Robin Coste Lewis
This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Elegy - Mary Jo Bang
The Castle - Kafka
Poems - Elizabeth Bishop
The Riverside Milton
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - William Blake
The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus
Vita Nuova (Musa trans.)
Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector
The Complete Poems - Anne Sexton
James Joyce - Richard Ellman
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
Three Guineas - Virginia Woolf

Rereads:
The Last Two Seconds - Mary Jo Bang
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
Complete Stories - Kafka

Currently reading Finnegans Wake along with William York Tindall's Reader's Guide because I fell hard for the Joyce meme a couple years back and have been making my way through all of his major works since then

It's been a pretty good year so far. Gravity's Rainbow is a reread, and I'm about halfway through Infinite Jest (another reread) now.

you are one of like two ppl on this thread who read anything substantial by women

how does one obtain such a graphic???

goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2017 here user. For some reason, it doesn't seem like you get get there from within the site easily. Replace year in url to see past stats.

I just got into /literature/ this year again. I'm going to start on the Western Canon soon, but here's what I've read so far to get back into reading.

> Beowulf (Heaney)
> The Stranger (Camus)
> Meditations (Aurelius)
> The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus)
> Frankenstein (Shelley)
> Why I Am Not A Christian (Russel)
> Tao Te Ching (Tzu)
> Grendel (Gardner)
> Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
> The Hobbit (Tolkie )
> Siddhartha (Hesse)
> Beowulf (Tolkien)
> Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
> The Pearl (Steinbeck)
> In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck)
> Huck Finn (Twain)
> Tom Sawyer (Twain)
> A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
> Stoner (Williams)
> Dubliners (Joyce)
> Ulysses (Joyce)
> The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)

Oh, yes, and I read a few companion books alongside Ulysses, but I don't quite count those.

Salve! Lingua Latina is exceptional.

>Invisible Cities - Calvino
>If on a winter's night a traveller - Calvino
>Story of My Life - Casanova
>Death in Venice/Tristan - Mann

>Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius
>Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche
>Futurist Theory and Collected Writings - Marinetti

>Italian Futurism 1909-44: Reconstructing the Universe
>Italian Cinema: Reinhabiting the Past in Post-War Cinema - Steimatsky
>Italo Calvino - McLaughlin
>Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews

>Wagner and Nietzsche - Fischer-Dieskau
>Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics
>The Cambridge Companion to the Lied
>Ockeghem - Krenek
>Ezra Pound and Music
>Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession - Rosselli
>Piano Notes: The Hidden World of the Pianist - Rosen
>Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism - Kimbell
There are certainly some other books about music I can't remember right now. Definitely one about Renaissance music with some generic title I can't quite remember at the moment, along with others.

ayyyyyy fellow calvino fan!

the title of casanova's memoir cracked me up. i'm imagining him as a nineties teen smoking a cigarette. "jesus, story of my life."

it seems like you're big on italian shit, can i recommend ferrante to you?

Just started to get into reading again, sorry if my choices are shit. I tried to read things I knew I would like to get myself going rather than pick something up I knew I wouldn't finish or be interested in. I'm in college and there's a lot of distractions so I want to read things that will keep me coming back. I read Fear and Loathing a year or so ago so hence why it's not on the list.

Lol sadly true, user. Turns out a lot of the contemporary poetry that's not hot garbage is written by women. Also I'm an undergrad who's focus of study is modernism hence the Joyce, all of the Woolf, Stein, Mansfield, etc.

I forgot Una pietra sopra as well. Tried to piece that list together using my library history but that is more difficult than it should be

Casanova's memoirs were really readable, although I did go with the Penguin Classics edition which is abridged, probably for the best since I think the manuscript runs to 3,700 pages. It's an entertaining read and though a lot of it is about him looking to fuck, it does provide an interesting look into the society of Europe during Casanova's life.

Nah

Just finished my undergrad in Italian and French, hence some of the Italian stuff there (although I read most of it because I was interested, as opposed to couple of chapters for use in essays)
I know a girl who adores Ferrante, but that's my only contact with her.

now i feel bad for teasing.

can i recommend some books that would probably be within your tastes but still expand your horizons a little?

kind of funny/sad that being in college makes extensive reading harder

no problem haha and of course user, i'm open to any suggestions.

yeah shit sucks

I don't think at all about the author's gender when choosing books, but when I look back on it, my reading list over time is also fairly balanced. Now that the almost complete maleness of most of these reading retrospectives has been pointed out, I'm wondering if my reading habits are all that unrepresentative, or if the issue is just that, well, we're talking about this on Veeky Forums.

Do people actively try to only read men?

Is no one reading Sappho anymore? Arendt, the Brontës, de la Cruz, Didion, Eliot, etc.?

(In fairness, I did see a Beauvoir thread and a Lispector one.)

i think you would really enjoy the neapolitan novels. and it sounds like you'll get to read them in the original italian, you lucky duck.

dedinitely try on the road and dharma bums

yeah i'm gonna read those soon

Those people either haven't read it, or don't read. It's a page-turner.

u could probly get into some sweet bret easton ellis too

yeah i want to read american psycho of course but do you have any other recommendations? i've heard mixed things about less than zero

...

You know, I think those who actively read only men are probably part of a small minority that congregate in places like Veeky Forums. I think you bring up a good point about reading classics written by women, since it does seem to me like the western canon is male-centric, but there are a good amount of classics people can read that are by women, so maybe the lib arts school environment I exist in is distorting my perspective a bit. Anyway, nice to have a chat with someone on fucking Veeky Forums of all places about shit like this.

Tl;dr the only people who actively try to read only men are those pathetic d-bags that make anti-women posts and threads on Veeky Forums

I read the few good women authors and I make lots of anti-women posts on Veeky Forums because women are for the most part worthless garbage.

There are just far more male authors of quality. Women's psyche is mired in the kind of shit that doesn't produce good authors, the way we construct it at least. And women really started producing literature mostly in a bourgeois era that mires the general psyche in shit and produces bland mediocrity.

Women are double-shit in our culture. Takes a rare schizotypal weirdo like Arendt to run that gauntlet and come out the other side with something to say.

Whatever you say, user. Clearly I'm not going to change your mind, so agree to disagree.

Embarrassingly enough I think by Siddhartha by Herman Hesse & The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler are the only books I've actually finished this year.

I have a terrible habit of starting books but not finishing them.

I started Idylls of The King by Tennyson but stopped 2/3 way through.
I also started reading Jill by Philip Larkin but it's not nearly as engaging as his poetry.

I'm currently muddling my way through Fagle's translation of The Iliad.

Hey! ( here), how do you like those Rankine? I read Citizen a few years back or whenever it came out and really enjoyed it.

You should read Lucia Berlin

Got a rec for any other Lakrin? I'm a big poetry reader but--fuck, nevermind. Just realized you meant Larkin whom I love and not Levine whom I hate. What's Jill about?

How was The Prophet?

The Alchemist
Lolita (reread)
Crime and Punishment
The Brothers Karamazov
Stoner
The Sun Also Rises
Prometheus Rising
Be Here Now
The Kybalion

so you're the dude making anti-womem threads on lit? you know those never have anything to do with literature, right? can you not go post those on pol or r9k?

>implying there aren't many who share the opinion that women make for sub-par authors

It's fine. It's great for what it is: a poetic and thematic collection of aphorisms with a slight narrative tying them all together.

Not a must read, unless you're trying to get into poetry; in which case, hey check it out!

meditations (aurelius)
letters to lucilius (seneca)
a sportsman's sketches (turgenev)
one day in the life of ivan denisovich (solz)
mitt liv som jag minns det (von wright)
the bell jar (plath)
plus random nonfiction and titles not worth translating here

>re-reads
a moveable feast (hem)
tinker tailor soldier spy (le carre)
tractatus & on certainty

Hamsun - Pan
Hamsun - Hunger
Hamsun - Mysteries
Musil - The Confusions of Young Törless
Hamsun - Victoria
Schopenhauer - Essays and Aphorisms
Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Krasznahorkai - Satantango
Hamsun - In Wonderland
Currently reading The Melancholy of Resistance.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai - The Last Wolf & Hermann
Karl Ove Knausgård - My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Elizabeth Jane Howard - The Long View
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
W. Somerset Maugham - The Painted Veil
Clifford D. Simak - Way Station
Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
Elmore Leonard - Killshot
Ivan Turgenev - Spring Torrents
George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo
Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
Philip K. Dick - Eye in the Sky
Sándor Márai - Embers
Philip K. Dick - The Simulacra
Nell Dunn - Poor Cow
Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Breece D'J Pancake - The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
Nicholson Baker - The Size of Thoughts
Amelia Gray - Gutshot
Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death
Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen
Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud a Solitude
Ian Mcewan - The Comfort of Strangers
Banana Yoshimoto - Asleep
Dino Buzzati - The Tartar Steppe

currently reading the next volume of knausgaard

Life of St Anthony - Athanasius
Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey
The French Lieutenant's Woman - Fowles
Nostromo - Conrad
At Swim-Two-Birds - O'Brien
Men Without Women - Murakami

That are some nice books, but why is it that Veeky Forums only ever talks about the same group of anglo high school curriculum books?

Ubu roi and that's about it.

reading dubliners and some commie stuff right now though

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevski
After the Death of God by Vattimo and Caputo
Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski
Hero with 1000 Faces by J. Campbell
Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of John, Revelation of John from the Bible
Nag Hammadi texts trans. J Meyer (2nd ed.)
Apocryphal Revelation of Paul

Currently reading: Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

oh, and a re-read of Agony of the Eros by Byung-Chul Han.

...

Good reading list.

Trump - Art of the Deal
Faulkner - Sound and the Fury
Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra
Ellison - Invisible Man
Pynchon - Crying of Lot 49
Ferris - 4 Hour Workweek
Pressfield - War of Art
Huxley - Doors of Perception
Pratchett - Color of Magic

slowly reading the KJB too, want to try Infinite Jest soonish

Thanks the rec! As for my thoughts on the Rankine collections, The End of the Alphabet was incredible, easily one of the best contemporary poetry collections I've ever read, if not THE best. The first contemporary literary work I've read that truly feels like it's doing something new. As for Don't Let Me Be Lonely, it's okay. Feels like a warm-up for Citizen desu. There are a lot of fascinating images in it but they end up battling with the poetry instead of complementing it, so call it a failed experiment, or more accurately an experiment she would refine to near-perfection with Citizen.

Holy shit it autocorrected desu to desu Veeky Forums is taking over my computer

>Lord of the Flies
>Catcher in the Ruy
>Hobbet
>Bill Bubb
>ninety eigty four

Fuck me I give up, you win Veeky Forums

I heard a quote from it years ago, which I memorized because I liked it, but I have yet to actually read the book.

I read a lot of poetry as well.

The Trial
Crime and Punishment
The Bible
The Stranger
Confessions
Moby Dick

The Bible took me a while

ooh, i loved hunger!

what would you recommend that we read?

What website is this?

What a great narcissism thread.

Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground
Gogol - Dead Souls
Plato - Apology
Plato - Crito
Pushkin - Collected Short Stories
Gogol - Collected Short Stories
Bible - Genesis
Plato - Phaedo
Plato - Meno
Plato - Protagoras
Plato - Gorgias
Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Williams - Stoner
Freud - Civilization and its Discontents
Mier - Jung's Analytical Psychology & Religion
Rieff - The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Jung - Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Freud - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Plato - Symposium
Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Bible - Exodus
Plato - Republic
Shakespeare - Hamlet
Shakespeare - Macbeth
Shakespeare - The Sonnets
Aurelius - Meditations
Epicurus - Letters, Fragments, Doctrines
Aristotle - De Anima
Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Seneca - Dialogues and Essays
Beard - SPQR
Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
Lewis - Mere Christianity
Augustine - Confessions

You can probably see the progress as I'm slowly converted to Christianity over the last 6 months.

What was your favourite piece of literature out of the ones you just listed?

Excluding all the Philosophy, Book of the New Sun was my personal favorite. Below that is a tie between The Brothers Karamazov and The Sonnets.

What did you think of Hunger? Would you consider it better than his other works?

Don Quixote
La muerte de Artemio Cruz

slow reader