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I haven't really done a reading challenge before, so I guess I'll go for 52 - hopefully I can read at least one book a week. My Goodreads account.
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Jan 2, 2014 06:32
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Got my first book down: 1) Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Richard Howard I'm actually kind of underwhelmed. I knew that it wasn't going to have the same edge that it did in its own context, but I also felt like most of the poems lacked rhythm, whether because they lacked rhythm in the original French or because Howard's translation is inept. The constant references to breasts were also very annoying, but that's also to be expected. With all that being said, I did like certain poems, phrases, images, etc., and it's always interesting to read iconoclasts. It also got me noticing that I shouldn't fill my reading challenge full of short books, so I'm going to try to have at least 30 of the books I read this year be over 300 pages long.
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Jan 3, 2014 07:49
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Blind Sally posted:I had the opposite problem last year, when I realized I shouldn't fill my reading challenge full of long books. I read Infinite Jest and the drat thing took most of January and all of February to read. 1 book of my goal of 52. (I should have counted it as five books, or something, aw well). There's that, too, yeah; I know I also plan to read IJ this year, having really enjoyed DFW's shorter pieces. I think I'll save that for the summer. I'm also using this first week of January, while I'm still on winter break, to read Anna Karenina, since I know it would have otherwise taken me all semester, like Jane Eyre last semester. And I'll probably want to read War and Peace this summer, too. 
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Jan 5, 2014 07:56
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Haven't actually stopped in to post what I've been reading yet, so I guess I'll be making this a quarterly thing. 1. Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Richard Howard I liked this one a fair bit for the variety of the images, but I feel like it must be much better in French. Then again, I imagine this problem is endemic to poetry translation. 2. On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner Having already loved his The Art of Fiction, I found this one very rewarding, too. If I'm remembering The Art of Fiction correctly, this one is very different, dealing less with technical aspects of writing and more with the lifestyle that you have to adjust to, and the type of person that you have to be. Still, very valuable. 3. The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson Some of the stories in here were very, very good (and "The Renegade" might actually be the most disturbing short story I've ever read), but then some were very boring, and I also don't quite see what was achieved by the continual use of James Harris (or at least the name). 4. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, trans. David Magarshack Mostly very good, but sometimes I really wanted to know what was going on with a different storyline than the one that happened to be receiving focus. I also had a hard time staying sympathetic with Anna once she started becoming more paranoid about what Vronsky was doing. But that probably just means I haven't lived long enough to fully get this book, and I certainly don't mind the thought of returning to it in maybe ten years or so. But it might help that I made a point of powering through this in about nine days before the end of winter break. 5. The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry This is actually the first time I'd come across anything involving Fry, but I was pretty impressed. Not all of the forms that he talked about were interesting to me (I don't see the value in, say, the sestina, and the endless variations on the rondel were tiring), but for the most part I found this very helpful and admire his scholarship. 6. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner Easily the best book I've read so far this year. Everything involving Benjy, in particular, was hideously moving, and I just loved the language and the way that the story was brought out. Looking forward to reading more Faulkner. 7. Daisy Miller, by Henry James The first full book I've had to read for the class I'm taking on James at the moment. It's probably my least favorite I've read of his so far, and I bet that's largely because it wasn't long enough for me to invest very much in it. 8. The Paris Review, Issue 206, ed. Loren Stein Read this one for a class I'm taking about small press publishing. I don't have much to say; I hated everything except the interviews (though I like this tradition enough that I've gone through a fair bit of their archive online), in terms of both form and content. I especially hate Loren Stein for publishing (and therefore further enabling) such pointless and poorly-written crap. Also for publishing one of Franzen's self-indulgent and vapidly-annotated translations of a Karl Kraus essay. 9. The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James Kind of a weird one for James in how focused it is on a single concept and a single strange character trait, but goddamn if this story's big line didn't get me the first time I read it. 10. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James More immediately engaging than usual for a James, I suppose, even in spite of its length. Overall I liked this one a lot. But Jane Campion's so-called adaptation of it is horrible on almost every level. Don't watch it. 11. Lapham’s Quarterly: Animals, ed. Lewis Lapham This is simply a wonderful magazine (website). Every issue discusses a new topic, and in doing so it draws on literature from all over the world and from as many moments in time as possible; this issue had the obligatory Moby-Dick excerpt, as well as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, and many more. It's sort of a historical mosaic made out of both literary and visual art. 12. Tenth of December, by George Saunders What an annoying writing style, and what a waste of talent. He has lots of interesting ideas for stories, and he's very good at fully using all of his elements, but overall I'm just not charmed by his particular brand of satire; I don't find him funny, I don't like the sound of his style, I don't like the repetitiveness of his themes, I don't like his motif of having characters speak in some "quirky" way as a result of drugs, and overall I wish he had let his ideas speak more for themselves and spend less time on supposedly-funny product names. But apparently he's huge right now, and I'm one of the only people I know who feels this way. 13. Theogony and Works and Days, by Hesiod "Theogony" wasn't really interesting because of how much of it has trickled down, but "Works and Days" was kind of amusing. 14. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov Once again I'm left in awe of Nabokov; the depth of his vocabulary is astounding, as is the way he keeps finding connections between the sounds of words (as with all of the puns on the name of the heroine), and if one ignores the specific context of his chronicle his portrayal of sexual jealousy is astounding. Unfortunately, it felt at times that, linguistically, he went after lots of low-hanging fruit and perhaps used too much alliteration even for my tastes. Between that, the relative lack of emotional connection (though it's better in this regard than Pale Fire), and the amount of time he spends on certain digressions, I can't rank this one as highly as Lolita. 15. The Ambassadors, by Henry James Probably the best book I've read by him so far, in light of just how many ideas he explored with it, the greater nuance of his characters, and the full development of his style of inhabiting his characters' thoughts and seeing them through every consideration. It's not as immediately exciting as The Portrait of a Lady, and it's probably even lighter on plot, but all in all it's still pretty good. 15/52 4/30 over 300 pages. Mr. Squishy posted:The Europeans was a slight but fun James book which hammers home the message of the upright, true, if boring Americans clashing against the devious, perverted, interested Europeans. From my survey of James (this and Roderick Hudson) this seems to be an idée fix. He does not seem to be my author For what it's worth, those are two of his earliest works. I agree that his fixation on America vs. Europe is tiresome, but based off of your summary of The Europeans, his later works at least handle it with more nuance and skill; I didn't get as much of an impression of bias in, say, The Ambassadors. All Nines fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 23:32
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All Nines posted:1. Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Richard Howard A bit more productive this quarter, and I read a fair number of books that I actually enjoyed as much as, if not more than anything I read in the previous three months. 16. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather For some reason it already feels like it's been a really long time since I read the book, because of how little I can remember of its plot, characters, and prose, so I guess that that doesn't necessarily speak well of it, but I would attribute it partly to the nostalgic tone. I enjoyed it a good bit for some easy reading at the time, though, so I guess I would recommend it. 17. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. various There were lots of delightful stories, and I'm really glad that Borges existed (though I feel like his creativity is going to preemptively ruin me on a ton of writers I haven't even read yet), but with the way that short story collections are there were a few that didn't really hold my attention. I think my favorite story was "The Library of Babel," and it would interesting if anyone wanted to talk about a different story that they preferred. 18. Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville Even for an incomplete book I felt like this was a waste of my time. Very disappointing, considering this is the same dude who wrote Moby-Dick, and I'm not sure if that's better or worse than if this had been some other dude I could just brush aside. 19. Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor I didn't feel that anything in this collection had the raw power of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" or "The River," from the the previous collection, and as with the previous collection it gets repetitive, perhaps more so this time since there's a new recurring motif of mother-hating intellectuals that's employed to different degrees of success, but overall I think that this was a much more solid and consistent collection, and I still really enjoyed it. 20. The Golden Bowl, by Henry James Fantastic, fantastic. I feel that it has as least the same degree of technical virtuosity as The Ambassadors, but was in every other respect more engaging (aside from Strether's midlife crisis in the latter, which was more nuanced and resolved in a less depressing way than John Marcher's in The Beast in the Jungle). I like how late James's characters can be so pitiable and so terrible to each other while rarely being just terrible, and when such conflict is pushed along by such great prose and such careful consideration of characters' psychologies, what else could this be but a masterpiece? 21. The Best American Short Stories 2013, ed. Elizabeth Strout Out of twenty stories, there were two in here that didn't reek of either modern affectation or modern dullness, and even then one of them, Alice Munro's, doesn't even hold up against the three other stories of hers that I've read. As I said in my Goodreads review I only find this book valuable as a period piece, and as a catalog of a bunch of magazines I'm no longer interested in.  22. Metamorphoses, by Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes It was pretty cool seeing how some of the Greek myths we're familiar with originated, or might have, but the quality of the writing was very disappointing (especially after the opening paragraph's description of the creation of the universe had me expecting a lyrical masterpiece), and the stupidities that drove most of the characters to do what they did got very annoying and made it hard to enjoy anything in here but the imagery. Then again, this translation is prose, rather than poetry, so I wonder if that has anything to do with it. 23. Lapham's Quarterly: Comedy, ed. Lewis Lapham I didn't like this issue as much as the one on animals, partly because comedy's a less interesting subject to me than animals, and partly because there were more writers I didn't enjoy (Woody Allen, Don DeLillo, and Gloria Steinem sucked in particular). Still a pretty interesting issue of a cool magazine. 24. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, by William Gass Granting that I haven't read very many books so far, Gass is probably the best living writer I've read. His vulgarity and the occasional clustered feeling of his prose get tiresome, and the first and last novellas in this particular collection were much better than the middle two, but still very creative and well-written. Looking forward to reading his work in other literary forms. 25. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green loving terrible. I can't be sure if it's actually the worst book I've ever read, but God is it annoying. Whether or not his characters talk like actual teenagers (I've never interacted with any teenagers who took such care to phrase their silly sentiments, but apparently they exist), they aren't really any more intelligent or compelling than any other teenager, with or without cancer, and the way his characters are all commending each other on this or that quality (as often as not one that's been taken for granted or played up) reads a lot like John Green's commending himself on his wit or creativity (also taken for granted except insofar as his creativity, that is to say his plot, is completely hokey). I don't think anything else about the book bugged me that much, but the mania surrounding it (and, to be honest, YA in general) is disheartening and exhausting. 26. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Now that I've read Faulkner this just doesn't do anything for me, though it wouldn't be the first time McCarthy's disappointed me. Like, his voice is very similar to Faulkner and should be more exciting in light of how boring so many writers are nowadays, but considering that reliance (if I wouldn't go as far as Goodreads's Keely in calling it aping), McCarthy seems redundant as a stylist since his writing is so far beneath Faulkner's. I really like the idea of this book as a sort of devilish, beached Moby-Dick, but even the violence and abjection of it wears thin--probably would have even if it had actually been Faulkner writing it. Though Faulkner's details compound each other rather than stepping on each other's toes. Not necessarily a bad book, but I feel like there's enough books out there that are better. 27. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima Unfortunately not as good as I was expecting it to be, prone to plodding, but the way that it felt partly like an essay on aesthetics melded into the narrative of a mentally disturbed young man at least made me think, and I look forward to reading more of Mishima. 28. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf Very quick read, but in the sense that a storm can quickly have its effect. I would have to read it again to keep more of its details, but its particular structure and style made it wonderful, and the middle section was surprisingly impactful. Great book. 29. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner Probably the most difficult book that I've ever read, which was to be expected given the reputation around this book, but ultimately penetrable, at least on the sentence level, even on this first read. I have to admit that the timeline at the end was really helpful--I thought the toughest thing about this book was making sense of the chronology--but I still enjoyed it. 30. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce I wish the first half of the book had been as good as the second, but then I guess the subject matter makes that impossible. Still glad that I had more patience for it this time than I did two years ago and didn't childishly skim the good part. 31. Le Morte d'Arthur, by Thomas Malory This one had some surprises for me, not all of them good. It would be hard for me to get into all of my impressions with such a long collection, especially because certain events end in the space of a page, but overall it was more valuable than enjoyable to read, much like the other books I've read of the European Matters, or anything older than that. 32. The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James I didn't think I would have such an easy time calling a book of the quarter, but this has to be it. I've already given a write-up of it in the What Did You Just Finish thread, so I'll just say that it was completely enthralling and highly rewarding. 32/52 11/30 over 300 pages. It's too bad that I'm falling behind on the number of more substantial novels that I've read, so hopefully the rest of this summer is more productive in that regard. Book I Couldn't Finish: Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami I was willing to go along with it for about the first half, even though all it really had going for it was unbridled imagination (and having read Mishima before it I was more conscious that any faults in Murakami's prose probably can't be blamed entirely on its being a translation), but then the scene with the feminist caricatures in the library being told off by the smug mentor figure was throw-it-across-the-room bad, only I'm borrowing it from my roommate. All Nines fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 04:27
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