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I'll bite. Going to attempt 20 books this year. Starting small since I read so infrequently, but that is something I hope to change.
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Jan 5, 2014 07:30
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1. Blue is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh - Was an okay graphic novel. At times rather touching, but more often than not, cliche and overly melodramatic. 2. The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll - Wow, what a great book. I love everything about this. I'd recommend this to anyone who doesn't mind darker material. The often irreverent way the heavy material was handled made for an interesting read. Off to a better start than I would've guessed, even if they are easy reads. Now I can't read for fun anymore, what with so much reading for school. Oh well, that was fun while it lasted. Anne Frankenstein fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 16:18
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So I kind of forget about this thread, hence the lack of updating my total. In any case, I failed to finish my small goal of 20 books, but I hit 12 (+2 texts that after all was said and done, I'm not counting towards my total since they were such insanely light/small reads). I'm still counting this as a good start, because that's way more books than I read in the past five years prior to trying this. In any case, I'd previously read Blue is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh, which I'm not counting towards my total because it's a rather short graphic novel, and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, which I loved. The rest of the year was 2. The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett A book I quite enjoyed in spite of the ridiculous plotting. It was a pretty easy read, and I loved the dated depiction of masculinity with the protagonist. I'll have to look for more Hammett. 3. Excluded by Julia Serano Read this for a class I was taking on Queer theories and politics, and mostly enjoyed it. Some good ideas in the book, but a lot of what was largely fueled by anecdotal evidence. Reading it more like an academically-minded editorial made the ideas resonate more, however I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who isn't interested in gender studies. 4. The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter Easily my favourite book of the year, it was absolutely ridiculous and batshit insane in the best possible ways. A look at how the civil rights movements might have ended up if the fears of the conservative naysayers of the day ended up true. It was a bit scattered at times, and I felt a bit hard to really get into at the start, but when things got rolling, it was hard to put down. 5. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot After an entire summer of not reading a single thing, I started a course on "The English Novel," which, while not terrible, I realize is not really my thing. First up was Daniel Deronda, which I can't say I really enjoyed too much. There were a lot of interesting ideas in this, but the huge plot shifts made the whole book feel a bit disjointed to me. It seemed to switch focus in who the book was about, as well as what it was about, about halfway through, and as a result I stopped caring about certain characters that the book continued to include but de-emphasize. 6. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence Enjoyed this one more, as I found the prose more engaging, however, I had a hard time with the characters in that their character shifts felt more like it was to aid the plot, and as such I felt some of the character's actions to be rather unbelievable. 7. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Another book I'm unsure how I feel about it. I liked the way Tess was portrayed as sympathetic in bad circumstances, but at the same time, no one else was depicted as such, so she felt 'too good' when constantly surrounded by bad things happening to her. It was a nice counter-view to the dominant society of the time, but it felt almost too defeatist without using that aspect of it as a comment. Of course, late-semester fatigue was starting to hit at this point, so I'm sure I missed a lot that was going on in this novel. 8. Maurice by E.M. Forster I don't have much to say about this book as I was reading it during final projects/papers. It was fairly dry, but pretty easy to read. 9. Nevada by Imogen Binnie This book really could've used some editing. Lots of grammar and syntax issues. That said, I found it interesting, and a refreshing change from the usual queer-lit I've read so far. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the subject area who isn't looking for anything particularly artful in its prose. It was an easy read, but would really have benefited from more revising. 10. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty I love reading about the funerary/death industry, as well as funeral practices, so I really enjoyed this sort-of memoir about a crematory operator who is disillusioned with current Western funerary practices. 11. Necrophilia Variations by Supervert Having wanted to read this since hearing about it in the Hysterical Literature series, I have to say it wasn't as shocking as I expected, at least, considering it's a book about necrophilia. Parts of it were well written, parts of it were really flat, but it was shockingly minimal in its discussions of Necrophilia, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was more focused on the necrophiliac than on the act of necrophilia (thankfully). I found the misogyny in it more disturbing than any of the corpse-loving. Overall, I wouldn't really recommend it, as there's way better transgressive fiction out there, but it was interesting for its introspection into the mind of a sexual deviant, and some of the short stories were well written. BONUS - SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas Counting this as bonus because it was only 35 pages. This was ridiculous. Further proof that toxic viewpoints can exist in any ideology. It was the most psychotically batshit idea of feminism I've read, but at the same time, there were some great lines in here, in that I could see a character in John Waters movie yelling them. Unintentional satire? 12. Wetlands by Charlotte Roche After having read the first paragraph earlier, I knew this book would be up my alley. It was a total gross-out, but I still read it all in one sitting. I'd like to say I really enjoyed the book for its brazen depiction of outsider sexuality, and it's blasé attitude towards the taboos it was tackling, but I felt like the direction the plot went did not have enough emphasis to really be meaningful. Too much time was spent on the gross-out stuff at the expense of exploring the deeper meanings. I did read a translation of it from the original German, so it is hard to say how much that altered it, but I was expecting more from it. And that was my year. I might finish more before it is over, but this might be it. Failed my goal, but I made a good start considering I'd maybe read one book a year prior to starting this. Anne Frankenstein fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 02:17
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