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This is actually the year I don't assign myself an arbitrary number of books to read. Last year I fell behind by a bit, so I ended up prioritizing a bunch of light, short SFF novels over heavier fare. The result is that a bunch of longer, meatier works have been sitting in my to-read pile for months because I don't have "time" to read them - and I didn't have time to read them solely because of an arbitrary constraint I'd placed on myself. That's dumb as hell. This is the year I say gently caress it to that and read however many big-rear end books I can. On deck (as soon as I finish the new William Gibson novel I got for Christmas) are Gass' The Tunnel, Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own and Anna Karenina. I might give the Stravinsky Challenge a shot as well, although I typically hit about 2/3rds of his list in a given year anyway (I've tried to prioritize books by women and POCs as much as possible in the last couple years). edit: I feel like I should know this already, but Stravinsky: what's so great about The Blind Owl? Popular Human fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 17:10
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:07 |
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Since January's over, here's my first update to the Stravinsky list. Doing well so far: 1. The vanilla read a set number of books in a year. 2. 3. 4. Philosophy 5. History 6. 7. A collection of poetry 8. Something post-modern 9. 10. The Blind Owl (Free translation if your ok with reading on a screen or cant find a copy!) 11. Something on either hate or love 12. Something dealing with space 13. Something dealing with the unreal 14. Wildcard (Some one else taking the challenge will tell you what to read) 15. 16. That one book that has been sitting on your desk waiting for a long time 17. A play 18. Biography 19. The color red 20. Something banned or censored 21. Short story(s) 22. A mystery Books read in January: 1. William Gibson, "The Peripheral" 2. Jacqueline Carey, "Kushiel's Dart" The kind of thing I'd usually avoid, as I'm not much into huge fantasy novels these days and the packaging makes it look like a romance novel wrapped up in fantasy trappings, but it came recommended by a Goodreads friend who's usually spot on with her tastes, so I gave it a shot. It was surprisingly well-written, tightly plotted and felt a lot like a less misogynistic take on the whole GoT/Dune "scheming houses" plot - but as the book goes on the protagonist gradually becomes a bigger and bigger Mary Sue until nearly every major character in the book has given a monologue about how great she is. Also it was long as balls. Not terrible, but I doubt I'll read the rest of the series. 3. Michel Houellebecq, "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" Fantastic: a series of three essays about Lovecraft's life and work written right before Houellebecq blew up in France. Has the best treatment of HPL's racism I've seen and informs Houellebecq's future writing nearly as much as it dives into Lovecraft's (It's no accident the phrase "elementary particles" is used like five times). 4. Kenzaburo Oe, "A Personal Matter" A self-centered manchild has a complete breakdown when he finds out his child was born brain-damaged, goes on a multi-week bender and concocts fanciful plots to have the baby murdered. Oe is an absolute master prose stylist; able to make you feel horrible for the narrator and utterly loathe him in the space of two sentences. Goes to some dark places - every husband or father who reads it will likely have some of them hit uncomfortably close to home. The ending felt kind of hokey and undeserved. 5. Thomas Pynchon, "Inherent Vice" I just finished this, and my initial impression is that it's a very smart book pretending to be a very stupid one. It's my first Pynchon, and "Gravity's Rainbow" is my "book you've had sitting on your desk forever book," so it definitely won't be my last. Currently about to start The Satanic Verses, which is both a book I've always wanted to read and will also fill the 'banned books' checkbox. Any recommendations for a good book of poetry for someone who is pretty much poetry illiterate? I tried a book of Rilke's poetry and couldn't get through ten pages of it; poems are not usually my thing.
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Feb 2, 2015 19:54
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