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ok, sign me up for 70, which is what I read this year. i think i did the whole stravinsky challenge thing last year, so i demand a prize. this year instead i'll try to read at least two 'proper' books in catalan as I'm living there & learning the language. my goodreads page is here, but i only post in latvian, so if you can't read it, too bad. Currently reading: Giles Milton - White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves Svetlana Alexievich - Время секонд хэнд (The Second-hand Time - one of her 'documental novels' about USSR; this one focuses on the collapse of the Soviet power, but the interviewees talk about a bunch of other things, too) John & Linda Friel - Adult Children: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families (i'm a translator, and this is what i'm currently working on) and i guess i can add 'The Little Prince' to the currently reading list, but it's more of a catalan learning tool for me, so i won't count it among the 'proper' books.
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Jan 3, 2015 15:44
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 07:30 |
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Hantama posted:Could someone give me a book for my wildcard please? Apuleius' Golden rear end. It has a guy having lots of sex and then turning into a donkey with a big dick.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:13
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1. Giles Milton - White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves. History book that read like a Flashman adventure with less sex and more adoration of the English. I think I will slowly read all of Milton's books (this being my third). 2. John Friel, Linda Friel - Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families. I'm translating this, but I'm counting it in. It's not as rubbish as I thought, even if it read like an AA advertisement at times (and the authors hate runners). 3. Brautigan, Richard - Revenge of the Lawn. I love me some Brautigan, and this is probably a better read than any of his novels. Just keep it in the loo and read one miniature every now and then. 4. Lu Xun - Call to Arms. The guy who is credited for dragging the Chinese literature into XX century. Some of the stories were very black-and-white in their moral tone, but 'The Story of Ah Q' was great fun and well worth the price of admission in itself. 5. Svetlana Aleksievich - Время секонд хэнд ('Second-hand Time')[/b]. A collection of in-depth interviews with 'regular' Soviet people about the last years of Soviet era and the dawn of capitalism. The author's impartiality is very suspect as is her choice of people to interview, but it's a good source for crazy personal events and some of the reasoning behind what happened in Russia then and is happening now. 6. Jeff VanderMeer - Authority (Southern Reach, #2). I found it much more boring than the first book of the series or VanderMeer's short stories. Maybe it's because I don't care about the characters personal troubles and mommy issues in a sci-fi book about crazy, mysterious happenings that threaten to destroy the world. Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 17:04
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Burning Rain posted:1. Giles Milton - White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves. History book that read like a Flashman adventure with less sex and more adoration of the English. I think I will slowly read all of Milton's books (this being my third). 7. Amin Maalouf - Samarkand. For some reason I was expecting something more than a straight historical political adventure novel, but that's what I got. Basically Eco-lite set in 10th/11th & 19th/20th century Persia with Omar Khayyam's manuscript being the tie between them (along with some nods to the contemporary Middle East). 8. Dino Buzzati - The Tartar Steppe. I don't think any other book has gotten to me so well in the last year or so. A slightly symbolic tale of a young soldier going to guard a fortress on the border with a country that seems to exist only in peoples' imagination and hopes. It's mostly about growing up and the disillusionment with life while always yearning for something big to happen, and the book does a fantastic job at portraying these feelings. 9. Elfriede Jelinek - Michael. Started off as a shock-lit with tons of graphic violence description, but then turned its attention to the infantile longings of the main characters, and the violence began to make sense as an exaggerated external showing of their feelings. This is Jelinek's first book and not something I'd suggest starting with, even if I ended up liking it more than I thought I would after the first 50 pages. 10. Juan Rulfo - Pedro Páramo. The book is often brought up to be the forefather of magical realism, and some of the more magical strands really appealed to me. However, once you scratched them off, the story of the village beneath the literary fireworks wasn't anything special and, unfortunately for my enjoyment, has been done often since Rulfo. 11. Oliver Sacks - Awakenings. A solid Sacks book, although not as good as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or An Anthropologist on Mars due to relating too many case histories that understandably had a lot of repetition (even if they also had a lot of unique characteristics, and I can understand that it was hard to select as few as he did). If anyone is going to read this, I suggest skipping the introduction unless you're dying to read a technical description of Parkinsonism/L-DOPA debate as seen in early 70s/80s. The 100 page afterword was interesting, but I suspect some neurologists and students would get a heart-attack of Sacks veering into metaphysics and even Freud quite often. I will read his autobiography when it comes out this year, though, especially since he doesn't have many months left to live... 12. Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle 1. Surprisingly enjoyable and different from the impression I had gotten from the reviews. It's not focusing on the banality of contemporary life and not even commenting on it (much), rather the contrary: it's a self portrait made up of 4 vividly recreated and very well written scenes that hold a strong meaning for the author.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:20
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Boatswain posted:Now read Waiting for the Barbarians, you will not regret it. It'll probably be the next Coetzee I read, yes. Looking forward to it!
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Mar 2, 2015 22:25
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Burning Rain posted:7. Amin Maalouf - Samarkand. For some reason I was expecting something more than a straight historical political adventure novel, but that's what I got. Basically Eco-lite set in 10th/11th & 19th/20th century Persia with Omar Khayyam's manuscript being the tie between them (along with some nods to the contemporary Middle East). 13. Robert Jackson Bennett - The City of Stairs . For all the hype I was expecting something much more interesting and stronger instead of NotEnglish in NotIndia with living gods and naked viking stereotypes and a great big battle in the end. It wasn't bad though, just... decent? 14. Josef Škvorecký - The Engineer of Human Souls. I was surprised to read a 900 page (in my edition) behemoth of a novel so engaging, especially considering that it consists an exiled English professor from Czech Republic remembering his life under two occupations and contrasting it with his Canadian students. But it was really good, and Škvorecký manages to keep almost all of the book's myriad of mini-plots interesting and moving. 15. Jeff VanderMeer - Acceptance. I still think that the first book was the best of series, although this was better than Authority. I really think the series would've been better without the second book and just having some of its stuff appear in flashbacks or something. Also, VanderMeer's prose can get unbearably flowery. 16. Daina Tabūna - Pirmā reize. A Latvian author's debut book of short stories. Not very ambitious but well developed, I'll be following her progress. 17. Juan Goytisolo - A State of Siege. The book borne out of Goytisolo's experiences in Sarajevo during the war, but it's not really about the war. To be honest, I'm not sure what it was about (except infinite and endlessly mirrored doppelgangers), but it was very good even if a bit too neat in the structure. I have 4 or 5 more of his books because I asked a friend who was cleaning his house of books, to leave his favourite Goytisolo, and he gave me a whole bunch. Good thing I was always curious about him.
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Apr 2, 2015 19:16
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Burning Rain posted:13. Robert Jackson Bennett - The City of Stairs . For all the hype I was expecting something much more interesting and stronger instead of NotEnglish in NotIndia with living gods and naked viking stereotypes and a great big battle in the end. It wasn't bad though, just... decent? I have a few half-finished books, but I don't feel like reading so I'll just throw these here: 18. Romain Gary - Promise at Dawn. I'm generally not a big fan of writers' memoirs, but this one was really great. It had crazy people (first and foremost his mother), great sustained tone with plenty of self-irony and even some war adventures. I'm sure I'll get to his novels soon enough. 19. Bill Bryson - At Home: A Short History of Private Life. In almost every page there's something to quote or laugh at, and that's why I read Bryson's books. 20. Brina Svit - Con Brio. Could get this for 50p and thought, hey, I've never read any Slovenian fiction. An older writer falls in love and promptly gets married with a young, mysterious woman. She doesn't let him get close, he gets obsessed, his life gets destroyed. Nothing terribly surprising but it was well written, with some good details. 21. Per Olov Enquist - The Book About Blanche and Marie. The author tried to fit in the whole 20th century as well as meaning of life, love and science in the story of Marie Curie and her assistant. At times he succeeds, but the sentences mostly withstand the weight he puts on them. Everything is a metaphor for everything else, but hardly anything resonates.
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May 1, 2015 18:33
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Burning Rain posted:I have a few half-finished books, but I don't feel like reading so I'll just throw these here: 22. Inga Ābele - Klūgu mūks. The winner of p. much all of last year's Latvian best book awards. A weighty historical novel with several (at times melodramatic plots ), good prose and all too clearly demarcated good and bad characters who often fall suspiciously well along ethnic and political lines. 23. Cortázar, Julio - A Change of Light: and other stories. Lots of freaky stuff going on, mostly involving obsessive sexual fantasies and/or subtle creepiness. Best stories leave a sense of having witnessed something inexplicable and unsettling, a couple of others just sort of fart around. 24. José Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Saramago is angry about well-off people who don't do poo poo and let the fascists take over (who also avoid taking sides - it's a Portuguese thing to Saramago, I guess). I'm not sure if all the metaphors and plot lines come together in the end, but an excellent book nevertheless. 25. Pascal Mercier - Lea. Every bloody scene in this novel was over the top - sometimes in the Hollywood-beautiful way it was going for, but I don't really have the patience for tearjerkers. 26. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles. I learned about Osaka dolls, Kyoto dolls, the defects of Tokyo singing style, the perversions of the West, bath-taking habits of early XX century Japanese, etc. It was really well written, subtly impactful stuff.
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May 30, 2015 10:49
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Burning Rain posted:22. Inga Ābele - Klūgu mūks. The winner of p. much all of last year's Latvian best book awards. A weighty historical novel with several (at times melodramatic plots ), good prose and all too clearly demarcated good and bad characters who often fall suspiciously well along ethnic and political lines. (most of these I read in languages other than English, but I translated the titles anyway) 27. Vladimir Voinovich - The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of the Private Ivan Chonkin. A foolish but fiercely loyal soldier gets sent off to a village to guard a crashed plane just before WW2 breaks out, which he does to the last moment (against Soviet soldiers, as it turns out). Surprisingly savage satire of Stalin's era, and it tells you why horses didn't become humans, so you should read it, too. Not as funny as Švejk, then again what is. 28. Paolo Bacigalupi - Pump Six and Other Stories. The first 20 pages of each story is worldbuilding, followed by The Most Dramatic Plot Twists he could think of before killing off the main character to show how terrible his fantasy world is. The worldbuilding is good though, but he likes his own prose too much. 29. Charles Freeman - The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. Despite the premise, the book was actually very respectful to Christianity and serves as a good overview of its early centuries (focusing on 4th and 5th century AD). It seemed that the book forgot it's point halfway through, so there are like a hundred pages about the minute differences between different early Christian movements instead of the focus being on their battles for supremacy (although there is plenty of that, too). 30. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future (and a bunch of other stories). I didn't think the stories were particularly well written, but they did have lots of interesting fantastical concepts and ideas thrown around, some of which stuck more than others. Fans of Calvino and Borges would appreciate them the most. 31. Māris Bērziņš - The Taste of Lead. Yet another Latvian novel about WW2, but surprisingly (and fortunately) lacking in pathos, focusing instead on the general shittiness of being caught between two superpowers. 32. Magda Szabó - The Masquerade. A disgustingly perfect teacher comes to a school and changes everybody's life around by being so wonderfully disciplined and uninhibited at the same time. Then one of her student does the same to her, and everybody becomes a happy and productive socialist citizen. The prose and the way the story was structured was much too good for such a lovely story, so I might check out some more of her work, hoping it shows a bit more subtlety in the character development, too.
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Jul 2, 2015 08:33
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Is it possible to fulfill the challenge only with warhammer/star wars books? Except blind owl, obv.
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Jul 30, 2015 06:17
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what did you think of Homo Faber?
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Sep 2, 2015 09:55
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 07:30 |
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Then you get Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis (either the complete seven novellas NYRB set or the previously published sets of 3 and 4 novellas, I won't judge you)
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Nov 10, 2015 11:05
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