Book Lists 2009

[TJ Wells]

I could've sworn there was a thread for this before, but I guess not. Obviously it's very late, and I'm sure mine (and most people's) lists won't be complete, but I really feel like giving it a shot since I've been reading like crazy lately. I'm not going to even attempt to put these in any kind of order.

[TJ Wells]

Currently Reading

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Books I've Read in 2009

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta
Go with Me by Castle Freeman Jr.
Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
Just After Sunset by Stephen King
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell
The Wicked Pavillion by Dawn Powell
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan

[jacinta.]

The Catcher in the Rye
Survivor
Lullaby
Fight Club
Invisble Monsters
Rant
1984
Shampoo Planet
Lord of the Flies (For school, but something that I wanted to read anyway)
Such Is My Beloved (Also for school)
Lamb


Most of these were read before April. I haven't done much reading lately...

[bailmeout13]

Currently Reading

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (for class)

Books I've Read in 2009

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Ava's Man by Rick Bragg
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall

I read others in school during winter and spring, but don't remember them.

[smogs]

Currently reading:
Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl by Anonymous
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

New books I read in 09 (I re-read a lot of books):
blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
and I read various poems from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I'm sure there are a few more.

I was swamped with school so I didn't get as much reading during the school year as I'd like. I had started Lolita and A Clockwork Orange during the year but still haven't finished them. But I bought Belle de Jour just the other day and can't put it down. Finally summer has slowed so I can catch up on reading.

[smogs]

Currently Reading

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (for class)

Books I've Read in 2009

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Ava's Man by Rick Bragg
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall

I read others in school during winter and spring, but don't remember them.

How is The Motorcycle Diaries? I really want to read it/see the movie.

[TJ Wells]

Haven't read the book, but the movie is fantastic.

[bailmeout13]

How is The Motorcycle Diaries? I really want to read it/see the movie.

It's really good, I am really getting into non-fiction/memoirs so that helps. I haven't seen the movie either, and am planning to once I finish the book.

I'm enjoying the fact that there really is somewhat of an adventure in every chapter and of course knowing its a true story.

[smogs]

It's really good, I am really getting into non-fiction/memoirs so that helps. I haven't seen the movie either, and am planning to once I finish the book.

I'm enjoying the fact that there really is somewhat of an adventure in every chapter and of course knowing its a true story.

Ah, very good to know. Definitely adding it onto my list of books to read.

[Java Nick]

I recently picked up David Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and will be picking up When You Are Engulfed In Flames shortly. Love his writing.

[Java Nick]

Currently reading:
Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl by Anonymous
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

New books I read in 09 (I re-read a lot of books):
blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
and I read various poems from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I'm sure there are a few more.

I was swamped with school so I didn't get as much reading during the school year as I'd like. I had started Lolita and A Clockwork Orange during the year but still haven't finished them. But I bought Belle de Jour just the other day and can't put it down. Finally summer has slowed so I can catch up on reading.

What were your thoughts on blink?

[Shakriel]

Currently Reading:

Ulysses
The Raw Shark Texts

Read this Year:
(too long to list, but recently)

Crooked Little Vein
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Death
Monster
Dave Barry books
etc

[bailmeout13]

Currently reading:
Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl by Anonymous
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

New books I read in 09 (I re-read a lot of books):
blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
and I read various poems from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I'm sure there are a few more.

I was swamped with school so I didn't get as much reading during the school year as I'd like. I had started Lolita and A Clockwork Orange during the year but still haven't finished them. But I bought Belle de Jour just the other day and can't put it down. Finally summer has slowed so I can catch up on reading.

I hope so much that I never have to read Red Badge of Courage ever again. It was pretty good the first time I read it, but by the fifth time I read it I was absolutely sick of it.

[TJ Wells]

I have read almost all of Sedaris' books, he is a freaking genius. Cannot wait to read When You Are Engulfed in Flames. That has his quitting smoking story in it, yes?

[Java Nick]

I have read almost all of Sedaris' books, he is a freaking genius. Cannot wait to read When You Are Engulfed in Flames. That has his quitting smoking story in it, yes?

Yes it does. Also looking forward to reading it.

[smogs]

What were your thoughts on blink?

I absolutely 100% loved it. I started reading it my school's book store between class one day and ended up being late to class cause I couldn't put it down.

That being said, at times it got tough to keep on reading because he talks about so many experiments and stuff like that and it was just an overload of information, but it was very very very interesting. I've read a bunch of Gladwell's articles, but I want to read his other books now.

[smogs]

I hope so much that I never have to read Red Badge of Courage ever again. It was pretty good the first time I read it, but by the fifth time I read it I was absolutely sick of it.

Yeah, I had to read it for a lit class I was in (it was an awesome class, all teen classics so I got to re-read Gatsby, Catcher, etc) and it was only alright, imo. I can't imagine reading it a second time, let alone 5 times.

[Java Nick]

I absolutely 100% loved it. I started reading it my school's book store between class one day and ended up being late to class cause I couldn't put it down.

That being said, at times it got tough to keep on reading because he talks about so many experiments and stuff like that and it was just an overload of information, but it was very very very interesting. I've read a bunch of Gladwell's articles, but I want to read his other books now.

I highly recommend checking out The Tipping Point. I haven't read Outliers, but it's on my list. I've read a couple of Gladwell's articles, but so far blink has been my favorite. When Gladwell began discussing thin-slicing and predicting divorces, I was hooked.

[smogs]

I highly recommend checking out The Tipping Point. I haven't read Outliers, but it's on my list. I've read a couple of Gladwell's articles, but so far blink has been my favorite. When Gladwell began discussing thin-slicing and predicting divorces, I was hooked.

I have both The Tipping Point and Outliers on my ever-growing book list, I just need to get to them. Haha. I'm assuming The Tipping Point is in the same vain as blink, style wise? I loved the chapter in blink when he discusses the Millennium Challenge and the ER. And the part about food tasting. I want to try that on my friends. Ha.

Oh, and the one Gladwell article I absolutely loved was The Art of Failure. (http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_08_21_a_choking.htm) It got me hooked on him. Check it out if you haven't.

[erikbue]

The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins

[crimsonandclovr]

currently reading:
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Bukowski poems - i forget which book

on my list:
Catch 22
Brave New World
The Alchemist
The Screwtape Letters

too many to lists, but here are the top ones

[thedrewman998]

been kinda busy this year so not much...

some i've read so far:
amsterdam - Ian McEwan
What is the What, Heartbreaking Work (again) - Dave Eggers
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
Gates of Fire - Steven Pressman

need to finally finish infinite jest!

[smogs]

been kinda busy this year so not much...

some i've read so far:
amsterdam - Ian McEwan
What is the What, Heartbreaking Work (again) - Dave Eggers
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
Gates of Fire - Steven Pressman

need to finally finish infinite jest!

How was What is the What? I'm really interested in reading it, and I love Eggers so I figured it's gotta be good.

[omgrawr]

angels & demons
the 7th harry potter (i skipped all the other ones OOPS)

gna get the new dan brown novel "the lost symbol" when it comes out

[Losthope182]

I'm sure I'll forget a few that I've read but I'll try and make it as complete as possible.

Currently Reading:
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Already finished:
Forever by Pete Hamill
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Firehouse by David Halberstam
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

[poppa Q]

Currently Reading:

Ulysses
The Raw Shark Texts

Read this Year:
(too long to list, but recently)

Crooked Little Vein
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Death
Monster
Dave Barry books
etc
Awesome book.

[hailthewarrior]

Read This Year:

1. Stephenie Meyer – Twilight
2. Stephenie Meyer – New Moon
3. Harvard Lampoon – Bored of the Rings
4. Nicole Krauss – The History of Love
5. Cohn & Levithan – Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
6. C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
7. C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce
8. C.S. Lewis - Perelandra
9. C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces
10. C.S. Lewis - The Weight of Glory
11. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
12. J.R.R. Tolkien - Fellowship of the Ring
13. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Two Towers
14. J.R.R. Tolkien - Returning of the King
15. C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape LEtters
16. Robert Jordan – Eye of the World
17. Robert Jordan – The Great Hunt
18. Robert Jordan – The Dragon Reborn
19. Robert Jordan – The Shadow Rising
20. Michael Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
21. Robert Jordan – The Fires of Heaven
22. Stephenie Meyer – Eclipse
23. Stephenie Meyer – Breaking Dawn
24. Stephen King – Salem’s Lot
25. J.K. Rowling – Beedle the Bard
26. Stephen King – The Green Mile
27. Robert Jordan – Lord of Chaos

I took a class focusing on C.S. Lewis/J.R.R. Tolkien, and I promised my friend I'd read the Twilight series (probably the worst promise I've ever made). Thoughts on Twilight here: http://thehyperionproject.blogspot.com/2009/07/twilight-saga-review.html

Currently Reading:
Robert Jordan - A Crown of Swords

[doyouhas?]

I've had a pretty productive reading year so far.

Reading
Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
Swann's Way - Marcel Proust

Read
War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
We The Living - Ayn Rand
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Fall - Albert Camus
The Stranger - Albert Camus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut
Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut
A Man Without A Country - Kurt Vonnegut
Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut
A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Nick Adams Stories - Ernest Hemingway
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
"Synecdoche, New York" Screenplay - Charlie Kaufman
The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Infinity Blues - Ryan Adams

[thedrewman998]

How was What is the What? I'm really interested in reading it, and I love Eggers so I figured it's gotta be good.

its amazing. definitely read it. i love the combination of dave eggers story telling and flow and the main characters story/auto biography...
powerful/heavy stuff given the subject matter of course though

[cashowyourteeth]

angels & demons
the 7th harry potter (i skipped all the other ones OOPS)

gna get the new dan brown novel "the lost symbol" when it comes out

actually read Angels and Demons and the 7th Harry Potter within the past month or two, loved them both. anticipating the new Dan Brown as well.

[spriltsc]

the only book i read this year is half blood prince

i'm pumped for lost symbol

[lindZ629]

Currently Reading
Neil Gaiman - American Gods

Books I've Read in 2009 (basing it off my comments in the official book thread, I didn't keep a list)
Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
Thomas L. Friedman - The World is Flat
Dave Eggers - What is the What
Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns
Chuck Klosterman - Downtown Owl
Dave Eggers - Zeitoun

That's sad. World is Flat took me about a semester to read and then What is the What took another three months. I'll keep adding on to this list, since there should be about 5 or 6 more before the year is done.

[TJ Wells]

Gonna bump this thread every once in awhile because it's not as frequently updated as the movie one is.

[poppa Q]

I'm gonna drop a sickbraq and just say that my brother has read 190+ books so far this year. Word.

[abandonship]

1. Isaac Asimov - Pebble in the Sky
2. Isaac Asimov - The Stars, Like Dust
3. Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity
4. Isaac Asimov - Earth is Room Enough
5. J.D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey

[Love As Arson]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/314kBJ3mw2L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb -sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

No matter how deadly serious his subjects, there's always been something essentially childlike at the heart of José Saramago's work -- that eagerness to consider simple, outlandish what ifs: What if the Iberian Peninsula broke off and floated away? What if everybody suddenly went blind? What if most voters cast blank ballots?

Like Franz Kafka, his literary ancestor, the unrepentant Portuguese communist and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature frequently focuses on the way people react to absurd situations. In Death with Interruptions, there's even a goofy touch of Woody Allen's "Don't Drink the Water," but this may be Saramago's most cosmic novel. While not as aggressively heretical as The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which provoked such outrage from the Catholic Church in 1991, his new book asks us to imagine a cessation of "the most normal and ordinary thing in life": dying. If you don't think such speculation is amusing, well, get your own Nobel Prize.

The story opens at the start of a new year in a small, unnamed modern country. As is typical of the allegorical universalism in much of Saramago's work, we never get a precise location or time period. The frenetic, amiable narrator refers to characters only by each one's generic function: e.g. prime minister, mother, editor. All of them are confronting the most unusual nonevent in human history: "No one died. . . . New year's eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day."

Initially, this "death strike" seems like "humanity's greatest dream since the beginning of time," but the horrible ramifications quickly become apparent: Traffic accidents still leave people mangled; illness strikes with the same ferocity; old age continues to ravage.

The first section of the novel describes "the ditherings of the government" trying to deal with this calamity. No writer since Orwell has zeroed in with such precision and vigor on the language of self-serving administrators, and Death with Interruptions contains some of Saramago's best satire about government corruption, military jingoism and media hysteria. Whole pages of this novel seem lifted from the recent news about our own economic crisis. The prime minister takes to the airways to make a statement "whose very incomprehensibility was intended to calm the commotion gripping the nation."

Religious leaders come off no better, reacting to the situation with a flurry of obfuscation and sophistry: "The church has never been asked to explain anything," the cardinal assures the prime minister. "Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith." As the crisis grows more severe, the clergy "organize a national campaign of prayer, asking god to bring about the return of death as quickly as possible."

Much of this section focuses on the political and economic upheaval caused by eternal life, as the country tries to adjust to living bodies piling up, "one on top of the other, like the leaves that fall from the trees onto the leaves from previous autumns." Various industries -- life insurance, hospitals, undertakers, retirement homes -- lobby aggressively for government relief. But there are scenes of real pathos here, too, amid the gallows humor: the personal costs of caring for so many desperately sick relatives, the horrible choices faced by burdened families, the nasty bargains they're forced to make with organized crime.

Halfway through, just as the satire is getting a little tedious, the novel shifts away from its national scope to concentrate instead on the Grim Reaper in disarmingly personal terms. It turns out that death (lowercase "d," she insists) is a discreet, elegant woman, if you can get past the skeleton and the sheet. She's conscientious and efficient, but still uses fine stationery rather than e-mail. "It has the charm of tradition," she tells her scythe, "and tradition counts for a lot when it comes to dying." The duty of dispensing with so many people day after day is "not exactly a killingly hard job," but it can grow tedious. "Death did indeed work her fingers to the bone," the narrator notes, "because, of course, she is all bone." Who could blame her for taking a little time off? If this sounds campy, it is, but Saramago is always ten steps ahead of us, subverting clichés, interjecting ancient philosophical concerns into his gags and scattering grenades of bitterness among the laughs.

After death's seven-month vacation, she devises a new scheme to dispense with human beings: She'll send people a letter on violet paper, announcing that they have a week left to live, "to sort out their affairs, make a will, pay their back taxes and say goodbye to their family and to their closest friends. In theory, this seemed like a good idea." But of course, in practice it raises all sorts of complications for the "preposthumous."

The real surprise, though, is death's. When one of her violet letters -- to a middle-aged cellist -- is returned unopened, she's alarmed, then intrigued. "How on earth am I going to get out of this fix," she wonders. "Poor death." And here Saramago catches us off guard once again, turning from the straight-faced absurdity of the novel's first section to a poignant romance. How can the most tender relationship that Saramago has ever written involve death as a nervous lover? This is a story that can't possibly work or affect us, but it does, deeply, sweetly. It's a novel to die for.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41xNfeSZVzL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb -sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg
Starred Review. The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in Wild America, the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls. Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself. In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection together in its heartbreaking final paragraph. Tower's uncommon mastery of tone and wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that seethes just below the surface of each of his characters.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513gUX1e91L._SL500_AA240_.jpg
Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.

Yet Engels was also, with Karl Marx, the founder of international communism, which in the twentieth century came to govern one-third of the human race. He was the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Marx could write Das Kapital. His searing account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of the human costs of capitalism. Far more than Marx’s indispensable aide, Engels was a profound thinker in his own right—on warfare, feminism, urbanism, Darwinism, technology, and colonialism. With fierce clarity, he predicted the social effects of today’s free-market fundamentalism and unstoppable globalization.

Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels’s intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England—of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes—Marx’s General tells a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal. And it tackles head-on the question of Engels’s influence: was Engels, after Marx’s death, responsible for some of the most devastating turns of twentieth-century history, or was the idealism of his thought distorted by those who claimed to be his followers?

An epic history and riveting biography, Marx’s General at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator..

[SuchAPerson22]

I'm reading Girl, Interrupted for the first time right now... So good :)

[Thomas Balkcom]

I'm gonna drop a sickbraq and just say that my brother has read 190+ books so far this year. Word.

holy shit

[tyramail]

Currently Reading

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Books I've Read in 2009

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta
Go with Me by Castle Freeman Jr.
Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
Just After Sunset by Stephen King
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell
The Wicked Pavillion by Dawn Powell
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan

i loved then we came to the end. i thought it was hilarious.

i just copied this from my blog that i keep my list in, and i really don't feel like deleting all my ratings haha.
1. the road by cormac mccarthy - 3
2. the long walk by richard bachman - 4
3. dead until dark by charlaine harris - 5
4. living dead in dallas by charlaine harris - 4
5. rage by richard bachman - 3
6. club dead by charlaine harris - 4
7. handle with care by jodi picoult - 5
8. rose of no man's land by michelle tea - 3
9. no country for old men by cormac mccarthy - 4
10. my horizontal life by chelsea handler - 5
11. i love you, beth cooper by larry doyle - 5
12. pygmy by chuck palahniuk - 3
13. the summer of naked dance parties by jessica anya blau - 4
14. dead to the world - charlaine harris - 4
15. dead as a doornail by charlaine harris - 4
16. definitely dead by charlaine harris - 3
17. all together dead by charlaine harris - 4
18. hairstyles of the damned by joe meno - 5

and i'm reading the pleasure of my company by steve martin right now.