To-Read List 2012/Book Club

Since this upcoming year will be our last on Earth, I've made a list of books I want to read pre-apocalypse. Almost all of these are already owned and/or authors I am returning to. Typically when I should be reading for classes I just read novels because I am actually an idiot.

~*Everyone post your reading goals for the year and if there's any overlap, we can simuread/circle jerk.*~

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace

Civilwarland in Bad Decline - George Saunders

[abandoned]Ulysses - James Joyce (summer only ok)

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

The Ghost Writer - Phillip Roth (re-read)

V. - Thomas Pynchon

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Despair - Vladimir Nabokov

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme

The Dead Father - Donald Barthelme

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

The People of Paper - Salvador Plasencia

Post Office - Charles Bukowsk

Pricksongs and Descants - Robert Coover

The House of Paper - Carlos Maria Dominguez

Cane - Jean Toomer

The Instructions - Adam Levin

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

Omensetter's Luck - William H. Gass

The Shawl - Cynthia Ozick

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson

Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo

Point Omega - Don DeLillo

Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau

The Art of the Novel - Milan Kundera

On Becoming a Novelist - John Gardner

How Fiction Works - James Wood

Struckthrough means I finished!

(clearly I won't be able to get to all of these, but there's always next year!!!)

*edit: no there isn't

also if just one nigga says they'll read the three Beckett novels I will drop some shit to do that, I own the collection and sometimes it crawls into bed with me and begs. I can deny her no longer.

somewhat in order

Moby-Dick
Sixty Stories
The Brothers Karamazov
The Crying of Lot 49
Invisible Man
The Dharma Bums
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Ulysses
One Hundred Years of Solitude (re-read)

I'd be interested in re-reading the Great Gatsby hehat

rofl I thought I had had enough of Barth after Lost in the Funhouse, but I guess it's been long enough now

nommers I thought you rully liked Lost in the Funhouse?

ok dude it's the most complicated thing ever, because like at times it was an amazing and unique experience but other times it was a complete goddamn chore and killed my interest in post-modern lit for awhile. Barth probably recognized that he was just being an asshole at certain points.

hey man

(Barth got his jollies being an asshole in that comp but omg it's so well done I can't even be mad at the shortest/longest piece ever written <3)

how familiar with Barthelme are you?

I've read like two of his stories and dyin' for more

Finish Hugo - Les Miserables
La Reserche Des Temps Perdue
War and Peace
re-read Infinite Jest and/or Mason & Dixon
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Consider the Lobster

long long books. First three plus school readings will probably take over all my time.

Also would like to read more Beckett, Nabokov and Pynchon novels. The Sound and the Fury, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mrs. Dalloway, and East of Eden are all good. So is Crying of Lot 49 and Supposedly Fun Thing. STAY THE COURSE.

oh yeah I forgot to put Lolita on my list for some reason

Yeah Crying of Lot 49 I read a few months ago, it's supree as shit but don't expect to finish it as soon as you think you will.

woggerton read beckett novels read them I will too

Wanna read dese: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6966833?shelf=to-read

Gonna add more, haven't got around to it yet

Finish Infinite Jest from last summer. The move out to MT screwed me up.
Gaddis' JR, when it gets republished in a few months.
I'll probably read Moby-Dick again for the fourth time because I love it so much.
I'd also love to start making inroads on finnegans wake but it's tougher than tough and I probably should read Ulysses again anyway.

I'll be happy to discuss Dick, Recognitions, and Ulysses with people here.

Which ones do you has? I'm most interested in Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable.

yep that's the trilogy I own. would gladly.

anything special with the new edition?

One or two Dawkins books is more than enough, you could try some other related (better) books, such as Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's dangerous idea"... or more interesting books in general instead of atheist dogma.

That's only a partial list, I plan to add many more books later. Don't assume that I'm only gonna read "atheist dogma." Also, in the end, what I read is up to me lol... I'm sorry you think what I'm reading isn't that interesting.

well of course, but I would just suggest to spread it out some more, those books all contain pretty much the same thing.

You've read every single one?

nope

So... what you're saying is complete bullshit then.

nope, I've read several books of that list and I know what they and the rest are about.. it's really not that complicated.

Right, but they can't contain the exact same things. C'mon now.

I'm not saying they contain the exact same things, they are about the same subject by the same author... you can't really expect much new insight into the matter, especially not with Dawkins, hence my suggestion to try some other stuff which might build on the stuff you've read in Dawkins's evolutionary books.

shwang, that is the most hipster reading list I have EVER seen.

No. Penguin published The Recognitions and JR in 1993 and stopped printing both of them last year. I actually called them and bitched about it. But Dalkey press picked both of them up and they're coming out in January, with the same typesetting and pagination as the Penguin editions.

http://www.amazon.com/J-R-William-Gaddis/dp/1564784339/ref=pd_sim_b_7

JR has always seemed like a little too much for me, I fear its wrath Eric. The Recognitions I'm really looking forward to though. Also considering In the Heart of the Heart of the Country or Omnesetter's Luck by Gass to gear up for The Tunnel, are you a Gass guy?

also convince me to read JR and I'll do it with you eric tell me I won't

I think Gass is a blowhard. His introduction to The Recognitions is just ridiculous and totally misses the point. He thinks that the book is great because Gaddis uses long alliterative sentences. Really. He quotes one, and says it's the best. I think Gass is a fucking cocksucker whiny bitch who completely misses the point of postmodernism and is a caricature of it.

So no.

tell me how you really feel Eric

Aeschylus - The Oresteia
Aristotle - the 1500 page hardcover containing most of his major works
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov (re-reads)
Ralph Waldo Emerson - all of his essays, lectures, and journals (that I haven't yet read)
William Faulkner - Selected Short Stories, The Sound and the Fury
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Goethe - Faust
James Joyce - Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
Franz Kafka - The Castle
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Vladimir Nabokov - Invitation to a Beheading
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice
Shakespeare - Hamlet
Shikibu - The Tale of Genji

There are probably plenty of others, but those are the ones on my bookshelf (or soon to be purchased) waiting to be read or re-read.

Why? Scholars of ancient philosophy don't read all of it. There is some real junk in there, and let's be real, Aristotle's prose isn't exactly lively.

EDIT - I would read Poetics, Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Metaphysics. That's the real important stuff that still has a ton to offer. I mean read it all if you want, but if what you seek is working knowledge of Aristotle, reading all of it is probably a waste of time.

You're probably right.

Pnoomer do you want to do Sound and the Fury with me and maybe a Ulysses summer reading?

ok awesome

Make sure you get to Cat's Cradle, schwiggity swang.
I'm in the process of the wind-up bird chronicle. It's been on my list for too long now.

ALSO I am probably going to go down your list and read what I haven't hit yet. I never know what to start.

Infinite Jest--David Foster Wallace
The Stars My Destination--Alfred Bester (inspired Slough Feg's Tiger! Tiger!)

Also:

La ciudad y los perros--Mario Vargas Llosa
Cien años de soledad--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

yeah, I'm reading in Spanish. u mirin?

We all have similar tastes in things.

Lanners I am stoked on Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions are two of my faves. I read the first 30 or so pages of Cat's Cradle when I got it but I was in the middle of another book at the time and had to put it down. I definitely wanted to add some books to this list that weren't a billion pages of dense jackoffery.

Cosmo Kramer, I'd be all on IJ again if I hadn't failed Infinite Summer a few months back. The shame is haunting me, I didn't want to put the book down by any means but I knew I couldn't do it this year. Is it odd that I find myself thinking about the characters sometimes?

naked?

HEY I FINISHED CIVILWARLAND AND POST OFFICE

GUESS I'LL REVIEW IT SOON OKAY

Updated reading list further down the thread.

siq list bro. Lemme know when you go for V. and Dubliners, I quit The Recognitions because I'm like 21 and in college and I don't think that book was written for me at this point in my life but I'll pick it up in a few years if I go to prison or something.

Almost done re-reading The Ghost Writer, plowing through Sixty Stories. Kiss it.

me2

Cool. Perhaps a good summer project, but if it happens sooner I'll chime in.
I'm scared of my list.

Added some more to the list. I'm sticking to books I own. I'm a dummy.

lol fuck this, litf is one of my favorite books

this summer is the summer I read everything I mean to read, FOR REAL THIS TIME

I started reading The Sot-Weed Factor many years back but abandoned it after 40 or so pages. Not because I didn't like it, but because it was just the wrong time for the style and length compared to my work load and attention span. Ever since when I cruise the library shelves all of John Barth's books taunt me.

dude that's some heft for just the summer. Crying is awesome but is a little cumbersome considering it's about as long as Gatsby. I'm almost done with Sixty Stories and it's very good, not as enjoyable as Forty Stories but full of interesting "failed experiments." If you're newer to Barthelme I recommend starting with the latter. (also obligatory "let's do Ulysses in a big group," everyone please refer to the Gabler edition.)

pick up Giles Goat-Boy with me broheim it seems easier to swallow. read the story Lost in the Funhouse please just for me (this is a link see it's bold)