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Thread: What do you plan to read in 2020?

  1. #1
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    What do you plan to read in 2020?

    My list for the coming year (I am going to try and mix fiction with popular science).

    1) Listen to the Sherlock Holmes books on audio (someone bought me the boxset of Stephen Fry reading them all - laying in a hot bath listening to it is pure bliss)

    2) Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

    3) Dickens Nicholas Nickleby

    4) Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (well, I will give it a try - whether I make it to the end or not remains to be seen!!)

    5) D H Lawrence Women in Love

    6) Richard Dawkins The Magic of Reality

    7) Nabokov Pale Fire

    8) Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim

    9) T S Eliot Four Quartets (slowly and with notes)

    10) Edward st Aubyn The Melrose novels

    I also want to read something by the British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, and I might re-read Shakespeare’s Henriad cycle.

  2. #2
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens - bought six Dickens volumes for £10, how good is that!
    Dr Thorne, Anthony Trollope - 3rd in the Barchester series
    The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn - American classic
    Wives and Daughters, Mrs Gaskell - seems to be Gaskell fans' favourite
    The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford - somewhere between 11 and 20 of the BBC's top 100 British books survey
    Hornblower and the Atropos, C.S. Forrester - reading for fun
    The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood - the most famous dystopia I have not read yet
    Atonement, Ian McEwan - somewhere between 11 and 20 of the BBC's top 100 British books survey
    Othello, William Shakespeare - I am going to try to understand and like Shakespeare
    Ullyses, James Joyce - the big one.

    I already have these waiting on my shelf to be read, but I shall probably read others.
    When does all this reading have an effect? I have not changed into a better person yet.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    I have been considering this year's French classic, American classic and Russian classic. I think my French classic with be Stendhal's The Red and the Black. I have not decided on the Russian classic: either the Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol or Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. I still have the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne to read, but I think I might have a go at William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom!
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Inspiring lists. I haven´t made a list this year, reading just now For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. One of the next books might be Oblomow- by Gontscharow.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

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    Neat these lists. Always a potential source of inspiration when I'm looking for something to read.

    Somewhere midway 2019, I decided to read, well partially reread, the entire oeuvres of Joe Abercrombie and Pete Dexter, alternating between them. At this point, I (re)read:
    - the entire First Law trilogy by Abercrombie
    - God's Pocket and Deadwood by Pete Dexter.

    Next-up is Paris Trout, for which Dexter got the National Book Award for Fiction.

    Francis
    "Some things in life need solitude to thrive. Will only flourish in seclusion and loneliness, without affection hushing and lulling them to sleep.
    The pursuit of dreams is such a thing."

    Tom Fitch - Intersection Diaries

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    Registered User Jackson Richardson's Avatar
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    I'm half way through Proust whatever you like to call the novel. A very long book with very long sentences. I hope to finish it in the next couple of months but wonder if I'm reading it in the same spirit as mountaineers climb mountains - because it's there.
    Previously JonathanB

    The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1

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    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    I suppose you mean the first one, the Swan volume. I didn´t go very far with it. If you are disposed, I think there are four or five more volumes following it.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

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    Not too much, since I'm finishing up nursing school this year, but let's see...

    The Portable Edgar Alan Poe next
    The Apocrypha and New Testament from the King James Bible (already read the OT)
    Maybe either the Aeneid or Paradise Lost (seems unlikely I'd do both)
    I'd like to read at least some of the horror books I got recently (The Terror, Song of Kali, The Ruins)
    The Haunting of Hill House
    Maybe I'll work on the Portable Plato I have

    To the OP, I loved A Brief History of Time! I hope you enjoy it, too. And to the second poster, I also loved Atonement back in the day. Been a while since I read it.

  9. #9
    Registered User Jackson Richardson's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Danik 2016 View Post
    I suppose you mean the first one, the Swan volume. I didn´t go very far with it. If you are disposed, I think there are four or five more volumes following it.
    I meant the entire work. I am giving it a rest but I have reached half way through it all. I am on the fourth book of seven, which the classic translation tweely called Cities of the Plain. In French, Sodome et Gomorrhe.
    Previously JonathanB

    The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson View Post
    I meant the entire work. I am giving it a rest but I have reached half way through it all. I am on the fourth book of seven, which the classic translation tweely called Cities of the Plain. In French, Sodome et Gomorrhe.
    Hi Jackson, so do the volumes of Proust get better after Swann's Way in your opinion? I thoroughly enjoyed that volume, though I found it like reading somnambulistically, which wasn't bad really; enraptured without really knowing why. I hear the works get better.

    So books I plan to read...

    Evelyn Waugh - The Sword of Honor Trilogy
    Richard Ford - Part 2 and 3 of the Bascombe Novels (I've read vol. 1 already)
    Arthur Schnitzler - The Road to the Open
    D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow
    Michel Houellebecq - Atomised
    Hermann Broch - The Guiltless
    Vladimir Nabokov - Ada
    Franz Werfel - The Song of Bernadette

    Lastly Mann's Joseph and His Brothers (4 volumes), but who am I kidding, maybe once I retire and have the drive...or maybe the time and nothing else to attend too. It seems so daunting.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Danik 2016 View Post
    Inspiring lists. I haven´t made a list this year, reading just now For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. One of the next books might be Oblomow- by Gontscharow.
    I put down For Whom the Bell Tolls as I didn't care much for Hemingway's style. Goncharov's Oblomov is soooooo good! Read it!

  12. #12
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    @JR-You are my favorite mountain climber!You must have enjoyed it some. He is one of the greatest authors there are but reading is a matter of taste.There is a Proust reading group in my German forum, for them he is one of the authors of their life. They read him for years.
    I am half through For Whom the Bell Tolls. I think it is good but not outstanding.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

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