Rate and discuss all the books I've read this year 2003.

[Robert E Lee]

Please NOTE: this is Robert E Lee's brother.


List begins in January 2003.


Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Idiot by Fyodor Dosteovsky
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Herzog by Saul Bellow
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Demons/(The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Wild ***'s Skin by Honore de Balzac
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Story of Jazz by Marshall Stearns
On the Road (reread) by Jack Kerouac
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Currently reading: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Feel free to post your own 2003 lists too.

[AbdoRinbo]

That's a long list, Bob.

[Jay]

If it's all true, WOW.

[den]

So brother, what did you to with Robert? :P


Books read in 2003 so far:

Deidre Barrett: The Pregnant Man
Willaim S. Burroughs: Junky

George Clare: Last Waltz in Vienna
Nick Cave: And the *** saw the Angel
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other poems
Albert Camus: The Plague

Omer Englebert: The Lives of the Saints

John Fowles: The Ebony Tower
Antonia Fraser: Mary Queen of Scots

Peter Gentry: Rafe
Graham Greene: Under the Garden
Nikolai Gogol: The Overcoat and The Nose

Aldous Huxley: Those Barren Leaves
Ben Hamper: Rivethead

Carl Jung: Man in Search of a Soul
Henry James: Daisy Miller

Lance Kinseth: River Eternal

D.H. Lawrence: Love Among the Haystacks

William Somerset Maugham: The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale and The Narrow Corner
Patrick Mann: Dog Day Afternoon
James Michener: Alaska
Hugh MacLennan: The Watch that Ends the Night

Ovid: Orpheus in the Underworld
P.J. O'Rourke: Parliament of Whores

Jean Rhyes: Leaving Mr. MacKenzie
Nino Ricci: Lives of the Saints and In a Glass House
Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus
Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Confessions and The Essential Rousseau

Gregory Scofield: Memories of a Metis childhood
Andrew Solomon: The Noonday Demon
Colin Simpson: The Lusitania
Peter Straub: Blue Rose
Wilbur Smith: When the Lion Feeds and Golden Fox
Ken Stange: Bushed

John Wyndham: Wanderers of Time
Edith Wharton: Madame de Treymes

Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent
Personal Dispatches: Writers confront AIDS
Ontario History Journal
OGS Quarterly
Collins Gem: Castles of Scotland
Story of O
Tibetan Book of the Dead

Currently: Richard Adams: The Plague Dogs


There's probably more but I give a lot of my books away, the dispensible paperbacks, through www.bookcrossing.com

[ihrocks]

Putting an old woman's memory to the test, but I think 2003 looks like this:

The Lord of the Rings --J.R.R. Tolkien
Under Milk Wood -- Dylan Thomas
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- Tom Stoppard
Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller
Henry And June -- Anais Nin
Quiet Days in Clichy -- Henry Miller
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
Lady Chatterley's Love -- D.H. Lawrence
Sons & Lovers -- D.H. Lawrence
Women in Love -- What can I say? I got on a roll!
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling (Previewing it before reading it to my daughter, and glad I did! This one can wait until she is much older!)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog -- Dylan Thomas
A Season in Hell/Drunken Boat -- Arthur Rimbaud
Cannery Row -- John Steinbeck

And one or two I'm sure I've overlooked. Not bad for full-time working mom!

Presently still working on Nin's "Fire" diary and next up is "Gravity's Rainbow."

I remember very much enjoying Conrad's "The Secret Agent." I always appreciate writers who play around with structure. I love "The Sound and The Fury," and if you enjoyed it, I would recommend "As I Lay Dying." Faulkner's writing has an almost hypnotic quality to it. I've lost count of the times I've read "The Great Gatsby." I would say it's the quintessential novel of 20th Century America, but then someone would disagree with me, I'm sure. And the only good Hemingway is Bad Hemmingway. I used to always enjoy reading the winning entries from Harry's Bar's Bad Hemmingway contest. 8)

ihrocks

[Sindhu]

Here's my 2003 list - I'm leaving out rereads.
Anthills of the Savannah - Achebe
Lucky Jim - Amis
To the Hermitage- Bradbury
Thinks- David Lodge
Orlando- Virginia Woolf
Bend in the River- Naipaul
Collected essays- Virginia Woolf
A Better Class of Person- Osborne
Daughter of Time- Josephine Tey
The Newcomes- Thackeray
Liber Amoris- Hazlitt
The Idiot - Dosteovesky
The Bear- Chekhov
Margaret Oglivy- Barrie
Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
Collected Plays- Noel Coward
Shakespeare- HenryVIpart1,2,&3, Cymbeline
Surgeon's Daughter- Walter Scott
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Ooronko- Aphra Behn
Arrow of God- Achebe
The Naulakha-Kipling

Currently reading Finnegan's Wake.

[crisaor]

I've yet to read anything by Conrad. That confession aside, I like best the metamorphosis of all the books you've listed. Naturally, Isabel Allende's La casa de los espíritus is (very) deep at the bottom. Just out of curiosity, what made you read it? Of course it's a diversified list, but it's the one book that strikes me as out of place.


My own list (what I can remember)

Happiness(TM), by Will Ferguson
Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger (again)
Bush y los Años del Miedo, by Noam Chomsky
Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore
La Mort d'Arthur, by Thomas Mallory
The Complete Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton
The Man who was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
El Club Dumas, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (again)
On Television, by Pierre Bourdieu
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Cervantes

[AbdoRinbo]

I've heard of, but never read, Chomsky's Bush y los Años del Miedo, what did you think of it?

[crisaor]

It's one of those "optional" books that you can buy next to a magazine (in this case, Le Monde Diplomatique). It's actually a transcription of interviews to Chomsky by Jorge Halperin (sociologist), rather than an essay book.

On topic, I loved it. Chomsky's views on the world's current events and specially his analysis on Bush's politics, both regional and foreign is probably the most accurate I've ever read. Among other things, he basically speaks about the way the US inspires fear over its citizens to justify its insane politics (i.e. Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the sandinists, and Santa Claus are just a couple of days of throwing nukes over our heads, we have to bomb them/overthrow their governments and install a dictatorship/melt down the north pole to prevent it), and how the whole culture revolves on fear. If you've seen Bowling for Columbine, you know the way it goes. Plus, I think I liked Halperin's questions better than Barsamian's.

I still get surprised everytime Chomsky says that nobody hears him in the US. I wonder if that's really true...

[AbdoRinbo]

It's not entirely false, but I know a lot of people who are really adamant supporters of Chomsky. He's my favorite political author.

(Bowling For Columbine was killer, I saw it three times in the same day when it first came out.)

[Koa]

Oooh i will do some brainstorming and post my list...it will be very short, I don't read so much lately... Or maybe I read more than I realise, just a lot of stuff is for studies... I used to read a lot more when I was younger, now I have less time and more interests...will think of my list anyway.

[Munro]

Wow, I'm impressed (and a little intimidated) by your lists so far, particularly den and Robert E. Lee. I want to read Chomsky very much, but I think I'll leave him, along with Tariq Ali, Pilger and Gore Vidal until I'm in university, along with a lot of other great thinkers/political commentators.
I take note of what books I've read through out the year, kinda as a part of the journal that I keep, so here's what I've read so far this year.

Dead Famous – Ben Elton
Soul Music – Terry Pratchett
Wyrd Sisters – Terry Pratchett
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Love Parade – Matthew Branton
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Point Counter Point – Aldous Huxley
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Virtual Light – William Gibson
Neuromancer – William Gibson
A Happy Death – Albert Camus
The Outsider – Albert Camus
Metamorphosis and other stories – Franz Kafka
Exile and the Kingdom – Albert Camus
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have so many more to read.

[AbdoRinbo]

If Munro is going to make a list then, goddamnit, so am I.

Das Kapital, Volume 1 -- Karl Marx
Dune -- Frank Herbert
Under the Jaguar Sun -- Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities -- Italo Calvino
t-zero --Italo Calvino
Cosmicomics -- Italo Calvino
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler -- Italo Calvino
Une Saison en Enfer -- Arthur Rimbaud
Illumination -- Arthur Rimbaud
Poesies -- Arthur Rimbaud
Exiles -- James Joyce
Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea -- Charles Seife
A Matter of Degrees -- Gino Segre
Discourse on Thinking -- Martin Heidegger
Anti-Oedipus -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (as yet unfinished)
Chomsky on Miseducation -- Noam Chomsky
How to Build a Time Machine -- Paul Davies
Welcome to the Monkey House -- Kurt Vonnegut

Jeepers, it isn't even that long. What have I been doing with my life?! Oh God . . . what a waste.

[Sindhu]

Oh Good- someone else's reading Calvino! I especially liked If on a Winters Night- I reread it thrice. And talk about spooky coincidences, i'm also as yet "unfinished" with Anti-Oedipus. Mainlybecause I'mon Holiday and forgot to bring the book along!

[AbdoRinbo]

Sindhu, we should discuss Deleuze sometime . . . the guy is a semantic nazi. But I do think his theories are interesting, in those brief moments when I understand what he's saying.