So what did we read in March?

[Kafka's Crow]

Pinch and a punch...

March was not a totally fruitless month for me. I read these books last month:

I Claudius by Robert Graves
http://www.islandlabs.com/countdown-pocket-pc.htm

Excellent book. Highly recommended for anybody interested in the Roman History in general and the crookedness and deceitfulness of the human ambition in particular.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
http://www.amazon.com/Kafka-Shore-Audiofy-Digital-Audiobook/dp/1600837964/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207054778&sr=1-10

Very complex mythopoeic construction of a novel collaborating both oriental and occidental myths and philosophy which wrap themselves round the narrative like a twin helix. His use of the occidental myths become as ostentatious to us living in the West as, I am sure, the occidental concepts of the soul would have sounded to the average Japanese readers. Could have been made less effortless and elaborate. If you want to employ the "mythical method" you've got to be as effortless and artless as Joyce, anything else and your book would turn into a lecture or a Wikipedia article. A fast-paced page-turner though (can't say the same about Joyce's book!).

The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BlindOwl/blindowl.html

If you like decadent, nightmarish and surrealistic literature, the above novella must be your cup of tea. Don't be put off by the exotic writer. The book is more exotic than you would anticipate, still it belongs up there with the dark European and American writings of Lautreamont and Poe. The whole story is a nightmare and nothing good happens at all.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Oprahs-Book-Club/dp/0307387895/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207055678&sr=1-1

Style is the man! Extremely style-conscious writing, every word oozes death, desolation, destruction and despair. American 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Also-Rises-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0743297334/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207056361&sr=8-1

I am more than half way through this book and am finding it difficult to get into it. I once adored Hemingway, maybe the passion is gone! Slow and heavy going.

The 3rd month of the Year of Reading Proust sped by and I am still stuck on Within a Budding Grove. Feeling very guilty about it. Managed to read hardly fifty pages of it in March. Not nice, not very nice at all!

So what did the forum members read in March, then?

[Sir Bartholomew]

I'm no big fan of I, Claudius. At first it was fun but it goes on and on and on. Relatives born, then they die. I know it's a historical novel but nothing surprises in the end (I'm not even sure if it's all facts), I was hoping something weird would happen at Caligula's reign. The title's misleading, Claudius barely participates. Enough of my complaints. Hehe!

I read Austen's last month and probably would finish this task till halfway this April.

This month I'm looking forward to Master & Margarita and North & South once I'm done with these books I'm reading.

[Mockingbird_z]

the Painted Veil by Maugham

[toro913]

A Bend in the River - Naipaul (great book about postcoloniolism in africa)
The Old Men and the Sea - Hemingway
What we talk about when we talk about love - Raymond Carver (Minimalistic short stories at their finest)
The Centaur - Updike (a modern retelling of the story of Chiron, beautiful language)
The Fall - Camus

[Niamh]

Finished Proof reading a book
Started and finished proof reading another book
gave up on Sword in the stone (crap)
Finished Mandkind
Dubliners
The Tain
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Lyr
Taran Wanderer
The High King
Stardust

[mortalterror]

I mostly drifted from one unfinished book to the next. Nothing really stuck. Although I did read all of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, I've been having a difficult time concentrating on any book for more than a few hours at a time. When this has happened to me in the past, I've usually broken the spell by reading short fiction like Lovecraft or Maupassant's short stories. Didn't do that this time.

I picked up in succession, Swann's Way, The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Oblomov, The Brother's Karamazov, Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome, Darwin's The Descent of Man, Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Kevin Smith's My Boring *** Life, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Nichomachean Ethics, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and most recently The Faerie Queene. I have yet to finish any of them.

[Kafka's Crow]

Finished Proof reading a book
Started and finished proof reading another book
gave up on Sword in the stone (crap)
Finished Mandkind
Dubliners
The Tain
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Lyr
Taran Wanderer
The High King
Stardust

Well done, Niamh, that's wonderful. Wish I could read this much.


I mostly drifted from one unfinished book to the next. Nothing really stuck. Although I did read all of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, I've been having a difficult time concentrating on any book for more than a few hours at a time. When this has happened to me in the past, I've usually broken the spell by reading short fiction like Lovecraft or Maupassant's short stories. Didn't do that this time.

I picked up in succession, Swann's Way, The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Oblomov, The Brother's Karamazov, Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome, Darwin's The Descent of Man, Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Kevin Smith's My Boring *** Life, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Nichomachean Ethics, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and most recently The Faerie Queene. I have yet to finish any of them.

I know what you mean. I drifted away in the past but instead of leaving books unfinished, I tend to stop reading and start feeling very guilty. It is a good idea to review our performance on monthly basis in a thread like this, gives one another reason to go on. You have a nice list up there and a complete reading of all these books would make one a pretty accomplished reader.

[Dark Muse]

Well I have been reading a lot of short stories lately. For March, I have read:

Herman Melville

The Piazza
The Encantadas
The Bell-Tower
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

Edgar Allan Poe

Ligeia
William Wilson
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Cask of Amontillado
The Masque of the Red Death
The Imp of the Preverse
MS. Found in a Bottle
Hop-Fog

Chekhov

Rothchild's Fiddle
The Man in the Case
Gooseberries
About Love

and I read Two Bluebirds by D.H. Lawrence

[Ryduce]

You guys read fast.I made it through four books this month,which is the most I've done in a single month in about a year.I almost made it through five,but halfway through The Turn of the Screw some books came in the mail and since I totally have literary ADD,I started reading them.

The Road
As I lay Dying
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Real Change

[ntropyincarnate]

The Red Badge of Courage
The Old Man and the Sea
The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime
The White Mare
finished Persuasion
and started The Dawn Stag, The Song of an Innocent Bystander, and The Picture of Dorian Gray

[Eric Cioe]

Farmer and Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway

And I started reading Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum and O Pioneers by Willa Cather.

[believin]

Pinch and a punch...

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
http://www.amazon.com/Kafka-Shore-Audiofy-Digital-Audiobook/dp/1600837964/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207054778&sr=1-10

Very complex mythopoeic construction of a novel collaborating both oriental and occidental myths and philosophy which wrap themselves round the narrative like a twin helix. His use of the occidental myths become as ostentatious to us living in the West as, I am sure, the occidental concepts of the soul would have sounded to the average Japanese readers. Could have been made less effortless and elaborate. If you want to employ the "mythical method" you've got to be as effortless and artless as Joyce, anything else and your book would turn into a lecture or a Wikipedia article. A fast-paced page-turner though (can't say the same about Joyce's book!).




Just picked that one up in March, but have not read it yet. Thanks for the run-down.

I finished these books in March:

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"
Goethe's Letters from Italy
Excerpts from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
Michael Shaara's For Love of the Game
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)
A Chinese book called something like "Staying Alone: the 5th year" (my translation of the title)

[aeroport]

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
http://www.amazon.com/Kafka-Shore-Audiofy-Digital-Audiobook/dp/1600837964/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207054778&sr=1-10

Very complex mythopoeic construction of a novel collaborating both oriental and occidental myths and philosophy which wrap themselves round the narrative like a twin helix. His use of the occidental myths become as ostentatious to us living in the West as, I am sure, the occidental concepts of the soul would have sounded to the average Japanese readers. Could have been made less effortless and elaborate. If you want to employ the "mythical method" you've got to be as effortless and artless as Joyce, anything else and your book would turn into a lecture or a Wikipedia article. A fast-paced page-turner though (can't say the same about Joyce's book!).


I pretty much completely agree with this review. He's probably not an author I'll be messing around with again for a while.



Herman Melville

The Piazza
The Encantadas
The Bell-Tower
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids


Goodness, all the Melville stories I haven't read yet... Are they as good as BC, BB, and Bartleby?

I read The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun. It was fun, but I'm glad it's over. I'm not sure how healthy a concentrated reading of Hawthorne is...

This month, I finally begin my comprehensive reading of HJ - at the moment, I'm planning to cover everything that he included in the New York Edition of his works. I'll finish Roderick Hudson this month, and at least begin The American. I'll also finish Paradise Lost within a week or so.
I kind of like this monthly review idea. Nice thread.

[Il Penseroso]

I'll see what I can remember. Most of my reading has been done in short bursts while I have free time from school texts.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Trial by Franz Kafka

about a quarter of the Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Saint Judas by James Wright (book of poems, so short)

Discrete Series and The Materials by George Oppen (both books of poetry. I wasn't really able to study these in much depth, mostly just read between classes)

"A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver (short story)

and I'm about twenty pages from finishing Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground


I hope I'm not forgetting anything

[Lulim]

I finished Ken Follett: World without End, which was not quite as good as I had anticipated

and read:
Alexander Aaronsohn: The Turks in Palestine
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

and started:
Barrack Obama: The Audacity of Hope, which I am going to finish this weekend and makes much better reading than I had anticipated.

[novelsryou]

I finished Ike, An American Hero and also read The Great Gatsby

[Equilibrium]

March was mostly taken up with Middlemarch but I also got through a few plays:
Edward II (Marlowe), The Jew Of Malta (Marlowe), A Woman of No Importance (Wilde).
Thats pretty good for me, I usually manage much less but its one of my new years resolutions to read more so I'm making an effort.

[KyleBennett]

Interesting to see what everyone read...

My addition to this thread:
The Dwarf Per lagerkvist-- found the dwarf annoying as hell but finally saw the allegories of World War... i'm a bit slow with these things

Brighton Rock Graham Greene... vivid imagery--- flew through it, gripping to the finallast sentence.

Actually, yeah I think i only read two books. But aye I'm a student and have other things to do :-)

[thelastmelon]

I didn't notice this thread in March, so I'll reply to it now as well as the thread for April.
Well, these are the books I read in March:

The Full Cupboard of Life - Alexander McCall Smith
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Attack - Yasmina Khadra
To the Is-Land - Janet Frame
The Lover - Marguerite Duras
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (audiobook)