What did-we read in April

[lupe]

Regis Jauffret - "Univers, univers" (started in March)
Edward Alla Poe - "The Crow"
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – Il Gatopardo
Lawrence Durrell – "The Alexandria Quartet: III Mountolive"
Redmond O'Hanlon – "Congo Journey"

[Mark F.]

The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Art, Imaginary Conversations With my Mother, by Juanjo Saez
The Flying Locksmith, by Tonino Benaquista and Tardi
Medea, by Euripides
Medea, by Seneca

[Adagio]

David Copperfield - Dickens
The Bell Jar - Plath
Frankenstein - Shelley
Far From The Madding Crowd - Hardy

Great month :)

[Uberzensch]

Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
Little Children - Tom Perrotta
Madame Bovary - Flaubert

[Mariamosis]

'The Red Badge of Courage' - Stephen Crane
'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' - Mark Twain
'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' - Mark Twain
'The Drinking Den' or 'L'Assommoir'- Emile Zola
'King Soloman's Mines' - H. Rider Haggard
'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' - Mark Twain
'Crime and Punishment' - Fyodor Dostoevsky
'Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings' - Mark Twain

[promtbr]

Right on, I see some momentous months of reading already...



Mysteries-- Knut Hamsun
A Sportsman's Sketches-- Ivan Turgenev
Out Stealing Horses-- Per Petterson
Gargantua and Pantagruel-- Francois Rabelais
Othello-- Bill Shakespeare (re-read)
Much Ado About Nothing-- Bill Shakespeare (re-read)
Don Quixote-- Miguel de Cervantes



Appropriate to read Bill and Miguel during the Month of April, as they BOTH died, on the exact same day: April 23, 1616..
-----

[manolia]

"Middlemarch" - G Eliot
"Capitalism: the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie" - V Rafaelides (non fiction)
"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

[crystalmoonshin]

1. Mossflower
2. Mattimeo
3. Mariel of Redwall
4. Salamandastron
(1-4 by Brian Jacques)

5. The Pearl- John Steinbeck
6. Lolita- Nabokov

[mayneverhave]

Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

William Faulkner: First Encounters - Cleanth Brooks

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

The View From Castle Rock - Alice Munro

The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi

[mortalterror]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight- Anonymous
Of Human Bondage- Maugham
A Clash of Kings- Martin

[JBI]

Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

William Faulkner: First Encounters - Cleanth Brooks

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

The View From Castle Rock - Alice Munro

The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi

What did you think of The View From Castle Rock? I generally prefer her collections Lives of Girls and Women, and Who Do You Think You Are? better.

[Pecksie]

"A Lawyer's Notes" by Lowell B. Komie
"Dante in Love" by Harriet Rubin
"Our Former Lives in Art" by Jennifer S. Davis
--- and two books by Uruguayan authors: a poetry book by Magdalena Ferreiro, and a novel by Juan Carlos Mondragón

[Dark Muse]

Kate Chopin

The Awalening
Beyond the Bayou
Ma'ame Pelagel
Desiree's Baby
The Kiss
A Paif of Silk Stockings
A Respectable Woman
The Falling in Love of Fedora
Story of the Hour

Brave New World ~ Huxley

Life in the Iron Mills ~ Davis
How I Went Out to Service ~ Alcott
Miss Grief ~ Woolson
The Revolt of "Mother" ~ Freeman
The Yellow Wallpaper ~ Gilman
The Wisdom of the New ~ Far
Sweat ~ Hurston

Passing ~ Larseon

Collected Sherlock Holmes stories

Maupassant

The Dead Woman's Secret
Diary of a Madman
At Sea
In the Wood
The Wrong House
A Queer Night in Paris

[Stargazer86]

Siddhartha- Herman Hesse
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Gold Bug- E. A. Poe
Devil in the White City- Erik Larson
A Collection of Celtic Poetry and Artwork (not the exact title..can't remember what it is)
Various Shakespeare sonnets & poems by S.T. Coleridge and other poets
The Necklace- Guy de Maupassant


Currently reading *points below* Island of Hope, Island of Tears & Beowulf

[JohnMelmoth]

1. The Drama of the Gifted Child
2. For Your Own Good
3. Banished Knowledge

All by Alice Miller

[Ghuyuran]

Lord of the Flies
The Catcher in the Rye
The Shack

and most of a introductory book on Jung.

I also began to read Othello. I had seen the opera a year ago and went to Montreal to see the play, but I had not read the text yet.

[Desolation]

'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre
'Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka
'God and the State' by Mikhail Bakunin
'Anarchism: Revolutionary Writings' by Peter Kropotkin
'Fear and Trembling' by Soren Kierkegaard
The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams
The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
The Selected Poems of Lew Welch
'Huge Dreams' by Michael McClure
'Walden' by Henry David Thoreau
'The Flowers of Evil' by Charles Baudelaire
'The Revolution Betrayed' by Leon Trotsky
'Death on the Installment Plan' by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
'The Age of Reason' by Jean-Paul Sartre

[mayneverhave]

What did you think of The View From Castle Rock? I generally prefer her collections Lives of Girls and Women, and Who Do You Think You Are? better.

I somehow knew you would pick up on that Munro inclusion. I was introduced to the author from the 2008 edition of The Best American Short Stories (which is slightly ironic, since Munro is obviously not even American), and my professor had us read the author's most recent work.

I enjoyed it to a great degree. I wouldn't call it a masterwork, but there were moments of extreme depth and power - especially in the first part of the book. The second half seemed more autobiographical and focused on the author herself, which, I felt, didn't hold up against the more encompassing first half. The titular short story was particularly great.

The book was good enough to persuade me to read some her other collections. I assume you would recommend the ones you mentioned?

[Drkshadow03]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight- Anonymous
Of Human Bondage- Maugham
A Clash of Kings- Martin

What'd you think of the Martin considering the intense debate over his work between JBI and myself and others months back?


Kate Chopin

The Awalening
Beyond the Bayou
Ma'ame Pelagel
Desiree's Baby
The Kiss
A Paif of Silk Stockings
A Respectable Woman
The Falling in Love of Fedora
Story of the Hour

Brave New World ~ Huxley

Life in the Iron Mills ~ Davis
How I Went Out to Service ~ Alcott
Miss Grief ~ Woolson
The Revolt of "Mother" ~ Freeman
The Yellow Wallpaper ~ Gilman
The Wisdom of the New ~ Far
Sweat ~ Hurston

Passing ~ Larseon

Collected Sherlock Holmes stories

Maupassant

The Dead Woman's Secret
Diary of a Madman
At Sea
In the Wood
The Wrong House
A Queer Night in Paris

You read all that in a single month?!

[Saladin]

1) Snow by Orhan Pamuk
2) Some poems (Terje Vigen, En broder i nød, I galleriet and many more) and plays of Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler, Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman, mostly re-read)
3) Antigone by Sophocles
4) Oresteia by Aeschylus

[wateredwhisky]

David Goodis - Down There
Philip K. Dick - Man in the High Castle
Chester Himes - Real Cool Killers
Eric Puchner - Music Through the Floor
A bunch of Keats poems
James Joyce - Dubliners (re-read)

and last but not least...

A whole bunch of really terrible stories for my writing workshop (but a few really good ones too!)

[Drkshadow03]

Philip K. Dick - Man in the High Castle

What'd you think of the Philip K Dick novel?

[wateredwhisky]

What'd you think of the Philip K Dick novel?

It was really great. Have you ever read it? He does a marvelous job of paralleling his alternate history setting in the post WWII era with the actual situation. America is divided up by the Germans and Japanese into east and west and there is a threat of war between the two conquering nations at any point. It was a brilliant idea to use this alternate history to give an objective way to look at cold war life. I'd highly recommend it to anybody who is looking to try out something by Dick.

[higley]

The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl's latest,
and wrapping up Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.

Plus a bunch o' rereads.

[JBI]

I somehow knew you would pick up on that Munro inclusion. I was introduced to the author from the 2008 edition of The Best American Short Stories (which is slightly ironic, since Munro is obviously not even American), and my professor had us read the author's most recent work.

I enjoyed it to a great degree. I wouldn't call it a masterwork, but there were moments of extreme depth and power - especially in the first part of the book. The second half seemed more autobiographical and focused on the author herself, which, I felt, didn't hold up against the more encompassing first half. The titular short story was particularly great.

The book was good enough to persuade me to read some her other collections. I assume you would recommend the ones you mentioned?
Yeah, I think, if you like the genre of short stories, either Lives of Girls and Women, or Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You would be good bets. But if your taste is more attuned to novels, Who Do You Think You Are? is more like that. Generally, I think she is quite a consistent author, in terms of how she writes, but her Selected Stories also offer a nice introduction, if you can get them from the library, as buying Selected Stories, to me at least, feels like a cheapening.

The strange part about the stories though, is the nature of their collections. The anthology itself, in the way it is very involved within the stories, whereas in other writers, with the exception of Faulkner's Scopes stories, shorts seem to stand alone more or less. The genre line between novel and anthology seems to be questioned a lot in her works, even her earliest connection, so perhaps selected stories may be a bad idea.

[Dark Muse]

You read all that in a single month?!

LOL yeah, most of them were short stories, and on average I read about 1 or 2 short stories a day

[mayneverhave]

The strange part about the stories though, is the nature of their collections. The anthology itself, in the way it is very involved within the stories, whereas in other writers, with the exception of Faulkner's Scopes stories, shorts seem to stand alone more or less. The genre line between novel and anthology seems to be questioned a lot in her works, even her earliest connection, so perhaps selected stories may be a bad idea.

I enjoy both novels and short story collections. I share your opinions regarding Collected works, however, as like buying a Collected Poetry of ____ or the Greatest hits of _____ (in music) seems to take all of the connective tissue from the originally published work, unless the "Collected Stories" orders them in the way the author originally intended.

Your mention of Faulkner was interesting because Faulkner immediately came to mind as I was reading The View from Castle Rock. The perspective shifts very much reminded me of the "every man is an island" approach of As I Lay Dying, and the idea of heritage and family-lines is definitely present in most of Faulkner.

[grotto]

The Movie Goer – Walker Percy
How I Became Stupid – Martin Page
About Love – Robert Solomon
The Fall – Camus
A few short stories by Gogol
The Idiot – Dostoyevsky
A Glimpse of Nothingness – Janwillem van de Wetering
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
Existentialism is a Humanism – Sartre

[Drkshadow03]

It was really great. Have you ever read it? He does a marvelous job of paralleling his alternate history setting in the post WWII era with the actual situation. America is divided up by the Germans and Japanese into east and west and there is a threat of war between the two conquering nations at any point. It was a brilliant idea to use this alternate history to give an objective way to look at cold war life. I'd highly recommend it to anybody who is looking to try out something by Dick.


Yes, I have. I wrote a post (http://beyondassumptions.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/booklist-2008-32-the-man-in-the-high-castle-by-philip-k-dick/) here about it.

[mortalterror]

What'd you think of the Martin considering the intense debate over his work between JBI and myself and others months back?

I saw that debate so I picked up A Game of Thrones. I can't put them down. They've pulled me away from Stendhal, Firdawsi, Herodotus, Flaubert, and Steinbeck which I was reading piecemeal. I just finished the third book and have the fourth on hold at the library. I haven't read fantasy sword and sorcery fiction in ten years. This takes me back to Zelazny's Amber series and Lackey's Valdemar, two of my first loves.

As books they are remarkably well written for fantasy. In structure, they are Tolstoy's children more than Tolkien's: lots of characters, lots of pages, heavy inner monologue psychological stuff, with an evenness and clarity of style which is the mark of a mature and experienced talent. The one thing I don't like about them is all the cliffhangers. After really exciting things happen, we don't find out how they resolve sometimes for nearly two hundred pages.

I've taken to skipping over most of Daenarys' chapters because I've never liked her. The books are split into three story lines and Daenarys' obviously isn't going to intersect with the other two until at least the fourth book so I'll deal with her then. I like the way Martin has the courage to kill off popular major characters and take others in unexpected directions. The good aren't always good. The bad aren't always bad. But I think it's a mistake for him to be presenting more characters as the books progress to replace the dead ones. This makes the books overlong and draws out an already epic storyline. I believe that's why he's had to release his next book in two separate volumes, cut them in half like Solomon, and from what I hear they suffer for it. But as to that, I'll find out for myself soon enough.

[papayahed]

Notes from Underground
Possession by AS Byatt
The Awakening

[JBI]

I saw that debate so I picked up A Game of Thrones. I can't put them down. They've pulled me away from Stendhal, Firdawsi, Herodotus, Flaubert, and Steinbeck which I was reading piecemeal. I just finished the third book and have the fourth on hold at the library. I haven't read fantasy sword and sorcery fiction in ten years. This takes me back to Zelazny's Amber series and Lackey's Valdemar, two of my first loves.\
(emphasis mine)

That is strange - I never would have picked you out as a Lackey reader - Perhaps that big dominating male figure of an avatar is just a facade.

[mortalterror]

That is strange - I never would have picked you out as a Lackey reader - Perhaps that big dominating male figure of an avatar is just a facade.

You got me. I collect glass animals and cry at weddings.

[The Comedian]

Preacher (vol 6) -- Dillon/Ennis
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction -- Mignola/Byrne
Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles
Watership Down -- Adams
The Jungle Book (Books I & 2) -- Kipling

[pagebypage]

Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk
The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming

[Wilde woman]

Epithalamion - by Spenser
Lycidas - by Milton
Absalom and Achitophel - by Dryden
The Dunciad - by Pope
The Rape of the Lock - by Pope (hilarious!)
Daisy Miller - by Henry James
Tintern Abbey - by Wordsworth
Songs of Innocence and Experience - by Blake (I was lucky enough to find a copy with the illustrations - beautiful!)
The Eyre Affair - by Jasper Fforde

It's been a poetry month for me!

[Scheherazade]

I collect glass animals and cry at weddings.You too?

I was beginning to think that I might be the only one on the Forum...

[thelastmelon]

What I read in april:

Andra boken om Kirre - Gunilla O. Wahlström
Breaking Dawn - Stephenie Meyer
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
31 Dream Street - Lisa Jewell
Vince & Joy - Lisa Jewell
Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery

[bouquin]

The Confessions of Nat Turner (by William Styron)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)

[TurquoiseSunset]

I read nothing! Can you believe it?! I only realised it now when reading this thread... I'm going to the library after work to pick up something...
I really should make more time for reading.
Which makes me think, how do you guys fit in all your reading? If you were banned from reading, what would you do instead?

[Alyoshka]

Notes from Underground
Possession by AS Byatt
The Awakening

How is Notes from Underground? I've read The Karamazov Brothers and Crime and Punishment of Dostoyevsky. Is this the one I should read next?

My April reading (well, I finished them in April):

Hemmingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Murakami: The Elephant Vanishes (short stories), After Dark, and Sputnik Sweetheart
Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

[Mariamosis]

I read nothing! Can you believe it?! I only realised it now when reading this thread... I'm going to the library after work to pick up something...
I really should make more time for reading.
Which makes me think, how do you guys fit in all your reading? If you were banned from reading, what would you do instead?

I refuse to pay for cable. Therefore I tend to read at times (especially at night) when I would be watching tv.

Also, due to the economy my afternoon job is slow, which allows me to escape to online books while receiving a paycheck. (not a bad deal, hey?)

[grotto]

I’m with you Mariamosis; I don’t have cable and I have only had my TV on three times in the last year and one of those times was to watch season 10 episodes from South Park on the DVD. It’s amazing to me now after being away from it so long how many and how annoying commercials are! I would watch for 15 minutes and in anger just shut it off! Grrrr!

[Mariamosis]

My fiance and I use Netflix and therefore have taken back some of the control television had over our lives. (mine more so than his) It is surprising how much can be accomplished when you are no longer a zombie! :)

[Emil Miller]

My fiance and I use Netflix and therefore have taken back some of the control television had over our lives. (mine more so than his) It is surprising how much can be accomplished when you are no longer a zombie! :)

This is a bit off topic but if you go into the General Chat forum and click on the Serious Discussions sub forum, you will find a thread called Trash Television very much in line with your thoughts on this issue.

[Amethyst2010]

A Doll's House, Ibsen
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
The Good Natur'd Man, Oliver Goldsmith