What are the books you want to complete before the year ends?

[krishna_lit]

With only one complete month remaining to fly by, how many books are you left with to complete before the year ends? How many did you finish reading this year? And of all those books you've read, which one did you find the best and which one did you dislike (I hate to use the word 'worst' when I talk of books) the most among them, if any ofcourse??

Let's just talk about them here - as a feel-good reminder to mark the occasion of 2013's end. Thank you, all!

[Volya]

I still have all the books I was given to read last Christmas, too many to count... Including the complete works of Charles Dickens (I think it is all of them), the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and countless others that I have not got round to starting yet :(

The best book I read so far this year I think was either Into The Wild, Perks of Being A Wallflower, or Fiesta. It is so hard to choose my favourite between them :)

With luck I can finish Life of Pi and The Count of Monte Cristo (which I started previously but took a break from) before Christmas. I feel as though this year I have not been reading as much as I did in the past, possibly due to stress of school-work, but in this past month or two my appetite has picked up again which is good :)

[krishna_lit]

The best book I read so far this year I think was either Into The Wild,

Of all the books I've read this year, or rather of all the books in my whole life, Into The Wild stands out as a five star book, always. Oh what a book it is!! I've never been moved like I was when I finished it. Especially, the last line of the book (about Chris McCandless' original photograph) will always reverberate in my mind forever: ".... his face, serene, like a Monk gone to God!"

[Calidore]

This hasn't been a good reading year for me, with the biggest culprit being War and Peace, which took six months to get halfway through before I gave up. I'm currently on a second feedback-polishing read-through of my cousin's debut novel (actually published this past March, but War and Peace), then I'm not sure. I think my first priority will be a reread of Ursula Le Guin's original Earthsea trilogy, as I've recently picked up her three follow-up books and want to start from the beginning. Not that I need much of an excuse to reread those.

[Vota]

I plan to read Crime and Punishment before the end of the year, as well as 1-2 Dickens Christmass stories and some other miscellaneous short stories.

Over the past year I have read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Jungle, Notes From Underground, Paradise Lost, Of Mice and Men, Gulliver's Travels, Little Essays In Literature and life by Richard Burton, Macbeth, Widower's Houses(play), The Philanderer(play), about half of The Histories of Herodotus, Beowulf, Troilus and Cressida, Wool, Double Star, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and probably a dozen short stories and as many essays.

Of What I have read so far this year I would say that my favorite is a three-way tie between The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Jungle. I expected to like the Homeric epics, but I loved them and plan to read them many times throughout my life in many translations. I had heard about The Jungle in my microeconomics class and decided to give it a read. Man, I blew through it in about 4 days which is fast for me.

The works I disliked, or rather, least liked, is a tie between Macbeth and Notes From Underground. Both of these would be classified as least liked, not disliked. I did not think Macbeth was that great, which I did not expect having LOVED Hamlet. Notes From Underground was an interesting one. I felt like I got what was going on and what the narrator was saying. I nodded my head more than a few times, but in the end when I closed the book I wasn't sure whether I liked it or disliked it, which is odd because I enjoyed reading it even though it is a depressing book. I will definitely re-read the book in the future.

[Pierre Menard]

It's been a slightly poor year for reading for me too, in regards to how much I've been reading and how many books finished…but as for what I'd like to have finished, then I expect I'll finish Conrad's "Lord Jim" in the coming weeks (which has been great so far), and I hope to start and finish "What Maisie Knew" by Henry James before the year is out as well as catch up on a bunch of my poetry and short story collections I've got on my shelfs, though I doubt I'll finish them.

[hannah_arendt]

I have started reading "Hobbit" and I would like to read "Lord of the rings". However it would be very difficult.

[krishna_lit]

I've read 30 books so far this year. This is the first time in my life that I finished so many books in a year's time. I want to read Brave New World, Carrie, Fight Club, Counter Clock World and some other books this year.. Currently am Traveling with Gulliver! Lol :P

[CharlesH]

Fight Club was a weird one for me. I really enjoyed it, and that first chapter is gorgeous, but the ending to the movie was better. Palahnuick said something similar I think. Have you read Rant by him? Probably his most out there in terms of style and content, and I think it's stronger for it.

[Vota]

I've read 30 books so far this year. This is the first time in my life that I finished so many books in a year's time. I want to read Brave New World, Carrie, Fight Club, Counter Clock World and some other books this year.. Currently am Traveling with Gulliver! Lol :P

I quite enjoyed Gulliver's Travels and look forward to reading Brave New World myself.

[JBI]

The whole ShiJi annotated addition, currently on volume 3 of 10.

[Snowqueen]

I haven’t read as much as I wanted to but enjoyed all the books I’ve read so far. I hope to finish Crime and Punishment by the end of the year, though there are so many things to do besides reading.

[chrisvia]

I've managed to read 67 books this year, whereas my annual average is usually around 90. But I did get Gravity's Rainbow in at the beginning of the year, which took the whole month of January! And I reread Don Quixote (Grossmann translation).

Lately, with the year ending, I've done like the OP and started making a list of the books I want to finish in 2013.

Every time I have a good list together, a book comes to my attention that topples the list at its core!

I just started Didion's Play It As It Lays last night, and I'm thinking of continuing with female authors for a while--my experience with literature written by women is woefully restricted. Dickinson, McCullers, O'Connor, Plath, Austen, and du Maurier; that's about it.

[Der Wegwerfer]

count me in for Crime and Punishment as well. About half way thru and it's heating up.

[maxphisher]

So far this year, I have read:

The Remains of the Day (again)
The Time Machine (again)
The Sea, the Sea
Dubliners (again)
Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination: 4 Essays
Orientalism
The Ends of Comparison
Washed by the Gulfstream
Omeros
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
White Tiger
about half of Finnegans Wake
Animal's Children
The Heart of the Country
Disgrace
Small Island
The Satanic Verses
The Hunger Games
Between the Acts
Open City
The New Science
Death of a Discipline
Stories: by Kate Mansfield
The Third Policeman

Right now, I am reading more of Edward Said's work, and I'd like to focus on wrapping that up before the end of the year.

[ArtVandoley]

So far this year, I have read (from what I can remember):

White Teeth
The Double
1Q84
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Never Let Me Go
Crime & Punishment
A Hologram for the King
Stranger in a Strange Land
Infinite Jest (for the second time)
A Confederacy of Dunces
2001: A Space Odyssey
Tropic of Cancer
The Hobbit
The Postmortal (picked that up on a whim, didn't like it too much. by a guy named Drew Magary)
Gravity's Rainbow
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (a biography of David Foster Wallace)
Some of Girl With Curious Hair

Currently reading The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen. Before the year ends, I want to read The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollman and Underworld by Don DeLillo. Probably won't finish Underworld by Dec 31 but I'll finish it up by mid January.

[ArtVandoley]

So far this year, I have read:

....................
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
.......................

Right now, I am reading more of Edward Said's work, and I'd like to focus on wrapping that up before the end of the year.


What did you think of Oscar Wao? I see that book everywhere. Don't know anything about it.

[ChicagoReader]

House of Leaves. I started it about a week ago and so far it's equal bits interesting and tedium, seems often to be odd just for the novelty.

[Clopin]

Finished this year

Mao the Unknown Story, Modern Times, The Divine Comedy, Childhood Boyhood and Youth, Resurrection, Short Fiction of Lev Tolstoy, Gogol the Complete Tales, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there, Bullfinch's Mythology, Greek Myths and Legends, Dead souls, Chekhov the Complete Plays, Ibsen four Major Plays, To The Lighthouse, Waves, Mrs Dalloway, Europe a History, The Penguin History of the World, The New Testament, The Kingdom of God is Within You, A History of Civilizations, Eugene Onegin, Complete Prose Works of Pushkin, Gogol The Inspector General and Short Stories, Sun and Steel, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Anderson's Fairy Tales, The Poetic Edda, The Prose Edda, The Once and Future King, Fairy Tales of the British Isles, Yeats selected poems, The Idylls of the King, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Les Miserables, Chekhov the Complete Stories, Malory (a biography), The Gulag Archipelago Volumes 1 and 2, Who do you Think you Are, Something I've been Meaning to Tell You, Carried Away, a Personal Selection of Stories by Alice Munro, Intellectuals

That's all I can remember though I know I've read a fair bit more. I plan to finish 'Mark Twain the Complete Short Stories', 'A Hero of our Time', 'The Metamorphoses (Ovid's)', 'First Love and Other Tales', and 'Sophocles Three Tragedies' before January first.

2014 I'm going to read at least one hundred books and cover a lot of ground I've missed. I want to read biographies of Tolstoy, Sofia Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Virginia Woolf and Joyce and really get my Greeks and Romans read up with some good histories of those times. I want to read a lot of early Christian writings and make a study of the history of the religion, and I want to read a lot more literature from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

[Lykren]

Clopin, you read the complete stories of Anton Chekhov? How many are there?

[Clopin]

Well that's what the book was called... It doesn't actually contain every story he wrote I don't think.

[mal4mac]

...The Count of Monte Cristo

That was one of the books I was glad to give up this year :) If you started it previously, why did you stop? You are allowed to stop permanently! I'm starting to get much better at stopping books I'm not enjoying, it's one of my greatest achievements this year.

On a more positive note, my best experiences were re-reads of "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", "Middlemarch", and "David Copperfield", "The great Gatsby", "The invisible man"[Wells].

But there were also some first time reads that happily exceeded my expectations, and stopped me from *just* re-reading the "greats":

Les Miserables - Hugo
Flannery O'Connor "short stories",
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
An artist of the Floating World by Ishiguro
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
The collector of lost things by Jeremy Page
The daylight gate by Jeanette Winterson
The spy who came in from the cold by John le Carré
The Forsyte saga / John Galsworthy
The slave / Isaac Bashevis Singer
Labyrinth / Kate Mosse
Tom Brown's schooldays / Thomas Hughes
Old Man Goriot / Balzac
Salvage the bones / Jesmyn Ward
The world in the evening / Christopher Isherwood
Tales of the jazz age / F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never let me go / Kazuo Ishiguro
The book thief / Markus Zusak
Prater violet / Christopher Isherwood
Mr Norris changes trains / Christopher Isherwood
Goodbye to Berlin / Christopher Isherwood
The family Moskat / Isaac Bashevis Singer
The master of Ballantrae & Weir of Hermiston / Robert Louis Stevenson
The drowning pool / Ross Macdonald
Kim / Rudyard Kipling

Note, these are the books I really enjoyed, I left out all the ones I found "just OK" and (certainly) the ones I gave up on. Interestingly I left out all the "non fiction" works I read. Can you *really* enjoy non fiction? I think non fiction is useful, and not to be ignored, e.g., it can give you tips on what novels to read and how to avoid viruses... all very good, but enjoyable?

Resolution: More novels this year :) The "one bright book" as D.H. Lawrence said.

[mal4mac]

Well that's what the book was called... It doesn't actually contain every story he wrote I don't think.

The complete set comes in about about ten thick volumes.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/ac/jr/

[Poetaster]

Finished this year:

Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney (Translation of Sophocles’s Antigone)
The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles (translated by Robert Fagles)
The First Forty Nine Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney
J.M.W. Turner: The Man Who Set Painting on Fire by Olivier Meslay
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (Modernized by Nevill Coghill)
Christine by Stephen King
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Carry on, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
Hesiod and Theognis Translated by Dorethea Schmidt Wender
Eldritch Tales: A Micellany of the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft
On Love and Barley – Haiku of Basho (translated by Lucien Stryks)
The Eclogues by Virgil (translated by Guy Lee & Latin text)
Inferno by Dan Brown
Dante’s The Divine Comedy translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Theocritus's Idylls (Translated by Anthony Verity)
A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney (Norton Critical Edition)
Rime de Dante Alighieri
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
North by Seamus Heaney
Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A Boy’s Will by Robert Frost
North of Boston by Robert Frost
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Mountain Interval by Robert Frost
9-11: Was There An Alternative? By Noam Chomsky
The Illiad by Homer (Fagles translation)

I aim to finish before the end of the year:

The Odyessy by Homer (Fagles translation)

Of the read so far (and I'm on the last book of The Iliad, so I am adding that too) the biggest surprises has been the Haiku of Basho, which I found enchanting, and I might check out more Japanese writers now, and Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut. I had never read Vonnegut before, and I liked it so much I went out and got Breakfast of Champions, which frankly isn't as good I don't think. The Iliad (which I have read before, and I told you I was counting it) I have read before, but it was a surprise just how easily I got back into the whole mood the poem put me in the first time reading it.

Edit: The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon was also another really nice surprise. What a good book!

[krishna_lit]

As for me, it's 'Hearts in Atlantis' by Stephen King and hardcover illustrated Telugu translation of 'How People Found The Shape of the Earth' by Anatholy Tomilin. Currently in the middle of both the books. Also started reading 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley, but I don't think I'll be tackling with it now.

[maxphisher]

I enjoyed it despite the fact that it is not an overly uplifting book. There are points where the narrator's footnotes, though sometimes entertaining, get to be a bit tedious. But overall, it was an interesting and enjoyable read. I, however, am a fan of Diaz's very casual and pop-culture laden prose style.