What do you hope to read in 2014?

[kev67]

My backlog of books is ridiculous. I have counted 44 books waiting to be read on my shelves. Four of them were foisted on me by a friend, and sixteen were my father's, which I picked out after he died. I have divided them into twelve classics from Georgian to Edwardian, thirteen modern literature including genre, nine social history and ten other non-fiction books. I doubt I will be able to restrain myself from buying more books, but I have resolved to read two for each new book I acquire. I hope to get through one Georgian to Edwardian classic per month. These are

A Tales of Two Cities
Bleak House
Middlemarch
Humphrey Clinker
The Man Who Was Thursday
Mary Barton
Far From The Madding Crowd
Kim
The Odd Women
The Netherworld
Nostromo
North and South

The thirteen modern literature and genre books:

Tripwire
The Visitor
Killing Floor
Die Trying
Officers and Gentlemen
Brick Lane
Amsterdam
A Proper Marriage
Under the Sun
Lionel Asbo
A Man of Parts
The Eternity Bridge
Leaving Cheyenne

The first four are Jack Reacher books. The next five were my father's. Of these I may prioritize Under the Sun, which is a collection of short stories, poems and essays. However, I am particularly looking forward to Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis, A Man of Parts by David Lodge about H.G. Wells, and The Eternity Bridge (steampunk).

The social history books:

The Victorians
Spitfire Women
FDR - The First Hundred Days
Samuel Pepys - The Unequalled Self
Going to the Wars
After the Victorians
The People of the Abyss
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
A Moment of War

I am particularly looking forward to the last two, written by Laurie Lee, describing his adventures after the events in Cider With Rosie. I am also looking forward to The People of the Abyss, which was a piece of reportage written by Jack London about the poor in London in around 1900.

Other non-fiction:

Heating and Air-Conditioning of Buildings
Madame Curie
Project Sunshine
Debunking Economics
17 Equations That Changed the World
Language
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Poverty and Inequality in Britain
The Economic History of the World Population
The History of Engineering in Ipswich Town

Heating and Air-Conditioning of Buildings is going to take most of the year to get through. Madame Curie and the last four books in the list were my father's. Several of them are Open University books and a bit out of date, so I won't prioritize them.

[Bill 42]

I'm planning on reading In Search of Lost Time, starting in about a week. After I'm finished (probably around mid-March), I have another 58 books that I own but haven't read yet. I doubt I'll get through all of them...

[Paulclem]

I've started How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton. It's very good - particularly as I've read a number of the examples he uses.

I've also got a few books from the old Uncle's house that we recently cleared. These include a biography of Julius Caesar and The 12 Caesars by Seutonius.

[Poetaster]

I have a good number of books I want to read in 2014, most of them are already on my shelves:

The Oresteia
The Poems of Catullus
The Outsider by Albert Camus
Rashomon and 17 other stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Those are what I what I want to read next year anyway, and that's in no real order. I don't expect to read as much as 2013, because I'm training to be a teacher, that will take up a lot of my time.

[ladderandbucket]

Definitely going to read War and Peace soon, hopefully get round to the Divine Comedy later in the year after some background reading.

Other than that I'll just see where my nose takes me. I am continually making lists and planning to immerse myself in one topic or another but never read half the books I want to. It is the most pleasant sort of frustration :)

[tonywalt]

The Life and Times of Michael K - JM Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians - JM Coetzee
Foe - JM Coetzee
Oracle Night - Paul Auster

(Well, those are the first ones I will read)

[PaulineGE]

I'm trying to read some of the classics I never read in school. I started with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which I had once started before and couldn't get very far. This time I read it over Christmas break when I had lots of time to read, and finished in about four days. I'll also read whatever the book club at our library chooses each month, and whatever interesting fiction I come across at the library, and some interesting non-fiction, but I can't say what it will be until I come across it. There are also some books in my bedroom and living room that I've started and haven't finished, and I might finish some of them.

[JBI]

Everything written in China from 220AD to 589AD poems, inscriptions, tombstones, Buddhist scriptures included.

[Lykren]

Everything written in China from 220AD to 589AD poems, inscriptions, tombstones, Buddhist scriptures included.

About how many pages does that consist of? How does it compare to, say, the textual output of the Roman Empire during roughly the same period of time? Also, why did you choose those particular dates?

[qimissung]

I hope to read some things that I enjoy. I hope to read some things that are fun, and some that are seriously beautiful.

[JBI]

About how many pages does that consist of? How does it compare to, say, the textual output of the Roman Empire during roughly the same period of time? Also, why did you choose those particular dates?
Tombstones is about 2-3000 pages of flat text. Prose is about 3000 pages or so, and poetry about 1000 pages. Generally the harder part is textual making sense of the stuff, which adds about three times as much in textual commentary just from linguistic annotations. Buddhist texts are trickier, since there are many of them, though they won't equal more than 3-4000 pages I think, mostly in repetitive formulaic language.

During the time period China suffered three major bibliographic disasters (The library burning down during the West-East Jin transition, the last Liang emperor torching the imperial library, and the Tang transportation of the imperial library being lost at sea) so there isn't much left of the massive thousands and thousands of pages that once existed. Reading imperial histories from the time will also add a lot more to the list, but I've already begun to plow through them.

As for those dates, I meant to hit 580. Basically the fall of the Han through reunification of China during the Sui.

[hannah_arendt]

I hope start something from Russian literature, probably Dostoyevsky.

[osho]

I am planning to read something different, something unread and un-thought of and I am fed up with the usual everyday humdrum and I like to the classics and especially the Mahabharata to know something about the time it was composed, about their value systems, cultural and social fabrics and their freedoms and boundaries, their enigmas and understandings.

I do not like to read any classics written over 200 years and I find most of them monotonous and some are intricate to confuse us and others give a tone of familiarity and I want to transcend all these man-thought and made domains and experience something unusual,exciting and exotic and my project is really demanding and my dreams are not easily realizable and my destiny are commonly unreachable but I do not fail to proceed for this gives me some adventure for I hate to accept my limitations

[blank|verse]

I'm just hoping to read more. And perhaps more novels, as I tend to stick to poetry.

But I'd like to read some more J.G. Ballard, W.G. Sebald (I'm reading Austerlitz at the moment), Christopher Isherwood (after seeing the film A Single Man recently)... and maybe I'll even get round to Ulysses after several false-starts!

In terms of non-fiction, I've been taken by the writings of contemporary philosopher John Gray, so would like to complete Straw Dogs before reading the sequel, The Silence of Animals - anyone who uses Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery to support a philosophical argument is alright with me... which brings me neatly back to reading poetry.

[Halifaxius]

Tombstones is about 2-3000 pages of flat text. Prose is about 3000 pages or so, and poetry about 1000 pages. Generally the harder part is textual making sense of the stuff, which adds about three times as much in textual commentary just from linguistic annotations. Buddhist texts are trickier, since there are many of them, though they won't equal more than 3-4000 pages I think, mostly in repetitive formulaic language.

During the time period China suffered three major bibliographic disasters (The library burning down during the West-East Jin transition, the last Liang emperor torching the imperial library, and the Tang transportation of the imperial library being lost at sea) so there isn't much left of the massive thousands and thousands of pages that once existed. Reading imperial histories from the time will also add a lot more to the list, but I've already begun to plow through them.

As for those dates, I meant to hit 580. Basically the fall of the Han through reunification of China during the Sui.

Sounds daunting...How would someone from an almost elusively Western tradition get into Asian literature? I've been meaning to for some time, but really have no idea where to start.

[JBI]

Sounds daunting...How would someone from an almost elusively Western tradition get into Asian literature? I've been meaning to for some time, but really have no idea where to start.

Depends what you want to read. To really get into it, you need to, like Western literature, start from the beginning. Get a good translation of the Analects, The Great Learning, Mencius, Xunzi, the DaoDeJing and Zhuangzi, and just read them. That will give you the important philosophical basis for the tradition. Reading a translation of the Zuo Zhuan will also help, but isn't as necessary.From there you read Sima Qian's Record of the Grand Historian (in parts, skipping over boring stuff), and the book of poems.

After that, you will have pretty much the entire basis of East Asian literature, from a philosophical perspective, in your mind. Then you just pick up an historically arranged book of poems, like Sunflower Splendor, and casually read it, enjoying the translations.

If you want to get into Buddhist literature, that is far more difficult, but it wouldn't hurt to flip through some Sutras, especially the major ones like the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Nirvana Sutra, etc. Kenneth Ch'en's history of Buddhism in China is also a good read.

After that pick up an anthology like Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature, flip through to what you like, read it, and pick up a full copy of the work if it interests you.

[Halifaxius]

Interesting...I think I'll certainly undertake some sort of a study of Asian lit at some point. I'm almost embarrassingly unschooled in it.

Thanks for the response, by the way.

[Pierre Menard]

I have 40+ un-read books on my shelves, so I'll shorten my list down to 10-15 of the most important ones I want to read:

The Divine Comedy (Ciardi translation)

Middlemarch

Madame Bovary

Swann's Way

Moby Dick (will be my first of 2014, hopefully start it in the next couple of days)

The Gormenghast Trilogy

The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

Collected Poetry of Eugenio Montale (I started this about a month ago though, so I'm cheating a bit, but it's the book of poetry I'm most looking forward to reading in full, aside from The Diving Comedy)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Cosmicomics by Calvino


As with every year, there'll also be Shakespeare (finish off the histories I think), various books of poetry, and I'll continue on dabbling in Montaigne's essays, Robert Burton's Melancholy and H.L. Mencken's savage wit. Not to mention a number of short story collections.

Hopefully it all goes to plan.

[luhsun]

Jdi, a bit bombastic, or showing hubris to want to read through everything written, or even the important parts from that era. Philosophical or religious tracts may need a bit of time to understand, even the boring repetitive parts. Kinda reminds me of the time i came across a young doctor who wanted to read all the published journal articles of a single disease.
However, i apologise if it was just a normal new year resolution/wish- mine was peace on earth and goodwill among all men...oops, i have just broken mine.

[Vota]

Off the top of my head, I will likely read the following list, plus whatever strikes my fancy, but I know I want to read this stuff within the next year:

1. Several of Plutarch's Lives
2. A Shakespeare play or two
3. A Bernard Shaw play or two
4. An Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen play
5. The Aeneid, Dryden translation
6. The Divine Comedy
7. Several Dialogues of Plato
8. Some Montaigne
9. Moby Dick
10. A sci-fi novel or two and many short stories

[Lykren]

I want to finish Three Kingdoms, and then get started on The Plum in the Golden Vase. After that will come La Princesse de Cleves, and then I will start In Search of Lost Time, which I doubt I will be able to finish this year.

[JBI]

Jdi, a bit bombastic, or showing hubris to want to read through everything written, or even the important parts from that era. Philosophical or religious tracts may need a bit of time to understand, even the boring repetitive parts. Kinda reminds me of the time i came across a young doctor who wanted to read all the published journal articles of a single disease.
However, i apologise if it was just a normal new year resolution/wish- mine was peace on earth and goodwill among all men...oops, i have just broken mine.

Don't misunderstand me. I greatly intend to read intensely of secondary material as well. I will get the Zhonghuashuju editions to supplement everything, especially the ones with the 集释，集评。 I'm not just going to read the plane text of most of this. Then again, it actually isn't that difficult, and has been done by numerous scholars already.

[chrisvia]

Typically I don't plan what I read--and I seldom even keep a list of books I want to get around to in a given year; I just sort of go with my feelings. Somehow one book leads to another for me. But this year I have already created a 2014 shelf on Goodreads! My plan is to read through a handful of my larger books and the 3 books that I have meant to read for years but somehow never get around to. Here is my 2014 list:

Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg
Europe, Norman Davies
Catch-22, Heller (I've tried to read this so may times and always lose interest around page 40!)
The Tunnel, Gass
The Recognitions, Gaddis
JR, Gaddis
To the Lighthouse, Woolf (another I keep putting off)
The Aeneid, Virgil (Fitzgerald translation that I've never read)
Middlemarch, Eliot
Atlas Shrugged, Rand (I've read this once, but a recent thread piqued my interest in its relevance/merit)
The Magic Mountain, Mann (currently reading)
Mason & Dixon, Pynchon
The Decameron, Boccaccio
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais
The World As Will and Presentation, Schopenhauer
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

Of course, this is my main list of year's reading. It will no doubt be supplemented with scholarly essays, the Atlantic Monthly, the Bible, and various poetry (including the new Neruda volume I got for Christmas) and short stories.

[Helga]

I probably have about 30 or 40 books that I haven't read so I want to get started on that pile. Besides what I read for school I hope to get to some books by:

Paul Auster
Susan Sontag
John Berendt
and a book of essays by Milan Kundera

These are just the authors on my nightstand at the moment, will probably add more in the next few days. I will also be reading plenty of books about monsters and essays on Beowulf.

[Halifaxius]

I made this general list of books I want to have done by May--or around about late spring.

1: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann.
2: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin.
3: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
4: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
5: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
6: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
7: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
8: Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy.
9: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
10: The Poetry of Keats (Throughout).

Don't really know how far I'll get.

[lawpark]

JBI - to stop at 589 is better than 580 - that I think is the year when Sui truly reunified China - the future YangDi conquered Chen Dynasty that year.

If you are reading Buddhist stuff, I'd argue that stopping at 589 is the worst stopping time - as the most exciting author wrote (or spoke) in the next decade - Tiantai Zhiyi died in 597, and his student Guanding wrote the lecture notes out in the first 3 decades of the 7th century.

My 2014 reading wishes.

Most important (often means less likely to start for me):
- Oxford Handbook of Causation
- Elementary Hindi and Workbook (Delacy & Joshi)
- Textual Commentaries on Vimalakirtisutra (Zhiyi) - Read 9 out of 28 chapters

What I should finish:
- Interaction Ritual Chain (Randall Collins) - read half already
- Literacy in the Persianate World - read about half
- Nagarjuna in Context (Walser) - read half several years ago already
- Venture of Islam 3 Vol - only about maybe 1 Vol worth of chapters not read yet
- The Penguin History of the USA (Brogan) - 1/3 read
- Historiography (Ernst Breisach) - read half already
- Oxford & Cambridge (Peter Sager) - mostly read
- Zhongguo Gongcan Geming Qishi Nian (Chen Yong-fa), 2 volumes - read half of the first volume
- Night & Horses & The Desert (Robert Irwin) - read half

What I should get serious and start more than flipping through a couple of chapters:
- Sanskrit: An Appreciation without Apprehension
- Qur'an (cross-reading: Tarif Khalidi, Arberry, and Ahmed Ali)
- Imperial China 900-1800 (Mote)
- Oxford History of the British Empire Vol 2, 3, 4
- Cambridge History of the Cold War 1,2,3
- Europe: A Cultural History (Rietbergen)
- Social Theory and Social History (Macraild and Taylor)
- Huisi Fahua Changuan Zhi Yanjiu
- Introduction to Electrodynamics (Griffiths)
- A First Course in General Relativity (Schutz)
- Quanqiushi Pinglun Vol 5

What I want to acquire and read:
- Global Intellectual History (just bought!)
- Oxford History of Historical Writings (Vol. 2)
- Social History of Knowledge II (Peter Burke)
- Does Capitalism have a future (Wallerstein, Collins, et al.)
- Ideas (Peter Watson)
- The Modern Mind (Peter Watson)

[Snowqueen]

Hoping to read some poetry and good prose, if I get time. It has been quite a busy year for me.

[hypatia_]

I would like to finish Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts, The Science of Breath by Swami Rama, Tipping Point and maybe Outliers by Gladwell, Science and Music by Sir James Jeans, the Divine Comedy, and On The Geneology of Morality by Nietzsche, some Emily Dickinson, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and any Rimbaud I can get my hands on :)

[Chris 73]

Solaris-Stanislaw Lem
A Canticle For Liebowitz-Walter M Miller jr
KJ Parker- Academic Exercises (Short story and essay collection)
Excession-Iain M Banks
The Last English King-Julian Rathbone
I Claudius/Claudius The God-Robert Graves
Shogun-James Clavell
Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy-John LeCarre
The Unreal And The Real-Ursula K Leguin (short story collection)
Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell-Susanna Clarke
Books Of Blood Vol. 1-3-Clive Barker

Most of these are in my tbr pile which I'm finally beginning to get under some form of control, that does involve a self imposed ban from all charity bookshops though.

[mal4mac]

I read a Jack Reacher novel recently, The Killing Floor. I wasn't impressed. I found it a mundane, cliched, repetive non-thriller and will not be reading any more. I read "The Man who was Thursday" immediately afterwards and found that it a much more interesting, imaginative thriller (if a bit strange!) I also read Amsterdam recently, and was not impressed, it's the worst McEwan I've read by far, and I've read most of them. Who picks the Booker judges?

Your classics list is looking a lot better than your modern list IMHO - I've read nine of them and they were all very good, and the ones I haven't read I'd like to read. I'd alternate the modern and classics so you don't get a clunker twice in a row :)

[Wondra]

Infinite jest
The brothers karamatzov
Journey to the west
Romance of the three kingdoms

And if I'm lucky vol. 6 of ice and fire

[ScribbleScribe]

Sandpaper Sisters By: Michele McKnight Baker
The Hebrew Alphabet (A Mystical Journey)
A Prayerful Journey Through Deployment by: Donna Mull
Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light
The Greatest Poems of the Bible
What Christians Believe
The New Evidence that Deserves a Verdict
NIV Bible

[Paulclem]

I'm giving Galbraith aka JK Rowlings The Cuckoo's Calling a whirl at the moment. It's a murder/ private detective novel and quite good. I'm also reading At Home by Bill Bryson. I find him very amusing and, of course, though he's based there, Bryson never stays at home.

[Desolation]

I haven't read anything for pleasure (yet) this year...Still, I'm hoping to get through:

Moby-Dick by Herman Meville
In Search of Lost Time (the last 3 volumes) by Marcel Proust
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Tunnel by William H. Gass
A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Don Quixote by Cervantes

[astrum]

I hope to read some early English poetry (Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, etc).