Books you've read in the past year?

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Originally Posted by NickAdams

How helpful are the Gardner books to a writer?

I posted a question, on Beckett's Trilogy thread http://www.online-literature.com/for...hlight=beckett, and would like to see if you can answer it.

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Gardner's awesome. Thing is, I haven't actually read any of his novels. I think he wrote upwards of twenty, though. (The James Bond books are written by a different JG.) I've read a few books on writing, and so far he's the only one who appears to approach the subject with anything like honesty. I just started his On Moral Fiction; it seems comparatively abstract so far, but The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist are definitely both worth reading - multiple times.

I'll try the Beckett thread, but... :(

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Originally Posted by Jamesian

Gardner's awesome. Thing is, I haven't actually read any of his novels. I think he wrote upwards of twenty, though. (The James Bond books are written by a different JG.) I've read a few books on writing, and so far he's the only one who appears to approach the subject with anything like honesty. I just started his On Moral Fiction; it seems comparatively abstract so far, but The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist are definitely both worth reading - multiple times.

I'll try the Beckett thread, but... :(

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Gardner wrote quite a few, but The Sun Dialogues and Grendal are the ones that come to mind. I haven't read either and his other two books, we've already discussed, are in my draw, on top of Mailer's Spooky Art, waiting to be studied. I skimmed through Art of Fiction, there's a lot of good stuff. I found a copy for a dollar at my favorite used bookstore; I figure it would make a nice gift for a writing friend.

Grendal sounds interesting, but I would like to read Beowolf first before I get to the monster's P.O.V.

Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure we even covered Part II. Our professor talked about it a bit, but I think that we only were assigned Part I, and only an early bit of The Unnameable. We were covering quite a bit of stuff, and the prof was kind of trying to stress the later stuff - Godot, Endgame, etc. so we didn't do any of the novels in their entirety - four chapters of Murphy, I believe, and the first few chapters of Watt. Those two I'd like to go back to, though. The beginning of Murphy is hilarious.

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Originally Posted by NickAdams

Grendal sounds interesting, but I would like to read Beowolf first before I get to the monster's P.O.V.

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I thought the same, but now that I've read it I have no excuse... I have that and October Light sitting here, waiting for me...
Jason and Medeia is another.

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Originally Posted by Jamesian

Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure we even covered Part II. Our professor talked about it a bit, but I think that we only were assigned Part I, and only an early bit of The Unnameable. We were covering quite a bit of stuff, and the prof was kind of trying to stress the later stuff - Godot, Endgame, etc. so we didn't do any of the novels in their entirety - four chapters of Murphy, I believe, and the first few chapters of Watt. Those two I'd like to go back to, though. The beginning of Murphy is hilarious.

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Beckett is a suprising funny. But I don't suggest you look at the thread then, becaus I posted a spoiler that has to do with the second part. If you get a chance to go to the second half, please do; it's extremely rewarding.

I'm well versed in scripture or much literature, so I don't get Beckett's allusions, but there is so much in there that you could have read nothing else and still enjoy his work.

I would be interested in what you found, or the Prof pointed out, in the first part. Of the many things I read into it, I read it as a commentary on literature. There is a great reality to the first part, because there is no dialogue and the conversations that happened are summed up in a conclusion by the narrator- who remembers conversations in verbatim?

Faulkner said he wrote a sprawling as he did, because he wanted to get the world in a sentence. I think Beckett achieved that with so much less.

This is getting way off the thread.

Are you a Joyce fan?

Well, is anyone really a Joyce fan? He's almost impossible to like as an author - one just sort of reads through it, trying to halfway understand, coming away just sort of marveling at the guy's intelligence... We read a few of the Dubliners stories, 'Portrait', several chapters of 'Ulysses', and "Anna Livia" from the Wake. I actually think it's all pretty cool, but Ulysses tires me a little. I was surprised to find that bit of the Wake actually understandable. I certainly couldn't get all of it, but the meaning was more or less..."clear" isn't quite the word...let us say "sorta gettable". Interestingly, in one of the Gardner books, when he's talking about "mannered" writing (i.e., when the author's voice is intruding on the fictional world, or "dream" as he calls it), he mentions Joyce's regret, late in life, that he hadn't stuck with the earlier style from 'Portrait' and 'Dubliners'... Yeah, altogether I think he's alright. You?

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Originally Posted by NickAdams

How is Women by Bukowski? I was reading a little of Pulp in B&B today.

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If you like Bukowski you should like it, I pick it up you're a Hemingway fan and their writing style seems very close, at least to me. I'd only read Post Office and Factotum before this, and Women contained more humour than those other two. It's a nice, easy read, with a lot of tenderness for the characters.

My only problem with Bukowski is that he tends to retell a lot of episodes of his life in different novels, short stories and poems, so if you start binge reading his work, it gets slightly repetetive.

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Originally Posted by tudwell

I definitely like Prisoner of Azkaban best.

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Agreed, Tudwell. Harry Potter #3! - although I haven't actually had the chance to sit down to #7 yet.

Over the past year, I've read:

The Prestige - Christopher Priest
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
The Tempest - William Shakespeare
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of my Melancholy Whore - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling (also reread GoF, OoTP and HBP)
Once and Always by Judith McNaught
Unchained Melody by Norberto Mercado
Makamisa: the search for Rizal's third novel by Ambeth Ocampo
Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

currently reading - Man of the Century (The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II) by Jonathan Kwitny, and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Originally Posted by Jamesian

Well, is anyone really a Joyce fan? He's almost impossible to like as an author - one just sort of reads through it, trying to halfway understand, coming away just sort of marveling at the guy's intelligence... We read a few of the Dubliners stories, 'Portrait', several chapters of 'Ulysses', and "Anna Livia" from the Wake. I actually think it's all pretty cool, but Ulysses tires me a little. I was surprised to find that bit of the Wake actually understandable. I certainly couldn't get all of it, but the meaning was more or less..."clear" isn't quite the word...let us say "sorta gettable". Interestingly, in one of the Gardner books, when he's talking about "mannered" writing (i.e., when the author's voice is intruding on the fictional world, or "dream" as he calls it), he mentions Joyce's regret, late in life, that he hadn't stuck with the earlier style from 'Portrait' and 'Dubliners'... Yeah, altogether I think he's alright. You?

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Joyce's regret, as you said or as Gardner said, is interesting. I haven't read any of Joyce, but he regret that he moved away from mannered writing or that he applied it? I want to be familiar with old and middle english, before I read Joyce.

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Originally Posted by Mark F.

If you like Bukowski you should like it, I pick it up you're a Hemingway fan and their writing style seems very close, at least to me. I'd only read Post Office and Factotum before this, and Women contained more humour than those other two. It's a nice, easy read, with a lot of tenderness for the characters.

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Thanks. I'll put Women on my book list.

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Originally Posted by Mark F.

My only problem with Bukowski is that he tends to retell a lot of episodes of his life in different novels, short stories and poems, so if you start binge reading his work, it gets slightly repetetive.

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Like Woody Allen.

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Originally Posted by NickAdams

Joyce's regret, as you said or as Gardner said, is interesting. I haven't read any of Joyce, but he regret that he moved away from mannered writing or that he applied it? I want to be familiar with old and middle english, before I read Joyce.

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According to Gardner - and I think I sort of agree with him - the "mannered" stuff comes later. Definitely in Finnegans Wake, and in Ulysses as well. You don't really need to know much about Old and Middle English to read Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist. And of course, if you're reading the other works...it won't help you anyway.
No one reads the Wake comfortably without being familiar with English, Russian, French, Swahili, Norwegian, German, probably Icelandic, and about fifty other languages - not an exaggeration.

No one reads the Wake comfortably without being familiar with English, Russian, French, Swahili, Norwegian, German, probably Icelandic, and about fifty other languages - not an exaggeration.



Yet another book I'll have to fight my way through.

Books I've read this year so far, minus the odd few which may have slipped my mind...

Lolita
Crime & Punishment
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Notes From the Underground
The Bell Jar
Steppenwolf
The Red and the Black
Wuthering Heights
A Wild Sheep Chase
Three Men in a Boat
Northanger Abbey
Animal Farm
The Double
A Brief History of Time
Letters to Lily
Perfume
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Lovely Bones
The Selfish Gene
1984
Me Talk Pretty One Day
On the Road
The Hobbit
Fight Club
And I'm reading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' at the moment, along with Vladimir Nabokov's 'Glory'.

Too many books, so little time!

I've read more but I don't have enough time to type! :blush:

Harry Potter 7
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The Golden Compass
Dickens: I hate pip!
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell- Susanna Clarke
John Irving: The Cider House
Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
Interview With a Vampire - Anne Rice
The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice
Queen of the Damned - Anne Rice
The Tale of the Body Thief - Anne Rice
The Devil Memnoch - Anne Rice
Angels and Demons - Brown
Twilight - Meyers
New Moon-Meyers
Eclipse - Meyers
Romeo and Juliet
Tithe-Holly Brown
Eldest-Christopher Paolini
Howls Moving castle- Wynne Jones
Sabriel-Garth Nix
Artemis Fowl-
A.F. And the Arctic Incident-
A.F and the Eternity Code- Eoin Colfer
A.F. And the Opal Deception-
A.F. and the lost Colony-

H.P. and the Philosophers stone-
H.P. and the chamber of Secrets-
H.P. and the prisoner of azkaban-
H.P. and the goblet of fire- J.K.Rowling
H.P. and the order of the phoenix-
H.P. and the half Blood Prince-

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Originally Posted by bibliophile190

Yet another book I'll have to fight my way through.

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Don't fight it! You'll hate it if you do. You have to sort of let go while you read it and let the meaning present itself (or sort of roughly sketch itself, anyway). I found it helpful, given a particular stretch of text, simply to go through it once without stopping and see how it works out, then - if you must - go back and look over the passages you're (more than reasonably) uncertain about. It doesn't help that much to review like that, though, from what I can see. It only intensifies that feeling that some critic or writer (maybe Beckett) described of diving into a stream only to find yourself a moment later completely dry back on the ground where you started...