what is on your 2008 reading list?

[Mark F.]

Sitting on my shelf right now :

Complete tragedies by Sophocles
The Castle by Kafka
First Love & Home of the Gentry by Turgenev
1000 page collection of Chekhov short stories
Dead Souls by Gogol
Green Hills of Africa by Hemingway
Hunger by Knut Hamsun

When I get through those, I want to read :

Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Uncle Vania and Three Sisters by Chekhov

And right now I'm reading The Plague by Camus.

[snufflesrules]

Well, I thought I had a definite book list for this year, but reading this thread gave me so many more ideas...
Anyway definitely on my list are some English classics like
Thomas Hardy: The return of the native, the Major of Casterbridge
Dickens: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield
And the being German I think I should finally read some German authors,too. Any advise would be welcome.

currently reading: Siegfried Sassoon (The George Sherston Memoires)

[Mark F.]

Herman Hesse. I've only read Siddhartha but it's a great book and judging by your list it's one you'd probably like.

[Takeahnase]

This is a little late but I just wanted to tell you that this is an amazing list!!

Thank you! I only wish I had enough time to get through them all. So far I'm halfway through Love in the Time of Cholera and I've picked up The Plague as my next read, but I just don't have enough time to get through the bulk of the rest. I'll probably save The Brother's Karamazov until the summer holidays, tempting as it is to start it now! That's one I definately want to read this year.

[Kafka's Crow]

For me this is the year of reading Proust. I am reading Within the Budding Grove. On the other hand, I am listening to the audio version of Swann's Way (this one: http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/PAGES/25312.htm)
in order to make sure that I don't forget what I have already read.

Books on my shelf waiting to be read:

Proust by Edmund White (biographical)
The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose
En Attendant Godot - Waiting for Godot (bilingual text) by Samuel Beckett
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Wolfe Solent by John Cowper Powys
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

[Gibran]

Herman Hesse. I've only read Siddhartha but it's a great book and judging by your list it's one you'd probably like.

Hesse is indeed a nice novelist and I've just read his UNTERM RAD and Narciß und Goldmund. Very enjoyable works.

Books waiting for me:

Always Astonished by Fernando Pessoa
Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke
Dramas by Maurice Maeterlinck
RETOUCHES À MON "RETOUR DE L'USSR" by Andre Gide

[Erichtho]

I've stopped making any lists, because most likely I will end reading something entirely different anyway. I guess I prefer my reading repertoire to be coincidental.

And the being German I think I should finally read some German authors,too. Any advise would be welcome.

I second Hesse, my favourite works by him are Narciß und Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. I also like many of his shorter stories.
Other German authors I highly appreciate are Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist and Arthur Schnitzler.
I could recommend you more suitable stuff if I knew your reading preferences. What periods and genres do you like?

[Mark F.]

It depends on how specific you were about German authors but Schnitzler (Austrian) and especially Kafka (Czech) are great authors.

I've only read the Dream Story by Schnitzler, what else would you recommend?

[Erichtho]

It depends on how specific you were about German authors but Schnitzler (Austrian) and especially Kafka (Czech) are great authors.

If someone asks for German literature I'm thinking of people who wrote in German, not of the countries they lived in - otherwise there would hardly be any "German" literature, thinking of how shortly a state like that has existed.
Kafka was most of his life an Austrian citizen, only after WW1 he became a Czech citizen for five or six years. He was fluent in Czech but still his native and "dominant" language has always been German. Schnitzler couldn't speak, as far as I know, any other langauge to an extent that would have enabled him to write literature in it. If you were consequent, you would have to call Kleist Prussian and not German.

I've only read the Dream Story by Schnitzler, what else would you recommend?

Fräulein Else, Leutnant Gustl and his other stories in general (he also was of course a great dramatist, but I happen to think that dramas are best to be seen on stage and not to be read).

[snufflesrules]

Herman Hesse. I've only read Siddhartha but it's a great book and judging by your list it's one you'd probably like.

Thanks for the advise. I'll give Hesse a try.

I second Hesse, my favourite works by him are Narciß und Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. I also like many of his shorter stories.
Other German authors I highly appreciate are Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist and Arthur Schnitzler.
I could recommend you more suitable stuff if I knew your reading preferences. What periods and genres do you like?[/QUOTE]


Thanks for the advise. As for reading preferences, I have no idea. I like English classics, like Dickens and Jane Austen, but I really enjoy Doyle and Poe,too and then i enjoy reading Tolkien and other fantasy books. So, I guess, no real preferences.

The only German authors I read so far have been Theodor Storm and Theodor Fontane.

[superunknown]

Lots of stuff. I intend to read all the unifinished books currently on my bookshelf, plus a few others that I've yet to purchase. So far that means:

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita (currently reading, about a third of the way through)
Virginia Woolf - Selected Works
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (read it once like 5 years ago, don't remember it too well, Point Counterpoint, Eyeless in Gaza, The Doors of Perception
Franz Kafka - The Complete Novels
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday - Mao: The Unknown Story
R.L. Stevenson - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories
F Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night
W Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf, Siddartha
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
James Joyce - Ulysses (got a few chapters into it last year, but then got too busy and had no time for it)
Charles Bukowski - Ham on Rye
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
John Fante - Ask the Dust
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Ojos de perro azul, Memoria de mis putas tristes
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
Julio Cortazar - Rayuela, Ceremonias
Carlos Fuentes - La muerte de Artemio Cruz
Jean-Paul Sartre - La nausee, Le mur
Simone de Beauvoir - Les belles images#
Boris Vian - J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, Et on tuera tous les affreux
Alain-Fournier - Le grand meaulnes
Honore de Balzac - Le pere Goriot

Not sure I'll be able to get through all that in a year. Probably not actually

[superunknown]

The Master and Margarita- Bulgakov
Crime and Punishment- Dostoyevski
The Brothers Karamazov- Dostoyevski
Anna Karenina- Tolstoy
War and Peace- Tolstoy
Lolita- Nabokov

It's the year of the Russian authors for me...can you tell?

I love Russian literature. I've read every one of those except Anna Karenina (well, I'm about a third of the way through The Master and Margarita).

I read War and Peace over the summer, seems quite daunting but it's well worth the effort.

[Quinn_]

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[kandaurov]

Oh, The Plague, eh? I'm really looking forward to reading it! I'm having a hard time finding it though. Other than that, I'm thinking of reading some Virginia Woolf (for the first time!), Shakespeare, maybe Eco, and, if I'm brave enough, Faulkner or one of them russian heavy-weight champions like 'The Brothers Karamazov' or 'Anne Katherina'.

[superunknown]

Oh, The Plague, eh? I'm really looking forward to reading it! I'm having a hard time finding it though. Other than that, I'm thinking of reading some Virginia Woolf (for the first time!), Shakespeare, maybe Eco, and, if I'm brave enough, Faulkner or one of them russian heavy-weight champions like 'The Brothers Karamazov' or 'Anne Katherina'.

Hehe, I think you're referring to Anna Karenina?

If you only read one Russian lit book go with The Brothers Karamazov, it's an absolutely amazing book and, depending on the edition something like 700-800 pages so not quite such a mammoth read as War and Peace.