Didn't manage much, too many films and too much drinking. Oh well...
A History of Books - B. Blasselle
Batman : The Killing Joke - Alan Moore & Brian Bolland
The Erasers - Alain Robbe-Grillet
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman
Didn't manage much, too many films and too much drinking. Oh well...
A History of Books - B. Blasselle
Batman : The Killing Joke - Alan Moore & Brian Bolland
The Erasers - Alain Robbe-Grillet
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman
"And the worms, they will climb
The rugged ladder of your spine"
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne-5/5
Othello by Shakespeare-5/5
Candide by Voltaire- 3/5 (reread)
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare-3/5
Gulliver's Travels by Swift -3/5
'The Battle of the Books' by Swift-5/5
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe-5/5
and I got a hundred and twnety pages, more or less in The Years by Woolf and Bleak House by Dickens (the latter of which is hilarious, fantastic).
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
-W.Blake
In the past month I fell for Murakami.
After Dark, Murakami, 4.5/5
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 5/5
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde, 4/5
Things Fall Apart, Achebe, 3.5/5
Treasure Island, Stevenson, 2.5/5
Norwegian Wood, Murakami, 5/5
Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami, 4.5/5
Thousand Cranes, Kawabata, 3/5
If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino, 5/5
The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, 4/5
Tom Sawyer, Twain, 4/5
Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand, 4/5
Franny and Zooey, Salinger, 3.5/5
The Stranger, Camus, 3.5/5
Our Town, Wilder, 4.5/5
Undead and Unwed – MaryJanice Davidson
The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
På grund av Leon – Jenny Leeb
De missanpassade – Belinda Olsson
Inkheart – Cornelia Funke
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (funny, but not as funny as Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse)
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (better than I had expected)
Ian McEwan: Saturday (preferred it to Atonement - he should set all his novels in the contemporary world)
Martin Amis: London Fields (v. v. good)
Bertrand Russell: Portraits From Memory (short chapters on various famous people he met, like H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, D H Lawrence)
In September I want to read: Evelyn Waugh's Scoop
Ian McEwan's The Child In Time
Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince
Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Anthony Burgess: Enderby novels
Shakespeare - Othello
Ovid - Metamorphoses
Orwell - Animal Farm (re-read - although it was about 15 years since I last read it!)
Fitzgerald - Gatsby (re-read)
Conrad - Heart of Darkness (re-read)
Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Gissing - The Nether World
Maupassant - Bel-Ami
Dante - The Inferno
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
The sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
I am always amazed how much people read in a month.
I cheated 'cause I wanted to classify all of Shakespeare's comedies together to get an argument going... I started them in January... I have been reading other things in August. Apart from Shakespeare and Dickens, the most impressive was Tolstoy's Shorter Works which gets an overall 5/5 - "The Cossack" 6/5. Others:Originally Posted by Thespian1975
Crime & Punishment - Dostoevsky 3/5 for readability, 5/5 for depth
Moll Flanders by Defoe 4/5
The 100 Minute Bible 5/5 for readability - 2/5 for detail
Testament - an Abridged Bible - 2/5 for readability, 5/5 for detail
Montaigne 5/5 for philosophical essays, 3/5 for military essays.
Chaucer - Canterbury Takes - Ackroyd "translation" 5/5
Karen Armstrong - the Case for God 4/5
Harold Bloom - Novelists and Novels 5/5
Chekhov - various short stories 5/5 (6/5 for "Ward 6")
Kafka - short stories (5/5) (6/5 "Metamorphosis")
Blood meridian - Cormac McCarthy 5/5
Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby 6/5
Joyce - Dubliners 5/5
These are at various stages of completion. I've only given up on "Testament".
Nietzsche (going back to April!) read the superb "Modern Library" hardback Collection of basic Writings translated by Kaufman:
The Birth of Tragedy 4/5
Beyond Good and Evil 5/5
On the Genealogy of Morals 5/5
(I've read most of Nietzsche by now and in my opinion, and many others, these three weeks are his best overall. They are certainly his most readable!)
The volume tails off rather with:
The Case of Wagner 3/5
Ecce Homo 2/5 (very disappointing as his own summary of his work)
And in a separate edition:
Also Sprach Zarathustra 2/5 (sorry, but this is just nuts!)
On this (revised) scale Shakespeare should get 6/5 for "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
More than half way through Ellmann's biograophy of James Joyce. Will finish it within this week:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/James-Joyce-...1898596&sr=8-1
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
What was this book about? Any good?
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
https://consolationofreading.wordpress.com/ - my book blog!
Feed the Hungry!
I really like the essays I've read by Ellmann on Yeats and some Joyce. I'd be interesting in read such a biography. Enjoy your read!
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
-W.Blake
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick (4/5)
The Princesse de Cléves - Madame de Lafayette (3.5/5)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (5/5)
As You Like It - Shakespeare (4.5/5)
Daisy Miller - Henry James (4/5)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (4.5/5)
"...You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?..." E. A. Poe
The Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (re-read)
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman (unfinished)
101 Things We Didn't Know About Shakespeare
The Horse-dealer's Daughter - D.H Lawrence
Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro - Gregorio Brilliantes
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!
the whole boatload of sensitive!
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl II.
Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia - Roberto Saviano 4/5
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell 5/5
The Victorian Novel - Barbara Dennis 3/5
Divine Right's Trip 4/4
I may be biased because the setting is close to home. There is a fence building scene that rivals Levin in the wheat fields.
By Night in Chile 2/4
Disappointed that this was only a two. But I'm judging it against 2666 and Savage Detectives.
Third Policeman 2/4
Hilarious at times but ultimately 'meh'
Ripley Under Ground 1/4
No where close to the first Ripley novel.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
El adjetivo, cuando no da vida, mata- Huidobro
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