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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 7, 2022 4:57:46 GMT
a week into 2022 and no thread. dropping the ball Mattsby  2021 was a great book year for me! Lots of great fiction and non-fiction and not too many duds. Set a goal to read 35 books and only got to 33, buuut I set that goal before I had a job so I'm not worried about it. Hell I could've got to 45 easily if my broke ass was still unemployed. so what were everyone's favorite reads in 2021? Did you read as much as you were hoping to? |
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 7, 2022 5:41:18 GMT
01. Diary of Andres Fava (1950, Julio Cortázar)
02. Chess Story (1943, Stefan Zweig)
03. The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947, Fredric Brown)
04. The Tremor of Forgery (1969, Patricia Highsmith)
05. The Hanging Tree (1957, Dorothy Johnson)
I liked these but I gotta say, I didn't read anything that I really loved... 2020 I read at least five masterpieces and several more great books. This year was twisted up, didn't get around to as much as I wanted !!
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Post by DeepArcher on Jan 7, 2022 5:52:51 GMT
Not a spectacular year for me ... hoping to have a much better 2022 in this regard ... these were the standouts:
Hamnet (Maggie O'Farrell)
Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky)
Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)
Ghostwritten (David Mitchell)
The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)
Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood)
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Post by Viced on Jan 7, 2022 6:23:00 GMT
almost exclusively read fiction that went down smoothly...
1. A Simple Plan (Scott Smith)
2. Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin)
3. Red Dragon (Thomas Harris)
4. Tapping the Source (Kem Nunn)
5. The Boys from Brazil (Ira Levin)
6. What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg)
7. The Ruins (Scott Smith)
8. The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin)
9. The Executioners [Cape Fear] (John D. MacDonald)
10. Ripley Under Ground (Patricia Highsmith)
non-fiction shout-outs
A Third Face (Samuel Fuller)
My Dark Places (James Ellroy)
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 7, 2022 9:54:34 GMT
For me it was a great year as well. I read a few books last year I really loved. Hope I remember all of them, since at some point I stopped listing them.
1. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
2. The Sound of Things Falling (Juan Gabriel Vasquez)
3. The History of the Siege of Lisabon (Jose Saramago)
4. Silas Marner (George Eliot)
5. Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro)
6. The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
7. Red Square (Martin Cruz Smith)
8. La Patience de Maigret (Georges Simenon)
9. Istanbul Istanbul (Burhan Sonmez)
10. Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
HM: An Evening with Claire (Gaito Gazdanov), Los Informantos (Juan Gabriel Vasquez)
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Drish
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Post by Drish on Jan 7, 2022 12:01:20 GMT
01. A Thousand Splendid Suns (This book has become so close to my heart)
02. Educated
03. Crime and Punishment
04. The Shining
05. Stoner
06. The Palace of Illusions
07. LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring
08. The Spy and the Traitor
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 7, 2022 16:44:08 GMT
~five stars~  01. East of Eden - Steinbeck 02. Educated - Tara Westover 03. A Promised Land - Barack Obama 04. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 05. Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Pérez 06. The Radium Girls - Kate Moore 07. Why We're Polarized - Ezra Klein ~four stars~  08. Outlander - Diana Gabaldon 09. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing 10. The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix 11. Misery - Stephen King 12. Notes on a Silencing - Lacy Crawford other standouts: Brideshead Revisited, The Grapes of Wrath, Intimations (essays by Zadie Smith), The Soul of a Woman (Isabel Allende's memoir), The Devil All the Time, Valley of the Dolls.a few disappointments but the only book I read in 2021 I'd call bad was Mexican Gothic.  Stephen King's Full Dark No Stars was my favorite re-read. An even better collection than I remembered |
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 7, 2022 17:01:07 GMT
I liked these but I gotta say, I didn't read anything that I really loved... 2020 I read at least five masterpieces and several more great books. This year was twisted up, didn't get around to as much as I wanted !! there's always 2022! Got plans to read anything specific this year? |
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 7, 2022 17:48:48 GMT
I liked these but I gotta say, I didn't read anything that I really loved... 2020 I read at least five masterpieces and several more great books. This year was twisted up, didn't get around to as much as I wanted !! there's always 2022! Got plans to read anything specific this year? My list always exceeds my eyes! For new releases: Mel Brooks All About Me ; Cortázar Mugwig ; Mamet's Recessional ; and a huge one I'm not sure when it's being released: Walter Murch's Suddenly Something Clicked. Older stuff-- Shirley Jackson's The Sundial ; Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man ; Celine's Journey to the End of the Night I've been meaning to read forever. Big ones like Moby Dick I've never read all the way thru. also craving more Donald Westlake after all those mentions in Soderbergh's year-end review. How about you?? |
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 7, 2022 18:39:49 GMT
yup been eyeing that Mel Brooks too And the Hayley Mills autobiography to boot My booklist is always going to be long too. Have enough in there to last years and more gets added every week. No concrete plans except I definitely want to finish book 2 of the Outlander series (my guilty pleasure) and at least one of the big Stephen King books that I missed--Shining, Salem's Lot (esp. before the movie comes out)-- and I have to get on The Dark Tower Book 3 because it's been 2020 since I read any of that, and maybe I can finally finish The Great Influenza which I started and never finished last year, and I'd really like to get to Where the Crawdads Sing before that movie comes out in the summer. Annnd maybe this is the year I finally read some McCarthy, ya never know! I'm probably not even going to attempt Moby Dick lol. I read an abridged version as a kid and that was more than enough Melville for me  |
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Post by notacrook on Jan 8, 2022 15:00:36 GMT
Was a pretty good of reading for me (another summer of isolation will do that to you). Didn't get to some of the big ones I'd planned to tackle, but I've managed to get a good bunch together.
Favourites in a rough order:
Rebecca, Daphe du Maurier
This is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay
Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx
Sleep Has His House, Anna Kavan
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Misery, Stephen King
Big Little Lies, Lianne Moriarty
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Howards End, E.M. Forster
Hoping for another strong year in 2022. Got off to a bang with Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, which is proving impossible to shake off.
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Post by Martin Stett on Jan 26, 2022 22:18:21 GMT
I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That was.... uh, it was good, but yikes is it a slog. A good slog. I mean, it's a three-volume nonfiction book about decades of fucking massacre. If it wasn't a slog that would be a problem. It is always interesting, sometimes very funny, sometimes exciting, mostly sad and difficult. I also read book 3 of Stand Still Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a comic book series about a group of incompetent adventurers traveling a post-apocalyptic world on a hunt for treasure they can sell on the black market scientific survey into places that nobody has been to for decades. Book 3 is generally more solemn and darker than the previous two books, but the humor is still on point ("I believe that's what you spiritual folks would call 'praying'"  ) and Sundberg's careful control of body language and panel layout grants a power to the hardest hitting moments of the series. |
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 27, 2022 9:20:51 GMT
I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That was.... uh, it was good, but yikes is it a slog. A good slog. I mean, it's a three-volume nonfiction book about decades of fucking massacre. If it wasn't a slog that would be a problem. It is always interesting, sometimes very funny, sometimes exciting, mostly sad and difficult. I also read book 3 of Stand Still Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a comic book series about a group of incompetent adventurers traveling a post-apocalyptic world on a hunt for treasure they can sell on the black market scientific survey into places that nobody has been to for decades. Book 3 is generally more solemn and darker than the previous two books, but the humor is still on point ("I believe that's what you spiritual folks would call 'praying'" ) and Sundberg's careful control of body language and panel layout grants a power to the hardest hitting moments of the series. Kudos to you for reading the whole thing. I only made it through book one of Gulag. As you say it's interesting, but contrary to other great novels of Solzhenitsyn it's more or less just a report of what happened, but without big literary quality and therefore it's enormous hard to read. |
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Post by Martin Stett on Jan 27, 2022 11:11:33 GMT
I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That was.... uh, it was good, but yikes is it a slog. A good slog. I mean, it's a three-volume nonfiction book about decades of fucking massacre. If it wasn't a slog that would be a problem. It is always interesting, sometimes very funny, sometimes exciting, mostly sad and difficult. I also read book 3 of Stand Still Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a comic book series about a group of incompetent adventurers traveling a post-apocalyptic world on a hunt for treasure they can sell on the black market scientific survey into places that nobody has been to for decades. Book 3 is generally more solemn and darker than the previous two books, but the humor is still on point ("I believe that's what you spiritual folks would call 'praying'" ) and Sundberg's careful control of body language and panel layout grants a power to the hardest hitting moments of the series. Kudos to you for reading the whole thing. I only made it through book one of Gulag. As you say it's interesting, but contrary to other great novels of Solzhenitsyn it's more or less just a report of what happened, but without big literary quality and therefore it's enormous hard to read. Book 1 is tough because it relies on a grasp of Russian history that I do not have. But I enjoyed Solzhenitsyn's style, which was surprisingly fun. There's an ironic humor to the way he tells the story of the death camps, it isn't just straight reporting of horror. In a way, it makes everything he reports on even more sickening. Book 2 is definitely the weakest volume, as it repeats itself a lot. He is so intent on making the book as comprehensive as possible that he winds up reporting story after story of similar happenings (all equally horrifying) and it is dispiriting - I understand that he wanted to include as many stories as he could out of respect for the victims, but dang does it wear on the reader. Which is sort of the point, I guess: Nothing the reader goes through can compare to the real thing. Book 3 is the "ray of sunshine" as he tells stories of escapes, rebellions, assassinations, times that the authorities buckled to the prisoners. There is some super cinematic stuff in there, from escapes successful and not - a few chapters aren't even written by Solzhenitsyn, as he steps aside to let a guy give his memoirs of an escape attempt that puts any prison escape movie to shame - to a full on riot that actually took control of a prison for weeks. Solzhenitsyn exposes chinks in Stalin's armor, showing the mistakes of his overreach (once Stalin began sticking 25 year terms on people, they stopped giving a shit about keeping their heads down and surviving to get out) and showing how hope and humanity could spring up in even the worst of places that actively turn people against each other (such as the woman who stayed behind on a work trip to help a friend back to the camp in a gesture that could and should have seen them both freeze to death). It is the writer illustrating that even though every survivor became an animal at some point in order to live, they could still grasp pieces of their humanity and learn to become better if they stopped looking after themselves and began caring about other people. It is still hard and scary and horrifying, but it shows how normal people can wear away at evil if we choose to fight it with goodness. And perhaps, some day down the line, the stones of evil will crumble because of these actions. |
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 27, 2022 11:18:09 GMT
Kudos to you for reading the whole thing. I only made it through book one of Gulag. As you say it's interesting, but contrary to other great novels of Solzhenitsyn it's more or less just a report of what happened, but without big literary quality and therefore it's enormous hard to read. Book 1 is tough because it relies on a grasp of Russian history that I do not have. But I enjoyed Solzhenitsyn's style, which was surprisingly fun. There's an ironic humor to the way he tells the story of the death camps, it isn't just straight reporting of horror. In a way, it makes everything he reports on even more sickening. Book 2 is definitely the weakest volume, as it repeats itself a lot. He is so intent on making the book as comprehensive as possible that he winds up reporting story after story of similar happenings (all equally horrifying) and it is dispiriting - I understand that he wanted to include as many stories as he could out of respect for the victims, but dang does it wear on the reader. Which is sort of the point, I guess: Nothing the reader goes through can compare to the real thing. Book 3 is the "ray of sunshine" as he tells stories of escapes, rebellions, assassinations, times that the authorities buckled to the prisoners. There is some super cinematic stuff in there, from escapes successful and not - a few chapters aren't even written by Solzhenitsyn, as he steps aside to let a guy give his memoirs of an escape attempt that puts any prison escape movie to shame - to a full on riot that actually took control of a prison for weeks. Solzhenitsyn exposes chinks in Stalin's armor, showing the mistakes of his overreach (once Stalin began sticking 25 year terms on people, they stopped giving a shit about keeping their heads down and surviving to get out) and showing how hope and humanity could spring up in even the worst of places that actively turn people against each other (such as the woman who stayed behind on a work trip to help a friend back to the camp in a gesture that could and should have seen them both freeze to death). It is the writer illustrating that even though every survivor became an animal at some point in order to live, they could still grasp pieces of their humanity and learn to become better if they stopped looking after themselves and began caring about other people. It is still hard and scary and horrifying, but it shows how normal people can wear away at evil if we choose to fight it with goodness. And perhaps, some day down the line, the stones of evil will crumble because of these actions. Oh yeah, Solzhenitsyn has definitely a sense of humour. I think without this he would hardly have survived his incarcaretion in the Gulags and wrote books about it the way he did.
I don't know if you have already read it, but I recommend everybody to read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which is among my top 10 books of all time probably. A rather short book about one day in one of those prison camps with an incredible sense of humor and irony. Heartbreaking and funny at the same time.
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Post by Martin Stett on Jan 28, 2022 16:42:26 GMT
I forgot that Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro) was a 2021 publication, since I read it the moment I could get my hands on a copy after finishing Gulag. I kept thinking that I read it last year.
Yeah, that was great. Ishiguro's simplest (it was conceived as a children's book before his daughter told him that he'd traumatize the kids) and most accessible work, but with a lot going on underneath that surface. Ishiguro's run from Never Let Me Go into this is the best streak I've ever seen a novelist pull off. (He even wrote some banger songs in the meantime!) He's become quite the romantic, and I love him for it. NLMG, Nocturnes, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun - they're all concerned with love, and how interpersonal connections are what make our lives meaningful. More than any of his others, Klara is openly about love and what it means to give yourself to somebody. It's heartwrenching stuff, and it's important stuff.
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Post by wilcinema on Mar 1, 2022 14:46:42 GMT
1. La Città dei Vivi (The City of The Living) - Nicola Lagioia.
I hope it will be translated and sold outside of Italy too. It's the Italian "In Cold Blood".
2. Secondhand Time: Last of the Soviets - Svetlana Aleksievich.
An absolutely necessary book right now. I learned much more about present-day Russia through this book than through docs and reporting.
3. The Power of The Dog - Thomas Savage
Masterpiece.
4. Sono stato un numero (I've been a number) - Alberto Sed.
A book by an Auschwitz survivor. Devastating.
5. The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh.
An excellent story about two cultures meeting and struggling to come together.
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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 1, 2022 14:53:02 GMT
3. The Power of The Dog - Thomas Savage Masterpiece. One of my favorite things about the lasy year - and let's face it I'm a cranky and humorless old fossil - is that 2021 saw adaptations of 2 of my all-time favorite books - that I read long before I knew they were being done as new films - TPoTD and Nightmare Alley - and I enjoyed both 2021 versions a lot.  |
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) and Sundberg's careful control of body language and panel layout grants a power to the hardest hitting moments of the series.
