It's been
over 3 years since I posted on this blog soooo… I’m, admittedly, a bit overdue.
My hobbies tend to wax and wane at 2-3 year intervals, often peaking with
unsustainable all-consuming binges. One such movie spree took place between
when I posted round 2 and today. I got a bit sidetracked from reading.
This pattern
dates back to my childhood. The first time I really fell head-over-heels into
reading was after discovering my father’s 1000+ collection of sci-fi and
fantasy in a bunch of cardboard boxes lined with spider eggs and left in the
basement, unpacked, from a previous move. Already a compulsive data
cruncher [nerd], I volunteered to air out, alphabetize and shelve this pulpy bounty for the pure fun of it. I asked my dad, almost incidentally, where to start if
I were going to read any of it. He gave me Dune. I was several years too young; my
mother would have made a different judgment call. While always encouraging me to read, and buying me books with what then seemed reckless abandon, she didn’t greatly approve of
my spending hours below earth thumbing through dusty $0.79 paperbacks whose
psychedelic covers featured a preponderance of mushroom clouds, half-naked
alien princesses and gratuitously explicit artist’s renditions of melting
and/or exploding faces. But I was hooked. Reading science-fiction, often when I
should have been paying attention in class, took me well into high school.
There, around the time of my freshman year, I discovered film and the next
decade of my life more or less disappeared into the rival medium.
That took me up to May 2009. My previous
two “rounds” of reading took place between then and Jan 2011, sandwiched
between multi-year bouts of excessive movie watching. My latest cinephelia
bender culminated in the Film Atlas Project, where I reviewed a favorite film
from each of 120+ countries. A few months later, for whatever reason, the
switch flipped back. I’ve returned to books.
Round 3,
like the previous two, spans 100 novels. These were read between Jan 2011 and May
2014. When I posted last I was living in Wyoming and working on a novel. Little
from that period of my life panned out, and, with many lessons learned, I’ve
since moved back to St. Louis and returned to the software industry. During this
time I also participated in two bookclubs, now both defunct: a quasi-family
affair consisting of my brother, father and a friend (Josh) and an eclectic St.
Louis-based group focused on women authors. I also started using Goodreads,
which has made the personal bookkeeping aspect of this post less pressing, but
I enjoy the exercise/indulgence of writing it up just the same.
Each round I
set a few goals for pushing outward my horizons. For round 3 I wanted to get
more into Eastern European literature (in part because of my family background)
and to sample some writing from the Middle East and Australia (which will
continue into round 4). Another focus was to not limit myself by what is easily
available on Amazon.com and, towards that end, I tracked down half a dozen
out-of-print books that I was interested in. Thank god for libraries!
And now for
the inevitable statistical breakdown:
US: 28
UK: 17
France: 7
Russia: 5
Czech
Republic: 4
Hungary,
Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain: 3
Australia,
Austria, Germany, India, Japan: 2
Albania,
Argentina, Canada, Chile, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Norway,
Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Trinidad: 1
This was my
first time reading books from Hungary, India, Albania, Egypt, Georgia, Iran,
Israel, Mexico, Palestine and Trinidad. About half the books I read were
translations (I still only read English). The best revelation was Hungary; all
three books landing in my top 100. On the other hand, the three books I read
from Poland left me disappointingly cold. I read somewhat fewer books from the
“big name” novel countries like the US, UK, France, Germany and
Russia.
I’ve seen
movie adaptations of 25 of the books from this batch. Of these films I’d peg
only 3 as notably superior to their source material: The Home and the World,
The Magnificent Ambersons, and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. I would,
however, also highly recommend the movie adaptations of Heart of Darkness (Apocalypse
Now), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, All the King’s Men, A Ghost at Noon
(Contempt), Men in the Sun, The Melancholy of Resistance (Werckmeister
Harmonies) and Under the Skin as well as the anime adaptation of The Count of
Monte Cristo (Gankutsuou).
Special
distinctions from this batch:
Overall favorite: The Death of Artemio Cruz
Best SF:
Infinite Jest, Under the Skin
Best crime
fiction: The Quiet American
Best
graphic novel: Fun Home
Best
romance: Oscar and Lucinda, Gone with the Wind
Best
obscurities: Past Continuous, The Notebook The Proof and the Third Lie, The
Ice Palace
Best
premise: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – A serial-killer in 18th
century France uses his heightened olfactory sense to hunt specially-chosen victims to use as ingredients for the
ultimate perfume.
Most
wasted premise: Exercises in Style - The same short story told [poorly] in
dozens of [lackluster] styles.
Best
story: The Magus, A Heart So White, The Forsyte Saga
Best
prose: Wolf Hall
Best structure: Hopscotch
Best structure: Hopscotch
Most Difficult:
The Flanders Road
Longest:
War and Peace, Infinite Jest
Funniest:
War with the Newts, At Swim-Two-Birds
Angriest:
Embers, Contempt
Most fun:
Wise Children, The Big Over Easy
Most
depressing: The Man Who Loved Children, The Floating Opera
Most energetic:
Insatiability
Most
emotional: Angle of Repose, So Long See You Tomorrow
Most
ambiguous: The Book of Disquiet
Best
bookclub discussion of a book I liked: The Talented Mr. Ripley
Best
bookclub discussion of a book I disliked: Divergent
Best
title: The Melancholy of Resistance
Key:
** Excellent
* Very Good
[blank] Fair
to Good
^ Bad
The List:
1207: The
Knight in the Panther's Skin by Shota Rustaveli (Georgia) ^
1820:
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (UK) *
1833: Eugene
Onegin by Aleksander Pushkin (Russia) *
1838:
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The by Edgar Allan Poe (USA)
1842: Dead
Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Russia)
1846: The
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (France) **
1846: Cousin
Bette by Honore de Balzac (France) *
1853:
Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens (UK) **
1857:
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (UK) *
1869: War
and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Russia) **
1885:
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant (France)
1895: Quo
Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Poland) ^
1902: Heart
of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (UK) **
1913: The
Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Henri Alain-Fournier (France) *
1916: The
Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore (India) ^
1918: The
Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (USA)
1921: The
Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (UK) **
1925: An
American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (USA) *
1927: Envy
by Yuri Olesha (Russia) ^
1927:
Insatiability by Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Poland) ^
1927: The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B Traven (Germany/Mexico) **
1930: The
42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos (USA) *
1932: 1919
by John Dos Passos (USA) *
1934: Tropic
of Cancer by Henry Miller (USA)
1934: A Week
of Kindness by Max Ernst (France)
1934: I,
Claudius by Robert Graves (UK) **
1935: Mr.
Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood (UK) *
1935: The
Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) *
1935:
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders by Vitezslav Nezval (Czech) *
1936: The
Big Money by John Dos Passos (USA) *
1936: War
with the Newts by Karel Capek (Czech) **
1936: Gone
with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (USA) **
1937:
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (Poland)
1937: The
Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (Iran) *
1938: The
Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (Ireland) *
1939:
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (UK) *
1939: At
Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (Ireland) *
1940: The
Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (Italy) *
1940: The
Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Australia) **
1942: Chess
Story by Stefan Zweig (Austria) *
1942: Embers
by Sandor Marai (Hungary) **
1946: All
the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (USA) **
1947:
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau (France) ^
1948: The
Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (UK) **
1949: The
Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (USA)
1954:
Contempt / A Ghost at Noon by Alberto Moravia (Italy) **
1955: The
Quiet American by Graham Greene (UK) **
1955: The
Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (USA) *
1956: The
Floating Opera by John Barth (USA) *
1959: The
Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (USA)
1960: The
Flanders Road by Claude Simon (France)
1961: A
House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
1962: The
Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) **
1962: The
Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (Italy) *
1962: The
Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (UK) **
1963:
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (Argentina) **
1963: The
Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (Norway) **
1963: V. by
Thomas Pynchon (USA)
1963: Men in
the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine) *
1963: The
Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (USA) *
1965: The
Magus by John Fowles (UK) **
1966:
Silence by Shusaku Endo (Japan)
1966: Spring
Snow by Yukio Mishima (Japan) *
1967:
Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
1970: Play
It As It Lays by Joan Didion (USA) **
1971: Angle
of Repose by Wallace Stegner (USA) **
1971: Lives
of Girls and Women by Alice Munro (Canada) **
1971: The
Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin (USA)
1971: I
Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal (Czech) *
1975:
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (USA)
1975:
Correction by Thomas Bernhard (Austria)
1977: Song
of Solomon by Toni Morrison (USA) **
1977: Past
Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai (Israel) **
1977: Delta
of Venus by Anais Nin (USA)
1978: Broken
April by Ismail Kadare (Albania)
1979: The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Czech)
1980: So
Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (USA) **
1981: July's
People by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) *
1983: The
Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (USA)
1984: Love
Medicine by Louise Erdrich (USA) *
1985:
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (Germany) *
1988: Oscar
and Lucinda by Peter Carey (Australia) **
1989: The
Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungary) **
1990: The
Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Spain)
1991: The
Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie by Agota Kristof (Hungary) **
1991: Wise
Children by Angela Carter (UK) **
1992: A
Heart So White by Javier Marias (Spain) **
1993: The
Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin (Russia)
1996:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (USA) **
1997: The
God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India) *
1998: The
Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano (Chile) *
2000:
Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas (Spain) ^
2000: Under
the Skin by Michel Faber (UK) **
2005: The
Sea by John Banville (Ireland) *
2005: The
Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde (UK) *
2006: Fun
Home by Alison Bechdel (USA) **
2009: Wolf
Hall by Hilary Mantel (UK) **
2011:
Divergent by Veronica Roth (USA) ^
2011: The
Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (UK) *
2012:
Marbles by Ellen Forney (USA)
