Let’s use this thread to talk about the books we read in 2020.
Favorites? Disappointments? Surprises! Let’s go!
What did you read in 2020?
Biggest disappointment is only hitting 30 in a year where I had planned to read at least 50 and had a lot of spare time on my hands.
The highlights:
Rachel Cusk's Transit and Kudos, especially the former
Javier Marias' The Infatuations
Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings
Annie Baker's The Flick
John Williams' Stoner
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
HMs: Andrew Martin's Early Work, Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Catherine Lacey's Certain American States, Tao Lin's Taipei, Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
Also read a few good running manuals but not gonna include those as they have little literary merit.
The highlights:
Rachel Cusk's Transit and Kudos, especially the former
Javier Marias' The Infatuations
Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings
Annie Baker's The Flick
John Williams' Stoner
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
HMs: Andrew Martin's Early Work, Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Catherine Lacey's Certain American States, Tao Lin's Taipei, Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
Also read a few good running manuals but not gonna include those as they have little literary merit.
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Monsieur Arkadin
- Posts: 422
- Joined: Mon May 27, 2019 5:56 pm
Jesus Christ... I don't know how you do it. It's possible I'm just an incredibly slow reader... but I can't get all my work done, read and watch movies regularly. This year I watched a lot more, so reading took a hit.Biggest disappointment is only hitting 30 in a year
I got to 13 this year.
Read Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk which was excellent. As was Duras Ravishing of Lol Stein.
The consistently reliable Pynchon's V and Balzac's Other Side of History also tickled my fancy.
Finally got Roth's Portnoy's Complaint which I liked, but didn't get bowled over the way so many of my friends do.
Did not particularly care for The Savage Detectives
vico says some pretty odd things in new science, but overall that was maybe my favorite read of the year. really liked sextus empiricus's outlines of pyrrhonism, while we're talking philosophy, but the other two of his works, that are more or less a follow-up to that, aren't quite as good (but still good). and i made it through the anatomy of melancholy. it was really good but also a slog. not sure if i've wrapped my head around it all yet in even abstract terms.
reread most of thomas hardy's novels this year, started last year with the first one, and just have one to go which i'll get to next month. pretty much loved all of them, with only jude the obscure being a bit worse than i remembered. i'll wait maybe 10 years and probably do this again, unless i get impatient and do it earlier.
finally read the sot-weed factor, which i'd been meaning to get to for a while, and liked it a lot.
the most recently published thing i read was the sellout, by paul beatty, and that was a lot of fun too. the one before that was house of leaves and that was not much fun.
worst book i read was incest, by christine angot. didn't know the term autofiction before, but i really don't like it. plus the thing had hardly any incest in it until the end. i was hoping for more.
reread most of thomas hardy's novels this year, started last year with the first one, and just have one to go which i'll get to next month. pretty much loved all of them, with only jude the obscure being a bit worse than i remembered. i'll wait maybe 10 years and probably do this again, unless i get impatient and do it earlier.
finally read the sot-weed factor, which i'd been meaning to get to for a while, and liked it a lot.
the most recently published thing i read was the sellout, by paul beatty, and that was a lot of fun too. the one before that was house of leaves and that was not much fun.
worst book i read was incest, by christine angot. didn't know the term autofiction before, but i really don't like it. plus the thing had hardly any incest in it until the end. i was hoping for more.
"Most esteemed biographer of Peter Barrington Hutton"
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Monsieur Arkadin
- Posts: 422
- Joined: Mon May 27, 2019 5:56 pm
Ah, I started this this year as well, but didn't get past the first 175 pages. It was a lot of fun, but I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to get through it.
Favorites novels this year:
Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald)
The Adventures of Maqroll (Álvaro Mutis)
Senselessness (Horacio Castellanos Moya)
Troubles (J.G. Farrell)
Passing (Nella Larsen)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis)
Best non-fiction:
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty)
Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
Edie: American Girl (Jean Stein)
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (C.L.R James)
Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (Studs Terkel)
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (J. Anthony Lukas)
Best graphic novels:
Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories ( Gilbert Hernández)
Locas (Jaime Hernández)
From Hell (Alan Moore)
Corto Maltese (Hugo Pratt)
Also read a bunch more from Elmore Leonard, all very enjoyable for the most part. And the plays of august Wilson. And Tales from H.P. Lovecraft.
Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald)
The Adventures of Maqroll (Álvaro Mutis)
Senselessness (Horacio Castellanos Moya)
Troubles (J.G. Farrell)
Passing (Nella Larsen)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis)
Best non-fiction:
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty)
Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
Edie: American Girl (Jean Stein)
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (C.L.R James)
Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (Studs Terkel)
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (J. Anthony Lukas)
Best graphic novels:
Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories ( Gilbert Hernández)
Locas (Jaime Hernández)
From Hell (Alan Moore)
Corto Maltese (Hugo Pratt)
Also read a bunch more from Elmore Leonard, all very enjoyable for the most part. And the plays of august Wilson. And Tales from H.P. Lovecraft.
Last edited by kanafani on Thu Dec 31, 2020 4:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
This year I read about 30% of Ulysses before I gave up. Not bad!
My biggest disappointment was Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Just found it so tedious. Granted, I know nothing about the inner workings of music, so that does not help. But the thing felt so... lifeless. Disappointing because The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks are all-time favorites.
I could not finish What Maisie Knew. Yawnerz.
My biggest disappointment was Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Just found it so tedious. Granted, I know nothing about the inner workings of music, so that does not help. But the thing felt so... lifeless. Disappointing because The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks are all-time favorites.
I could not finish What Maisie Knew. Yawnerz.
The Night Watch, Patrick Modiano
Shantytown, César Aira
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira
Agustino, Alberto Moravia
In the Café of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano
Shantytown, César Aira
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira
Agustino, Alberto Moravia
In the Café of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano
Aw man The Savage Detectives is one of my all time favourites! Yeah I guess it's all relative but I think I read about a page a minute and gravitate towards shorter books, so if we estimate 30*200=6000 minutes or a 100 hours, about 50 movies' worth. I definitely watched way more stuff this year which had something to do with it but it's really not that much, I think. If they were all 1000 page behemoths I'd agree with you.Monsignor Arkadin wrote: ↑Thu Dec 31, 2020 4:07 pmJesus Christ... I don't know how you do it. It's possible I'm just an incredibly slow reader... but I can't get all my work done, read and watch movies regularly. This year I watched a lot more, so reading took a hit.Biggest disappointment is only hitting 30 in a year
I got to 13 this year.
Read Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk which was excellent. As was Duras Ravishing of Lol Stein.
The consistently reliable Pynchon's V and Balzac's Other Side of History also tickled my fancy.
Finally got Roth's Portnoy's Complaint which I liked, but didn't get bowled over the way so many of my friends do.
Did not particularly care for The Savage Detectives
i watched 13 from Jan-Mar
and 0 from Apr-Dec 0_______o
p good yr tho. 5x10, 4x9, 2x8, 2x7
avg= 8.9!!!
the will to change: men, masculinity, and love (bell hooks) - 10/10
growing up absurd (paul goodman) - 8/10
dead girls (nancy lee) - 10/10
the vagabond (colette) - 9/10
one, no one and a hundred thousand (luigi pirandello) - 9/10
the journals of susanna moodie (margaret atwood) - 8/10
a room of one’s own (virginia woolf) - 7/10
stoner (john williams) - 10/10
the enchantment (victoria benedictsson) - 9/10
play it as it lays (joan didion) - 10/10
a ghost at noon (alberto moravia) - 7/10
the diary of a young girl (anne frank) - 9/10
the violent bear it away (flannery o’connor) - 10/10
and 0 from Apr-Dec 0_______o
p good yr tho. 5x10, 4x9, 2x8, 2x7
avg= 8.9!!!
the will to change: men, masculinity, and love (bell hooks) - 10/10
growing up absurd (paul goodman) - 8/10
dead girls (nancy lee) - 10/10
the vagabond (colette) - 9/10
one, no one and a hundred thousand (luigi pirandello) - 9/10
the journals of susanna moodie (margaret atwood) - 8/10
a room of one’s own (virginia woolf) - 7/10
stoner (john williams) - 10/10
the enchantment (victoria benedictsson) - 9/10
play it as it lays (joan didion) - 10/10
a ghost at noon (alberto moravia) - 7/10
the diary of a young girl (anne frank) - 9/10
the violent bear it away (flannery o’connor) - 10/10
more or less nothing that wasn't short(er) nonfiction (i.e. essays) or a textbook. started henry james' daisy miller for like the fiftieth time (an author i return to after long layoffs from fiction; like flaubert, the crystalline prose immediately draws me in), and subsequently got sidetracked after the first chapter for the forty-ninth time. also read maybe the first twenty pages of mccarthy's the road, but also got sidetracked (but also also it wasn't really capturing me like some of his other work; kinda came off like the oldtimer had lost a bit of his knack for his own literary language (unless the book is supposed to be his ya novel, and so hence his normally sibylline prose seemed more semi-sophomoric))
obviously a weird year for everything, i think i watched many fewer movies than almost any year since i was in college but while i read a lot (88 books as of today) it isn't all that much than last year (70). and a lot of those books were very short (which is why thinking of a year of reading in terms of number of books read is always so strange to me - it makes no sense to give a 150 page wisp of a suspense novel the same weight as the sot-weed factor).
some favorites -
the vice-consul, marguerite duras - the last thing i read this year and think it's her very finest novel, at least out of those i've read. can't recommend highly enough for anyone who likes her film india song, as this is definitely the seed that film grew from.
the wealdwife's tale, paul hazel - very strange whatsit of a novel, just on the outskirts of the fantasy genre but as far removed as most commercial fantasy as possible; if this were translated from the french and published by new directions it would almost certainly considered a cult classic.
a king alone, jean giono - maybe the best book i read this year, a not quite murder mystery in rural france, an incantatory nature novel and a book full of violence and loss.
the charterhouse of parma, stendhal - talked about this a lot on the main reading thread, but it was one of the earliest books i read this year and has stuck with me through everything.
empty space, the sunken land begins to rise again, and the course of the heart, m john harrison - 3 wonderful, bleak works that blend the fantastic (and in empty space science fiction) with a deeply observed look at the state of england at the end of the 20th century.
lyonesse trilogy, jack vance - the absolute best work of "classical" (i.e. there are magicians and trolls and fairies and shit) i've read after like...leguin in the '60s. a kind of prehistory of arthurian myth, big and truly weird and melancholy.
who was changed and who was dead, barbara comyns - best book i read by a completely new to me author, coming in right at the end of the year. will make reading her other novels a project in 2021.
barley patch, gerald murnane - always great to read your first book by an author you've been curious about for years and find it's genuinely something of a masterpiece. his books will definitely be something else i'll try to make a project out of in the year to come.
had kind of thought in my head that this was a lesser reading year for me, but looking over the full list of everything i read i think that's not quite true...
some favorites -
the vice-consul, marguerite duras - the last thing i read this year and think it's her very finest novel, at least out of those i've read. can't recommend highly enough for anyone who likes her film india song, as this is definitely the seed that film grew from.
the wealdwife's tale, paul hazel - very strange whatsit of a novel, just on the outskirts of the fantasy genre but as far removed as most commercial fantasy as possible; if this were translated from the french and published by new directions it would almost certainly considered a cult classic.
a king alone, jean giono - maybe the best book i read this year, a not quite murder mystery in rural france, an incantatory nature novel and a book full of violence and loss.
the charterhouse of parma, stendhal - talked about this a lot on the main reading thread, but it was one of the earliest books i read this year and has stuck with me through everything.
empty space, the sunken land begins to rise again, and the course of the heart, m john harrison - 3 wonderful, bleak works that blend the fantastic (and in empty space science fiction) with a deeply observed look at the state of england at the end of the 20th century.
lyonesse trilogy, jack vance - the absolute best work of "classical" (i.e. there are magicians and trolls and fairies and shit) i've read after like...leguin in the '60s. a kind of prehistory of arthurian myth, big and truly weird and melancholy.
who was changed and who was dead, barbara comyns - best book i read by a completely new to me author, coming in right at the end of the year. will make reading her other novels a project in 2021.
barley patch, gerald murnane - always great to read your first book by an author you've been curious about for years and find it's genuinely something of a masterpiece. his books will definitely be something else i'll try to make a project out of in the year to come.
had kind of thought in my head that this was a lesser reading year for me, but looking over the full list of everything i read i think that's not quite true...
didn't read one single 5/5 in 2020... ho hum! some good stevenson, verne, lagerkvist, turgenev, pope, hesse, etc. some bad books. some okay books
i wrote an A+ essay on that very tome, so i completely agree that it is an important work in the history of philosophy
Am currently working on a Top 100 list in preferential order, and the Giono is also my no. 1 of the year.nrh wrote: ↑Thu Dec 31, 2020 9:50 pm
a king alone, jean giono - maybe the best book i read this year, a not quite murder mystery in rural france, an incantatory nature novel and a book full of violence and loss.
had kind of thought in my head that this was a lesser reading year for me, but looking over the full list of everything i read i think that's not quite true...
Same for what I thought of the year, but browsing through my readings, there was so much good stuff!
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
Here's my Top 100 for 2020:
01. Chroniques 1. Un Roi sans Divertissement
Jean Giono, France 1947
02. Der Überläufer [new, edited version]
Wilhelm Lehmann, Germany/West Germany 1927/1962
03. Der Opfergang
Rudolf Georg Binding, Germany 1911
04. Ferdydurke [second, new version]
Witold Gombrowicz, Poland 1956
05. Rosenemil
Georg Hermann, Netherlands 1935
06. The Lady of the Shroud
Bram Stoker, UK 1909
07. Die Tigerin. Eine absonderliche Liebesgeschichte
Walter Serner, Germany 1925
08. Gradiva. Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück
Wilhelm Jensen, Austria-Hungary 1902
09. Postřižiny
Bohumil Hrabal, Czechoslovakia 1976
10. Moselfahrt aus Liebeskummer
Rudolf Georg Binding, Germany 1932
01. Chroniques 1. Un Roi sans Divertissement
Jean Giono, France 1947
02. Der Überläufer [new, edited version]
Wilhelm Lehmann, Germany/West Germany 1927/1962
03. Der Opfergang
Rudolf Georg Binding, Germany 1911
04. Ferdydurke [second, new version]
Witold Gombrowicz, Poland 1956
05. Rosenemil
Georg Hermann, Netherlands 1935
06. The Lady of the Shroud
Bram Stoker, UK 1909
07. Die Tigerin. Eine absonderliche Liebesgeschichte
Walter Serner, Germany 1925
08. Gradiva. Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück
Wilhelm Jensen, Austria-Hungary 1902
09. Postřižiny
Bohumil Hrabal, Czechoslovakia 1976
10. Moselfahrt aus Liebeskummer
Rudolf Georg Binding, Germany 1932
Spoiler!
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov