What did you read last month?

[kanafani]

Hombre (Leonard)
Three-Ten to Yuma/The Tonto Woman (Leonard)
Valdez is Coming (Leonard)
The Spanish Civil War (Thomas)
The Song of Roland
Close Range (Proulx)

[brian d]

le spleen de paris (charles baudelaire) ****
the rainbow (dh lawrence) ****
the loved one (evelyn waugh) [reread] ****
the book of the virgins (gabriele d'annunzio) **
dombey and son (charles dickens) ***
pylon (william faulkner) **
clotel (william wells brown) ***
blindness (henry green) ****
the crossing (cormac mccarthy) **
the drowned and the saved (primo levi) ****
the heart goes last (margaret atwood) *

[---]

DEC (2)
the signal and the noise (nate silver) - 8/10*
they shoot horses, don’t they? (horace mccoy) - 8/10

*would've been 9/10 if he hadn't implied that palestinians resisting their european colonists are terrorists

[mesnalty]

The Last of the Crazy People (Findley)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Brown)
For Today I Am a Boy (Fu)
The Green House (Vargas Llosa)
Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (Jonke)
The Idiot (Batuman)
Gesell Dome (Saccomanno)
Essential Cinema (Rosenbaum)
The Shadow Puppet (Simenon)

excellent month!

[liquidnature]

Sketches by Boz (Dickens)
Christ and the Carols (Reynolds)

[wba2]

December 2018

Un adolescent d'autrefois “Der Jüngling Alain“ [translated by Wolfgang Teuschl] (Francois Mauriac / 1969 / France / French / German) - 7/10
Fundbüro (Siegfried Lenz / 2003 / Germany / German / German) - 7.5/10

[Joks Trois]

^^Not a bad book at all, but I think there aren't many truly great writers on Straub-Huillet, mostly because cinema studies types don't have a background in philosophy, so they don't really get to the heart of what the fundamental questions asked in their films are. That includes Tag.

[josiahmorgan11]

I'm going to do my January tally now, seeing as I won't finish anything more. All-around positive month. The weakest book I read was de Sade's epic.

Carrie, Stephen King, ****
Second Person, Gabi Losoncy, ***
Talisman Angelical, Matthew Davies & Samantha Bower, *****
Small Talk At The Clinic, Thomas Moore & Steven Purtill, ****
Salem's Lot, Stephen King, ****
Bosun, New Juche, ****
Inside The Castle, Josiah Morgan, [No Rating]
Sea of Love, Simon Morris, *****
The 120 Days of Sodom, Marquis de Sade, ***
My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper, ****

[DT.]

The weakest book I read was de Sade's epic.

Would've been awkward if you said your own book.

[kanafani]

• Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) 3/5
• What hath God wrought : the transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Howe) 3/5
• Maigret Sets a Trap (Simenon) 4/5
• The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Massad) 4/5
• Dark Passage (Goodis) 4/5
• Nightfall (Goodis) 2.5/5
• Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 2.5/5

[mesnalty]

Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah)
Complete Stories (Lispector)
Cyclonopedia (Negarestani)
Monument: Poems New and Selected (Trethewey)
Clint Eastwood: A Biography (Schickel)
Less Than Angels (Pym)
Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders)
Complete Plays (Sarah Kane)
Down to Earth (Latour)
The Summer Book (Jansson)
Receptive Bodies (Bersani)
Hideous Kinky (Freud)

[liquidnature]

Red Harvest (Hammett) ****

[brian d]

cove (cynan jones) ****
the floating opera (john barth) **
the virgin and the gipsy (dh lawrence) ***
in hazard (richard hughes) ***
reflections in a golden eye (carson mccullers) ****
riders in the chariot (patrick white) **
melville (jean giono) **
pierre, or the ambiguities (herman melville) *****
wise children (angela carter) ***
liolà (luigi pirandello) ***


melville's pierre is probably one of the oddest reading experiences i can remember having. i get why it was rejected in its time, and i get why it's dismissed now, but the things he does with narrative i haven't seen done in really any other novel i can think of. in some weird way it really shook me, even if the story itself is ridiculous.

[Roscoe]

THE WOMAN IN WHITE (Collins) good tasty fun, but undone by a rather pat ending. 7/10

[---]

JAN (1)
meditations (marcus aurelius) - 7/10

WEAK

[wba2]

January 2019

Der Schrecksenmeister (Walter Moers / 2007 / Germany / German / German) - 6.5/10
Eine kleine Geschichte der DEFA (Ralf Schenk / 2006 / Germany / German / German) - 6/10
My “Wir“ [translated by Gisela Drohla] (Yevgeny Zamyatin / 1920 / Soviet Union / Russian / German) - 7.5/10
Bette Davis “Bette Davis. Ihre Filme – ihr Leben“ [translated by Alfred Dunkel] (Jerry Vermilye / 1973 / USA / English / German) - 3.5/10
Re-Agitator. A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike (Tom Mes / 2013 / UK / English / English) - 7/10
Instantanés “Momentaufnahmen” [translated by Elmar Tophoven] (Alain Robbe-Grillet / 1962 / France / French / German) - 7/10

[patrick]

I didn't get much time to read last month as I was (and still am) busy settling into my new job:

White Nights (Dostoevsky)
First Love (Turgenev)
The Waves (Woolf)

[kanafani]

The House of Mirth (Wharton)
Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano)
The Balkans (Mazower)
The Madman of Bergerac (Simenon)
Beirut Nightmares (Al Saman)

[mesnalty]

Chronicle of the Murdered House (Lucio Cardoso)
Collected Poems and Translations (Veronica Forrest-Thompson)
Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)
Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward)
Liquid Modernity (Zygmunt Bauman)
The Xenofeminist Manifesto (Laboria Cuboniks)
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
The Fragility of Goodness (Martha Nussbaum)
The Day of Creation (J. G. Ballard)

[brian d]

the baron in the trees (italo calvino) **
scenes of clerical life (george eliot) **
thousand cranes (yasunari kawabata) ***
israel potter (herman melville) ***
the end of the road (john barth) *
the story of hong gildong ***
the mystery of edwin drood (charles dickens) ***
titus alone (mervyn peake) ***
the nine-cloud dream (kim man-jung) *****
age of iron (jm coetzee) ****

[nrh]

didn't post for january so both months -

january
killing commendatore, haruki murakmi
chemmeen, thakachi sivasanakara pillai
honeymoon, patrick modiano
melville, jean giono
maigret's failure, georges simenon
the black prince, iris murdoch
warlord of the air, michael moorcock
the land leviathan, michael moorcock
the steel tsar, michael moorcock

february
friend of my youth, amit chaudhuri
the goodbye look, ross macdonald
the underground man, ross macdonald
laura, vera caspary
shadrach in the furnace, robert silverberg
the jewel in the skull, michael moorcock
the mad god's amulet, michael moorcock
sword of the dawn, michael moorcock
the runestaff, michael moorcock
first stories, clarice lispector
master and commander, patrick o'brian

[---]

WEAK month but not as WEAK as jan. hopefully mar will be LESS WEAK

FEB (3)
message (fernando pessoa) - 6/10
white nights (fyodor dostoevsky) - 9/10
ripley under ground (patricia highsmith) - 9/10

[wba2]

February 2019

Il colore del sole “Die Farbe der Sonne” [translated by Moshe Kahn] (Andrea Camilleri / 2007 / Italy / Italian / German) - 3.5/10
Memoires d’un tricheur “Memoiren eines Falschspielers” [translated by Henriette Beese] (Sacha Guitry / 1935 / France / French / German) - 6/10
Der Verlorene (Peter Lorre / 1951 / West Germany / German / German) - 7.5/10
Jatek a kastelyban “Spiel im Schloß” [translated by Vera Thies] (Ferenc Molnar / 1926 / Hungary / Hungarian / German) - 7.5/10
Egy, ketto, harom “Eins, zwei, drei” [translated by Vera Thies] (Ferenc Molnar / 1929 / Hungary / Hungarian / German) - 6/10
Odishon “Das Casting” [translated by Leopold Federmair, Motoko Yajin] (Ryu Murakami / 1997 / Japan / Japanese / German) - 7/10
Peter Lorre. Der Verlorene (Michael Farin, Hans Schmid [editors] / 1996 / Germany / German / German) - 7/10
Dr. Mabuse und seine Zeit. Eine deutsche Chronologie (Sven Safarow / 2016 / Germany / German / German) - 7/10
Sourcery (Terry Pratchett / 1988 / UK / English / English) - 6/10

[brian d]

fanshawe (nathaniel hawthorne) [reread] ****
[several] tales (hp lovecraft) ***
cities of the plain (cormac mccarthy) **
cane (jean toomer) ***
the adolescent (fyodor dostoevsky) **
runaway horses (yukio mishima) **
the other house (henry james) *
the reivers (william faulkner) *
the lost girl (dh lawrence) **
the criticón (baltasar gracián) *****

lots of shitty stuff from supposedly good writers this month. i'm officially done with mccarthy. maybe done with henry james too (i mostly read this one because it's part of the inspiration for céline and julie go boating, which is far better). i was thinking of reading dostoevsky's demons at some point, but i'm not sure how much the adolescent might have turned me off to that idea. just felt like a fairly pointless novel. but i'm making my way through hawthorne again, starting at the beginning, and am happy that it's starting out as well as i remembered.

[wigwam]

There There | Tommy Orange | 2018 | 2019-01-21 to 2019-03-01 | LIKED
Alcoholics Anonymous | Alcoholics Anonymous | 1939 | On 2019-03-09 | REREAD INDIFFERENT
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous | Augustine Fellowship | 1986 | 2019-03-09 to 2019-03-10 | REREAD LIKE
The Twelve Steps and Dual Disorders | Hamilton & Samples | 1994 | 2019-03-10 to 2019-03-30 | LOVED
A Man in Love | KO Knausgard | 2009 | 2019-03-01 to 2019-03-31 | INDIFFERENT
The Friend | Sigrid Nunez | 2018 | 2019-03-13 to 2019-03-31 | LIKED

[kanafani]

Shoot the Piano Player (Goodis)
The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson)
The Killer Inside Me (Thompson) ♥
The Real Cool Killers (Himes) ♥
Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (Reed)
Pick-Up (Willeford)

[rischka]

best of luck with your recovery wigwam

[mesnalty]

Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
The Blazing World (Margaret Cavendish)
Parade's End (Ford Madox Ford)
Not After Midnight (Daphne du Maurier)
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Catherine Millet)
The Lover (Marguerite Duras)
Barracoon (Zora Neale Hurston)

[---]

another WEAK-ASS month

MAR (1)
hunger (knut hamsun) - 9/10

but i started like 3 other books... april might have a decent total

[wigwam]

hunger is so great tho you dont need many more, maybe pan or dreamers

best of luck with your recovery wigwam

thx so much!!