Tuesday, November 20, 2012

books read 2012 - bump

So I don't have to go looking:


Started Annals late last year and just finished last night (January 23). Asterisk means I loved it. Hashtag means I didn't like it.

1. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
2. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
3. How to Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell 
4. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote*
5. The Control of Nature, by John McPhee*
6. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, by Lawrence Weschler
7. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor*
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor*
9. The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O'Connor*
10. Pakistan, A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven
11. Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks*
12. Freakonomics, by Stevens Levitt and Dubner#
13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John LeCarre*
14. The Russia House, by John LeCarre#
15. Hail to the Victors, ed. by Brian Cook
16. The Cave, by Jose Saramago#
17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
18. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by Jonathan Berendt
19. Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
20. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene*
21. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov*
22. Irons in the Fire, by John McPhee (again)
23. Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng
24. The Book of Job, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (again)*
25. The White Hotel, by D.M. Thomas
26. The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
27. The 50 Funniest American Writers, by Andy Borowitz
28. The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo

updated reading list

This is getting out of hand. In no particular order

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
The Animal Family, by Randall Jarrell
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
God Loves Man Kills, by Chris Claremont
Psychiatric Tales, by Darryl Cunningham
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, by David Grann
A Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein
Where I'm Calling from, by Raymond Carver
Crazy in Berlin, by Thomas Berger
The Death of Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory
Underworld, by Don Delillo
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle
Them, by Joyce Carol Oates
Between Past and Future, by Hannah Arendt
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Faust, by Goethe
Go Down Moses, by William Faulkner
Three Tales, by Gustave Flaubert
Psychological Types, by Carl Jung
Genet
Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebhur
What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe
Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters
Moth Smoke, by Mohsin Hamid
Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Quo Vadis? by Henry Sienkiewicz
The Translated Man and Other Stories, by Chris Braak
Levels of the Game, by John McPhee
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Great House, by Nicole Krauss
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Manto
Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills
Through the Eye of  a Needle, by Peter Brown

The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O'Brien
The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, by Milan Kundera

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman
The Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro
The Shipwrecked, by Graham Greene
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Jerusalem, by Goncalo Tavares
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Hassan Manto
The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebhur
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sabato
History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The Nature of Things, by Lucretius
Confessions, by Augustine
Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, I Corinthians, Romans
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Meditations, by Rene Descartes
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Theologico-Political Treatise, by Baruch Spinoza
Discourse on Metaphysics, by Gottfried Liebniz
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Histories, by Herodotus
The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of Right, by GWF Hegel
Collected Short Stories - Isaac Babel
Labyrinths - Borges
Other Inquisitions - Borges
One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
Correction - Thomas Bernhard
Nog - Rudy Wurlitzer
Gimpel The Fool - Isaac B. Singer
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud
Entire - Samuel Beckett (In other words, everything!)
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
Man In The Holocene - Max Frisch
Seven Gothic Tales - Dineson
Gogol's Wife - Tommaso Landolfi
V - Thomas Pynchon
The Lime Twig - John Hawkes
Blood Oranges - John Hawkes
Little Disturbances Of Man - Grace Paley
I, Etc., - Susan Sontag
Tell Me A Riddle - Tillie Olson
Hero With A Thousand Faces - Campbell
The Paris Review Interviews - Various
How We Live - ed, Rust Hills
Superfiction - ed, Joe David Bellamy
Pushcart Prize Anthologies

Manifestos Of Surrealism - Andre Breton
Documents Of Modern Art - ed, Motherwell
Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
A Homemade World - Hugh Kenner
Letters - Flaubert

The Changeling - Joy Williams

Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
The Palm-Wine Drunkard - Amos Tutola
Searching For Caleb - Ann Tyler
Thank You - Kenneth Koch
Collected Poems - Frank O'Hara
Rivers And Mountains - John Ashbery
Tragic Magic - Wesley Brown
Mythologies - Roland Barthes
The Pleasure Of The Text - Barthes
For A New Novel - Robbe-Grillet
Falling In Place - Ann Beattie
In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country - William Gass

The World Within The Word - Gass
Journey To The End Of The Night - Celine
The Box Man - Kobo Abe
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke
Kaspar And Other Plays - Peter Handke
Nadja - Andre Breton
Chimera - John Barth
Lost In The Funhouse - John Barth
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Black Tickets - Jayne Anne Phillips
Collected Stories - Peter Taylor
The Pure And The Impure - Colette
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please - Carver
Collected Stories - John Cheever
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could - Leonard Michaels
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
The Oranging Of America - Max Apple
Mumbo Jumbo - Ishmael Reed
The Death Of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
The Rhetoric Of Fiction - Wayne C. Booth

Thursday, November 15, 2012

job

“I am speechless: what can I answer?
I put hand on my mouth.
I have said too much already;
now I will speak no more.”

I think I'm starting to understand it.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012