ateolf 2009

i'd already started in the 50 Book Challenge group, but as my goal is 80, after discovering this group i thought i'd go ahead here too as it's closer to my aims...:
January:
The Zero Train by Yuri Buida
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner
The Burn by Vassily Aksyonov
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan
Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

February:
Complete Works: 1 1954-1960 by Harold Pinter
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Amerika: the Missing Person by Franz Kafka
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

March:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Mustache by Emmanuel Carrère
Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
V. by Thomas Pynchon
Complete Works: 2 1959-1963 by Harold Pinter
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

April:
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin
The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
A Visit from the Footbinder by Emily Prager
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
Cat and Mouse by Günter Grass
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Complete Works: 3 1963-1969 by Harold Pinter

Welcome to the group!

Welcome!

Hi there...what did you do with April? And what an interesting assortment of books!

Wow, what an interesting list! Welcome!

Welcome! What did you think of Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Quite a few 75ers have read it this year, myself included - though I think of everyone who read it, I am the only one who did not like it very much.

Great list of reads, ateolf! What did you think of The Burn, Ferdydurke, and Gargantua and Pantagruel?

#4: whoops, "May" was a typo, though it'd be awesome if i could have read that many books in one day...

#6: i'm totally with you on Haroun! i thought it was OKAY, but i was a bit disappointed by it...it's my third Rushdie book (The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children being the others, of course...and The Satanic Verses being one of my favorite books ever...) it's not bad, but a little simplistic and not nearly up to par with his other books i've read...

#7: The Burn was great i liked it a lot...Ferdydurke i didn't like as much as i thought i would...it seemed better in theory than the book itself was...it was okay though...both of those were santa thing gifts, incidentally, so they were pretty awesome in that respect...i liked Gargantua and Pantagruel..i haven't read too many classics, but it's my favorite so far...although that's still kind of relative...it does get a little long in parts, but the parts that are good are awesome...

Haroun was my first Rushdie, but the plan is to read Midnight's Children or Satanic Verses later this year. I hope I like them as much as you did!

May (for real this time!):
A Fable by William Faulkner
Dog Years by Günter Grass
Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard
Rosencrantz & Guildentern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Salutations!
I heard Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is hilarious...did you like it?

Marian

oh yeah, i liked it a lot...actually most of what i read this past month i liked a lot...i guess i had some quality even if my quantity was lagging a bit...

And the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is worth the rental, screenplay also by Stoppard and starring incredibly young Tim Roth, also Gary Oldman--and a surprising performance by Richard Dreyfuss as the Player King.

June:
Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann
Complete Works: 4 1971-1981 by Harold Pinter
Interzone by William S. Burroughs
The Immoralist by André Gide
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
J R by William Gaddis

and now that i've reached the halfway point's a good time for assessment: 43 books so far...i'm perfectly on my way towards my goal...very nice...

What is Letters to Felice exactly, and how was it? I see it has a very high rating on LT and that it's a collection of letters, but there's not much more information there.

it's a collection of his letters to Felice Bauer, whom he was engaged to twice...very good letters, though obviously more for the Kafka fan than the general reader...(and note only 10 people rated it and you've got to assume most people who even read this book are already Kafka fans...not to disparage its rating, i mean, i'm one of the 5 to give it 5 stars myself...but it is that kind of book...and, yeah, Kafka is my favorite writer...) oh and lots of self-deprecation and paranoia...

July:
And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski

August:
Larva: a Midsummer Night's Babel by Julián Ríos
A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Light in August by William Faulkner
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Sappho
Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet

#19: What did you think of The Heart of a Dog? I have Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on my Planet TBR and would add this one too if it is worth the read.

Heart of a Dog is good, not nearly as good as The Master and Margarita, but that book's exceptionally great...anyway, it is definitely worth reading...

OK, thanks for the input!

September:
Something Happened by Joseph Heller
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Hell House by Richard Matheson
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Atonement by Ian McEwan

#23: Some very good reads there! I really enjoyed Angle of Repose.

Angle of Repose was one of those books I was sure I would not like and enjoyed very much. I read it about the same time I was working through some of of The Adventures of Augie March, but found Stegner more interesting. Still haven't finished the Bellow, although I've read something else by him this year.

i was actually a little underwhelmed by Angle of Repose...i mean, i didn't dislike it...there were things i liked about it, but overall i thought it was just okay...

October:
Three Major Plays by Lope de Vega
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš
Annihilation by Piotr Szewc
Four Plays by Eugène Ionesco

November:
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
The Major Works by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

that's 76, i hit the community's goal and it looks like my personal goal is well in sight...

Congratulations!

Congrats!

hah, thanks!

December:
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Three Plays by Kōbō Abe
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller
Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
The Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2009 | Vol. XXIX: Georges Perec Issue
Bad News of the Heart by Douglas Glover
The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

so there's my year, if i didn't miscount that's 86 books...woohoo!

Congratulations on hitting 86!

i made a mistake and left a book out of my previous post:
Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill