nyt "100 notable books of 2009" no shaman king manga itt :-(((((

http://www.nytimes.com/gift-guide/holiday-2009/100-notable-books-of-2009-gift-guide/list.html?hp

whats good what should i read that lorrie moore book was butt imo

nytimes notable book lists are butt.

the only one i read was sag harbor which was butt imo

death in venice was p good as is the munro collection

i have read:

the art students war - enh
both ways are the only way i want - this is good but v. v. slight esp compared to her novels
everything ravaged, everything burned - best thing on here i think mr que really liked it as well?
jeff in venice - 2nd half is too "literary"
love & summer - my mom lent me this i never finished it :/
too much happiness - munro, so

fallada, hemon, trevor are good, not butt.

ive read

everything ravaged, everything burned - v. good
generosity - ehh ~ not up to the better powers' books
the song is you - dope, i talked abt it on the art phillips thread on ilb
columbine - p. good, wasnt as illuminating abt the killers as i was lead to believe it wld b
fordlandia - stopped abt 200 pages in, was too mundane

def are several on this list i want 2 read

all the britisher choices on this seem really dull which makes me wonder if the non-britisher choices are equally dull

otoh the only one i have read is sag harbor. which is an ok minor novel from a real talented dude

^^ another disappointed shaman king manga fan ^_-

think i may try to pick up that fallada novel

everything ravaged, everything burned - v. good
generosity - ehh ~ not up to the better powers' books

Seconded

And the Fallada is really good

wow there were 100 notable books published this year!

i haven't read any of them :(

One hit, but it was purely accidental.

The Sarah Waters is not her best, but "Wolf Hall" by Mantel is exceptionally good. I'm interested in what people think of the Lorrie Moore as I've been tempted to buy it.

lamp, i think you are probably the only person 'itt' who knows what 'shaman king' even is

Viz Media licensed the series for an English-language release in North America, with chapters initially being serialized in the Shonen Jump. It started in the issue 3 from 2003, but stopped as of the September 2007 issue. Viz is also publishing the volumes from the manga first at irregular date and now every two months. Volume 1 was released on September 3, 2003 and as of September 9, 2009 (2009 -09-09), 24 volumes have been published by Viz. In the US release, VIZ Media began editing the lips of Joco, an African-American character. The lips are reduced in size to avoid a Blackface stereotype.

shaman king is a manga, i know this because of the thread title

i really liked:
await yr reply
sag harbor
a gate at the stairs

liked with reservations:
jeff in venice, death in varanasi
the song is you (really not as good as any of his other novels)

i guess i'm eazy to pleaze

actually probably should have put a gate at the stairs in the second category

why didn't you like "sag harbor," max?

hmmmmm.... Books.

thx for ur contribution ade

i haven't read any of them :(

― brooklyn we go ham (samosa gibreel), Sunday, November 29, 2009 10:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Neither have I. There are so many old books that I want to get through that I rarely buy new ones. I already have too many sitting on my shelves that I haven't read yet.

im trying to remember now n/a--i didnt even finish it! i think i was mostly bored. and im a big fan of whitehead. i dont know that i could even tell you anything about the book at all.

yeah it's not exactly a thrill a minute but for me it was just like warm and comfortable, i dug it a lot

here is the financial times boty btw:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2fb47d30-dae5-11de-933d-00144feabdc0.html

it is equally bad

i should have stopped reading after i saw nick cave listed *_*

ilx intellectual thomp did u read that colm tóìbîn novel? if so was it good? im sorry i jokingly insinuated u might read mangas btw ~ hope no1 @ cambridge was reading this thread u_u

sag harbor was something i kind of wanted to read but was turned off by the cover, which i thought looked kind of like a james patterson beach murder thing, also it was called sag harbor. n/a i was thinking about reading await your reply but then i read the skating rink instead - any particular reason to read it?

await your reply is basically a really well-done mystery/thriller thing. i mean it doesn't follow the tropes of the mystery or thriller genre but essentially that's what it is. it's also a pretty fast read, so i'd say go for it if you're in the mood for that kind of thing.

'A Gate at the Stairs' is pretty good, pretty funny BUT seemed to me a bit weak for Lorrie Moore--as though she'd tried to fit too much in, and it didn't all work. One subplot in particular (the boyfriend and who he is) seemed incredibly daft.

what was that book abt a paramedic in nyc r something that was a big deal i think and based on the authors real life experiences, i heard abt it on the radio this summer and my dad and i thought it sounded pretty good

"king lear" by william shakespeare

ikr? its "black flies" & its really good - came out last year tho at least in america

which i read the other evening, actually. you were right, it was good.

hope no1 @ cambridge was reading this thread

ha i think you have me confused with someone else maybe?

we had some terrible 'sag harbor: a writer's celebration' volume show up at work this week. does the name of the place have, like, instant and terrible associations of prestige? because i had never heard of it before reading the book, so er oh well. british edition has a dorky looking black kid on the cover, which is better. i liked it but it's covering territory i feel i've seen enough of? you know, the metaphors dorky kids use to organise their lives, that thing - jonathan lethem and 'the brief wondrous life of oscar wao' and such. and paul beatty. it's probably better-executed than that, though. it's pretty low key, uneventful, there's not really much more in play than 'this is a book in which a dorky kid's teenage summer happens'.

haven't read the toibin yet :/

british edition of the colson whitehead book sag harbor, not the other sag harbor book i started off talking about there. oy.

http://www.nytimes.com/gift-guide/holiday-2009/10-best-gift-guide-sub/list.html?hp

here are the 10 best of the year

does the name of the place have, like, instant and terrible associations of prestige?

Well, it's a bit less flashy than the Hamptons, which it borders, but it probably has associations of well-heeled summer vacationers rubbing shoulders with a more artsy year-round population of artists and writers as well as a tiny, shrinking remnant of blue-collar fishermen types. The main literary association that I have with it is that Steinbeck lived there and wrote a book set there.

that jeanette walls book sounds worse than watching ten episodes of dr. quinn medicine women

there were no books written in languages that are not English published in the year 2009 that were any good. thanks for clearing that up nytimes.

can't believe jeff in venice

Fairly unexciting list, but I do want to read the Maile Meloy stories.

i liked those meloy stories but i still think its weird that the times staff rates them above munro's collection

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/12/james-wood-on-the-books-of-2009.html

kind of a weird conceit, for a eoy list. i really didnt like censoring an iranian love story altho i also didnt finish it

here's a great list. goes beyond this year, but still

http://htmlgiant.com/?p=20355

how many of those have u read mq? am more interested in the lydia davis book now but im not sure how sympathetic i am to the p specific aesthetic of that list. interesting (to me, lol) that its "important" rather than favorite or best or w/e

notable american women seems like such a big deal to ppl w/masters degrees and no1 else i no has read it

Oblivion
Pastoralia
Why Did I Ever
I Looked Alive
The Hempel Collection
(most) collected Lydia Davis
Super Flat Times
Notable American Women

all super

ive read:

oblivion - liked this a lot
the sluts - enh
dear everybody - didnt make a huge impression; clever iirc
collected stories (hempel) - admired this v much
notable american women - not my thing, i think?

yeah notable american women is not the kind of book you read straight through i think. his sentences work in strange and unusual ways on your brain, so i dipped into it now and then and enjoyed it very much. it's almost like reading poetry, you have to stop and savor and read slowly

I found The Age of Wire and String to be brilliant.

I haven't read (or mostly heard of) any of the books on that list. I could grant the writer everything he claims if it weren't for the presence of the Zizeks. That tells me we are at cross-purposes.

aw man, whaddya got against old Slavoj?

I find him very readable tho I'm not sure I cd stomach more than 1 book a year

I'd take wittgenstein's mistress over this is not a novel but eh

it misses inclusion by like 16 years though .. ?

i like everything i have read on that list and may now even bookmark it to later return to and improve my hipster reading cred