What are you planning to read in 2011?

I'm going medieval this year.

Maybe biblical, we'll see.

im going to mexico for six months so size permitting, i might only be able to bring 2 or 3 books so they are all gonna be big reads. books in english are going to be hard to come by too over there, i'm sure. i'll bring 'moby dick' def., probably 'don quixote' and 'portrait of a lady' too

I'm going medieval this year.

Maybe biblical, we'll see.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, December 30, 2010 1:35 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

I'm going medieval this year

'blood sister: one tough nun'

The Bible, Hebrew and New Testaments, hopefully cover-to-cover.

the 2 nyrb books that i got fox xmas (warlock + that one that has a preface by borges... cant remember the title)
apart from that im not sure, i guess i shld do some big book, maybe jr?

or maybe fever + spear

perhaps i will read 'middlemarch'.

someone gave me gravity's rainbow as a gift and it was like hitting some sort of rock bottom, acknowledging my failure as a literatteur; the thought of reading nine hundred pages seemed so impossible that i'm gonna concentrate on just finishing things rather than bookhopping. wanna read the cordelia fine book on gender and the new michael cunningham novel pretty soon.

The Bible, Hebrew and New Testaments, hopefully cover-to-cover.

Xmas present recommendation oh wait

^ this is what I meant by me going biblical, if i find 'em 2nd hand. Possibly unlikely.

As far as 20th century doorstoppers are concerned I'm only looking at JR and Grossman's Life and Fate

Looking at 'Man Without Qualities' and the first of the 'They Were...' Miklos Banffy books

Here's the To-Read list I'm working on of stuff published in 1950:

Fritz Leiber- Gather, Darkness
William Faulkner- Collected Stories
Wallace Stegner- Joe Hill
Doris Lessing- The Grass is Singing
Wallace Stevens- Auroras of Autumn
Mary McCarthy- Cast a Cold Eye
Tennessee Williams- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
L. Sprague de Camp- Castle of Iron
Gore Vidal- Dark Green, Bright Red
David Reisman- The Lonely Crowd
IB Singer- The Family Moskat
Budd Schulberg- The Disenchanted
Robert Heinlein- The Man Who Sold the Moon, Farmer in the Sky
Nigel Kneale- Tomato Cain
Michael Gilbert- Smallbone Deceased
Paul Bowles- Collected Stories
Robert Duncan- Medieval Scenes
Nikos Kazantzakis- Freedom & Death
Miguel Angel Asturias- Strong Wind
Juan Carlos Onetti- Brief Life
Jack Vance- The Dying Earth
Martin Hansen- The Liar
Eugene Ionesco- The Bald Soprano
Heinrich Boll- Adam, Where Art Thou?
Yukio Mishima- Thirst for Love
Octavio Paz- Labyrinth of Solitude
Marguerite de Angeli- The Door in the Wall
Rex Stout- In the Best Families

And the books I've finished so far:

Ray Bradbury- The Martian Chronicles
Gore Vidal- Search for the King
Isaac Asimov- Pebble in the Sky
Cornell Woolrich- Fright
William Demby- Beetlecreek
Edmond Hamilton- City at World’s End
Henry Green- Nothing
Edmund Crispin- Frequent Hearses
Henry Nash Smith- Virgin Land
Par Lagerkvist- Barabas
Lionel Trilling- The Liberal Imagination
Simenon- Dirty Snow
Edmund Wilson- Little Blue Light
Edgar Mittelholzer- Morning at the Office
Helen McCloy- Through a Glass, Darkly
Bart Spicer- Blues for the Prince
Howard Nemerov- A Guide to the Ruins
Judith Merrill- Shadow on the Hearth
Robert Penn Warren- World Enough and Time
William Goyen- House of Flesh
Theodore Sturgeon- The Dreaming Jewels

David Reisman- The Lonely Crowd

The society of 1950 is one with Nineveh and Tyre, so I can't believe the sociology of that era has anything to offer. Why not straight history?

Otherwise, that was a pretty good year.

enrichment reading for 'mad men', at the very least?

President, what'd you think of 'Barabas' and 'Nothing'? i read them both last year and really dug them.

enrichment reading for 'mad men', at the very least?

I'll drink to that!

Reisman's theory of inner-directed VS outer-directed people is still hugely relevant I'd submit

starting off the year w/this

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oYWWBxuA2MU/TQPK-hofitI/AAAAAAAAkYU/_2yion1Namg/s1600/Saul+Bellow+-+Letters.jpg

I read Epstein's review

Wow.

alternate headline: "saul bellow: the old friend I never liked"

just from reading his novels I gathered that bellow was a prickly, difficult guy. of course I didn't know him IRL so I can't contest epstein's portrait of bellow as monstrous. but I found his analysis of the writing to be reductive & depressingly - almost pathologically - literal-minded. not to mention self-serving, envious, butthurt, pedantic. etc.

still I'm glad to have read that attempted takedown before embarking on the letters, more data - however biased - helps complete the picture of a complex personality. in the end it says more about epstein than bellow. (I know that's a cliche but sometimes cliches fit.) No doubt bellow could be a merciless bastard but wouldn't you say epstein undercuts his own severe judgments - of both the life and work - by pointing out that bellow at least occasionally acknowledged his own flaws and shortcomings? shit, nobody's perfect.

You should here what Epstein said about Nabisco

Epstein: "the two main questions about Saul Bellow: How good a writer was he? And why was there so gaping a discrepancy between the large moral claims made in his fiction and his own erratic personal behavior?"

The first question is fair. The second is comical.

I survived a relationship with a writer in my youth, and the lesson learned (listen up, you young people) was Do Not Form Emotional Bonds With Writers. Simple, effective.

"Perhaps he wasn't a novelist at all but a high-octane riffer, a philosophical schmoozer, an unsurpassed intellectual kibbitzer, one of the great monologists of the age. But he was no storyteller."

There's something to that judgment. I'll agree, but add that Bellow became a novelist by force, and that "the novel" was flexible enough to encompass his methods, at least in the short run. Bellow's novels aren't "classics", and I'll go far with Epstein in doubting their moral claims, but they have a life of their own and give a good picture of a certain sensibility.

I gathered that bellow was a prickly, difficult guy

Not to mention a backstabber who could always get the last word, using his novels.

Epstein is bothered by Bellow's habitual accusations of anti-Semitism. In Epstein's time, those carried a lot of moral weight. In the 2010s we are more used to such things, race, class and gender having become the conventional language for expressing personal disapproval of anything.

I want to finish Musil. And Proust. Other than that it depends if I go back to school or not.

On the other hand, the only book I have so far finished in 2011 is 'A Cat on the Cutting Edge: An Alice Nestleton Mystery' by Lydia Adamson, so eh well.

what'd you think of 'Barabas' and 'Nothing'? i read them both last year and really dug them.

Both were great. It was my 2nd time through Barabas, but "Nothing' is the first Henry Green book I've read--though I looked through that graphic novel based on one of his books.

There's a graphic novel based on a Henry Green book? Surely we live in a world of wonders! I've never heard of this.

The other one of his I read last year was 'Back', which was also excellent.

Actually, I just checked and I wrong about the graphic novel. It was a different writer.

was wrong

Michael Wood, Yeats & Violence

Always admire xyzzz's programme reading. I lack focus so often. I'll likely be on a lot of Seventeenth Century stuff this year, but should try to focus it, otherwise I'll just drift into thinking 'flaubert flaubert's interesting must read more flaubert. Wait, maybe LeGuin instead'. Had to write a brief bio for a magazine on dec 31, and made up a non-fiction book I was working on so that I didn't have to pad it out by mentioning Warcraft or ilx or 'working on first novel' or some quirky crap about cats. Maybe I'll actually work on it.

Biblical, though, that's tempting.

'A study of paranoid and fantastic politics in the seventeenth century'. That was my made-up book.

today I finished reading Alasdair Gray, A LIFE IN PICTURES!

damm, was getting ready to put that henry green graphic novel on my wish list!

things i want to get round to reading this year - herman melville beyond moby dick, 'the tragic muse' by henry james, some elizabeth taylor, a good cordwainer smith collection, zola, george eliot, balzac.

Always admire xyzzz's programme reading

i admire the amount he reads (and mostly good things by the looks of it)

i'll be happy if i just read more books in 2k11, whichever books

I'm heading back to school this year. Taking a class on Saul Bellow along with a British Victorian Novel class. I don't know exactly what Bellow stuff we'll be reading, but as far as BVNs go, it'll be "Mary Barton" - Elizabeth Gaskell, "Bleak House" - Dickens, "East Lynne" - Ellen Wood, "The Moonstone" - Wilkie Collins, "Middlemarch," and "Dracula."

The only thing I know about Gaskell is that she coined the phrase "trouble up at t'mill."

got a book called "Strange Fatality" about the war of 1812 for christmas. after that - i have no idea what my next book will be.

Michael Wood, Yeats & Violence

i suppose you've read his empson lectures, pinefox? i really like those.

i admire the amount he reads (and mostly good things by the looks of it)

aww thx, looks like I jinxed it as I've just started a book by Nick Hornby today.

h8 making plans to read anything just see how it goes

i guess if the new grr martin book actually gets published i plan on reading that

Going to read and reread some Delany this year -- the Neveryona quartet, Stars in My Pocket. I've never managed to make it through the Fall of the Towers, maybe I'll give that another shot.

j: Literature and the Taste of Knowledge? Yes, I reviewed that book at some length for a journal - alas I can find no trace of the text online so can't give you a link here. But I did mention Stevie T, without naming his name (or even calling him Jerry the Nipper).

As I'll probably have said elsewhere, I think of Wood as the greatest living literary critic writing in English, though he can write things (like reviews, or even whole books) that are finally maybe too openended and unresolved for their own good (though those things can be good qualities, not least in him, for sure).

yeah, that's the one. i had never read him before (perhaps in periodicals or something)—i do recall your mentioning him now, probably also my thinking you meant james wood (who is irritating). michael strikes me as very impressive now.

damm, was getting ready to put that henry green graphic novel on my wish list!

Me too!

i am not buying myself 1 book this year. books given to me are different but i am not buying 1 book. i refuse to. i must not buy another book. so this leaves me trying to read the ridiculous amount of books i have bought and not yet read-

currently half way thru One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denishovich or whatever his name is.
War & Peace
Crime & Punishment
The complete Alan Bennett collection
A couple of Jean Rhys novels
The Oxford Murders
both fraznen novels
Lots of poetry
Three Men In a Boat (I read half of it LJ!)
Some Spike Milligan
A bunch of nonfiction and theory

ALL OF IT WILL BE READ

ppl who can draw, perhaps you should set to work on a Henry Green graphic novel? Everyone here quite keen to read it.

Suggest Loving as top candidate for adaptation (doubles as Dowton Abbey/Upstairs Downstairs cash-in).

I'm aiming for a massive cull early in the new year - atm i intend to get rid of, like, a third of my books. I love 'em but I need space. So there may be a big giveaway trailed here in a few weeks' time, logistics permitting - buggered if I'm remortgaging to pay the postage on that lot.

Suggest Loving as top candidate for adaptation (doubles as Dowton Abbey/Upstairs Downstairs cash-in).

― portrait of velleity (woof), Wednesday, 5 January 2011 10:25 (2 hours ago) Bookmark

the 90s harvill edition of loving makes it look like there was an adaptation, but i can't find any trace of it.

http://images.alibris.com/imageid/2002336567.jpg

At least, you gotta hope that was an adaptation link-in.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113714/

just came here to post that! it's got danny dyer in it :\

sam, which jean rhys books do you have?

I don't really plan my reading ahead, but I'm re-reading War and Peace, and reading James Woods's Broken Estate. I'm guilty of buying more books than I read, but recent purchases I'm pretty sure I will read include Nemesis (Philip Roth), The Soul of Kindness (Elizabeth Taylor), a couple of Peter Careys (Parrot and Ned Kelly). I've got me a Kindle which may slant my reading a little towards the classics - it's a temptation when I can download stuff instantaneously and sometimes very cheaply or free, even when I know I've got the physical book in a cupboard or shelf somewhere. Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith are both due to publish novels in 2011 and I'd expect to be reading those.

Barring catastrophe, DV, I vow to read Foster's biography of Yeats.

keep promising myself I'll read that, but I struggle when I start - rotten with biographies. Want to re-read Foster's Modern Ireland as well.

got the second Alan Furst spy novel, Dark Star, heading my way

Ismael in for some good times!

I'm going to read them in order, I don't want to risk spoilers. I've already incurred one for Dark Star after reading some interviews yesterday. The Furst thread on here seems ruiner-free though, so I may post thoughts there instead.

Modern Ireland is very readable and intriguing. So are large parts of Foster's LUCK & THE IRISH. I too would like to make myself read the full WBY.

http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&sugexp=evnsp&xhr=t&q=mr+punch+gaiman+and+mckean&cp=26&wrapid=tljp1295280845064060&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1209&bih=551

for Captain Pugvosh - Punch & Judy action?

try this link instead
http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Comics/Mr.+Punch+%3A+The+Tragical+Comedy+or+Comical+Tragedy/

because enbb reminded me of it on the difficult books thread i'm going to read/re-read (the first half) independent people in 2011

If you include stuff I have to read for law school (besides casebooks):

Lawrence Lessig - Code 2.0
Don Thompson - The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
Caro - The Power Broker
Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World
Fisher, Ury and Patton - Getting to Yes

That's what I have queued up right now. Would also maybe like to read Jonathan Franzen - Freedom and get around to finishing Crabgrass Frontier.

Well, if anything, this thread has just made me realise I've been confusing Jonathan Franzen with Jonathan Lethem! 2011 - get back in the bin :(

I don't have much queued up, apart from "Never Let You Go", which I didn't even realise I was a film, until someone who might actually take a passing glance at the world outside them informed me. So now I am avoiding all film talk as well. GRATE!

My favourite Ishiguro is 'The Unconsoled', and already more has happened in Never Let You Go than I remember in the whole of the former. Not sure whether this will pan out as a good or bad thing!

I found Never Let You Go a pretty absorbing if somewhat uncomfortable read. It suffers from the usual flaw of high concept dystopian sci-fi, ie there are lots of details that don't ring true even if you buy the basic "what if", but I'd recommend it to anyone who didn't think they'd be too squeamish to handle the subject matter.

Mind you "The Unconsoled" is my least favourite Ishiguro, so our tastes may not be alike.

I'm finally getting around to reading The Name of the Rose, aided by the Key to TNOTR companion book and an online book club covering the book (which is already nearing the conclusion, but I'll just follow along the discussion from the beginning, alone).

Thanks for the Gaiman P&D stuff, pinefox (and the Birtwhistle stuff at the FAP, xyzz___) . I'm not looking at or reading anything at the moment until I find somewhere to live, but am looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into some of this stuff soon (and maybe Mills & Boon too!).

My Reading List 2011
(will qualify and say once again that I'm a slow reader and doubt I'll get through all these, although I've started a handful of them already)

Dracula - Bram Stoker
UBIK - Philip K. Dick
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Darkmans - Nicola Barker
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
V for Vendetta (graphic novel) - Alan Moore
Palestine (graphic novel) - Joe Sacco
Safe Area Gorazde (graphic novel) - Joe Sacco
A Life In Pictures - Alasdair Gray
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell

The Fierce and Beautiful World is good!

"(and the Birtwhistle stuff at the FAP, xyzz___)"

The other thing i was thinking of is The Juniper Tree (1981) for shadow puppet theatre (or animated film) and ensemble by Richard Emsley. All I've heard is the music (available on CD) and I just relate to Punch and Judy in my head.

Dog Latin's list is full of excellent things (except Darkmans, which I haven't read, given how much I didn't like Barker's much shorter books)

Frankiemachine I think I agree with yr positing about Never Let You Go - I think I may have *enjoyed* it more than the Handmaids Tale (because there's something about Ishiguro's sonic cathedrals of loneliness/melancholy that I heart), but I think there's either *more* in the Handmaids Tale or that... there's not much at the heart of the scenario of Never Let You go perhaps.

But then again, my fave is the Unconsoled which is a near impenetrable dreamscape so I hardly read KI for tightly-plotted blahblahs.

(I've never actually read Remains of the Day! Perhaps I should get round to it).

Next up is Carter Dixon and another Xiaolu Guo book, which complies pretty well with that 'how to design a Japanese/Chinese book cover' link that went around a while ago. Both are easy to lug about on public transport; good.

frankiemachine/superpitching: I loved "Never Let Me Go"! And I think there's a lot going on despite the fact that its a real page-turner. Lots of class issues, e.g. donors as underclass (or immigrants), and questioning the value of art and education in a society that treats humans as expendable. ("Remains of the Day" deals with class too, but it's through the protagonist's internalization of class structure). And I just love Ishiguro's prose.

I've never read Handmaid's Tale, so I can't compare the two. Haven't read The Unconsoled either, but it's been on my list for a while.

and another Xiaolu Guo book, which complies pretty well with that 'how to design a Japanese/Chinese book cover' link that went around a while ago

Hey--I wrote that article! Cool!

Handmaid's Tale is my unfortunate massive bugbear after doing it to death at GCSE *and* A-level, and most dystopian novels just make me flashback to being a very irritated teen! Then I put on the Manics and recover, harhar.

Romeo - yeah, I did enjoy it, don't get me wrong. Loved all the idylic school stuff in part 1 and the post-school awkward relations they had with each other and their realisations about the world around them too, especially in Norfolk! That was great!

James - haha! That went fairly viral a while ago, or at least in my circle of interwebs. Ku-dos!

Got a craving for Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy - you'd think its ok as it sounds ideal to dip in and out but I find that hard to do. Need to read a good chunk before I put anything I'm enjoying down.

Never more than dipped in, always happy to stay in there for a couple of hours tho. Always remember the bit about the Persian kings hawking after butterflies with sparrows, for some reason.

Oddly, I've never been mad keen on Burton despite his being more or less the perfect author in priciple for me (C17th prose, anecdotal, dead knowledge, melancholy, huge). A bit listy for my tastes, maybe? There are great bits, but I feel like I'm wading through clutter to get there.

Think I might building up to a period with c18th novels. I'd forgotten how much I like spending time with Fielding, am thinking about a stretch committing to him.

I'm ashamed to say I've only read Tom Jones, which seeing as it's possibly one of my favourite things ever is self-perplexing. I guess Shamela or Jonathan Wild would be good next. Wd fit in with finishing that Uglow biog of Hogarth as well.

Shamela is awesome - just such a neat, deadly well-executed joke, takes delight in going for Richardson's throat while having its own things to say. But I'd go for Joseph Andrews next if a TJ fan.

My own plan is maybe a re-read of TJ, and then a first go at Amelia, but there's stuff like the Voyage to Lisbon winking at me too.

i am reading 'the instructions'. it is actually very good.

that was meant to go on one of two other threads but not this one

yeah don't pollute the fantasy reading plans with stuff you're really reading

Maybe I'll read some Smollett while I'm keen on the c18th novel.

woof - out of interest what other 17th century books were you looking at reading this year?

18th century is probably one for the 'what are you planning to read in 2031?' for me

Most of the c17th stuff I had (have) lined up is history, a bit up the dry end, & with special ref to the Civil War: Ends of Life by Keith Thomas, vols of Hugh Trevor-Roper essays, some C Hill, Commonwealth to Protectorate by Austin Woolrych, Blair Worden on the Rump Parliament, The Nobles Revolt by John Adamson etc etc. That's the pile I'd need to knuckle down to: as I've said, want a better map or picture of that period, and a better grip on the hist arguments.

Around that, I hadn't firm plans – usual canon suspects (Shaks, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Milton, Browne, Dryden, Congreve) mostly, see where I end up reading around them.

But yes, I have been distracted by the charms of Fielding.

Thx - yes I use the civil war as a 'zone in' point on 17th century, probably the only I know about the 17th century is that England had a civil war (had a Christopher Hill/Keith Thomas phase a couple of years ago) and certainly wanna read more about.

I'm gonna add those titles to my reading list, might be something to collect and get round to in the middle of the year.

The two most recent survey histories might be useful if you do that: Blair Worden's (I've mentioned it before I think) is a short & clear summary of events, with a gloomy reading of the whole thing; God's Fury, England's Fire by Michael Braddick is also meant to be good, think it's a bit broader, takes on the cultural and popular stuff. I'll look at it myself sometime this year.

What I am planning to read: a FUCKING lot of out-of-copyright ebooks for free, thanks to Aldiko.

Over the weekend I re-read White Fang, before that, The Riddle of the Sands, an exhaustingly meticulous sailing novel about two Englishmen navigating the tidal sands of NW Germany just before WWI, and now, The House of a Thousand Candles, about some ner-do-well, fortune-wasting adventurer who comes home from North Africa to live in his grandfather's mysterious house in Wabash, Indiana as a condition of the old man's will.

This stuff is GREAT!!

Wasn't the meticulousness of The Riddle of the Sands basically because he was trying to indicate a weakness in the Eastern coastal defences of England to the government? Or is that one of those things that I've never bothered to properly find out about, but repeat ever more vaguely, that isn't quite true?

No you are totally right! Is it more well-known that I would have guessed from the rank patriotism and scrupulosity?

* than

fairly well-known - it's always been available in penguin and wordsworth super-cheap popular classics, gets name-dropped a fair bit. Some of that's historical importance - one of the first spy novels, hauled up as grandpa of Deighton, Forsyth, Follett fiction. Also Childers an interesting fish, Irish Republican stuff especially.

(never read it myself. don't like the sound of this 'meticulous')

It's no more meticulous than Swallows and Amazons say, although actually that's pretty meticulous iirc. And as woof says Childers is absolutely fascinating. There was a film of it as well, which always helps general awareness of a book (I think it's supposed to be pretty good as well - my teenage self can't remember).

I love Swallows & Amazons so very very much, but found Riddle to be about 4x less penetrable w/r/t the sailing talk, which doesn't make it any less interesting, and in fact if I knew more about the subject, would probably add a lot. I also didn't know anything about canals, or the Rhineland, or any of the places or landscapes that were described, so a huge amount of the total book was just floating in my brain, unattached to any mooring. And I was STILL awfully intrigued, which I think is as good a recommendation as any.

Richard Powers

Have now bought the 3 Miklos Banffy novels... now how long will it take me to gird my loins. Oh, look, a nice 200p English novel from the 1940s!