What all did you read in 2013?

This thread was inspired by what all did you read in 2012.

I count this as having been a banner year for my reading. In 2013 I completed these 48 books. They include a lot of great books I thoroughly enjoyed. Sweet! Also, a goodly number I thought were just OK. They are listed here in the order I first mentioned them in the various WAYR threads from ILB.

Riding Toward Everywhere Wm. T. Vollmann
Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
White Noise, Don DeLillo
Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard & Nottker the Stammerer
Letters to Atticus, Cicero
The Watch, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrell
Beulah Land, H.L. Davis
Elegies of Sextus Propertius as translated by Philip Katz
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
A Child of the Steens, an Oregon 'pioneer' memoir
Silk Parachute, John McPhee
The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas
Independent People, Haldor Laxness
Made in America, Bill Bryson
The Plot Against America, Phillip Roth
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Addams
The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark
Vita Nuova, Dante Alghieri
Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
The Jewish War, Josephus
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
Stasiland, Anna Funder
First Love, Ivan Turgenev
A Primate's Memoir, Robert Sapolsky
Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, Kenny Moore
Why War Came in Korea, Robert Oliver
Eyrbyggja Saga, anonymous
The Runaway Brain, Christopher Wills
The Philosopher and the Druids, some forgettable guy
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
Willehalm, Wolfram von Eschenbach
A Short History of Byzantium, J.J. Norwich
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams
The Good Soldier[i], Ford Madox Ford
[i]Collected Poetry, Lorine Niedecker
The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
Arguably, Christopher Hitchens
We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, Joan Didion
Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels
Anabasis, Xenophon
Spartacus and the Slave Wars, Shaw
The First Poets, Michael Schmidt (my current book)

as chronological as possible, mostly recovered using ilb backlogs

corey robin - the reactionary mind
chris hayes - twilight of the elite
italo calvino - if on a winter's night a traveler
hannah arendt - eichmann in jerusalem
karl ove knausgaard - my struggle vol 1
thomas bernhard - the loser
horacio castellanos moya - senselessness
horacio castellanos moya - dance with snakes
horacio castellanos moya - tyrant, memory
renata adler - pitch dark
zadie smith - white teeth
chris kraus - i love dick
tao lin - richard yates
albertine sarrazin - astragal

Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
Collins - The Woman in White
McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
DeLillo - The Body Artist
Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground
Malcolm - The Journalist and the Murderer
Koestler - Darkness at Noon
Christie - Five Little Pigs
Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl
Campbell - Who Goes There? (novella)
Golding - Lord of the Flies
Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
Baum - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Le Carre - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Christie - The Mystery of the Blue Train
Sleator - Interstellar Pig

comics

Gaiman - Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections and Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives
Sacco - Safe Area Gorazde
Kochalka - Superf*ckers
Sim - Cerebus (Vol. 1) and High Society

will probably also finish Stephen King's On Writing and Salinger's Nine Stories by the end of the year.

I read 22 books this year, thats the most ive ever read in a year

michel foucault - discipline and punish: the birth of the prison
andre bazin - what is cinema vol. 1
anne enright - the gathering
glenn paterson - the mill for grinding old people young
margaret atwood - the edible woman, lady oracle, the handmaids tale, alias grace
kevin barry - city of bohane
claire keegan - foster
douglas coupland - life after god
philip k dick - the man in the high castle
joan didion - play it as it lays
don delillo - white noise
ruth barton - irish national cinema
peter cowie - revolution! the explosion of world cinema in the 60s
voltaire - candide
gayatri spivak - righting wrongs
walter benjamin - illuminations: essays and reflections
peter balakian - black dog of fate
antjie krog - country of my skull
adorno/benjamin/bloch/brecht/lukacs - aesthetics and politics

If I get David Byrne's finished I will make eight for the year, which will be the lowest I can remember. I think I might've had a period of not reading when I was at school or university; if I did that's the only thing that'll keep this year from being the lowest ever.

On the other hand, there's not a dud among them. I'd be happy with that any year. In order from best to least-best:

1. Victor Klemperer: I Will Bear Witness 1942-45
2. Victor Klemperer: I Will Bear Witness 1933-41
3. Max Hastings: All Hell Let Loose
4. Ian Kershaw: The End
5. Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch
6. David Byrne: How Music Works
7. Kevin Sampson: Awaydays
8. Bill Buford: Among The Thugs

kevin powers, "the yellow birds"
herman melville, "bartleby the scrivener"
sonali deraniyagala, "wave"
john jeremiah sullivan, "pulphead"
junot diaz, "the brief wondrous life of oscar wao"
muriel spark, "the prime of miss jean brodie"
junichiro tanizaki, "in praise of shadows"
cees nooteboom, "in the dutch mountains"
samuel delany, "babel-17"
tarjei vesaas, "the ice palace"
john jeremiah sullivan, "blood horses"
barbara comyns, "who was changed and who was dead"
j.m. coetzee, "disgrace"
tove jansson, "moominvalley in midwinter"
james hogg, "the private memoirs & confessions of a justified sinner"
alice munro, "open secrets"
tom mccarthy, "remainder"
hilary mantel, "wolf hall"

gustave flaubert, "madame bovary"

Lots of George Eliot. I reread Middlemarch, then read Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Romola over the course of the year, all for the first time. She's amazing.

Some great horror fiction. "The White People" by Machen totally blew me away. Suzy McKee Charnas's Vampire Tapestry was amazing. More recent stuff: The House is on Fire, The Children All Gone by Stefan Kisbye, Something Red by Douglas Nicholas, and The White Forest by Adam McOmber. Bits of Lovecraft, Poe, and Blackwood.

Tom Jones and Vanity Fair, both of which took forever but which I'm glad I did.

Rereads of The Line of Beauty, Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, The Hobbit, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence.

The Your House is on Fire, The Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kisbye Kiesbye

Got that one totally wrong.

Earthly Powers by Burgess was another large one. I wasn't that into it though.

Some books that I started but did not finish.

Small World, by David Lodge. I found something about his whole vibe off-putting in Changing Places (a campus milieu is always gonna be slightly off-putting). I quit when he introduced a stack of new characters halfway through Small World.

Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erickson. Way too many characters all at once, everything much too rushed. I've heard that Malazan comes together really well in the next couple volumes, but there's too much else to read.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. This is fantastic, but I lost focus and eventually returned it. I did put it on an Xmas list, so maybe I'll be resuming it soon.

Trying to remember, and in the process reliving a pretty intense year. No time for books, apparently.

Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies.

The only other two I remember are Wodehouse "Jeeves in the Morning" and a local author, John Lawrence Reynolds, whose mystery "Beach Strip" was quite good.

I have loads of unread books from the past few years of birthdays/christmases so I want to try to make 2014 the year I make time for reading again.

Somehow I forgot to mention The Code of the Woosters on any of the WAYR threads, but I read it a couple of months ago.

i started the division of labor

in society

27 books finished this year, which is quite pleasing. In chronological order:

1. J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories Volume 1
2. Georges Simenon: Dirty Snow
3. Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
4. Jon McGregor: Even The Dogs
5. Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
6. Henry Green: Loving
7. PG Wodehouse: The Code of The Woosters
8. Laurent Binet: HHhH
9. Michel Faber: Under the Skin
10. Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin
11. Michel Faber: Some Rain Must Fall
12. Graham Greene: Our Man In Havana
13. JG Ballard: The Complete Short Stories Volume 2
14. John Lanchester: Capital
15. William Golding: Lord of the Flies
16. Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives
17. Donald Barthelme: Forty Stories
18. David Malouf: Remembering Babylon
19. Chelsea Cain: Heartsick
20. Muriel Spark: The Abbess of Crewe
21. Muriel Spark: The Girls of Slender Means
22. Jonas Jonasson: The Hundred Year Old Man Who oh for fuck sake who cares
23. Shena Mackay: Heligoland
24. Bruce Chatwin: The Viceroy of Ouidah
25. Gore Vidal: Messiah
26. Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude
27. Wells Tower: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Difficult to pick a favourite, but the worst three of the year is easy: Capital (dreary and uninspired), Heartsick (dreary and uninspired) and The Hundred Year Old Man… (smug and unfunny).

How do you keep track? Do you keep a list/reading diary, or do you just remember what you've read?

I can remember about the last 6 books I've read (mostly because they're sitting either on my bedside table or on top of the bookshelf waiting to reach their level) but before that they all kind of merge into one another.

Going to go through the book pile and give it a try.

Working backwards:

Harry Mount - How England Made The English
Kathleen Jamie - Sightlines
Robert Macfarlane - The Wild Places
Kristin Hersh - Paradoxical Undressing
Daphne Du Maurier - The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte
Susan Cooper - The Dark Is Rising
Margot Livesey - The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Jonathan Smith - Summer In February
C.S. Lewis - Studies In Words
Carl Watkins - The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among The Dead
Rhian E Jones - Clampdown
Wella Brown - Skeul an Yeth
Judith Schalansky - Pocket Atlas Of Remote Islands
...

OK, that's as far back as about July, which makes me *know* there are at least that many books again. But before that is the sea of poor memory where I can't remember if I read something in the spring, or the previous autumn. There's a combination of "things near the top of my bookshelf, but did I read the Gavin de Becker, Michael Sandel and Elizabeth Abbott this year, or just get them out again to consult something" and "things I got out of the library, so I know that I have read the Popol Vuh, a book on hermetical alchemy and a collection of Borges within living memory, but was that this year, or last?" And then there are things I have got out of the library but clearly were not memorable (I wouldn't remember that execrable Jonathan Smith if I hadn't read it on holiday... but what did I read on holiday in April? It's gone.)

Why is my memory so poor. Why. New years' resolution: keep a list of books I've read.

I keep track on goodreads.com, it's the easiest way. Plus, I've gotten some good suggestions from browsing friends' books. I read 53 books this year. Here they are, via the Destiny's Child rating system:

Erwin W. Lutzer - Hitler's Cross
David Rakoff - Fraud
Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
John Quiggin - Zombie Economics
James F. Simon - FDR and Chief Justice Hughes
Jacinto Benavente - Four Plays
David Bayles & Ted Orland - Art & Fear
Italo Calvino - The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Sign of the Four
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Pär Lagerkvist - Barabbas
Ken Jennings - Brainiac
Christoper M. Andrew - For the President's Eyes Only
GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
Christopher Winn - I Never Knew That About Wales
Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Seance and Other Stories
Leonard Mlodinow - The Drunkard's Walk
Lemony Snicket - Who Could That Be At This Hour?
Mo Yan - Pow!
Peter F. Hamilton - Judas Unchained
Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling On Happiness
Richard Brautigan - A Confederate General from Big Sur
Suzanne Collins - Mockingjay
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Italo Calvino - The Baron in the Trees
Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Jane Austen - Sense & Sensibility
Stephen King - Night Shift
David M. Potter - The Impending Crisis
Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
Edna Ferber - So Big
China Miéville - The City & The City
Horace McCoy - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Edwin A. Abbott & Ian Stewart - The Annotated Flatland
Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
Ivan Bunin - The Gentleman from San Francisco
Graham Greene - The Power & The Glory
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Barbara W. Tuchman - The Guns of August
Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind
Harry Martinson - Aniara
Mo Yan - Life & Death Are Wearing Me Out
Primo Levi - The Periodic Table
Russell S. Bonds - War Like the Thunderbolt
Victor Mollo - Bridge in the Menagerie
Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Raymond E. Brown - 101 Questions And Answers on the Bible
Rudolf Christoph Eucken - Can We Still Be Christians?

Haha, these are not via the Destiny's Child rating system, I copied that from a Facebook post I made.

26. Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude

Loved this, so amazing.

Off the top of my head:

Joyce Carol Oates – Blonde
George Saunders – Tenth of December
Lorrie Moore – Birds of America
Phillip K Dick - Ubik
Nicolas Royle – First Novel
Richard Price – Lush Life
James Joyce – Ulysses (reread)
Karen Russell – Vampires In The Lemon Grove
BS Johnson – The Unfortunates
Roberto Bolano – The Third Reich
John Lanchester - Capital
Wells Tower – Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Joanna Kavenna – Come To The Edge
John Banville – The Sea
Peter Carey – The Chemistry of Tears
Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers
Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse
Kevin Powers – The Yellow Birds
Nicole Krauss – Great House
Adam Thirlwell – Kapow!
Samuel Beckett – Molloy
John Cheever – The Wapshot Chronicle
JG Ballard – The Drowned World
David Foster Wallace – Oblivion
Lydia Davis – Almost No Memory
Richard Farina – Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Thomas Pynchon – Bleeding Edge
Iris Murdoch – The Black Prince
Dashiell Hammet – The Thin Man
Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise
Norman Mailer – The Naked And The Dead
Richard Ford - Canada

Forgot to mention Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon, which I read because of a post in the Cocteaus poll. This was a beautiful book.

Frank Herbert. Whipping Star.
A.J. Ayer. Language, Truth, and Logic.
Ben Rogers. A. J. Ayer: a life.
Mikhail Bulgakov. A Country Doctor’s Notebook.
Djuna Barnes. Nightwood.
John Adlard (ed.); John Wilmot, Lord Rochester &c. The Debt to Pleasure.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Devils.
.. Call of Cthulhu: Delta Green.
Anne Carson. Euripides: Grief Lessons.
Greg Stolze, &c. Unknown Armies: One Shots.
W.M. Thackeray. Vanity Fair.
Michael Chabon. Telegraph Avenue.
A.M. Homes. May We Be Forgiven.
Roberto Bolano. Monsieur Pain.
Roberto Bolano. The Skating Rink.
Ernest Cline. Ready Player One.
Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses.
Simon Reynolds. Retromania.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Poor Folk.
Sigismund Krzhanovzky. Memories of the Future.
Dino Buzatti. Poem Strip.
Sigismund Kzhizanovsky. The Letter Killers Club.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead.
John Jones. Dostoyevsky.
Michael Robbins. Alien vs Predator.
Sheila Heti. How Should a Person Be? .
George Saunders. Tenth of .
Frederick Seidel. Evening Man.
Frederick Seidel. Ooga-Booga.
Andrey Platonov. Happy Moscow, etc.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot.
Dennis Cooper, Guide.
Philippe-Paul de Ségur. Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign.
Alex Forman. Tall, Slim, and Erect: Portraits of the Presidents.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace.
Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash.
Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age.
Peter Whigham. (?) The Poems of Catullus.
Brandon Brown. The Poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus.
Fanny Burney. Evelina.
Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White.
Hanif Kureshi. The Buddha of Suburbia.
various. Marooned.
Catherine Storr. Marianne Dreams.
Javier Marias. While the Women are Sleeping.
Bob Shaw. Shadow of Heaven.
Bob Shaw. Orbitsville.
Robert Lowell. Life Studies.
Dominic Sandbrook. Seasons in the Sun.
George Orwell. Inside the Whale.
JUNE
Young-Ha Kim. Your Republic is Calling You.
Young-Ha Kim. I have the Right To Destroy Myself.
Hans Fallada. (vol. of two short stories I forget the title of and don’t care to check).
The Marquis de Sade. 120 Days of Sodom.
John Phillips. A Very Short Introduction to de Sade.
Georges Bataille. Story of the Eye.
Stephen King. Joyland.
Tao Lin. Taipei.
David Berman. Actual Air.
Ernest Hemingway. Fiesta: the sun also rises.
John Phillips. How to read Sade.
Rachel Kushner. The Flamethrowers.
Ernest Hemingway. A Moveable Feast.
Muriel Spark. The Driver’s Seat.
Edward St Aubyn. Never Mind.
Edward St Aubyn. Bad News.
Edward St Aubyn. Some Hope.
Ernest Hemingway. The Garden of Eden.
Edward St Aubyn. Mother’s Milk.
Edward St Aubyn. At Last.
Renata Adler. Speedboat.
SEPTEMBER
Simon Raven. The Rich Pay Late.
Simon Raven. Friends in Low Places.
Jonathan Dee. The Privileges.
Joan Smith. Misogynies.
Simon Raven. The Sabre Squadron.
Simon Raven. Fielding Gray.
Tao Lin. Eeeee Eee Eeee.
Thomas Pynchon. Bleeding Edge.
Ben Lerner. Leaving the Atocha Station.
Introducing Rousseau.
Jake Adelstein. Tokyo Vice.
Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides.
Simon Raven.
Susie Orbach. Fat is a Feminist Issue.
Simon Raven. Places Where They Sing.
Stephen Potter. The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship.
Simon Raven. Sound the Retreat.
Barbara Ehrenreich. Nickel and Dimed.
Simon Raven. Come Like Shadows.
Jonathan Dee. A Thousand Pardons.
Simon Raven. Bring Forth the Body.
Simon Raven. The Survivors.
Margaret Drabble. The Garrick Year.
Stephen King. Doctor Sleep.
Randall Jarrell. Poetry and the Age.
Thomas Harris. Red Dragon.
Thomas Harris. The Silence of the Lambs.
Stephen King. Full Dark, No Stars.
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Life of Alan Turing.
Renata Adler. Pitch Dark.
Muriel Spark. Memento Mori.
Muriel Spark. The Go-Away Bird, and other stories.
Gavin Maxwell. Ring of Bright Water.
Howard Sounes. Seventies.
Muriel Spark. Bang-bang you’re dead.
Muriel Spark. A Far Cry from Kensington.
Jay Anson. The Amityville Horror.

beat that, James Morrison

Nicolas Royle – First Novel
How's this? I really dug _Quilt_, though I really didn't understand it. All those "ray" pages! And the afterword that made it obvious that this dude's a lit professor. Do look forward to revisiting it, since it has a central image that I keep thinking about.

I hadn't heard of the Turing bio -- just ordered it through interlibrary-loan, thanks!

jesus, thom p

oystein i think it's pretty bad, i suspect the big one it's borrowing most of its research from is better

Thanks for the warning. I didn't really read up on it, but I see now that _Alan Turing: The Enigma_ might be a better choice. No luck finding a library that has it though.

Turns out there are two Nicholas Royles! Apparently mine mostly writes books about Derrida etc. Uh, I guess I'm glad I didn't know that before starting _Quilt_ or it would've scared me the hell away. Similar facts have made me leery of picking up S .D. Chrostowska's _Permission_, which sounds somewhat enticing.

did you like pitch dark?

Dave Cullen - Columbine
David Foster Wallace - The Pale King
Proust - The Guermantes Way
Jon Meacham - Jefferson: The Art of Power
Stevenson - The Master of Ballentrae
Thornton Wilder - The Eighth Day
Thornton Wilder - Heaven's My Destination
Thornton Wilder - The Cabala
Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Armistead Maupin - Sure of You
James Wilcox - Polite Sex
Zizek - In Defense of Lost Causes
Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in a Castle
Robert Remini - The Election of Andrew Jackson
Jeffrey Frank - Ike & Dick
Garry Wills - A Necessary Evil
David L. Roll - The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler
Wodehouse - Jeeves in the Offing
Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins
Edmund White - The Flaneur
Amity Shlaes - Coolidge
Ira Katznelson - Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Saul Bellow - Dangling Man
Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song
George Packer - The Unraveling
Richard Breitman - FDR and the Jews
Harold Nicolson - The Congress of Vienna
Evan Thomas - Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World
Kingsley Amis - One Fat Englishman
Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It All Away
Brad Gooch - Flannery
Thomas Hardy - Two in a Tower
Edmund White - Hotel de Love
Marie Arana - Bolivar
Glenway Westcott - Apartment in Athens
Jonathan Alter - The Center Holds
Guy de Maupassant - Pierre and Jean
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
A. Scott Berg - Wilson
Lynne Olson - Those Angry Days
Anthony Trollope - The Way We Live Now
Henry Janes - The Reverberator (reread)
Barney Hoskyns - Hotel California
Albert Murray - South To a Very Old Place
Tony Judt - Postwar
Anthony Trollope - An Eye for an Eye
Tracy Letts - August: Osage County
Jean Edward Smith - John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
J.M. Coetzee - The Childhood of Jesus
Elmore Leonard - Be Cool
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Tombs of Atuan
Robert G. Kaiser - Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall
Mary Dudziak - Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
Gary May - Bending Towards Justice
Willa Cather - O Pioneers!
Peter Ackroyd - The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Margaret MacMillan - The War That Ended The Peace
Douglas Murray - Bosie

Reviewed a lot of'em here: http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/tag/books/

thomp, u shd read more internet

Christopher Isherwood / Goodbye to Berlin
David Harvey / A Brief History of Neoliberalism
E.M. Forster / Maurice
Jacques Derrida / The Politics of Friendship
William Wordsworth / The Prelude
Ben Lerner / Leaving the Atocha Station
George Saunders / Tenth of December
Kenneth Goldsmith / Uncreative Writing
Eric Hobsbawm / The Age of Empire: 1875-1914
Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Interesting, Zany
Jenny Boully / The Body: An Essay
Eric Hobsbawm / The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991
Eric Hobsbawm / The Age of Capital: 1848-1875
Hal Foster / Design and Crime
Samuel R. Delany / Dhalgren
Chris Ware / Building Stories
Eric Hobsbawm / The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848
Aldous Huxley / Brave New World
Herbert Marcuse / Eros and Civilization
Marshall McLuhan / The Medium is the Massage
Sigmund Freud / Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Ezra Pound / Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI
Dave Sim / Cerebus, Book 2: High Society
Alejandro Zambra / Ways of Going Home
Benedict Anderson / Imagined Communities
Jacques Rancière / Aisthesis
McKenzie Wark / The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro / Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic
Raoul Vaneigem / The Revolution of Everyday Life
Rachel Kushner / The Flamethrowers
Jacques Rancière / Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics
Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Ernst Fischer / The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach
Stendhal / The Red and the Black
Paul Virilio / The Art of the Motor
William H. Gass / Omensetter’s Luck
Amélie Nothomb / Hygiene and the Assassin
Jean-Paul Sartre / We Have Only This Life to Live: Selected Essays 1939-1975
Fredric Jameson / The Antinomies of Realism
Karl Ove Knausgaard / My Struggle (Book I)
Peter Osborne / Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art
Ludwig Wittgenstein / Philosophical Investigations
Kenneth Burke / Counter-Statement
John Jeremiah Sullivan / Pulphead
Julia Kristeva / Desire in Language
Cyril Connolly / The Unquiet Grave: A Word-Cycle by Palinurus
Thomas Pynchon / Bleeding Edge
Julio Cortazar / We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales
Michel Foucault / The Order of Things
David Mitchell / Cloud Atlas
Roberto Bolaño / Woes of the True Policeman
Lauren Berlant / Cruel Optimism
H.P. Lovecraft / The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
Ernest Hemingway / The Garden of Eden
Kate Zambreno / Heroines

[Stendhal, Delany, and Hobsbawm probably the highlights of the year.]

First Novel isn't particularly worth reading IMO. Fairly ponderously written with a poor twist at the end. Weirdly out of character shoehorning in of references to post-rock bands the author likes as well.

beat that, James Morrison

i can--i counted and i read 243 books, and abandoned 10 more

not sure how to get the list into a form i can cut and paste, though, not that anyone needs to scroll down through all that to get to something readable

I read about 100. These are my favourite 50 or so:

Chekhov - The Bishop & Other Stories, The Steppe & Other Stories
Robert Musil - Young Torless
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero Of Our Time
Mikhail Bulgakov - A Country Doctor's Notebook
Stefan Zweig - Confusion (loads of his others too)
Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss (ditto)
Alan Partridge - I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan
Rebecca West - The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night
Antal Szerb - Journey By Moonlight
Penguin Book of English Short Stories
Henry Handel Richardson - The Getting of Wisdom
Isbael Colegate - The Shooting Party
Willa Cather - My Antonia, A Lost Lady
DH Lawrence - The Rainbow
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome
Elizabeth Gaskell - Cranford
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O & Other Stories
Georges Simenon - Act of Passion
Turgenev - First Love & Fire At Sea
W Somerset Maugham - Collected Short Stories Vol 1, The Summing Up
James Thurber - The Thurber Carnival
Madeleine Bunting - The Plot
Paul Fussell - The Great War and Modern Memory
Arthur Koestler - The Sleepwalkers
C G Jung - Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Dorothy Strachey - Olivia
Harold Nicolson - Good Behaviour
John Meade Falkner - The Nebuly Coat
Patrick Hamilton - Craven House (re-read)
The Lettters of Vincent Van Gogh
Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
Stephen Benatar - Wish Her Safe at Home
J R Ackerley - We Think The World of You, My Dog Tulip
Theophile Gautier - Mademoiselle de Maupin
Joanna Canaan - High Table
W H Davies - The Autobiography of a Supertramp
Walter de la Mare - Stories, Poems & Essays
Mary Webb - Precious Bane
Guy de Maupassant - Notre Coeur, Yvette & Other Stories
James Hanley - Boy
Jeremias Gotthelf - The Black Spider

I've been mostly re-reading (off the top of my head) all the old favourites: GR, MwQ, The Prisoner and the Fugitive, The Moon and the Bonfires, Journey to the End of the Night, Old Masters, Journey by Moonlight, The Adventures of Szindbad, The Foundation Pit and most of 2666. So much joy to me in most of this.

Really biggest disappointment has been me + books by new authors - reading something like Malaparte's Kaputt, a book I would've devoured "back in the day" was just half-read. otoh Knausgaard's My Struggle I found in retrospect offensive -- in its casually tossed off manner -- but who knows once the cycle is translated (and I might be alive enough to read it in 2018) it ends up to be the "substantial work of our time" lol.

The only book that gave me any joy for the future that I hadn't seen before was Kosztolanyi's Skylark.

Lots of George Eliot. I reread Middlemarch, then read Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Romola over the course of the year, all for the first time. She's amazing.

Terrific I envy you as Eliot is one of the few authors I've not read anything by that I'm interested in.

thomp - what did you think of Sodom in the end?

The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrell

Aimless, what did you think? The poem falls apart somewhere in "Mirabell" but, man, Merrill is a poet of amazing dexterity and lightness -- the best of the last fifty years imo

Dorothy Strachey - Olivia

Cool, I loved this book.

At least one goal for 2014 is to get through Richardson's Clarissa. I'm about 150 pages in, and it's wonderful when I'm properly in the zone, like a Jane Austen plot magnified down to the smallest details.

xps 243 is absurd. Are bedtime stories included, because otherwise...

Randall Sullivan - Untouchable: The Strange Life & Tragic Death of Michael Jackson
Julian Barnes - Through The Window: Seventeen Essays and One Short Story
Julian Barnes - Levels of Life
George V Higgins - Trust
George V Higgins - The Judgement of Deke Hunter
George V Higgins - Outlaws
George V Higgins - Bomber's Law
George V Higgins - Kennedy for the Defense
George V Higgins - Penance for Jerry Kennedy
George V Higgins - Defending Billy Ryan
George V Higgins - Imposters
George V Higgins - The Patriot Game
George V Higgins - The Rat On Fire
Sergio Esposito - Passion on the Vine
Lawrence Wright - Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Jeffrey Frank: Ike & Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Jonathan Mahler - Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning
Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind
Edward St. Aubyn - Bad News
Edward St. Aubyn - Some Hope
Edward St. Aubyn - Mother's Milk
Edward St. Aubyn - At Last
Michael Connelly - The Black Box
David Foster Wallace - Both Flesh & Not
Richard Hell - I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp
James Mann - The Obamaians
William Manchester & Paul Reid - The Last Lion
Christian Caryl - Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
John Le Carre - The Little Drummer Girl
Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings
Christopher Isherwood - The Berlin Stories
Gregor Von Rezzori - Memoir of an Anti-Semite
George Packer - The Unwinding
Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life
Steve Miller - Detroit Rock City
Simon Winchester - The Men Who United the States
George Pelecanos - What It Was
George Pelecanos - The Double
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Dream of the Celt
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller
Charles Willeford - The Shark-Infested Custard

Edward St. Aubyn must be really good then?

yeah v good but maybe not great. time will tell. first and last of the series were best imo, but they're all short (almost novella length) and breezy/readable

hmm like nabakov my taste in authors is "exclusively homosexual" well in 2013 anyway

Unless people here are in an Edward St Aubyn book club, I'm not sure I understand the binges. Then again I've only read Mother's Milk and it would take a lot to convince me to go back to him after that.

I assume most folks are just reading the omnibus that came out last year. Makes sense to read it in one go, as all of the novels are quite short.

I'm curious because he's of the St Michael's Mount St Aubyns, isn't he? But not curious enough to read a book.

oh THOSE st aubyns ;)

xxp: mothers milk is unrepresentative in many respects and by far worst of the lot i'd say, preciously told from toddler's perspective

preciously told from toddler's perspective

I found this baffling. That first paragraph... this is supposed to be articulating an infant's perspective?

The second and third books were good, I thought. His talent is verbal precision, which in his case comes out better in comedy. When he tries to philosophize and/or skewer philosophers it's bad.

The bits that weren't baffling toddler perspective were just pages and pages of dreadful self-involved rich people fucking each other over, but not as entertaining as that sounds.

any standouts from those george v higgins?

i read diggers game & eddie coyle near the beginning of last year then kindof forgot abt them/him

diggers game and eddie coyle are probably his best, dg was my favorite overall. trust is oddly compelling and convoluted, outlaws stands out too by following the prosecution of a 60s radical bombing crew over several decades, a slight departure from higgins usual new england lowlife crime/legal milieu. the jerry kennedy books are a decent series about a low rent borderline-unscrupulous lawyer (possibly the model for michael connelly's "limousine lawyer"). what compelled me to read all of higgins is his unique dialogue-based style but this is also his undoing. in the 1990s his books became too discursive, just one pointless digression after another, reading like legal depositions. higgin's last book, at end of day, redeems his approach. it's a fictionalized telling of the whitey bulger saga.

Aimless, what did you think?

The poetry itself is of a high order, even rising to the lyrical upon occasion (nb: any poem of great length cannot possibly sustain lyricism throughout and it shouldn't even be attempted imo). That is what kept me reading it to the end. Or, that, and a doggedness to finish what I'd already put so much time into (aka 'the sunk cost fallacy').

As one progresses deeper into the poem, Merrell spends more and more of his attention explaining all the incidental details of his version of the afterlife, which sadly is nowhere near as rich in symbol and substance as Dante's and from the start to the end of the poem alters so much as to make his 'heaven' fairly incoherent. I was saddened upon ending the poem, less because I would miss the poetry, and more because so much talent had been poured into something that embodied so much delusion.

i didnt keep track of stuff i reread which was a lot of junky fantasy stuff and then a bunch of russians depending on my mood and the weather. new or new to me in '13:

adler - speedboat, pitch dark
azuchi - supermarket
aira - varamo, miracle cures, the hare
baker - cassandara at the wedding
brett - daylight war
cossery - laziness in the fertile valley
erens - the virgins
ferrante - days of abandonment, my brilliant friend, story of a new name
hair - mage's blood
kay - river of stars
knausgaard - my struggle vol.1, vol. 2
krasznahorkai - seiobo three below
kushner - the flamethrowers
lin - type a
leys - the hall of uselessness
lloyd - the dusk watchman
lynch - the republic of thieves
marías - infatuations
messud - the woman upstairs
miéville - the city & the city, kraken
parker - the company, the folding knife
pynchon - bleeding edge
reck - diary of a man in despair
redick - the night of the swarm
sanderson - a memory of light, magical western
sicha - very recent history
tregillis - necessary evil
waldman - the love affairs of nathaniel p.
wescott- the pilgrim hawk
wexler - the thousand names

lamp what is ur ~take~ on adler? and is the new marias as good as i'd want it to be if i read it?

also how did u feel about how redick wound his series up

-

i think the best bits of 'mother's milk' exist in dialogue with the trilogy proper. it suffers a lot in comparison in that the trilogy proper are the autobiographical project of a man who realises he is a cunt but m's m the autobiographical project of a man who appears not to. though the thrust of the final one, in which melrose realises it's Finally Okay to blame his mother for everything, beggars belief. that one is really definitely not a good book by any means; i'd defend the first four on various grounds. i think melrose is mb better at doing philosophy than ppl give him credit for.

-

xyz: i think i posted about sodom a little bit here? i forget. it's one of my favourite things i read this year, 'the devils' is the only thing doing a remotely similar project i think better. but then i don't know how many books i read this year that where doing the thing where a massive novel attempts to delineate or include a world. like i guess in terms of short books spark's 'memento mori' and the krzhanovzky i wasn't rereading and simon raven's 'sound the retreat' and i don't want to admit it on some level but tao lin are all things i found p remarkable.

but sodom, right -- it's really interesting in terms of arbitrary construction as a thing for a novelist to work around, in ways which seems in places to call up both the new novel and the oulipo -- the nominal meat of the story is the five tales being told a day to the four protagonists, everything happening around this in both nominally naturalistic ways and ways which seem near-metafictional. (it probably benefits from being 'unfinished' a lot.) it seems to embody some interesting thoughts about sex and other minds, though i don't think these thoughts are identical with the attitudes the protagonists are given to profess. -- the bits that are interesting in terms of structural conceit seem to work well at bringing out aspects of The Book's Themes And What It Is About. i am hesitant about fleshing this account out, really, it doesn't seem very christmassy.

lamp what is ur ~take~ on adler?]

'speedboat' was probably the best book i read this year, although i really liked those ferrante novels, but i felt that sort of spiritual kinship w/ it, with the girl at the centre (not holding) of it that always makes you idealize a book w/o necessarily having read it that 'deeply'. i like the way she very sharply described nothing at all, her way of capturing the space where specifics dissolve into generalities, into vaguer and vaguer impressions of people and places and ideas that wash into other generalities, other impressions. it was 'contradictory', i guess? like i kept thinking of this didion essay, for obvious reasons, the one about being young in new york in the late 60s and how rooted that essay was in details, in meaning-in-retrospect, and how adler was eschewing the biographical somehow? idk really, my ideas on this are suspect. someone somewhere has written the word 'prototwitter' when writing abt this book probably if not than i have now, right here #history

'night of the swarm' was mostly really boring and cynical in an obvious way? genre authors need to let their stories flow a little looser idk, this a trend i am noticing

marias is fantastic but not as [adjective] as 'your face tomorrow'.

i can cope with that. i will read it after all.

i thought night of the swarm was crazy messy. like if that was the set of resolutions he was going for from the beginning it needed to be about three books longer.

i don't know why i didn't feel speedboat so much, other than that i was feeling like shit at the time. i mean i also thought the idiot was sort of 'ok i guess'. when i read pitch dark a couple weeks ago i was thinking "this is really good, it could be excellent if it weren't for x thing and y thing" and realised the book i was postulating was basically speedboat. the irish holiday was great.

also this which was mb the single passage i felt most immediately struck by this year

"When the clouds shift, for one moment, or for several moments, and there is a possibility for action with absolutely no ingredient of reluctance—any action, shopping, playing tennis, getting out of bed—when there is a sense of the capacity to act, without any equal and dialectical incapacity to act, or desire not to, when the urge to move is, for a moment, some moments, freed of the urge to move another way, or not to move at all, or the drag of a rock, a doubt, a paralysis; then it is as though clouds did part, briefly, in a place where the climate is always and always inimical. There are, of course, sadnesses that appear to consist of a stillness heaped upon a stillness, layers of apathy, over a base that is despair and lack of hope. Despair and lack of hope, because lack of hope is by no means incompatible with the cloudless and the free state. … But if the state, the condition, the zone, the tenor of spirit, where no light shines lacks any ingredient either of calm or of expectation, there are also depressions of which the appearance is jaunty, counterdepressive. That is, the degree to which the creature is able to act, or to permit itself to be seen, reflects such a surface play of the energy, which, in its perfect conflict, has brought to the paralysis an almost convulsive force, that the energy appears active, liberated, even cheerful. Analysis has no access to this condition. It poses very radically, however, the question of what it is to be sincere.”

Mccarthy - blood meridian
jose saar - the witness
walser - short stories
di benedetto – zama
proust – vol. 4
Mathias Enard - Zone
Orhan Pamuk - Black Book
Blaise Cendrars – Moravagine
marguerite Yourcenar- Memoirs of Hadrian
Curzio Malaparte – Kaputt
Broken April - Ismail Kadere
65 years of washington - juan jose saer
The Engineer of Human Souls - Josef Škvorecký
Leonardo Sciascia – to each is own + day of the owl
Cortazar – short stories
sabato - the tunnel
arenas - before night falls
sebald - vertigo
Wolfgen Kappen - pigeons in the grass

probably forgot some

i notice i read a lot more non-fic this yr than like ever i recall

george v higgins - diggers game; friends of eddie coyle
richard lloyd parry - people who eat darkness
phil roth - deception; goodbye columbus
amy hempel - collected stories
george saunders - tenth of dec
joan didion - after henry; the white album
demetri martin - this is a book
gordon burn - happy like murderers
edith wharton - summer
peter biskind - star
lipsyte - the fun parts
david gooblar - the major phases of philip roth
barthleme - 60 stories
atul gawande - complications; better
evan hunter - last summer
christopher frankie - nailed!
marilynne robinson - housekeeping
tao lin - taipei
lawrence wright - going clear
maria semple - whered you go bernadette
parmy olson -we are anonymous
updike - self-consciousness
james lasdun - give me everything you have
rachel kushner - the flamethrowers
adelle waldman - the love affairs of nathaniel p
eugenides - the marriage plot
rodney dangerfield - its not easy being me
chris russo - the 100 greatest sport arguments
pynchon - bleeding edge
david grain - the lost city of z
eggers - the circle
salisbury & sujo - provenance: how a con man and a forger rewrote the history or modern art
john williams - stoner
nicholson baker - house of holes
Wilt Chamberlain and David Shaw: Just like any other 7-foot black millionaire who lives next door

no one read the zibaldone yet then? slackers

The Short Stories -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Daisy Miller -- Henry James
Quicksand -- Nella Larsen
Passing -- Nella Larsen
The Public Burning -- Robert Coover
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes -- Anita Loos
Ragtime -- E.L. Doctorow
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan -- Alan Partridge
The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers -- Curtis White
The Book of Daniel -- E.L. Doctorow
American Pastoral -- Philip Roth
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past -- Simon Reynolds
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? -- Horace McCoy
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture -- Jon Savage
In a Lonely Place -- Dorothy B. Hughes
Babbitt -- Sinclair Lewis
Subculture: The Meaning of Style-- Dick Hebdige
The Living End -- Stanley Elkin
More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts -- James Naremore
The Magnificent Ambersons -- Booth Tarkington
The Fifth Child -- Doris Lessing
The Faraway Goodbye -- Rebecca Solnit
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
God Jr. - Dennis Cooper
Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture -- Echols, Alice
The Love of the Last Tycoon -- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
A Confederacy of Dunces -- Toole, John Kennedy
Tarzan of the Apes -- Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Catch 22 -- Heller
Absalom, Absalom - Faulkner
Myra Breckenridge - Gore Vidal
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

xyz: i think i posted about sodom a little bit here? i forget.

You did yeah, just when you picked it up, wondering whether you liked it or not.

Thanks for a few more of yr thoughts on it -- will have a look at it next year.

hey Lamp, how was seiobo there below? abt to crack into satantango, but i hear seiobo is a different kind of thing, maybe more up my alley, a series of sebald-y vignette/meditations that pivot around transfiguring encounters with works of art. something like that? sounds like its in the vein of rings of saturn, and I'd love to read more stuff like that.

here's my thing, as chronological as i can make it. fell in love with ms. mantel this summer.

le guin - left hand of darkness
saunders - tenth of dec
marcel schwob - the book of monelle
sadegh hedayat - the blind owl | three drops of blood
auden - the sea and the mirror (reread)
sebald - the emigrants
denis johnson- angels | train dreams
freud - three case histories
capote - in cold blood
mantel - wolf hall | bring up the bodies | a place of greater safety | the giant, o'brien
luc sante - low life
jack black - you can't win (reread)
donne - selected prose
exley - a fan's notes
art pepper - straight life
king - the stand
steve coll - ghost wars

civilwarland in bad decline - george saunders
the lover - marguerite duras
the swimming-pool library - alan hollinghurst
smilla's sense of snow - peter høeg
oranges are not the only fruit - jeanette winterson
autobiography of red - anne carson
queering anarchism (anthology)
the love of a good woman - alice munro
the summer book - tove jansson
we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson
the wind's twelve quarters - ursula k le guin
the grandmothers - doris lessing
parable of the sower - octavia butler
reasons to live - amy hempel
the summer without men - siri hustvedt
the shawl - cynthia ozick
billy and girl - deborah levy
geography iii - elizabeth bishop
the long tomorrow - leigh brackett
plainwater - anne carson
ami i redundant human being? - mela hartwig
the powerbook - jeanette winterson
the hour of the star - clarice lispector

favorites were probably autobiography of red, the summer book, and we have always lived in the castle

the summer book, and we have always lived in the castle are two of the best books ever, so good call

pff, read the zibaldone, i can't even afford the zibaldone

Thanks for a few more of yr thoughts on it -- will have a look at it next year.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, December 26, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I didn't - roll on '15.

This is what I looked at instead. Some re-reads among this but not too many.

Prose:
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis and Short stories/The Trial/Diaries 1910-1923/Letters to Milena/Letters to Felice
Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina
Elias Canetti - The Voices of Marrakesh/Kafka's Other Trial
Frank Wedekind - Diary of an Erotic Life*
Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance/Leavetaking/Vanishing Point
Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters on Cezanne/Letters to a Young Poet/The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge/
Ernst Juenger - On the Marble Cliffs
Gert Hofmann - The Film Explainer
Georg Buchner - The Complete Plays
Paul Celan/Ingebord Bachmann - Correspondence
Peter Handke - A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Peter Stamm - Seven Years/We're flying
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Other Stories
Arthur Schnitzler - La Ronde and Other Plays/The Green Cockatoo (plus more plays)
Robert Walser - Berlin Stories
Thomas Bernhard - Gathering Evidence/Wittgenstein's Nephew/Concrete
Joseph Roth - The Hundred Days/Antichrist
Carlo Emilio Gadda - Acquainted with Grief
Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask
Marina Tsvetava - A Captive Spirit
Fernando Pessoa - Always Astonished
D.H.Lawrence - (Two Collections of Short Stories)
Cesare Pavese - The Suicides (short story)/The Beach
Miklos Szentkuthy - Marginalia on Casanova
Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt/The Skin
Gyula Krudy - Sunflower
Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods
Louis Ferdinand-Celine - Rigadoon/North/Castle to Castle
Henry Green - Concluding/Doting/Nothing/Pack my Bag
Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmarte
Jocelyn Brooke - Image of a Drawn Sword
Victor Serge - The Conquered City
J.G. Ballard - (vol. of short stories)
Denton Welch - I left my Grandfather's House
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Eugenio Montale - Poet in our Time
Elena Ferrante - My Beautiful Friend/The Story of a New Name/The Lost Daughter/Days of Abandonment
Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook
Elio Vittorini - Women of Messina*
Natsume Soseki - Kokoro/Botchan***
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz - House of Desires
Herman Melville - The Confidence Man: His Masquerade **

Poetry:
Goethe - Roman Elegies and Other Poems and Epigrams
Heinrich Heine - Selected
Friedrich Holderlin - Complete
Paul Celan - Selected
Georg Trakl - Selected
Bertold Brecht - Complete
Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies
Hans Magnus Enzenberger - Mausoleum: 37 Ballads on the History of Progress/Selected (Modern European Poets)
20th Century German Poems on Faber
Marina Tsvetaeva - The Ratcatcher: A lyrical satire
Eugenio Montale - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Salvatore Quasimodo - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Giuseppe Ungaretti - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Miroslav Holub - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Federico Garcia Lorca - Poet in New York
Emily Dickinson - Complete *
Petrarch - Songs & Sonnets
A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Richard Hamer)
Chretien de Troyes - Erec and Enide/Cliges
Paul Verlaine - Selected
Wislawa Szymborska - View with a Grain of Sand
Walt Whitman - A Choice of Whitman's Verse
Osip Mandesltam - Selected Poems
Joseph Brodsky - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Four Greek Poets - Selected (Modern European Poets)
Giacomo Leopardi - Canti
Gerard Manley Hopkins - Selected Poetry
D.H Lawrence - Selected Poetry
Faber book of Italian 20th century poems
Nostradamus - The Prophecies
Kabir - Songs of
Ovid - Heroides
John Donne - Selected
Ezra Pound - Selected Poems and Translations ****

* didn't finish.
** I am on page one of this, should finish.
*** on page fifty, may not finish.
**** Just started, who knows if I'll finish as it has excerpts from 'The Cantos'

Doing this early for '14 because I see the ILM lists countdown and thought about this, and tonight seemed not too depressing to compile something.