What are you planning to read in 2014?

Certainly Dhalgren as part of our group read in mid-Jan.

I want to revisit as much Philip K Dick as I can as well (maybe Mishima, depends how much I acquire on my travels through London's 2nd hand bkshops), re-read another couple of vols of Proust and some Genet.

As for new books I don't know.

The extended Lewisohn Beatles edition is my posh bedside reading, likely for the year.

For portable commuting reads my intention is to get back to pulpy mid-century intrigue, which I forewent this year. So Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and I'm thinking of taking on the Georges Simenon Maigret series as they're reissued. I haven't had the pleasure before, but they sound like they might be worthwhile.

Also I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Jonathan Wilson's The Anatomy of Liverpool.

i was going to try and get a jump on dhalgren to join that group read and i literally made it like 12 pages..

started reading gilead instead

more poetry, more philosophy, less unfinished things, more criticism, something not in english

get the 'current reading' pile down to less than three items

get the 'sort of half-abandoned once-current reading' pile down to less than, say, twenty

'mein kampf' and 'the kills' from everyone's best of '13 lists

the collected geoffrey hill from absolutely no-one's best of '13 list that i have for some reason bought from amazon

piss i don't know if i'll have a chance to pick up my copy of dhalgren from my parents' before mid jan

a couple of books i bought last week, nothing much else planned

Gormenghast, I think. Never read it before, looks awesome.

more poetry, more philosophy, less unfinished things, more criticism, something not in english

i am a very slow, promiscuous reader, so don't really cruise the what are you reading threads a lot, but i read a bunch of, & always more, poetry, & i wondered if anybody would post in a What Poetry Are You Reading thread. maybe because it would be easier to cruise receptively, instead of feeling like i should read these novels & then not.

i'm reading david antin right now, i hope in 2014 i'll read more david antin.

I would post in a 'What Poetry Are You Reading' thread!

so would i!

! ! what poetry are you reading ! !

i wrote something about the david antin book but please do just post the names or the text of poems you are reading & we can see if any of us can overlap at all.

Gormenghast is that weird phenomenon: the trilogy where the middle book is actually the best. (This might be another thread.)

Things I have lined up to read: aforementioned Robert Graves, the KLF book, and I somehow have to get Anne Bronte's Tenant finished before the poll closes, oops.

There was another writer that Fizz told me to read this year but of course I have forgotten who it was, because: ale.

mainly hoping to get through all the novels i've bought in the last year and haven't gotten around to. first up is julian barnes's 'a history of the world in 10½ chapters.' also hoping to tackle at least one of the several multi-volume civil war histories i own (foote, nevins).

Monk's biography of Oppenheimer (which I've been staring at since summer).

the collected geoffrey hill from absolutely no-one's best of '13 list

Well, it isn't out yet, so it shouldn't be.

last year one of my resolutions was to read more books by women writers, so i guess i will continue that since it's been pretty successful. reading the flamethrowers right now, got some maxine hong kinston

gormenghast is great. never made it through titus alone, though

Am planning to read short books. Lots of short books. And Eric Hobsbawm.

in the fall i made a little schedule of monthly reading goals, up through spring

i might have met one of several so far. : /

so i guess i will try to salvage what i can of that - philosophy stuff basically, hadot, foucault, mulhall.

would like to finish some novels this year, we'll see.

word yeah ive been meaning to read hobsbaum too

Monk's biography of Oppenheimer (which I've been staring at since summer).

I've been picking my way through this, sporadically. I'm not so keen on Monk as a writer; hopefully he is a stronger historian.

I think I've been saying this for the last five years at least, but I'm hoping to read about economics (at various levels, from various angles, but not the really technical writing which is beyond my mathematical abilities for now). I'd like to get to the point where I am much more comfortable with economic concepts, especially as related to investment banking and monetary policy. On my reading shelf now: Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies.

Also interested in starting to read (very broadly) about WWII and the Holocaust, but I won't be able to get far with this if I am reading as much about economics as I hope to be. (This would probably mean reading about WWI, as well, which will probably lead to wanting to go further back.)

I wouldn't mind if I get a little sidetracked by taking in a broader view of what's available on intel. agency history and activities (from the well documented to more dubious accounts by individual insiders). On my shelf now: NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe.

But any of these could be life-long study programs.

I wish I thought I had time to read philosophy. I am a slow reader to begin with, and health problems have sapped my energy and made it more difficult to concentrate.

I have to finish Moby Dick and Stephen King's On Writing.

My New Year's resolution is to read more non-fiction.

Tentative reading list:

Delany - Dhalgren
Hitchcock/Truffaut
Perlstein - Nixonland
Feldman - Give My Regards to Eighth Street
Pearl - Causality -- a math textbook with some philosophy
more of the Bible. All of the Gospels, at least.

(Or I may just keep re-loading the pages of the same couple dozen websites, sometimes including this one.)

Yet again I plan to read A Man Without Qualities, as I have meant to for the last 2 years

Gonna start my 2014 reading with...Tao Lin's Taipei tonight. Genuinely excited.

economic concepts, especially as related to investment banking and monetary policy

I recommend Denninger's Leverage.

Yet again I plan to read A Man Without Qualities, as I have meant to for the last 2 years

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Wednesday, January 1, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you manage to finish and another 200+ bks I'll be genuinely impressed ;-)

how many do you get to add to your count if you read vol. 1 and vol. 2 AND the supplementary materials?

i think that's the book i have spent longest reading, though at the moment delany's 'through the valley of the nest of spiders' (15mo+) is drawing closer and closer

My plans are always easily abandoned for any shiny object, but I currently have How Music Works, Byrne's book, on hold at my library, so I apparently hope to read it.

Already purchased and on my shelf there are several others I expect to read:

Parade's End, Ford
The Savage Detectives, Bolano
The Three Musketeers, Dumas

Also, I got a couple of books for Christmas as gifts, and I am not so poltroonish as to fail to read them:

Life Among Giants, Roorbach
Scatter, Adapt and Remember, Newitz

Started on Taipei last night after ~1.5 weed biscuits...boy, he's really going for it with this one isn't he? Not sure if I'll enjoy every single emotion taking half a page to be described but it feels like a huge step up from Richard Yates' intentional affectless style (and I loved that novel).

I would like to read more biographies. Any good recommendations? I really enjoyed The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography.

some sort of genius: a life of wyndham lewis by paul o'keefe is quite thorough if you want to read up on an almost wholly unlikeable individual (if occasionally great writer/painter)

a couple i've only dipped into so far: bello's biography of perec and in extremis: the life of laura riding (see above re: unlikeable individuals) by deborah baker

there's also a biography of oscar wilde's niece dolly which i found fascinating. covers the intricacies and rivalries of early 20th century parisian based lesbian artists, natalie barney, djuna barnes, gertrude stein, etc

forgot probably one of the best biographies i've read... like a fiery elephant: the story of b.s. johnson by jonathan coe (now if only i could get it back from the person who gave it to me in the first place)

left me wondering if anyone's written a decent (or any) biography of anna kavan?

wow at naomi mitchison's letter at the end of this lrb piece on the riding biography:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v16/n05/jenny-turner/lauraphobia

Argh @ "here is a quarter of the article, subscribe to read the rest..." trick. I'd almost rather be shown none. I suppose that's the point.

A biography recommendation for Jacob Sanders: The Devil Drives by Fawn M Brodie about Sir Richard Burton, 19th Century explorer, linguist and all round colossus.

Some books I'm hoping to read this year:

William James - Varieties of Religious Experience
Winston Churchill - My Early Life
William Roughead - Classic Crimes
Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience
Walter de la Mare - Desert Islands
Joanna Cannan - Princes in the Land
Montaigne's Essays

Also intending to read more plays: Ibsen, Chekhov, Moliere...

Thanks guys those all sounds fascinating and right up my alley!

Gormenghast is that weird phenomenon: the trilogy where the middle book is actually the best. (This might be another thread.)

Things I have lined up to read: aforementioned Robert Graves, the KLF book, and I somehow have to get Anne Bronte's Tenant finished before the poll closes, oops.

There was another writer that Fizz told me to read this year but of course I have forgotten who it was, because: ale.

― Branwell Bell, Tuesday, 31 December 2013 18:47 (3 days ago) Bookmark

definitely agree that Gormenghast is the best.

can't for the life of me remember who the writer was (ale). Helen deWitt maybe?

am eyeballing Turgenev for starters this year.

then my backed-up reading list in no order:

City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London - Stephen Inwood
Newton and The Pipes of Pan - McGuire & Rattansi (a paper)
Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715 - Paul Hazard
scarecrow - matthew pritchard
the ancient paths - graham Robb
The Adventures of Szindbad - Gyula Krudy
Engine Summer - Crowley
Civilwarland in Bad Decline - Saunders
Will to Sickness - by Gerhard Roth

Let me know how that Graham Robb book is, because I looked at it in the bookshop and thought "hmmm" (because I've learned to be deeply suspicious of any treatises on "Who The Celts Really Were" beyond a group of languages on the Atlantic rim.)

ok, thanks for the warning. i can't remember why it's on my list, but yes, like you I'm suspicious of that sort of thing (suspicious as in angrily throwing any book with that sort of drift into the corner of my room and not retrieving it).

I am capable of reading books that make me really, really angry (vis a vis the Harry Mount book I suffered through on "The Nature Reader" and that awful awful Victorian book on "The Celts" that had Cornwall and Wales as "negroid" that I ranted about on the race thread) but it's actually the ones that make me slightly eye-rolly in a "this is so close, and yet... no." that make me unable to finish them. I was tempted because it looked almost like a travelogue of interesting long-distance walks of pre-Roman Europe, e.g. pilgrim trails and trade routes of Galician Spain with bits of historicalising in it, rather than A History Book.

I need a better and more recent book of the deep pre-history of the British Isles as is currently conceived, if anyone knows of such a thing?

Because lots of The White Goddess has me going "um, I don't think this considered is true any more?" (e.g. theories of long-headed conquerers who built long barrows which have been proved wishful thinking verging on racist bunkum.) I wish my memory were better.

Sorry. Rambling. :(

The Adventures of Szindbad - Gyula Krudy

I also recommend the film, which is really good in its own right.

I feel i should read more Robertson Davies, i have all the books in the Deptford, Salterton and Cornish trilogies around the flat somewhere but have only read Fifth Business.

Looking forward to Krzhizhanovsky's Autobiography of a Corpse being available in the UK.

Am in the mood to tackle something enormous in the vein of the Alms To Oblivion series but haven't settled on what that might be. May give Powell a crack.

I went through a phrase of loving Robertson Davies! (I had a thing for the "academic quest" genre, which he excels at) but I'm not sure how much my love would survive time and distance.

I feel like giving myself an overarching project to focus my 2014 reading...not sure what though. Do I pick a single author with a hefty catalogue and delve in? Do I pick a genre I've never explored and solicit the cream of the crop and the off curveball? Do I pick a nation in a period of time? HELP ME!

*ODD CURVEBALL

modern caribbean

Of the half dozen Robertson Davies novels I've read, my fondest memories are for The Cunning Man, because of the many deeply embedded references to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Davies' essays are a good place to go, if you just want to stick a toe in and check the waters first.

Got Stephen baxter Omnibus of Xeelee sequence out of library today after reading the Long Earth thing he wrote with Terry pratchett. Wanted to see what his own stuff was like. Not sure if there would be a breakdown to constituent halves in a writing collaboration, I do still enjopy Terry pratchett's own stuff so wanted to see what the partner was like.
Don't know his work so not sure if this is a good place to start.

The rest of David Byrne's How Music Works which I've enjoyed the first couple of chapters of.

Christopher Isherwood picked up Goodbye to Berlin or similar title when looking to fil out a 2 for £5 deal in FOPP. Have been meaning to read him for years, not sure why I haven't. So will hopefully read some other stuff too.

White Heat a book about the 60s.

Bedlam London and its Mad a book I picked up from the library earlier.

Mary Poppins since I don't think I ever have.

I still have a lot of books around taht I've accumulated from sales etc for the last few years. So loads of those.

So there's a start at least.

I need a better and more recent book of the deep pre-history of the British Isles as is currently conceived, if anyone knows of such a thing?

Barry Cunliffe, Britain Begins might be good for this - haven't read it, but from the bits of Europe Between the Oceans I've read he seems good - respected prof who's clear if not lively. He also did the very short introduction to the Celts book, which iirc is free of any 'who the celts really are' taint, & is mostly about languages and the trouble with recovering the complexities of cultural transmission from the archaeological record.

The White Goddess is such a strange book - I've always assumed that he read a few things then just shot off, making stuff up (or 'trusting his instincts') throughout - that it's basically a personal myth book to enable his poetry, closer to Yeats's A Vision than it is to even the shadiest arch/anth of the era. (But I always forget how shady that arch/anth can be.)

as for thread title

same as 2013:

Will probably end up with last year's mix of c17th stuff, The Canon, poetry, ilb recommends, arbitrary non-fiction, greek, the bible,

I ended up v scattershit though, partly because of an iPad entering my life and hundred of books always just being there. Ideally I'd get a bit of focus back: I started drawing up plans last night, just trying to find a line through things. I would like to be very c17th/18th this year.

Just have to finish Ellmann's Wilde.

& Austerity Britain. I should finish Austerity Britain.

Intentions.

scattershit! i like that.

i dont really start the year intending to read stuff - theres a ton of stuff out there i want to read, just play it by ear

Got Stephen baxter Omnibus of Xeelee sequence ... Don't know his work so not sure if this is a good place to start.

It's probably the best place to start--most of his later stuff seems to tie into the same future history that the Xeelee books set up (basically Earth being repeatedly invaded by bigger and weirder aliens, then a massive interstellar war in the far future against photino-based life-forms trying to accelerate entropy, if I remember right)

I don't tend to plan my reading but I'm two volumes into Proust so I would hope to complete that, although probably not in a oner. Probably some critical and biographical stuff related to Proust as well.

I've just started reading Roth Unbound, the new critical bio by Claudia Roth Pierpont.

I have Donna Tartt's Goldfinch and David Eggar's The Circle downloaded on my Kindle which makes it probable but not certain that I'll read them. I'm easily discouraged these days if the first few pages of a novel don't grab me.

It looks like I'll actually finish vol 1 of J.G. Ballard's complete short stories. The early ones at least are all magazine pieces and perfectly readable – totally enthralled here. And they all seem like starting points.

on deck: FDR bio "A Traitor to His Class" and Frederick Pohl's "The Age of the Pussyfoot"

http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2014-book-preview.html

from there - the richard powers, lorrie moore, walter kirn, updike bio, maybe josh ferris, def rivka galchen

tho like half of the books i id'd to read early in 2013 i still haven't gotten to so

cool i'll def read new teju cole

for sure

although seems like it's not quite new?

Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief is an “amalgamation of fiction, memory, art, and travel writing” originally culled from his blog (now removed) about a young Nigerian revisiting Lagos and a version of the book was published in 2007 by Nigeria-based Cassava Republic Press. (Anne)

The Richard Powers and Lorrie Moore I really want. Was very disappointed by Rivka Galchen's novel, so will pass on her stories. The Kirn could be book, though didn't love the one novel of his that I read.

ive never read any by him but that 1 sounds p cool, ive become a true crime semi-junkie

I've already veered from alleged plans, finally getting to The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict, by Richard Griswold del Castillo, before someone recalls it from me (I've had it checked out forever). Among other things, learning more sordid details of my splendid American heritage. In general it's making me more interested in New Mexican, Southwestern, and western history.

Reviewing my shelf of books, looks like I'll have Nobel winners, tons of Holocaust books, and more drama and poetry than I normally go for.

tons of Holocaust books

don't kill yourself!

I'm halfway through Tadeusz Borowski right now and not sure I'm gonna have the stomach for the Primo Levis.

deciding to write St Paul detective novels (see terrible ideas thread) means that I am now completely focused on the bible, early Christianity, ancient history & historical detective fiction for the foreseeable.

I'm no good at planning my reading, usually only getting two books deep before veering off on whatever tangent catches my interest and forgetting all about it.
Still, I'd like to spend a good amount of time with the Icelandic sagas, including the Heimskringla. Also, the eddas.

Tempted by, but haven't decided if I should give _Alms for Oblivion_ a try. I guess I should look for an excerpt.

deciding to write St Paul detective novels (see terrible ideas thread) means that I am now completely focused on the bible, early Christianity, ancient history & historical detective fiction for the foreseeable.

I recommend The Corinthian Body. It's fairly specialized bit it's a really fascinating read.

oh, that sounds great - I listened to his intro to the New Testament lectures on itunes U a couple of years ago, really enjoyed them.

Tempted by, but haven't decided if I should give _Alms for Oblivion_ a try. I guess I should look for an excerpt

Not sure that would necessarily help as the books are quite varied. You can get The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray (the first four novels) in one edition and, to be honest, it's mostly downhill from there.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

for some reason i wanna read tom clancy

you'll soon be cured of that

you think? is it really that bad?

i've read one tom clancy book and it was glorious

like, i read it probably a 12 years ago and still remember tonnes of stuff about it, from the fact that the villain was a reclusive french billionaire video game designer encoding subliminal racist messages into his bestselling platform adventures to the part where a feisty young production assistant cauterizes some cia guys woulds and they banter about film rights to the part where you learn that racism is pretty bad when french people do it

sounds pretty cool. part of the appeal to me is that it's batshit rw cold war military porn

i feel like the period btw the end of the cold war and 9.11 is really fertile ground for tom clancy and fighting nazi billionaires in general

i think the thing with tom clancy is that there are a lot of facts about guns and planes and stuff, like its interesting to know that so many specific types of guns exist to shoot people with

its not as good as the 'facts' that you get from michael crichton novels but yknow

i just realised everything i was going to say about tom clancy i was actually thinking of michael crichton

no, wait: jeffrey archer

i have a copy of congo on my floor, too

I decided I also want to do a little reading around Germanic lit. Like I want to read Kafka (and the Kafka I haven't read like the letters and diaries) and Rilke again but also more of the German poets like Heine/Trakl/Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann (getting Malina as an ILL). Also finally get round to Novalis, Kleist, Buchner and Lenz.

Very depedant on what I will be able to collect around. Did get a copy of the Kafka stories as translated by Hofmann, not that this is hard to source.

This is based on reading Canetti's portraits of the Vienna circle as well as going to the Vienna exhibition late last year. Weird because the former was an odd mixture of gossip and good intentions, the latter was the artist biting the hand that feeds - an attitude I am normally allergic to. But its like I got to know a lot of people and an age more vividly, and I want to see where that goes even if I find it impressive now but have a strong premonition I won't the more I delve into it.

In any case it would be good to read more plays by Schnitzler and Brecht's poetry and much, much more...

i think i've said this before but the main thing i took away from reading 'hunt for red october' at the age of about 10 was 'wow! russians are awesome!' which i suspect was not the author's conscious intent.

What I concluded from The Cardinal of the Kremlin is that Clancy writes English like he tried translating Russian.

Poetry, fiction, esp. Speculative fiction

Not so much with the non fic this year

this book sounds cool: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-quiet-life/

He is also named Jesse Ball, though he refers to himself throughout the manuscript as Int., for Interviewer. He has come to a village in Japan’s Osaka Prefecture armed with a tape recorder to investigate an incident known as the Narito Disappearances of 1977, when eight old men and women disappeared from their homes without any sign of a struggle, leaving only a single playing card as valediction. Shortly thereafter, one Oda Sotatsu, a thread salesman and virtual nonentity, met with two “wild characters” named Jito Joo and Sato Kakuzo and signed a confession taking responsibility for the disappearances. He refused to offer any additional statement, either in his defense or against it, other than to affirm the written confession. In fact, he remained completely silent from the day in October when he was first taken into custody until his execution for the crimes in the spring.

Why has the Interviewer undertaken this record? We know only that “a strange thing happened,” whereupon his lover, like Sotatsu, suddenly ceased speaking. Thus, if we believe the frame, the Interviewer is on some level restaging his own trauma. But it is an open question whether anyone is to be believed here, in this place where people disappear, the guilty party is to be convicted by paper instead of evidence, and silence speaks louder than words.

There are several Desmond Morris titles I am interested in.

I'm halfway through Tadeusz Borowski right now and not sure I'm gonna have the stomach for the Primo Levis

Primo Levi is much less stomach-churning

Depends - iirc there is much more philosophical reflection leading to damnable conclusions in Levi.

I read The Periodic Table a year ago and it was A+, one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. The Levis I have at home are The Drowned and the Saved, If Not Now, When?, and Survival In Auschwitz. I'll get to them soon.

Reviving this so that we may all contemplate our sins of omission.

Glad I only committed to Gormenghast. I didn't read it.

more poetry, more philosophy, less unfinished things, more criticism, something not in english

yes! no! yes! no, but i don't really care! really no!

get the 'current reading' pile down to less than three items

i think so?

get the 'sort of half-abandoned once-current reading' pile down to less than, say, twenty

mmprobably

'mein kampf' and 'the kills' from everyone's best of '13 lists

two volumes of the former and gave up on 'boyhood island'. one chunk of the latter. it was rubbish.

the collected geoffrey hill from absolutely no-one's best of '13 list that i have for some reason bought from amazon

well, i read 'mercian hymns' twice.

Still, I'd like to spend a good amount of time with the Icelandic sagas, including the Heimskringla. Also, the eddas.

Tempted by, but haven't decided if I should give _Alms for Oblivion_ a try. I guess I should look for an excerpt.

lol

LOL @ my first post.

But this is sorta scary:

I decided I also want to do a little reading around Germanic lit. Like I want to read Kafka (and the Kafka I haven't read like the letters and diaries) and Rilke again but also more of the German poets like Heine/Trakl/Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann (getting Malina as an ILL). Also finally get round to Novalis, Kleist, Buchner and Lenz.

Very depedant on what I will be able to collect around. Did get a copy of the Kafka stories as translated by Hofmann, not that this is hard to source.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In any case it would be good to read more plays by Schnitzler and Brecht's poetry and much, much more...

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, January 15, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did it all apart from Novalis, and found other names and read most of them too - turned into something that was sorta monstrous. But well worth it.

Think I'll do the 2015 thread in a bit as I was thinking about what I'm going to tackle.

I read alms for oblivion! don't bother. but do read 'sound the retreat' and the prion 'world of simon raven'