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Member: Banoo

CollectionsYour library (496), To read (1), All collections (496)

Reviews176 reviews

TagsRead (278), Read 2009 (82), Nobel (77), Read 2008 (73), Read 2007 (26) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Groups1001 Books to read before you die, 50 Book Challenge, 75 Books Challenge for 2009, Author Theme Reads, Books that made me think, Group Reads - Literature, Reading Globally

Favorite authorsSamuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jonathan Evison, James Joyce, Ismail Kadare, Yasunari Kawabata, Orhan Pamuk, Walker Percy, Charles Portis, John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy (Shared favorites)

About meI'm a bayou-born Cajun from Cut Off, Louisiana (real name place and has nothing do to with cutting things off but more about things cut off). I've been in Singapore and Malaysia since 1989… a two year move just kind of dragged on. Though I love nasi-lemak, it's still not as good as jambalaya... luckily, thanks to my Dad, I know how to cook Cajun food. Here's my Gumbo Recipe.

I went through a period not long ago where all my reading was done using my hand phone. It was convenient. A mobile phone could be pulled out and looked at almost anywhere without question. And I could keep hundreds of books on my memory card… it was more a portable library than phone but I hated getting calls when I was in my library. So I’ve gone back to paper print. Yeah, the environment is important and we should save the trees, but the smell of a new book and feel of it’s lightly textured paper is a joy worth a tree or two… just be sure to replant a tree for every few books you read.

Problem with my reading is I don’t remember things too well. I’ve got multiple copies of books. It’s a costly problem. I think it may be an age thing, though I’m not fully convinced of that. My memory goes back a couple of weeks fairly well, before that…

I'm a landscape architect working at WDI Design Sdn Bhd. I’m paid to tell people where to plant trees so that I can read more books. I design swimming pools and fountains too because water is cool.

My sign is Cynic not Virgo. The charts are wrong… I should know.

About my libraryMy library is my current library. Not my library when I was younger... or older. I've gone through many libraries and my books of yesterday seemed to have vanished from my shelves. I'm not sure where they ended up, whether they just turned to dust or sneaked off to be with other books on other shelves. I need a book dog to keep my flock of books in order. I'm beginning to think books are wild beasts and cannot be tamed.

Also I've read almost all of the books listed in my library but since my memory is limited and getting less reliable I'm only marking 'read' the books I've recently gone through.

Currently Reading
• Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti

2009 Completed Books
• Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury
• Valis, Philip K. Dick
• Poachers, Tom Franklin
• The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil
• Savage Night, Jim Thompson
• The Bells of Nagasaki, Takashi Nagai
• The Woman in Black, Susan Hill
• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
• The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
• The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
• The Following Story, Cees Nooteboom
• Magnetic Field, Ron Loewinsohn
• Nine, Andrzej Stasiuk
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Basho
• The Izu Dancer and Other Stories, Kawabata & Inoue
• The Hunting Gun, Yasushi Inoue
• Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Richard Brautigan
• Detective Story, Imre Kertész
• Novel without a Name, Duong Thu Huong
• The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov
• Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, Yasutaka Tsutsui
• Aimez-vous Brahms, Françoise Sagan
• Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan
• The Bread of Those Early Years, Heinrich Boll
• Letters From My Windmill, Alphonse Daudet
• Natasha: And Other Stories, David Bezmozgis
• Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
• The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, Tim Burton
• The Haunted Dolls' House, M. R. James
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Broken April, Ismail Kadare
• Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee
• The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
• Fire Ants, Gerald Duff
• In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami
• The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
• Quicksand, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
• A Dog's Heart: An Appalling Story, Mikhail Bulgakov
• Almost Transparent Blue, Ryu Murakami
• Dante, Dante Alighieri
• Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed, Lance Carbuncle
• Gather the Weeds, Patrick Kilgallon
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Women, Haruki Murakami
• Seven Nights, Jorge Luis Borges
• The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene
• House of Glass, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• Diary of a Mad Old Man, Junichiro Tanizaki
• Dark Water, Koji Suzuki
• The New Life, Orhan Pamuk
• My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper
• In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
• Five by Endo, Shusaku Endo
• Audition, Ryu Murakami
• Footsteps, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• Hauntings: Bangla Ghost Stories, edited by Suchitra Samanta
• Hell, Yasutaka Tsutsui
• Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
• Ubik, Philip K. Dick
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
• Child of All Nations, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
• This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
• Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, Philip K. Dick
• Bayou Farewell, Mike Tidwell
• The Lake, Yasunari Kawabata
• Karnak Café, Naguib Mahfouz
• Fever, J. M. G. Le Clézio
• The Tenant, Roland Topor
• Lost Paradise, Cees Nooteboom
• Prufrock and Other Observations, T.S. Eliot
• Terra Amata, J. M. G. Le Clézio
• The Nimrod Flipout: Stories, Etgar Keret
• 69, Ryu Murakami
• Shadow Family, Miyuki Miyabe
• Utz, Bruce Chatwin
• The Giants, J. M. G. Le Clézio
• The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
• Please Don't Call Me Human, Wang Shuo
• Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Stanley Crawford
• A Prescription for Love :P, Leeanne Marie Stephenson
• Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov

Books Read in 2008
01. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
02. The Successor, Ismail Kadare
03. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, Henry W. Longfellow (read twice and loved it both times)
04. Snakes and Earrings, Hitomi Kanehara (my bad apple of the year)
05. First Love and Other Novellas, Samuel Beckett
06. War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
07. The Futurist, James P. Othmer
08. Liquidation, Imre Kertesz
09. The Dog of the South, Charles Portis
10. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima

11. The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata
12. The Box Man, Kobo Abe
13. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy (probably my second favorite book of the year)
14. Wonderful Wonderful Times, Elfriede Jelinek
15. Dusklands, J. M. Coetzee
16. Masters of Atlantis, Charles Portis
17. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino
18. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. Taras Bulba, Nikolai Gogol (more Gogol for 2009 is guaranteed)
20. The Waste Land and Other Writings, T. S. Eliot

21. My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
22. Junky, William S. Burroughs
23. All That Is Gone, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
24. Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates
25. Candide, Voltaire
26. The Palace of Dreams, Ismail Kadare
27. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (my favorite Faulkner this year)
28. Edith's Diary, Patricia Highsmith
29. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blurn, Heinrich Boll
30. All About Lulu, Jonathan Evison

31. July's People, Nadine Gordimer
32. Light in August, William Faulkner
33. Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
34. Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl
35. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
36. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
37. The 210th Day, Natsume Soseki
38. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker (thanks Ben for this recommendation)
39. The Fugitive, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
40. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (better than when I read at age 12)

41. Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard
42. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
43. Serve the People!, Yan Lianke
44. The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz (nice surprise of a find)
45. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes (another great find)
46. The Stranger, Albert Camus (a re-read that reminded me of a Hal Hartley script)
47. Other Colors: Essays and a Story, Orhan Pamuk (my favorite book of the year)
48. Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, Gao Xingjian
49. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut
50. A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe

51. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
52. Three Elegies for Kosovo, Ismail Kadare
53. Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata
54. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (nice surprise)
55. Piercing, Ryu Murakami (wicked good)
56. The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa
57. The Old Capital, Yasunari Kawabata (read while in the old capital)
58. The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe
59. Coin Locker Babies, Ryu Murakami (one of the best first halves of a book I've ever read)
60. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

61. Selected Short Stories from Contemporary China
62. Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
63. Epitaph of a Small Winner, Machado de Assis
64. The Atom Station, Halldor Laxness (more Laxness in 2009)
65. The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers (bought it for the cover but the contents were even better)
66. Classic Haiku: The Greatest Japanese Poetry from Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki and Their Followers, Tom Lowenstein
67. I Love Dollars and other Stories of China, Zhu Wen (funny stuff from China)
68. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
69. Berji Kristen: Tales from the Garbage Hills, Latife Tekin
70. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadare

71. The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Yoko Tawada
72. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys (will need to add more sci-fi to 2009… thanks you know who)
73. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

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Emailbrian_doucetmac.com

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Member sinceFeb 27, 2008