TBR 2010

With 3 weeks to go before X-Mas, I am already drafting my reading list for next year. It is heavily influenced by the discussions in the Salon. Thanks to you all !

These are the books to be read in 2010. I aim for 35 because this seems the number I can reasonably tackle in a year. As you'll see, I am still missing 12 titles.

a) Still unread from 2009

- “Wolf Hall” by Hillary Mantel
- “My Name Is Red” by Orhan Pamuk
- “ Schindler’s Ark” by Thomas Keneally
- “ The sea, the sea” by Iris Murdoch

b) Compulsive

- Booker prize winner 2010
- Herta Muller
- Xenophon's Hellenika

c) Advised by friends

- Julien Gracq : Au château d'Argol
- Sketches from a Hunters' Album by Turgenev
- Dead souls by Nicolas Gogol
- A hero of our time by M. Lermontov
- Eugene Onegin by Pouchkine
- “Myra” by Gore Vidal
- “The Sot-weed factor” by John Barth
- “Giles Goat Boy” by
- “Invisible Man” by Ralph Elisson
- “Les Miserables” by Hugo
- “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Warton
- “The Heart is a lonely hunter” by Carson Mc Cullers
- “As I lay dying” or “Absolom, Absolom” by Faulkner

d) Rereads

- Proust
- “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

e) Just an idea

- “ Danton” by Buchner
- …

This is my 2010 wishlist (which may or may not bear any relation to what I actually read in that august year).

Virtually all are books I first heard of, or first understood the importance of, on LT.

Recollection of a Journey: A Novel R.C. Hutchinson

The Emperor's Tomb Joseph Roth

Against The Grain Joris-Karl Huysmans

Kaputt, Curzio Malapart

The Journal of Jules Renard

The Silver Dove Andrei Bely

Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater

Chateau d'Argol Julien Gracq

All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity Marshall Berman

Garden, Ashes: A Novel Danilo Kis

Joseph and His Brothers Thomas Mann

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Frances A. Yates

Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty

In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann Malcolm Spencer

The Play of the Eyes Elias Canetti

Frank Honywood, Private: A Personal Record of the 1914-1918 War Eric Partridge

Snow Country Yasunari Kawabata

Auto-da-Fe Elias Canetti

Dictionary of the Khazars Milorad Pavic

Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 Jack Temple Kirby

The Way of the World Nicolas Bouvier

Subterranean Railway Christian Wolmar

World of Yesterday Stefan Zweig

The Box Man: A Novel Kobo Abe

A Journey Round My Skull Frigyes Karinthy

She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her Paul Bowles

Memoirs of a Revolutionary Victor Serge

Impressions of Africa Raymond Roussel

I have tagged 107 books in my collection as possibilities for next year's reading. I won't get to all of those, maybe only half or so, but I do think that maybe I should cut down on the number of books I buy and read some of the ones I have. I tend to fly off on tangents during my reading year--I'm reading Proust! Let's read some books about Proust! Ok I just read Les Mis! I need to know more about Hugo! Wow, Middlemarch sounds great! I should buy that and read it right now! Hey, it *was* great! I should buy everything Eliot wrote and get started on that ASAP! ...Which is ok, I suppose, except that I now have an absurd number of unread books at home.

I'm almost afraid of making a list, because that can virtually assure that I will not read something. But I'll say that these are "strong possibilities" and then maybe I won't feel bound to them and thus start ducking my "responsibilities." :)

Classics or something like that (including the ones my LT folks love)
A Passage to India
The Odyssey & The Iliad
Crime and Punishment
The Brothers Karamazov
Candide
The Canterbury Tales (all of them)
Catch-22
Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner
The Divine Comedy
Dickens Dickens Dickens
Invisible Cities
Going to Meet the Man and/or Giovanni's Room
Madame Bovary
Paradise Lost
The Portrait of a Lady
Shakespeare (back on the wagon that I fell off earlier this year)
Vanity Fair
Wives and Daughers

Living Authors
Generosity by Richard Powers
something by Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic or Empire Falls?)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
something by Gene Wolfe (I picked up a zillion of his books on the cheap)
Song of Solomon or Beloved by Toni Morrison
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Possession by A.S. Byatt

Long books or series
Anathem
The Arabian Nights, Powys/Mathers translation (all of it)
Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire
John Crowley's Aegypt cycle
The Raj Quartet (Paul Scott)
A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)

Recommendations from LT friends
An Animal of the Sixth Day by Laura Fargas
Tolstoy's Confession
Children of the New World by Assia Djebar
Infinite Jest (group read time!)
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Africa, Latin America, Asia
The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa
more Borges
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
A Dry White Season by Andre Brink
Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka
The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan
Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda
Woman of the Aeroplanes by Kojo Laing

And Medellia's post reminds me that I want to read the remainder of Proust's ISoLT. These alone may take me a year - at the rate I read...

Wow! You guys are phenomenal. So many choices.

Below is a priority ranking of what I want to read in 2010 - probably 20-25 books or so.

I'm committed to reading Infinite Jest, parts of Proust, and The Brothers Karamazov. And, gulp, The Chronicles of Narnia - never read it before and I'm told I simply must.

Inbetween somewhere's, my reading priority ranks something (always subject to change) sort of like this:

-1. Middlemarch
-2. something by Forster
-3. Almanac of the Dead - I'm pretty sure this will be a tome read for the salon in 2011. It's been described as a "native-American's War & Peace."
-4. Naked Lunch
-5. The People of Paper
-6. Dictionary of the Khazars
-7. The Thanatos Syndrome
-8. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
-9. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
10. Nightwood
11. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
12. something by Henry James definitely
13. A Model Childhood
14. The Children's Hospital

and I'll stop there since there's some shorter monthly salon reads I'd like to tackle too, like the Pamuk, Lagerkvist, and Winterson & Gaddis selections too.

and how could I forget Faulkner! Must read at least one Faulkner in 2010 as well.

WOW,

the gap of 12 will be filled fast !

thanks zeno, got myself 5 more

Oh, no, no, no, no, no! My TBR list is hovering around 640 titles, mostly gleaned from LT posts such as these!

Like Macumbeira, I do about 35 books a year. So, I'll grab maybe 20 of those 640 titles for 2010. Selection will depend upon me stumbling on them, in area libraries.

I'm another one with a list I'll never get through in a year. Here are some ideas I'm playing with (definitely not set in stone):

Big classics
Les Misérables
Middlemarch
Moby Dick
War and Peace
Crime and Punishment
Proust

Look, I've never read any of the Big-and-Serious classics, so the list is both endless and daunting. I'll stop there for now.

Others
- something by Kazuo Ishiguro (probably Nocturnes)
- If I fall in love with Middlemarch, I'll probably read more by George Eliot
- A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel (I know a little more about the French Revolution than I do about Cromwell, so I'll start here instead of Wolf Hall)
- finish the Barchester series by Anthony Trollope
- I might tackle Virginia Woolf again, after failing to 'get' her five years ago at uni.
- I'd like to re-read Villette if I get time.

And no doubt I'll fit in plenty of comfort and fluff reads, which I'll NEED among all this intellectual hammering.

Plus I'm in a book group, where we will be reading by turns a genre novel, then a novel written and set in a country not England or USA, then a classic, then back to genre again and so on. That happens monthly. We're starting with Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett in Jan.

Oh, and if I ever get my hands on a cheap-and-battered copy of The Hour of the Star, I shall give it a go. Promise.

My reading is like yours, Medellia. I am tossed about by the waves and every new wind of doctrine—er, diversion :)

But I want to seriously get into Dostoevsky this year. I read Crime and Punishment two years ago and didn't really love it. I want to do The Brothers Karamazov... from what I've read about it, it sounds amazing.

I want to reread Middlemarch, and maybe do Daniel Deronda too.

I also want to start St. Augustine's City of God. And I need to revisit Rosemary Sutcliff. And I want to get into Trollope, too. I got halfway through Can You Forgive Her? and just lost interest... apparently I couldn't :-P. I'm sure there is a better place to start among his books.

THE WARDEN and BARCHESTER TOWERS

My very partial/preliminary list for 2010 is:

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (thanks, wisewoman!)
Light in August for Faulkner group
Back to Proust (this summer, right?)
Emma and/or Mansfield Park (They're the two Austens I've yet to read.)
Anna Karenina
Lolita
Middlemarch (intrigued by Medillia's comments and have had the book sitting around forever)
Some George Sand
More Goethe, next up Iphigenia in Tauris. Then Faust?
ETA-Burr by Gore Vidal
Much, much more poetry

Nonfiction (I usually read as much nonfiction as fiction)

Essays Before a Sonata by Charles Ives
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang

If I managed only the books listed here I'd be a happy reader. Of course, who knows where our interests will take us? We should all return to this thread next year and report on how closely our actual reading followed these lists.

Yay! It's Middlemarch all around, then. :)

I do plan to return to this thread in a year and give a report. Sounds like fun.

Rena & Amy & Theresa, I think we will have much to discuss. As Porius is our resident Trollope expert, I feel secure in my plans to venture into Barsetshire. I'll be following in your footsteps there, Rena.

TBR right now at home:
le Desert (I am just beginning the second book but took a break to read les Miz)
The Savage Detectives bought after so many on LT raved about Bolano.
Ficciones bought because I remembered how totally amazing it is to read short stories by Borges. I have been resisting the temptation. It's like having a delectable dessert sitting there just daring me to dig in.
The Warden (Yay trollope! I have not read any of the Barchester books except for Dr. Thorne but I totally loved it and have already re-read it about a dozen times.)
Lolita because I loved Speak, Memory and it's so famous that I am overcoming extreme squeamishness because of the icky topic. I bought it a while ago, but have yet to read it.

I plan to read > 52 of the books in this collection: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/aethercowboy/toread

Of course, since everybody who buys me gifts for Birthday/Christmas knows I'm a bibliophile, they think , "Hey, books are a great gift!" so this set becomes open-ended (as time approaches infinity, so do the books I have to read). After each subsequent gift-giving holiday, I find myself more and more encumbered with books. Tears of sadness + Tears of joy.

As far as order, I have no particular order. Books received through the ER program have precedence, then MG program books, then whichever books my fancy falls to, provided its the earliest unread book in its respective series. I usually try to read 1 fiction print book, 1 nonfiction print book, 1 fiction ebook, and 1 nonfiction ebook at the same time (threaded, of course!). Of course, sometimes I'm reading 2 nonfiction/fiction print books at the same time (due to certain book precedence). C'est la vie.

My major goal for the next few months is to finish reading all of my outstanding Member Giveaway books. This is progressing much better now that my wife has a break from school and I don't have to use my lunches to play chauffeur.

We could have a mini group read of Barsetshire! I'm done with The Warden (didn't find it all that riveting, to tell truth) and am now about halfway through Barchester Towers (and loving it). I'd love to discuss with you all!

A nonfiction tome would be so much fun! As a first suggestion, is anyone interested in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age?

aaaaarrrgh!!!!
*bang bang bang thump*

AAAAARGHH AAARGH * v.b. CRASH *

*sobbing*

My cinnamons exactly, Tomcat.

I'm not into a group non-fiction read that would lead to any kind of subject and discussion that would look like a news/politics blog. If the non-fic was old history, essays or a memoir, (e.g. Charles Lamb) or something along those lines, I would consider.

Heh, if I was the source of those convulsions and tears, I sincerely apologize. Sticking to the storybooks then?:)

These are just from the books I already own, and I am sure that I will fill in some time with some fluffier stuff, and, like others, will go off on tangents from books I read because that is what I do.

Fiction:

Pere Goriot - Balzac
The Plague - Camus
Nana -Zola
Germinal - Zola
The Ladies' Paradise - Zola
Suite Francaise - Nemirovsky
Bleak House - Dickens
A Pale View of Hills - Ishiguro
Mount Olive - Durrell
Midaq Alley - Mahfouz
My Name is Red - Pamuk
The Book Thief - Zusak

Non-fiction:
Reconstruction - Foner
Path Between the Seas - McCullough
Paris 1919 - MacMillan

I see tangents developing already!

no, booksfallapart, it was not your suggestion, it was my TBR pile toppling to the ground after reading this thread and adding one more book to it. Here is a picture of what my TBR pile looked like before it collapsed:



I like the suggestion of doing a group non-fiction read, and agree with slick that it should be something which is not going to descend into a political fight. Gibbon's Decline and Fall, perhaps, or some of Plato's dialogues? Or some literary criticism?

My reading plans for next year include finishing my study of Pushkin's life and Eugene Onegin, and then getting back to Dostoevsky. I need to prepare myself to lead the group for KARAMAZOV in the autumn, otherwise our beloved dictator will hang me upside down.

>24 QuentinTom: ha ha, right. I'd love to do Gibbon or Plato--or, somebody suggested Lamb upthread--what about Montaigne?

Didn't realize we were dong The Brothers next year. I'll have to save my book for then. I was sans plus with C&P but I feel that perhaps if I had had a forum for discussing it I would have enjoyed it more. Or at least gotten more out of it.

For 2010 I'd like to get more read. Last year I was able to get a few tomes read (Notre-Dame, Don Quixote, C&P, The Count of M-C) but this year I've been filling the "void" with smaller books. The only two big books I read were The Three Musketeers and the second volume of the Count.

I'm thinking I'd like to read another Dumas (La Reine Margot), the larger Vargas Llosa I have (Conversacion en La Catedral), another Hugo and maybe the Stendhal I have (Le rouge et le noir). Then I can fill in the rest with smaller but still very interesting works.

And I hope to actually join in a group read with you guys in 2010. Become a real member instead of just a lurker.

tomcatMurr said in a post above:

otherwise our beloved dictator will hang me upside down.

Quite true. And you'll be crucified upside down too.



And this is what happens to anyone who says they'll lead a read but no-shows!

How about Herodotus, The Histories for non-fiction?

Montaigne or Herodotus--great ideas since I have both waiting to be read.

Herodoyes!

My Herodotus is waiting (impatiently I might add) to be read.

Here, oh, dote us.

Herodotus rocks !
The Strassler edition of Herodotus super -rocks !

There are way too many fairytales and too much nonsense being passed off on US today. Why should I read these things in Herodotus when I can pick up a copy of Going Rogue (save me O Lord, from such a possibility) and read the modern equivalent?

>35 geneg: geneg: The sentence structure is better?

How about this classic?
http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/3441452.aspx

~8 - Welcome Mac, what 5 did you take?

By the way I believe you are to blame for putting me on to Mann (Joseph rather than Magic Mountain takes my fancy).

Slick, that was AWESOME (I love these American vogue words) AWESOME

37 and 39: I agree. Classic gotcha.

38

"Kaputt" by Malaparte
- "Raymond Roussel"
- "A passage to India" by Foster
- "Journal" by Jules Renard
- "All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity" by Marshall Berman

Joseph and his Brothers is a great book but intented for the courageous. Basically Mann develops and extrapolates huge chunks out of Genesis for better understanding.

How is it to be thrown in a pit by your brothers ?
sold as a mere commodity to a Slave trader ?
Having your bosses wife eyeing you ?
How do you feel if you get a job at the top of the piramide ? ( litteraly LOL )

Thanks to Mann, we know

re 11 maybe www.rosemarysutcliff.wordpress.com will help encourage you to revisit Rosemary Sutcliff . And I'm interested what it is about RS that makes you want to revisit? (Ps A piece of trivia I noticed: Your post was just eight days before her birthday Dec 14th)