What books are you planning to read in 2010?

I was thinking about the books I wanted to work through in 2010. Last year's reading list was consisted mostly of history, especially, ancient history. This year I want a change of pace so I am going to concentrate on fiction and literary classics. While the list will prove a return to some literary classics and an introduction to others; it is bound to change as new books come on to the market and others will no longer move me. In any event, this is my preliminary reading list for 2010. Has any one else come up with a reading list for next year?

Reading list - 2010

Of Human Bondage

Portrait of a Lady

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Two years before the Mast

Rubicon

Cicero

The Woman in White

The Sun also Rises

The Private life of Marie Antoinette

My Literary Passions: Criticism and Fiction

Crotchet Castle

Candide

I joined Group Reads - Literature and have not had a chance to read anything yet. I am resolving now that I am going to read the last few - Count of Monte Cristo, Life and Fate, and Vanity Fair. And I'm going to keep chipping away - however slowly - at Remembrance of Things Past. Ambitious, yes?

Maybe, but what's life without goals?

By the way, how do you like Every Man Dies Alone?

New DeLillo. Definitely new DeLillo...

For the past few years, I've had one vague New Year's Resolution, and that is to read a novel by Patrick White. Maybe in 2010...?

Apart from that, I don't really make reading resolutions. Although maybe finishing my bookgroup reads *on time* would be a good resolution to make and keep. :)

Against the Day

Darconville's Cat

Atlas Shrugged -- for a summer read called "Atlas Summer" for my blog. It's a take-off of the recent "Infinite Summer."

Given our current economic meltdown, it's time for Ayn Rand's seminal and plainly idiotic work/rant/Benzedrine fog to get re-assessed by someone with a brain, unlike her uncritical minions who occasionally get ensconced in high office. I'm looking at you, Alan Greenspan, ya idiot scum!

Probably some other shorter works so my brain doesn't completely melt when "John Galt speaks."

Pale Fire

And something or other by Faulkner.

Rubicon is a great read. As is Cicero by Everitt. I'm assuming these are the titles you mean.

My reading list is a strange mix of fiction, pulp (what I call "popular fiction" including SF) and, of course, non-fiction. Even this diversity is an advance for me, for not long ago I read non-fiction exclusively.

I'm looking forward to reading The Lions of July which has been on my shelves for a few years. Great Expectations by Dickens and even something as light as Child 44 (albeit it was "longlisted" for the Booker). I bought my father-in-law a copy of Cultural Amnesia for Christmas last year, and having only just found that he has never read it I took it back again to have a go myself! Along with that I'm looking forward to Everitt's other biography Augustus and two of Vidal's historical novels; Julian and Creation.

In amongst all that I'm sure I'll read some tripe too. Sometimes you have to have the "Big Mac and Fries" to offset the Foie Gras and Nuit St Georges... :-)

I'm looking forward to a few releases in the coming year:
The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison
Canada by Richard Ford
Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane

And I plan to read a lot of Don Delillo, because I've ignored him up to now, dig into the new Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, and also read a lot of Alice Munro.

Gravity's Rainbow is the biggest, scariest book on my shelf. That'll be a 2010 project for sure.

Basically I just see myself working through the other books that I've bought but have yet to read - including Gilead, Pale Fire, Portrait of a Lady, and many, many others.

I'd like to try a Pynchon in 2010. Not to mention all the books I have on my book-shelves that I'd like to get around to reading: Endless Things, Ilario, The Years of Rice and Salt and Galileo's Dream, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, Flood and Ark, Panic Spring, The Black Book, Black and White, all five books of the Marq'ssan Cycle and Gwyneth Jones' five-book series beginning with Bold as Love... and lots more.

Yes, I was referring to Rubicon by Tom Holland and Cicero by Anthony Everitt. And yes, these are both history books after I have just stated my desire to get away from them this year; but what can I say, every time I try to get out they drag me back in.

I'm being lazy and reposting this from another thread.
TBR right now at home:
le Desert (I am just beginning the second book but took a break to read les Miserables with a group)
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 (I have not read any of the Barchester books except for Dr. Thorne but I loved it and have already re-read it about a dozen times. I loaned Dr. Thorne to my sister, and she loaned The Warden to me in return.)
Lolita because I loved Speak, Memory and it's so famous that I am trying to overcome extreme squeamishness because of the icky topic. I bought it a while ago, but have yet to read it.

12, I really enjoyed Rubicon. I am not a history buff generally and I thought it was very well written and interesting for a "common reader" like myself.

I'll follow Anna's lead and repost from elsewhere, with some additions

My very partial/preliminary list for 2010 is:

Fiction:
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Light in August for Faulkner group
Back to Proust
Emma and/or Mansfield Park (They're the two Austens I've yet to read.)
Anna Karenina
Lolita
Middlemarch
Some George Sand
More Goethe, next up Iphigenia in Tauris. Then Faust?
Burr by Gore Vidal
Much, much more poetry

Nonfiction:
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
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

Omigod! You guys actually know what you plan to read this far ahead? With me it's always a case of what catches my eye at the time, though there are a few I'm still waiting for the p/b of - Last Night in Twisted River, The Little Stranger etc. which I know will get read.

I plan to get through my Mount TBR of nearly 300 books but whether I'll actually do that is anybody's guess. So can I ask a supplementary question here? Of all the books you 'plan' to read next year - how likely is it that you will actually stick to that list and not wander off and get to the end of the year with the list still untouched (or is that just me?)

If I come anywhere close to my list I'll be a happy reader. My list is what I hope/want to read. I frequently go off on tangents and I'm sure this year will be no exception.

Others on the to-read list, now that I'm next to it:

Motherless Brooklyn
Ragtime
I, Claudius and Claudius the God
Friday Night Lights
Sometimes a Great Notion
The Executioner's Song
Germinal
The Bonfire of the Vanities

Ragtime is amazing! Hope you enjoy it too.

15:
Good luck with Light in August. If you can figure out what Lena Grove is doing in that book, let me know.

#2: I recently joined Group Reads--Literature too. I didn't get to Vanity Fair but loved Life and Fate. I'm hoping to read both of the next quarter's selections, no matter what they are.

Other books for 2010:
The Snopes Trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion
and at least one novel by:
Norman Mailer-- perhaps The Castle in the Forest
Graham Swift -- probably Shuttlecock
Don Delillo -- maybe White Noise
Henry James -- starting with short stories
Peter Ackroyd -- Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Saul Bellow -- Herzog
Peter Carey -- several to choose from
Milan Kundera -- not sure
Barry Unsworth -- likely Morality Play
plus my book club selections!

I can already tell, I won't make it through this list. But I'm sure gonna try!

I LOVED I, Claudius-- but plan on drawing out the family tree as you go along or you'll get very confused. It isn't a tree anyway, more like a viney bush.

Lolita is not graphic at all, and very different from the movie. It is icky, but but more multi-dimensional (not a black-and-white or good vs. evil story) than you might think.

As to whether I will absolutely stick to the list, probably not. As I said earlier new books will come onto the market that will catch my interest; others I will start, but for whatever reason not be able to get into and therefore set it aside. However, I am confident I will complete 80% of the list. Although I will stray I am pretty good at sticking to a plan.

I'm going to be reading selections mostly from 1001 books and 501 books reference guides . Of course I'll also be attacking my wishlist collection and any new releases that intrigue me .

It'll depend more upon our library than in the past - but I may buy Lethem's Chronic City - ok i just ordered it from daedalus books, $17.98 w/ signed book plate. I find my response to Lethem very iffy..when i like his stuff, i REALLY like it, but the books i haven't cared for I wish i'd never started.

My goals for 2010:

* The Memoirs of Elias Canetti
* Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes
* New Literary History of America ed. by Greil Marcus (maybe one essay a week?)
* ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
* at least one novel by Nicholas Mosley\
* Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
* Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas
* The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

waiting on deck right now is guston in time: remembering philip guston by ross feld.

i guess i was feeling militaristic. i requested the audiobook versions of war and peace and battle cry of freedomat the library. i will give those at try in the coming weeks. audio books are great but it really depends on the reader.

other than that who knows. i love going to a local thrift store and buying books for $1.50 or less so i have a whole bunch waiting. today i bought disgrace by coetzee and the periodic table by primo levi.

extra hardback copy of Murakami's after dark, to anyone in the US (chintzy on postage) who'd like it. unused and our local library has a copy (and 2 audio copies??? wtf?). Forgot to check our LT catalog before getting another copy a while back.

bob
I'm working on being non-u for the first few weeks. Dr Who novelizations, G. Willow Wilson's defn. weird Air comics, world war z , and similar light, some trivial, others less so, but hardly snobworthy. And then SAS and R:data management, Statistical analysis and Graphics . R is free, awesomely powerful for stats analysis and sucky for data validation, control and manipulation. And similar tomes for work related reading. The trend to "imperative" command driven stats program in analysis may well be the downfall of data quality in the analysis of large, complex datasets where data preparation is more important than specific statistical procedures. If a "finding" is strong enough, relatively simple approaches will generally bring it to light. But if the data is crap, the most sophisticated analysis in the world is still crap.
(again...world war z is pretty terrific. )

>29 bobmcconnaughey: - I'd like to take After Dark off your hands if you don't mind. If yes, should I send a private message with the mailing information?

Thank you.

My list will change infinitely throughout the year (only about 300 books in my house that I haven't read that I want to read, and more are added frequently), but here's the main ones:
1984 by George Orwell
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
any pre-1926 sci-fi work I can get my hands on - early science fiction might be my topic for senior project :)
Henry Fielding's works besides Tom Jones and Shamela
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann and Mephisto by Klaus Mann
Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Galesia Trilogy by Jane Barker
backlog of books from Member Giveaways that I should have read/reviewed months ago...

31:
I got about 3/4 of the way through Titus Groan about 2 years ago, and then someone stole it! Like, out of a backpack at a train station. Who the heck would steal a single book? Especially that book! Anyway, I've never started it again, but I now own it again and I'm sure I'll get to it eventually. It's a fantastic book.

#32 I would.

I think we've found our thief! Although he is a sloth, so I'm not sure how good a thief he/she'd be...

Our bookclub had the idea of reading all those classics that are actually too long to read if you are sane. So this year I will spend my time reading War and Peace, Brothers Karamasov, Recherche en temps perdu, The Magic Mountain, Gravity's Rainbow and even The Holy Bible. While this sounded ridiculous from the very beginning, it appears even more ridiculous now that I finished Swans Way. Anyhow, I look forward to it.

Those Mervyn Peake novels are murder. Dense, the worlds illustrated with precise strokes, every blade of grass painted, each cloud animated by hand. The "New Weird" folks like to claim Peake as one of their influences but none of them have his literary chops or his unique, brilliant intellect...

#34 You're right, chamberk. Far too slow for successful thievery but if I were to steal someone else's book I can't think of many better ones to go for.

An aside - why does everyone think I'm a bloke? ;-)

The sloths we have known and been willing to identify as sloths are guys.

Robert

But all male sloths must have had a mummy.