katieinseattle's (new) category list

1. Literary fiction from the last 25 years
2. Classics
3. Re-reads (some I read too long ago or too young, some just perennial favorites)
4. Post-apocalyptic (loosely defined and not necessarily fiction)
5. Science fiction
6. Science
7. Neuroscience/Cognitive science/Psychology
8. Books on books
9. Essays/anthologies
10. The inevitable catchall

I'm going for 10 in each category with no overlap, but as there are a fair number of very long books on my tentative list, this is flexible. As are the categories, for that matter...I posted one category list maybe not even a month ago and I've already decided it sucks and completely redone it. So we shall see.

-- Literary fiction from the last 25 years

Candidates: Underworld by Don De Lillo, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy , The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

-- Classics
1. Lolita by Nabokov -- Read 19 January

Candidates: Pale Fire by Nabokov, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Ulysses (God help me) by James Joyce, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, Dracula by Bram Stoker

--Re-reads

Candidates: Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Macbeth by Shakespeare, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Stand by Stephen King

--Post-apocalyptic
1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy -- Read 6 January
2. On the Beach by Nevil Shute -- Read 2 February

Candidates: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, World War Z by Max Brooks, Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Cantor

--Science fiction

Candidates: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Time and Again by Jack Finney, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, Dune by Frank Herbert, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

--Science

1. The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann -- Read 2 March

Candidates: Longitude by Dava Sobel, Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller, Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh, The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind, Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglad R. Hofstadter, Einstein by Walter Isaacson, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman

--Neuroscience etc.

1. The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge -- Read 20 February
2. How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer -- Read 23 February

Candidates: The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio R. Damasio, The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter, Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, The Promise of Sleep by William C. Dement, The Family that Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max, Darkness Visible by William Styron, The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

--Books on books
1. A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel -- Read 27 January
2. How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark -- Read 6 February

Candidates: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom, A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury by Harold Rabinowitz, A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski, Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

--Essays/anthologies
1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace -- Read 4 January
2. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace -- Read 12 January
3. Oblivion by David Foster Wallace -- Read 12 February

Candidates: How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn, Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman, Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, The Eloquent Essay edited by John Loughery, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair (DFW again), Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

--Catchall

1. Enduring Patagonia by Gregory Crouch -- Read 21 January

I could easily fill an essays category too. I'm very fond of them.

I've read several of your choices just in the last year or so, including Pale Fire and Stranger in a Strange Land. Read for the first time.

And although I'm not at ALL a horror person, World War Z was amazing.

A very interesting group of categories and of books. I'm especially interested in the post-apocalyptic group.

The World Without Us and Alas, Babylon are also on my list for this year.
I've read both On the Beach and The Road recently and can recommend them both.

There are several other members of this challenge who are reading in this category and will probably respond.

Uh-Oh, another thread I'm going to have to follow. If this keeps up I may have to negotiate with the powers that be to add a couple of hours to each day in 2010. I like the neuroscience category.

I think I saw at least one other individual reading Dune for the 1010. Maybe I'll do a reread of it, it's been awhile.

Blood Meridian was the book that put me off McCarthy. So brutal.

I'll be watching your dystopian and scifi reads!

Just checking in to see your interesting categories! Quite a few books I haven't heard of in your post-apocalyptic category, so I'll be following that. Loads of great titles in categories 1,2 and 5 too!

Love the categories - books on books is on my list too - so I was glad to see some ones for me to consider. Francine Prose's book is on my list - I've started it at least three times and have loved the beginning each time. My goal this year, however, is to finish it. I'll be back to see which ones you like best!

Do you know when you'll be reading A history of reading? I have it on my list too, and will try and read it pretty early in the year, I think. It might take a while though, since the format is silly and I can't easily bring it with me on my daily commute - where most of my reading happens.

And, oh, Ex libris! Might be up for a re-read in 2011, that one.

@19 That's one I don't own (so didn't know about the silly format), so I didn't have any specific plan for when to read it. Most everything on this list is flexible :)

AAND Update #1:

4 January 2010 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Four and a half stars. Review here.

6 January 2010 The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Three and a half stars. Review here.

12 January 2010 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Four stars. Review here.

19 January 2010 Lolita by Nabokov. Three stars. I feel like a total philistine for not enjoying this more. I have found I have short patience for prose poetry and wordplay, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I was also totally exasperated with the density and obscurity of allusions by the end of the book; I ended up spending the afternoon in a bookstore with the annotated version, and that only left me more irritated, feeling like the allusiveness just reflected hostility to readers failing to live up to nabokovian standards of erudition. Maybe I am just in a bad mood. Le sigh.

I haven't read Nabakov so I cannot comment, but your review made me laugh!

I kinda feel that it was intentional on Nabokov's part - towards the end, with all the paranoia, its not supposed to be real clear what actually happens or who does what to whom or who exists in reality or just in the characters' mind. Hope that wasnt a spoiler for those that haven't read it, but really what I find to be amazing was Nabokov's ablity to write that well - that was clearly ambiguous.

That isn't what bothered me about it, though, and what was bothering me wasn't just at the end but through the whole book; it was just at the end that I got so frustrated I went to find the annotated version (and then got even more frustrated). Besides the paranoia and unreliability of the narrator, Lolita is famous for its density of literary allusions, obscure allusions to itself, &c., and by the end this had started to feel to me (and the annotated version only made this worse, as the annotator pretty much made this attitude explicit) like a hostile challenge to the reader, "let's see you figure this out, you plebe!"

Is this totally bizarre? Has anyone else had this reaction?

25-I don't think it's bizarre. I'm not sure it's a hostile challenge to the reader but writers like Nabokov and Thomas Mann really didn't like the idea of 100% of the people who started their books finishing them. They wrote to shed some readers. And give the scholars something to do.

"let's see you figure this out, you plebe!"
I can totally imagine Joyce muttering that while he wrote. ;)

I haven't read Lolita but I enjoyed your honest review!

@26 That makes me a little nervous about my plans to take a stab at Ulysses later this year...:)

Review of Lolita here.

21 January 2010 Enduring Patagonia by Gregory Crouch. Three and a half stars, review here.

27 January 2010 A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. Four stars, short review here.

2 Feburary 2010 On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Two stars, not-short review here.

I'm just about done with Manguel's The Library at Night and have been enjoying it. It's a good one for reading a chapter or two in bed at night.

I'm thinking of doing ONE more title after I finish the etched city before picking up A history of reading. I'm glad you liked it!

>30 katieinseattle:

Loved your review of On the Beach. You're right that it didn't age well and the characters are hard to understand. OTOH, the young wife, who reacts the worst, was the least likable of them all. Have you seen the film, with Gregory Peck? HE makes it worth watching, but the movie is very true to the book, so don't expect any improvement in storyline or characterization. Oh, and Fred Astaire, in a role completely wrong for him, plays the race car owner.

Yeah, she manages to have the worst reaction while almost-paradoxically being the most incomprehensible. She's just wilfully ignoring reality to the point where she seems downright stupid--and even that could have been interesting, had other characters reacted to her in any way that made any sense (or, uh, any way at all, really).

I haven't seen the movie, but if the characterization isn't any better than the book's, I probably won't bother. The post-apocalyptic genre is huge, in books and film, and this story didn't make up for its poor execution by being particularly original, so why waste time?

>34 katieinseattle:. It's worth seeing if you're a Gregory Peck fan. He, of course, is magnificent, no matter the script. But, no, the characterization is no better.

35 - how is If on a winters night a traveler? I grabbed that from my brother years ago but still havent gotten to it. I've read the first few pages and it looks intersting but other things have gotten in the way. is it good?

6 February How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark. Four stars, review here.

12 February Oblivion by David Foster Wallace. Four stars, review here.

20 February The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. Two and a half stars, review here.

I am having a sloooooow month. My excuse is that the three other books I'm reading concurrently are all over a thousand pages long, so the short books end up taking way longer because my attention is so divided. Off to go work on 2666 now--there's one that's not going to be done anytime soon...

23 February How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Three and a half stars, review here.

Read 2 March The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann. Three stars, review here.