What book from the 1001 list are you reading in JULY 2010

Not reading one at the moment, but will soon be pulling Cry the Beloved Country out of Mnt TBR for the upcoming group read.

I'm reading Buddenbrooks right now and I love it.

Almost finished with Stone Junction (finally found a second-hand copy!) and enjoying it immensely.

I'm reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I book I could have lived without reading before I died. There are some excellent one-liners but the book as a whole is like an overly long Monty Python sketch. I can understand that the book was a cultural phenomenon, though.

I am reading 'Dont Move' Non ti muovere from the 2006 list (removed from the 2008 list). I am trying to read it in Italian, so this will probably take up all of July. As far as I can judge it the language is beautiful, but the story is very 'intense'. More than I needed, but it might get better.

# 4 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is also on my pile and I am dreading it. I wasn't aware that I need to read all 4 (or 5?) books to mark it as 'read' on the list, so first I bought book one, then realized my mistake and additionally got one of those complete editions. This tome is now sitting on my shelf (it came with a set of stickers, I have no idea what to do with them), and I wonder if I will ever be in the mood to pick it up. Maybe I am too old for it already.

Picked up Wild Swans again for the first time in ages - trying to remember why I stopped! Also reading The Professor's House which I'm trying to work out if it's good or not... (I'm know that grammar was BAD!).

Plus Cry the Beloved Country is ready and waiting for the weekend.

Started The Plague by Albert Camus, who I love. I even have a ditty: Camus, Camus, how I love you. Repeat.

I'm reading germinal by Emile Zola.

I also loved The Plague. I haven't read any other Camus books yet.

#5 (Deem)--
In 1001 Books they describe their entry as "this, the first book"--so they are only asking that you read THIS one, the 1979 volume. It's' not actually hard to get through (I think it will take me 3 days, and I have kids and a job too) so go for it.

At the halfway point in Kafka on the Shore

I just finished Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, which is really different from the movie. I am ready to start Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. My daughter read it first and really liked it. Starting Swann's Way on Monday.
--BJ

I'm reading American Psycho and Tono Bungay. Almost done with American Psycho, I love Ellis, but it seems like it takes SO long to read his works. I can't quite figure out why.

I'm reading Rites of Passage by William Golding right now (I guess it's on the 2006 list).

After that I'll first read two books, that are not on the list. But after that I really want to read The Count of Monte Christo (which I already wanted to read in June)

Finished Buddenbrooks, which I loved and can't recommend highly enough. Started The Last Chronicle of Barset, a nice beach read.

Reading The Cider House Rules. I've loved everything in the list by John Irving so far and I commend Irving on tackling the Right To Life vs. Right To Choose issues. So far, I like The World According To Garp and A Prayer For Owen Meany better, but it's pretty good as well.

-- M1001

Still reading Howard's End .

I finished War and Peace! The book ended up growing on me and now I am going to miss hearing about Natasha, Pierre and the other characters that you got to know so well in this tome.

I will be starting Cry, the Beloved Country next.

I finished The Hobbit this weekend. It was excellent. I really enjoy an adventure novel. Now I've started on Things Fall Apart. What a switch.

I finished A Pale View of the Hills This ends really really abruptly with plenty of unanswered questions. I'm torn! Perhaps I shall read again to see if I can make more sense of it.

I'll try Kafta on the Shore next. Keep with the Japanese theme. And the confusion!

#8 strandbooks: your post reminded me that I never managed to finish a Zola book so far (I tried reading the original versions of both Germinal and Le Ventre de Paris about 15 years ago, but my French wasn't good enough so I gave up).

So now I am reading La Bete Humaine in online version, and I was a bit taken aback by the graphic description of violence towards a woman in chapter 1 - maybe I should have guessed something from the title.
But now that the story unfolds I can see what a strong book this is. I will read more Zola and soon give Germinal another try.

#9 annamorphic: thanks for this information. I moved 'Hitchhiker' forward on my tbr list.

Decided to finally tackle Moby Dick I'm about 80 pages in right now. I don't know why I was so nervous to start this novel, its wonderful so far. The style of prose is amazing.

Finished In the Heart of the Country yesterday. I started Disgrace today. I've been working my through J.M. Coetzee's books on the lists.

I'm reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and loving every minute of it.

Deern--Oh, yes, Zola is a naturalist through and through. Humans are beasts and our instincts can lead us to do really bad things. I'm just amazed that he was writing at the same time as Dickens. He obviously influenced Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser in the United States, and they wrote years later. In Germinal the wealthy people are pretty horrible, but the miners definitely have their faults too. I love the rawness and depravity of his writing. Not sure what that says about me.

I just discovered the 1001 List. I want to start reading older novels so I started at the bottom of the list with the Pre-1700 novels. I started Gargantua and Pantagruel late last night and have read about 40 pages so far. I am finding it to be an interesting book, if only for it's strangeness. I plan on reading Don Quixote next.

#25 You're brave! I keep meaning to read Gargantua and Pantagruel but it is rather a tome!

I've just started Cry, the Beloved Country for the group read. Not sure so far but am only 30 odd pages in. Also reading In pursuit of Love for a bit of light relief.

Tome indeed - I made the mistake of choosing to read Gargantua and Pantagruel via DailyLit and it is taking forever.

I meant to start Cry, the Beloved Country, but I got distracted by In Cold Blood instead. I intend to spend plenty of time in my hammock this weekend reading, so hopefully I can finish them both. In Cold Blood is a quick read and very well done, but of course it is gruesome and depressing.

Oh, agreed, I was very impressed with In Cold Blood but my overwhelming emotion afterwards was depression. Such senseless waste and brutality.

I cannot find my copy of Cry, The Beloved Country anywhere!! I'm beginning to doubt that I ever bought that second hand copy some years back (although I do have a strong recollection of the woman behind the counter raving about it).

Currently reading Around the World in Eighty Days, which is fun. I loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a kid, so I'm rather amazed that I've never read any other books by Jules Verne. Great to be going back to him!

Finished Things Fall Apart last night. It was a good story, but not rave I thought it would be. Maybe I expected too much. The ending was strange. It did not fit the personality of the main character at all. I gave it 3 stars.

Over the past week I read Patterns of Childhood by Christa Wolf. This is the reason I started the 1001 quest--because there might be life-changing books out there that I had never read, or even heard of. This was one of those books. It is a tough read, and you cannot skim or read ahead but have to read every single word. I read it at our church camp and the book was as thought-provoking as the theological discussions we were having, sometimes on the same subjects. The issue of compassion, for instance.

I have read a lot of World War II memoirs but this one was different. It made me think about humanity, society, selfhood, individuality. Completely brilliant. I could never have read it during my ordinary life, though--it needed a week of contemplative time.

I also listened to Like Water for Chocolate in the car on the way to and from camp. Interesting, textured, enjoyable.

I just started re-reading War and Peace. When I first finished it, 10 years ago, I was so impressed I immediately wanted to start over. But there are so many good books to read, and it is almost 1700 pages long, so I decided to allow myself a re-read every decade. I cheated a bit: I started in august 2000, but I started rereading on july 1st 2010. I have been waiting for this moment since at least the end of 2008!

Steven, good for you! I've decided to save War and Peace for the December holidays this year. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment last winter, so for some reason, I'm resolved to save my thick Russian lit. for cold weather. Wish me luck!

Annamorphic--You've made me want to read Patterns of Childhood now. My library doesn't have it...that is, the entire Minneapolis and greater suburb library system doesn't have it. They have other Wolf books and quite a few German titles, but since I don't read German that's not an option. I guess I'll have to purchase this one, but it does sound excellent!

The Once and Future King as a group read.

Strandbooks, yes you should read Patterns of Childhood and yes it is hard to find. The copy I got on Amazon was the first, and I think the last, English edition. But definitely worth purchasing.

Since that I have read Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum. It mystified me that Boll won the Nobel Prize and Christa Wolf did not, because Lost Honor, while an interesting book (and blessedly short) had nowhere near the moral and literary weight that Patterns of Childhood. Lost Honor reads like a prolonged "case summation" by Hercule Poirot--you know at the beginning who was murdered and who did it, and the book traces why. It's an idictment of the gutter press and more; it concerns the clash of truth and fiction, words and deeds. But it's not a *great* book.

Now I'm on The Bell Jar. One of those books that I knew I should read but never did, and now I'm glad to be doing it.

Reading Of Mice and Men with my ESL (English as a second language) student and just started Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir last night.

Just finished The Three Musketeers and laughed the whole way through. Next for me is Middlemarch.

Have now moved on to Howards End, which is one of those books that's been on Mt TBR for Far Too Long. Great start, which is good, because the last book of his I read, A Passage to India, left me dissatisfied and positively grumpy.

And to quote Meg, "I used an affected word". That phrase summed me up to a tee, that did! (Also loved Helen's comment that her younger brother "starts a new mortal disease every month".) Hey, two quotes I love already, and I'm only three chapters in!

#37 I picked up The Three Musketeers at Heathrow Airport years ago when my flight was delayed. I didn't expect much from it and I only chose it because it look the best of a bad bunch of what was available.

Boy, was I surprised. It was a fabulous read, funny and, even in English (penguin edition), it was beautifully poetic. A really fabulous book. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I'm re-reading Great Expectations for my book group. My second favorite Dickens! And now I want to re-read Howards End, one of my favorites.

I'm listening to The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan on my way to/from work this week.

Interesting stuff, death, kids coping by themselves.

Started Evalina. At this point I am really hoping it is not all in letter format.

Sorry Evolphoto - but it is. Still, I got really hooked by it when I read it earlier this year, ended up loving it. It's not quite as soap opera-y as Camilla.

I hadn't read any Fanny Burney before, and it has gotten MUCH better. I love Evalina's narrative voice. The letters concerning her in the start were very dry, and thats the point I was to when I posted last night.

I really liked Evelina but found Camilla overly long and hard going. It's like an early Pride and Prejudice without Austen's humour. After finishing House of Mirth I'm in the mood for more Wharton so I'm reading some of her short stories.

I picked up a hard back of Aesop's Fables at Barnes and Noble. I'm glad I didn't check it out of the library. I wouldn't want to read it from cover to cover, but a few of the stories a couple of times a week is nice before going to bed.

Working on Madame Bovary right now.

#44 Glad you're enjoying it more now!

#45 I found Evelina much better too - though I was shamefully hooked by Camilla at the end. I guess after 900 odd pages there has to be some connection! I do have Cecilia lined up, but it's another whoper so I might leave it a while longer.

Oh and I love Edith Wharton too - I only discovered her last year and read all the 1,001 ones I could get my hands on in a big Wharton binge...

Have moved on to Gormenghast at the insistence of a friend

I finished All Quiet on the Western Front yesterday. I am still processing how I felt about it - it packs a lot into a short book. I found it very profound how the story individualized the war and as a result made the concept of war so absurd.

I started The Unfortunate Traveller. I guess it is supposed to be a humorous novella, but I find I have to reread sections to glean any humor from them. Maybe it is one of those things where "you had to be there" to find it funny, or I am just obtuse : )

Just finished Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between. Unusual style, felt naive in a lot of ways, and I found it hard to get through but I also feel like I learned something from it. Not sure I've ever read such a completely African book, without a single white figure although they are very much there as a force in the background. I also never thought I'd read anything that could make me "get" why women wanted to be "circumcized" and this book doesn't make it pretty, but it does make it important.

I'm re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, since the book's 50th anniversary was this month. I also just re-read Everything That Rises Must Converge, so whatever I read next will be very Not Southern. Russian. I'm gonna go with Russian.

Finished Evelina and ended up loving it. Now I am going to attempt to tackle Anna Karenina. I hope I will like it since I liked the short stories I read by Tolstoy before. Also, I seem to enjoy Russian lit.

Going along with the Russians, I started The Death of Ivan Ilyich last night and that will be my last Tolstoy from the list.

mygirlmaybe, will Ivan Ilyich be your last Tolstoy because you hated it, or because you've read all the others?

I've started American Rust by Philipp Meyer, one of the new books on the 2010 list. So far I am really enjoying it.

Finishing Babbitt, my first Sinclair Lewis book, and I'm really enjoying it. It's a slice of American life during the prohibition era. Things have not changed too much since the early 1920's.

I'm actually listening to it as a LibiVox recording. LiberVox is a free web site that has hundreds of recording of public domain books. It's like the book on tape version of Project Gutenburg.

I'm going to begin The Children's Book. I loved Posession so I was excited to see this on the newest list. If I count all the lists combined, I've now completed 200 books.

I've recently started Cold Comfort Farm and loving it !

Annamorphic - I have read the other 3 Tolstoy works from the 2006 list. I read Anna Karenina several years ago...*and I hated it* (whispered very quietly). But then I read The Kreutzer Sonata and War and Peace, which were both very good, so I am thinking I need to give Anna Karenina another chance.

I meant to finish Ivan Ilyich last night, but I got engrossed in The Good Earth - shouldn't this be on the list?!?! Maybe the 1001 editors smartened up and put it on subsequent editions.

Started The Virgin Suicides today. >60 aliciamay: I think The Good Earth is worthy of inclusion on the list too.

Just received Pastoralia and Castle Rackrent from B&N and trying to decide which to tackle first!

(Wow. Did I really spell "tackel" that way?!)

60
I'm loving Anna Karenina so far! You really should give it another chance!

Re The Good Earth-- I heard somebody on NPR today saying that in the USA they admire Pearl Buck but don't read her, while in China they read her but don't admire her.

Still plugging away at The Plague. Not enthralled I must say. I also still have In pursuit of love going for a bit of light relief that I am, unfortunately, not finding that light.

Now reading August is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien. Hate it. 50 pages in and don't know if I will be able to finish it. Read ahead to the ending and that just made it worse. Ugh. Why is this book on the list? Hate it.

Oh, I see I didn't even mention reading Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass. I enjoyed it a lot, the sense of words, the style of writing; it was smart and engaging and unsettling. Sometimes I wondered if I really understood everything, and maybe I read it too fast, but clearly a great writer and a marvelous short book.

#66 Annamorphic: wow, I love strong reactions. Can you elaborate what exactly makes you hate it so much?

I just completed American Rust by Philipp Meyer. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would recommend it. There are a lot of lukewarm reviews on LT though so I guess this is a love/hate book. I will write a review for it sometime this week.

The next 1001 book I will read is Excellent Women by Barbara Pym... might be August by then though...

You know, I thought The Good Earth *was* on the 1001 list! My bad, have fixed my tags for that one. It still remains near the top of Mt TBR, however. :)

#66> I've read one Edna O'Brien, In The Forest, and found the story very unpleasant and oppressive (my review: http://www.librarything.com/work/129136/reviews/47017944). While I could appreciate her crafting of such a book, I couldn't enjoy it at all. Haven't been at all keen to try any of her others.

Finished Howards End and thought it was quite simply marvellous. Highly recommended, wish I had time to re-read it, it's worthy of an immediate re-read.

Now onto non-1001 books for the next little while...

I'm reading Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. I was a little doubtful of this one, but I think it might be my favourite Woolf novel yet (I've read 4.5 of her other novels, plus several of her other books). Definitely a good read. I also loved the movie, although so far I'm finding them rather different from each other.

I finished Kafka on the Shore It was very wacky as expected. I had already read Murakani's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle so I was forewarned.

Its very readable page turning stuff but in the end means bugger all to me. Apparently his earlier stuff is more realistic.

Anyways, now reading Cry, The Beloved Country which is great so far.

Strong reaction (total spoiler alert):

Ordinary Irish woman with not much character decides to let estranged husband take child on camping holiday without her. She immediately sleeps with man whose name we barely know. When this doesn't turn into anything bigger, she decides to remake herself into sexy chick and go to south of France and sleep around. Encounters group of variously perverted, boorish, shallow, feckless Americans (not my favorite stereotype) but fails to sleep with any of them, or with hotel busboy, etc. etc.
About to return home, she calls husband and is told that child was hit by car and is dead and buried. Husband hates her now. So instead of going home, she has affair with unpleasant American who gives her STD. All this is told in kind of deadpan way. She's the one who was going to come to life, but she doesn't and everybody else in the book is dead already in one way or another.

Supposedly an indictment of women's lives and choices in the 1960s, I think. Hate it.

Oh, that was about August is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien.

I've started The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, because my edition has a pretty girl on the front and I'm just that shallow. Woohoo!

I've finished Cry, The Beloved Country. Fabulous stuff. A wonderful redemptive tale.

Now reading Therese Raquin which will be my third Emile Zola.

I'm into Graham Greene at the moment. I recently finished Brighton Rock and am currently re-reading The Heart of the Matter. Next will be The Power and the Glory.

I finally finished Gargantua and Pantagruel. I am not quite sure what to say about it. I read a review about it that said you can't read it expecting the plot to dominate, but you just have to go along for the ride and enjoy the digressions. That was good advice, but I still skimmed a bit (I could only take so much discussion about a plant).

I have started Cat's Cradle and will probably be reading Evelina too.

Finished The Once and Future King today and started The Old Man and The Sea.

I am starting a heavy Russian hitter Crime and Punshiment .

Finished The Red and the Black this morning. Not a compelling plot. The writing was pretty straight forward and simple. The whole thing followed the line boy meets girl, then meets another girl. Both of these girls are from a higher social class than he is. As we know, keeping within your own social class was a must during the mid-19th century. Disaster. What could they all have been thinking? Oh, well.

Starting Middlemarch today. Looking for something interesting from this one. But probably will end up being boy meets girl, then.........zzzzzzz!

I hope to finish Zorba the Greek today and I am also reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and The Crow Road which I will both finish some time in August. July wasn't a good month for my 1001 list...

#79: Crime and Punishment is another book I've had on my shelf forever and never dared opening. Somehow those long books with serious titles by Russian authors intimidate me. I also had War and Peace planned for 2010, but I don't think I'll make it.

#80: I loved Middlemarch, but it has some lenghts and I remember I had to read something easy with a bit more action in parallel. But I'd say it goes beyond the usual 'boy meets girl' story.

> 81 Actually it is not that bad, I was able to read about 100 pages last night and it is going alot faster then what I had thought.

I am also going to stop by the book store and see if I can find a coy of Middlemarch and if I can then I will join in the group read.

Middlemarch isn't anything like that, just to reassure you. It's intelligent social realism, so a few boys do meet a few girls, but that is by no means the focus of the book.

#77, I also just finished Gargantua and Pantagruel this morning. It took me 18 days to read, which is unbelievably long for me, considering that I can usually read a 700 page book in about a week interrupted, and a few days uninterrupted. I don't think I have ever read a book that more confounded my senses than this one. I found myself having to reread paragraphs and entire chapters over again just to get the tiniest of glimpse into the meaning of it all. While in the end I enjoyed the stories, once I got past all the rambling, I was left wondering why on earth this book made the list.

#85 - "I don't think I have ever read a book that more confounded my senses than this one"...too funny.

Kudos to you for rereading paragraphs/chapters to glimpse their meaning - I didn't care enough to do so. To make up for all the rambling and lack of plot, I am now reading a non-1001 NY Times bestseller.

I just finished Northanger Abbey and should finish The Three Musketeers sometime tomorrow (a really fun story...I think I will read the rest of the books in the series soon!). I'm also slowly wading through Proust and Bleak House.

Edited to add that I'm also reading Frankenstein.

Now I am reading Fateless by Imre Kertesz. A very odd writing style, almost like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime or Boy in Striped Pajamas (closer in subject matter), or Marcelo in the Real World, but written long before any of them. The narrator seems so preternaturally naive, innocent, direct in his observations, that it's quite unsettling since he is writing about terrible things without quite registering them that way. I think I like it, so far, but I haven't yet figured out if it was worth a Nobel Prize or not...

I finished "Zorba" and I managed to squeeze in two more very short books: "The Cement Garden" by Ian McEwan and "Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton.
I was positively surprised by "Ethan Frome", I liked it even more than "The Age of Innocence", but the ending is really quite ridiculous.
Sorry - no touchstones here, I have no idea where those brackets are hidden on my MacBook keybord...

I did read Excellent Women and finished it yesterday, July 31st! I did enjoy it and can see why she is compared to Jane Austen. I need the book to rest a bit before I can type up my thoughts on my thread... bring on August!

#87 I read Frankenstein earlier in the year. That book is so sad you cant help but to feel sorry for the poor thing.