back by popular demand it's the 2017 reading challenge thread

[braindancer]

1/20 - The Secret History - Donna Tartt
2/20 - The Grifters - Jim Thompson
3/20 - His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet
4/20 - The Sellout - Paul Beatty
5/20 - The North Water - Ian McGuire

 

[billy_bob]

there's also the possibility that a book you didn't enjoy the first time (esp when young) might on a second reading turn out to be a book you end up loving. You're not always 'ready' for some books.

And the other way round, though. Catcher in the Rye, most famously. Loved it at 13 but I think I'd want to slap the pretentious little tosser now.

 

[Orang Utan]

And the other way round, though. Catcher in the Rye, most famously. Loved it at 13 but I think I'd want to slap the pretentious little tosser now.

yes, quite! On The Road is another case in point. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test too.

 

[ringo]

yes, quite! On The Road is another case in point. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test too.

And The Dice Man

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1/50 Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory
2/50 Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
3/50 Steve Reicher - Mad Mobs and Englishmen?: Myths and realities of the 2011 riots
4/50 Stuart Jeffries - Grand Hotel Abyss
5/50 Sean Birchall - Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-fascist Action
6/50 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
7/50 Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
8/50 Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed
9/50 Justin McGruick - Radical Cities
10/50 Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
11/50 Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem
12/50 Martin Ford - Rise of the Robots
13/50 John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
14/50 Franz Kafka - The Trial (re-read)
15/50 Robert Baxell - Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism
16/50 John Berger - Ways of Seeing
17/50 Bill Beverly - Dodgers
18/50 Susan Sontag - On Photography
19/50 James Baldwin - Another Country
20/50 Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
21/50 Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
22/50 Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum

Took me about 4 months on and off to finish, a great book but hard work at times.

 

[billy_bob]

And The Dice Man

Yep, that was the very next one that came to my mind too. Seemed oh-so--thrillingly-counter-culture as a younger teenager, would probably just seem juvenile now.

 

[ringo]

Yep, that was the very next one that came to my mind too. Seemed oh-so--thrillingly-counter-culture as a younger teenager, would probably just seem juvenile now.

And rapey

 

[billy_bob]

1/50 Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory
2/50 Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
3/50 Steve Reicher - Mad Mobs and Englishmen?: Myths and realities of the 2011 riots
4/50 Stuart Jeffries - Grand Hotel Abyss
5/50 Sean Birchall - Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-fascist Action
6/50 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
7/50 Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
8/50 Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed
9/50 Justin McGruick - Radical Cities
10/50 Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
11/50 Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem
12/50 Martin Ford - Rise of the Robots
13/50 John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
14/50 Franz Kafka - The Trial (re-read)
15/50 Robert Baxell - Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism
16/50 John Berger - Ways of Seeing
17/50 Bill Beverly - Dodgers
18/50 Susan Sontag - On Photography
19/50 James Baldwin - Another Country
20/50 Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
21/50 Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
22/50 Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum

Took me about 4 months on and off to finish, a great book but hard work at times.

Once again, I may as well print off your read-it list and treat it my next year's to-read list. A mixture of books I love already, and ones that sound like something I'd want to read

 

[Voley]

And the other way round, though. Catcher in the Rye, most famously. Loved it at 13 but I think I'd want to slap the pretentious little tosser now.

yes, quite! On The Road is another case in point. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test too.

Those two were the ones that sprang to mind with me as well. I can remember someone on here (Dillinger4 possibly?) slating the selfishness of Kerouac and thinking it seemed harsh. Went back and re-read it and totally agreed with him. Bunch of spoiled brats.

 

[billy_bob]

Those two were the ones that sprang to mind with me as well. I can remember someone on here (Dillinger4 possibly?) slating the selfishness of Kerouac and thinking it seemed harsh. Went back and re-read it and totally agreed with him. Bunch of spoiled brats.

Some of his later work (Big Sur comes to mind) I think may age along with the reader rather better. Kerouac had kind of come to terms with himself better by that point.

 

[Beats & Pieces]

21. Forget Foucault - Jean Baudrillard

This features an interesting introduction by Sylvere Lotringer in which the history of the text is discussed. I find that Baudrillard's style often gets in the way of ideas - and that is the case here. That said, the observations regarding Power / Desire and the relationship between Foucault and Deleuze are interesting and worthwhile.

 

[Threshers_Flail]

Yeah Kerouac really doesn't age well, his work is really misogynistic and all the characters are kinda selfish twats.

And frankly it isn't that well written to start with.

 

[Orang Utan]

Charles Bukowski is another one who is impressive when you're young, but, despite his skill as a writer, his attitude towards women is unpalatable. Shame, as he writes so well about the drudgery of employment.

 

[bimble]

Also Hunter S Thompson and timothy Leary (embarassing books that i thought were cool when i was a teenager)

 

[Threshers_Flail]

I do think Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is pretty good, but yeah his fiction really isn't all that.

 

[Me76]

1/50 Teenage Revolution, Alan Davies
2/50 The Third Woman, Jonathan Freedland
3/50 The Art of Peeling an Orange, Victoria Avilan
4/50 Courting Trouble, Lisa M Hawkins
5/50 Dr Vigilante, Alberto Hazan
6/50 the Husband's Secret, Liane Moriarty
7/50 Sleep Tight, Rachel Abbot
8/50 A Dark Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine
9/50 Patchwork Man, DB Martin
10/50 Gone Bad, JB Turner
11/50 The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger
12/50 The Cry, Helen Fitzgerald - really enjoyed this.

 

[billy_bob]

Charles Bukowski is another one who is impressive when you're young, but, despite his skill as a writer, his attitude towards women is unpalatable. Shame, as he writes so well about the drudgery of employment.

I think I can accept it more from Bukowski, because it's more brutally honest and less self-aggrandising. You don't really get the impression he ever wants or expects to come out of it looking good, which I'm not sure you could say about Kerouac.

 

[Pickman's model]

14/50 maurice druon, a king without a kingdom

15/50 georges simenon, maigret at the coroner's (london: penguin, 2016)

 

[Pickman's model]

Winston Churchill wrote something eloquent about the crushing feeling you get in libraries, that there's all this knowledge and history and literature in all these books and you'll never see more than a tiny, insignificant fraction of it....

I reckon 2,000 books might be an optimistic but not totally unrealistic target for the rest of my life, assuming that I retire at some point, and don't lose my sight or my marbles before I do so.

It doesn't feel like enough

Yeh but when you work in a library and see how many of these books are about e.g. management or accountancy or the duller aspects of law - you can rule out thousands of books as they will be of no interest to you, or select but one or two to represent those thousands. I know there's much I don't know, I know there's much I don't want to know, but if I want to find out about the things I do want to know, I know how libraries work so I can find it using e.g. subject headings as well as more obvious means.

 

[Orang Utan]

Yeh but when you work in a library and see how many of these books are about e.g. management or accountancy or the duller aspects of law - you can rule out thousands of books as they will be of no interest to you, or select but one or two to represent those thousands. I know there's much I don't know, I know there's much I don't want to know, but if I want to find out about the things I do want to know, I know how libraries work so I can find it using e.g. subject headings as well as more obvious means.

True, but every time i go to my public library, i see many books that i want to read but will probably never get around to reading. Aon my last visit, I had to put away a book on emotions cos I'd reached my borrowing limit (the fact that it claims there are 154 of them was tantalising enough).
There's plenty enough interesting books to give you that 'crushing feeling'!

 

[Orang Utan]

I don't really get that crushing feeling, actually. I feel more like this:

 

[Fozzie Bear]

1/25 Malcolm X and Alex Haley - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
2/25 Alex de Jonge - Nightmare Culture: Lautremont & "Les Chants de Maldoror"
3/25 Viv Albertine - Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys
4/25 Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials For A Balance Sheet Of The Twentieth Century
5/25 Susana Medina - The Bowie Neuro-Transmitter
6/25 Michael Muhammad Knight - The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip Hop and the Gods of New York
7/25 Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
8/25 Endnotes 2: Misery And The Value Form
9/25 Kim Gordon: Girl In A Band

10/25 Tom Vague - King Mob Echo: From The Gordon Riots to Situationists and Sex Pistols

(fairly rubbish)

 

[kropotkin]

Fozzie, are those endnotes books worth reading?

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Fozzie, are those endnotes books worth reading?

I've found them quite hard work. Also I suspect that the basic premise is probably balls.

The 4th one is quite good on the origins of black lives matter in the states. I'd probably start there.

The first two are a fairly dense look at arguments in a fairly odd area of late 20th century European ultra left stuff. (Barrot, Theorie Communiste, Camatte, all that biz).

Some of it went way over my head but it's worth a go if that sounds like your bag. A bunch of it is online anyhoo.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

This was basically the worst bit.

 

[butchersapron]

Fozzie, are those endnotes books worth reading?

No

 

[kropotkin]

Thanks guys. That looks quite oriented to a university audience. I'll give them a miss

 

[Fozzie Bear]

No

It's hard to argue with that.

Where are you at with the hip kids and formal and real subsumption?

 

[butchersapron]

Thanks guys. That looks quite oriented to a university audience. I'll give them a miss

It's the good part of aufheben taken away dessicatesd and phd-ed oakland. The naked private school oxbridgificartiobn of this is hidden because every single fucker who writes about the left in the US comes from the same private liberal arts college background. It's disgusting. See the clover book on Riot. Filth.

100 btw.

 

[butchersapron]

It's hard to argue with that.

Where are you at with the hip kids and formal and real subsumption?

Formal subsumption is real. These people are now attacking the very idea of periodisation. I just want to smash shit up and that.