What's the first book you'll finish reading in 2017?

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>>8912098
pretty glorious

lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring
its my first fantasy book ever and i'm really impressed on how natural all these fantasy names sounds

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This is great. It's the first black author I've ever read, too.

Blood Meridian for me, bit over halfway through now.
I was getting pretty bored with all the riding around and doing nothing, with only a few interesting parts, but now that they've started massacring people it's easier to go on.

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Good, but not as great as I thought it would be. Hope the series improves after this one

Gonna start on the Castle today~

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Pretty good so far.

Amos Oz - Panther in the Basement

Anyone else read it? I've enjoyed it.

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It's great, but I don't feel like I have an adequate understanding of it yet

>>8912098
the old man and the sea
first hemingway book I'm reading

>>8912224
Hating it so far.
There's an hell of a gap between classic and "american classic".

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damn fine short stories

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Pleasantly somber, though sometimes a bit too subdued for me. It's been a while since I last read Soseki.

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>>8912098

It's either going to be this or The Double.

>>8912640
I've only read Botchan and bits of Sanshiro. How does this compare to those? Do all his works center themselves on the whole young man going out into the world theme?

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It's spooky stuff

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Picrelated; really I could not recommend it highly enough. In one volume of 900 pages, you learn so so much about western poetry and as a result, western culture, since poetry was so prominent up until the 20th century, that you feel like you've made ground on actually getting an idea of the breadth of artistic thought over the last millenium. Great foundational text in understanding a facet of the western canon imo

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started this a couple months ago and its the last of the books I brought home for Christmas to finish. Really enjoy this authors work and am looking forward to finishing it.

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>>8912098
This communist pamphlet.

>>8912633
egzamin's really good

>>8912702
what did he mean by this?

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Lame old Jewish jokes tediously deconstructed for the service of a fraudulent practice. 2017 off to a bad start

>>8912711
It's an absolute joy, if you liked his other books then you'll like this a lot.

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Zizek's "In Defence of Intolerance". It's my first Zizek but it's actually quite good. I think I'll finish it today.

After this, I don't know whether to read Woolf's To the Lighthouse or Saramago's Quasi Object.

>>8912699
just got this one too.

>>8912098
The Stand - Stephen King

Just finished The Gate. It's growing on me.

>>8912695
Unfortunately I can't speak to that, since I've only read Kokoro. The Gate covers very different themes from what you've described, though--it's more about age, decay, isolation, and ambivalence.

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The Magus by John Fowles. It's so good I'm wondering why I haven't heard it praised before. I get the same feeling I do when reading peak Pynchon -- not that they're similar in terms of form or content, just that it's a pleasure to be 100 pages into a very long book and know that the author knows exactly what he's doing.

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Pic related and I'm very disappointed, I don't know if I'll read Gatsby.

Yes, the prose is excellent but for the most part it's everything I had feared it would be : a portrayal of self-indulgent, navel-gazing characters filled to the brim with sometimes unbearable clichés about romance and women in general (especially in sections involving Rosemary, such a bore) :

'Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel'

Give me a break, I'm not even a some sort of hardline feminist but this is just laughably bad in a novel. Another one :

' I am a woman and my business is to hold things together'

I feel this had so much potential as well with the psychology angle but in the end there's not much content about this in the middle sections. The first part is very good but it becomes a slog as soon as Rosemary is introduced.


Maybe the ending will make me reconsider my judgement but I doubt it will, I only have about 100 pages left to read.

Is Gatsby much, much better than this?

>>8912098
Ironically the first book I read in 2016. Nabokov doesn't disapoint.

>>8912098
"Desolation Angels" by Kerouac probably. Unless I start "Dubliners" first.

>>8912098
I'll be finished reading roadside picnic after I have a nice bath. Pretty mediocre novel honestly, I wasn't expecting much from it seen as it's scifi, but it's just overwhelmingly one dimensional.

Grapes of Wrath

>>8913109
>Is Gatsby much, much better than this?
No, Fitzgerald is a meme. You're right, sometimes his prose is kind of pretty, but everything else in his novels is a mess, and he produces howlers just as often as he does original turns of phrase. Gatsby at least has some interesting characters but it's still nothing special imo.

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>>8912098
The book of disquiet. I'm only 25 pages in but I'm not liking it so far. It has some nice passages, but collectively it all just seems a collection of nihilistic observations without any argumentation or progression.

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Nice and frothy. I read the first 40 pages before Christmas, put it away, and have read almost all of the rest since this morning between other tasks.

>>8913158
Cheers for the answer, I don't think I'll read it anytime soon then. I know some people who hail Gatsby as one of their favourite books but I highly suspect they haven't read many

>he produces howlers just as often as he does original turns of phrase.

Might have to do with him knowing several languages after travelling to Europe? Just a hunch, but some sentences seem constructed as it would be in French—I'm French myself.

I don't know whether Fitzgerald actually knew French or not though

>>8912098
The Idiot.
As much as I'm enjoying it I really feel like it's twice as long as it should be. Far too bloated.
>>8912121
thanks, this is interesting
>>8912124
If you've made it that far it picks up momentum as it goes.
>>8912224
>>8912483
That's one of my all time favorites. Better when thought about after the fact than actually read.
>>8913184
That's not a real novel, it's exactly that- a collection of Pessoa's notes assembled post-mortem for a novel he was going to start working on.

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>>8912098

>>8913184
Yeahhh I can appreciate the beautiful prose in this but it's not something I'd sit down and read - a lot of it is rehashing the same ideas and that new edition is like 500 pages long.

Probably Mother Night by Vonnegut

It's a pretty comfy and easy read

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>>8912098
I've finished Walden and am now working my way through A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Excellent stuff, all of it. After this one I might take a break from Thoreau, but I'll be sure to read the entire volume eventually. Also got his Journals (NYRB edition) and Letters to a Spiritual Seeker on my to-read list.

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>>8912098
is it just me or did the translator fuck up completely
i´m just a chapter in but fuck i have rarely read stuff write so awkwardly
harmony was Shakespeare compared to this

it´s not annoying enough to stop though so it´ll be my first

>>8912098
Jerusalem. All memes aside, it's pretty good.

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its growing on me more and more

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>>8912098
Has some really fucked up kids in it

>>8912738
Anna Karenina

>>8912098
it looks like mine will be "the cherry orchard" by chekohv

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>>8914148
>you will never use the peep hole some ecchi hentai America-jin soldier made to spy on your mother undressing, then watch her get fucking ploughed by some sailor

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>>8912098
hopefully going to be finished with it by February

>>8914262
im about 400 pages into IJ right now
fucking excellent so far

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Good, but crude for Dickens. 2016 did a lot of late Dickens.

Chronologically: Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bartleby Rudge, Christmas Stories.

Ranked:

Great Expectations = Bleak House > > Bartleby Rudge >= Little Dorrit > Martin Chuzzlewit > Oliver Twist > Tale of Two Cities

Christmas stories I won't rank.

Also gotta finish the Divine Comedy. Only just got to the earthly paradise.

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Finished it today. I can see why it won the Goncourt compared to Houellebecq's other work, it's much more restrained and feels more taut and carefully parsed, but it lacks the ferocity of Atomised and Platform and the pure dystopian miserablism of The Possibility of an Island. Still impeccable, though.

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Pic related is what I'm currently reading. Very comfy. Will probably finish tomorrow.

>>8912224
This probably my favorite of his, and I usually recommend it to people who have never read him before, though it is quite different from his other novels.

>>8913130
Good shit comrade

>>8914547
Oliver Twist was the only Dickens novel I liked desu (I've only read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities besides). The Divine Comedy is excellent.

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I'm about to begin the fifth chapter. So far, this is one of the best books I've ever read.

The sound of falling things by J. G. Vasquez. Finishing in two days proly

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Unfortunately it will also be my last

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Beautiful poignant book on love and loss. I loved it.

Exodus by Moses. God, this book's a lot more brutal than I expected. At around 32:26, and things are looking pretty messed up at this point.

Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur

I think I'd like it more if I hadn't read The Once and Future King first.

Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on New Year's eve. Was too hungover to read yesterday. Gonna start A Confederacy of Dunces today.