January reads

>>9050080
>Winesburg, Ohio
>The Aleph
>A Good Man is Hard to Find
>The Idiot

mostly cleaning up last month's reads

Winesburg, Ohio was probably my favorite, but A Good Man and The Aleph come damn close to it. comfiest book I've ever read, the themes were varied and characters were well developed. It deserves its title of "America's Dubliners", I'll probably reread it more than once.

Honestly my least favorite was The Idiot. It was twice as long as it needed to be. The parts that I considered invaluable were spread through way too much plot fluff; Dostoyevsky kept reiterating himself and digressing, losing my attention. That being said, Avsey's translation is top notch.

>ya. i could kill you with this book. nothing personal.

>>9050080
>>9050101
refer to
>>9050094

Book of the New Sun 2-4, Wolfe
Poetics, Aristotle
Cosmos, Gombrowicz
How It Is, Beckett
Steppenwolf, Hesse
War and Peace, Tolstoy
The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, Borges which turns out is completely different from The Aleph and Other Stories

I loved Cosmos, How It Is, and War and Peace. A good month.

>>9050080
I only managed to read Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad, but, man, what a read. Also, RIP Hektor. You were the man.

The Winter’s Tale
The Emigrants
Elegy
Afghanistan: A Lexicon
Standoff (David Rivard)
Richard II
The Real Inspector Hound
Translation (Brian Friel)
When My Brother Was an Aztec
Henry IV Part One
Illuminations (Walter Benjamin)
Terra Nova
Homesick for another Planet
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
Idaho

Trying to get through the Henriad. It's actually quite excellent I just don't look forward to it as I do as much as others in his oeuvre.

A lot of poetry and plays in that list, only a couple of novels. I 100,000% recommend Larry Levis. I have completely fallen in love with his poetry, it is stunning.

>>9050158
oh shit, Henry IV Part Two is on there I forgot where though, I think after Illuminations

>>9050158
How much time do you read per day?

>>9050101
>>9050132

Aleph is great. Some of my favourite borges stories (Immortal, Deutches Requiem) are there.

>Lolita
>El Cantar del Mio Cid
>The Wise Man's Fear

Imre Kertész - Fatelessness
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Leo Tolstoy - Three Deaths, The Death of Ivan Ilych, After the Dance
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
Nelson Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom
Rudyard Kipling - The Man Who Would Be King
Leo Tolstoy - Reread 2/3 of Anna Karenina

>>9050132
>The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, Borges which turns out is completely different from The Aleph and Other Stories
What was included in the 1933-1969 version?

>>9050080
>If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, Calvino
>Why read the classics?, Calvino
>Travels In Hyperreality, Eco
>How to travel with salmon, Eco
>Book of Sand, Borges

Book of Sand was probably the best read this month. An incredibly pleasant surprise after I was disappointed with Brodie's Report. Book of Sand is possibly my favourite Borges collection now. The high points of Eco's essays are fantastic too. Some very funny stuff in there. Looking forward to reading more of Calvino's essays. There were fantastic insights in Why read the classics? but a few of the books discussed were a little too obscure for me and difficult to follow having not read them.

Underworld
Pretentiousness: Why It Matters
HHhH
Submission
Barabbas
Collected Short Stories by Stefan Zweig
A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing

Best was no doubt HHhH, was completely in love with the author's deconstruction of the historical novel.

Worst was A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing which turned out to be a lot less interesting than I thought it would be. It's basically just "misery lit" written in stream-of-consciousness.

A shitload of little Archimedean mathematical proofs
Irving Fisher's Theory of Interest
Charles Dodgson's (Lewis Carroll) Euclid and His Modern Rivals

I didn't have a 'favorite' they were all good reads from an informational perspective. Euclid and His Modern Rivals was pretty clever though, told in a play style, Shakespeare-like.

Tours of Duty.

Never have a collection of Nam memoirs could both make me laugh and bring out the waterworks in just one book.

Sakutaro Hagiwara, Cat Town
Andre Breton, Nadja
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
Ogura Hyakunin Isshu
Charles Baudelaire Flowers of Evil

Favourite:
Flowers of Evil, some of the works in it just resonated so perfectly.

Worst:
Nadja, Simply because I don't think I really get it. I'm gonna definitely re read though.

Help /lit/

Kokoro or Count of Monte Cristo next?

>>9050645

>Kokoro or Count of Monte Cristo next?

monte cristo. drop the aesthetics chasing and be a plotpleb for a bit. change it up.

>The Sellout
>Brave New World
>Hologram for the King
>Cat's Cradle
>Ham On Rye

Really liked The Sellout, found the rest pretty meh.

Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Been a slow month as I've recently become a parent and some of my usual reading time is taken up by my fortnightly Private Eye. I'm reading Tigana now as a bit of light relief. It'll likely take me all of February.

>Legend of the Galactic Heroes Volume III
Was pretty good,eagerly waiting for the next one

>Nothing by Janne Teller
Interesting read.Pretty varied themes.
Liked the puppet play version too.

>Tao Te Ching
James Legge's translation is a mixed bag but the notes were interesting

>Voyage to Faremido
Great Sci-fi novel from the WWI era.

>Book of Odes by Confucius
Pretty poems.
Interesting to see how he selected them based on morals

>Circle of Chalk
First chinese play I have read
Pretty comfy read honestly.

Out of the bunch I would say LoGH was the best followed closely by the Book of Odes and Nothing.

>>9050211
I'm unemployed and I'm living with my parents after having graduated, so, as much as I want. I don't do much other than that other than some gigs around town and auditing a creative writing class.

>>9050290
Yo, I'll check him out

>>9050305
>What was included in the 1933-1969 version?
It's just a greatest hits collection of stories from I guess when he wasn't as famous in the the US and just bringing translations over. This one's weird because Borges himself collaborated on the translation to make it less of a strict word by word translation and closer to an English adaptation. As a result it reads a whole lot more plainly, with more simple words being used and though it's interesting it also comes out inferior to other ones out there. There's also an autobiographical essay which is good but nothing really special, and commentary by Borges about each of the stories. It has The Aleph, Streetcorner Man, Approach to al-Muʻtasim, The Circular Ruins, Death and the Compass, The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874), Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths, The Dead Man, The Other Death, Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari Dead in his Labyrinth, Man on the Threshold, The Challenge, The Captive, Borges and Myself, The Maker, The Intruder, The Immortals, The Meeting, Pedro Salvadores, and Rosendo's Tale.
It's long out of print so I don't think it's worth going out of your way for it, I just grabbed it from a library thinking it was The Aleph which it isn't. But Borges is Borges so it's still good.

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>>9052088
>This one's weird because Borges himself collaborated on the translation
Is it translated with di Giovanni? Been meaning to track down his translation of Book of Sand since many people reckon his superior to the Hurley translations currently in print.

>>9052275
Yes it is. No it's not superior at all. It sucks that unique mystical and academic feeling of the writing in favor of plain language. As a result some of the weaker stories don't have the extra boost that atmosphere would have given. It's not bad by any means, but it's not worth tracking down.

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>>9052308
Thanks for the insights, anon. Maybe I'll try comparing translations at some point in the future, but I'll set that back behind a few more obscure Borges books I want to find first.

Pic related are on the reading pile for this month.

>>9052366
Also I'll add I don't think I've ever read Hurley, just stuff by Kerrigan and the others. So it's still totally possible di Giovanni is way better.

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>>9052374
Ah, I've not read Kerrigan's translation of Fictions. It's another one I'd like to compare actually as di Giovanni didn't release a translation of it (only as a pdf on his website recently). Yates and Irby's Labyrinths was my gateway to Borges and it's what I mostly return to.

>>9050101
>Winesburg, Ohio

How is this book not on the depressing list? It felt a sad read "Hands" was my favourite and also the saddest.

>Heart of Darkness
>The Double
>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Was hoping to get both Les Misreables and 2666 finished for the last week but I guess I'll finish them this week. I'd say The Double was my favourite out of the lot due to how different it was from Dostoyevsky's other novels, feels like it could've been a Kafka story.