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50 Books In a Year Thread.


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On 7/13/2020 at 10:25 PM, Anie said:
On 6/16/2020 at 4:42 PM, Anie said:
On 4/24/2020 at 2:52 PM, Anie said:
On 3/5/2020 at 10:37 AM, Anie said:

2020 Read books:

 

1. The Last Mortal Bond - Brian Staveley

2. Call Down The Hawk - Maggie Stiefvater

3. Geography Club - Brent Hartinger

4. Broken Homes - Ben Aaronovitch

5. Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea - Adam Roberts

6. Two Can Keep A Secret - Karen McManus

7. Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James 

8. The Smoke Thieves - Sally Green

9. Queenslayer - Sebastien de Castell

10. City of Lies - Sam Hawke

11. We All Looked Up - Tommy Wallach

12. Sisters Red - Jackson Pearce

13. The Name on Your Wrist - Helen Hiorns

14. This Savage Song - V. E. Schwab

15. The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin

16. The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin

17.  The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin

18. Tehanu - Ursula K. Le Guin

19. Eve & Adam - Michael Grant, Katherine Applegate

20. The Wall - William Sutcliffe

21. The Sin Eater’s Daughter - Melinda Salisbury

22. The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe - Ally Condie

23. Too Like The Lightning - Ada Palmer

24. Stormbreaker - Anthony Horowitz

25. She Is Not Invisible - Marcus Sedgwick

26. Wild Cards - edited by George R. R. Martin

27. Anna and the French Kiss - Stephanie Perkins

28. Lola and the Boy Next Door - Stephanie Perkins

29. Stray - Rachel Vincent 

30. Isla and the Happily Ever After - Stephanie Perkins

31. Rogue - Rachel Vincent

32. Pride - Rachel Vincent

33. The Lightkeeper’s Daughter - Jean Pendziwol (currently reading)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

iff's list 2020


 

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1. The outlaw album - Daniel Woodrell ★★★★ 167 pages reread

2. Normal People - Sally Rooney ★★ 266 pages

3. Adele - Leila Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★★ 209 pages

4. The Transmigration of Bodies - Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman ★★★★ 101 pages

5. Meat Market - Juno Dawson ★★★★★ 402 pages

6. Crossing - Pajtim Statovi translated by David hackston ★★★★ 1/2 257 pages

7. The Sopranos - Alan Warner ★★★★★ 324 pages reread

8. Girl Woman Other - Bernadine Evaristo ★★★★★ 452 pages

9. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue - Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins ★★★★★ 124 pages

10. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex - Oksana Zabuzhko translated by halyna Hryn   ★★★★ 161 pages

11. The Discomfort of Evenings - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld translated by Michele Hutchison ★★★★★282 pages

12. Serotonin - Michele Houellebecq translated by Shaun Whiteside ★ 309 pages

13. Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin ★★★★ 1/2 342 pages

14. Lotharingia - Simon Winder ★★★★ 480 pages

15. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood ★★★★  415 pages

16. Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry ★★ 214 pages

17. Picnic in the Storm - Yukiko Motoya translated by Asa Yoneda ★★★★ 209 pages

18. Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth ★★★★★ 282 pages

 

19. Disoriental - Negar Djavadi translated by Tina Kover ★★★★★ 338 pages

20. Akin - Emma Donoghue ★★★★ 335 pages

21. Sermon on the fall of Rome - Jerome Ferrari, translated by Geoffrey Strachan ★★★★★ 235 pages reread

22. The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Riviera Garza translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana ★★★★  105 pages

23. Accomodations - Wioletta Greg translated by Jennifer Croft ★★★ 187 pages

24. Snow, Dog, Foot - Claudio morandini translated by J Ockenden  ★★★★★ 122 pages

25. A long petal of the sea - Isabel Allende translated by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson  ★★★★★ 314 pages

26. Property - Lionel Shriver ★★ 317 pages

27. Boulevard Wren and other stories - Blindboy Boatclub ★★★ 1/2 241 pages

28. The complete poetry of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe ★★★  133 pages

29. The Way I Found Her - Rose Tremain ★ 359 pages

 

30. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes ★★★ 1/2 226 pages

31. The Ascent by Barry Ryan ★★★ 385 pages

32. Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid ★★★★★ 310 pages

33. Wretchedness - Andrzej Tichy translated y Nichola Smalley ★★★★ 165 pages

34. Humans - Tom Phillips ★★★ 1/2 304 pages

35. Weather - Jenny Offill ★★★★ 201 pages

 

36. Ankomst - Gohril Gabrielsen translated by Deborah Dawkin ★★★★ 187 pages

37. We Rode All Day - Gareth Cartman ★★★★★ 230 pages

 

total pages - 9,410 pages (does not include currently reading)

 

Sun a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is a superb novel,  really loved the character of Emira, who is accussed of kidnapping in the first chapter of the child she babysits

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1. The Vision of God, Nicholas of Cusa

(15th century German mysticism) 

2. Ecomysticism, Carl von Essen

(Thoreau, Emerson, Richard Jeffries et al, plus modern psycho-biology and the experiences of war, sport, hunting and art.) 

3. Dark Night, Early Dawn, Christopher Bache

(Following on from Grof - the perinatal & transpersonal, NDEs, OBEs, reincarnation, Gaia and Deep Ecology) 

4. Fighting the Flying Circus, Edward V. Rickenbacker

(The memoirs of the top scoring American WW1 fighter ace, which includes some hilarious and disturbing anecdotes about strafing.)

5. In Search of The Christian Buddha, Donald Lopez & Peggy McCracken

(How the story of Barlaam & Josaphat was originally based on the life of the Buddha and then influenced Christianity and Islam.)

6. Croiset, The Clairvoyant, Jack Harrrison Pollack

(A study of the Dutch clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, who worked closely with Utrecht University's Institute of Parapsychology and various police forces tracing missing persons and finding murder victims.)

7. The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard

(An amazing account of Scott's ill-fated 1910-1913 Antarctic expedition by a member of the team.)

8. The Inner Game of Tennis, W Stephen Gallwey

(How to allow the subconscious to be in the foreground and let the conscious take a back seat - just as much mysticism as sports psychology.)

9. The New Poacher's Handbook, Ian Niall

(A nostalgic and evocative account of poachers and poaching and the game they were after. Very much a period piece, even when it came out over 50 years ago.)

10. Wild Awakening, Dzogchen Ponlop

(A survey of Dzogchen and Mahamudra, with the emphasis on the latter.)

11. Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness, Padmasambhava (trans. John Myrdhin Reynolds)

(A Dzogchen terma text.)

12. Russia in 1916, Stephen Graham

(Another of Graham's highly readable accounts of travels through Tsarist Russia, with no hint of what was just around the corner, except for the vastly inflated prices in the shops.)

13. The Heart of Nature, Sir Francis Younghusband

("Nature is a person, and a person is a process." ; "It is the 'I' of Nature, which informs, directs, controls the whole from the centre to utmost extremity through all space and all time. It is the Soul and Spirit, the Genius of Nature. It is what we should mean when we speak of God.")

14. The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin

(Lenin's 1917 work on violent revolution followed by the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and then the state 'withering away of itself' in the higher communist phase. A re-read from the 80's.)

15. Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin

(The continual flux of being born and passing away, in terms of social and class relationships, is rather revealing in terms of the psychosis and paranoia of Stalin's old age. Another reread from the 80s.)

16. Stonehenge, Temple of Ancient Britain, Robin Heath

(A brief archaeo-astronomical monograph - an overview of scientific and new age theories on Stonehenge.)

17. Last of the Summer Wickets, John Fuller

(Reminiscences of the Scarborough cricket festival.)

18. The Mystery & Lore of Perfume, C.J.S. Thomson

(Various scents and perfumes and their uses from the ancient world to the present.)

19. The Precepts of the Dharmakaya, ed J. Myrdhin Reynolds

(A Bon Dzogchen text in the Zhang-Zhung tradition.) 

20. The Teacup and the Skullcup, Chogyam Trungpa

(Zen and Tantra compared in Trungpa's usual insightful and idiosyncratic manner)

21. Madness, A Brief History, Roy Porter

(Really a history of modern and early modern approaches and attitudes to the insane, culminating in the increasingly problematic DSM IV and V)

22. In Days of Great Peace, Mouni Sadhu

(A beautifully observed memoir of time spent with the dying Ramana Maharshi at Arunachala)

23. Bridge of The Brocade Sash, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Travels in Japan with a focus on architecture and the fine arts, mainly focusing on Kyoto and Nara)

24. Life of St Aloysius Gonzaga, Fr Virgil Cepari, S. J.

(A biography by a Jesuit colleague of the 16th century ascetic, the patron of Catholic youth, who 'made an entire and perfect holocaust' of his life and ultimately martyred himself - arguably suicidally - by tending plague victims)

25. The Santiago Pilgrimage, Jean-Christophe Rufin

(A memoir of a walk along the 'Camino de Santiago' from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. I started a thread on this in Hot Box called 'Christianity, Paganism and Contempt'

26. Byzantium: The Early Centuries, John Julius Norwich

(From the foundation of Constantinople under Constantine to the Empress Irene and the contemporaneous establishment of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in the West.)

27. Byzantium: The Apogee, John Julius Norwich

(From the reign of Nicephorus I to the disastrous defeat in 1071 at Manzikert to the Seljuk Turks)

28. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, John Julius Norwich

(From the revival under Alexius Comnenus to the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Over the three volumes that's 1200 pages of war, political intrigue, theological disputation, murder, magnificence and depravity. And that's quite enough of that for the moment!)

29. The Compassionate God, Choan-Seng Song

(Transpositional Theology: "If the cross is a negation of Jewish messianism, it should also be the negation of Christian messianism, the messianism that believed in the Christian church and its history as the sole instrument of God's saving work in the world."

30. Fear & Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

("Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal... This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation comes about precisely by means of the universal; it is and remains to all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox - or else there has never been a faith ...precisely because it always has been.")

31. The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard

("His collision is essentially this: is he the elect, is the thorn in the flesh the expression for the fact that he is to be employed as the extraordinary, is it before God quite as it should be in respect to the extraordinary figure he has become? or is the thorn in the flesh the experience he must humble himself under in order to attain the universal human?")

32. Electra/Orestes/Iphigeneia in Taurica/Andromache/Cyclops, Euripedes

(4 tragedies and a satiric comedy. In Freudian terms if Oedipus can be said to represent a complex in the unconscious then Orestes (who kills his mother in revenge for murdering his father, and then rescues his sister from a Goddess who rescued her from being murdered by their father, only to condemn her to murder anyone who approached her) could be said to represent a complex in the conscious.)

33. A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, Miron Bialoszewski

(A deliberately fractured and disjointed narrative of the author's experiences with some particularly effective passages, especially the escape through the sewers.)

34. Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944, Antony Beevor

(Monty's plan could never have worked, despite the best efforts of those involved. A well structured account of a brutal encounter with atrocities committed on both sides.) 

35. Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell

(A lyrical, touching but ultimately tragic account of bringing up otters on the remote West coast of Scotland. Rather a contrast to the doom and gloom in the last few books!)

36. An Arab Tells His Story, Edward Atiyah

(The autobiography of an Anglophile Syrian Christian, born in in Ottoman ruled Lebanon, educated in British Egypt and England, who worked in the colonial administration in Sudan and became a pan-arab nationalist who eventually sought reconciliation between colonisers and colonised.) 

37. Treatise on Parapsychology, Rene Sudre

(Psi phenomena, as exhibited by mediums and others, accounted for entirely through telepathy and collective psychism, with the spiritualist hypothesis dismissed. I was amused by the repeated injunctions that large quantities of bilberry preserve should be ingested by mediums to prevent fraudulent exhibitions of ectoplasmic manifestation!)

38. The Origin of Species, 6th Ed. 1876, Charles Darwin

("Have we any right to assume that the Creator works through intellectual powers like those of man?" Natural Selection, the survival of the fittest and the struggle for life in the later edition - published after The Descent of Man - with the focus on groups rather than individuals. An amazingly wide ranging argument.) 

39. On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, Charles Darwin

(A minutely detailed account, surprisingly interesting, written to back up what is argued in 38.)

40. Themes & Variations, Aldous Huxley

("The Chinese taught that the Tao, or indwelling Logos, was present on every level from the physical and the biological up to the spiritual; and they knew that outrages against Tao, in Nature no less than in man, would lead to fatal results. We have to recapture some of this old lost wisdom. If we fail to do this - if, presumptuously imagining that we can 'conquer' Nature, we continue to live on our planet like a swarm of destructive parasites - we condemn ourselves and our children to misery and deepening squalor and the despair that finds expression in the frenzies of collective violence.")

41. The Byzantine Achievement, Robert Byron

("The existence of St Sophia is atmospheric, that of St Peter's overpoweringly, imminently substantial. One is a church to God; the other a salon for his agents. One is consecrated to reality, the other, to illusion. St Sophia, in fact, is large, and St Peter's is vilely, tragically small." Having visited both I know exactly what RB means.)

42. The Triads, St Gregory Palamas

(A 14th century defence of Byzantine hesychasm - mystical experience of God as the unborn.

43. The World I Live In, Helen Keller

("Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision of those who, have will, soul, passion, imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all worlds.")

44. Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait, Van Wyck Brooks 

(A short biography of HK by someone who knew her.)

45. Facades: Edith, Osbert & Sacheverell Sitwell, John Pearson

(A triple biography of the Sitwells. With all of the triumphs, disasters, eccentricities, suffering, self deception and interminable wrangling over money that that involves.)

46. Splendours and Miseries: Sacheverell Sitwell, Sarah Bradford

(A biography of Scacheverell Sitwell.)

47. The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron

Travels through Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s. As vivid as Patrick Leigh Fermor's books on Greece, and mainly a paean to Persian and Seljuk art and architecture, with the Bamiyan Buddhas being cursorily dismissed as "of no artistic value".)

48. On Acquisition of the Holy Spirit, St Seraphim of Sarov 

(A tiny but very dense work by the 18th century Russian ascetic on experiencing the mystical transcendence of mutually exclusive, dualistic logic.)

49. Michael Psellus On the Operation of Daemons, ed S Skinner

(An 11th century Byzantine work on daemons - a la Socrates rather than later medieval demonology)

50. Ghosts and Hauntings, Dennis Bardens

(A rehash of various famous and lesser known ghost stories by an investigative journalist who had some very interesting paranormal experiences himself.)

51. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John Climacus

("From him who is without alacrity or generosity even what he has shall be taken away from him. It is impossible for us who have fallen into the pit of iniquities ever to de drawn out of it, unless we sink into the abyss of the humility of the penitents.")

52. Narrative Pictures, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Art criticism: English genre painting from Hogarth to Tissot. Some interesting observations on Richard Dadd, and George Cruickshank.)

53. Sacheverell Sitwell's England, Sacheverell Sitwell, ed. M Raeburn

(Concerned with architecture, garden design and interior decoration. An anthology from various of SS's works on England arranged as if he had taken a circular tour of England.)

54. Morning, Noon and Night in London, Sacheverell Sitwell

(A kind of imaginative fantasia on London in the 1860s based on some lithographs by Alfred Concanen.)

55. All Summer in a Day, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Autobiographical sketches; particularly effective scenes on childhood. A reread from the 80s.)

56. The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, St John Maximovitch

(Mainly concerned with a critical appraisal of the  Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception.)

57. The Alexiad, Anna Comnena

(A biography of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius II Comnenus (reigned 1081 - 1118) which includes a fascinating account of the First Crusade from the Byzantine point of view, written by his daughter.)

58. Fanfare for Elizabeth, Edith Sitwell

(Unloved by her mother, distant from her tyrannical father, oversensitive about her appearance and quite possibly asexual, ES saw herself in Elizabeth I. This, though, has more on her mother, Anne Boleyn, famously executed by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII.)

59. The Queens and the Hive, Edith Sitwell

(A biographical work mainly focused on Elizabeth I and her relationship to her sister Mary Tudor, and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots (who she had executed) but also Burleigh, Walsingham and Leicester, and her 'relationship' with Essex (also executed).

60. Victoria of England, Edith Sitwell

(The private life of Queen Victoria and those close to her, particularly Melbourne, with a devastatingly effective section - based on Engels - on the conditions in which the ordinary working classes were living whilst polite society amused itself with gossip and political intrigue.)

61. The Story of My Life & Optimism, Helen Keller

("Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!")

62. My Religion, Helen Keller

("If you can enjoy the sun and flowers and music where there is nothing except darkness and silence you have proved the mystic sense.")

63. English Eccentrics, Edith Sitwell

("The strangest episode, perhaps, in which Squire Mytton was concerned was the episode of The Nightshirt and The Hiccup … 'Damn this hiccup', said Mytton, as he stood undressed on the floor, apparently in the act of getting into his bed; 'but I'll frighten it away'; so, seizing a lighted candle he applied it to the tab of his shirt and, it being a cotton one, he was instantly enveloped in flames... 'The hiccup is gone, by God', said the squire, as, appallingly burnt, he reeled into bed.")

64. The Hidden Hitler, Lothar Machtan

(A vey interesting and persuasive biography of Hitler, arguing that he was gay. The 'evidence' is all circumstantial so is ultimately unprovable. But he could well have been gay, I think. One could also make a pretty good case for arguing he was ace.)

65. The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Travels in Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India and Ceylon. Mainly concerning temples and temple architecture with some interesting observations on the depiction of the human face in S.E. Asian sculpture.)

66. The Comic English Grammar, Perceval Leigh 

(A fascinating and very entertaining account, from 1840, of the way in which ordinary working class people actually spoke, and the sort of things they said. "The objective case of the personal pronoun is by some, for want of better information, employed in the place of these and those: as, "Let them things alone." "Now then, Jemes, make haste with them chops." "Give them tables a wipe." "Oh! Julier, turn them heyes away." "What's the use o' mancipatin' them niggers?" "Don't you wish you was one of them lobsters?" "I think them shawls so pretty." "Look at them sleeves." The adverb there, is sometimes, with additional impropriety, joined to the pronoun them: as, "Look after them there sheep."") 

67. I was Hitler's Chauffer, Erich Kempka

(The memoirs of Hitler's chauffer, mainly concerned with the end-game in the bunker in April/May 1945.)

68. Iga and Koka Ninja Skills: The Shinobi Scrolls of Chikematsu Shigenori, Antony Cummins & Yoshie Minami

(A translation of Japanese Ninja teachings, with a commentary on the famous chapter on espionage in Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Particularly interesting on the 5 types of spies, especially the use of doomed spies and converted spies, i.e. double agents.) 

69. With Hitler to the End, Heinz Linge

(The memoirs of Hitler's valet with some very interesting descriptions of AH's daily life.)

70. Over The Teacups, Oliver Wendell Holmes

(It is apparently 35 years since I read the much earlier The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table by the same author. Charming late Victorian fiddle-faddle, written when OWH was over 80, but not quite as good as his earlier writings in a similar vein.)

 

 

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71. Our Village, Mary Russell Mitford

(Reminiscences of English country life in a small Hampshire village in the 1820s & 30s.)

72. The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell

(An autobiographical memoir about schooldays in the English public school system and holidays in Scotland during WW1 and the 1920s, by the author of 35.)

73. Taken Care Of, Edith Sitwell

(Edith Sitwell's autobiography, completed the day she died, which ends with a haunting description of skid row in L.A., reminiscences of meeting Marilyn Monroe, and her own approaching end.)

74. Ghosts and Poltergeists, Herbert Thurston, S.J.

(A Catholic priest's account of some famous cases - sceptical in some respects, in other ways not.)

75. Seal Morning, Rowena Farre

(A memoir of an idyllic childhood spent in an isolated croft in the remote north of Scotland in the 1930s, largely devoted to describing bringing up various wild animals adopted as pets. A rat called Rodney, two tame squirrels, a couple of otters and a musical seal which could play various tunes on the xylophone, such as 'Nearer My God To Thee' and 'O Danny Boy!') 

76. Haunted England, Christina Hole

(The English Folklorist's description of various famous cases.)

77. The Age of Adam, James Lees-Milne

(A survey of the architecture of Robert Adam and the other architects and artists he rivalled and cooperated with.) 

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2020:

 

Spoiler

1. On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden

2. Nimona - Noelle Stevenson

3. Radio Silence - Alice Oseman

4. The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow - Fuyumi Ono

5. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory - Caitlin Doughty

6. Summer Bird Blue - Akemi Dawn Bowman

7. The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiro Arikawa

8. Stargazing - Jen Wang

9. The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow

10. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me - Mariko Tamaki

11. The Bone Houses - Emily Lloyd-Jones

12. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton

13. Girl Made of Stars - Ashley Herring Blake

14. Famous in a Small Town - Emma Mills

15. How to Make Friends with the Dark - Kathleen Glasgow

16. Bunny - Mona Awad

17. The Enigma of Amigara Fault - Junji Ito

18. Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente

19. How It Feels to Float - Helena Fox

20. We Are the Ants - Shaun David Hutchinson

21. Exhalation: Stories - Ted Chiang

22. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

23. Saga, Vol. 4 - Brian K. Vaughan

24. Saga, Vol. 5 - Brian K. Vaughan

25. Moonstruck, Vol. 1: Magic to Brew - Grace Ellis

26. Harley in the Sky - Akemi Dawn Bowman

27. Harrow County, Vol. 1: Countless Haints - Cullen Bunn

28. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

29. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

30. Edenbrooke - Julianne Donaldson

31. Harrow County, Vol. 2: Twice Told - Cullen Bunn

32. Nightbooks - J.A. White

33. Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

34. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

35. City of Ghosts - Victoria Schwab

36. Saga, Vol. 6 - Brian K. Vaughan

37. Tunnel of Bones - Victoria Schwab

38. When the Sky Fell on Splendor - Emily Henry

39. Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

40. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

41. Lucky Caller - Emma Mills

42. Saga, Vol. 7 - Brian K. Vaughan

43. Rules for Vanishing - Kate Alice Marshall

44. Saga, Vol. 8 - Brian K. Vaughan

45. Saga, Vol. 9 - Brian K. Vaughan

46. The Monster of Elendhaven - Jennifer Giesbrecht

47. Scary Stories for Young Foxes - Christian McKay Heidicker

48. Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire

49. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

50. The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters

51. A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness

52. The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo

53. A Million Junes - Emily Henry

54. This Was Our Pact - Ryan Andrews

55. Snow, Glass, Apples - Neil Gaiman

56. Nothing is Forgotten - Ryan Andrews

57. Coraline - Neil Gaiman

58. Deeplight - Frances Hardinge

59. The Last True Poets of the Sea - Julia Drake

60. The Regrets - Amy Bonnaffons

61. If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley

62. Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone - Bo Burnham

63. Thornhill - Pam Smy

64. In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire

65. Into the Drowning Deep - Mira Grant

66. This Is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar / Max Gladstone

67. The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave

68. The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune

69. Winterwood - Shea Ernshaw

70. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance - Ruth Emmie Lang

71. The Wicked Deep - Shea Ernshaw

72. To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers

73. Skin and Other Stories - Roald Dahl

74. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

75. Song for a Whale - Lynne Kelly

76. Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds

77. Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

78. For Every One - Jason Reynolds

79. Perfect Rhythm - Jae

80. The Crown Ain't Worth Much - Hanif Abdurraqib

81. Surge - Jay Bernard

82. The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins

83. Lanny - Max Porter

 

84. The Broken Girls - Simone St. James

85. The Poison Thread - Laura Purcell

86. Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire

87. Rolling in the Deep - Mira Grant

88. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

89. Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson

90. Randomize - Andy Weir

91. Ark - Veronica Roth

92. The Last Conversation - Paul Tremblay

93. Emergency Skin - N.K. Jemisin

94. You Have Arrived at Your Destination - Amor Towles

95. Song for the Unraveling of the World - Brian Evenson

96. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reid

97. Wilder Girls - Rory Powers

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  • 2 weeks later...

I feel like I haven't read for fun since 2013. Just hit the library a bunch these last couple weeks. Don't know about fifty books by 2021 but I'll do my darndest.

 

1. Sabriel, Garth Nix

2. Lirael, Garth Nix

3. Abhorsen, Garth Nix

4. The Woman in the Window, A.J. Finn

5. Clariel, Garth Nix

6. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness

7. The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness

8. Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness

 

(I'm cheating a bit; I haven't actually read 5-8, but I fully intend to just because they're all part of a series I know I like. Starting off with rereading books I loved but haven't touched in years.)

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iff's list 2020


 

  Hide contents

 

1. The outlaw album - Daniel Woodrell ★★★★ 167 pages reread

2. Normal People - Sally Rooney ★★ 266 pages

3. Adele - Leila Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★★ 209 pages

4. The Transmigration of Bodies - Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman ★★★★ 101 pages

5. Meat Market - Juno Dawson ★★★★★ 402 pages

6. Crossing - Pajtim Statovi translated by David hackston ★★★★ 1/2 257 pages

7. The Sopranos - Alan Warner ★★★★★ 324 pages reread

8. Girl Woman Other - Bernadine Evaristo ★★★★★ 452 pages

9. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue - Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins ★★★★★ 124 pages

10. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex - Oksana Zabuzhko translated by halyna Hryn   ★★★★ 161 pages

11. The Discomfort of Evenings - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld translated by Michele Hutchison ★★★★★282 pages

12. Serotonin - Michele Houellebecq translated by Shaun Whiteside ★ 309 pages

13. Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin ★★★★ 1/2 342 pages

14. Lotharingia - Simon Winder ★★★★ 480 pages

15. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood ★★★★  415 pages

16. Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry ★★ 214 pages

17. Picnic in the Storm - Yukiko Motoya translated by Asa Yoneda ★★★★ 209 pages

18. Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth ★★★★★ 282 pages

 

19. Disoriental - Negar Djavadi translated by Tina Kover ★★★★★ 338 pages

20. Akin - Emma Donoghue ★★★★ 335 pages

21. Sermon on the fall of Rome - Jerome Ferrari, translated by Geoffrey Strachan ★★★★★ 235 pages reread

22. The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Riviera Garza translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana ★★★★  105 pages

23. Accomodations - Wioletta Greg translated by Jennifer Croft ★★★ 187 pages

24. Snow, Dog, Foot - Claudio morandini translated by J Ockenden  ★★★★★ 122 pages

25. A long petal of the sea - Isabel Allende translated by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson  ★★★★★ 314 pages

26. Property - Lionel Shriver ★★ 317 pages

27. Boulevard Wren and other stories - Blindboy Boatclub ★★★ 1/2 241 pages

28. The complete poetry of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe ★★★  133 pages

29. The Way I Found Her - Rose Tremain ★ 359 pages

 

30. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes ★★★ 1/2 226 pages

31. The Ascent by Barry Ryan ★★★ 385 pages

32. Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid ★★★★★ 310 pages

33. Wretchedness - Andrzej Tichy translated y Nichola Smalley ★★★★ 165 pages

34. Humans - Tom Phillips ★★★ 1/2 304 pages

35. Weather - Jenny Offill ★★★★ 201 pages

 

36. Ankomst - Gohril Gabrielsen translated by Deborah Dawkin ★★★★ 187 pages

37. We Rode All Day - Gareth Cartman ★★★★★ 230 pages

 

38, Winter in Sokcho - Elisa Sh8ua Dusapin translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins ★★★★★ 154 pages

39. The Cook - Maylis De Kerangel translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★ 100 pages

 

total pages - 9,664 pages (does not include currently reading)

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  1. North, C., 2019. The Gameshouse
  2. Wurtzel, E., 1994. Prozac Nation
  3. Galbraith, R., 2018. Lethal White
  4. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Goodbye Tsugumi. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  5. Hastings, M., 2010. Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945
  6. Vaughn, B. K., Chiang, C., Wilson, M. & Fletcher, J., 2019. Paper Girls Vol. 6. [e-book]
  7. Lowry, E., 2017. Broke Millennial
  8. Allison, J. & Treiman, L., 2015. Giant Days Vol. 1. [e-book]
  9. Jemisin, N. K., 2015. The Fifth Season
  10. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Asleep. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  11. Jemisin, N. K., 2016. Obelisk Gate
  12. Comeau, J. & Horne E., 2015. Anatomy of Melancholy: The Best of A Softer World
  13. Jemisin, N. K., 2017. The Stone Sky
  14. Latour, J., Rodriguez, R. & Renzi, R., 2019. Spider-Gwen: Gwen Stacy
  15. Thompson, T., 2019. The Rosewater Redemption
  16. Kuang, R. F., 2018. The Poppy War
  17. Freed, A., 2019. Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron
  18. Sanderson, B., 2005. Elantris
  19. Karpyshyn, D., 2011. Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan
  20. Scalzi, J., 2005. Old Man’s War
  21. Scalzi, J., 2006. The Ghost Brigades
  22. Scalzi, J., 2007. The Last Colony
  23. Scalzi, J., 2008. Zoë's Tale
  24. Freed, A., 2020. Star Wars: Shadow Fall
  25. Scalzi, J., 2013. The Human Division
  26. Scalzi, J., 2015. The End of All Things
  27. Powell, G. L., 2019. Embers of War
  28. Powell, G. L., 2020. Fleet of Knives
  29. Brooks, M., 2020. Devolution: A First Hand Account the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
  30. Paolini, C., 2020. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
  31. Ellis, L., 2020. Axiom’s End
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/29/2020 at 9:17 PM, Anie said:
On 7/13/2020 at 10:25 PM, Anie said:
On 6/16/2020 at 4:42 PM, Anie said:
On 4/24/2020 at 2:52 PM, Anie said:
On 3/5/2020 at 10:37 AM, Anie said:

2020 Read books:

 

1. The Last Mortal Bond - Brian Staveley

2. Call Down The Hawk - Maggie Stiefvater

3. Geography Club - Brent Hartinger

4. Broken Homes - Ben Aaronovitch

5. Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea - Adam Roberts

6. Two Can Keep A Secret - Karen McManus

7. Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James 

8. The Smoke Thieves - Sally Green

9. Queenslayer - Sebastien de Castell

10. City of Lies - Sam Hawke

11. We All Looked Up - Tommy Wallach

12. Sisters Red - Jackson Pearce

13. The Name on Your Wrist - Helen Hiorns

14. This Savage Song - V. E. Schwab

15. The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin

16. The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin

17.  The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin

18. Tehanu - Ursula K. Le Guin

19. Eve & Adam - Michael Grant, Katherine Applegate

20. The Wall - William Sutcliffe

21. The Sin Eater’s Daughter - Melinda Salisbury

22. The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe - Ally Condie

23. Too Like The Lightning - Ada Palmer

24. Stormbreaker - Anthony Horowitz

25. She Is Not Invisible - Marcus Sedgwick

26. Wild Cards - edited by George R. R. Martin

27. Anna and the French Kiss - Stephanie Perkins

28. Lola and the Boy Next Door - Stephanie Perkins

29. Stray - Rachel Vincent 

30. Isla and the Happily Ever After - Stephanie Perkins

31. Rogue - Rachel Vincent

32. Pride - Rachel Vincent

33. The Lightkeeper’s Daughter - Jean Pendziwol

34. Stolen - Lesley Pearce

35. The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiegvatee

36. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

37. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton

38. Ship Breaker - Paolo Bacigalupi

39. Tattoo - Jennifer Lynn Barnes

40. Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

41. Siege and Storm - Leigh Bardugo

42. Ruin and Rising - Leigh Bardugo

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2020:

 

Spoiler

1. On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden

2. Nimona - Noelle Stevenson

3. Radio Silence - Alice Oseman

4. The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow - Fuyumi Ono

5. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory - Caitlin Doughty

6. Summer Bird Blue - Akemi Dawn Bowman

7. The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiro Arikawa

8. Stargazing - Jen Wang

9. The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow

10. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me - Mariko Tamaki

11. The Bone Houses - Emily Lloyd-Jones

12. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton

13. Girl Made of Stars - Ashley Herring Blake

14. Famous in a Small Town - Emma Mills

15. How to Make Friends with the Dark - Kathleen Glasgow

16. Bunny - Mona Awad

17. The Enigma of Amigara Fault - Junji Ito

18. Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente

19. How It Feels to Float - Helena Fox

20. We Are the Ants - Shaun David Hutchinson

21. Exhalation: Stories - Ted Chiang

22. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

23. Saga, Vol. 4 - Brian K. Vaughan

24. Saga, Vol. 5 - Brian K. Vaughan

25. Moonstruck, Vol. 1: Magic to Brew - Grace Ellis

26. Harley in the Sky - Akemi Dawn Bowman

27. Harrow County, Vol. 1: Countless Haints - Cullen Bunn

28. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

29. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

30. Edenbrooke - Julianne Donaldson

31. Harrow County, Vol. 2: Twice Told - Cullen Bunn

32. Nightbooks - J.A. White

33. Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

34. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

35. City of Ghosts - Victoria Schwab

36. Saga, Vol. 6 - Brian K. Vaughan

37. Tunnel of Bones - Victoria Schwab

38. When the Sky Fell on Splendor - Emily Henry

39. Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

40. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

41. Lucky Caller - Emma Mills

42. Saga, Vol. 7 - Brian K. Vaughan

43. Rules for Vanishing - Kate Alice Marshall

44. Saga, Vol. 8 - Brian K. Vaughan

45. Saga, Vol. 9 - Brian K. Vaughan

46. The Monster of Elendhaven - Jennifer Giesbrecht

47. Scary Stories for Young Foxes - Christian McKay Heidicker

48. Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire

49. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

50. The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters

51. A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness

52. The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo

53. A Million Junes - Emily Henry

54. This Was Our Pact - Ryan Andrews

55. Snow, Glass, Apples - Neil Gaiman

56. Nothing is Forgotten - Ryan Andrews

57. Coraline - Neil Gaiman

58. Deeplight - Frances Hardinge

59. The Last True Poets of the Sea - Julia Drake

60. The Regrets - Amy Bonnaffons

61. If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley

62. Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone - Bo Burnham

63. Thornhill - Pam Smy

64. In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire

65. Into the Drowning Deep - Mira Grant

66. This Is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar / Max Gladstone

67. The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave

68. The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune

69. Winterwood - Shea Ernshaw

70. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance - Ruth Emmie Lang

71. The Wicked Deep - Shea Ernshaw

72. To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers

73. Skin and Other Stories - Roald Dahl

74. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

75. Song for a Whale - Lynne Kelly

76. Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds

77. Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

78. For Every One - Jason Reynolds

79. Perfect Rhythm - Jae

80. The Crown Ain't Worth Much - Hanif Abdurraqib

81. Surge - Jay Bernard

82. The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins

83. Lanny - Max Porter

84. The Broken Girls - Simone St. James

85. The Poison Thread - Laura Purcell

86. Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire

87. Rolling in the Deep - Mira Grant

88. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

89. Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson

90. Randomize - Andy Weir

91. Ark - Veronica Roth

92. The Last Conversation - Paul Tremblay

93. Emergency Skin - N.K. Jemisin

94. You Have Arrived at Your Destination - Amor Towles

95. Song for the Unraveling of the World - Brian Evenson

96. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reid

97. Wilder Girls - Rory Powers

 

98. Craven Manor - Darcy Coates

99. The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell

100. The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

101. The Ghost of Graylock - Dan Poblocki

102. The Twisted Ones - T. Kingfisher

103. Spirit Hunters - Ellen Oh

104. Kill Creek - Scott Thomas

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Lady.Saturnina.94
On 7/11/2020 at 11:47 PM, Lady.Saturnina.94 said:
On 4/22/2020 at 11:34 PM, Lady.Saturnina.94 said:
On 2/29/2020 at 10:09 PM, Lady.Saturnina.94 said:

2020 List

1. The Hunger Games-Suzanne Collins

2. Catching Fire- Suzanne Collins

3. Mockingjay- Suzanne Collins

4. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte

5. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon- Stephen King

6. The Woman in Black- Susan Hill

7. Jennifer Government- Max Berry

8. The Aspern Papers- Henry James

9. Beneath the Citadel- Destiny Soria

10. Reader's Digest Select Editions, Vol. 1, 1998

11. Les Miserables- Victor Hugo

12. Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen

13. Sober Curious- Ruby Warrington

14. The Girl I Used to Be- April Henry

15. What Waits in the Woods- Kieran Scott

16. What Waits in the Water- Kieran Scott

17. A Face Like Glass- Frances Hardinge

18. Moll Flanders- Daniel Defoe (currently reading)

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Phantasmal Fingers
On 8/10/2020 at 4:29 PM, Real Jazz Hands said:
  Reveal hidden contents

1. The Vision of God, Nicholas of Cusa

(15th century German mysticism) 

2. Ecomysticism, Carl von Essen

(Thoreau, Emerson, Richard Jeffries et al, plus modern psycho-biology and the experiences of war, sport, hunting and art.) 

3. Dark Night, Early Dawn, Christopher Bache

(Following on from Grof - the perinatal & transpersonal, NDEs, OBEs, reincarnation, Gaia and Deep Ecology) 

4. Fighting the Flying Circus, Edward V. Rickenbacker

(The memoirs of the top scoring American WW1 fighter ace, which includes some hilarious and disturbing anecdotes about strafing.)

5. In Search of The Christian Buddha, Donald Lopez & Peggy McCracken

(How the story of Barlaam & Josaphat was originally based on the life of the Buddha and then influenced Christianity and Islam.)

6. Croiset, The Clairvoyant, Jack Harrrison Pollack

(A study of the Dutch clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, who worked closely with Utrecht University's Institute of Parapsychology and various police forces tracing missing persons and finding murder victims.)

7. The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard

(An amazing account of Scott's ill-fated 1910-1913 Antarctic expedition by a member of the team.)

8. The Inner Game of Tennis, W Stephen Gallwey

(How to allow the subconscious to be in the foreground and let the conscious take a back seat - just as much mysticism as sports psychology.)

9. The New Poacher's Handbook, Ian Niall

(A nostalgic and evocative account of poachers and poaching and the game they were after. Very much a period piece, even when it came out over 50 years ago.)

10. Wild Awakening, Dzogchen Ponlop

(A survey of Dzogchen and Mahamudra, with the emphasis on the latter.)

11. Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness, Padmasambhava (trans. John Myrdhin Reynolds)

(A Dzogchen terma text.)

12. Russia in 1916, Stephen Graham

(Another of Graham's highly readable accounts of travels through Tsarist Russia, with no hint of what was just around the corner, except for the vastly inflated prices in the shops.)

13. The Heart of Nature, Sir Francis Younghusband

("Nature is a person, and a person is a process." ; "It is the 'I' of Nature, which informs, directs, controls the whole from the centre to utmost extremity through all space and all time. It is the Soul and Spirit, the Genius of Nature. It is what we should mean when we speak of God.")

14. The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin

(Lenin's 1917 work on violent revolution followed by the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and then the state 'withering away of itself' in the higher communist phase. A re-read from the 80's.)

15. Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin

(The continual flux of being born and passing away, in terms of social and class relationships, is rather revealing in terms of the psychosis and paranoia of Stalin's old age. Another reread from the 80s.)

16. Stonehenge, Temple of Ancient Britain, Robin Heath

(A brief archaeo-astronomical monograph - an overview of scientific and new age theories on Stonehenge.)

17. Last of the Summer Wickets, John Fuller

(Reminiscences of the Scarborough cricket festival.)

18. The Mystery & Lore of Perfume, C.J.S. Thomson

(Various scents and perfumes and their uses from the ancient world to the present.)

19. The Precepts of the Dharmakaya, ed J. Myrdhin Reynolds

(A Bon Dzogchen text in the Zhang-Zhung tradition.) 

20. The Teacup and the Skullcup, Chogyam Trungpa

(Zen and Tantra compared in Trungpa's usual insightful and idiosyncratic manner)

21. Madness, A Brief History, Roy Porter

(Really a history of modern and early modern approaches and attitudes to the insane, culminating in the increasingly problematic DSM IV and V)

22. In Days of Great Peace, Mouni Sadhu

(A beautifully observed memoir of time spent with the dying Ramana Maharshi at Arunachala)

23. Bridge of The Brocade Sash, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Travels in Japan with a focus on architecture and the fine arts, mainly focusing on Kyoto and Nara)

24. Life of St Aloysius Gonzaga, Fr Virgil Cepari, S. J.

(A biography by a Jesuit colleague of the 16th century ascetic, the patron of Catholic youth, who 'made an entire and perfect holocaust' of his life and ultimately martyred himself - arguably suicidally - by tending plague victims)

25. The Santiago Pilgrimage, Jean-Christophe Rufin

(A memoir of a walk along the 'Camino de Santiago' from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. I started a thread on this in Hot Box called 'Christianity, Paganism and Contempt'

26. Byzantium: The Early Centuries, John Julius Norwich

(From the foundation of Constantinople under Constantine to the Empress Irene and the contemporaneous establishment of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in the West.)

27. Byzantium: The Apogee, John Julius Norwich

(From the reign of Nicephorus I to the disastrous defeat in 1071 at Manzikert to the Seljuk Turks)

28. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, John Julius Norwich

(From the revival under Alexius Comnenus to the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Over the three volumes that's 1200 pages of war, political intrigue, theological disputation, murder, magnificence and depravity. And that's quite enough of that for the moment!)

29. The Compassionate God, Choan-Seng Song

(Transpositional Theology: "If the cross is a negation of Jewish messianism, it should also be the negation of Christian messianism, the messianism that believed in the Christian church and its history as the sole instrument of God's saving work in the world."

30. Fear & Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

("Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal... This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation comes about precisely by means of the universal; it is and remains to all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox - or else there has never been a faith ...precisely because it always has been.")

31. The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard

("His collision is essentially this: is he the elect, is the thorn in the flesh the expression for the fact that he is to be employed as the extraordinary, is it before God quite as it should be in respect to the extraordinary figure he has become? or is the thorn in the flesh the experience he must humble himself under in order to attain the universal human?")

32. Electra/Orestes/Iphigeneia in Taurica/Andromache/Cyclops, Euripedes

(4 tragedies and a satiric comedy. In Freudian terms if Oedipus can be said to represent a complex in the unconscious then Orestes (who kills his mother in revenge for murdering his father, and then rescues his sister from a Goddess who rescued her from being murdered by their father, only to condemn her to murder anyone who approached her) could be said to represent a complex in the conscious.)

33. A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, Miron Bialoszewski

(A deliberately fractured and disjointed narrative of the author's experiences with some particularly effective passages, especially the escape through the sewers.)

34. Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944, Antony Beevor

(Monty's plan could never have worked, despite the best efforts of those involved. A well structured account of a brutal encounter with atrocities committed on both sides.) 

35. Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell

(A lyrical, touching but ultimately tragic account of bringing up otters on the remote West coast of Scotland. Rather a contrast to the doom and gloom in the last few books!)

36. An Arab Tells His Story, Edward Atiyah

(The autobiography of an Anglophile Syrian Christian, born in in Ottoman ruled Lebanon, educated in British Egypt and England, who worked in the colonial administration in Sudan and became a pan-arab nationalist who eventually sought reconciliation between colonisers and colonised.) 

37. Treatise on Parapsychology, Rene Sudre

(Psi phenomena, as exhibited by mediums and others, accounted for entirely through telepathy and collective psychism, with the spiritualist hypothesis dismissed. I was amused by the repeated injunctions that large quantities of bilberry preserve should be ingested by mediums to prevent fraudulent exhibitions of ectoplasmic manifestation!)

38. The Origin of Species, 6th Ed. 1876, Charles Darwin

("Have we any right to assume that the Creator works through intellectual powers like those of man?" Natural Selection, the survival of the fittest and the struggle for life in the later edition - published after The Descent of Man - with the focus on groups rather than individuals. An amazingly wide ranging argument.) 

39. On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, Charles Darwin

(A minutely detailed account, surprisingly interesting, written to back up what is argued in 38.)

40. Themes & Variations, Aldous Huxley

("The Chinese taught that the Tao, or indwelling Logos, was present on every level from the physical and the biological up to the spiritual; and they knew that outrages against Tao, in Nature no less than in man, would lead to fatal results. We have to recapture some of this old lost wisdom. If we fail to do this - if, presumptuously imagining that we can 'conquer' Nature, we continue to live on our planet like a swarm of destructive parasites - we condemn ourselves and our children to misery and deepening squalor and the despair that finds expression in the frenzies of collective violence.")

41. The Byzantine Achievement, Robert Byron

("The existence of St Sophia is atmospheric, that of St Peter's overpoweringly, imminently substantial. One is a church to God; the other a salon for his agents. One is consecrated to reality, the other, to illusion. St Sophia, in fact, is large, and St Peter's is vilely, tragically small." Having visited both I know exactly what RB means.)

42. The Triads, St Gregory Palamas

(A 14th century defence of Byzantine hesychasm - mystical experience of God as the unborn.

43. The World I Live In, Helen Keller

("Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision of those who, have will, soul, passion, imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all worlds.")

44. Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait, Van Wyck Brooks 

(A short biography of HK by someone who knew her.)

45. Facades: Edith, Osbert & Sacheverell Sitwell, John Pearson

(A triple biography of the Sitwells. With all of the triumphs, disasters, eccentricities, suffering, self deception and interminable wrangling over money that that involves.)

46. Splendours and Miseries: Sacheverell Sitwell, Sarah Bradford

(A biography of Scacheverell Sitwell.)

47. The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron

Travels through Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s. As vivid as Patrick Leigh Fermor's books on Greece, and mainly a paean to Persian and Seljuk art and architecture, with the Bamiyan Buddhas being cursorily dismissed as "of no artistic value".)

48. On Acquisition of the Holy Spirit, St Seraphim of Sarov 

(A tiny but very dense work by the 18th century Russian ascetic on experiencing the mystical transcendence of mutually exclusive, dualistic logic.)

49. Michael Psellus On the Operation of Daemons, ed S Skinner

(An 11th century Byzantine work on daemons - a la Socrates rather than later medieval demonology)

50. Ghosts and Hauntings, Dennis Bardens

(A rehash of various famous and lesser known ghost stories by an investigative journalist who had some very interesting paranormal experiences himself.)

51. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John Climacus

("From him who is without alacrity or generosity even what he has shall be taken away from him. It is impossible for us who have fallen into the pit of iniquities ever to de drawn out of it, unless we sink into the abyss of the humility of the penitents.")

52. Narrative Pictures, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Art criticism: English genre painting from Hogarth to Tissot. Some interesting observations on Richard Dadd, and George Cruickshank.)

53. Sacheverell Sitwell's England, Sacheverell Sitwell, ed. M Raeburn

(Concerned with architecture, garden design and interior decoration. An anthology from various of SS's works on England arranged as if he had taken a circular tour of England.)

54. Morning, Noon and Night in London, Sacheverell Sitwell

(A kind of imaginative fantasia on London in the 1860s based on some lithographs by Alfred Concanen.)

55. All Summer in a Day, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Autobiographical sketches; particularly effective scenes on childhood. A reread from the 80s.)

56. The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, St John Maximovitch

(Mainly concerned with a critical appraisal of the  Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception.)

57. The Alexiad, Anna Comnena

(A biography of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius II Comnenus (reigned 1081 - 1118) which includes a fascinating account of the First Crusade from the Byzantine point of view, written by his daughter.)

58. Fanfare for Elizabeth, Edith Sitwell

(Unloved by her mother, distant from her tyrannical father, oversensitive about her appearance and quite possibly asexual, ES saw herself in Elizabeth I. This, though, has more on her mother, Anne Boleyn, famously executed by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII.)

59. The Queens and the Hive, Edith Sitwell

(A biographical work mainly focused on Elizabeth I and her relationship to her sister Mary Tudor, and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots (who she had executed) but also Burleigh, Walsingham and Leicester, and her 'relationship' with Essex (also executed).

60. Victoria of England, Edith Sitwell

(The private life of Queen Victoria and those close to her, particularly Melbourne, with a devastatingly effective section - based on Engels - on the conditions in which the ordinary working classes were living whilst polite society amused itself with gossip and political intrigue.)

61. The Story of My Life & Optimism, Helen Keller

("Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!")

62. My Religion, Helen Keller

("If you can enjoy the sun and flowers and music where there is nothing except darkness and silence you have proved the mystic sense.")

63. English Eccentrics, Edith Sitwell

("The strangest episode, perhaps, in which Squire Mytton was concerned was the episode of The Nightshirt and The Hiccup … 'Damn this hiccup', said Mytton, as he stood undressed on the floor, apparently in the act of getting into his bed; 'but I'll frighten it away'; so, seizing a lighted candle he applied it to the tab of his shirt and, it being a cotton one, he was instantly enveloped in flames... 'The hiccup is gone, by God', said the squire, as, appallingly burnt, he reeled into bed.")

64. The Hidden Hitler, Lothar Machtan

(A vey interesting and persuasive biography of Hitler, arguing that he was gay. The 'evidence' is all circumstantial so is ultimately unprovable. But he could well have been gay, I think. One could also make a pretty good case for arguing he was ace.)

65. The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei, Sacheverell Sitwell

(Travels in Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India and Ceylon. Mainly concerning temples and temple architecture with some interesting observations on the depiction of the human face in S.E. Asian sculpture.)

66. The Comic English Grammar, Perceval Leigh 

(A fascinating and very entertaining account, from 1840, of the way in which ordinary working class people actually spoke, and the sort of things they said. "The objective case of the personal pronoun is by some, for want of better information, employed in the place of these and those: as, "Let them things alone." "Now then, Jemes, make haste with them chops." "Give them tables a wipe." "Oh! Julier, turn them heyes away." "What's the use o' mancipatin' them niggers?" "Don't you wish you was one of them lobsters?" "I think them shawls so pretty." "Look at them sleeves." The adverb there, is sometimes, with additional impropriety, joined to the pronoun them: as, "Look after them there sheep."") 

67. I was Hitler's Chauffer, Erich Kempka

(The memoirs of Hitler's chauffer, mainly concerned with the end-game in the bunker in April/May 1945.)

68. Iga and Koka Ninja Skills: The Shinobi Scrolls of Chikematsu Shigenori, Antony Cummins & Yoshie Minami

(A translation of Japanese Ninja teachings, with a commentary on the famous chapter on espionage in Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Particularly interesting on the 5 types of spies, especially the use of doomed spies and converted spies, i.e. double agents.) 

69. With Hitler to the End, Heinz Linge

(The memoirs of Hitler's valet with some very interesting descriptions of AH's daily life.)

70. Over The Teacups, Oliver Wendell Holmes

(It is apparently 35 years since I read the much earlier The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table by the same author. Charming late Victorian fiddle-faddle, written when OWH was over 80, but not quite as good as his earlier writings in a similar vein.)

 

 

71. Our Village, Mary Russell Mitford

(Reminiscences of English country life in a small Hampshire village in the 1820s & 30s.)

72. The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell

(An autobiographical memoir about schooldays in the English public school system and holidays in Scotland during WW1 and the 1920s, by the author of 35.)

73. Taken Care Of, Edith Sitwell

(Edith Sitwell's autobiography, completed the day she died, which ends with a haunting description of skid row in L.A., reminiscences of meeting Marilyn Monroe, and her own approaching end.)

74. Ghosts and Poltergeists, Herbert Thurston, S.J.

(A Catholic priest's account of some famous cases - sceptical in some respects, in other ways not.)

75. Seal Morning, Rowena Farre

(A memoir of an idyllic childhood spent in an isolated croft in the remote north of Scotland in the 1930s, largely devoted to describing bringing up various wild animals adopted as pets. A rat called Rodney, two tame squirrels, a couple of otters and a musical seal which could play various tunes on the xylophone, such as 'Nearer My God To Thee' and 'O Danny Boy'!) 

76. Haunted England, Christina Hole

(The English Folklorist's description of various famous cases.)

77. The Age of Adam, James Lees-Milne

(A survey of the architecture of Robert Adam and the other architects and artists he rivalled and cooperated with.) 

78. The Battle for Spain, Antony Beevor

(Both sides in The Spanish Civil War committed atrocities and were not prepared to live alongside the other. Franco triumphed because of Hitler and Mussolini's backing and the Republican sides military incompetence. Had the Republicans won, Beevor argues, the subsequent regeime would have been little different to Franco's.)

79. The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, Herbert Thurston, S.J.

(Strange physical phenomena as reported by catholic mystics:- stigmata, levitation, telekinesis, seeing without eyes, breatharianism and one or two others.)

80. Pagan Regeneration, Harold R. Willoughby

(A study of the mysteries of Eleusis, Orpheus, Mithras, Hermes, Dionysius, Isis and the writings of Philo of Alexandria.)

81. The Egyptian Book of The Dead (The Book of Going Forth By Day - The Papyrus of Ani), James Wasserman et al

(The post mortem travels of discarnate personalities and various texts associated with this, from the famous Ani Papyrus of The British Museum.) 

82. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, Ian Stevenson

(The classic study of reincarnation.)

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iff's list 2020


 

  Hide contents

 

1. The outlaw album - Daniel Woodrell ★★★★ 167 pages reread

2. Normal People - Sally Rooney ★★ 266 pages

3. Adele - Leila Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★★ 209 pages

4. The Transmigration of Bodies - Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman ★★★★ 101 pages

5. Meat Market - Juno Dawson ★★★★★ 402 pages

6. Crossing - Pajtim Statovi translated by David hackston ★★★★ 1/2 257 pages

7. The Sopranos - Alan Warner ★★★★★ 324 pages reread

8. Girl Woman Other - Bernadine Evaristo ★★★★★ 452 pages

9. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue - Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins ★★★★★ 124 pages

10. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex - Oksana Zabuzhko translated by halyna Hryn   ★★★★ 161 pages

11. The Discomfort of Evenings - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld translated by Michele Hutchison ★★★★★282 pages

12. Serotonin - Michele Houellebecq translated by Shaun Whiteside ★ 309 pages

13. Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin ★★★★ 1/2 342 pages

14. Lotharingia - Simon Winder ★★★★ 480 pages

15. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood ★★★★  415 pages

16. Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry ★★ 214 pages

17. Picnic in the Storm - Yukiko Motoya translated by Asa Yoneda ★★★★ 209 pages

18. Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth ★★★★★ 282 pages

 

19. Disoriental - Negar Djavadi translated by Tina Kover ★★★★★ 338 pages

20. Akin - Emma Donoghue ★★★★ 335 pages

21. Sermon on the fall of Rome - Jerome Ferrari, translated by Geoffrey Strachan ★★★★★ 235 pages reread

22. The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Riviera Garza translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana ★★★★  105 pages

23. Accomodations - Wioletta Greg translated by Jennifer Croft ★★★ 187 pages

24. Snow, Dog, Foot - Claudio morandini translated by J Ockenden  ★★★★★ 122 pages

25. A long petal of the sea - Isabel Allende translated by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson  ★★★★★ 314 pages

26. Property - Lionel Shriver ★★ 317 pages

27. Boulevard Wren and other stories - Blindboy Boatclub ★★★ 1/2 241 pages

28. The complete poetry of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe ★★★  133 pages

29. The Way I Found Her - Rose Tremain ★ 359 pages

 

30. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes ★★★ 1/2 226 pages

31. The Ascent by Barry Ryan ★★★ 385 pages

32. Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid ★★★★★ 310 pages

33. Wretchedness - Andrzej Tichy translated y Nichola Smalley ★★★★ 165 pages

34. Humans - Tom Phillips ★★★ 1/2 304 pages

35. Weather - Jenny Offill ★★★★ 201 pages

 

36. Ankomst - Gohril Gabrielsen translated by Deborah Dawkin ★★★★ 187 pages

37. We Rode All Day - Gareth Cartman ★★★★★ 230 pages

 

38, Winter in Sokcho - Elisa Sh8ua Dusapin translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins ★★★★★ 154 pages

39. The Cook - Maylis De Kerangel translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★ 100 pages

 

40. little Eyes - samta schweblin translated by Megan McDowell ★★★★ 241 pages

41. The Eighth life (for Brilka) - Nino haratischvili translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin ★★★★★ 935 pages

42. loveless - alice Oseman ★★★★ 433 pages

 

total pages - 11,271pages (does not include currently reading)

 

Little eyes reminded me of an episode of Black Mirror but i thought it was very good.

 

The Eighth Life was such a brilliant novel about 6 generations of a georgian family spanning world war I, russian revolution, world war 2, and everything up to 2006 or 2007. It was brilliant novel. at time i found it hard to read but it was rivetting. a strong contender for my favourite of 2020.

 

i did like loveless too

 

the last 2 weeks i have been struggling with my current read

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I like books, and Lists! So far in 2020:

 

1: Armed in Her Fashion – Kate Heartfield

2: Leonardo da Vinci – Walter Isaacson

3: The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett

4: Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When it’s Gone – Astra Taylor

5: Night School – Richard Wiseman

6: A Deadly Divide - Ausma Zehanat Khan

8: Call Them by Their True Names – Rebecca Solnit

9: Memory Serves – Lee Maracle

10: My Real Children – Jo Walton

11: Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic - Michael Axworthy

12: Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport

13: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler – E. L. Konigsburg

14: Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey

15: How to Survive a Plague – David France

16: Finding Baba Yaga – Jane Yolen

17: The Collected Schizophrenias - Esmé Weijun Wang

18: Memories of the Future – Siri Hustvedt

19: Draw Your Weapons – Sarah Sentilles

20: Hild – Nicola Griffith

21: The Library Book – Susan Orlean

22: The Gentrification of the Mind – Sarah Schulman

23: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths – Barbara Comyns

24: Meddling Kids – Edgar Cantero

25: Germany: Memories of a Nation – Neil MacGregor

26: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space – Amanda Leduc

27: War Primer – Bertolt Brecht

28: House on the Cerulean Sea – TJ Klune

29: The Next Great Migration – Sonia Shah

30: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Jenny Odell

31: The Rest of Us Just Live Here – Patrick Ness

32: Ninth House – Leigh Bardugo

33: Sick – Porochista Khakpour

34: Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All – Laura Ruby

35: Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams - Douglas W. Druick

36: Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts - Kate Racculia

37: This is Where You Belong – Melody Warnick

39: Sofonisba's Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work – Michael W. Cole

40: Hench - Natalie Zina Walschots

Currently Reading:

Full-Metal Indigiqueer – Joshua Whitehead

ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex – Angela Chen

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  • 3 weeks later...

iff's list 2020


 

  Hide contents

 

1. The outlaw album - Daniel Woodrell ★★★★ 167 pages reread

2. Normal People - Sally Rooney ★★ 266 pages

3. Adele - Leila Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★★ 209 pages

4. The Transmigration of Bodies - Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman ★★★★ 101 pages

5. Meat Market - Juno Dawson ★★★★★ 402 pages

6. Crossing - Pajtim Statovi translated by David hackston ★★★★ 1/2 257 pages

7. The Sopranos - Alan Warner ★★★★★ 324 pages reread

8. Girl Woman Other - Bernadine Evaristo ★★★★★ 452 pages

9. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue - Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins ★★★★★ 124 pages

10. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex - Oksana Zabuzhko translated by halyna Hryn   ★★★★ 161 pages

11. The Discomfort of Evenings - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld translated by Michele Hutchison ★★★★★282 pages

12. Serotonin - Michele Houellebecq translated by Shaun Whiteside ★ 309 pages

13. Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin ★★★★ 1/2 342 pages

14. Lotharingia - Simon Winder ★★★★ 480 pages

15. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood ★★★★  415 pages

16. Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry ★★ 214 pages

17. Picnic in the Storm - Yukiko Motoya translated by Asa Yoneda ★★★★ 209 pages

18. Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth ★★★★★ 282 pages

 

19. Disoriental - Negar Djavadi translated by Tina Kover ★★★★★ 338 pages

20. Akin - Emma Donoghue ★★★★ 335 pages

21. Sermon on the fall of Rome - Jerome Ferrari, translated by Geoffrey Strachan ★★★★★ 235 pages reread

22. The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Riviera Garza translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana ★★★★  105 pages

23. Accomodations - Wioletta Greg translated by Jennifer Croft ★★★ 187 pages

24. Snow, Dog, Foot - Claudio morandini translated by J Ockenden  ★★★★★ 122 pages

25. A long petal of the sea - Isabel Allende translated by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson  ★★★★★ 314 pages

26. Property - Lionel Shriver ★★ 317 pages

27. Boulevard Wren and other stories - Blindboy Boatclub ★★★ 1/2 241 pages

28. The complete poetry of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe ★★★  133 pages

29. The Way I Found Her - Rose Tremain ★ 359 pages

 

30. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes ★★★ 1/2 226 pages

31. The Ascent by Barry Ryan ★★★ 385 pages

32. Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid ★★★★★ 310 pages

33. Wretchedness - Andrzej Tichy translated y Nichola Smalley ★★★★ 165 pages

34. Humans - Tom Phillips ★★★ 1/2 304 pages

35. Weather - Jenny Offill ★★★★ 201 pages

 

36. Ankomst - Gohril Gabrielsen translated by Deborah Dawkin ★★★★ 187 pages

37. We Rode All Day - Gareth Cartman ★★★★★ 230 pages

 

38, Winter in Sokcho - Elisa Sh8ua Dusapin translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins ★★★★★ 154 pages

39. The Cook - Maylis De Kerangel translated by Sam Taylor ★★★★ 100 pages

40. little Eyes - samta schweblin translated by Megan McDowell ★★★★ 241 pages

41. The Eighth life (for Brilka) - Nino haratischvili translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin ★★★★★ 935 pages

42. loveless - alice Oseman ★★★★ 433 pages


43. Apeirogon - colum Mccann ★★ 1/2 457 pages

44. The end of Days - jenny erpenbeck translated by Susan bernofsky ★★★★★ 238 pages reread

45. Where Reasons End - Yiyun Li ★★★★ 170 pages

46. The Nickel Boys - colson whitehead ★★★★★ 208 pages.

 

total pages - 12,344pages (does not include currently reading)

 

The Nickel boys was superb, i was just engrossed by it and read it in 4 days with 3 of those days beng work daysi

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Very glad to see this thread! I got back from more than a year in the military last spring and realized that I'd read practically no books at all due to being so busy with the army stuff. I started an Excel sheet to document the books I read, the movies I watch etc. to get somehow back on track with the important things in life (which mostly means reading to me). After getting my brain to understand the written word again, I've read some 27 books this year and aim to crank it up to 40 in these two months I still have.

 

Here goes!

  1. Gaiman, Neil: Stardust
  2. Martin, George: Fire and Blood
  3. Pihkala, Juha; Valtaoja, Esko: Nurkkaan ajettu Jumala?
  4. Machiavelli, Niccolo: The Prince
  5. Chomsky, Noan: Tulevaisuuden valtio
  6. Snowden, Edward: Permament Record
  7. Raatikainen, Panu: Ihmistieteet ja filosofia
  8. Eco, Umberto: Ruusun nimi
  9. Rajaniemi, Hannu: Kvanttivaras
  10. Heikkinen, Antti: Risainen elämä - Juice Leskinen 1950-2006
  11. Jansson, Tove: Muumipeikko ja pyrstötähti
  12. Jansson, Tove: Taikurin hattu
  13. Jansson, Tove: Muumipapan urotyöt
  14. Jansson, Tove: Vaarallinen juhannus
  15. Jansson, Tove: Taikatalvi
  16. Jansson, Tove: Näkymätön lapsi
  17. Jansson, Tove: Muumipappa ja meri
  18. Jansson, Tove: Muumilaakson marraskuu
  19. Weir, Andy: The Martian
  20. Aroluoma, Kimmo: Keikkapäivä – 24h kiertue-elämää
  21. Adams, Douglas: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  22. Adams, Douglas: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
  23. Adams, Douglas: Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
  24. Kylänpää, Riitta: Pentti Linkola, ihminen ja legenda
  25. Adams, Douglas: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
  26. Adams, Douglas: Mostly Harmless (1992)
  27. Lundberg, Ulla-Lena: Jää (2012)
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20 minutes ago, Onomatopoet said:

I started an Excel sheet to document the books I read, the movies I watch etc.

I have spreadsheets for those as well :)

 

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  1. North, C., 2019. The Gameshouse
  2. Wurtzel, E., 1994. Prozac Nation
  3. Galbraith, R., 2018. Lethal White
  4. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Goodbye Tsugumi. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  5. Hastings, M., 2010. Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945
  6. Vaughn, B. K., Chiang, C., Wilson, M. & Fletcher, J., 2019. Paper Girls Vol. 6. [e-book]
  7. Lowry, E., 2017. Broke Millennial
  8. Allison, J. & Treiman, L., 2015. Giant Days Vol. 1. [e-book]
  9. Jemisin, N. K., 2015. The Fifth Season
  10. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Asleep. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  11. Jemisin, N. K., 2016. Obelisk Gate
  12. Comeau, J. & Horne E., 2015. Anatomy of Melancholy: The Best of A Softer World
  13. Jemisin, N. K., 2017. The Stone Sky
  14. Latour, J., Rodriguez, R. & Renzi, R., 2019. Spider-Gwen: Gwen Stacy
  15. Thompson, T., 2019. The Rosewater Redemption
  16. Kuang, R. F., 2018. The Poppy War
  17. Freed, A., 2019. Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron
  18. Sanderson, B., 2005. Elantris
  19. Karpyshyn, D., 2011. Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan
  20. Scalzi, J., 2005. Old Man’s War
  21. Scalzi, J., 2006. The Ghost Brigades
  22. Scalzi, J., 2007. The Last Colony
  23. Scalzi, J., 2008. Zoë's Tale
  24. Freed, A., 2020. Star Wars: Shadow Fall
  25. Scalzi, J., 2013. The Human Division
  26. Scalzi, J., 2015. The End of All Things
  27. Powell, G. L., 2019. Embers of War
  28. Powell, G. L., 2020. Fleet of Knives
  29. Brooks, M., 2020. Devolution: A First Hand Account the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
  30. Paolini, C., 2020. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
  31. Ellis, L., 2020. Axiom’s End
  32. Hoffman, A., 2019. The Outside
  33. Brosh, A., 2020. Solutions and Other Problems
  34. Moor, J., 2020. The Keeper
  35. Petersen, A. H., 2020. Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

Just in case anyone's wondering, Christopher Paolini is an awful writer, and should have his hands cut off for crimes against the written word.

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2020:

 

Spoiler

1. On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden

2. Nimona - Noelle Stevenson

3. Radio Silence - Alice Oseman

4. The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow - Fuyumi Ono

5. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory - Caitlin Doughty

6. Summer Bird Blue - Akemi Dawn Bowman

7. The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiro Arikawa

8. Stargazing - Jen Wang

9. The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow

10. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me - Mariko Tamaki

11. The Bone Houses - Emily Lloyd-Jones

12. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton

13. Girl Made of Stars - Ashley Herring Blake

14. Famous in a Small Town - Emma Mills

15. How to Make Friends with the Dark - Kathleen Glasgow

16. Bunny - Mona Awad

17. The Enigma of Amigara Fault - Junji Ito

18. Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente

19. How It Feels to Float - Helena Fox

20. We Are the Ants - Shaun David Hutchinson

21. Exhalation: Stories - Ted Chiang

22. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

23. Saga, Vol. 4 - Brian K. Vaughan

24. Saga, Vol. 5 - Brian K. Vaughan

25. Moonstruck, Vol. 1: Magic to Brew - Grace Ellis

26. Harley in the Sky - Akemi Dawn Bowman

27. Harrow County, Vol. 1: Countless Haints - Cullen Bunn

28. Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

29. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

30. Edenbrooke - Julianne Donaldson

31. Harrow County, Vol. 2: Twice Told - Cullen Bunn

32. Nightbooks - J.A. White

33. Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

34. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

35. City of Ghosts - Victoria Schwab

36. Saga, Vol. 6 - Brian K. Vaughan

37. Tunnel of Bones - Victoria Schwab

38. When the Sky Fell on Splendor - Emily Henry

39. Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

40. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

41. Lucky Caller - Emma Mills

42. Saga, Vol. 7 - Brian K. Vaughan

43. Rules for Vanishing - Kate Alice Marshall

44. Saga, Vol. 8 - Brian K. Vaughan

45. Saga, Vol. 9 - Brian K. Vaughan

46. The Monster of Elendhaven - Jennifer Giesbrecht

47. Scary Stories for Young Foxes - Christian McKay Heidicker

48. Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire

49. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

50. The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters

51. A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness

52. The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo

53. A Million Junes - Emily Henry

54. This Was Our Pact - Ryan Andrews

55. Snow, Glass, Apples - Neil Gaiman

56. Nothing is Forgotten - Ryan Andrews

57. Coraline - Neil Gaiman

58. Deeplight - Frances Hardinge

59. The Last True Poets of the Sea - Julia Drake

60. The Regrets - Amy Bonnaffons

61. If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley

62. Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone - Bo Burnham

63. Thornhill - Pam Smy

64. In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire

65. Into the Drowning Deep - Mira Grant

66. This Is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar / Max Gladstone

67. The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave

68. The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune

69. Winterwood - Shea Ernshaw

70. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance - Ruth Emmie Lang

71. The Wicked Deep - Shea Ernshaw

72. To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers

73. Skin and Other Stories - Roald Dahl

74. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

75. Song for a Whale - Lynne Kelly

76. Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds

77. Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

78. For Every One - Jason Reynolds

79. Perfect Rhythm - Jae

80. The Crown Ain't Worth Much - Hanif Abdurraqib

81. Surge - Jay Bernard

82. The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins

83. Lanny - Max Porter

84. The Broken Girls - Simone St. James

85. The Poison Thread - Laura Purcell

86. Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire

87. Rolling in the Deep - Mira Grant

88. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

89. Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson

90. Randomize - Andy Weir

91. Ark - Veronica Roth

92. The Last Conversation - Paul Tremblay

93. Emergency Skin - N.K. Jemisin

94. You Have Arrived at Your Destination - Amor Towles

95. Song for the Unraveling of the World - Brian Evenson

96. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reid

97. Wilder Girls - Rory Powers

98. Craven Manor - Darcy Coates

99. The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell

100. The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

101. The Ghost of Graylock - Dan Poblocki

102. The Twisted Ones - T. Kingfisher

103. Spirit Hunters - Ellen Oh

104. Kill Creek - Scott Thomas

 

105. Home Before Dark - Riley Sager

106. Horrid - Katrine Leno

107. The Sun Down Motel - Simone St. James

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  1. North, C., 2019. The Gameshouse
  2. Wurtzel, E., 1994. Prozac Nation
  3. Galbraith, R., 2018. Lethal White
  4. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Goodbye Tsugumi. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  5. Hastings, M., 2010. Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945
  6. Vaughn, B. K., Chiang, C., Wilson, M. & Fletcher, J., 2019. Paper Girls Vol. 6. [e-book]
  7. Lowry, E., 2017. Broke Millennial
  8. Allison, J. & Treiman, L., 2015. Giant Days Vol. 1. [e-book]
  9. Jemisin, N. K., 2015. The Fifth Season
  10. Yoshimoto, B., 1989. Asleep. Translated from Japanese by M. Emmerich
  11. Jemisin, N. K., 2016. Obelisk Gate
  12. Comeau, J. & Horne E., 2015. Anatomy of Melancholy: The Best of A Softer World
  13. Jemisin, N. K., 2017. The Stone Sky
  14. Latour, J., Rodriguez, R. & Renzi, R., 2019. Spider-Gwen: Gwen Stacy
  15. Thompson, T., 2019. The Rosewater Redemption
  16. Kuang, R. F., 2018. The Poppy War
  17. Freed, A., 2019. Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron
  18. Sanderson, B., 2005. Elantris
  19. Karpyshyn, D., 2011. Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan
  20. Scalzi, J., 2005. Old Man’s War
  21. Scalzi, J., 2006. The Ghost Brigades
  22. Scalzi, J., 2007. The Last Colony
  23. Scalzi, J., 2008. Zoë's Tale
  24. Freed, A., 2020. Star Wars: Shadow Fall
  25. Scalzi, J., 2013. The Human Division
  26. Scalzi, J., 2015. The End of All Things
  27. Powell, G. L., 2019. Embers of War
  28. Powell, G. L., 2020. Fleet of Knives
  29. Brooks, M., 2020. Devolution: A First Hand Account the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
  30. Paolini, C., 2020. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
  31. Ellis, L., 2020. Axiom’s End
  32. Hoffman, A., 2019. The Outside
  33. Brosh, A., 2020. Solutions and Other Problems
  34. Moor, J., 2020. The Keeper
  35. Petersen, A. H., 2020. Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
  36. Kuang, R. F., 2019. The Dragon Republic
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25 minutes ago, I_Like_Art said:

For this challenge, is it supposed to be 50 different new books?

Hi. Some members have included books they've reread, marking them as "reread" in their lists; so, it looks like you could do that, too, if you wanted to.

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5 minutes ago, LeChat said:

Hi. Some members have included books they've reread, marking them as "reread" in their lists; so, it looks like you could do that, too, if you wanted to.

yeah, that makes sense

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4 hours ago, I_Like_Art said:

For this challenge, is it supposed to be 50 different new books?

I reread books all the time. I count them every time. 🙂

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3 minutes ago, fuzzipueo said:

I reread books all the time. I count them every time. 🙂

makes sense, because they do take the same amount of time to read them as the first time you read them

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7 minutes ago, I_Like_Art said:

makes sense, because they do take the same amount of time to read them as the first time you read them

Also, it's like visiting old friends, and I forget details between readings.

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2 minutes ago, fuzzipueo said:

Also, it's like visiting old friends, and I forget details between readings.

That is very true, I LOVE rereading series like Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games and because every time I get very attached to the characters again, and feel like that I have learned more about the characters and picked up on things I didn't before.

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Yeah, regarding rereading, the book hasn't changed (unless it's a revised edition :P ) but maybe the reader has. :D 

I have reread certain books many times (Alice in Wonderland, LOTR, and a few others), and each time I have grown, learned, experienced, since the time before. :) 

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I count rereads. 

It is up to each to decide for themselves. 

 

Also a personal target doesn't need to be 50 books, it is just what you want to do

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