1. Inside Mari - Shuzo Oshimi 2. The King of Elfland's Daughter - Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany 3. fear and loathing in las vegas - Hunter S. Thompson 4. tranquility - Attila Bartis 5. the peregrine - J. A. Baker
My favorites of '20: 1. Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age- Bohumil Hrabal 2. Kafka in the Shore- Haruki Murakami 3. Chronicles of a Liquid Society- Umberto Eco 4. VALIS- Philip K. Dick 5. Ladders to Fire- Anais Nin
Not sure if this has been recommended before, but among Brazilian authors, Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos are fine choices should definitely be checked out.
Read it and many other Kurt Vonnegut books many years ago in college. I reread “Breakfast of Champions” recently and it was not as good as I’d remembered it being. I will be reading his others again.
great picks! here's mine: 1. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse 2. Why I Write - George Orwell 3. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 4. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier 5. Music For Chameleons - Truman Capote
1. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion- Yukio Mishima 2. Embers- Sándor Márai 3. A River Runs Through It- Norman Maclean 4. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald 5. A Pale View of Hills- Kazuo Ishiguro
Stoner- John Williams Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison Where Men Win Glory- John Krakauer H Is For Hawk- Helen Macdonald Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- Dee Brown Thank you for this channel! Without it I never would have come across Stoner. This is the first Patreon I've ever contributed to and this channel resulted in me buying my first punk album. Happy 2021 everybody!
My picks: "Conversations" by Gilles Deleuze "Notes on literature I" by Theodor Adorno "Das Unheimliche(Uncanny)" by Freud "The Tower" by W.B. Yeats "Three studies on Hegel" by Theodor Adorno "Père Goriot" by Balzac "The seagull" by Anton Chekhov
@@ngdsmedia8189 thank you sir. I live in Brazil and bought in portuguese, so I dont think I can help you hahahah. But it´s a lovely book and probably the best introduction to the man
1) S. Lipsett-Rivera - The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico 2) J. Buisman - Duizend jaar weer, wind en water in de Lage Landen [Durch: A Thousand Years of Weather, Wind and Water in the Low Countries] (I read the first 5 books in the series) 3) G. Aalders - Oranje Zwartboek [Dutch: Orange Blackbook]
This year the best reads were: The Stormlight Archive series - Brandon Sanderson The Road - I mean you know who this is. Vineland - Thomas Pynchon Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
1. Norwood - Charles Portis 2. Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami 3. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo 4. The Dog Stars - Peter Heller 5. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Read over 30 books this year which was a great accomplishment for me but my top 5 would have to be: 1. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 2. The Illustrated Man - Bradbury 3. The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway 4. Someday Angeline - Louis Sachar 5. Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney The Topeka School - Ben Lerner Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness-Arundhati Roy The Prague Cemetery- Umberto Eco The Wall -John Lanchester A white so white-Havier Marias Serotonin-Michel Houellebecq
1. The Sorrow of War - Bao Ninh 2. In the Distance - Hernan Diaz 3. On the Road - Jack Kerouac 4. Outline - Rachel Kusk 5. Provinces of Night - William Gay
My Top FIVE of 2020 - Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis - Animals Farm by George Orwell - The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway - Breakfast at Tiffany's by Capote - Not forgetting the Whale by Ironmonger (My number 1 this year)
High fidelity - Nick Hornby La vie devant soi - Romain Gary Boussole - Mathias énard Ask the dust - John Fante The bricks that built the house - Kate Tempest
Go on then since everyone else is doing it I will do my own 1. Autobiography of Malcolm X 2. Rum Diary - Hunter S Thompson 3. Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain 4. Goodbye To Berlin - Christopher Isherwood 5. Homicide Life on The Streets - David Simon Honourable mentions would be Waiting for The Barbarians - JM Coetzee, Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro and Post Office - Charles Bukowski
5 favs of 2020: -The Argonauts: Maggie Nelson -My year of rest and relaxation: Ottessa Mossfegh -Conversations with Friends: Sally Rooney -Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh -The Art of Fielding: Chad Harbach
My personal favorites were: 5: Yoko Ogawa - the memory police 4: Irvine Welsh- trainspotting 3: William Burroughs- Naked lunch 2: Marlen Haushofer- the wall 1: Angela Carter- Nights at the circus Picked up so many great recs thanks to your Clifford, hoping for even more this year!
Positions With White Roses by Ursula Molinaro Cassandra At The Wedding by Dorothy Baker The Island by Ana Maria Matute Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck all of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn All Souls by Javier Marias Trick Mirror : Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino Sula by Toni Morrison
I think I finally spot Gaddis laying there on the shelf? Just read that ... if you can. (: Some books I really liked last year, recommend all of them (you have already read some): Houellebecq's Serotonin, Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, Temple of the Golden Pavilion by you know by who, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Moby Dick and anything William Gass (always wondered why you didn't try him, can check out his interview with M. Silverblatt to get a taste). Good video, I love what you said about Houllebecq in the end. You said something similar once about the absurdity of trying to find the silver lining in everything a while back. Those are the parts I'm here for - thanks for these videos!
Your reviews put me on to NYRB Classics, which I read about seven of last year. A fantastic series of publications. Keen for another year of your reviews! Kaputt - Curzio Malaparte Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin Stoner - John Williams
Last year was the year I got back into reading books so I went through a few classics and man am I hooked. I loved Blood Meridian, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Fictions, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I had the time of my life and am excited to keep up the habit this year.
I'm working on the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I read a bunch of Houellebecq this year, Submission, Platform, Possibility of an Island, and recently The Elementary Particles I somehow missed out on . I read Bolaño's Woes of a True Policeman, Nazi Literature of the Americas, and By Night in Chile, I re-read the Man Who Was Thursday By Chesterton, I read The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, and started Mason and Dixon by Pynchon
My top books of the year are : 1.)The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 2.)Absalom, Absalom By William Faulkner 3.) Siddhartha By Herman Hesse 4.)The Spy Who Came In From The Cold By John Le carre 5.) One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez 6.) East Of Eden By John Steinbeck 7.)The Fall By Albert Camus
5. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino 4. Post office by Charles Bukowski 3. The illicit happiness of other people by Manu Joseph 2. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger 1. House of leaves by Mark Z Danielewski Thanks for House of Leaves!
5. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman 4. Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog 3. Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris 2. You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames 1. Screwjack by Hunter S. Thompson
the machine for making spaniards - valter hugo mãe the book of disquiet - fernando pessoa demian - hermann hesse notes from the underground - dostoevsky the weight of the dead bird - aline bei
1. The Great Concert of the Night, Jonathan Buckley 2. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry 3. Apeirogon, Colum McCann 4. The Unnamable Present, Roberto Colasso 5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell 6. Threshold, Rob Doyle 7. Silk, Alessandro Baricco
-The Magus by John Fowles -The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco -Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner -Cavalleria Rusticana and other stories by Giovanni Verga - The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
In no particular order: - Out of the Dark - Patrick Modiano - A Heart So White - Javier Marías - Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino - Delirium's Mistress - Tanith Lee - Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore I'm currently reading "The Devil All the Time" by Donald Ray Pollock, which is likely to make this year's list - it's excellent.
If you like The Joke you might want to read Saint Peter's Snow by Leo Perutz. Calvino loved Perutz! Have you read Petersburg by Andrei Bely? It's kind of a sequel to Demons. Great list btw!
@@milfredcummings717 Hey man, thanks for the recommendations I really appreciate it! Peterburg really interests me I shall definitely check out. I'm currently reading "The ruin of Kasch " by Roberto Calasso, it's really good! I think Calvino was friends with Calasso and admired his work as well!
@@ngdsmedia8189 Thanks! I'll put Calasso on my tbr list. If you want to find more great books check out Kundera's literary essays, especially The Curtain.
1) Serotonin - Michel Houellebecq 2) Public Enemies - Michel Houellebecq & Bernard-Henri Lévy 3) Die zitternde Welt - Tanja Paar (don't think there's an English translation yet; the title translates as "The Trembling World" 4) The Prisoner of Heaven - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 5) Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker (not a novel, though, but challenged me profoundly).
2020 was a year I really got into reading again and finished 22 books before the year ended, which I'm really proud of! My top 5 of the year: 1. John Williams - Stoner It's almost a bit of a meme how good this book it, but it really is excellent. Fantastic through and through. 2. Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage Short and sweet, probably Murakami's best book in my opinion. A fantastic portrait of how friendship changes when you become an adult. 3. Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest Controversial author for sure, but the second book of his sci-fi trilogy is absolutely jaw dropping in terms if ambition and concepts. 4. Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore Another one by Murakami I really enjoyed. Way more out there with a lot more magical realism. 5. George Orwell - 1984 Re-read this one for the first time in ages, and man, is this a good and important book. While there is no doubt the grander story of the novel is more and more pertinent every year that goes by, I was really surprised by how much the relationship between Winston and Julia drew me in. Both characters are way more well written than I remember.
I started reading again in 2020 thanks to Booktubers like yourself, so thank you for that! My favorites of 2020: Eat a Peach - David Chang Perfume - Patrick Suskind South of the Border West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
You dress well. Consider doing a video on how you developed your sartorial style. Despite being my mid-30's, I'm just now buying into the importance of style. Better late than never.
The Dying Grass - William T. Vollmann Ice - Anna Kavan Sweet Days of Discipline - Feur Jaeggy Dune - Frank Herbert Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain - Charles R. Cross
My favourites of 2020, in no particular order: Master and Margarita by Bulgakov The Brothers Karamasov by Dostoevsky The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas by Harsch My Struggle Book 2 by Knausgard Storm of Steel by Jünger
the books I liked the best last year probably were: A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry Jesus’ Son - Denis Johnson Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov Dune - Frank Herbert honorable mentions go to Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs, Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories - H. P. Lovecraft, House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski, and The Two Towers - J. R. R. Tolkien
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff Death in Venice, Thomas Mann Team of rivals, Doris Kearns Kim, Rudyard Kipling The Preregrine, J. A, Baker (Thank you Cliff!) The uncommon Reader, Alan, Bennett Promise at dawn, Romain Gary
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy The Headmaster's Wager - Vincent Lam Pol Pot - Philip Short The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wulf
My top 5: 1. Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien 2. Lanny by Max Porter 3. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar 4. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson 5. No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani Bonus: The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
1. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (easily the best) 2. Independent People - Halldor Laxness (very slow, punctuated with quiet violence) 3. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass (maddening, infuriating, and genius) The biggest letdown was 'A Dance To The Music Of Time' series.
my top 5: 1) 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) 2) a collection of short- stories by Chekhov (Russia) 3) Papéis Avulsos - a collection of short-story by Machado de Assis (Brazil) 4) Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) 5) The Asphalt Kiss - a play by Nelson Rodrigues (Brazil) (cheers from Brazil)
1. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami 2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera 3. On Love - Alain de Botton 4. Ilustrado - Miguel Syjuco 5. My Struggle 4: Dancing in the Dark - Karl Ove Knausgaard
my favorites of 2020 are The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce Orientalism, Edward Said Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather
Many by Dostojewski: 1st The Brothers Karamasow 2nd Demons 3rd The Adolescent 4th The Idiot 5th The Eternal Husband (all by Dostojewski, I read crime and punishment already in 2019 so it doesn't make the list) 6th Agnes by Peter Stamm 7th The Posthumous Memoires of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis (Thank you very much for your suggestion it was great) 8th Brave New World by Huxley 9th Animal Farm by Orwell 10th Midas or the Black canvas by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (I reread it and it was great. I'm not sure if there's an English translation though. If not I recommend the Physicist, which should be translated.) Happy new year! I hope you all read many great new books in this new year. Hope you have a great time. And sty healthy!
1. East of Eden, Steinbeck 2. The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu 3. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders 4. Butcher's Crossing, John Williams 5. Dune, Frank Herbert
Educated by Tara Westover When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy The Pisces by Melissa Broder The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Happy reading! ☺️📚
My top five in no particular order: Miracle of the rose - Jean Genet Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison Backlash - Susan Faludi If this is a man - Primo Levi Frisk - Dennis Cooper (anyways... your description of Act of passion reminded me of another book called “the dice man” by Luke Rhinehart)
The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti Bonne Nuit, Doux Prince by Pierre Charras The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay One, No One and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello
I think my top 3 fav books I've read last year was: Music for chamaleons - Truman Capote // The borgias - Mario Puzo // The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
@@davidcadwallader434 I'm planning on reading "in cold blood" this year! And yes, music for chamaleons was fantastic!! I fell in love with his writing, so witty and beautiful.. I wish more people knew this book
Paradise Lost - John Milton Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov Underworld - Don Delillo Shadow Without A Name (Amphitryon) - Ignacio Padilla Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
My Top 5 reads this year were: 1. Moby Dick by Melville 2. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 3. Chronicles by Bob Dylan 4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 5. Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon Honorable Mention would be Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Here are mine: Stoner by John Williams The Magus by John Fowles East of Eden by Steinbeck The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by Peter Glob Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
My favorite books of 2020: - Franz Kafka, The Trial - Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle - Neil Gaiman, The Sandman - Alan Moore, Miracleman - Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragility
My top five reads of 2020 - 1)The Islanders by Pascal Garnier, 2) A Cure for Cancer by Michael Moorcock, 3) Helliconia by Brian Aldiss, 4) The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus and 5) Butcher's Moon by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark
Mine were: A Tale of Two Cities Dickens Chess Novella Zweig The Murderess (Greek classic I recommend) Jurassic Park Crichton Odyssey Homer Have a nice reading year!
@@mishababernathy7165 I just bought his complete short stories, and Chess Story. Can't wait to get into them. Heard him compared to Maupassant and Chekov, so bring it on!
Very well done. Now, if you show the book cover up in the corner as you talk about each book, that would help me decide and remember if I want to buy them.
Best two books I read was Blood Meridian and The Road. Read a lot of McCarthy before those two, but not the two most known works of his. By the end of The Road I was damn near about to weep and at the end of Blood Meridian I had an existential crisis. Easily my favorite American author. I also read Albina and the Dog-Men by Jodorowsky and that book is fucking WILD it’s like LSD in book form. Goals for 2021 is to read all the classic literature that I missed. Don Quixote, Mody Dick, etc. I also want to finish the rest of McCarthy’s work as well as go back and re-read all of Jack London’s work. I definitely picked up Blood Meridian because of you buddy. Thanks again Cliff 🤙 Oh and Kafka, definitely wanna read more Kafka.
I don't know if all of them would interest you, but here are mine: Alfanhuí- Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, The chess player- Stefan Zweig, Life: a user's manual-Georges Perec, The storyteller-Mario Vargas Llosa, Cronopios and famas-Julio Cortázar
Intimations by Zadie Smith Otherwise Known As the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer The Happy Isles Of Oceania by Paul Theroux Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham The Trembling Of a Leaf by Somerset Maugham Kim by Rudyard Kipling Stare Back and Smile by Joanna Lumley The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré Imperium by Christian Kracht Barbarian Days by William Finnegan Mountains Of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane La Mort viennoise by Christiane Singer
I’ve been reading No Longer Human because of your review and I love it! I can relate to Yozo on a certain level and I plan on rereading it after I finish it, thanks man!
I am so glad you always recommend viewers to give the video a thumbs up if they're enjoying it. Always slips my mind. Look's like I've got 5 more books to read now..... one of my book's of the year would have to be The Door by Magda Szabó, also an NYRB Classic. I'd definitely suggest it. Just a wonderful, compelling, and alarming look at class, ideology, friendship, love, and two people world's apart coming together over the course of several years. It was a beautifully haunting way to enter 2020
I wanted to read more female writers this year, as it had really unsettled me as a young girl, that all the authors in my parents library were men- what back than, not knowing better, seemed to mean, that women generally are just not that good at writing. This year I took the time to proof my younger self wrong. Oh how wonderful it can feel to be wrong. 6. - Gusel Jachina Dark, raw, brutal look at a part of Russian history I didn't know about. 5. L'amica geniale- Elena Ferrante (entire series) Addictive to watch this competitive friendship unravel. 4. Homegoing- Yaa Gyasi Deep insight into a harsh truth. 3. To kill a mockingbird- Harper Lee A classic for a reason. 2. The signature of all things- Elizabeth Gilbert I love this book. Moss has never been this eccentric. 1.Pachinko- Min Jin Lee Amazing portrait of a family trying to survive. 1. Amazing portrait of a family amidst the unforgiving chaos of war and the universe that might destroy everything beautiful. Or not.
1. The Divine Comedy (read w/ La Vita Nuova as a sort of Prologue) by Dante Alighieri 2. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann 3. The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake 4. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter 5. The Portable Poe (Penguin) Probably started the most books in my life ever, at the beginning of this year, prime pandemic time, when everyone was panicked and no one knew what was going on, only to not complete them. But once I learned to ride the wave of chaos and scream into the void, I caught a good rhythm by summer lol.
My Top 5 of 2020 1. Future Shock- Alvin Toffler 2. Kindred- Octavia Butler 3. Kafka on the Shore- Haruki Murakami 4. Sister Outsider- Audre Lorde 5. The Stranger- Albert Camus
I read many great books in 2020. Just three on them I really enjoined : 1. Illusions perdues by Honoré de Balzac 2. Il deserto dei Tartari by Dino Buzzati 2. The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing
My favourite books I read in 2020 were: 1 - Dune - Frank Herbert 2 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski 3 - The Rum Diary - Hunter S Thompson 4 - I Am Legend - Richard Matherson 5 - The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy
Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai Trilogy by Jon Fosse Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard Death Fugue(poem) by Paul Celan No particular order Virginal Woolf, Herta Müller, Georges Perec, Tarjei Vesaas and more Jon Fosse are what I'm looking forward to the most this year.
My favorites 1. Independent People by Halldor Laxness 2. JR by William Gaddis 3. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford 4. The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic 5. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
My top: 1- Passion according to GH, Clarice Lispector 2- Stoner, John Williams 3- Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal 4- A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe 5- The Process, Franz Kafka
Personal Favorites: 1. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth 2. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco 3. The Plague by Albert Camus 4. The Collector by John Fowles 5. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace Great picks, I’ll be adding them to my ever expanding to-read list!
This year was the year I finally started reading every day and for the first time fully fell in love with reading. Thanks for all the great recommendations! I'm currently reading The War of the Worlds by H G Wells, but A Cup Of Rage is next in line! My 5 favourite books of 2020 were: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea - Yukio Mishima Norweigian Wood - Murakami Dune - Frank Herbert I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Here's my top 5: 1.The Snows of Kilimandjaro - Ernest Hemingway 2. Childhood's end - Arthur C. Clark 3. L'archipel d'une autre vie - Andrei Makine 4. L'œuvre - Émile Zola 5. O Pioneers - Wila cather
My five favorites of 2020 Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger The Mystery of Rio by Alberto Mussa Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Great list! Here’s mine:( in no order) 1. After Dark Haruki Murakami 2.Sanctuary Faulkner 3.Solitude Anthony Storr 4.Paradise Lost Milton 5. The Birth And Death Of Meaning Becker
1. 'The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant' 2. 'The Oxford Book of Ghost Stories' (so many excellent stories) 3. 'The Water Babies' by Charles Kingsley 4. 'Selected Poems' by David Harsent 5. 'The Rattle Bag' Hughes/Heaney
Okay folks, here's my list: 5. The Plague (Camus) 4. Journey To The End Of The Night(Celine) 3.The Doors Of Perception (Huxley) 2. Women (Bukowski) 1. And The Ass Saw The Angel (Cave) F&L should be Cliff's number one. Imo the greatest book ever written.
1. Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin 2. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon 3. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson 4. Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo 5. The City and The Mountains, Eça de Queirós
I'm most intrigued by your assessment of society in the houellebecq discussion: hopeless but safe, meaningless but entertained, full of despair but polite. I'll have to read it, but it seems to me many of us want polar opposites at the same time, which I often want but have never found a way to have. We seem to want great meaning which I've found comes from struggle and being unsafe, but we also want to avoid the struggle and violence. Maybe future generations will succeed where the 60's failed but I feel like we tried the back to the land movement, in fact I lived in a few intentional communities and found them to be inauthentic though well intentioned largely because I dont think we have figured out how to get along with each other largely. Personally I think we read too much into how similar we are on the surface and ignore how different we are at depth, so when we live together in close proximity and encounter those depths we often come apart at the seams it seems (sorry couldnt help myself, but if Michel can have c and q in his last name I can allow myself this indulgence).
My top five of 2020: 1) Sabbath's Theather, Philip Roth 2) The Loser, Thomas Bernhard 3) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace 4) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 5) Beginners, Raymond Carver
1. The Power Broker - Robert Caro 2. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky 3. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner 4. Intellectuals and Race - Thomas Sowell 5. What It Takes - Richard Cramer
Mine: 1) The Tiger by John Vaillant, 2) Libra and White Noise by Don Delillo, 3) Ham on Rye and Factotum by Charles Bukowski, 4) The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, 5) I am Dynamite! (Nietzsche biography) by Sue Prideaux
Thank you for sharing the joy of reading with us! My three favorites of 2020: The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner and My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.
1. Inside Mari
- Shuzo Oshimi
2. The King of Elfland's Daughter - Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
3. fear and loathing in las vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
4. tranquility - Attila Bartis
5. the peregrine - J. A. Baker
My favorites of '20:
1. Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age- Bohumil Hrabal
2. Kafka in the Shore- Haruki Murakami
3. Chronicles of a Liquid Society- Umberto Eco
4. VALIS- Philip K. Dick
5. Ladders to Fire- Anais Nin
And thanks for always bringing brazilian literature to your channel. We appreciate it
Yeah haha we do! 🇧🇷
Not sure if this has been recommended before, but among Brazilian authors, Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos are fine choices should definitely be checked out.
I don't think he brought it because it's Brazilian, he brought it because it's good.
I'm an Arab graduate in English literature but fond of Latin American literature. Western literature unfairly overshadows world literature.
@@europa7533 Don’t be a pedant. You know what they mean. Of course he bought it bc it’s good, but Brazilian lit is sorely under-discussed on booktube.
- Story Of The Eye
- Notes From Underground
- The Master And Margarita
- The Catcher In The Rye
- Naked Lunch
Reading the notes right now, it's brilliant.
Have you read any of Boulgakov's shorter novels? "Morphine" and "Memoires of a young doctor" are good ones!
@@bookwaeys4686 I read morphine and the heart of a dog, both are excellent short novels from Bulgakov!
@@leadbellymidnightangel doesn't get better than Dostoevsky!
i re-read Notes from Underground in 2020, too. What an incredible, incredible work.
The House of Spirits - Isabel Allende
Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murikami
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
I have Killing Commendatore...is it good?
Also read Killing Commendatore and really enjoyed it.
Narcissus and Goldmund is my favourite book in the history of the world
My top 3 were:
Cat's cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
The Bell jar - Sylvia Plath
No longer Human - Osamu Dazai
I just finished Cat's cradle, it was so funny!
Loved Cat's Cradle too, lots of laughs on some gloomy days.
Read it and many other Kurt Vonnegut books many years ago in college. I reread “Breakfast of Champions” recently and it was not as good as I’d remembered it being. I will be reading his others again.
The Bell Jar - painful.
The Bell Jar AND No Longer Human... i hope you didn't read them back to back! That would throw me into a depressive loop
Nana by Zola
King, Queen, Knave by Nabokov
Steppenwolf by Hesse
The Plague by Camus
Season of migration to the north
Steppenwolf and The Plague were in my top 5 too. I'm looking forward to reading Zola this year.
Happy reading:)
Awesome picks, mine were:
1. East of Eden - Steinbeck
2. Submission - Houellebecq
3. Il Deserto - Buzzati
4. The Trial - Kafka
5. Norwegian Wood - Murakami
yass east of eden is a god tier!
The Trial is incredible!
East of Eden is one of my all time favorites.
I also read East of Eden and Norweigan Wood this years. First one, not my cup of tea, but Norwegian Wood turned out to be my number one
New, huh?
great picks! here's mine:
1. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
2. Why I Write - George Orwell
3. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
4. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
5. Music For Chameleons - Truman Capote
I enjoyed My Cousin Rachel more than Rebecca! Check it out if you haven't already.
Thank you Cliff, and thank you to you're viewers; the suggestions in the comments below will provide me w/ enough reading for the next decade!
1. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion- Yukio Mishima
2. Embers- Sándor Márai
3. A River Runs Through It- Norman Maclean
4. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. A Pale View of Hills- Kazuo Ishiguro
Stoner- John Williams
Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison
Where Men Win Glory- John Krakauer
H Is For Hawk- Helen Macdonald
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- Dee Brown
Thank you for this channel! Without it I never would have come across Stoner. This is the first Patreon I've ever contributed to and this channel resulted in me buying my first punk album.
Happy 2021 everybody!
My picks:
"Conversations" by Gilles Deleuze
"Notes on literature I" by Theodor Adorno
"Das Unheimliche(Uncanny)" by Freud
"The Tower" by W.B. Yeats
"Three studies on Hegel" by Theodor Adorno
"Père Goriot" by Balzac
"The seagull" by Anton Chekhov
Great list, may I enquire where did you acquire your copy of "conversations" by Deleuze?
@@ngdsmedia8189 thank you sir. I live in Brazil and bought in portuguese, so I dont think I can help you hahahah. But it´s a lovely book and probably the best introduction to the man
Convenience Store Woman - Suyaka Murata
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Candide - Voltaire
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
1)
S. Lipsett-Rivera - The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico
2)
J. Buisman - Duizend jaar weer, wind en water in de Lage Landen [Durch: A Thousand Years of Weather, Wind and Water in the Low Countries]
(I read the first 5 books in the series)
3)
G. Aalders - Oranje Zwartboek [Dutch: Orange Blackbook]
This year the best reads were:
The Stormlight Archive series - Brandon Sanderson
The Road - I mean you know who this is.
Vineland - Thomas Pynchon
Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter
Rare to see someone interest in both Sanderson and Pynchon. Awesome.
1. Norwood - Charles Portis
2. Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
3. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
4. The Dog Stars - Peter Heller
5. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Read over 30 books this year which was a great accomplishment for me but my top 5 would have to be:
1. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
2. The Illustrated Man - Bradbury
3. The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
4. Someday Angeline - Louis Sachar
5. Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney
The Topeka School - Ben Lerner
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert
My top 5 in 2020:
1. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
2. Vertigo - W.G Sebald
3. Kolyma Tales - Shalamov
4. Collected Stories (Only the published ones) - Kafka
5. Notes on Cinematography - Bresson
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness-Arundhati Roy
The Prague Cemetery- Umberto Eco
The Wall -John Lanchester
A white so white-Havier Marias
Serotonin-Michel Houellebecq
It’s so nice to hear from you about Nassar. I’m Brazilian and I love him too!
1. The Sorrow of War - Bao Ninh
2. In the Distance - Hernan Diaz
3. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
4. Outline - Rachel Kusk
5. Provinces of Night - William Gay
My Top FIVE of 2020
- Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
- Animals Farm by George Orwell
- The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway
- Breakfast at Tiffany's by Capote
- Not forgetting the Whale by Ironmonger (My number 1 this year)
1. Life and Fate
2. The Master and Margarita
3. I, Claudius
4. Perfume
5. Blood Meridian
High fidelity - Nick Hornby
La vie devant soi - Romain Gary
Boussole - Mathias énard
Ask the dust - John Fante
The bricks that built the house - Kate Tempest
Go on then since everyone else is doing it I will do my own
1. Autobiography of Malcolm X
2. Rum Diary - Hunter S Thompson
3. Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
4. Goodbye To Berlin - Christopher Isherwood
5. Homicide Life on The Streets - David Simon
Honourable mentions would be Waiting for The Barbarians - JM Coetzee, Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro and Post Office - Charles Bukowski
5 favs of 2020:
-The Argonauts: Maggie Nelson
-My year of rest and relaxation: Ottessa Mossfegh
-Conversations with Friends: Sally Rooney
-Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh
-The Art of Fielding: Chad Harbach
My personal favorites were:
5: Yoko Ogawa - the memory police
4: Irvine Welsh- trainspotting
3: William Burroughs- Naked lunch
2: Marlen Haushofer- the wall
1: Angela Carter- Nights at the circus
Picked up so many great recs thanks to your Clifford, hoping for even more this year!
Positions With White Roses by Ursula Molinaro
Cassandra At The Wedding by Dorothy Baker
The Island by Ana Maria Matute
Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck
all of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn
All Souls by Javier Marias
Trick Mirror : Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino
Sula by Toni Morrison
My copy of Serotonin arrived only earlier this week. On page 26 at the moment.
I think I finally spot Gaddis laying there on the shelf? Just read that ... if you can. (:
Some books I really liked last year, recommend all of them (you have already read some): Houellebecq's Serotonin, Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, Temple of the Golden Pavilion by you know by who, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Moby Dick and anything William Gass (always wondered why you didn't try him, can check out his interview with M. Silverblatt to get a taste).
Good video, I love what you said about Houllebecq in the end. You said something similar once about the absurdity of trying to find the silver lining in everything a while back. Those are the parts I'm here for - thanks for these videos!
Your reviews put me on to NYRB Classics, which I read about seven of last year. A fantastic series of publications. Keen for another year of your reviews!
Kaputt - Curzio Malaparte
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin
Stoner - John Williams
Last year was the year I got back into reading books so I went through a few classics and man am I hooked.
I loved Blood Meridian, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Fictions, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I had the time of my life and am excited to keep up the habit this year.
Blood Merridian is hard core
I'm working on the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I read a bunch of Houellebecq this year, Submission, Platform, Possibility of an Island, and recently The Elementary Particles I somehow missed out on . I read Bolaño's Woes of a True Policeman, Nazi Literature of the Americas, and By Night in Chile, I re-read the Man Who Was Thursday By Chesterton, I read The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, and started Mason and Dixon by Pynchon
My top books of the year are :
1.)The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
2.)Absalom, Absalom By William Faulkner
3.) Siddhartha By Herman Hesse
4.)The Spy Who Came In From The Cold By John Le carre
5.) One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6.) East Of Eden By John Steinbeck
7.)The Fall By Albert Camus
5. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
4. Post office by Charles Bukowski
3. The illicit happiness of other people by Manu Joseph
2. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger
1. House of leaves by Mark Z Danielewski
Thanks for House of Leaves!
5. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
4. Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog
3. Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
2. You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames
1. Screwjack by Hunter S. Thompson
my favorites were:
Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
Kim Ji-Young, born 1982 - Cho Nam-joo
Empty Set - Verónica Gerber Bicecci
the machine for making spaniards - valter hugo mãe
the book of disquiet - fernando pessoa
demian - hermann hesse
notes from the underground - dostoevsky
the weight of the dead bird - aline bei
Demian is great. Love how the spooky heart of the book emerges really quickly but subtly.
1. The Great Concert of the Night, Jonathan Buckley
2. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry
3. Apeirogon, Colum McCann
4. The Unnamable Present, Roberto Colasso
5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
6. Threshold, Rob Doyle
7. Silk, Alessandro Baricco
-The Magus by John Fowles
-The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
-Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner
-Cavalleria Rusticana and other stories by Giovanni Verga
- The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
In no particular order:
- Out of the Dark - Patrick Modiano
- A Heart So White - Javier Marías
- Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
- Delirium's Mistress - Tanith Lee
- Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore
I'm currently reading "The Devil All the Time" by Donald Ray Pollock, which is likely to make this year's list - it's excellent.
The Joke -Kundera
Bel-Ami -Maupassant
Voyage au bout de la nuit -Céline
Mr. Palomar Calvino
Demon -Dostoyevsky
If you like The Joke you might want to read Saint Peter's Snow by Leo Perutz. Calvino loved Perutz! Have you read Petersburg by Andrei Bely? It's kind of a sequel to Demons. Great list btw!
@@milfredcummings717 Hey man, thanks for the recommendations I really appreciate it! Peterburg really interests me I shall definitely check out. I'm currently reading "The ruin of Kasch
"
by Roberto Calasso, it's really good! I think Calvino was friends with Calasso and admired his work as well!
@@ngdsmedia8189 Thanks! I'll put Calasso on my tbr list. If you want to find more great books check out Kundera's literary essays, especially The Curtain.
1) Serotonin - Michel Houellebecq 2) Public Enemies - Michel Houellebecq & Bernard-Henri Lévy 3) Die zitternde Welt - Tanja Paar (don't think there's an English translation yet; the title translates as "The Trembling World" 4) The Prisoner of Heaven - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 5) Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker (not a novel, though, but challenged me profoundly).
2020 was a year I really got into reading again and finished 22 books before the year ended, which I'm really proud of! My top 5 of the year:
1. John Williams - Stoner
It's almost a bit of a meme how good this book it, but it really is excellent. Fantastic through and through.
2. Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
Short and sweet, probably Murakami's best book in my opinion. A fantastic portrait of how friendship changes when you become an adult.
3. Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest
Controversial author for sure, but the second book of his sci-fi trilogy is absolutely jaw dropping in terms if ambition and concepts.
4. Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Another one by Murakami I really enjoyed. Way more out there with a lot more magical realism.
5. George Orwell - 1984
Re-read this one for the first time in ages, and man, is this a good and important book. While there is no doubt the grander story of the novel is more and more pertinent every year that goes by, I was really surprised by how much the relationship between Winston and Julia drew me in. Both characters are way more well written than I remember.
You have great taste, I've scribbled 'Cixin Liu' onto my bedside notepad. Thank you. Oh, and the user name, :D Love it.
Recently started reading and read 1984 and Stoner both are awesome. 1984 might be my best read ever with such a powerfull ending
I started reading again in 2020 thanks to Booktubers like yourself, so thank you for that!
My favorites of 2020:
Eat a Peach - David Chang
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
South of the Border West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
You dress well. Consider doing a video on how you developed your sartorial style. Despite being my mid-30's, I'm just now buying into the importance of style. Better late than never.
The Dying Grass - William T. Vollmann
Ice - Anna Kavan
Sweet Days of Discipline - Feur Jaeggy
Dune - Frank Herbert
Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain - Charles R. Cross
My favourites of 2020, in no particular order:
Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
The Brothers Karamasov by Dostoevsky
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas by Harsch
My Struggle Book 2 by Knausgard
Storm of Steel by Jünger
the books I liked the best last year probably were:
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
Jesus’ Son - Denis Johnson
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Dune - Frank Herbert
honorable mentions go to Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs, Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories - H. P. Lovecraft, House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski, and The Two Towers - J. R. R. Tolkien
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Team of rivals, Doris Kearns
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Preregrine, J. A, Baker (Thank you Cliff!)
The uncommon Reader, Alan, Bennett
Promise at dawn, Romain Gary
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Headmaster's Wager - Vincent Lam
Pol Pot - Philip Short
The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wulf
My top 5:
1. Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
2. Lanny by Max Porter
3. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
4. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
5. No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani
Bonus: The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
1. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (easily the best)
2. Independent People - Halldor Laxness (very slow, punctuated with quiet violence)
3. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass (maddening, infuriating, and genius)
The biggest letdown was 'A Dance To The Music Of Time' series.
2020 was when I discovered you. and thus, A Heart So White. I still feel shivers down my spine everytime I look at my shelf and see it. Thanks, man.
my top 5:
1) 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)
2) a collection of short- stories by Chekhov (Russia)
3) Papéis Avulsos - a collection of short-story by Machado de Assis (Brazil)
4) Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
5) The Asphalt Kiss - a play by Nelson Rodrigues (Brazil)
(cheers from Brazil)
1. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
3. On Love - Alain de Botton
4. Ilustrado - Miguel Syjuco
5. My Struggle 4: Dancing in the Dark - Karl Ove Knausgaard
my favorites of 2020 are
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Orientalism, Edward Said
Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag
My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather
Many by Dostojewski:
1st The Brothers Karamasow
2nd Demons
3rd The Adolescent
4th The Idiot
5th The Eternal Husband (all by Dostojewski, I read crime and punishment already in 2019 so it doesn't make the list)
6th Agnes by Peter Stamm
7th The Posthumous Memoires of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis (Thank you very much for your suggestion it was great)
8th Brave New World by Huxley
9th Animal Farm by Orwell
10th Midas or the Black canvas by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (I reread it and it was great. I'm not sure if there's an English translation though. If not I recommend the Physicist, which should be translated.)
Happy new year! I hope you all read many great new books in this new year. Hope you have a great time. And sty healthy!
1. East of Eden, Steinbeck
2. The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu
3. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
4. Butcher's Crossing, John Williams
5. Dune, Frank Herbert
Educated by Tara Westover
When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy
The Pisces by Melissa Broder
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Happy reading! ☺️📚
My top five in no particular order:
Miracle of the rose - Jean Genet
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Backlash - Susan Faludi
If this is a man - Primo Levi
Frisk - Dennis Cooper
(anyways... your description of Act of passion reminded me of another book called “the dice man” by Luke Rhinehart)
The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti
Bonne Nuit, Doux Prince by Pierre Charras
The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello
I think my top 3 fav books I've read last year was: Music for chamaleons - Truman Capote // The borgias - Mario Puzo // The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
@@davidcadwallader434 I'm planning on reading "in cold blood" this year! And yes, music for chamaleons was fantastic!! I fell in love with his writing, so witty and beautiful.. I wish more people knew this book
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
Underworld - Don Delillo
Shadow Without A Name (Amphitryon) - Ignacio Padilla
Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
My Top 5 reads this year were:
1. Moby Dick by Melville
2. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
3. Chronicles by Bob Dylan
4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
5. Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon
Honorable Mention would be Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Thank you for Bob Dylan
Here are mine:
Stoner by John Williams
The Magus by John Fowles
East of Eden by Steinbeck
The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by Peter Glob
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
My favorite books of 2020:
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman
- Alan Moore, Miracleman
- Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragility
My top five reads of 2020 - 1)The Islanders by Pascal Garnier, 2) A Cure for Cancer by Michael Moorcock, 3) Helliconia by Brian Aldiss, 4) The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus and 5) Butcher's Moon by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark
Mine were:
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens
Chess Novella Zweig
The Murderess (Greek classic I recommend)
Jurassic Park Crichton
Odyssey Homer
Have a nice reading year!
Zweig is FANTASTIC!
@@mishababernathy7165 I just bought his complete short stories, and Chess Story. Can't wait to get into them. Heard him compared to Maupassant and Chekov, so bring it on!
Very well done. Now, if you show the book cover up in the corner as you talk about each book, that would help me decide and remember if I want to buy them.
Best two books I read was Blood Meridian and The Road. Read a lot of McCarthy before those two, but not the two most known works of his. By the end of The Road I was damn near about to weep and at the end of Blood Meridian I had an existential crisis. Easily my favorite American author. I also read Albina and the Dog-Men by Jodorowsky and that book is fucking WILD it’s like LSD in book form.
Goals for 2021 is to read all the classic literature that I missed. Don Quixote, Mody Dick, etc. I also want to finish the rest of McCarthy’s work as well as go back and re-read all of Jack London’s work.
I definitely picked up Blood Meridian because of you buddy. Thanks again Cliff 🤙
Oh and Kafka, definitely wanna read more Kafka.
I don't know if all of them would interest you, but here are mine: Alfanhuí- Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, The chess player- Stefan Zweig, Life: a user's manual-Georges Perec, The storyteller-Mario Vargas Llosa, Cronopios and famas-Julio Cortázar
Intimations by Zadie Smith
Otherwise Known As the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer
The Happy Isles Of Oceania by Paul Theroux
Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
The Trembling Of a Leaf by Somerset Maugham
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Stare Back and Smile by Joanna Lumley
The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré
Imperium by Christian Kracht
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
Mountains Of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
La Mort viennoise by Christiane Singer
I’ve been reading No Longer Human because of your review and I love it! I can relate to Yozo on a certain level and I plan on rereading it after I finish it, thanks man!
I am so glad you always recommend viewers to give the video a thumbs up if they're enjoying it. Always slips my mind. Look's like I've got 5 more books to read now..... one of my book's of the year would have to be The Door by Magda Szabó, also an NYRB Classic. I'd definitely suggest it. Just a wonderful, compelling, and alarming look at class, ideology, friendship, love, and two people world's apart coming together over the course of several years. It was a beautifully haunting way to enter 2020
I wanted to read more female writers this year, as it had really unsettled me as a young girl, that all the authors in my parents library were men- what back than, not knowing better, seemed to mean, that women generally are just not that good at writing. This year I took the time to proof my younger self wrong. Oh how wonderful it can feel to be wrong.
6. - Gusel Jachina
Dark, raw, brutal look at a part of Russian history I didn't know about.
5. L'amica geniale- Elena Ferrante (entire series)
Addictive to watch this competitive friendship unravel.
4. Homegoing- Yaa Gyasi
Deep insight into a harsh truth.
3. To kill a mockingbird- Harper Lee
A classic for a reason.
2. The signature of all things- Elizabeth Gilbert
I love this book. Moss has never been this eccentric.
1.Pachinko- Min Jin Lee
Amazing portrait of a family trying to survive.
1.
Amazing portrait of a family amidst the unforgiving chaos of war and the universe that might destroy everything beautiful. Or not.
1. The Divine Comedy (read w/ La Vita Nuova as a sort of Prologue) by Dante Alighieri
2. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
3. The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake
4. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
5. The Portable Poe (Penguin)
Probably started the most books in my life ever, at the beginning of this year, prime pandemic time, when everyone was panicked and no one knew what was going on, only to not complete them. But once I learned to ride the wave of chaos and scream into the void, I caught a good rhythm by summer lol.
My Top 5 of 2020
1. Future Shock- Alvin Toffler
2. Kindred- Octavia Butler
3. Kafka on the Shore- Haruki Murakami
4. Sister Outsider- Audre Lorde
5. The Stranger- Albert Camus
I read many great books in 2020. Just three on them I really enjoined :
1. Illusions perdues by Honoré de Balzac
2. Il deserto dei Tartari by Dino Buzzati
2. The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing
My favourite books I read in 2020 were:
1 - Dune - Frank Herbert
2 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski
3 - The Rum Diary - Hunter S Thompson
4 - I Am Legend - Richard Matherson
5 - The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy
Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai
Trilogy by Jon Fosse
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard
Death Fugue(poem) by Paul Celan
No particular order
Virginal Woolf, Herta Müller, Georges Perec, Tarjei Vesaas and more Jon Fosse are what I'm looking forward to the most this year.
My favorites
1. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
2. JR by William Gaddis
3. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
4. The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic
5. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
My top:
1- Passion according to GH, Clarice Lispector
2- Stoner, John Williams
3- Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal
4- A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe
5- The Process, Franz Kafka
The Plague, A Heart So White and Siddhartha are definitely my favourites from last year. All ones I bought on recs from this channel.
Great show, Cliff. Agree with your credo in your excellent Serotonin critique. Wishing you only good reads in 2021.
Personal Favorites:
1. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
2. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
3. The Plague by Albert Camus
4. The Collector by John Fowles
5. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
Great picks, I’ll be adding them to my ever expanding to-read list!
This year was the year I finally started reading every day and for the first time fully fell in love with reading. Thanks for all the great recommendations! I'm currently reading The War of the Worlds by H G Wells, but A Cup Of Rage is next in line!
My 5 favourite books of 2020 were:
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Norweigian Wood - Murakami
Dune - Frank Herbert
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Here's my top 5:
1.The Snows of Kilimandjaro - Ernest Hemingway
2. Childhood's end - Arthur C. Clark
3. L'archipel d'une autre vie - Andrei Makine
4. L'œuvre - Émile Zola
5. O Pioneers - Wila cather
My five favorites of 2020
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores
Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger
The Mystery of Rio by Alberto Mussa
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Great list!
Here’s mine:( in no order)
1. After Dark Haruki Murakami
2.Sanctuary Faulkner
3.Solitude Anthony Storr
4.Paradise Lost Milton
5. The Birth And Death Of Meaning Becker
1. 'The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant'
2. 'The Oxford Book of Ghost Stories' (so many excellent stories)
3. 'The Water Babies' by Charles Kingsley
4. 'Selected Poems' by David Harsent
5. 'The Rattle Bag' Hughes/Heaney
Okay folks, here's my list:
5. The Plague (Camus)
4. Journey To The End Of The Night(Celine)
3.The Doors Of Perception (Huxley)
2. Women (Bukowski)
1. And The Ass Saw The Angel (Cave)
F&L should be Cliff's number one. Imo the greatest book ever written.
1. Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin
2. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
3. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
4. Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo
5. The City and The Mountains, Eça de Queirós
I'm most intrigued by your assessment of society in the houellebecq discussion: hopeless but safe, meaningless but entertained, full of despair but polite. I'll have to read it, but it seems to me many of us want polar opposites at the same time, which I often want but have never found a way to have. We seem to want great meaning which I've found comes from struggle and being unsafe, but we also want to avoid the struggle and violence. Maybe future generations will succeed where the 60's failed but I feel like we tried the back to the land movement, in fact I lived in a few intentional communities and found them to be inauthentic though well intentioned largely because I dont think we have figured out how to get along with each other largely. Personally I think we read too much into how similar we are on the surface and ignore how different we are at depth, so when we live together in close proximity and encounter those depths we often come apart at the seams it seems (sorry couldnt help myself, but if Michel can have c and q in his last name I can allow myself this indulgence).
My top five of 2020:
1) Sabbath's Theather, Philip Roth
2) The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
3) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
4) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
5) Beginners, Raymond Carver
1. The Power Broker - Robert Caro
2. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
3. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
4. Intellectuals and Race - Thomas Sowell
5. What It Takes - Richard Cramer
Mine: 1) The Tiger by John Vaillant, 2) Libra and White Noise by Don Delillo, 3) Ham on Rye and Factotum by Charles Bukowski, 4) The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, 5) I am Dynamite! (Nietzsche biography) by Sue Prideaux
Thank you for sharing the joy of reading with us!
My three favorites of 2020: The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner and My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.