(no subject)

[proximoception]

This year's reading plan mostly and I guess understandably fell apart, and given how much of my time is spoken for next year's will too, but I'll make one anyway.

I did get to reread a lot of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Stevens and Whitman this year, as well as some scraps of Shelley, Emerson, and Tolstoy. Not really any Kafka or Proust though. Maybe I'll just carry the last five over.

Or should I add books new to me? Maybe five more to match five by those guys.

So:

Anna Karenina (or Ivan Ilych et al.?)
Selected Shelley
Selected Emerson (or Journals?)
Kafka's Diaries
Swann's Way

Plus some of these which, embarrassingly, I never finished:

Iliad
Aeneid
Nature of Things
Montaigne's Essays
Table Talk
Hundred Years of Solitude
Lolita
Book of Disquiet
Ricardo Reis
Invisible Man
The Waves
Walden
Demons

Or never much more than started:

Tristram Shandy
Blindness
Joseph and His Brothers
Independent People
A Lost Lady
Bostonians
Jane Eyre
Eros the Bittersweet
Love in the Time of Cholera
Radetzky March
Brighton Rock
Emma

It's also statistically unlikely that I've read all of Dickinson or Leaves of Grass, given the unsystematic way I proceed. Definitely 90 plus percent, but not all. Maybe time to do it the other way.

Any favorites among those nominated? As you'd basically be seconding books I've already recommended to myself I'll likely really read whatever's suggested.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd surely be interested in what you had to say about Brighton Rock. Greene might be the writer I read all the way through. Toss up between him and Conrad, and he might be victorious. I was thinking of trying Conrad again, because I'm convinced I'm wrong about him since everyone else is on the other side. Try Pnin instead of Lolita. Or have you already? One Hundred Years of Solitude I have such fondness for that since it was one of the first great books I read for fun and I always go back to it out of sheer nostalgia.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Nope, never gotten through a Nabokov novel. Or so much as started a Greene.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Pale Fire!!!!!

More later.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, that too.

[ensenchiridion.livejournal.com]

Enjoyed Blindness as a book, not so much as a film. One Hundred Years of Solitude took me a few tries too, but it was worth it. Love In the Time Of Cholera had good bits.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Tried it once when I thought I might be going blind but it was too harrowing. Probably be fine now I'm sure I'm not.

Have a preference among the Marquesas?

[ensenchiridion.livejournal.com]

I don't have much of a memory for books, but I do have a memory for feelings. On feeling I would lend Love In the Time of Cholera and not worry if I got it back, yet it'd be difficult to part with One Hundred. That said, I've just taken both from my shelf, and it seems Cholera has more dog-eared pages... Still, there's that feeling...

...yes, One Hundred wins my Alzheimer heart.

My seconds

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Iliad, Ricardo Reis, Invisible Man (the last hundred pages are amazing), Independent People, The Bostonians.