My Five Favorite Books of 2020
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- Опубліковано 15 чер 2024
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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.
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
- 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.
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
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
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!
It’s so nice to hear from you about Nassar. I’m Brazilian and I love him too!
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?
"Adaptable chaos fatigue" is my new favorite phrase.
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:)
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
1. Life and Fate
2. The Master and Margarita
3. I, Claudius
4. Perfume
5. Blood Meridian
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.
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!
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 have discovered so many great books from you, Cliff. A thousand thank you’s from my past, present, and future selves!
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
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
Great show, Cliff. Agree with your credo in your excellent Serotonin critique. Wishing you only good reads in 2021.
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.
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. You got me back into reading, as well as introduced me to my new obsession George Bataille. You transformed my reading taste, and for that I'm eternally grateful. I'm starting the year off with Blood Meridian per your recommendation. Cheers man to another great year of reading.
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
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! ☺️📚
Hi. I've just found your UA-cam page, after watching several of the early posts I just wanted to say thank you. For the time you take to create these videos but also because of your reading suggestions I have finally found literature that is brilliant and insightful. I was becoming bored with my usual books usually known as 'beach' reads, no substance. Because of your reviews, I have I have removed the potboilers I usually read and replaced them with some of your reviews. Now I have recovered my joy of reading and now 'read' not just scanning the page. Thanks again. All the best from Mike in the UK
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
i'm so delighted you read Brazilian books!! That makes me so happy, thank you
I'm so glad i discovered this channel in 2020... Thank you Cliff for some awesome recomentadions and for showing me some dark literature
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
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
Convenience Store Woman - Suyaka Murata
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Candide - Voltaire
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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
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
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)
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]
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
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
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
I am definitely going to pick up A Cup Of Rage, thank you!
Great video!! My favorites were Lavoura Arcaica, by Raduan Nassar; The Stream of Life, by Clarice Lispector and The City and the Mountains by Eça de Queirós. I really recommend Nassar's book. It is so different from everything I've ever read.
Nice Cliff! I think mine were The Fall, by Camus ( thanks for that one ), Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, and the man who Smiled, by Henning Mankell, great existential detective novel.
Man these videos are so chill
I read Submission earlier this year, and didn't know he had a new book out. Will definitely check out Serotonin
I’ve only recently started to read seriously, last year I started and finished Infinite Jest by DFW and was somewhat proud that I conquered it. After that I read The Road by McCarthy and I got Equus by Shaffer and read that on Boxing Day. Great stuff.
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
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
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
my favorites of the year: hurricane season, tender is the flesh, and my reread of all the ugly and wonderful things.
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!
I don't have one of last year, but you've inspired me to read out for the rest of this year for at least a book a month or hopefully more. 10-20 books this year. Thanks man! Please remind come Jan 2021 to give you my list.
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
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
A great list and video. Keep up the good work 👍
My favourite five reads of 2020 were Stoner, The end of the affair, Silence, The little stranger and A moveable feast.
Honourable mentions must go to: Carol, Butcher's crossing, True grit and Hiroshima.
1. Solaris 2. Ducks, Newburyport 3. Savage Detectives 4. Braiding Sweetgrass 5. No Friend but the Mountains
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
I love your jacket!
Hey! My favorites I read were The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld. The Last Pirate of New York by Rich Cohen. On the Road Jack Kerouac. Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick. Glad I found your channel this year!
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
my favorites were:
Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
Kim Ji-Young, born 1982 - Cho Nam-joo
Empty Set - Verónica Gerber Bicecci
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 copy of Serotonin arrived only earlier this week. On page 26 at the moment.
You have been doing book reviews for several years now, would you consider doing a post on the top ten best books you would highly recommend that people read and the reason why you especially chose them. Since finding your UA-cam page I have changed my reading pattern and feel that I have improved not only in my reading but also my vocabulary has increased - which is not a bad thing, so I thank you for that. I would never have known or read these books if I had not found your channel and that would have been a travesty. Keep up the great work and stay safe. Keep drinking that coffee!
Definitely hurricane season for me, read it again a few weeks ago. Also read loads of Joan Didion and enjoyed some Cesar Aira, among others. Cheers man keep it up
I'll have to try Aira. I also enjoy Melchor and Didion.
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!
I read The God of Small things last year and it blew me away. The lyricism and the rich descriptions, the use of motifs, was used in the most incredible way.
I also read:
choke by chuck palahniuk
the book of disquiet by pessoa
the sound of waves by yukio mishima
a wild sheep chase by haruki murakami
and a bunch of others
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!
blood meridian, suttree, hundred years of solitude, unbearable lightness of being, a moveable feast
Damn! That is one hell of a list! Great tase, good sir. 👍
I don't know anyone else who has read A Moveable Feast. Wicked.
McCarthy is my all-time favorite. And a line from a moveable feast that still makes me reflect is when Gertrude stein compares a good story to a painting one has to buy and hang on their wall. Nice list
Unbearable Lightness of Being was joint top for me last with Cosmos by Gombrowicz.
Kundera! Love that book.
Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster are two must-reads. Both are short but deeply touching.
Great Video as always!
My favorites were:
The perfume - Patrick Süßkind
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
The Dead - Christian Kracht
Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Greatings from germany:)
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
My favorite books read in 2020 :
1. Pynchon's 'Gravity Rainbow'
2. Lowry's 'Under the Volcano'
3. Gardner's 'Mickelsson's Ghosts'
4. Perec's 'La Vie mode d'emploi' ('Life: A User's Manual')
5. Verhaeghen's 'Omega Minor'
And thanks to you, Cliff, I've also read these other books I really liked: Melchor's 'Hurricane Season', Topor's 'Le Locataire chimérique' ('The Tenant'), Anger's 'Hollywood Babylone', Sacher Masoch's 'Venus in Furs', Gamboa's 'Necropolis', Piñera's 'René's Flesh'... and even Moynihan and Søderlind's 'Lord of Chaos'! Thanks a lot!
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.
Thanks for the heads up on The Peregrine. Sounds like a more intense rendition of H is for Hawk. I’m intrigued!
My god, Rick watches Cliff! Two of my favorite booktubers. My life is complete.
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).
A very pleasant surprise for me was Candide by Voltaire. The sarcasm and dark humour really got me.
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
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
The Plague, A Heart So White and Siddhartha are definitely my favourites from last year. All ones I bought on recs from this channel.
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)
Brazilians are also looking forward to this video!
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.
My fave one was, but I don’t know there’s a translation in English. “La lluvia amarilla” de Julio Llamazares
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.
A solid list. Keep up the great work.
Edit. My picks are One Hundred Years of Solitude, American Gods, The Old Man and The Sea, The Tongues of Men or Angels and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
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
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
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
It would be awesome if you reviewed Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology. Really great. And a Neo-Decadent 12 Manifestos books is gonna be released really soon, Drowning has two Manifestos too
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
100 years of solitude. Although I've only just discovered my love of reading after finishing this I knew almost anything I read afterwards is just downhill from here.
That is my feeling. I only realized the majesty of this book when I closed it and kept staring at the horizon in a train station, completely moveless, and realized I would never read anything like that in my life.
That's a foolish statement to proclaim!
As someone who read great things before and after, I'm happy to say that you're wrong!
I'm happily informing you that you're wrong
I love one hundred years of solitude. But I urge you to read The Master and Margarita next!
My top 3 are : The Corrections, Underworld and Sabbath's Theatre. A good reading year overall
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.
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.
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is one of my favorite books of all time, and I enjoy quite a bit of Hunter S Thompson’s books.
My top three books of 2020 was I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It would be fun if you gave us a review of The Cabin at the End of the World. It's pretty dark and kind of different.
I've had The Peregrine on my beside for months dipping into it when the mood takes me. I really should commit to finishing it because I agree that it is some of the most astoundingly beautiful prose I've ever seen.
2020 was the year where I started reading more non-fiction (mostly philosophy) alongside fiction so I feel like I should list them as two separate top 5s:
Non-fiction:
5. Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra (this one's kind of fiction though)
4. James Hillman - The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
3. Arthur Schopenhauer - Parerga & Paralipomena Vol. 1
2. C.G. Jung - The Red Book
1. Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space
Fiction:
5. Clarice Lispector - Near to the Wild Heart
4. Dino Buzatti - The Tartar Steppe
3. Chingiz Aitmatov - The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
2. James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1. Virginia Woolf - The Waves
Picked up The Peregrine on your recommendation. Looking forward to it! Also, just read Ada, Nabokov. I could have sworn you did a video on this book but can't seem to find it anymore. Am I mistaken?
My favorite of the year was "The Glister" by John Burnside. Still thinking about it today and it's been about six months. "Serotonin" sounds interesting - going to see if I can get my hands on a copy.