Help Me With My New Year's Reading List.

Cafe Society
1

Hey all.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read a book a week for the whole of 2008. Trouble is, I don’t know what to read. I want to broaden my literary horizons a little bit so I’m calling on the teeming millions to suggest some books for me to include in my new year’s reading list. I do have a few guidelines

  1. Nothing too long. I want to stick to my book a week schedule and, since I reckon I can read about 50-60 pages a day, that means I wouldn’t consider any books longer than about 450 pages.

  2. Nothing too heavy. I like some heavy stuff but I don’t really want anything that goes out of its way to be abstruse. It’s a bit difficult to define ‘heavy’ objectively, so adhering to this would be a bit of a judgement call. If it helps, something like ‘A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’ is just the right amount of heavy. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is too heavy.

  3. I don’t really have a favourite genre. The books I like are those which are well written and make you think a bit. If it helps, my favourite fiction authors are Martin Amis, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Haruki Murakami. I’ve already read pretty much everything by those guys but if you can think of anything which may appeal to their fans please suggest it.

  4. No non-fiction books, please. I’ll save those for 2009.

Cheers.

2

Here are a few suggestions:

Here are a few that seem to me along the lines of what you say you like …
Fahrenheit 451
*The Jungle * (warning: last chapter is a screed on socialism, but the rest of the book is good)
The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden
Brave New World
The Stranger

Something a little different
The Poisonwood Bible
White Doves at Morning or The Tin-Roof Blowdown
Beloved

My local public library has a service where you can tell them books and authors you like and they give you a list of 10 or so recommended books. Presumably they use their madd librarian skillz to come up with that. I thought they did a pretty good job for me. You might want to see if you local library does the same thing.

3

Two memoirs that I enjoyed reading recently:

*Foreskin’s Lament * - Shalom Auslander
The Bill from my Father- Bernard Cooper

Both are terrifically written, and neither will take more than a few days to read. Writing from each has been featured on “This American Life” multiple times.

EDIT:

Oops, I didn’t see #4 on your criteria… I guess these will have to wait till 2009.

4

You might want to check out www.goodreads.com. There’s a SDMB group there, but also, most people classify their books and you can read a lot of reviews easily. You can input some fiction you’ve enjoyed and then compare your ratings to other people’s (if someone rates the books as you did, you might enjoy reading the other books they’ve read).

You might also like the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal.

5

Thanks for the suggestions. Keep 'em coming.

6

I hope someone around here (like you) reads “Atonement” (that the movie is based on) so that we could discuss it!

Other recommendations - Check out good YA fiction [young adult]. Usually short. The best is very good indeed. “The Book Thief” is a recent example. I’ll try to find more when back at the office.

“Never Let Me Go” was really good, not too long - but makes you think a little too much.

7

I’ve been lending World War Z to everybody I know. Fast and thought-provoking.

8

I’ll second Foreskin’s Lament–it was awesome!

9

Thanks for the suggestions guys. For your undoubtedly immense edification I present my reading list of 2008.

  1. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut.
  2. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey.
  3. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut.
  4. The Old Man And The Sea – Ernest Hemingway.
  5. The Picture Of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde.
  6. A Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood.
  7. The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World Of Jokes – Jimmy Carr.
  8. Post Office – Charles Bukowski.
  9. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce.
  10. A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami.
  11. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem.
  12. Bringing Out The Dead – Joe Connelly.
  13. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov.
  14. Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail – Hunter S. Thompson.
  15. Notes From The Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky.
  16. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson.
  17. The Trial – Franz Kafka.
  18. Dawn Of The Dumb – Charlie Brooker.
  19. Atonement – Ian McEwan.
  20. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson.
  21. Darkness At Noon – Arthur Koestler & Daphne Hardy.
  22. Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges.
  23. 100 Years Of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
  24. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie.
  25. The Naked And The Dead – Norman Mailer.
  26. The Truth (Discworld) – Terry Pratchett.
  27. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler.
  28. The Crying Of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon.
  29. Herzog – Saul Bellow.
  30. London Fields – Martin Amis.
  31. Forrest Gump – Winston Groom.
  32. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro.
  33. Carry On Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse.
  34. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty And Other Stories – James Thurber.
  35. The End Of The Affair – Graham Greene.
  36. Flying Home And Other Stories – Ralph Ellison.
  37. Exit Ghost – Philip Roth.
  38. How To Be Funny On Purpose – Edgar E. Willis & Richard L. Weaver.
  39. The Grapes Of Wrath – John Steinbeck.
  40. The Sound And The Fury – William Faulkner.
  41. The Plague – Albert Camus.
  42. The Quiet American – Graham Greene.
  43. Beloved – Toni Morrison.
  44. Flowers For Algernon – Daniel Keyes.
    45)Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor.
  45. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks.
  46. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis.
  47. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair.
  48. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard.
  49. Three Uses Of The Knife: On The Nature & Purpose Of Drama – David Mamet.
  50. The War Of The Worlds – H.G. Welles.
  51. Othello – William Shakespeare.

I confess to not being particularly well read so if anyone has read any of the above and would recommend I avoid them give me a heads up. Cheers.

P.S. I included a couple of non-fiction books against my better judgement because I’d been wanting to read them for absolutely ages.