2018 Reading Challenge

[Samus Aran]

So, we have a thread for pushing ourselves to finish a lot of games this year. Why not one for books? Especially since I know a lot of us here use Goodreads and I expect most of us will do the usual Goodreads reading challenge thing.

So anyway, use this thread to talk about how many books you plan to try to read this year, which books you're working on now/next, etc.!

Kaz's 2018 Reading Challenge

-Goal: 20 Books
-Progress: 5/20

-Finished Reading:

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (finished 1/9/18): This book rules. Kicks the shit out of the film. The whole reason this book is so damn good is because of Chief Bromden's narration, and that's entirely absent in the film so yeah.


• The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens (finished 1/20/18): Kinda bad tbh. Local author, tho, so that's kinda neat.


• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (finished 2/17/18): Like the above author, Tim O'Brien is also a Minnesota native, and some stories in this lil collection reflect that. Neat. But more than that, this is just a legitimately fucking excellent collection of stories from O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War. Really simple, humble writing style. Good handle on verisimilitude. Which I feel is pretty necessary when describing the horrors of war.


• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (finished 3/1/18): I wanted to love this book. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it. But I could never get over my difficulties with the odd stylistic choices. The protagonist's thoughts constantly trailing off into ellipsis, unfinished. The protagonist's highly methodical and mathematical thought process, with decidedly little room for anything other than the hard facts (an understandably good tactic, given the setting and the character's profession, but I didn't necessarily always enjoy reading it). It's a good read for anyone interested in the "first" big dystopian novel though.


• The Miner by Natsume Soseki (finished 4/13/18): Wonderful. Bizarre for Westerners, perhaps, in how very little hard "plot" there is, and how much of the book's journey is purely psychological. And it is sometimes hard to wade through all that thick psychological goop - sometimes you'll be hoping for a paragraph break and for someone to please actually say something because Soseki's protagonist has been doing nothing but describing his anguished thoughts for pages. But it's really worth it, and as an antinovel this thing is fucking seminal tbh. It's easy to see why it's Murakami's favorite book.

-Plan to Read:

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky


• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin


• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera


• Silence by Shusaku Endo


• A Disaffection by James Kelman


• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins]


• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson


• Island by Aldous Huxley


• Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov


• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson


• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon


• Universal Harvester by John Darnielle


• Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut


• Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami


• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov


• Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

[C.Mongler]

Sure, I wanna read a humble 12 books this year tho; considering I usually hit 1 or 2 that's a lot okay

Currently Reading:
-idk, maybe nueromancer??

Finished:

1. The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness by Andy Puddicombe
V nice, digestible introduction to the practice of mindfulness meditation. deff recommended for anyone trying to dip their toes into it. that said, he retirates A LOT of what he writes here in the headspace app, so much so that they are basically the same thing, so i'd start with this book first.

[Hiro]

My goal should be 2 books lol, I haven't read a book since high school

1) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
2) ????

[Samus Aran]

i actually just finished reading another book today. so two already this month, i'm going at a good pace.

it was Allen Eskens' The Life We Bury. Eskens is a local (as in Minneapolis) defense attorney who's now published a couple books as well. this one...wasn't very good. i don't know. i wasn't necessarily expecting it to be so amateurish lol, like it's honestly pretty poorly written and comes off as a mystery book for young teenagers. except that it deals with stuff (violent rape, murder) too mature for them. so i think it's just sloppily written and that's that. but i didn't hate reading it. sometimes it's nice to read things by local authors, and it's also nice (and reassuring) to be reminded that not everything that gets published (and enjoyed by many people) is immaculately-written

[The artist formally known]

I’m trying to get 17 but no biggie if i don’t.


Finished:
-The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future Paperback by Kevin Kelly
-Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

[silvertone]

i was going to shoot for fifty books but i ended up going with 1 and i did it.

i got a krazy kat collection and ive been going through that. i really like it.

[Samus Aran]

oh i forgot about this thread i need to update my post sometime

[silvertone]

oh i forgot about this thread i need to update my post sometime

hey yeah. do it man

[Samus Aran]

updated, finished The Miner today

[The artist formally known]

updated, finished The Miner today

how was it

[Samus Aran]

my impressions of the book are in the OP

[The artist formally known]

my impressions of the book are in the OP

nice i totally didnt see it. sums up my experience with some of the eastern asia books i've read.

[Samus Aran]

i really love Japanese writing, and not just because i'm a weeb. the post-war styles are heavy with disaffection, deep introspection/reflection, juxtapositions of realism and spirituality, and laid-back approaches to plot and setting that often stress mood more than action. and they're often just generally "chill," in a way that i'm not sure how else to describe. honestly i'm pretty addicted to Japanese novels. so many of my favorite books i've read the past few years have all been Japanese lol

my favorites thus far are Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai, and Naoko by Kiego Igashino

[Nyerp]

i read An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (for school)
also I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (for school)
also The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (for school)
and i'm in the middle of Salem's Lot by Stephen King (for school)
i only read (for school)

[The Hand That Fisted Everyone]

how wasd floating world