The year is almost over. What were your favorite reads in 2015?
Mine, in no particular order:
>Fiction:
Calvino, Cosmicomics
Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
DeLillo, The Names
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Gide, The Immoralist
Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
>Non-fiction:
Cioran, A Short History of Decay
Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype
Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel
Herodotus, Histories
Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays
Marx and Foucault changed the way I view the world a little bit. Paradise Lost was the most beautiful thing I've ever read. I enjoyed Demons even more than TBK and C&P.
i'm 2/3 done with Moby-Dick, so i'll count it
Carpenter's Gothic blew my mind
Ed the Happy Clown was perfect surrealist comix
Jacques Maritain's philosophy of education was A+ shit and Education at the Crossroads is a brilliant piece of philosophy
W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folks was immense. The writing had such a religious power that i couldn't stop reading.
Favorites in no particular order:
>Stoner
4chan has never been more right about a book. Interesting, as I usually don't enjoy /lit/ meme books (Notes from Underground, Lolita).
>The Corrections
Probably just liked it so much because of personal experience, but still, definitely Franzen's strongest work.
>Ender's Game
Went out and bought a nice copy after reading the ebook, jumped up to my top 5 easy, fun reads. Could not put this down, holy shit.
>Master and Margarita
My first real introduction to Russian Literature. It was fun discussing it with my Polish immigrant grandfather who read it when it was new.
Final book count for the year is 27, including IJ and an attempt at Anna Karenina, so I'm fairly happy with my year.
Scifi:
-I read the three Hunger Games books out of curiousity. Was kind of let down. It wasn't all that great. The first one was OK I guess, 6/10.
-Dune: I read the first Dune book, and it was fucking amazing. I loved every page. One of the best books I've read hands down. 9/10
-The Martian: Was uh... I guess 7/10? The fucking humor was God-awful and Reddit-tier though, like everyone here has so adequately pointed out time and time again.
-The Maze Runner: I mean... It was... Meh. 4/10.
-The Diamond Age by Neal Senpai: REALLY hard to get into for some reason. I liked the parts with Nell reading the Primer, but other than that I just couldn't get into the whole thing with... John Hackworth? I could barely remember his name just now.
-Ender's Game: Was not let down. Really fun read. 8/10
-Ender's Shadow: It was not as good as Ender's Game. The Piggies were a fun addition though, so like.. 7/10? That fucking Jane shit was really dumb, and Ender was kind of a fucking Gary Stu.
So that's all I've read this year, other than Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, which made me accept the Economic Redpill.
Right now I'm reading this fucking The High Druids Blade shit by some retard called Terry Brooks. Already 30 pages in and very very annoyed. See >>7524827
I have a stack of books on my desk to read after this. Hopefully next year I'll read more.
>>7525041
Glad to see another Enders Game post right after mine. 9/10 here.
>>7525041
Is this a reddit pasta?
>>7525056
How's it a Reddit pasta?
If it was a Reddit pasta, I'd be praising shit nonstop... I kind of am really, but I really dont' like being harsh with criticsm.
Is it because the Martian was such a high rating? I mean honestly, the main character was retarded and fucking annoying, and things worked out a little too well, but that was all I thought was dumb about it.
seiobo there below
ice trilogy
voices from chernobyl
eleven kinds of loneliness
skylark
>>7525056
Holy shit, how pants on head autistic do you have to be to care about your special internet club vs a different special internet club?
>>7524920
Mrs. Dalloway easy first place.
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
The Song of Roland
I read a lot, but these are the ones I will be re-reading in the future no question. I also bought Les Mis which is amazing, but haven't finished it. So, I guess that'll be my favorite read of 2016.
>>7525041
Economic Redpill?
>>7525078
>The Song of Roland
What translation did you read?
>>7525075
Hello Reddit
>>7525075
I'm the anon that anon responded to, and even I have to say you're retarded. Please go back to Lebbit.
>>7525131
Hello, autistic neckbeard.
>>7525106
Yeah not to go too far /pol/, but I used to be a retarded liberal who thought he knew it all, and tried to give my extremely un-informed opinion on the way the economy was and how it worked. I used to be behind all that liberal "muh feels shit" and thought raising minimum wage had no problems, Socialism was good, etc... God how wrong I was. I think that book helped me not only get my head outta my ass on the economy, but in general, because now I'm more willing to question alot of my own views on shit that I think.
>>7525140
hey, reddit!
>>7525145
Nigga listen.
I am the farthest thing from a Redditor at this point in my life. Just because I gave a book you don't like a high rating doesn't mean I am a Redditor. I think that is highly insulting, and I demand an apology.
>>7525064
The problem here aren't the scores, but the fact that you read not only one terribly cliched YA novel, but multiple trilogies on top of other badly written novels like Martian which are Reddits favorite.
>Error: You cannot delete a post this old.
goddamnit
fuck you and your reddit whining
And fuck you >>7525041 most of all because your idiotic taste started the whole thing.
>>7524920
Miles Davis' autobiography and Akira Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography were wonderful reads.
I also finally got around to reading Dubliners, Notes from Underground and The Double which I thoroughly enjoyed.
>>7525141
I think I'll read it soon as a countermeasure to all the Marxism I've been reading lately.
>>7525123
Glyn Burgess, Penguin. It's almost a bilingual edition, though, the last hundred pages are pieces of the original. Did I fuck up?
>>7525149
I just like reading shit that I hear is popular to see if it holds up. I guess Reddit makes them popular then? Literally the only ones in that list I can think of that are Reddit tier are the Martian, the Mazr Runner, and the Hunger Games. Which I criticised and said I didn't like that much. So I really don't see the problem here.
Also, I still demand the apology. My feelings are very hurt.
>>7525148
It's not how you rate your books, it's the fact that you have the reading list of a manchild.
>>7525170
>Complains about manchild habits being reddit-like
>on 4chins
>>7525164
>>>/r/books
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>/trash/
This board is for the discussion of literature, not shitty teen bestsellers
>>7525164
I feel u brother. My sis gave me hunger games, because she's stuck in her teen years.
It was pretty mediocre... but I still speedread it and got about as much enjoyment as one gets from a bland hollywood action movie.
>>7525170
Well I am also 18.
Plus, I'm new to reading. I have not read this many books in a year before, so I'm just feeling around and trying to find my way through it.
Since you seem to know so much about reading, recommend me some books that don't suck dick then instead of saying the ones I read all suck dick.
I like Sci-Fi.
>>7525174
>hur durr all of 4chan is the same xD
>those crazy 4channers! I wonder what they're up to now, those bigoted, neck-bearded, anime-watching weirdos!
You realize this is exactly how most of reddit sees 4chan, right?
Most people on /lit/ aren't manchildren because reading classics requires a certain maturity and possession of higher mental faculties, which doubtless, you don't have.
>>7525186
YA is for fucking 12-14 year olds dude. There are stickies, check them out.
>this thread
plebs pls go
>>7525192
They're all young adult? Even Ender's Game and Dune? Well fuck.
I'll go take a look at those stickies and write some books down for my next trip around the book store.
>>7525208
Dune isn't YA, a lot of people here also like it (haven't read it myself).
>>7525210
See I really want more books like Dune, that was fucking amazing. That shit was literally a masterpiece. Unlike the shit I'm reading at the moment, which is really making me tempted to just throw it in the garbage, even though I don't like throwing books out at all.
I really try as hard as I can to finish all the books I buy. No matter how hard it gets.
>>7525216
Don't buy books you haven't read, just go to the library.
>>7524920
nah
>>7525208
>Ender's Game
Ender's Game isn't even for teenagers, it's for children at the same age as the protagonist.
>>7525186
mein gott, you need to kill the pleb in you while it's still young
speaking of which, you come off extremely young
read something that expands your mind
>>7525216
check pynchon out
>>7525243
Holy Shit, that Picture of Dorian Gray cover looks exactly like an old fuckbuddy I had. Is that like a gay book?
>>7525216
Hainish Cycle - Ursula Le Guin
Solar Cycle - Gene Wolfe
Kefahuchi Tract trilogy - M. John Harrison
Hyperion Cantos - Dan Simmons
Bas-Lag series - China Miéville
>>7525288
And I haven't read them yet myself, but I heard Iain M. Banks's Culture series is quality too.
For a different sort of sci-fi, Philip K. Dick is fascinating.
>>7525243
>Read something that expands your mind
like atlas shrugged?
No but seriously thanks for the list. I'll go check some of those out.
I didn't read much, but a lot of the books I read I felt were really good. Lolita is probably the best book, but my favorite to read was probably Babbitt or A confederacy of dunces. Acod is probably the better book but both were really funny.
I started getting a bit more serious in my reading this year (limit the amount of trashy autobiographies and such).
The ones that stood out:
>A Confederacy of Dunces
Easily my favorite of the ~30 books I've read this year. So, so funny and entertaining. High on the list of my favorite books
>The Trial
I didn't understand all of it but I felt like I was reading something truly brilliant throughout the entire novel. Great premise and simple writing.
>Lolita
It's easy to see through the fancy prose and realize that Humbert is a pedophile. I still thought the story was heartbreaking. I think that a lot of people misinterpret it as Humbert trying to convince the reader that he's not guilty, but I saw it as him trying to make sense of the things that drove him to the actions.
>The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea
This was an interesting read, seeing as how the author committed seppuku (literally) a few years after writing it. You can tell that Mishima (the author) was letting his anger towards Japanese societies' abandonment of traditional values through the rebellious son. What I gathered was that the mother was adopting Western values and the son was a traditionalist, who is obsessed with things like "honor" and stoic men. The sailor is a mixture of both, one who longs for honor but also likes the idea of being a romantic.
>The Big Sleep
Not much to say about it. It's just very entertaining and the humor is sharp.
>A Portrait of the Artist
I read this and Dubliners and liked Portrait way more.
>One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich
This was so goddamn bleak but it stuck with me. Pretty haunting, especially how the author was in a camp before he wrote this. The ending was pretty disturbing because he declares that dull nightmare of a day as "good". What also got me was thinking about how many more days he'll spend in the camp (or if he'll die in there)
>The Picture of Dorian Gray
I just found this book to be very entertaining. It's a fairly straightforward cautionary tale about vanity. This was my first Wilde book, and plan on reading more from him in the future.
>>7525278
>Is that like a gay book?
The painter is ambiguously gay. He is obsessed with Dorian's beauty. Read it if you haven't already.
>>7525190
"You realize this is exactly how [s]most of reddit[/s] everyone that isn't a 4channer sees 4chan, right?"
I mean, I've spent time on /lit/, /out/, /n/, /g/ and more recently /his/ starting in 2009. I still come back, which says something, but god damn if most of us aren't bigoted, neck-bearded, anime watching weirdos. We circlejerk just as much as reddit, only about different topics. The biggest difference between us and reddit is that we don't hide the fact that we don't like black people and women, and reddit doesn't hide the fact that it doesn't like fatties.
>>7525762
>lolita
It's easy enough to realize he's trying to romance you and gain sympathy, but the degree to which he does it can be deceptive.
The part where her legs are on him or something and he has an orgasm went way over my head. Also his descriptions of her receptiveness to him are also incredibly deceitful. I plan on reading it again soon to see what I can pick out the second time around.
>>7525794
He's admitting his guilt but he's trying to paint a picture that it was Lolita who seduced him. In reality he preyed on her and trapped her (figuratively, at least). I think the main pointer was how despondent she was and how cynical her worldview got after the road trip. He cut her off from contact with other kids and pretty much fucked her all the time. What draws sympathy is that he realized that he still loved her, even when she was a used up, pregnant woman past her girl-child stage. He was mad for her, but he doesn't deserve to get off the hook because at the end of the day he raped a 12 year old.
