This year I did a big cleaning out of all the media I’ve carried around with me all these years. Got rid of cds I know I’m not going to listen to anymore (smell ya later Andrew bird), blockbuster rental DVDs (vanilla sky is embarrassingly bad), books I won’t pick up again (foer? hardly knew’er), and so on. Anyway, I ended up flipping through the lemony snicket series and it made me remember how much i liked all of it. Those books did way more for me, and are way way better than any queen terf harry potter stuff. I remember the autobiography, specifically, being so fun to read through bc of all the mystery.
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Same! It felt like an on-ramp for postmodern devices as a kid, and the autobiography is the earliest thing I can remember reading that played with factual prose, like my first Tlön
It’s funny about the potter/terf thing because there is occasional transphobia in those books but Handler had the grace to own it and the Netflix adaptation never plays crossdressing or androgyny for grotesque
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i keep falling asleep during nightwood but i’ll get through it eventually
i am just a sleepy guy
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I was regifted this huge anthology of classic fantasy stories and novellas and I had like big plans about what cozy bedtime reading it would make but it turns out I can’t get through more than like 5 pages of obscenely racist Conan the Barbarian stories before I get all drowsy. I know I should just skip ahead to the non Conan parts but I’m a committed linearist so I think I’ll just never finish it
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Iliad, Homer trans. Lattimore (sorry everybody)
Symposium, Plato trans. Benardete
Antigone, Sophocles trans. Grene
Paradise Lost, Milton
War & Peace, Tolstoy trans. Garnett
Middlemarch, Eliot
Beyond Good & Evil, Nietzsche trans. Kaufman
Blood Meridian, McCarthy
Suttree, McCarthy
Watchmen, Moore & Gibbons
Book of the New Sun, Wolfe
Tehanu, LeGuin
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Middlemarch is a goal of mine next year.
Pale fire, Nabokov
Confederacy of dunces, otoole
Seven American nights, Wolfe
Princess bride, Goldman
Yiddish policeman’s union, chabon
Augustus, Williams
Hyperion, Simmons
Crime and punishment, Dostoyevsky
Ways of seeing, Berger
Name of the rose, eco
Canticle for Leibowitz, miller
Cloud atlas, Mitchell
Some of these are a bit embarrassing (especially Simmons, though I’ll stand by Hyperion) and overall this list is pretty basic/embarrassingly male, but all of these books had an impact at the time i first read them and resonate to some extent now
Some of you also put comics on your lists, but I feel that deserves its own thread. For posterity though…
quimby the mouse, ware
Breakdowns, spiegelman (contrarian in me picks this, though Maus is better)
Akira, otomo
Calvin and Hobbes, watterson
Understanding comics, Mccloud
Making comics, Barry
Flies in the ceiling (Izzy flashback sequence), Hernandez
Here, mcguire
Ghost world, clowes
From hell, Moore and campbell
Helder and Showing helder, brown
Far side, larson
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I did it this year, it’s fun
like George Eliot is actually very funny and laughs at her own characters a lot which really makes it work
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A few that I would second:
I never played D&D, but I used to borrow this from a friend during class and read it:
I will probably read a book or two because of this thread.
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i commit to at least audiobooking everything here i’ve never tangled with that’s also on myanonamouse
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I can’t stop clicking on this thread and rereading my list so now I have to make an additional list of 12 honorable mentions that just barely didn’t get on
Elements, Euclid
The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
Almagest, Ptolemy
Job
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
Gargantua & Pantagruel, Rabelais
Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli
As You Like It, Shakespeare
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Light in August, Faulkner
The Long Good-Bye, Chandler
The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin
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Don Quixote is also a goal of mine next year…hmm. Now that I mention it, @vegetables brought up 2666 and I am committing to buying a Spanish copy and getting as far as I can with it.
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don quixote, like moby dick, is extremely light and funny and not difficult in the least, it’s just long and has a reputation
as long as you aren’t impatient with it (and just put it down if you are) you will encounter zero resistance
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This is also how I feel about The Three Musketeers tbh. Great, just kinda long?
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Here’s what I have right now: SB 12 Writings You Liked Reading - Google Sheets
I haven’t finished adding dates and languages yet and a lot of authors are incomplete. However! I will definitely be looking at it whenever I’m trying to choose a new book to read (or a new book to gift for someone else. I already gifted The Book of the New Sun to my sister). Thank you everyone!
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I generally haven’t read a lot of fiction - and I appreciate that I am new here - but I love compiling a good list.
- The Grasshoper - Bernard Suits
- Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut
- Seconds - Bryan Lee O’Malley
- Cigars of the Pharaoh - Hergé
- Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
- Cutting Across Media - (edited by) Kembrew McLeod & Rudolf Kuenzli
- Video Games Have Always Been Queer - Bo Ruberg
- Nintendo Power - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Official Player’s Guide - (edited by) Scott Pelland
- Schooling - Heather McGowan
- Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
- Connections - James Burke
- Mr Bump - Roger Hargreaves
I have read a few of the classics posted already but I’m afraid they haven’t made much of an impression on me.
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I’ve been curious about this book for years, but I’ve never been able to find an affordable copy and my local library system doesn’t have it. (And the reviews say the printing is bad anyway.)
Looks like there’s a brand new sequel, and unlike the original that one has a digital version.
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Bernard Suits wrote a sequel?
Apparently.
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