Hey /lit/ what books did you read last year? We're there any that stand out in your mind?I've been reading a lot of Sci-fi lately. Early last year I read J.G. Ballard's High Rise. I enjoyed it's themes of class and cultural tensions but I agree with the criticism that it could've been a much shorter book. I read Downward to the Earth by Silverberg. I liked it better than Man in the Maze. It reminded me of some of the more interesting concepts from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Man in the Maze and Downward were both a bit of a let down compared to Dying Inside. I read Valis by PKD over the summer and was really impressed. PKD had some misses for me like Galactic Pot Healer. Towards the end of 2025 I also read some Murakami novels. I enjoyed his stories and characters but his style tends to make his books like an expanded universe soup with the same concepts or motifs showing up throughout.
>>25002473I only read star wars books now
Two girls, fat and thin. it was very good. im literally dorothy
>>25002541Nice>>25002553Looks neat I added it to my list. What else did you like about it besides relating to one of the characters? Any scenes or ideas that wouldn't spoil it?
After avoiding DFW all my life, thinking he was gay, retarded, and a normie, I finally read Infinite Jest, and it was really, really good. Then I read all the short stories and essays, and then The Pale King. Now I’m sort of sad there isn’t more. I’ve also gotten into DeLillo—White Noise and Libra—and the new Pynchon (with The Crying of Lot 49 as a warm-up), The Mezzanine and Room Temperature by Baker, and a bunch of McCarthy (The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road). It was a good year.
>>25002473The Postman Always Rings Twice was great. It's noir, but not detective noir, it's a dysfunctional romance between two shitty people spiraling into worse and worse decisions. I really like the Elmore Leonard style of crime fiction where the criminals aren't masterminds, but losers, assholes and retards - much like in real life. The genre tends toward everyone being a cool badass otherwise, which gets dull.I also read Whatever, the Houellebecq breakthrough, and it's like reading an incel rant on 4chan in 2016, which considering it's a 90s book is pretty prescient. It's a contrast to the Fight Club or American Psycho type battle with dull modernity in that it offers no action, no flirting with genre fiction, it's just relentlessly engrossed in our loser protagonist hating life and himself. I read The Alienist, which is a great piece of historical fiction but is overly long and tries to be too cute with integrating into its time period (Teddy Roosevelt is a side character as the police commissioner). It's at its best when presenting crime science in its infancy, which actually crosses over to another great book I'm reading which is a Short History of Eugenics, in which many of the same figures presides, because the forgotten ingredient of the idea you could predict crime was that besides fingerprinting you should try measuring their skulls for the biological origin of criminal behavior. Same with the psychologists - the very same that lay the foundation of how the mind works had some radical ideas of where bad traits came from (bad "genetics" - a bit anachronistic as half of them did not believe in genes as such). I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain which was interesting, but couldn't quite deliver on being a literature crash course. Saunders learned essays become muddled by immediately finding counter examples of what he just laid out as principles of good and bad writing. Also read The Player of Games (Culture series 2) by Iain Banks, which was a lot more interesting than the first one. They're only vaguely interconnected so you can read whichever first, I'd recommend this one so far. He kinda does the same thing as the first book in making a micro and macro narrative where you only learn about The Culture indirectly. The micronarrative is a more traditional story. The way it's told you get the sense that the Culture is roughly an AI assisted "Federation", only its real motivations are hidden and its highly manipulative of its own members, calling into question the values it purports to support. Which is a lot more interesting than the Star Trek kumbaya society. Not sure if that's what he intends it to be however, and if the series just devolves into the latter it will suck.
>>25002577I enjoyed A Supposedly Fun Thing and I'm currently listening to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He's very descriptive but definitely an odd ball. I'm not sure if I want to bite the Infinte Jest bullet yet.>>25002610Do you enjoy true crime as well? I really enjoy the JCS (Jim can't swim) yt channel. I haven't read much crime or mystery stuff. I enjoyed Agatha Christie's stuff. Ten Little Indians was my favorite book in middle school. Consider Phlebas is on my sci-fi reading list.
I only managed to read a couple:Faust. This one didn't really resonate with me. Filtered?The Day of Doom (Michael Wigglesworth). I actually really liked this one. I'm surprised that I don't see more people talking about it given that it was heavily read in pre-Revolution New England. It's probably because the depiction of Jesus as a harsh judge who is angry with humanity doesn't really fit modern notions of American Protestantism where he's this kindly guy.Pioneers of France in the New World (Francis Parkman). My favorite read of the year. It's a nonfiction book but you might as well be reading a good novel, Parkman is a talented writer. There's obvious bias when he's talking about Catholics or Native Americans but honestly who cares.Empire of Liberty (Gordon Wood). My second favorite read of the year. The focal point of the book is the struggle between the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists. Honestly my perception of what it means to be American is changed.The Sorrows of Young Werther. I liked it. I think that the feeling of romance toward someone that doesn't reciprocate it is something that everyone goes through in their life, and Goethe captures it really well. There was also some symbolism that I liked, the main one being the decline of Werther's paradise as his own mental state declines.
>>25002541It's okay if you're a child. But when you're an adult, you have to read real books.
>>25002473Plato's Myths (extracts including Atlantis and the Myth of Er)- very nice, you can tell Plato liked adding lots of detail and verisimilitude to his speculative stories, then immediately says they're definitely not true lol.Canterbury Tales- awesome and hilariousHamlet- honestly found it a bit meandering in the middle, the stuff with Hamlet and Ophelia doesn't seem to go anywhere. But as an entire piece, fantastic.Piers Plowman- absolute load of shit, the most boring thing I've ever read in my lifeMartin Luther, Selected Works- His autobiographical and polemical stuff is very interesting and entertaining, reading what the guy actually thought and his motivations were. The purely catechetical stuff was dull as dishwater though.Bunyan, Pilgrims Progress- Awful. The most on-the-nose rote allegories you could put to paper, and even then he just gives up on allegory for large sections where the characters become pure mouthpieces for the author. Intenseley boring.Milton, Paradise Lost- Fantastic, and deservedly a classic. Milton clearly had an inspired grasp of English, he could back up the hubris of composing an epic about the fall of man. Satan is brilliant as a character, and no he is absolutely not the good guy just because he has motivations, he's portrayed as utterly narcissistic, vain, spiteful, and egotistical. Milton's genius is portraying him as genuinely tempting, Satan's rhetoric is very impressive and sounds superficially convincing, but as soon as you think about what he's actually saying, it's clearly full of misdirection and lies. Managing to capture that as well as making it top-rate poetry is incredible.Jade War Trilogy- surprisingly not bad for a fantasy series. Mostly stays very grounded in pseudo-Hong Kong set in the equivalent of the 70s/80s. But gets bogged down in exploring boring parts of its fictional worldArgonautica- great fun to read, I liked the travelogue sections with all the weird places they pass, and the romantic drama with Medea was very well done
>>25002473I just got Dying Insode for Christmas! I hope it is as great as I expect it to be.
>>25002541Absolutely fucking based.
>>25002473It was late in the year, but the Crying Lot of 49 was great. It makes me want to write.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman AlexieAdult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay GibsonThe Aesopica - Aesop's Fables, by the Greeks (t. V.S. Vernon Jones)The Aesop Romance - The Life of Aesop, by the Greeks (t. Lloyd William Daly)Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud MontgomeryBand of Brothers, by Stephen AmbroseThe Bean Trees, by Barbara KingsolverBeowulf, by the Old English (t. J. R. R. Tolkien) (prose)The Books of Earthsea 1: A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Books of Earthsea 2: The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Books of Earthsea 3: The Farthest Shore, by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Books of Earthsea 4: Tehanu, by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Books of Earthsea 5: Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Books of Earthsea 6: The Other Wind, by Ursula K. Le GuinA Child Called It, by Dave PelzerA Christmas Carol, by Charles DickensCollected Poems, by Philip LarkinA Confession, by Leo Tolstoy (t. Aylmer Maude)A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen (t. Robert Farquharson Sharp)The Dreadful Lemon Sky, by John D. MacDonaldEncyclopedia Brown and His Best Cases Ever, by Donald J. SobolFlush: A Biography, by Virginia WoolfThe Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov (t. Dmitri Nabokov and Michael Scammell)The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de BeckerThe Gospel in Brief, by Leo Tolstoy (t. Louise and Aylmer Maude)The Hobbit, by J. R. R. TolkienI'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdyThe Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar WildeJane Eyre, by Charlotte BronteThe Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz (t. Lysander Kemp)The Life of Our Lord, by Charles DickensLysistrata, by Aristophanes (t. Oscar Wilde)Medea, by Euripides (t. Edward Philip Coleridge)Menaechmi, or The Twin Brothers, by Plautus (t. Henry Thomas Riley)Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon SandersonA Murder is Announced, by Agatha ChristieThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha ChristiePeter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, by J. M. Barrie (play)The Princess Bride, by William GoldmanRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom StoppardThe Seagull, by Anton Chekhov (t. Constance Garnett)Selected Poems, by Octavio Paz (t. Eliot Weinberger)Sense and Sensibility, by Jane AustenSix Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello (t. Edward Storer)The Sonnets, by William ShakespeareThe Taming of the Shrew, by William ShakespeareTao Te Ching, by Laozi (t. Ursula K. Le Guin & James Legge)The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher MarloweUprooted, by Naomi NovikWaiting for Godot, by Samuel BeckettWuthering Heights, by Emily BronteZhuangzi - The Inner Chapters, by Zhuang Zhou (t. Burton Watson)Thoughts:There are 2 types of Nabokov books, boring "look at me, I'm so smart" and fun "look at this guy, he's so dumb". Classics like Lolita are the latter, we're meant to laugh at Humbert for being a retard. Shits like The Gift are the former, we're meant to fellate Nabokov. I hate Nabokov.
This is like the 10th identical thread we've had over the past ~2 weeks. FUCK OFF.
>>25002473I only read Normal people (bad), The god of small things (great), White nights (Literally dostoevsky's worst book idk why it's so hyped) and Norwegian wood (mid)
>>25006906Im 32 and non fiction sucks and star wars is better than anything written >>25006977Classic bantam stuff. I love it. May Allah SWT grant me Jannah and while in Jannah I wish to enter the star wars universe for me
>>25002473I only fully read three books this year: The Concept of the Political, The Dark Enlightenment, and The Accursed Share Vol. 1. All were brilliant in their own way, I still find myself rereading passages from all three. If I had to pick a favorite, it would have to be The Dark Enlightenment, its analysis of things like Leninism and the Civil War were really eye-opening. Other than that, I've mostly been reading essays and blog posts, I wish I still had the time and energy I had when I was younger.
>>25002541Based, better to read what you enjoy than read shit you hate just to impress this board
>>25011412Yeah I learned that after reading Mishima, and Goethe etc. I didn't care of like any of their stuff and realized Kevin J Anderson and Timothy Zahn are better writers
I love Robert Silverberg but he probably should be added to the modern manchild meme bait chart. Sb add it
>>25002473https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_Biashttps://anthropic-principle.com/anthropic-bias/
