2025 Reading Challenge

[avecigrec]

I almost never read when I'm high

I pretty much fall asleep whenever I try to.

 

[Mr Moore]

Ok, I made a reading list for myself from other lists and books/authors I had already been thinking about.
These all won't be this year, but between my local library, borrow from friends, and maybe a couple purchases I'll get into this list as the year progresses.
(going to post this in the general reading thread too)

I'd love to hear any input you folks have on these; which ones are absolutely epic, or snoozefests, or whatever.

Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea
Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
Virginia Wolfe - Mrs Dalloway
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Kazou Ishiguro - where to start?
Paul Auster - where to start?

Brighton Rock is really good and has one of the meanest antagonists I’ve read. Because it could just as easily be a modern gangster story, it can seem a bit dated at times and Greene’s return to Catholic guilt is a bit bewildering if you weren’t brought up under such a regime. Good and quick read though.

Mrs Dalloway is magnificent but, hands down the most difficult book I’ve ever read. I read Ulysses a few years afterwards and had it suggested early on that there’s more enjoyment to be had if you allow the prose to simply wash over you and mentally pick up again when your brain allows you to re-engage. I truly think that did help with Ulysses and suspect it would have with parts of Mrs Dalloway too. As it was, I found myself repeatedly going back on myself to try and make full sense of another person’s train of thought. That had its own rewards but be prepared to spend at least twice the time you normally would on a book it’s size.

I preferred Remains of the Day over Never Let Me Go, which I found a stilted read (there’s good narrative reason for this) and rather overrated. RotD is just a wonderful exploration into a changing world through the eyes of a few people who are struggling to adapt. As someone who has felt a little like that myself, this one really spoke to me.

I’m just a couple away from finishing my Auster bibliography read-through. I’ve found myself enjoying his later period books much more. For want of a better way to describe them, they’re slightly more mainstream and slightly less up their own arse. It’s funny because I read many of the earlier works back in the 90s when I was in my early 20s and loved them so, Auster’s style of metafiction either appeals more to a younger, possibly more experimental brain or, acceptance of slightly pretentious bullshit diminishes as we get older.

I’ve only read V from Pynchon and whilst I didn’t dislike it, it didn’t blow me away and to be honest, in my mind suffered from some of what I’ve written about Auster insomuch as it felt like it was trying to be a bit too clever for its own good. I’m honestly not against smart writing and smart writers, quite the opposite but, I do think V was one of those books that perhaps ignores the pleasure a reader gets from actually understanding just a bit about what is going on! I’ve half a dozen other Pynchons in my kindle library but every time I think about opening one, I’m reminded that I’ve also got hundreds of other books that are less likely to frustrate me.

 

[Nee Lewman]

Depending on the page, I was sometimes in awe, sometimes laughing, sometimes confused, and sometimes just plain annoyed.

Sounds like Pynchon to me.

 

[Rowan]

Are you familiar with Pynchon or other postmodern stuff? If not it's kinda hard to describe.

There's barely a plot, more like a general self aware vibe it has of itself. It runs the gamut from like ultra mathematical impenetrable descriptions of missle tech to hilariously grotesque, sexually explicit asides. It's a very funny book, but can also be devastatingly beautiful, or kind of disturbing. I took it as trying to contextualize the chaos of the 20th century but even that is probably reductive. It was one of the first books to be called an encyclopedic novel, i.e. does a little bit of everything: Encyclopedic novel - Wikipedia

My advice is to treat it like poetry, you are 100% not going to understand it all, there's just no way, but just keep reading, and let the general vibe or feeling it give you shape of the work. That's worked really well for me and Infinite Jest (less than 300 pages left!)

This is pretty bang on. You look at the first chapter and its soldiers growing bananas in London and you kinda think it’s going to be a laugh but you get to the second and quickly realise it’s absolutely not. One of my mates once described Pynchon to me as ‘James Joyce if he’s left the last couple of shots in the bottle’ which is both really unfair and also really accurate.