amnemonic:

Отвернись! - Приколы на ЯПлакалъ

Borges and his seeing eye cat

Herman Hesse and cat

Capote and cat

from http://writersandkitties.tumblr.com

Last year I did this exact same post, but I hadn’t made a list of all I’d read that year so I was frustrated to know that I must have left some out. This year I made a list. Hurrah. I’m not entirely sure if everything’s on there because somewhere in the middle of the year I neglected to regularly update the list, but I’m pretty happy with the final product. I’m halfway through part 3 of 1Q84 so have put it on the list in the hope that I’ll finish it in the next two days. Since the list is made much longer thanks to Penguin’s series of little short story books which only take an hour or two to devour, I’ll seperate out novels, normal sized short story collections (which take just as long to read as a novel), non-fiction, and the bite-sized penguin short story collections. Apart from that they’re in no real order.

my year in books

penguin short storys

Jean Rhys - La Grosse Fille

Shirley Jackson - The Tooth

Zweig - Chess

Dorothy Parker - The Sexes

Saul Bellow - The Man with his Foot in his Mouth

Samuel Beckett - The Expelled

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - Through the Wall

E M Forster - The Machine Stops

Hans Fallada - Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Last Demon

Katherine Mansfield - Bliss

Chekhov - A Russian Affair

short story collections

Albert Camus - Exile and the Kingdom (read fairly early in the year but blew everything else I’d read so far completely out of the water)

Chekhov - Ward Number 6 and Other Stories (loved this so much)

Kurt Vonnegut - Look at the Birdie

Tove Jansson - Travelling Light

Saul Bellow - Complete Short Stories (so good)

F Scott Fitzgerald - Flappers and Philosophers

Granta 115  - Feminism

Granta Pakistan

Granta Aliens

Granta Horror

novels

Kobo Abe - The Old Woman and the Dunes

Kobo Abe - The Ark Sakura

Saul Bellow - Herzog

Margaret Atwood - Cat’s Eye

Margaret Atwood - Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood - Surfacing (really bad and made me not want to read any more Atwood for a while)

David Bezmozgis - The Free World

Virginia Woolf - The Waves

Virginia Woolf - Jacob’s Room

Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake

Kurt Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan (the most sci fi book I’ve ever read and wonderfully shamelessly entertaining)

David Foster Wallace - The Pale King (painfully unfinished. and I found it really sad to know I’d never read anything now by him again. goodbye DFW)

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons

Junot Diaz - Drown

John Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meany

Philip Roth - Goodbye, Columbus

Iris Murdoch  - The Sea, The Sea

Don DeLillio - Americana (I shouldnt really have included this as I couldnt finish it. It was absolutely terrible)

Shane Jones - Light Boxes

Updike - Couples

Karel Capek - War with the Newts

Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Tao Lin - Richard Yates

Graham Greene - Dr Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party

Gunter Grass  - The Tin Drum

Chabon - Wonderboys

Magnus Mills - Explorers of the New Century

Murial Spark - The Comforters

Murial Spark - The Only Problem

Murial Spark - Memento Mori (all of these were included in a big cheap paperback murial spark omnibus I bought from the little second hand bookshop in Harrogate, and became my guilty pleasure bedtime reading for a while)

Gunter Grass - The Call of the Toad

Maupin - Tales of the City

Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms (rubbish)

Neal Beauman - Boxer Beetle

Roth - The Ghost Writer

Yasunari Kawabata - The Sound of the Mountain

Zweig - Journey into the Past

Voltaire - Candide

Magnus Mills - Three to See the King

Magnus Mills - A Cruel Bird Came to Nest and Looked in

Samuel Beckett - Murphy

Jeffrey Eugeines - The Marriage Plot (compared to Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides this was awful)

Saul Bellow - Humboldt’s Gift

Nicholson Baker - The Anthologist

Haruku Murakami - 1Q84 Part 1&2, and Part 3 (so disappointingly bad)

non-fiction

Oe - Hiroshime Notes

Barbara Demick - Nothing to Envy

Siddhartha Deb - The Beautiful and the Damned

Philip Hoare - Leviathan (I’m only halfway through this to be honest, I keep going back to it)

susiesnapshot:

London book store, 1956.

(via bestiario)

(Source: klarapersson)

indietracks ‘11

indietracks ‘11

(Source: muramr, via iimono)