Hopefully this doesn't overlap with the what are you reading thread.

To start the year, I'm finishing off Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which is really great and highly recommended, especially for people who don't read a lot in translation. I plan to read 2666 sometime soon but I'm afraid of reading two books by the same author of 650 and 900 pages back to back. New Directions is going to release Bolano's The Skating Rink in 2009, and I would like to delve deeper into his back catalog as well (Amulet, Distant Star, By Night in Chile, Nazi Literature in the Americas and even his poetry collection The Romantic Dogs). I have a slight fear of reading too much of Bolano too soon, since he unfortunately died in 2003. However, I believe there is still a long of his work that is yet to be translated into English.

I also need to clean up a lot of the books that I've purchased but haven't read. These include Camus' The Plague, The Castle, The Fall, Exile and Kingdom, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

I would like to read a fair amount of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. I would also like to read more Kafka.

I still have to finish the second half of Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From.

Orhan Pamuk has a new novel coming out called The Museum of Innocence.

Pynchon has a new one coming out called Inherent Vice but I probably won't get to this since I still have yet to finish Gravity's Rainbow.

Some more fiction:
Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar
Collected Fictions - Borges

I would also like to start reading more non-fiction, I've read way less in this past year. I have Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and I would also like to read:

Nixonland
The Post-American World
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

after 2666, i will be reading white teeth. if anyone has good modern lit. recs or poetry (from any period), i would appreciate it.

I want to finish the Proust I am on before the middle of next week, then my reading time is pretty much booked through may. I am taking a Romantics course and a contemporary literary theory course, so I won't have time for much else.

Hopscotch and the collected fictions by Borges are both fuckin' fantastic.

I've read a lot of random Borges but I'd like to really go through the whole thing. I've read the Blow Up collection which is really nice.

I'd also like to read this

I've got a long list of books I want to read:

-- The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (This has been on my list forever).
-- Foreskin's Lament, by Shalom Auslander (Auslander hilariously recounts his orthodox Jewish upbringing).
-- The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby (Seen as an update on richard hofstadter's "Anti-intellectualism in American Life").
-- God: a Biography, by Jack Miles (Detailed analysis of the nature and character of God as he appears in the Old Testament).
-- A History of God, by Karen Armstrong (The title speaks for itself, focuses on three big monotheisms).
-- What Jesus Meant, by Garry Wills (I just picked this up, looks interesting).
-- Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, by Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths (Is the history of life a series of accidents or a drama scripted by selfish genes? Is there an "essential" human nature, determined at birth or in a distant evolutionary past? What should we conserve—species, ecosystems, or something else?).
-- The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (I've never fully read through it cover-to-cover).
-- Being and Nothingness, Sarte (Yea, I'm going to try ... again)
-- Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett

and a ton more. i'd also love to delve into some eastern religious literature, more about islam, and some of david hume's work.

good thread.


this sounds interesting. any recs for other books that outline the history and evolution of the world's dominant religions?

put a nice dent in my ever growing pile of books that I've bought but have yet to read

i know dan dennett covers this partially in his latest book, breaking the spell, in which he argues religious belief and religion should be scientifically studied. he devotes five chapters to it:


the book didn't get much attention, actually, because even as one of the "new atheists," dennett doesn't have quite the demeanor than dawkins or hitchens have, but it's good, maybe or probably better than those from the two guys mentioned.

i don't know if i have any suggestions beyond that. i feel as if the history of religion is not a topic generally broached very often (though armstrong does it, kudos to her). it may be easier to read books from each respective religion. for instance, i read a book on the history of islam before diving into the qu'ran.

this is precisely what i'm looking for. what's the name of the book on the history of islam? have you read similar books on christianity? judaism?

I want to read books.

Halfway through "Horton Hears a Who" which while quite entertaining, I'm not usually big on such heavy reading, usually preferring something a little lighter i.e "Everybody Poops" which is a favorite of mine. If I can get through this I'm thinking of moving into some Mr. Men territory but I'll have to see how I'm feeling after Suess' epic.

Whatever I get interested in.

I want to actually allow myself to read things that are not assigned to me by professors this year. It's hard to do sometimes though.

I started Being and Time but my head started to hurt all intense like, and I had to put the damn book down. I'll try again soon. Hopefully I'll have better luck and actually understand it, well some of it at least.

I'm going to say that I'm going to read War and Peace again, then I'm going to look at it and not read it again.

the Very Short Introduction series also has one on islam that i didn't read:



and also books christianity and judaism. i haven't read either but they're at least worth a look.

this may interest you as well. armstrong has to be considered one of the lead authors in terms of history of religion:

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Transformat ... 320&sr=1-2


also, if by any chance you were interested in the history of american secularism, i just finished this book and it gets two thumbs way up:

http://www.amazon.com/Freethinkers-Amer ... 433&sr=1-2