Sean’s
Comments
(group member since Jan 30, 2019)
Sean’s
comments
from the Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die group.
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Jasmine wrote: "hello, new here...what list is this thread referring to?"
Welcome Jasmine.
The LIST = Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Here is the GR link to the book that contains the LIST: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Here is a link to the whole LIST
Time to discuss.
A Woman's Life by Guy de Maupassant - 0The Garden Where the Brass Band Played by Simon Vestdijk - 1
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth - 5
January group read is now posted.
Just finished Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Loved it. Love Jeeves. Loved the wit. When I am done with this list I will go back and read the rest. Ha!
Finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Having just recently Ready Player 1 and 2, I got a very similar feel. While RP1/2 was a very self indulgent trip into nerdy 80's, this book was a self indulgent trip into total nerdism... But much smarter...
It also gave off some very Catch-22 vibes in tone... the comedic military tone. Only this book made actual sense...
I LOVED IT!
No word from GR yet. I will try again periodically. Until then, here is a link for the poll to vote for February and March. POLL
Google forms seemed to allow me to vote over and over. Survey Monkey at least took my IP address and I'd have to try harder to vote multiple times. Hopefully the honor system is all we need.
Please follow this link to choose what you would like to read for the first quarter of 2021. POLL
This thread can also be used for discussions on the poll. I will leave the poll open until 11:59 January 31 PST (UTC -8).
After the poll closes I will immediately post the discussion threads so that we can quickly see what books are coming up. If you have already read the book, please avoid the temptation to enter the threads early and begin discussing....
I just started In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Thank you Ellinor for the update. I just finished reading Charity's message and was going to relay the same. I really hope that Charity's health improves soon. Never a way we want to lose a member. Remember her in your well-wishing, whatever form that takes for you.
I have contacted GR staff, but they have yet to reply. It's good that we have had a few people contact them now. Charity has also contacted them on our behalf.
Also, thank you to those who volunteered to help staff our page. And thank you to those who are voicing your support for our potential new staff. Charity has guided GR staff to this page also, so hopefully they will read it and see how earnest we are about keeping the page and having it staffed with people who care about its endurance.
Just a note about the upcoming poll, I like the idea of an off-site option, we can do that if we have to. Hopefully we won't. I also wanted to clarify the cutoff time for the current poll. I will count and announce the next read at midnight Jan. 15 Pacific Standard Time (UTC -8)
That went to pieces fast. I have the create poll link, but when I click on it, I get a "You don't have permission to create polls in this group." banner. Plan B:
Vote below for one of the three (picked randomly as has been standard for this group) for January. I will count up the votes and declare a winner on midnight January 15th. I know I can create the group read page. Hopefully we will have something figured out for February.
A Woman's Life by Guy de Maupassant - Apparently a group read in 2010. I think it's ok to pick it again
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played by Simon Vestdijk
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Putting in my vote for The Radetzky March right now.
I have messaged Charity... the one who was running it before...
ok. So... I was going to go see if I could take over the task and my perusing of the group home indicated to me that we have only one moderator left. And she/he has not been active since October of '19. We seem to have lost our command staff. I also noticed that there is a create poll tab. So... I will create the poll. I am unoffically taking over this task. I think the only thing I won't be able to do is to update the currently reading page (Major Issue) and clean up the polls by deleting old ones (minor issue).
First I will create the polls. I will have January end on the 15th.
I will have February and March end on Jan 31. I will also create the group read threads when the time comes.
Second I will contact good reads to see if there is a way to take command of a captainless ship.
If I am way out of bounds here and there actually is somebody in charge of this group, please feel free to set me straight.
I was hoping to see a new poll soon. I very much look forward to the group reads. It's the highlight of my GR experience.Normally it happens around the 15th of the previous month. In this case it should have been out around Dec 15. I am fearful that it's not a matter of "when", but a matter of "if" at this point. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
I'd also be willing to take over the process if the powers that be would like some assistance.....
Finished The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić. Very interesting history that I has happy to revisit after reading Death and the Dervish.
Irem wrote: "not all list books are created equal. Reading Les Miserables or Count of Monte Christo (or even for me Anna Karenina) is a huge challenge. I find it hard to keep focus. I can read maybe 10 books ea..."I found that it's a bit of an acquired skill. The more I read, the better I understand. I find that I am able to focus and understand philosophically heavy literature much better now than I was just two years ago.
Apparently the only one who has not read Chandler yet... I could really only compare this to Christie, le Carré, Doyle. Different genres, I realize, but as close as I can come from the list. I have read a few other similar style from off the list... But at any rate, I enjoyed the story very much. The language was fun. All the slang for the era. I do agree it was hard to have any compassion for the Op. He was not a very moral person as apparently others are comparing to Marlowe. But I do seem to think it seemed realistic. He was not in a friend making business for sure.
Just finished Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. A little late for the group read, but I will add my comments there.
What's that? You want to see a list of what I read from the LIST in 2020? Okay!1/37 - The Quiet American by Graham Greene - 1/7/20
2/37 - Martin Eden by Jack London - 1/9/20
3/37 - The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - 1/17/20
4/37 - Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann - 1/24/20
5/37 - The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks - 1/27/20
6/37 - Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges - 1/30/20
7/37 - Foundation by Isaac Asimov - 2/7/2020
8/37 - Watchmen by Alan Moore - 2/8/2020
9/37 - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - 2/8/2020
10/37 - The History of Love by Nicole Krauss - 2/11/2020
11/37 - Native Son by Richard Wright - 2/28/2020
12/37 - The Untouchable by John Banville - 3/3/2020
13/37 - A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - 3/10/2020
14/37 - A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - 3/13/2020
15/37 - Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline - 03/22/2020
16/37 - The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas - 03/26/2020
17/37 - Beloved by Toni Morrison - 4/6/2020
18/37 - Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin - 4/12/2020
19/37 - Ulysses by James Joyce - 4/12/2020
20/37 - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - 4/14/2020
21/37 - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo - 4/24/2020
22/37 - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon - 4/27/2020
23/37 - A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway - 5/1/2020
24/37 - Walden by Henry David Thoreau - 5/10/2020
25/37 - Middlemarch by George Eliot - 05/16/2020
26/37 - Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak - 5/26/2020
27/37 - The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy - 5/30/2020
28/37 - Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - 6/3/2020
29/37 - The Jungle by Upton Sinclair - 6/4/2020
30/37 - The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing - 6/17/2020
31/37 - The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende - 7/3/2020
32/37 - Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa - 7/13/2020
33/37 - The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes - 8/10/2020
34/37 - The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante - 8/13/2020
35/37 - Cost by Roxana Robinson - 8/19/2020
36/37 - The Plague by Albert Camus - 8/19/2020
37/37 - A Ballad for Georg Henig by Viktor Paskov - 8/25/2020
38/37 - Bleak House by Charles Dickens - 8/28/2020
39/37 - Summer by Edith Wharton - 9/1/2020
40/37 - Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović - 9/16/2020
41/37 - Half of a Yellow Su/n by /Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 9/16/2020
42/37 - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 9/23/2020
43/37 - Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi - 9/25/2020
44/37 - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré - 9/27/2020
45/37 - The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - 10/6/2020
46/37 - The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa - 10/8/2020
47/37 - Smiley's People by John le Carré - 10/21/2020
48/37 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie - 10/23/2020
49/37 - Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh - 10/28/2020
50/37 - Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally - 11/11/2020
51/37 - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - 11/16/2020
52/37 - The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - 11/20/2020
53/37 - The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen - 11/22/2020
54/37 - Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin - 12/3/2020
55/37 - Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 12/15/2020
56/37 - Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang - 12/31/2020
What did you read?
(in case you are wondering, the /37 is because that was my goal for LIST books for 2020)
