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Nocturnalux -> RE: Favorite book of 2007 (1/7/2008 8:17:21 PM)
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Oh, I like this kind of topics. My list:
The History of Atheism
(Histoire de l'Athéisme) by Georges Minois
Again, Minois excels in terms of scholarship. Probably the best recent author of the École des Annales, this tour de force covers every important Atheist thinker since since the Antiquity all the way to our times. The bibliography used is nothing short of impressive and so is the ability to still retain the most relevant traits without including useless fodder. Impressive is the final chapter that gives a rather sober and very accurate potrait of a very faith deprived Europe.
Searching for Lost Time (or The Rembrance of Things Past)
(À la Recherche du Temps Perdu)
by Marcel Proust
Genius. Pure and simple. It took me quite a while to read the entire series, I started reading the first volume in Highschool and only now did I finish, in 2007 I read the entire series and am glad I did so. In the interim I re-read the first three books more than once and learned how to appreciate the bizarreness that is Proust. The psychological accuracy with which he portrays the reshaping role of memory insofar as shaping personality is as amazing as his very dense and stratling prose. The same goes for the melancholy note that a few volumes echo across the depth of stylish cynicism. I was surprised at the envolving tone of closure with which this mamoth ends.
Against Nature
(A Rebours)
by
Huysmans
The "yellow book" in Dorian Grey, or so it is rumoured, "Against Nature" (at times also translated as "Against the Grain") is an odd tale of a paranoid individual who shuns the world and proceeds to indulge in artistic and gastronomic excesses of all kinds. It is decadent literature at its best, something that I can truly imagine Lord Henry recommending Dorian. I approached this book with high expectations and did not fail me. I now feel that my understanding of Wilde's masterwork has been deepened. I can hardly wait to re-read it this time around in the original French.
Decameron, volume 1
by Bocaccio
Fun all around. The stories range from gruesome to comic, and I enjoyed one that served as template for Shakespeare's "Winter Tale". Given the context- a few gentle born dames and gents travelling around a plague stricken country- one would expect horror all around but it is not so. Although tragedy does strike every now and then Bocaccio remains faithful to his introduction in which he promises to entertaine and not to shock.
The Devil's Spectacles
by Wilkie Collins
An interesting story about a pair of goggles that reveal (and might heighten) the worst in human nature.
Piers Plowman
by William Langland
A rather long winded allegory, it reads as a more religious and clearly Medieval Fearie Queene. The narrative often halts and regresses and is not altogether linear, as one would expect from a moralizing text of the Middle Ages plenty of personifications abound and not all are taken at face value.
To The Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
My second Woolf book and my favourite thus far. I enjoy the fragmented structure and how atavic every single moment is. Mundane events are charged with foreboding and the theme of war is woven into the narrative in a subtle yet distubing manner.
Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare
Maddening aliteration, maddening plot, one of Shakespeare's plays that few people ever touch. I enjoyed it, it qualifies as "problem play" in that it offers no clear resolution at the end. It fails to be a comedy in the technical conception of the term but it does not veer close to tragedy.
Watership Down
by Richard Adams
I admit that I enjoyed this one because...well, I love bunnies. It's an obsession of mine. At any rate, this book has enough drama, adventure and believable rabbit-on-rabbit interaction to catch my attention. I also loved the rabbit mythology, it is only a shame that the rabbits themselves have little or no physical description.
also, I read plenty of short stories by Ambrose Bierce (Lovecraft was right in calling Bierce a master of the bizarre) and Dorothy Parker (all of which impressed and depressed me equally)
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