Just proud of myself and wanted to brag, but I missed that post from a few days ago. AMA about any of these if you're curious:
books
January
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Robert Nichols - Theft is Property!
Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem
Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Andre Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Aph Ko - Racism as Zoological Witchcraft
Various Authors - Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Fiction
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, & Pun Ngai - Dying for an iPhone
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Found and the Lost (13 novellas)
W. E. B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
Brian Moore - The Magician's Wife
February
Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imaginaries
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
William Blum - Killing Hope
Michelle Good - Five Little Indians
Kristen J. Sollée - Witches, Sluts, Feminists
March
Catherine Hernandez - Scarborough
Jane Jacobs - The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Omar El Akkad - What Strange Paradise
Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols - The Rust Programming Language
Esi Edugyan - Washington Black
April
Clayton Thomas-Müeller - Life in the City of Dirty Water
Marcel Proust - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Aditya Bhargava - Grokking Algorithms
Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest
May
Karl Marx - Capital Vol. 3
June
Peter Watts - Blindsight
John P. Clark - Between Earth and Empire
Marcel Proust - Guermantes Way
Jessica Fern - Polysecure
Sara Collins - Confessions of Frannie Langton
G. W. F. Hegel - Introduction to the Philosophy of History
July
Xiran Jay Zhao - Iron Widow
Kim Moody - Tramps and Trade Union Travelers
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Itzik Ben-Gan - T-SQL Fundamentals
August
Homer - The Illiad
Keith Basso - Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
September
Marcel Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah
Richard Lachmann - First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
October
Marcel Proust - The Prisoner
James Ladyman and Don Ross - Every Thing Must Go
November
Marcel Proust - The Fugitive
Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté - The Myth of Normal
Nora Roberts - Origin in Death
Stephanie Kelton - The Deficit Myth
December
Marcel Proust - Finding Time Again
Tyler A. Shipley - Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination
Adrienne Maree Brown - Grievers
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
Which Proust books would you recommend? Keen to hear thoughts on the Illiad, The Found and the Lost, and Cixin Liu.
The Proust I have on here is all volumes of one work, In Search of Lost Time. It's an incredible read and I can't recommend it enough but it's very long, and if you're not game for lots of mini-essays on art, life, experience, etc. it's probably going to be a tough read, especially if you need enough plot to keep you engaged. Some of his sentences are a bit tortuous but if you take it with a bit of speed, surprisingly, I find it's easy enough to follow. The best way I could describe it is like watching someone hand-paint a movie frame by frame. Give the first chapter a try and see how you feel.
I've never touched ancient fiction before the Iliad, so it was a unique read for me. My partner and I read it aloud to each other and the verse is very well-suited to that. It's very action-oriented, very bodily, very honour-driven, and drops you right in the thick of ancient heroic close quarters combat with all the death and homoeroticism that comes with it.
The Found and the Lost is excellent. I'm very impressed with how wildly real her sci-fi worlds feel, and the way she plays with relationships and gender roles is fantastic. It makes a lot of other sci-fi, even that with strong female characters, feel like it's missing a feminist's imagination. The last novella in that collection has a brilliantly chilling existential emptiness to it. I've actually never read one of her full novels so I'm going to do that this year.
Cixin Liu's stuff is good, in a reddit tech nerd kinda way. Compared to some of the other stuff I read the writing maybe feels a bit more cheap, and gets away with easy corny action-movie dialog and some heavy-handedness by making up for it with a knack for technically driven plot. I find it very entertaining and look forward to the third book (idk where the story can go from here) but I will say the actual dark forest "cosmic sociology" as its laid out near the end of the second book gave me a good shiver.