2012 Books

Lord of the Flies
"'Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!"


William Golding
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a sailor, and a musician.
Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was published in 1954.

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Started: 15/01/2012
Finished: 23/01/2012

The Outsider
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.


Albert Camus
He was as a French-Algerian author, journalist, and philosopher of the 20th century. Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label.
Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd. He saw it as the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plague.

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Started: 24/01/2012
Finished: 28/01/2012

The Great Gatsby
"I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool... You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow... And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."


F.Scott Fitzgerald
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, considered his masterpiece, was published in 1925.
Highly lauded as a writer, Fitzgerald was often mired in debt because of his and Zelda's lavish lifestyle, living beyond their means. The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's characters Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Myrtle, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway epitomise the Jazz Age but is has also remained timeless in its examination of man's obsessions with and need for money, power, knowledge, and hope.

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Started: 29/01/2012
Finished: 01/02/2012

The Sound of Waves


Yukio Mishima
ukio Mishima was one of the most accomplished and celebrated writers to come out of post-war Japan. He has been compared to Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust. 
On November 25, 1970, the same day that he finished the last novel of "Sea of Fertiliity", Yukio Mishima along with several members of his private army,called "The Shield Society" took over a military base in Ichigaya and demanded the resignation of Japan's prime minister. He read a manifesto to the soldiers who gathered in the courtyard encouraging them to rise up and save Japan. When his actions failed to rouse the soldiers to revolt, he committed seppuka (ritual japanese suicide).He was 45 years old.

Mishima planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members had any indication of what he was planning.

Movie about him
 

I want to read next: The Sea of Fertility tetralogy


Started: 02/02/2012
Finished: 03/02/2012

The Sound of Waves
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”


Haruki Murakami
Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time focuses on themes of alienation and loneliness
On Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami explores familiar themes such as the effects of prolonged loneliness, growing up emotionally stunted in an overwhelmingly conformist society, and the conflict between following one's dreams and clamping down on them in order to assimilate into society. Many elements of the plot remain deliberately unresolved, contributing to the idea that true knowledge is elusive, and actual events of the story are obscured in favour of the characters' perceptions.

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Started: 03/02/2012
Finished: 04/02/2012

Man and His Symbols
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C. G. Jung


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Started: 05/01/2012
Finished: 24/02/2012

Steppenwolf
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Hermann Hesse


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Started: 24/02/2012
Finished: 20/03/2012

Brave New World
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Aldous Huxley


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The Dubliners
The stories incorporate epiphanies, a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the "soul" of a thing.


James Joyce


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Small is Beautiful
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Schumacher


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Started: 09/09/2012
Finished: -

A Lover's Discourse
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Roland Barthes

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Started: 09/09/2012
Finished: -

The Antichrist
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Nietzsche


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Started: 13/02/2012
Finished: -