Media Books

Best books I've read this year:

-Persuasion by Jane Austen: I also read Pride and Prejudice this year, but I think I prefer this one.

-Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers: Very cute and cozy book. It's very episodic which I particularly like.

-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Incredible book.

-The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill: Cute, cozy, whimsical.

-When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson: This one was a reread. When I read it in 2021 it became my favorite book and now it still is. It's about a girl called Anna that was quite depressed living with her foster parents so she goes to Norfolk, where she finds a house across the marsh and later a mysterious girl called Marnie. It's a very cute story and I love the way the author describes the beach, the plants, the birds and everything. Studio Ghibli also made a movie with the same name and it's pretty great.

-Caminhos Cruzados (Crossed Paths) by Erico Verissimo: It's a brazilian novel, it depicts a bunch of characters in a span of 5 days. There isn't an ongoing story but it shows the life and struggles of brazilian people in a really nice and real way.

-Livro de Mágoas (This Sorrow That Lifts Me Up) by Florbela Espanca: It's a poem book with 33 poems in which the main themes are sorrow and loneliness. The best book, that wasn't a reread, that I read this year.

It's also my first time posting here :)
 
The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang is a great memoir i finished like a few months ago, very good prose, mini window into Hmong and Hmong-American culture.

Also currently going through Reading Lolita In Tehran, but I'm not very far in, reading in small chunks. It's a memoir too, about the author running a book club/lit class out of her apartment in post-Islamic-revolution Iran, after quitting her job as a university lit professor. Curious to see exactly where it goes, though I just know somebody's gonna die or be jailed indefinitely by the end.
 
Read Wings of Fire. It is easily the best book series I have ever read. I'd elaborate more, but the time you spend reading this post is time you should spend reading Wings of Fire.

I also recommend How to Train your Dragon. Not the movie, the book series the movie was based on. It is fantastic, but it is completely different from the movies. It starts off a bit slow, but books 9-12 are fantastic.
 
This is usually a thread I lurk for random recommendations but I've read a good amount of random stuff over the summer and I decided that I want to contribute something too.
The Power - It's like what if women suddenly had power over men, and then what if that actually made a good book. Follows through on every level of the concept, really nails the emotions of the characters, in some ways feels weirdly prescient which is a theme among several of the books I've read recently. Excellent vibe, would recommend.

The Red Scholar's Wake - Apparently this is one small random book in a massive universe, but I'm going to stick with just scratching the surface. A pretty fine sci-fi romance story in a world of sentient spaceship pirates. Not terribly written just not really for me, but I do get the feeling some people are or would be very obsessed with all this.

A Stroke of the Pen - Someone decided to publish a bunch of old Terry Pratchett stories that they didn't know were his until after his death. I'm a huge sucker for everything Pratchett but to be honest, these aren't very good. It was interesting seeing things that would recognizably become ideas from Discworld or Good Omens, but I got pretty bored with it and barely finished.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands - An autobiographic graphic novel about working in Canadian oil refineries. Also sexism and gender politics. Consistently interesting, I love the art style, really moving at points.

Cahokia Jazz - This book rules. It's a 20's noir detective mystery but set in an alternate version of the US in the capital of what's basically a native American state. The detective is also a jazz player because why not I suppose. It's more religion and politics and ideas than clues and being about the mystery in particular, but the plotting is really tight. Every development feels right, everything builds towards the ending, I dunno it's great. This is why I don't post here much because for me so much of a good book is in the vibes but the vibes are *immaculate*.

Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents - These are classics for a reason. Or if they're not considered classics by now then they should be. I kept getting sucked into what happened, and even had to put down Talents for a while because it just got so upsetting when the characters were going through bad stuff. I'm not going to sum it up better than a million things on the internet, although I will say that I'd been sort of undersold on how important religion is in these books in a really fascinating way. Incredibly prescient despite their age. Anyone interested in sci-fi and futurism should read these.

Even Greater Mistakes - I'm not usually for short story collections and this one felt as hit or miss as the rest, but with hits that're just better than what I'm used to. Got sold by the first story about finding a genie after the apocalypse, it's fun. I can't really sum it up because all of the stories are different, it's really really queer if that's a selling point. Would recommend but also don't know how to talk about it.

The Deep Sky - Had to read the entire thing front to back. Not the most intense or gripping as much as everything kept flowing so well that I just wanted to stay with the world and keep it all in my head. Effectively plants a lot of little ideas and big themes that come back up really well and I didn't want to forget after a day or two. Hard to describe, it's a sci-fi mystery on a ship taking colonists from an apocalyptic Earth to some habitable planet. It's about a crew member trying to track down a saboteur, but also about how they ended up on the ship in the first place, and relationships with parents and nature, and a bunch of other stuff. Left me feeling very satisfied. I'm gonna go get the next book by the same author from the library as soon as I can.
 
I recently read “The White Boy Shuffle” by the author Paul Beatty. It is genuinely one of the most emotionally wrenching and thought provoking books I have read in a long while. It covers the life of a young man as he grows up from a surfer boy to a messiah figure and poet for the under-represented. It also covers his High School basketball career and his experiences with LA gang culture. It’s fantastic, it destroys the idea of what a Black man in America can be while also falling exactly in line with the stereotypes. And it does it while providing biting satire.
 
I was gonna make a post at the start of the year but I forgot... Anyways here's some of my favorite readings of 2024.

Best Book (it's actually 2):
Klara and the Sun, bye Kazuo Ishiguro:
I only read this one and 'Never Let Me Go' by him (and now I'm reading 'Remains of the Day') but he is amazing, he crafts his stories very slowly and they are all very nostalgic, we get many hints on what's going on with the characters and the world but he doesn't elaborate on those right from the start, instead we go deep into the thoughts of the main character and as we go along we get to know everything. Well, in this book we meet Klara, she is an Artificial Friend and she tells the story with this soft and naive voice as if she were a child. And I think that's all you need to know, Ishiguro's books are, in my opinion, best read when you don't know what's going on and discover it along the way as the protagonist tells their story. When I finished the book I couldn't stop holding it, I just didn't want to let Klara go, and I cried so much, I don't even remember the last time I cried after reading a book.

Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke: This is basically a bible, I'm not joking! Just imagine a great writer from the past giving you advice on your life, ranging from love, loneliness, religion, art and so much more. In this book there are 10 letters he wrote to Franz Kappus, a young poet who asks Rilke for advice and he simply gives an answer that is my favorite first paragraph from any book that I've read (it's on the spoiler tag below). I've read it twice and it's absolutely amazing!
("Aside from his role in writing to Rilke and later publishing these letters, Kappus is largely forgotten by history." This is on Kappus' wiki page and it's pretty sad).

"Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life". translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Best Author:
Alejandra Pizarnik:
Argentine poet that I discovered on Pinterest (image below). She has 4 poetry books published here in Brasil and I read them all last year. She uses very few words and pretty much the same imagery, but it's so good, it goes very deep, one thing that she writes a lot is what the text above from Rilke talks about, the silence and the impossibility of using words to completely describe what you're feeling. An example is on this poem: "Explicar com palavras deste mundo / que partiu de mim um barco levando-me" ("explain with words of this world / that a ship left me taking me"). Well, I love her and I can't express how much I love her here, but basically she's my favorite writer nowadays and the poem "Sentido de su Ausencia" might be my favorite from her.

Alejandra Pizarnik on Pinterest.jpeg

Other Books:
Poemas de Amor, by Alfonsina Storni:
First time reading in Spanish and it's really good. The poetry is a bit different, there isn't verses it's basically a text but it's amazing.
Cada vez que te dejo retengo en mis ojos el resplandor de tu última mirada. Y, entonces, corro a encerrarme, apago las luces, evito todo ruido para que nada me robe un átomo de la substancia etérea de tu mirada, su infinita dulzura, su límpida timidez, su fino arrobamiento. Toda la noche, con la yema rosada de los dedos, acaricio los ojos que te miraron.

The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe: At one point of last year I got heartbroken so naturally I thought it was a good idea to read this book. Yeah... well, this book is amazingly beautiful, really recommend if you don't suffer from any mental issues.

A Hora da Estrela, by Clarice Lispector: Simply amazing, I really wanna read more from her.

Engenheiro Fantasma, Fabrício Corsaletti: This book won the most important literary award in Brasil in 2023, the Prêmio Jabuti, and I don't get it. It's a poetry book about Bob Dylan living in Argentina (what???) and it makes no sense, I have absolutely no idea what was going on the entire time, I was probably missing the point but still I really disliked it. The only good thing is that it mentioned Alejandra Pizarnik in one of the poems, at least the author has good taste.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens: I'll finish with one that really didn't hold up to my expectations (i'm so funny hahaha). I think I was expecting the greatest book of all time, considering its lenght, but no it's just a regular book, a good one but still too big for a regular book.

That was it, thank you for reading and have a Good Year!
 
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forgot if I told people to do this hear, but read how to train your dragon.

you heard me right
READ
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this is the book the movies were based on, and while the first movie is still better than the book series, the books are very good in their own right. here's the thing. the book series follows a completely different plotline than the movies, with mostly different characters, a different world, and different dragons. there are a suprising lack of similarities between the books and the movies. now, about the books themselves.

for the first like six books, its nothing special. its alright. then, at the ninth book, everything falls into place and it becomes peak fiction. I can tell you basically nothing about it because spoilers, but oh my god its so good. read it.
 
forgot if I told people to do this hear, but read how to train your dragon.

you heard me right
READ
View attachment 711400
this is the book the movies were based on, and while the first movie is still better than the book series, the books are very good in their own right. here's the thing. the book series follows a completely different plotline than the movies, with mostly different characters, a different world, and different dragons. there are a suprising lack of similarities between the books and the movies. now, about the books themselves.

for the first like six books, its nothing special. its alright. then, at the ninth book, everything falls into place and it becomes peak fiction. I can tell you basically nothing about it because spoilers, but oh my god its so good. read it.
shoutouts fishlegs the goat
 
I collect math books, it started off as opting to get the books required for my courses because having an actual textbook, despite it being expensive, helps my ADHD a lot. But now I have gone down the deep end and own like 30 of them lol

I plan to one day make a blog reviewing each of them as I go over most of them semiregularly
 
I collect math books, it started off as opting to get the books required for my courses because having an actual textbook, despite it being expensive, helps my ADHD a lot. But now I have gone down the deep end and own like 30 of them lol

I plan to one day make a blog reviewing each of them as I go over most of them semiregularly
Sounds dope. Someone sort of did that once with Social Studies books: Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.
 
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