The Castle

Glenn Greenwald - No Place to Hide Reason why isn't necessarily because of the specifics of the 2013 leaks, but because he documents the interaction between government and press (and how he was demonized and threatened afterwards). Tl;dr the government blackmailed journalists to keep the story from getting published Also (on a related note because both are about obscure bureaucracy), Kafka's Castle. Kafka bored me at first, but he writes situations that are just a little "off" in a way that's really unique. It's incredibly hard to describe and definitely very surreal, he takes certain aspects of human nature and amplifies them to the point of absurdity

The Bible (technically working on my 2nd cover-to-cover readthrough, but have read individual books in it many times, especially the Gospel of Matthew). All of Kafka's novels, but especially "The Castle". Several of PKD's novels: "The Man in the High Castle", "Through a Scanner Darkly", "Ubiq" "The Silmarillion" (when I was a young adult) Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency" (when I was a teenager)

Plato - Meno, Symposium, Parmenides, Gorgias, Protagoras Plotinus -Enneads Markus Aurelius - Meditations Descartes - On method Descartes - Meditations Spinoza - On the improvement of Understanding Leibniz - Monadology Leibniz - Grace Voltaire - Candid Diderot - D'Alembert's Dream Kant - How to orient oneself in thinking Kant - Critique of Pure Reason Kant - Critique of Judgment Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel - Logic von Kleist - Marionette Theatre Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death Heidegger - Being and Time Sartre - Being and Nothingness Sartre - Flies Sartre - Nausea Deleuze - Difference and Repetition Kafka - Metamorphosis Kafka - The Castle Lem - Magellan Nebula Lem - His Master's Voice Cioran - A Short History of Decay Pessoa - Book Of Despair Wolfe - New Sun tetralogy

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…