Hello everyone.

It's been quiet around here lately so I thought I would remedy that with a new thread to project ideas for next year.

As I feared, Dostoevsky, I would say, was a difficult choice for starting off. I think it's easy for people to get excited about such a project, especially Dostoevsky, and especially around New Years resolutions, and then just not go forward. I for one am not a Dostoevsky fan so I found it difficult to really get inspired.

So, with this in mind, what do you guys think about how 2009 went? And what would you like to see in 2010?

I was all for Dostoevsky then got scared off after a 100 pages. Maybe someone more accessible next year like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy etc

Exactly, more accessible was exactly what I was thinking of.

I've compiled (mostly) a list of the authors nominated for last year. Just to get people going but I think we should cut out all the Russians (although this list still has them) since we just did a Russian and obviously it didn't work out very well. I also got rid of our mini-authors whom we've already covered.

Emile Zola
Honore de Balzac
Romain Gary/Emile Ajar
Yukio Mishima
Truman Capote
Milan Kundera
Jose Saramago
Alexandre Dumas, pere
Arturo Perez-Reverte
Mario Vargas Llosa
Isabel Allende
Naguib Mahfouz
Haruki Murakami
Solzhenitsyn
Turgenev
Nabokov
Hemingway
Faulkner
Naipaul
Böll
Grass
Cormac McCarthy
Dickens
Hardy
Kathryn Davis
Orhan Pamuk
Kobo Abe
Ismail Kadare
J.M. Coetzee,
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Personally I'd be interested in doing Vargas Llosa or a Japanese author.

That's an interesting list. I'd also be interested in Mario Vargas Llosa; he's one of my favorite authors, but I've only read a few of his novels. I'd love to read more by Mishima or Abe. Even though I've read most of Murakami's books, I would like to re-read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood in the near future. Pamuk, Zola and Ngugi would also be of interest to me. I'm planning to read the Library of America editions of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers in the next year or two, as I've neglected Southern writers in my reading over the past few years.

I'd be down for many:

Truman Capote (never read)
Haruki Murakami
Hemingway
Cormac McCarthy (read nearly everything, but down for re-reads)
Kobo Abe
Grass
Nabokov
Coetzee
Flannery O'Connor (good mini-author)
Carson McCullers (good mini-author)

Not mentioned:
Donald Barthelme
John Barth
Joseph Conrad
Robert Coover
Robertson Davies
Stephen Dixon
E.L. Doctorow
Lawrence Durrell
Raymond Federman
John Gardner
William Gass
John Hawkes
Hermann Hesse
John Irving
Henry James (might get old since so many of his plots are the same)
Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey
Stephen Katz
Rudyard Kipling (good mini-author)
Malcolm Lowry (good mini-author)
Ben Marcus (good mini-author)
Herman Melville (HECK YEAH!)
Henry Miller
Toni Morrison
John Nichols
Flann O'Brien (good mini-author)
Grace Paley (good mini-author)
Manuel Puig (good mini-author)
Alain Robbe-Grillet (good mini-author)
Philip Roth
Terry Southern (good mini-author)
John Steinbeck
Ronald Sukenick
Vollmann
David Foster Wallace
Tennessee Williams (should totally have a playwright as a mini-author!)
Thomas Wolfe

Guess I'd be down for a lot....

Some interesting ideas especially for mini-authors. Thanks.

Anything Japanese should be cool, too. I'm not familiar with a whole lot. Haruki Murakami a bit. Read one Yukio Mishima, which I found very meh (probably due to the translation--tried way too hard to sound like spring-and-doves poetry).

There's lots of authors on that list that I've been meaning to read, or read more of particularly:

Milan Kundera
Jose Saramago
Alexandre Dumas,
Isabel Allende
Haruki Murakami
Solzhenitsyn
Nabokov
Hemingway
Faulkner
Naipaul
Böll
Grass
Cormac McCarthy
Dickens
Hardy
Orhan Pamuk
Ismail Kadare
J.M. Coetzee,
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

If we did Japanese authors would we just focus on the country or one particular author?

As the group's title implies "Author Theme Reads", we would just focus on one author.

I'm thinking for the second year of this group it might be best to start off with an author who is easier to read as it might help those who want to work on this project. As I've mentioned before, I think trying to tackle authors like Dostoevsky, although its very interesting, is quite daunting especially the first time around. Perhaps with an "easier" author we can get a good rhythm going so we can tackle more "difficult" authors in the future.

Hi all - new to the group and gutted that I've missed out on the Ishiguro session! My preferences from the list:

Jose Saramago
Mario Vargas Llosa
Isabel Allende
Naguib Mahfouz
Haruki Murakami
Nabokov
Naipaul
Dickens
Orhan Pamuk
J.M. Coetzee
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

But there are a number of the list whose work I know nothing about and a few I've never heard of, so I can't make a decision one way or another on them.

So who makes the decision? Does it go to a vote? I think Dickens would be my number one choice, I may read him in 2010 whatever happens with this group and then try and keep up with whoever you are all reading.

My favorites from the list pretty much mirror charbutton's, although I'd like to add Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, and Yukio Mishima.

Last year each person nominated their top three picks then we had a vote based off of that. We didn't do it till January but perhaps I should start it now so that people in this group can have time to see it. I'll start a new thread.