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powersnail

Favorite Technical: The Pragmatic Programmer. This is something that I should have read much earlier.

Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.

Also great (in no particular order):

- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)

- The Odyssey (poem)

- Tropic of Cancer (novel)

- Tenth of December (short story collection).

- Endurance (non-fiction)

- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)

- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)

- Agent Running in the Field (novel)

- Little Dorrit (novel)

To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.

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+1 for The Odyssey. I started it during an off year, almost as an intentionally-irrelevant book to pick up and forget about, but it ended up being a genuine gem; one I remember fondly, and often.

I was blown away by Lolita, but couldn’t finish Pale Fire. The poetry felt like satire to me. And reading online about it I found mixed opinions on that!

I certainly agree that Lolita is the best work of Nabokov. For _Pale Fire_, it's a weird narrative, and I think for the first read, linearly going through the book, first the poem, and then just enjoying the story in the commentary is the easiest way to go. Think of it as a mad man trying to tell you a story, while referring to various far-fetching clues hidden inside a normal poem.

> The poetry felt like satire to me

The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.

If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.

Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.

+1 for Endurance, and if you enjoyed that I also recommend The Terror (which is historical fiction but had a similar feel to me)

I also recommend Lost Moon (which is sometimes published as Apollo 13). I've joked with people it's the same story, except in outer space. If by "story" you mean getting the feeling every 20 pages or so of "they are dead now for sure," then it's not really that much of a joke.

I read both of these around the same time and loved them both.

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