Books I read in 2017

These are the books I read in 2017. I'm hoping to read a lot more in 2018! I'd love to know what everyone has been reading last year and plans to read this year. Are there any book clubs on Steemit?

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

Favorite Quote: “As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity, he single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of the world.”

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Favorite Quote: “A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously, I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.”

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Favorite Quote: “ What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

Favorite Quote: “Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but it is more – let me see – more like a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene a tingle. That way; it overlaps…As prehistoric ferns grow from bath tub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way back to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Favorite Quote: “Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that self-same reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for a largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Favorite Quote: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Chin: the Life and Crimes of Mafia Boss Vincent Gigante by Larry McShane

Favorite Quote: “The Genovese influence extended to the garbage, concrete, construction, and music industries; they held an iron grip on the labor trust that allowed them to dominate the New Jersey waterfront, the Javits Convention Center and Fulton Fish Market. The family was stealing money on every window installed at the city’s vast housing projects and skimming cash from New York’s enormous concrete industry.”

Amerika by Franz Kafka

Favorite Quote: “There was endless motion, and unrest borne from the restless elements to helpless men and their works.”

Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien

Favorite Quote: “For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war. Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish or the fantasy.”

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

Favorite Quote: “Again, there is the horrible jargon that nearly all Socialists think it necessary to employ. When the ordinary person hears phrases like “bourgeois ideology” and “proletarian solidarity” and “expropriation of the expropriators,” he is not inspired by them, he is merely disgusted. Even the single word “Comrade” has done its dirty little bit towards discrediting the Socialist movement.”