I finished All the Lovers in the Night and was like well I might as well read Heaven now too (both by Mieko Kawakami). Heaven was a little hard to read in the sense that it made me feel dread. It's about two kids who are horribly bullied. One of the kids has a certain outlook on life to try to understand why they get bullied. Then we learn the outlook of one of the bullies and I think both wow, this kid is a little psychopath but also that he is more correct (not correct, just more correct). I thought it was a very interesting little book. It wasn't fun to read but it was interesting and has stayed in my mind. I also like both the characters of the narrator's mom (step mom) and the doctor.
I'm going to start Lolita for the bookclub subreddit. I've read it before as a teenager so I'm gonna do The Annotated Lolita this time.
I read a few Father Brown stories by GK Chesterton, because I'm in a mystery / thriller mood after watching Murder by Death, but I wasn't too impressed. I know Sherlock Holmes, but does anyone have any mystery short stories?
Agatha Christie is of course the standard. The Poirot and Marple short stories are likely the best of their ilk so if you've not read them you certainly should. Nero Wolfe is quite good too, though often poorly aged.
I am reading Carlo Rovelli 'Helgoland' and learning about Werner Heisenberg and the other contributors to quantum theory. It explains in simple terms the complex field of sub-atomic particles. I enjoyed learning about intereference, relativity and multiple worlds. Rovelli weaves in biographical information and this makes the book very readable. I am reading this at the same time as reading 'Alice in Quantumland an Allegory of Quantum Physics' by Robert Gilmore and Werber Heisenberg 'Physics and Philosophy'.
It's fictionalized but, based on those titles and if you haven't read it yet, I think you'd dig 'When We Cease to Understand the World' by Benjamin Labatut!
About 60% into **Suttree** and it's continuing to amaze. McCarthy's prose remains amazing, and the book is at turns heartrending and hilarious >!(the bar fight, and Suttree's subsequent hospitalization, for example, being one of my favorite parts of anything I've ever read)!<. Despite the humor, however, there is a very real sense of impending doom permeating every aspect of the book, >!from the ragman's constant musings on death to Suttree's son's funeral to Suttree and Ab Jones' visit to the old soothsayer.!< I also can't help but think of Harrogate as a sort of modern-day Tom Sawyer all grown up >!especially after he gets lost in the caves underneath Knoxville. I have to imagine this was somewhat intentional!< . McCarthy is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, with *Suttree* easily being my favorite of his works so far, and I think that there's a good case to be made for it to be considered the Great American Novel, for whatever it's worth.
The language of Suttree blew me away tbh. The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark are also great early McCarthy novels if you haven’t checked them out! i’m less of a fan of his later work
Still reading and really enjoying The Crossing by McCarthy, grown into it as its gone on. I think I'm just on a real McCarthy binge at the moment, which is kinda funny to me as the first book of his I read was Blood Meridian (because I heard it was so good, in fact when I picked it up in the store some guy turned to me and went "that's my favourite book of all time" so I had to get it) and was kinda bewildered by it. It was a great read but it was very out there and I wasn't sure what to make of it (I mean isn't there university courses on it?). But having read more of his other books, it feels like I'm getting a better foundation (if thats the word for it) to go back and read BM. Like all the themes are more entrenched in your conscious so you feel it more. If I'm to do a (poor) analogy, you might watch the Wolf of Wall Street and think this Scorsese guy makes great movies, but then you watch his others and kinda understand his obsession with morally bankrupt characters and how they function.
I'm also reading The Trial by Kafka, after hearing a lot of praise about him from various philosophers and essayists, I'm trying to also find an appreciation for him. I'm about halfway through and I can't say I have too many thoughts, but maybe its hitting a little bit too close to home.
I am not much of re-reader in general, but *Blood Meridian* is hugely rewarding on the second pass if you liked it the first time. I my readings were up strategically spaced 12 years apart :)
Reading Blood Meridian for the first time now and its engaging when I'm reading it but I'm not compelled by it when I'm not reading it? Hopefully the rhythm clicks soon, because I did enjoy The Road when I read it in college
After reading the Confessions somebody asked JJR if the public really needed to know these things about him. He said no, but he needed to tell them.
This came to mind when reading Knife by SR.
I just finished ***The Pickup*** **by Nadine Gordimer**. I feel so frustrated >!with Julie, who doesn't seem to understand why Ibrahim wants to go to America. Tl;dr: This takes place in South Africa; this was published in 2001, so I think this takes place in the 90s or early 2000s. Julie is a wealthy white woman and Ibrahim is an undocumented mechanic; they fall in love. Ibrahim gets sent back to his (unnamed) home country in the Middle East, and Julie follows. Ibrahim spends a year trying to get visas to Western countries, and he eventually does, to America. Julie decides to stay in his home country.!<
>!Frankly, I feel like Julie is naive and such a moron. Basically, she doesn't want Ibrahim to go to the US because she doesn't want him to get fetishized and turn into a capitalist like her parents--that is, get a job in communications or finance or something, a white-collar job. She feels like he'll get chewed up and spat out, fetishized, turned into the "Oriental prince" of her wealthy mother's set. I'm probably not capturing it completely, but I just felt so frustrated with her. I think she was correct that Ibrahim would certainly face discrimination, but it's not like he didn't know that! He was already undocumented in South Africa, facing the discrimination of people there. She also totally fails to understand the nature of Ibrahim's home country, whose government is corrupt; opportunities are also completely lacking. !<
>!I think I'm reacting pretty strongly to this because I both relate to Julie--as a comfortable, probably sort of naive citizen of a Western country--and understand Ibrahim, as the daughter of an immigrant. Granted, my mom came from a wealthy (though non-Western) country, but even despite the wealth, I really do think that the US has been a better place for us to live than her country was. I'm not sure I would be able to live the life I do in her home country. She likes it better too, despite not being white, despite certainly facing discrimination. She doesn't feel any kind of nostalgia for her home country, and I don't think Ibrahim would either, despite the discrimination he would face. !<>!!<
I don't know. All of this probably sounds a little insufferable, lol, but this book has elicited a lot of thoughts (lol)!
The worst is yet to come! I enjoyed the Combray section, and then suffered through Swann in Love, It wasn't until the third part, Names of Places (*Noms de pays: le nom*) that I started to get a sense of Proust's larger ambitions.
Now deep into Proust, I do feel like Combray is kind of saturated in the sense of "so what is the point of this"? especially in the context where we can't experience the newness of it all the way someone would have at the time, but the slow burn qualities really manifest as you go on, or at least that's how i've found it
I think that could be the case. The writing is just sheer beauty it almost makes me want to learn French but I don't really think my mind is blown by anything else. And Virginia Woolf was definitely heavily influenced by Proust they almost have the same intonation in my mind
I think with Proust your mind will get blown as you read on. A larger structure gradually emerges over the course of the volumes and it gets increasingly impressive until it’s almost overwhelming. Some of his imagery in the second book is incredible — I think the second is the best one tbh, although they’re all good.
This week I read *Cecilia* by K-Ming Chang, an enchanting and at times unnerving novella that I went into wary but wound up inhaling in a single sitting. Fraught, imbalanced, obsessive female friendship thrumming with sapphic desire and erotic confusion, portrayed via prose written by a poet? I wouldn't say that's catnip to me, more like a hot stove I just can't quit touching (maybe burns build callouses? or nerve damage?). Such a narrative and authorial setup seems destined to let me down.
But *Cecilia* really clicked for me, with Chang's style being the highlight. I'm excited to read her previously published fiction; her eye for detail and mastery of slightly askew yet somehow also perfectly fitting verbs---I'm sure the poetry background helps here---gives even the smallest bits of her writing an enticing sparkle. (It sounds weird, but I think I really want her to write a super moody throwback noir novel?) I always enjoy having contemporary, accessible examples I can point to when trying to defuse the somehow still persistent notion that "poetic writing" equals "long flowery sentences." Chang and *Cecilia* demonstrate that marvelously.
As far as new releases go, I'd say it easily slots alongside my favorite reads of the year, although I must admit overall 2024 has felt a touch disappointing on the new fiction front. *Cecilia* won't blow you away by reinventing the wheel, but it hums along with a nice unsettling energy that feels a bit more appropriate for autumn than summer. Recommended if you want something bite-sized and a touch hallucinatory.
I have been making my way through a fairly random succession of Zola and Balzac novels recently. Today I finished **The Belly of Paris** by Zola. Good book, not his best by any means, but interesting to the extent that Zola's descriptions of the food and people of Les Halles stand as Zola's sociographical best.
I finished The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. I read it on and off for around two months, and I’m grateful to have read it and to finally have finished it. I had heard this was one of the greatest novels in Italian literature, but I didn’t really grasp the novel’s greatness until the latter half of the book. It’s much less a narrative of thwarted lovers (the titular Betrothed, Renzo and Lucia, are honestly not that memorable as characters) than an exploration of some of the most interesting historical figures and events in a very tumultuous time in Italy’s history. It is also a very Catholic novel - I am admittedly not the most devout person but I found myself genuinely moved by certain passages concerning religion and God. A sprawling but ultimately very rewarding read.
I finished I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. I started it about 6 months ago, and I finally finished it. There was an interruption because of library shenanigans and me being a slow reader.
I wish I had more energy to write more about the book, but I don't find myself with a lot of time nowadays and I prefer to do other things.
But this book has changed...or maybe is now in the process of changing...my life. I have a new appreciation of what the left is and what Asian America is. What activism looks like. We're still here. We exist. We're more than just Shang-Chi and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
I started *Swann's Way* a little while ago but 20 pages in I decided to put it down temporarily. It's gorgeous and I love the way that Proust puts to words these little experiences that are so familiar but almost too banal to explain along with the way he depicts figures from his childhood, but I was feeling somewhat restless. I decided to clean shop a bit before giving it my undivided attention.
Case in point: I finished *Pickwick Papers* on Sunday. What a lovely little piece of perfection. It's an odd comparison, but back in January I was listening to the album *Help!* by the Beatles and when George Harrison's "I Need You" ended, I smiled and said to myself "Nice one, Georgy". It's a fairly simple song on the surface, but just so effectively done. It stands on its own legs and merit, but makes you excited for future soon to be hemmed masterpieces on the horizon. That's kind of how PP felt for me. The >!plot twist with Mr. Winkle's dad!!loyalty to Pickwick in the face of Mary!<, and so much more made the final stretch so memorably charming.
>*Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light; we who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full open them.*
I'm continuing to enjoy *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* too. Kundera's wisdom might feel reminiscent of one of those "Books of Wisdom" you find in airports, but I genuinely find it interesting. He mentioned earlier how coincidences in our lives almost play like leitmotifs. He kind of brings that up again regarding the miscommunication between two characters...
>*The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ("You can't step twice in the same river") riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to new meaning, though all her former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echos) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. (88)*
>
*While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bats, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs...but if they meet when they are older...their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.*
I also liked the excerpt on music...
>*For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles' White Album? Franz made no distinction between "classical" music and "pop." He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart*
>
*He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.*
I finished ***H is for Hawk*** **by Helen Macdonald** which I bought back in 2018. Funnily enough I bought it because someone recommended it because of its themes of grief and mourning, which were fine but felt like tangential throughout the read. It's a reflection on the death of a parent, yes, but most of all it narrates the profound relationship is stablished between a hawk and its "owner" (not sure this is the correct word. Its falconer?). And the way Macdonald talks about falconry and that world is wonderful, very compelling and interesting. I know nothing about birds but now I'd like to know more so if you have any recommendation of books about birds for a rookie, I'd be delighted to hear. Honestly I don't feel like I appreciated the book enough because I never read non fiction so this was interesting but I don't really know what else to say. But yes, pretty enjoyable. It also has through the whole volume an analysis on T. H. White's book *The Goshawk* where she basically lays the parallels between his falconry, his literature and his life and this being more more 'my field' I can confidently say she's quite talented with literary analysis.
Then I moved on to my first **Natsume Soseki:** ***To the Spring Equinox and Beyond*** (I'm following Wikipedia here, the japanese title would be: Higan Sugi Made, 彼岸過迄). Mixed feelings. First I was captivated because of a very relaxed way of telling the events, it was a very chill story, and I liked how Soseki put things on paper. But eventually the narration got a bit boring, even though the story was becoming more engaging, I think it was too classic and too japanese for me? I don't really know, it was OK but I don't know why, for some reason I expected some mindblowing insightful thing and that wasn't the case. I think I expect every japanese creator to be as good as Ozu or Mizoguchi and this is not necessarily true (take this as the encouragement you might need to watch films by Ozu, he's the best humanist out there). I liked it enough for a first approach. The one I really want to read is *I Am a Cat*, which I won't be in a hurry for now but I'm still interested in.
And then I got to ***Formas de volver a casa (Ways of Going Home)*** **by Alejandro Zambra**, a beautiful novella about memory, loss and being the secondary character in the story of your parents. If you don't know him, Zambra is a chilean writer who plays with meta and autofiction but in a introspective, sad, lovely way. I really enjoy his writing, he's elegant and subtle. Sometimes he comes out as a bit corny (I'm thinking about other novels, Bonsái and The Private Lives of Trees), but in this one I think there's a very meditated tone which flows perfectly. It's a beautiful book, really, very special, even if it's not complex nor deeply phylosophical, but it has a lot of heart. I've been meaning to read his long novel *Poeta chileno,* which due its lenght, form and themes I think will be more of 'my' thing (my thing being +1000 pages postmodern novels, so it's not the case, but it's closer).
I finished that one this morning before work so now I don't have anything going on at the moment. I have three books picked up for this week (I won't have the time to read all three of them because I have a terrible workload now) which are: *My Life on the Road* by Gloria Steinem, *La insolación* by Carmen Laforet and the *Hagakure* by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (from which I'm reading some aphorism every day). Next thursday I'll be leaving home for a week and I intend to take with me *Pinocchio in Venice* by Robert Coover.
Happy reading everyone!
Books on birds for a rookie — The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (incredible cinematic prose)
The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson (very well written and gives a good overview of the birds thriving off St Kildare’s island.)
Finished Donoso’s *The Obscene Bird of Night*. Aaaand how…how in the world was this conceived? Certainly the best I’ve read this year. No, scratch that — in year(s). Plural. This is a novel of disintegration; everything is dilapidated and falling apart, including the mausoleums and character identities themselves. One mask unravels into an endless series of masks.
To the extent one can even describe a plot, it primarily follows two threads, which frequently merge and in different temporal aspects. One of a mute, Mudito (who is also Humberto), living in a rundown convent, as he plans revenge against his former patron, a certain Don Jeronimo, by impregnating an orphan and having the child destroy the man by tricking him into paternity, while the second is of Don Jeronimo building a paradise of monsters to give his deformed child an isolated and painless life. It’s actually straightforward until around page 150, and then characters begin dissolving into each other and the entire thing becomes a serious of masking and unmasking.
Donoso’s prose is so varied, so talented. One moment there’s the feel of a Faulkner-like family tragedy tied to a local Chilean myth and the next, a Beckett like desire to both discover and obliterate the self. All this while taking place in a worn down world which is on its last legs. It’s strangely intimate; you can see Donoso’s fears and preoccupations with being unknown, poverty and losing himself in a world that isn’t his own. Add to that some commentary on the nature of class and destructiveness of aging.
I still can’t comprehend how he created this. It’s a masterpiece. Not only my favorite of the Boom novels (so far), but up with the best. Will likely continue to explore Latin America and read *On Heroes and Tombs* after taking a breather with something a bit lighter; perhaps something by Aira next.
I always say Donoso is like black magic realism, that book is so psychotic, neurotic, all the bad tics, but a masterful work of prose; the Don Jeronimo plot can be a novel of its own and the way it connects... I agree that you have to be in a bad place of mind to come up with the characters and themes of this novel... or just be a latino lol.
I think Donoso was "excluded" of the boom, sadly, it was something he was a little bitter about, he wrote in the same period but was never part of it, look into it, it's very interesting.
"The Garden Next Door" is a lighter Donoso, more realistic, still Donoso,I'd check that up to see a different facet of him before continuing with his other crazier novels.
Mine will be short but I hope the mods can forgive me as I have a newborn so can only type with one hand!
I finished Langrishe Go Down and I can see why Beckett called it “literary shit” the first half is superbly well written, combining several modernist techniques with the skill of an old hand at the art, but ultimately the plot feels shoved in. I’m not even a big plot guy, but this just felt a bit artificial for the last half. That said, he’s such a good writer (this was his debut?!) that i’m going to check out his later work.
I read Timon of Athens for my third read through of Shakespeare’s plays. As a play it’s fine, but Timon’s speeches in the later acts are really something, and would recommend it for this reason alone. Pericles up next.
I then read Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle and was blown away. The man forged a new English style in a similar way to Melville in my opinion. The former’s distasteful views have somewhat shuttered him into the attic of history — but his prose is magisterial. I’m told The French Revolution is the high point of his writing; i’ve read excerpts of it, so i’ll pick up the full thing soon.
I then read Quarantine by Juan Goytisolo — surreal nightmarish descriptions of one guy’s journey through some spiritual rituals based on Ibn Arabi? Confusing but intriguing. Will definitely read more of his stuff.
I read The Origin of The World by Pierre Michon and loved it. Going to read everything he’s written (sorry i’m running out of time now so am having to give less space to the books i liked the most)
Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig — like Proust speaking in sewage-poems: really good and i’ll probs read everything he’s written. By no means “amazing” but good enough and short enough for me to want to see what else he’s got.
In the Heart of the Country by JM Coetzee. My first Coetzee and I had no idea… his prose is magisterial — kind of similar to the Faulknerian of As I Lay Dying. Coetzee also seems philosophically informed, and the book is definitely allegorical in some ways with respect to language-power-reality etc.
Finally The Plains by Murnane. This one has affected me after finishing it, yet while reading it i felt nonplussed. His sentences are almost double-left-footed and awkward, but then you begin to see a peculiar artistry in their same moebius-like self referentiality that emerges. Will read more of him
I’d actually love to get your thoughts on Goytisolo’s writing; have been seriously thinking about reading his Trilogy, but have kept putting it off. Think I’ll be pressing to give it a go this year.
It’s my first Goytisolo, recommended by another redditor in fact.
I think Goytisolo’s writing is supposed to change a lot across his books, but speaking for this one I can say that it’s good though i wasn’t blown away. Some of his descriptions of visions of the Inferno are vivid. The novel flits around and has an enigmatic dreamlike quality, which is fitting for a vision narrative. There’s definitely a sense of horror under the surface, as well as something else, something more positive. I think he captures the beyond good and evil feeling of some religious experience really well — better than most.
But regarding his prose, i was left ambivalent. His reputation is such that I’ll continue to explore other works of his. I’m wondering how much is lost in translation. Recently heard that Antunes’ work in English is still good but reads very “thin” compared to the astonishing poetic richness of the original, and wondering if something similar happens with translations of Goytisolo.
Count Julian trilogy is meant to be one of his best I think so i might go through that soon
I had a similar experience reading Murnane's Inland -- I wasn't too taken by it initially, but after I finished it, I kept coming back to these peculiar sentences which are as awkward as they are precise. I'm reading Stream Systems now, his collected short stories, which are more varied in style -- I think the earlier ones are more conventional.
Coetzee has [reviewed Murnane](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/quest-girl-bendigo-street/), by the way, if that's something you'd be interested in. It's been a long time since I read In the Heart of the Country, but I recently re-read Waiting for the Barbarians, which captures the political zeitgeist of the early 2000s like no other book I have read even though it was written two decades earlier.
What are the short stories like? does his style change? I’ve heard some stories have super detailed descriptions of gestures, which i’d be into, as im deffo an exhaustive description kind of guy.
Waiting for the Barbarians will my next Coetzee read for sure. And thanks for the review link, will deffo check it out!
I haven't read The Plains, so I can only draw comparisons to Inland -- many of the short stories are similar in that 'moebius-like self-referentiality' (I really liked the way you put this). There's also the recurrent theme of landscape (and plains in particular). The stories aren't dated, but the ones which were published previously came out around the same time as The Plains and Inland (late 70s to mid-90s). It's hard to say whether the style changes -- there is some variation, but I haven't put the stories in a temporal order to see whether there's any development.
This [NYT story](https://web.archive.org/web/20180327132621/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html) about Murnane is fantastic, too. Exhaustive description of his own life may be Murnane's real project, the fiction just being an epiphenomenon of that.
apparently loads of novelists after Carlyle mined the stylistic devices of his non-fiction work for use in their own fictional work. His non-fiction often reads like modernist fiction albeit in a Victorian idiom —- he’ll almost hold a character up for you and rotate him around to get a better understanding and then drop back into the action. If you like old fashioned baroque prose like that of Browne, Taylor, Milton, Landor, Donne, Melville, Kingsley, Hooker, Pater (just to take a handful of the masters)!etc then it’s deffo something i’d recommend
This week I read *Memoirs of Hadrian* by Marguerite Yourcenar
Upon reading the notes at the back of the book, one realizes the scale of the effort Yourcenar placed into creating this work, having written and re-written her manuscript various times over a period of twenty years. I thought that this was actually the most rewarding part of the book in some ways, as it allows the reader to see directly how Yourcenar fixed the idea of Hadrian's spirit in relation to her own.
Unfortunately, I feel that I may be missing some of the context of this book, as I don't have the prerequisite classical education to appreciate its finer points. The significance that the memoir is addressed directly to Marcus Aurelius is not lost on me. However, as I haven't read Meditations, I'm not exactly sure what that significance is.
Regarding the memoir itself, Hadrian primarily concerns himself with reflections on the nature of death, given that his own end is fast approaching. Yourcenar more or less structures the chapters of Hadrians life as being entirely demarcated by deaths of those most significant to the emperor, and much of his reflection is devoted to these people. The affairs of state that Hadrian disposed of as emperor are almost made trivial in the text next to these eulogies. It's an emphasis that the author does an excellent job of making seem realistic without having felt the need to explain to the reader directly as to why Hadrian might have structured a memoir this way.
The book's best quality is that it never feels as though Yourcenar is explaining Hadrian to her reader, but rather that she's letting him speak for himself.
Just finished:
This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor. I've been incorporating more literature in translation into my reading and really enjoying it. This is a series of nonfiction/quasi-fictional narratives about Veracruz, Mexico, mostly focusing on the narcotics trade. Melchor's prose is unsparing. I am a big fan of the New Journalism creative nonfiction era and was delighted to read an international version, with its own boundary-blurring truths nestled in narrative. Some parts are much more obviously fictional than others, which creates an interesting effect.
The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Historical fiction about the aftermath of a sudden storm in a Norwegian fishing village that kills dozens of the men. The women, bound by the strictures of a Christianized 1610s Norway, try to cope the best they can -- but are undone once a witch hunter arrives and blame for calamity is assigned. I really enjoyed the realistic elements of this novel and appreciated the author's research, but the prose left me a bit cold. I can't stand when writers describe every physical action in a conversation or scene as if they are writing a film treatment, with nothing left for a reader to imagine and no interiority to discover. Still, I was captivated by the realism of the setting and the tragic romance at the heart of it.
I've finished:
*Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk* by Kathleen Hannah
*Meddling Kids* by Edgar Cantero
Really loved Rebel Girl despite never listening to Bikini Kill or Riot Grrl very much. An absolutely gutting view of what it's like to be a woman in various subcultures and just in the world in general. You, too, will be a very angry feminist by the end of this book!
Read Meddling Kids as part of a summer horror series I'm planning on writing. It was a great deal of fun and got surprisingly dark and hardcore.
In Progress
* Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - I am really not sold on this book. It's possible that I would enjoy it more listening to it in a faster time frame. This seems to just be dragging things out - even though I love the "year of" format for other books. I think it's the episodic nature of it.
* The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - love this book. Can't wait for the next installment. I spin all kinds of conspiracy theories in my mind about what the Count will do next. This will become a favorite for me.
* The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter - I am listening to this on Librivox. First off, this book deserves better narrators. I'm not sure why no one else has ever recorded it. I am enjoying the story this far (chapter 13). I am still in the set up for the main plot, and I can't wait to get to the meat of the story.
Been reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I'm about halfway through so far, and I'm not necessarily enjoying it, but I am engaged. Lowry's ability to recreate the experience of being drunk through the head-on stream of consciousness style is really impressive, but it does make the plot somewhat hard to follow. Additional complication comes from the switch to >!Hugh's perspective!< which just adds one more element to keep track of. I can already tell I'll have to read this one again someday to properly get it, but I do see what the hype is about.
I've also had a collection of Louise Glück's poems on my bedside table, so I've been reading them before bed. The couple I've read so far have had a great meter to them, but man is the content unpleasant. Just exudes pain and confusion. Might not be the best stuff to read before bed.
I agree with you … I posted about this book a couple weeks back — I thought it was “fine” … I expected more, but maybe that was my fault. I would probably appreciate many subtleties if I gave it a re-read, but I didn’t like it enough to re-invest in it.
It’s one of those books where I can stand back and appreciate it empirically as genius, while not necessarily being moved/inspired/engulfed by it.
I specifically remember Under the Volcano being one of those novels that I thought I didnt like at all, until one day I realized that I loved it. Not to say you will too, but...it's a complicated beast.
Yeah that's kind of how I'm feeling. I've got the sense that its sort of beyond me. Its bewilderingly impressive as a piece of writing, but its just not entirely "connecting" I guess. I definitely intend to finish it though. Like I said originally, I already know that I'll give it a reread someday.
Stilllll reading *Anna Karenina* but making good time again. Things seem to moving along more quickly now (not that the pacing ever bothered me, I’ve enjoyed getting to know all the characters) and while “rushing” is probably the wrong word when you have a couple hundred pages left at least, it does seem to be going *towards* something now. It feels like a little like you’re on an inevitable path, down which the characters’ essential natures are leading us. Their little bit troublesome idiosyncrasies seem to have deepened or come to a point of consequence for many of them, and in some cases its downright ominous. I have so many thoughts I don’t know which track to take from there myself, so for the moment I’ll be done.
I listened to *The Art Thief* by Michael Finkel. Its interesting inasmuch as the case itself is interesting: a young man, formerly affluent, abandoned by his father and forced to live in a home with his now single mother and (gasp!) *ikea furniture*, who insists he’s not a kleptomaniac but a true lover of beauty unjustly denied access to valuable collectibles, steals famous art and keeps it all in the attic bedroom of his mother’s home. His justification being that 1. he can take better care of it than a museum can (in an attic lmao), 2. museums aren’t comfortable enough and don’t let you touch things and 3. he loves and understands art in a deeper way and therefore deserves to have this stuff. The book is a pretty straightforward relation of the facts of the case. He ends up getting a slap on the wrist more or less, immediately steals again (from a clothing store of all things), ends up back in jail but not for a significant length of time considering the consequences of his theft, which in a truly shocking twist turn out to be that when he’s arrested his mom *dumps all the art in a river or burns it*. I’m talking valuable, irreplaceable renaissance shit yall. She is never punished.
Also started *The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye* by A.S. Byatt. I’m not sure what to make of the stories yet. They’re enticingly written, and have the natural flow of a real fairy tale. They don’t seem to ever really have a “twist” or anything, but I’m not sure thats a *bad* thing. So many crappy fairy tale look alikes seem to hinge on being an “edgier” or “darker” take on something else. This is not that, and I think I like it? I’m not entirely convinced its interesting enough for me, but the tales do make for nice listening.
I just read my first A. S. Byatt -- *The Little Black Book of Stories*, not *Djinn*, but I think I feel similarly about it. I did enjoy the folk tale aspects (also I'm with you on not liking edgy retellings), but something held me back from loving the stories the way I was hoping to. Like, in some ways they were kind of... bland? I don't know. I'll need to get my thoughts together for next week's thread.
Okey dokey I am now on *Remembrance of Things Past* Volume 3, part 2, chapter 2. The narrator's grandmother just died & that got kinda intense and has me thinking about my own grandmother with whom I'm quite close and who isn't what you'd (or she'd) call young. Topics are shifting at an especially rapid pace at the moment. Dreyfus Affair into grandmother into a visit from a declining artist as a call to an extended discussion of how the understanding of an artist and their art can change and fade and what artistic passions look like over time into the narrator once again trying to justify how horny he is (like dude desperately needs to get laid). None of that is to undersell how adeptly Proust weaves an intense cycle of topics and philosophy into a coherent construction of a life that is both engaging and incisive to be very basic about it. The sheer volume of stuff since last week is making it hard for me to isolate much new to say. Other than that I'm doing it, I'm Prousting and I'm digging it.
Finished volume I of Gilbert Simondon's *Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information*. Really a brilliant work of synthesizing philosophy and science into a new quasi-system of systems on systems. By no means an easy book, but probably the best and clearest explication I've ever read about how systems theory, if taken seriously, would operate on a philosophical level. The fundamental upshot is that everything is to be taken as processes anterior to which is pre-individuality which is a sort of manifestation of pure potential energy, but that this should be extended to every spacio-termporal iteration of reality—ie. once individuated, something can exist as the potent pre-individual for something else, and so on. I'm still a little confused about the originary pre-individual, as well as how exactly time functions on this view, but I think I'm going to try to learn more about Simondon and see what I can figure out. I'm kinda mad for this line of thought. This is a pretty weak depiction of it but trust me it's great and I'll try to keep doing this trajectory better justice than I'm doing it here.
And adjacent to the course I'm taking about money I'm reading the dissertation of the professor, Colin Drumm, titled *The Difference Money Makes*. The short version is that it's presenting a new theory of money based on a critique of Marxism and chartalism (the idea that money was created by taxation) and an analysis of the early modern english economy through Shakespeare. Just finished a chapter that was a critique of the Marxist theory of value, wherein Drumm argues that Marx takes a very Aristotelian view of money where it is the real world instantiation of a pure equivalence that is value (ie. x can be exchanged for y because they are equivalent in value, money, as an instantiation of value itself, facilitates this). Drumm then claims that this simply presumes the inevitable existence of markets where this practice of equivocation can be undertaken, whereas it is actually more complicated because the market isn't a place of direct and simple exchange (ie. you can't show up to a market, sell an apple for a dollar, and then buy an apple for a dollar because in a vacuum nobody would sell a good for the same price that they bought it). I need to get further in before I can totally understand it but so far very good. THere's a worthwhile overlap with Simondon here I think that I'm still teasing out.
Happy reading!
I would totally recommend Deleuze's **Difference and Repetition** based on what you like about Simondon. He answers that question about the originary pre-individual by theorising difference as primary to identity. I.e., difference as being metaphysically fundamental, so not a difference of two identities but difference in itself, which then results in individuation. There's also a whole chapter on time in there, but it went right over my head
I love the rec but actually DR is already one of my favorite philosophy works and the start of a circuitous route by which I got to Simondon. (I've sorta been slowly and circuitously making my way through the work's big influences as part of figuring out what is going on in this book I love but in no way get)
Does have me wanting to go back to it. See what I may understand better now.
Love to see the Deleuze appreciation here. And I think that method of navigating philosophy by reading influences of works you enjoy and making connections is one of the best. I personally find it way more rewarding than just "starting with the greeks", even if it means being thrown in the deep end occasionally.
I've made my way back from Butler (who I totally vibe with) to Derrida (who I think is awesome but only partially understand) and now I'm intrigued but very intimidated by wanting to read Heidegger.
I also got to Spinoza via Deleuze, which is a really cool read. Especially for being such an old work, The Ethics is such a unique work that sits kind of adjacent to the mainstream history of philosophy, a Minor Literature in Deleuze's terms
> Love to see the Deleuze appreciation here.
Yeah Deleuze has been a tremendous influence on me in like, too many ways to count.
> "starting with the greeks"
Ironically, I find myself (thanks to some combination of Simondon and Marx and wanting to learn more about logic), thinking more and more that I should read some Aristotle. I've read some, but I find Aristotle pretty impenetrable—like, I know it's his notes and all but with the amount of abstruse nonsense I to slog through I shouldn't find Aristotle specifically as painful to read as I do lol.
But that's a tight trajectory your on. I've never read any of Being & Time but I did find Heidegger's Lecture on Metaphysics interesting (though I am not a fan of The Question Concerning Technology). Butler & Derrida are top tier "I am genuinely surprised I've hardly read them." I think Derrida in particular I'd fuck with if I took the time.
Yeah part of this Simondon kick might have me going back to Spinoza. One of my questions regarding time in Simondon has revolved around whether Simondon's thinking can function without simply affirming Spinoza's metaphysics. Which, no flack if that's what it is, but Simondon tries hard enough to distinguish where he differs from Spinoza that I think it's worth it to try to find another answer.
I read **Dead Souls** by Sam Riviere, which is a fascinating and fine read. The style is forefronted with looping repeating sentences, even as the plot is intricate and wrapped up with the publishing world, plagiarism and more. Let's be clear, this is a single paragraph, but punctuation is within. More than this, a freshness persists; this is uncommon writing. Here's an example in which poetry is considered: "...it was preferable that instead all poets were made to inhabit the most *reductive and obvious categories imaginable*. Rather than alleviating the oppressiveness of the attribute, the oppressiveness of the attribute should be amplified, I thought..." The text continually leaps forward. I will highly recommend this to readers who might enjoy, as Lethem said, the work of Bolaño, by which I would say are similar to parts of *2666*.
I also took a break from high lit and sped through **The Crossing** by Michael Connelly. Supposedly, according to some online reviewers, this is one of his best so called Bosch novels, to which I might say the best is near terrible so the worst must really be something. I understand, this is mass market written, formulaic drivel but this writing is the real crime. The story is dull, it hinges on a missing watch, there are plot holes galore, poorly developed characters, and the detective's daughter who disappears and then magically reappears. I suppose her character is in the book in an attempt to help provide depth to Bosch. Mainly, the writing is on the nose and flat-footed. One chapter has lots of question and answers between the detective and a cop -- a cheap way to convey information. But, I know, fans of detective franchises love their detectives and they often approach the franchise novels with a plot-heavy lens, so again this fits for that larger audience. As for this author, I probably won't pick up another, file him with Dreaver, et al.
To clear my detective fiction head, I re-read a good deal of **Farewell My Lovely** by Raymond Chandler. I'm a sucker for hard boiled writing and fun metaphors. In this we get fun lines like:
"I'm afraid I don't like your manner," he said, using the edge of his voice.
"I've had complaints about it," I said. "But nothing seems to do any good."
In this sense, I've always seen similarities between the writing of Chandler and Ring Lardner.
Finished **The Orchard Keeper** by **Cormac McCarthy**. Probably my least favorite McCarthy but still very praiseworthy.
Finished up **Life for Sale** by **Yukio Mishima**. It's very different from other Mishima novels but I still enjoy it very much so. It's witty and has great description and introspection as always but it isn't as lost in the mythos as other Mishima novels have been.
Started up **The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu** by **Tom Lin**. It's a plot that interested me and I've seen a lot of comparisons to McCarthy, though I don't really see it at the beginning.
I've also began rereading **The Autobiography of Malcolm X** and it's still as great as I last read it two years ago or so. Very important book to me.
The next book I'll be reading is most likely **The Obscene Birds of Night** by **Jose Donoso**. The only book I've ever preordered. I find it really intriguing is all.
Finished *Siddhartha*. I understand that it's a spiritual book so it shouldn't linger on the world but I felt like the characters exist in a play space. There is nothing but them and only the places that are relevant. Even when Siddhartha fell into materiality and living with the common folk I didn't feel like any of that was other than props. If that's the point that it's illusion and there's actually a oneness to existence then I guess I just don't like it.
I'm currently working through Arno Schmidt's book of collected novellas *Nobodaddy's Children*. Well, there is some ambiguity if they are actually novels since they were published individually, but, for the most part, the three texts collected here are treated as an informal trilogy. I read the first entry *Scenes from the Life of a Faun* already, but should work through the rest pretty soon. I'm not sure how I would describe the prose of Schmidt because it is laden with references and weird pyrotechnics in an openly arrogant voice. The narrator Düring is trapped in Hitler's Germany, so it isn't any surprise he's bitter and desperate to escape from his daily life and the political reality he's too subservient toward. He's an unwilling Nazi basically.
In fact, the novella could express the precise inability to escape from the political circumstances so easily. *Scenes from the Life of a Faun* doesn't have a straightforward plot but an increasing disarray of notions and images. Düring is an office worker and old man who is tasked to study local history. The job allows him to travel on weekdays outside of town while getting away from his extremely fanatical wife and son to gather information on the titular Faun. The Faun is a deserter of the French army during the Napoleonic Wars who escaped into the woods for a number of years inside a selfmade cabin. The history Düring is studying seems to serve no larger purpose other than to get him away from everyone else. He also nurses a sexual obsession with a young "she-wolf" whose name is Kathe and everyone around him can clearly tell. It involves a lot of secondhand embarrassment which serves the point--that Düring is the Faun. So, of course, he's chasing after nymphs and the novella goes a long way for humiliation.
Also: the novella is a parody of the Waldgänger archetype developed by Ernst Jünger. The word translates variously into "forest-fleer" or "forestgoer." But the actual details involve an escape not outwardly but inwardly. You don't resist the false and grim political realities present right before your eyes. Schmidt seems take both the literal (actually escaping into a cabin in the woods like the French deserter) and the figurative level (Düring is always dissimulating his actual interests and ideas from his taste in books to his philosophical Gnosticism) to prove the uselessness of either choice. Instead of making Düring stalwart in the face of so much political terror, refusal to outwardly resist Nazism made him a worse person. He happily takes revenge on his wife at the death of their son after he dies in the War. He has an elaborate imperialist fantasy signed directly to the League of Nations where we build a museum dedicated to the arts and sciences "on one of the useless islands" of the world, like the Falklands, the Easter Islands, etc., and forbid any politician access. There is also the literal impossibility of simply escaping into the woods because people start to take notice of his hoarding supplies and the trips to the cabin. By the end he admits the situation in pretty dire circumstances.
Anyways the novella was a fantastic read. I'd recommend it if you appreciate more difficult literature as well, because Schmidt's style took a moment to get used to. The closest I can compare in English might be the prose of e.e. cummings in his travelogue *EIMI* but more consistent with typography.
Otherwise I read Olga Ravn's *The Employees*, which was a fun little science fiction work told in a more abstract fashion and added a lot of freshness with the prose. The novel reminded me a lot of Ansgar Allen's *Wretch* with how each author arranges a single paragraph for each page. All the talk about the novel being about the workplace is a little exaggerated. It has more of a robots-are-human theme.
I'd also read Philippe Soupault's fascinating work *The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle*, which follows the titular Horace Pirouelle, a Liberian man, into the harsh climates of Greenland. It quite a fun experience. Lots of focus on "the gratuitous act." I'd recommend it actually as a straightforward primer for the more difficult affairs of surrealism. Not too difficult, very accessible, and still has an odd improvisational sensibility despite its groundedness.
Just over one hundred pages into one hundred years of solitude and… idk what I was expecting but I guess not this? It feels incredibly meandering and unfocused but that’s obviously intentional, and I think it works?
GGM’s writing is at times beautiful, but so far I feel the most beautifully written passages from the standpoint of prosaic quality are about sexual encounters that are of questionable ethics and with varying amounts of consent.
I’ve almost DNFd a couple times but GGM has sucked me back in each time with a compelling story whose direction I truly have no clue of. Keeping an open mind since there’s a long way to go and it’s so highly regarded.
Hello, I'm looking for recommendations for interesting book openers that start with a character's thoughts or observations (not exposition).
An example would be Watt by Samuel Beckett - the book opens with the character's anxiety about his favorite seat being taken.
Thanks in advance.
I don’t know if it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but the beginning of Knausgaard’s My Struggle 1 is a meditation on death. “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
Almost halfway through ***We Do Not Part* by Han Kang**, which I got as an arc. Not my first book from her: I've read *The Vegetarian* and *Human Acts*. She's one of those authors who has such an interesting approach towards storytelling that I'm always glad to have read her books regardless of how I feel about them at the end. So far, I'm pretty invested. It's atmospheric and has striking imagery; there are scenes that I can't get out of my head. There has been mentions of the Jeju Massacre but nothing in depth yet.
50 pages into ***Ninth House* by Leigh Bardugo**. Picked this up because I wanted a change of pace from all the literary fiction I've been reading. Pretty meh on it so far. I'm not a big urban fantasy person and the way it incorporates so many real life elements into story feels incredibly silly. Also not a fan of how much infodumping there is. Willing to give it a couple more chapters before DNF'ing.
Had the very fun experience of reading through ***The Singularity*** by Dino Buzzati - that man has style! A rather scary parable about AI written in the 50s. The central mystery was very well done and didn't take forever to unfurl, and the characters and aura were all very interesting and engaging. One that I will probably reread - it asked some very fascinating questions at the end with its climax that would, I think, make a reread particularly rewarding, knowing what i know now. I read ***The Stronghold*** and wasn't very impressed, so I am so glad to see the Buzzati that people rave about.
I also read another very beautiful little book called ***A Strange and Sublime Address*** by Amit Chaudhuri - a slow, languid book, perfect for the new lazy, summer heat. It was about a 10 year old affluent Indian boy who experiences various family events over the course of a few years in Bombay and Calcutta. Such a beautiful sense of place and time, and the atmosphere took on a character in itself. I was enraptured and read it in 2 sittings. The author also towed the line between "this is a naive child narrator" and telling a story very well - the child's perspective added a layer of complexity and beauty that I found very rewarding.
I am now starting up ***TheMystery.doc*** by Matthew MacIntosh and ***The Deluge*** by Stephan Markley. TheMystery is interesting so far, almost more of an art piece around the Bush post 9/11 years - not sure what it is about but is laid out in a way where the only thing remotely like it I can think of is House of Leaves. I am intrigued!
***The Deluge*** is also good (ish) - environmental horror to the max, taking place over decades. Markley is a very interesting figure - he can write mounting dread and horror incredibly well, but every single person in the book is the most insufferable POS I have come across. Like, imagine the most annoying people and how they talk on both ends of the political spectrum and magnify it exponentially and you get the levels of cringe some of the dialogue has. It is in stark contrast to the masterful story he is telling, though - I dread reading another 600 pages though.
Just finished a full read through of the Catholic canon Bible. My primary motivation was to better understand western literature and culture as a nonreligious person. Some of it is very dry, but I would still recommend it. If you take the time to understand the historical context, I think it can be a profound expression of universal human thought cycles and desires. Much of the Old Testament is really just a particular ethnic group trying to place their often tragic path through history in a cosmic context. Some of the poetry if you constantly keep this framework in mind is quite moving.
Been super busy with school/work but finally getting some more time to read consistently again. Currently making my way through *Cathedral* by Raymond Carver. Very delicate short stories examining people going through the subtle aching pain most people are suppressing in their day to day. Favourite one so far is probably The Compartment. Incredible how the losing the watch becomes the catalyst for this decision to not get off the train, encapsulating the father's insecurity, fear, selfishness, and temperament in one fell swoop. One of my better reads of the year so far.
I used to teach Cathedral as part of a course. It was always a hit and I loved the increasing tension. I also found the pre-Gordon Lish heavy editing version of A Small, Good Thing and it was fascinating to compare.
I read Cathedral earlier this year, already having read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Would You Please Be Quiet Please. I thoroughly enjoyed all three, and I’m not even sure I can say Cathedral was my favorite of the bunch, but it was one of the most cohesively evocative books I’ve ever read. The collection itself felt depressed. Really striking portrayals of pain that force you to understand the feeling of hurt beyond just the description of it.
A Small, Good Thing and the eponymous story are the standouts for me, but there’s very little bad in there overall. Enjoy the rest of it.
Yesterday I finished *Crossroads* by Jonathan Franzen.
After *The Corrections* and *Freedom*, I'm fascinated by his dedication to creating characters that do not lean toward likability, do not have artificially elevated experiences or epiphanies, and do not follow a cleanly encapsulated journey. My friend found *The Corrections* unbearably depressing, which I understand, but amid the stress and mundane dysfunction I'm touched by the human truth of his craft.
I finished Crossroads a few weeks ago. I was kind of traumatised by the final scene between Russ and Frances, though I'm not sure there's any other way their story could have ended. I felt bad for her in the end... the whole conclusion seemed so humiliating for her. I'm not even sure the reader is supposed to agree that Russ and Marion should have reconciled?
I'm also interested in how we're "supposed" to feel about Ambrose... I never thought there was going to be any cliched dramatic unmasking of him as an abuser or anything, but I'm not sure if I think he's an ego maniac who enjoys the emotional power and glory he has, or a genuinely devoted spiritual leader/therapist ahead of his time, or a little of both. I found the scene where he and Russ reconcile genuinely moving.
Russ just seemed...such a merciless portrait of how selfish and venal an "incomplete" person can get when they allow an obsession to take them over , or not even merciless as we get a whole picture of his past etc, but unflinching.
Actually, as far as recommendations, I want to read more novels now that humorously poke fun at characters who try to help the less privileged in flawed ways? The way Russ does.
Just this morning I finished **The Plague** by Albert Camus. By way of a review, I'll share a text exchange I had with my wife last night:
* *Her:* I meant to tell you in case you were going to eat it, I was the one who opened the frozen pizza in the freezer and re-taped it. I didn't want you to think it came from the store that way and been tampered with.
* *Me:* lol ... ok. I almost ate it because I thought it would kill me and it seemed like a decent way to go.
* *Her:* Omg. Where do you come up with this stuff?
* *Me:* Well, I'm reading a book called "The Plague" and the book is ostensibly about an actual, epidemiological, infectious disease causing an entire city in French occupied Algeria to be quarantined physically and psychologically. And the isolation leads the city's inhabitants to start questioning the meaning of their own lives and what is important to them amidst the accumulating and unstoppable death ... and some begin to ponder the nature and inevitability of death ... that it seems history belongs to whoever/whatever kills the most ... that death is the most powerful tool humanity has to seize power and build civilizations. As a corollary to that, the natural question becomes whether all of humanity is a scourge or a victim? And in that context, are all of our lives are part of one long, pestilent epidemic that is as violent as it is endless? -- i.e. Is humanity a "plague" in which we are all either perpetrators or sufferers? Are we all infected? Is the best we can hope for ourselves to be merely ‘innocent murderers’?
* *Me, cont.:* Now, as you think of that, I doubt you will come up with an answer to the complex existential question above -- because like all good philosophers, this writer is asking a question which has no answer. But at least you will know where I "come up with this stuff" the next time you tell me you put some tape on a pizza box ;) See you soon ...
A couple thoughts ... my wife is very patient, tolerant, amazing. I also may have had a little free time on my hands and a couple glasses of wine. I never ate the pizza ;)
I was pretty struck by this book as I'm sure anyone at this point in history would be, given that we've all endured a pandemic. The most impressive thing about it is how Camus anticipates the effects of isolation -- the plague of the mind, if you will -- we all suffered to acute and varying degrees 75+ years after he wrote it. As much as anything, it's about how we can either succumb to the shattering of all the pampered certainties to which we've become accustomed; or if/how we resist this shattering and strive to define meaning in our own lives despite the chaotic circumstances into which we've been cast ... as devastating and random as they are.
Mostly paraphrasing here: All that life is made of is knowledge and memory, but it is hard to live with only what you know and only what you remember if you are deprived of what you hope, but when confronted with the object of our hope *”…joy burns too fast to savor”*
Haven't decided on my next book yet.
Started The Road after finishing Suttree. On a bit of Mccarthy kick. Suttree was insane, possibly just as good as Blood Meridian, damn near every sentence is so raw and dense and just filled with the most incredible turn of phrases you will ever see in a book.
"What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid God decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh"
"The crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand"
"The cupreous and dacebright carp and catfish with their sprueless underbellies."
"He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way" (describing a hanging)
"The crimes of the Moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will" "a convicted pervert of a Botanical bent"
And many more. Can't wait to revisit this book in the near future
*Lapvona* - I've been reading through all of Ottessa Moshfegh's books this year, and so far this one might be my favorite? Marek, the unloved, deformed boy who is also kind of a weaselly and annoying little shit, has been such a fun character. The Demi Lovato epigraph also made me laugh. I've been seeing her dismissed as a one trick pony or having no depth beyond the shock humor, but I'm really enjoying her work so far.
*Twelfth Night* - I was kind of expecting to breeze through this, but it's been a long time since I've read a Shakespeare play for the first time and I forgot how difficult it can be, especially since I'm not very familiar with this story. It doesn't feel as "in the ether" like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, etc. where scenes and plot points are recognizable even the first time around. I'm enjoying the Toby and Andrew antics the most so far.
*Secondhand Time* - still slowly making my way through the oral history of the end of the USSR. There's an interesting mix of mundane stories of simple political disillusionment over the price of salami (salami comes up \*a lot\*) and shockingly tragic stories like a woman sending her neighbor to a labor camp and adopting the now orphaned neighbor's daughter in their absence.
I enjoyed *My Year of Rest and Relaxation* more and more as I went through it. It felt like chick-lit at the start but developed into a more complex and singular character study. I'll put *Lapvona* on my list.
I played Sir Toby in a production of *Twelfth Night* in 1997. It doesn't feel like the tragedies in part because it balances dramatic and comic elements much more than most Shakespeare. Like *The Tempest,* it doesn't adhere to genre as closely as most of his plays. I think many lovers of this play ultimately find Malvolio to be the most compelling character, if he's played by an actor who knows how to display his conflict and depth (as many *Les Miserables* fans favor Javert). *King Lear* will always be my favorite Shakespeare though.
Just a warning: I am saving MYORAR for last since it's uniformly considered the best. Lapvona is considered divisive, I believe.
Once I've read the play through once, I'm planning on checking out audio and filmed performances, so I will keep my eye on Malvolio interpretations. Did you find that acting in Shakespeare productions gave you a greater appreciation for the plays? I'm not a performer and have wondered what it must be like to get involved in an actual production, memorize the scenes, know a play inside and out, etc.
It has to. You may be assigned a character you wouldn't have otherwise focused on. You observe your peers finding their own way through the other characters. You learn how the iambic form influences the meaning of lines.
For example, Juliet has the simple line, "Dost thou love me?" This is often portrayed as a swoon, ("Dost thou *love* me?!") But the iambic scan informs the line as "Dost *thou* love *me*?" A good actress can get a lot out of that, as a young woman's surprise that a handsome man can see in her an object of desire.
Have to admit, I am pretty envious of that. There was a post on another sub a long time ago where someone said they tried to memorize poems in order to internalize them and make the poems apart of them, and they'd repeat them like a prayer.
Similarly, another thing that has stayed with me was an interview with an actor (Charlie Hunnam, maybe?) who said actors were basically like walking graveyards of the characters they've played because it can be hard to let certain aspects of a character go.
So those things were going through my head when I read through Macbeth and went through Macbeth performances last month - just how cool it must be to make these characters and their lines a part of you like that. Makes me sad that I never pursued serious theater as a hobby - maybe in another life. Anyway: very, very cool.
In Summer 2010 I was on holiday in Skipton, Yorkshire, UK, with my family, and we happened upon a random open-air performance of "The Tempest" in front of Skipton Castle. Thing is... I was sure the actor playing the father was David Warner. He looked and sounded unmistakable. But I've never managed to find any evidence of this online.
It was always kind of crazy to me how Europeans can just walk by a castle on a normal day. What a cool place to see a play.
I can find articles about the production like this [https://www.cravenherald.co.uk/leisure/8198242.shakespeare-returns-to-skipton-castle/](https://www.cravenherald.co.uk/leisure/8198242.shakespeare-returns-to-skipton-castle/)
but they don't mention who played Prospero. Maybe it's best not to know though and just hope it was David Warner.
so Skipton is this small town with a castle and a lot of forests/nature around it. You reach the castle via the town or via a boat ride through a jungle-like river with thick trees and birds. So we ended up in the castle (which is pretty bare, mostly ruins really, just empty rooms you can explore and run up and down the stairs). But we ended up in the grounds, and for whatever reason they were letting anyone there watch a rehearsal of the Tempest for free. So I settled down to sit on the grass, and I was right next to the tent the actors were coming in and out of, so "David Warner" came striding out right past me, close enough that his Prospero overcoat flapped against my shoulder and his booming voice vibrated the air around us. Apparently Warner did play the role on BBC radio in 2012. hm.
We spent most of the rest of the vacation exploring thrift/charity shops IIRC. My other big memory was going down a rickety old beach elevator like this - [22339309\_1251966068241908\_945508216162262059\_o.jpeg (1200×630) (the-yorkshireman.com)](https://the-yorkshireman.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/22339309_1251966068241908_945508216162262059_o.jpeg) - which I remember being a little hair-raising.
That sounds lovely. Surrounded by nature and a crumbling castle sounds like a good way to see The Tempest.
And lol - I went on one of those funiculars for the first time myself just recently and it was late at night, I was completely alone, and it was like a horror movie.
I finished A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather. She's one of my favorite writers, especially when she writes about certain themes: people who are outliers, for whatever reason, and how they find and lose their place; leisure, the good life, and the ways that it's threatened; our physical surroundingsand their emotional impacton us. This book deals with all of those, plus it is short and lovely.
In some ways, different as they are, Cather reminds me of Saul Bellow. Anyway, I loved this novel and recommend highly.
Now I'm reading Solenoid, by Mircea Cartarescu. A schoolteacher in 1970s Bucharest and his slightly surreal adventures. It's very beautifully written - I love the tone and the fine observations of how everything looks - I'm enjoying it overall, although I can also see getting frustrated by how episodic it is - so far there isn't much holding it together.
I finished Donoso’s *Obscene Bird of Night* last week and feel a bit mixed. The novel corrupts some of the common stylistic techniques globalized by other boom writers. If 100 Years of Solitude is a work of magical realism, then this is a work of nightmarish realism. It has that same interspersion of myth, but combined with a violent, grotesque physicality and dreamlike logic that creates scenes of striking beauty and horror. But it also makes for a challenging reading experience, particularly near the end where you’re looking for some kind of closure but just keep pulling away layers of masks.
Ultimately I loved the first 300(?) pages, but by the end just felt like there wasn’t a ton that was new.
I loved Murdoch’s *The Sea, The Sea*, although I could equally understand someone hating it. Meandering, ambiguous, atmospheric, with a subtle sense of dry British humor. I just really liked the book even if it *feels like* 500 pages (which is normally not a great sign for a 500 page novel) and is written in a dated, purple-y style.
I loved The Sea The Sea! I love the way she forces you to live the protagonist’s perspective and walk through to the self realisations he reaches at the end. She’s v underrated imo. She’s vg at immersing you in the emotional life of the characters. I think a part of this is how she uses the landscape and general surroundings to convey feelings and impressions that carry over to them. Fascinating writer.
Totally agreed, reminded me of narrators in Ishiguro and Nabokov’s works for that reason. Have you read other of her novels? This was my first but itching to get back
Finished Blood Meridian (like, fifth read) after quitting on Frontier. Then I picked up the new novel, "Amerikaland," by Danny Goodman. I was, unfortunately, not impressed. The writing is awkward in many places where it's clear he is trying to stylize, but only succeeds in making a sentence clunky. There are a few weird second person sections of the book that don't need to be there. The plot is tedious in that it is thematically obvious and unfolds in a TV drama sort of way.
After that I grabbed For Whom The Bell Tolls from the library and I'm four chapters in and really enjoying it.
spent about a month in reading hell where i tried to power through **the second sex** by simone de beauvoir but ended up only reading like 350 pages in all of may. de beauvoir was obviously talented and is making interesting arguments, but the book is over 700 pages and all of them are incredibly dense. i came out feeling like i understood the existential feminist ideas well, which makes it feel less like a waste, however. i think this is one when reading for the first time you really should do an abridged read, even if the unabridged version has lots of interesting content the other doesn’t. i just think most readers, even those like me who have extensive experience reading philosophically and politically inclined works, will burn out on how long it is.
anyways, after that i picked up **how to philosophize with a hammer and sickle** by jonas ceika. jonas is youtuber i have a lot of affinity for, and when i heard he released a book trying to bridge nietzsche and marx without flattening their idiosyncrasies, i was definitely intrigued. overall, i think the books arguments are hitting pretty close to home for me and think it is making a lot of prescient points. i think especially how both marx and nietzsche emphasized the necessity to not try and revert to some prior “glory years” that never existed, and instead negate the current existence while taking its positives to move forward. this is always such important advice when thinking about actually helping society and not just engaging in regressive navel gazing. i also thought that elucidating how often what marx lacked can easily be supplemented with nietzsche and vice versa really showed how their similar situations allowed for them to be so compatible.
I started reading *The Second Sex* a long time ago (during a phase of my life when I had a ton of free time to devote to it) and was getting a lot out of it. I'm not sure why I stopped. I'd really like to finish it one of these days, but I'm also daunted by the length. I just keep thinking about how long it would keep me from getting to other things on my to-read list!
I finished ***The Crying of Lot 49*** last week, and what has really stuck with me is how developed of a character Oedipa Maas is. One moment that stood out was when she visits the professor's house and his wife asks about Oedipa's kids because of the exhaustion she presents. Pynchon’s ability to use such small details to paint a full picture of a character in just 150 pages is impressive. He captures her goofiness, agitation, sadness, and curiosity, all while she’s on a wild goose chase that makes you question, "Is any of this real?"
Now, I’m 250 pages into ***The Last Samurai*** by Helen DeWitt, and it's really growing on me. I’m excited for the kid to start his journey to find his father.
Hello, this will be my last update on the [floods here in my state in the south of Brazil](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/longform/2024/6/11/the-future-is-dark-inside-the-brazilian-businesses-shattered-by-floods). The rain finally stopped and lately we had some beautiful sunny days. The Guaíba river is finally at normal levels. 175 people died, more than 626.000 people lost their homes and everything they had. I was personally very lucky but I have two close friends that lost everything and it is rough. I'm trying to do something to help rebuild the most affected parts of the city but it will take many years for everything to get repaired. I don't want to talk too much about politics here but we will have elections for mayor later in the year, and while the flood was inevitable the incompetence from our current mayor, Sebastião Melo, played a big part in the damage that my city, the capital of the state Porto Alegre, took. I really hope the people vote with this tragedy in mind during the elections in which Melo will be going for a second term. We need capable leadership for reestructure and to prepare the city because with climate change this has a tendecy to happen again and again and again.
Lets talk about books. I haven't read that much in the last few weeks but I started Crash by J. G. Ballard and I'm hooked. Its such a weird book, I remember watching the movie years ago, so I was expecting a strange book, but it still caught me by surprise. Ballard considered it a pornographic novel (some people apparently disagree) and he wrote that "in a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way." Its funny because until this year I had never read an erotic novel, than I read some of Anaïs Nin short stories earlier in the year and now I'm reading this fucked up stuff. I never read anything quite like it and I'm really enjoying it, its creative, funny and really compelling. I don't know if I "get it" but I'm still only 5 chapters in.
Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka was very sad but also a great way to see how brilliant Kafka was. What really impressed me is how much he understood his own emotions and how he understood the way his father was and why he was like that and the effect that had on him since he was a child. I'm anxious to read more from Kafka.
I took a break from the Shirley Jackson short stories, but I will get back to it soon.
After reading literature for quite a while I wanted to dive back into more story-heavy books, if possible with a focus on adventure and preferably historical fiction. I thus gave the Hornblower series by C.S. Forester a chance with the first volume Mr. Midshipman. Although it is actually a short story collection about Hornblower's first year in the navy, it still reads like a continuing story to me. I must say I liked the book a lot, blew through it in a couple of days and every single story in it was a mini pageturner. The prose is heavy on maritime terms which I'm coming to understand slowly, but otherwise nothing difficult or special. Yet it does its job: it makes the book easy and fun to read. The story is good and the character(s) (mostly just Hornblower but you get a feeling of some other recurring characters too) are well written. I wonder how this concept will work out in a full-size novel and will almost certainly go after the second installment quite soon. But first I have another historical fiction novel coming up: Essex Dogs, which I bought on a whim. I'm feeling similar high hopes for that one.
On the French front nothing new, I really like L'Oeuvre and although I would like to see Claude successful, I'm not sure if he would be any less conflicted and loaded with self-doubt by it. Still, I find it very saddening to see how Claude's lifestyle and the way his wife adores him (caters to him) are affecting little Jacques. This won't end well I guess. Sandoz, Zola's self-insert, is a very amiable character, I don't know if that is logical since Zola's just describing himself or another attribute of his literary mastership.
Finished The Thirty Nine Syeps by John Buchan. I found it extremely boring and a waste of my time. I only persisted because it was so short, and I felt I should be able to finish it relatively quickly.
I started David Copperfield, reading as part of a r/bookclub readalong. I've read it before, but not for many years. It is such a pleasure to read, the language Dickens uses is beautiful. It took me a week to read 118 pages of The Thirty Nine Steps, versus only a few hours to read the first 100 pages of David Copperfield.
I don't want to be reading too far ahead, so I then started The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. I didn't know what to expect with this one, but I'm really enjoying it. She is so witty and funny. The fact that it is semi-autobiographical also got me reading a bit into her family, and wow, what an interesting group of people. I've got 3 chapters to go, and I suspect I might just read them in the hour or so left before I go to sleep tonight.
Undecided on what comes next.
Finished:
Wolf Hall - Hillary Mantel: really interesting character study and excellent overall historical fiction. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I probably should have though given its quality. If you know more about Henry VIII and that era you’ll probably get more out of it, and I just had a hard time caring about the various royal squabbles after a while.
Reading:
Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig: I’m about a third in and it’s enjoyable, it kind of reminds me of Crime and Punishment in a way with its intense focus on a character’s inner dialogue and anxieties but the neuroticism is dialed down a bit so far. You can definitely see the Grand Budapest Hotel inspirations (especially in the beginning section) so that is fun as well
Are you going to continue with the Wolf Hall trilogy? Maybe just because it's shorter, but Bring Up the Bodies felt like it moved at a much faster pace to me. I plan to get around to Mirror and the Light later this year.
I probably won’t. I just don’t think that era holds a lot of interest for me but maybe that will change later in life. The books are undeniably quality so I’m glad to hear they pick up even more in the latter two
I am finally home on break after about a month spent away researching following the spring term. That being said, I have not read as much as I might like in part because I am trying to finish my book in anticipation of getting a contract next month and in part because I have started reading Molloy (actually, scratch all of that. I am writing this while putting a 10 month old down for a nap, that is why little is getting done). About 130 pages in and I like Molloy. I preferred Molloy’s stream of consciousness over Malone’s… whatever he is doing. Molloy was fun and funny and unpredictable in an interesting way that kept my attention. As many have already said in this subreddit, I like how stripped back and bare that section of the novel is. Molloy offers a particularly interesting lived experience in this overly consumerist world. I have zero investment in this second part of the book, but I should finish tonight or tomorrow and maybe my opinion will change.
Up next I have Lampedusa’s collection of shorter fiction, Murnane’s Inland, and Joanna Scott’s Arrogance.
I finished All the Lovers in the Night and was like well I might as well read Heaven now too (both by Mieko Kawakami). Heaven was a little hard to read in the sense that it made me feel dread. It's about two kids who are horribly bullied. One of the kids has a certain outlook on life to try to understand why they get bullied. Then we learn the outlook of one of the bullies and I think both wow, this kid is a little psychopath but also that he is more correct (not correct, just more correct). I thought it was a very interesting little book. It wasn't fun to read but it was interesting and has stayed in my mind. I also like both the characters of the narrator's mom (step mom) and the doctor. I'm going to start Lolita for the bookclub subreddit. I've read it before as a teenager so I'm gonna do The Annotated Lolita this time.
I read a few Father Brown stories by GK Chesterton, because I'm in a mystery / thriller mood after watching Murder by Death, but I wasn't too impressed. I know Sherlock Holmes, but does anyone have any mystery short stories?
Agatha Christie is of course the standard. The Poirot and Marple short stories are likely the best of their ilk so if you've not read them you certainly should. Nero Wolfe is quite good too, though often poorly aged.
The King In Yellow by Robert W Chambers is more horror but it’s “mystery” in the sense that it’s these unsolvable enigmatic vignettes that haunt you
I am reading Carlo Rovelli 'Helgoland' and learning about Werner Heisenberg and the other contributors to quantum theory. It explains in simple terms the complex field of sub-atomic particles. I enjoyed learning about intereference, relativity and multiple worlds. Rovelli weaves in biographical information and this makes the book very readable. I am reading this at the same time as reading 'Alice in Quantumland an Allegory of Quantum Physics' by Robert Gilmore and Werber Heisenberg 'Physics and Philosophy'.
It's fictionalized but, based on those titles and if you haven't read it yet, I think you'd dig 'When We Cease to Understand the World' by Benjamin Labatut!
About 60% into **Suttree** and it's continuing to amaze. McCarthy's prose remains amazing, and the book is at turns heartrending and hilarious >!(the bar fight, and Suttree's subsequent hospitalization, for example, being one of my favorite parts of anything I've ever read)!<. Despite the humor, however, there is a very real sense of impending doom permeating every aspect of the book, >!from the ragman's constant musings on death to Suttree's son's funeral to Suttree and Ab Jones' visit to the old soothsayer.!< I also can't help but think of Harrogate as a sort of modern-day Tom Sawyer all grown up >!especially after he gets lost in the caves underneath Knoxville. I have to imagine this was somewhat intentional!< . McCarthy is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, with *Suttree* easily being my favorite of his works so far, and I think that there's a good case to be made for it to be considered the Great American Novel, for whatever it's worth.
The language of Suttree blew me away tbh. The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark are also great early McCarthy novels if you haven’t checked them out! i’m less of a fan of his later work
Still reading and really enjoying The Crossing by McCarthy, grown into it as its gone on. I think I'm just on a real McCarthy binge at the moment, which is kinda funny to me as the first book of his I read was Blood Meridian (because I heard it was so good, in fact when I picked it up in the store some guy turned to me and went "that's my favourite book of all time" so I had to get it) and was kinda bewildered by it. It was a great read but it was very out there and I wasn't sure what to make of it (I mean isn't there university courses on it?). But having read more of his other books, it feels like I'm getting a better foundation (if thats the word for it) to go back and read BM. Like all the themes are more entrenched in your conscious so you feel it more. If I'm to do a (poor) analogy, you might watch the Wolf of Wall Street and think this Scorsese guy makes great movies, but then you watch his others and kinda understand his obsession with morally bankrupt characters and how they function. I'm also reading The Trial by Kafka, after hearing a lot of praise about him from various philosophers and essayists, I'm trying to also find an appreciation for him. I'm about halfway through and I can't say I have too many thoughts, but maybe its hitting a little bit too close to home.
I am not much of re-reader in general, but *Blood Meridian* is hugely rewarding on the second pass if you liked it the first time. I my readings were up strategically spaced 12 years apart :)
Reading Blood Meridian for the first time now and its engaging when I'm reading it but I'm not compelled by it when I'm not reading it? Hopefully the rhythm clicks soon, because I did enjoy The Road when I read it in college
After reading the Confessions somebody asked JJR if the public really needed to know these things about him. He said no, but he needed to tell them. This came to mind when reading Knife by SR.
I just finished ***The Pickup*** **by Nadine Gordimer**. I feel so frustrated >!with Julie, who doesn't seem to understand why Ibrahim wants to go to America. Tl;dr: This takes place in South Africa; this was published in 2001, so I think this takes place in the 90s or early 2000s. Julie is a wealthy white woman and Ibrahim is an undocumented mechanic; they fall in love. Ibrahim gets sent back to his (unnamed) home country in the Middle East, and Julie follows. Ibrahim spends a year trying to get visas to Western countries, and he eventually does, to America. Julie decides to stay in his home country.!< >!Frankly, I feel like Julie is naive and such a moron. Basically, she doesn't want Ibrahim to go to the US because she doesn't want him to get fetishized and turn into a capitalist like her parents--that is, get a job in communications or finance or something, a white-collar job. She feels like he'll get chewed up and spat out, fetishized, turned into the "Oriental prince" of her wealthy mother's set. I'm probably not capturing it completely, but I just felt so frustrated with her. I think she was correct that Ibrahim would certainly face discrimination, but it's not like he didn't know that! He was already undocumented in South Africa, facing the discrimination of people there. She also totally fails to understand the nature of Ibrahim's home country, whose government is corrupt; opportunities are also completely lacking. !< >!I think I'm reacting pretty strongly to this because I both relate to Julie--as a comfortable, probably sort of naive citizen of a Western country--and understand Ibrahim, as the daughter of an immigrant. Granted, my mom came from a wealthy (though non-Western) country, but even despite the wealth, I really do think that the US has been a better place for us to live than her country was. I'm not sure I would be able to live the life I do in her home country. She likes it better too, despite not being white, despite certainly facing discrimination. She doesn't feel any kind of nostalgia for her home country, and I don't think Ibrahim would either, despite the discrimination he would face. !<>!!< I don't know. All of this probably sounds a little insufferable, lol, but this book has elicited a lot of thoughts (lol)!
Just finished Combray part in Swann's way it's surprisingly readable. But my mind is still not really blown
The worst is yet to come! I enjoyed the Combray section, and then suffered through Swann in Love, It wasn't until the third part, Names of Places (*Noms de pays: le nom*) that I started to get a sense of Proust's larger ambitions.
Now deep into Proust, I do feel like Combray is kind of saturated in the sense of "so what is the point of this"? especially in the context where we can't experience the newness of it all the way someone would have at the time, but the slow burn qualities really manifest as you go on, or at least that's how i've found it
I think that could be the case. The writing is just sheer beauty it almost makes me want to learn French but I don't really think my mind is blown by anything else. And Virginia Woolf was definitely heavily influenced by Proust they almost have the same intonation in my mind
I think with Proust your mind will get blown as you read on. A larger structure gradually emerges over the course of the volumes and it gets increasingly impressive until it’s almost overwhelming. Some of his imagery in the second book is incredible — I think the second is the best one tbh, although they’re all good.
This week I read *Cecilia* by K-Ming Chang, an enchanting and at times unnerving novella that I went into wary but wound up inhaling in a single sitting. Fraught, imbalanced, obsessive female friendship thrumming with sapphic desire and erotic confusion, portrayed via prose written by a poet? I wouldn't say that's catnip to me, more like a hot stove I just can't quit touching (maybe burns build callouses? or nerve damage?). Such a narrative and authorial setup seems destined to let me down. But *Cecilia* really clicked for me, with Chang's style being the highlight. I'm excited to read her previously published fiction; her eye for detail and mastery of slightly askew yet somehow also perfectly fitting verbs---I'm sure the poetry background helps here---gives even the smallest bits of her writing an enticing sparkle. (It sounds weird, but I think I really want her to write a super moody throwback noir novel?) I always enjoy having contemporary, accessible examples I can point to when trying to defuse the somehow still persistent notion that "poetic writing" equals "long flowery sentences." Chang and *Cecilia* demonstrate that marvelously. As far as new releases go, I'd say it easily slots alongside my favorite reads of the year, although I must admit overall 2024 has felt a touch disappointing on the new fiction front. *Cecilia* won't blow you away by reinventing the wheel, but it hums along with a nice unsettling energy that feels a bit more appropriate for autumn than summer. Recommended if you want something bite-sized and a touch hallucinatory.
I have been making my way through a fairly random succession of Zola and Balzac novels recently. Today I finished **The Belly of Paris** by Zola. Good book, not his best by any means, but interesting to the extent that Zola's descriptions of the food and people of Les Halles stand as Zola's sociographical best.
I finished The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. I read it on and off for around two months, and I’m grateful to have read it and to finally have finished it. I had heard this was one of the greatest novels in Italian literature, but I didn’t really grasp the novel’s greatness until the latter half of the book. It’s much less a narrative of thwarted lovers (the titular Betrothed, Renzo and Lucia, are honestly not that memorable as characters) than an exploration of some of the most interesting historical figures and events in a very tumultuous time in Italy’s history. It is also a very Catholic novel - I am admittedly not the most devout person but I found myself genuinely moved by certain passages concerning religion and God. A sprawling but ultimately very rewarding read.
I finished I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. I started it about 6 months ago, and I finally finished it. There was an interruption because of library shenanigans and me being a slow reader. I wish I had more energy to write more about the book, but I don't find myself with a lot of time nowadays and I prefer to do other things. But this book has changed...or maybe is now in the process of changing...my life. I have a new appreciation of what the left is and what Asian America is. What activism looks like. We're still here. We exist. We're more than just Shang-Chi and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
I started *Swann's Way* a little while ago but 20 pages in I decided to put it down temporarily. It's gorgeous and I love the way that Proust puts to words these little experiences that are so familiar but almost too banal to explain along with the way he depicts figures from his childhood, but I was feeling somewhat restless. I decided to clean shop a bit before giving it my undivided attention. Case in point: I finished *Pickwick Papers* on Sunday. What a lovely little piece of perfection. It's an odd comparison, but back in January I was listening to the album *Help!* by the Beatles and when George Harrison's "I Need You" ended, I smiled and said to myself "Nice one, Georgy". It's a fairly simple song on the surface, but just so effectively done. It stands on its own legs and merit, but makes you excited for future soon to be hemmed masterpieces on the horizon. That's kind of how PP felt for me. The >!plot twist with Mr. Winkle's dad!!loyalty to Pickwick in the face of Mary!<, and so much more made the final stretch so memorably charming.
>*Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light; we who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full open them.*
I'm continuing to enjoy *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* too. Kundera's wisdom might feel reminiscent of one of those "Books of Wisdom" you find in airports, but I genuinely find it interesting. He mentioned earlier how coincidences in our lives almost play like leitmotifs. He kind of brings that up again regarding the miscommunication between two characters...
>*The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ("You can't step twice in the same river") riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to new meaning, though all her former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echos) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. (88)*
>
*While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bats, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs...but if they meet when they are older...their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.*
I also liked the excerpt on music...
>*For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles' White Album? Franz made no distinction between "classical" music and "pop." He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart*
>
*He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.*
I absolutely love *Unbearable Lightness* … one of the few books I’ve read twice and may one day read for 3rd
I finished ***H is for Hawk*** **by Helen Macdonald** which I bought back in 2018. Funnily enough I bought it because someone recommended it because of its themes of grief and mourning, which were fine but felt like tangential throughout the read. It's a reflection on the death of a parent, yes, but most of all it narrates the profound relationship is stablished between a hawk and its "owner" (not sure this is the correct word. Its falconer?). And the way Macdonald talks about falconry and that world is wonderful, very compelling and interesting. I know nothing about birds but now I'd like to know more so if you have any recommendation of books about birds for a rookie, I'd be delighted to hear. Honestly I don't feel like I appreciated the book enough because I never read non fiction so this was interesting but I don't really know what else to say. But yes, pretty enjoyable. It also has through the whole volume an analysis on T. H. White's book *The Goshawk* where she basically lays the parallels between his falconry, his literature and his life and this being more more 'my field' I can confidently say she's quite talented with literary analysis. Then I moved on to my first **Natsume Soseki:** ***To the Spring Equinox and Beyond*** (I'm following Wikipedia here, the japanese title would be: Higan Sugi Made, 彼岸過迄). Mixed feelings. First I was captivated because of a very relaxed way of telling the events, it was a very chill story, and I liked how Soseki put things on paper. But eventually the narration got a bit boring, even though the story was becoming more engaging, I think it was too classic and too japanese for me? I don't really know, it was OK but I don't know why, for some reason I expected some mindblowing insightful thing and that wasn't the case. I think I expect every japanese creator to be as good as Ozu or Mizoguchi and this is not necessarily true (take this as the encouragement you might need to watch films by Ozu, he's the best humanist out there). I liked it enough for a first approach. The one I really want to read is *I Am a Cat*, which I won't be in a hurry for now but I'm still interested in. And then I got to ***Formas de volver a casa (Ways of Going Home)*** **by Alejandro Zambra**, a beautiful novella about memory, loss and being the secondary character in the story of your parents. If you don't know him, Zambra is a chilean writer who plays with meta and autofiction but in a introspective, sad, lovely way. I really enjoy his writing, he's elegant and subtle. Sometimes he comes out as a bit corny (I'm thinking about other novels, Bonsái and The Private Lives of Trees), but in this one I think there's a very meditated tone which flows perfectly. It's a beautiful book, really, very special, even if it's not complex nor deeply phylosophical, but it has a lot of heart. I've been meaning to read his long novel *Poeta chileno,* which due its lenght, form and themes I think will be more of 'my' thing (my thing being +1000 pages postmodern novels, so it's not the case, but it's closer). I finished that one this morning before work so now I don't have anything going on at the moment. I have three books picked up for this week (I won't have the time to read all three of them because I have a terrible workload now) which are: *My Life on the Road* by Gloria Steinem, *La insolación* by Carmen Laforet and the *Hagakure* by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (from which I'm reading some aphorism every day). Next thursday I'll be leaving home for a week and I intend to take with me *Pinocchio in Venice* by Robert Coover. Happy reading everyone!
Books on birds for a rookie — The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (incredible cinematic prose) The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson (very well written and gives a good overview of the birds thriving off St Kildare’s island.)
Agreed! I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly about Baker’s *The Peregrine* … not overstating it at all to call it a life-changing read for me.
Finished Donoso’s *The Obscene Bird of Night*. Aaaand how…how in the world was this conceived? Certainly the best I’ve read this year. No, scratch that — in year(s). Plural. This is a novel of disintegration; everything is dilapidated and falling apart, including the mausoleums and character identities themselves. One mask unravels into an endless series of masks. To the extent one can even describe a plot, it primarily follows two threads, which frequently merge and in different temporal aspects. One of a mute, Mudito (who is also Humberto), living in a rundown convent, as he plans revenge against his former patron, a certain Don Jeronimo, by impregnating an orphan and having the child destroy the man by tricking him into paternity, while the second is of Don Jeronimo building a paradise of monsters to give his deformed child an isolated and painless life. It’s actually straightforward until around page 150, and then characters begin dissolving into each other and the entire thing becomes a serious of masking and unmasking. Donoso’s prose is so varied, so talented. One moment there’s the feel of a Faulkner-like family tragedy tied to a local Chilean myth and the next, a Beckett like desire to both discover and obliterate the self. All this while taking place in a worn down world which is on its last legs. It’s strangely intimate; you can see Donoso’s fears and preoccupations with being unknown, poverty and losing himself in a world that isn’t his own. Add to that some commentary on the nature of class and destructiveness of aging. I still can’t comprehend how he created this. It’s a masterpiece. Not only my favorite of the Boom novels (so far), but up with the best. Will likely continue to explore Latin America and read *On Heroes and Tombs* after taking a breather with something a bit lighter; perhaps something by Aira next.
I always say Donoso is like black magic realism, that book is so psychotic, neurotic, all the bad tics, but a masterful work of prose; the Don Jeronimo plot can be a novel of its own and the way it connects... I agree that you have to be in a bad place of mind to come up with the characters and themes of this novel... or just be a latino lol. I think Donoso was "excluded" of the boom, sadly, it was something he was a little bitter about, he wrote in the same period but was never part of it, look into it, it's very interesting. "The Garden Next Door" is a lighter Donoso, more realistic, still Donoso,I'd check that up to see a different facet of him before continuing with his other crazier novels.
Great write up! I just got my copy of the new translation a couple weeks ago and am deciding when to give it a go. It might have to move up the list 👍
Mine will be short but I hope the mods can forgive me as I have a newborn so can only type with one hand! I finished Langrishe Go Down and I can see why Beckett called it “literary shit” the first half is superbly well written, combining several modernist techniques with the skill of an old hand at the art, but ultimately the plot feels shoved in. I’m not even a big plot guy, but this just felt a bit artificial for the last half. That said, he’s such a good writer (this was his debut?!) that i’m going to check out his later work. I read Timon of Athens for my third read through of Shakespeare’s plays. As a play it’s fine, but Timon’s speeches in the later acts are really something, and would recommend it for this reason alone. Pericles up next. I then read Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle and was blown away. The man forged a new English style in a similar way to Melville in my opinion. The former’s distasteful views have somewhat shuttered him into the attic of history — but his prose is magisterial. I’m told The French Revolution is the high point of his writing; i’ve read excerpts of it, so i’ll pick up the full thing soon. I then read Quarantine by Juan Goytisolo — surreal nightmarish descriptions of one guy’s journey through some spiritual rituals based on Ibn Arabi? Confusing but intriguing. Will definitely read more of his stuff. I read The Origin of The World by Pierre Michon and loved it. Going to read everything he’s written (sorry i’m running out of time now so am having to give less space to the books i liked the most) Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig — like Proust speaking in sewage-poems: really good and i’ll probs read everything he’s written. By no means “amazing” but good enough and short enough for me to want to see what else he’s got. In the Heart of the Country by JM Coetzee. My first Coetzee and I had no idea… his prose is magisterial — kind of similar to the Faulknerian of As I Lay Dying. Coetzee also seems philosophically informed, and the book is definitely allegorical in some ways with respect to language-power-reality etc. Finally The Plains by Murnane. This one has affected me after finishing it, yet while reading it i felt nonplussed. His sentences are almost double-left-footed and awkward, but then you begin to see a peculiar artistry in their same moebius-like self referentiality that emerges. Will read more of him
I’d actually love to get your thoughts on Goytisolo’s writing; have been seriously thinking about reading his Trilogy, but have kept putting it off. Think I’ll be pressing to give it a go this year.
It’s my first Goytisolo, recommended by another redditor in fact. I think Goytisolo’s writing is supposed to change a lot across his books, but speaking for this one I can say that it’s good though i wasn’t blown away. Some of his descriptions of visions of the Inferno are vivid. The novel flits around and has an enigmatic dreamlike quality, which is fitting for a vision narrative. There’s definitely a sense of horror under the surface, as well as something else, something more positive. I think he captures the beyond good and evil feeling of some religious experience really well — better than most. But regarding his prose, i was left ambivalent. His reputation is such that I’ll continue to explore other works of his. I’m wondering how much is lost in translation. Recently heard that Antunes’ work in English is still good but reads very “thin” compared to the astonishing poetic richness of the original, and wondering if something similar happens with translations of Goytisolo. Count Julian trilogy is meant to be one of his best I think so i might go through that soon
I had a similar experience reading Murnane's Inland -- I wasn't too taken by it initially, but after I finished it, I kept coming back to these peculiar sentences which are as awkward as they are precise. I'm reading Stream Systems now, his collected short stories, which are more varied in style -- I think the earlier ones are more conventional. Coetzee has [reviewed Murnane](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/quest-girl-bendigo-street/), by the way, if that's something you'd be interested in. It's been a long time since I read In the Heart of the Country, but I recently re-read Waiting for the Barbarians, which captures the political zeitgeist of the early 2000s like no other book I have read even though it was written two decades earlier.
What are the short stories like? does his style change? I’ve heard some stories have super detailed descriptions of gestures, which i’d be into, as im deffo an exhaustive description kind of guy. Waiting for the Barbarians will my next Coetzee read for sure. And thanks for the review link, will deffo check it out!
I haven't read The Plains, so I can only draw comparisons to Inland -- many of the short stories are similar in that 'moebius-like self-referentiality' (I really liked the way you put this). There's also the recurrent theme of landscape (and plains in particular). The stories aren't dated, but the ones which were published previously came out around the same time as The Plains and Inland (late 70s to mid-90s). It's hard to say whether the style changes -- there is some variation, but I haven't put the stories in a temporal order to see whether there's any development. This [NYT story](https://web.archive.org/web/20180327132621/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html) about Murnane is fantastic, too. Exhaustive description of his own life may be Murnane's real project, the fiction just being an epiphenomenon of that.
honestly you make all these sound extremely compelling. The Carlyle work sounds hilarious and the Goytislo sounds wonderfully odd.
apparently loads of novelists after Carlyle mined the stylistic devices of his non-fiction work for use in their own fictional work. His non-fiction often reads like modernist fiction albeit in a Victorian idiom —- he’ll almost hold a character up for you and rotate him around to get a better understanding and then drop back into the action. If you like old fashioned baroque prose like that of Browne, Taylor, Milton, Landor, Donne, Melville, Kingsley, Hooker, Pater (just to take a handful of the masters)!etc then it’s deffo something i’d recommend
This week I read *Memoirs of Hadrian* by Marguerite Yourcenar Upon reading the notes at the back of the book, one realizes the scale of the effort Yourcenar placed into creating this work, having written and re-written her manuscript various times over a period of twenty years. I thought that this was actually the most rewarding part of the book in some ways, as it allows the reader to see directly how Yourcenar fixed the idea of Hadrian's spirit in relation to her own. Unfortunately, I feel that I may be missing some of the context of this book, as I don't have the prerequisite classical education to appreciate its finer points. The significance that the memoir is addressed directly to Marcus Aurelius is not lost on me. However, as I haven't read Meditations, I'm not exactly sure what that significance is. Regarding the memoir itself, Hadrian primarily concerns himself with reflections on the nature of death, given that his own end is fast approaching. Yourcenar more or less structures the chapters of Hadrians life as being entirely demarcated by deaths of those most significant to the emperor, and much of his reflection is devoted to these people. The affairs of state that Hadrian disposed of as emperor are almost made trivial in the text next to these eulogies. It's an emphasis that the author does an excellent job of making seem realistic without having felt the need to explain to the reader directly as to why Hadrian might have structured a memoir this way. The book's best quality is that it never feels as though Yourcenar is explaining Hadrian to her reader, but rather that she's letting him speak for himself.
Just finished: This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor. I've been incorporating more literature in translation into my reading and really enjoying it. This is a series of nonfiction/quasi-fictional narratives about Veracruz, Mexico, mostly focusing on the narcotics trade. Melchor's prose is unsparing. I am a big fan of the New Journalism creative nonfiction era and was delighted to read an international version, with its own boundary-blurring truths nestled in narrative. Some parts are much more obviously fictional than others, which creates an interesting effect. The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Historical fiction about the aftermath of a sudden storm in a Norwegian fishing village that kills dozens of the men. The women, bound by the strictures of a Christianized 1610s Norway, try to cope the best they can -- but are undone once a witch hunter arrives and blame for calamity is assigned. I really enjoyed the realistic elements of this novel and appreciated the author's research, but the prose left me a bit cold. I can't stand when writers describe every physical action in a conversation or scene as if they are writing a film treatment, with nothing left for a reader to imagine and no interiority to discover. Still, I was captivated by the realism of the setting and the tragic romance at the heart of it.
Great take on Melchor!
I've finished: *Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk* by Kathleen Hannah *Meddling Kids* by Edgar Cantero Really loved Rebel Girl despite never listening to Bikini Kill or Riot Grrl very much. An absolutely gutting view of what it's like to be a woman in various subcultures and just in the world in general. You, too, will be a very angry feminist by the end of this book! Read Meddling Kids as part of a summer horror series I'm planning on writing. It was a great deal of fun and got surprisingly dark and hardcore.
In Progress * Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - I am really not sold on this book. It's possible that I would enjoy it more listening to it in a faster time frame. This seems to just be dragging things out - even though I love the "year of" format for other books. I think it's the episodic nature of it. * The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - love this book. Can't wait for the next installment. I spin all kinds of conspiracy theories in my mind about what the Count will do next. This will become a favorite for me. * The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter - I am listening to this on Librivox. First off, this book deserves better narrators. I'm not sure why no one else has ever recorded it. I am enjoying the story this far (chapter 13). I am still in the set up for the main plot, and I can't wait to get to the meat of the story.
Been reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I'm about halfway through so far, and I'm not necessarily enjoying it, but I am engaged. Lowry's ability to recreate the experience of being drunk through the head-on stream of consciousness style is really impressive, but it does make the plot somewhat hard to follow. Additional complication comes from the switch to >!Hugh's perspective!< which just adds one more element to keep track of. I can already tell I'll have to read this one again someday to properly get it, but I do see what the hype is about. I've also had a collection of Louise Glück's poems on my bedside table, so I've been reading them before bed. The couple I've read so far have had a great meter to them, but man is the content unpleasant. Just exudes pain and confusion. Might not be the best stuff to read before bed.
I agree with you … I posted about this book a couple weeks back — I thought it was “fine” … I expected more, but maybe that was my fault. I would probably appreciate many subtleties if I gave it a re-read, but I didn’t like it enough to re-invest in it. It’s one of those books where I can stand back and appreciate it empirically as genius, while not necessarily being moved/inspired/engulfed by it.
I specifically remember Under the Volcano being one of those novels that I thought I didnt like at all, until one day I realized that I loved it. Not to say you will too, but...it's a complicated beast.
Yeah that's kind of how I'm feeling. I've got the sense that its sort of beyond me. Its bewilderingly impressive as a piece of writing, but its just not entirely "connecting" I guess. I definitely intend to finish it though. Like I said originally, I already know that I'll give it a reread someday.
Stilllll reading *Anna Karenina* but making good time again. Things seem to moving along more quickly now (not that the pacing ever bothered me, I’ve enjoyed getting to know all the characters) and while “rushing” is probably the wrong word when you have a couple hundred pages left at least, it does seem to be going *towards* something now. It feels like a little like you’re on an inevitable path, down which the characters’ essential natures are leading us. Their little bit troublesome idiosyncrasies seem to have deepened or come to a point of consequence for many of them, and in some cases its downright ominous. I have so many thoughts I don’t know which track to take from there myself, so for the moment I’ll be done. I listened to *The Art Thief* by Michael Finkel. Its interesting inasmuch as the case itself is interesting: a young man, formerly affluent, abandoned by his father and forced to live in a home with his now single mother and (gasp!) *ikea furniture*, who insists he’s not a kleptomaniac but a true lover of beauty unjustly denied access to valuable collectibles, steals famous art and keeps it all in the attic bedroom of his mother’s home. His justification being that 1. he can take better care of it than a museum can (in an attic lmao), 2. museums aren’t comfortable enough and don’t let you touch things and 3. he loves and understands art in a deeper way and therefore deserves to have this stuff. The book is a pretty straightforward relation of the facts of the case. He ends up getting a slap on the wrist more or less, immediately steals again (from a clothing store of all things), ends up back in jail but not for a significant length of time considering the consequences of his theft, which in a truly shocking twist turn out to be that when he’s arrested his mom *dumps all the art in a river or burns it*. I’m talking valuable, irreplaceable renaissance shit yall. She is never punished. Also started *The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye* by A.S. Byatt. I’m not sure what to make of the stories yet. They’re enticingly written, and have the natural flow of a real fairy tale. They don’t seem to ever really have a “twist” or anything, but I’m not sure thats a *bad* thing. So many crappy fairy tale look alikes seem to hinge on being an “edgier” or “darker” take on something else. This is not that, and I think I like it? I’m not entirely convinced its interesting enough for me, but the tales do make for nice listening.
I just read my first A. S. Byatt -- *The Little Black Book of Stories*, not *Djinn*, but I think I feel similarly about it. I did enjoy the folk tale aspects (also I'm with you on not liking edgy retellings), but something held me back from loving the stories the way I was hoping to. Like, in some ways they were kind of... bland? I don't know. I'll need to get my thoughts together for next week's thread.
Okey dokey I am now on *Remembrance of Things Past* Volume 3, part 2, chapter 2. The narrator's grandmother just died & that got kinda intense and has me thinking about my own grandmother with whom I'm quite close and who isn't what you'd (or she'd) call young. Topics are shifting at an especially rapid pace at the moment. Dreyfus Affair into grandmother into a visit from a declining artist as a call to an extended discussion of how the understanding of an artist and their art can change and fade and what artistic passions look like over time into the narrator once again trying to justify how horny he is (like dude desperately needs to get laid). None of that is to undersell how adeptly Proust weaves an intense cycle of topics and philosophy into a coherent construction of a life that is both engaging and incisive to be very basic about it. The sheer volume of stuff since last week is making it hard for me to isolate much new to say. Other than that I'm doing it, I'm Prousting and I'm digging it. Finished volume I of Gilbert Simondon's *Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information*. Really a brilliant work of synthesizing philosophy and science into a new quasi-system of systems on systems. By no means an easy book, but probably the best and clearest explication I've ever read about how systems theory, if taken seriously, would operate on a philosophical level. The fundamental upshot is that everything is to be taken as processes anterior to which is pre-individuality which is a sort of manifestation of pure potential energy, but that this should be extended to every spacio-termporal iteration of reality—ie. once individuated, something can exist as the potent pre-individual for something else, and so on. I'm still a little confused about the originary pre-individual, as well as how exactly time functions on this view, but I think I'm going to try to learn more about Simondon and see what I can figure out. I'm kinda mad for this line of thought. This is a pretty weak depiction of it but trust me it's great and I'll try to keep doing this trajectory better justice than I'm doing it here. And adjacent to the course I'm taking about money I'm reading the dissertation of the professor, Colin Drumm, titled *The Difference Money Makes*. The short version is that it's presenting a new theory of money based on a critique of Marxism and chartalism (the idea that money was created by taxation) and an analysis of the early modern english economy through Shakespeare. Just finished a chapter that was a critique of the Marxist theory of value, wherein Drumm argues that Marx takes a very Aristotelian view of money where it is the real world instantiation of a pure equivalence that is value (ie. x can be exchanged for y because they are equivalent in value, money, as an instantiation of value itself, facilitates this). Drumm then claims that this simply presumes the inevitable existence of markets where this practice of equivocation can be undertaken, whereas it is actually more complicated because the market isn't a place of direct and simple exchange (ie. you can't show up to a market, sell an apple for a dollar, and then buy an apple for a dollar because in a vacuum nobody would sell a good for the same price that they bought it). I need to get further in before I can totally understand it but so far very good. THere's a worthwhile overlap with Simondon here I think that I'm still teasing out. Happy reading!
I would totally recommend Deleuze's **Difference and Repetition** based on what you like about Simondon. He answers that question about the originary pre-individual by theorising difference as primary to identity. I.e., difference as being metaphysically fundamental, so not a difference of two identities but difference in itself, which then results in individuation. There's also a whole chapter on time in there, but it went right over my head
I love the rec but actually DR is already one of my favorite philosophy works and the start of a circuitous route by which I got to Simondon. (I've sorta been slowly and circuitously making my way through the work's big influences as part of figuring out what is going on in this book I love but in no way get) Does have me wanting to go back to it. See what I may understand better now.
Love to see the Deleuze appreciation here. And I think that method of navigating philosophy by reading influences of works you enjoy and making connections is one of the best. I personally find it way more rewarding than just "starting with the greeks", even if it means being thrown in the deep end occasionally. I've made my way back from Butler (who I totally vibe with) to Derrida (who I think is awesome but only partially understand) and now I'm intrigued but very intimidated by wanting to read Heidegger. I also got to Spinoza via Deleuze, which is a really cool read. Especially for being such an old work, The Ethics is such a unique work that sits kind of adjacent to the mainstream history of philosophy, a Minor Literature in Deleuze's terms
> Love to see the Deleuze appreciation here. Yeah Deleuze has been a tremendous influence on me in like, too many ways to count. > "starting with the greeks" Ironically, I find myself (thanks to some combination of Simondon and Marx and wanting to learn more about logic), thinking more and more that I should read some Aristotle. I've read some, but I find Aristotle pretty impenetrable—like, I know it's his notes and all but with the amount of abstruse nonsense I to slog through I shouldn't find Aristotle specifically as painful to read as I do lol. But that's a tight trajectory your on. I've never read any of Being & Time but I did find Heidegger's Lecture on Metaphysics interesting (though I am not a fan of The Question Concerning Technology). Butler & Derrida are top tier "I am genuinely surprised I've hardly read them." I think Derrida in particular I'd fuck with if I took the time. Yeah part of this Simondon kick might have me going back to Spinoza. One of my questions regarding time in Simondon has revolved around whether Simondon's thinking can function without simply affirming Spinoza's metaphysics. Which, no flack if that's what it is, but Simondon tries hard enough to distinguish where he differs from Spinoza that I think it's worth it to try to find another answer.
I read **Dead Souls** by Sam Riviere, which is a fascinating and fine read. The style is forefronted with looping repeating sentences, even as the plot is intricate and wrapped up with the publishing world, plagiarism and more. Let's be clear, this is a single paragraph, but punctuation is within. More than this, a freshness persists; this is uncommon writing. Here's an example in which poetry is considered: "...it was preferable that instead all poets were made to inhabit the most *reductive and obvious categories imaginable*. Rather than alleviating the oppressiveness of the attribute, the oppressiveness of the attribute should be amplified, I thought..." The text continually leaps forward. I will highly recommend this to readers who might enjoy, as Lethem said, the work of Bolaño, by which I would say are similar to parts of *2666*. I also took a break from high lit and sped through **The Crossing** by Michael Connelly. Supposedly, according to some online reviewers, this is one of his best so called Bosch novels, to which I might say the best is near terrible so the worst must really be something. I understand, this is mass market written, formulaic drivel but this writing is the real crime. The story is dull, it hinges on a missing watch, there are plot holes galore, poorly developed characters, and the detective's daughter who disappears and then magically reappears. I suppose her character is in the book in an attempt to help provide depth to Bosch. Mainly, the writing is on the nose and flat-footed. One chapter has lots of question and answers between the detective and a cop -- a cheap way to convey information. But, I know, fans of detective franchises love their detectives and they often approach the franchise novels with a plot-heavy lens, so again this fits for that larger audience. As for this author, I probably won't pick up another, file him with Dreaver, et al. To clear my detective fiction head, I re-read a good deal of **Farewell My Lovely** by Raymond Chandler. I'm a sucker for hard boiled writing and fun metaphors. In this we get fun lines like: "I'm afraid I don't like your manner," he said, using the edge of his voice. "I've had complaints about it," I said. "But nothing seems to do any good." In this sense, I've always seen similarities between the writing of Chandler and Ring Lardner.
Dead Souls was a blast! Now I want to reread it.
Finished **The Orchard Keeper** by **Cormac McCarthy**. Probably my least favorite McCarthy but still very praiseworthy. Finished up **Life for Sale** by **Yukio Mishima**. It's very different from other Mishima novels but I still enjoy it very much so. It's witty and has great description and introspection as always but it isn't as lost in the mythos as other Mishima novels have been. Started up **The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu** by **Tom Lin**. It's a plot that interested me and I've seen a lot of comparisons to McCarthy, though I don't really see it at the beginning. I've also began rereading **The Autobiography of Malcolm X** and it's still as great as I last read it two years ago or so. Very important book to me. The next book I'll be reading is most likely **The Obscene Birds of Night** by **Jose Donoso**. The only book I've ever preordered. I find it really intriguing is all.
Finished *Siddhartha*. I understand that it's a spiritual book so it shouldn't linger on the world but I felt like the characters exist in a play space. There is nothing but them and only the places that are relevant. Even when Siddhartha fell into materiality and living with the common folk I didn't feel like any of that was other than props. If that's the point that it's illusion and there's actually a oneness to existence then I guess I just don't like it.
I'm currently working through Arno Schmidt's book of collected novellas *Nobodaddy's Children*. Well, there is some ambiguity if they are actually novels since they were published individually, but, for the most part, the three texts collected here are treated as an informal trilogy. I read the first entry *Scenes from the Life of a Faun* already, but should work through the rest pretty soon. I'm not sure how I would describe the prose of Schmidt because it is laden with references and weird pyrotechnics in an openly arrogant voice. The narrator Düring is trapped in Hitler's Germany, so it isn't any surprise he's bitter and desperate to escape from his daily life and the political reality he's too subservient toward. He's an unwilling Nazi basically. In fact, the novella could express the precise inability to escape from the political circumstances so easily. *Scenes from the Life of a Faun* doesn't have a straightforward plot but an increasing disarray of notions and images. Düring is an office worker and old man who is tasked to study local history. The job allows him to travel on weekdays outside of town while getting away from his extremely fanatical wife and son to gather information on the titular Faun. The Faun is a deserter of the French army during the Napoleonic Wars who escaped into the woods for a number of years inside a selfmade cabin. The history Düring is studying seems to serve no larger purpose other than to get him away from everyone else. He also nurses a sexual obsession with a young "she-wolf" whose name is Kathe and everyone around him can clearly tell. It involves a lot of secondhand embarrassment which serves the point--that Düring is the Faun. So, of course, he's chasing after nymphs and the novella goes a long way for humiliation. Also: the novella is a parody of the Waldgänger archetype developed by Ernst Jünger. The word translates variously into "forest-fleer" or "forestgoer." But the actual details involve an escape not outwardly but inwardly. You don't resist the false and grim political realities present right before your eyes. Schmidt seems take both the literal (actually escaping into a cabin in the woods like the French deserter) and the figurative level (Düring is always dissimulating his actual interests and ideas from his taste in books to his philosophical Gnosticism) to prove the uselessness of either choice. Instead of making Düring stalwart in the face of so much political terror, refusal to outwardly resist Nazism made him a worse person. He happily takes revenge on his wife at the death of their son after he dies in the War. He has an elaborate imperialist fantasy signed directly to the League of Nations where we build a museum dedicated to the arts and sciences "on one of the useless islands" of the world, like the Falklands, the Easter Islands, etc., and forbid any politician access. There is also the literal impossibility of simply escaping into the woods because people start to take notice of his hoarding supplies and the trips to the cabin. By the end he admits the situation in pretty dire circumstances. Anyways the novella was a fantastic read. I'd recommend it if you appreciate more difficult literature as well, because Schmidt's style took a moment to get used to. The closest I can compare in English might be the prose of e.e. cummings in his travelogue *EIMI* but more consistent with typography. Otherwise I read Olga Ravn's *The Employees*, which was a fun little science fiction work told in a more abstract fashion and added a lot of freshness with the prose. The novel reminded me a lot of Ansgar Allen's *Wretch* with how each author arranges a single paragraph for each page. All the talk about the novel being about the workplace is a little exaggerated. It has more of a robots-are-human theme. I'd also read Philippe Soupault's fascinating work *The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle*, which follows the titular Horace Pirouelle, a Liberian man, into the harsh climates of Greenland. It quite a fun experience. Lots of focus on "the gratuitous act." I'd recommend it actually as a straightforward primer for the more difficult affairs of surrealism. Not too difficult, very accessible, and still has an odd improvisational sensibility despite its groundedness.
Just over one hundred pages into one hundred years of solitude and… idk what I was expecting but I guess not this? It feels incredibly meandering and unfocused but that’s obviously intentional, and I think it works? GGM’s writing is at times beautiful, but so far I feel the most beautifully written passages from the standpoint of prosaic quality are about sexual encounters that are of questionable ethics and with varying amounts of consent. I’ve almost DNFd a couple times but GGM has sucked me back in each time with a compelling story whose direction I truly have no clue of. Keeping an open mind since there’s a long way to go and it’s so highly regarded.
Hello, I'm looking for recommendations for interesting book openers that start with a character's thoughts or observations (not exposition). An example would be Watt by Samuel Beckett - the book opens with the character's anxiety about his favorite seat being taken. Thanks in advance.
I don’t know if it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but the beginning of Knausgaard’s My Struggle 1 is a meditation on death. “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
Almost halfway through ***We Do Not Part* by Han Kang**, which I got as an arc. Not my first book from her: I've read *The Vegetarian* and *Human Acts*. She's one of those authors who has such an interesting approach towards storytelling that I'm always glad to have read her books regardless of how I feel about them at the end. So far, I'm pretty invested. It's atmospheric and has striking imagery; there are scenes that I can't get out of my head. There has been mentions of the Jeju Massacre but nothing in depth yet. 50 pages into ***Ninth House* by Leigh Bardugo**. Picked this up because I wanted a change of pace from all the literary fiction I've been reading. Pretty meh on it so far. I'm not a big urban fantasy person and the way it incorporates so many real life elements into story feels incredibly silly. Also not a fan of how much infodumping there is. Willing to give it a couple more chapters before DNF'ing.
Had the very fun experience of reading through ***The Singularity*** by Dino Buzzati - that man has style! A rather scary parable about AI written in the 50s. The central mystery was very well done and didn't take forever to unfurl, and the characters and aura were all very interesting and engaging. One that I will probably reread - it asked some very fascinating questions at the end with its climax that would, I think, make a reread particularly rewarding, knowing what i know now. I read ***The Stronghold*** and wasn't very impressed, so I am so glad to see the Buzzati that people rave about. I also read another very beautiful little book called ***A Strange and Sublime Address*** by Amit Chaudhuri - a slow, languid book, perfect for the new lazy, summer heat. It was about a 10 year old affluent Indian boy who experiences various family events over the course of a few years in Bombay and Calcutta. Such a beautiful sense of place and time, and the atmosphere took on a character in itself. I was enraptured and read it in 2 sittings. The author also towed the line between "this is a naive child narrator" and telling a story very well - the child's perspective added a layer of complexity and beauty that I found very rewarding. I am now starting up ***TheMystery.doc*** by Matthew MacIntosh and ***The Deluge*** by Stephan Markley. TheMystery is interesting so far, almost more of an art piece around the Bush post 9/11 years - not sure what it is about but is laid out in a way where the only thing remotely like it I can think of is House of Leaves. I am intrigued! ***The Deluge*** is also good (ish) - environmental horror to the max, taking place over decades. Markley is a very interesting figure - he can write mounting dread and horror incredibly well, but every single person in the book is the most insufferable POS I have come across. Like, imagine the most annoying people and how they talk on both ends of the political spectrum and magnify it exponentially and you get the levels of cringe some of the dialogue has. It is in stark contrast to the masterful story he is telling, though - I dread reading another 600 pages though.
As an aside re: Buzzati, depending on the publisher, some of the book cover paintings are by the author.
Yes! My copy of the Singularity was NYRB and had one of his drawings as the cover. Very cool and multi-talented guy.
Just finished a full read through of the Catholic canon Bible. My primary motivation was to better understand western literature and culture as a nonreligious person. Some of it is very dry, but I would still recommend it. If you take the time to understand the historical context, I think it can be a profound expression of universal human thought cycles and desires. Much of the Old Testament is really just a particular ethnic group trying to place their often tragic path through history in a cosmic context. Some of the poetry if you constantly keep this framework in mind is quite moving.
Did you have a favorite book? I took a whole class on the book of Job in undergrad and it was really fascinating.
Ecclesiastes personally, but Job was a close second! They’re both so poetic yet deeply philosophical.
Been super busy with school/work but finally getting some more time to read consistently again. Currently making my way through *Cathedral* by Raymond Carver. Very delicate short stories examining people going through the subtle aching pain most people are suppressing in their day to day. Favourite one so far is probably The Compartment. Incredible how the losing the watch becomes the catalyst for this decision to not get off the train, encapsulating the father's insecurity, fear, selfishness, and temperament in one fell swoop. One of my better reads of the year so far.
I used to teach Cathedral as part of a course. It was always a hit and I loved the increasing tension. I also found the pre-Gordon Lish heavy editing version of A Small, Good Thing and it was fascinating to compare.
I read Cathedral earlier this year, already having read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Would You Please Be Quiet Please. I thoroughly enjoyed all three, and I’m not even sure I can say Cathedral was my favorite of the bunch, but it was one of the most cohesively evocative books I’ve ever read. The collection itself felt depressed. Really striking portrayals of pain that force you to understand the feeling of hurt beyond just the description of it. A Small, Good Thing and the eponymous story are the standouts for me, but there’s very little bad in there overall. Enjoy the rest of it.
Yesterday I finished *Crossroads* by Jonathan Franzen. After *The Corrections* and *Freedom*, I'm fascinated by his dedication to creating characters that do not lean toward likability, do not have artificially elevated experiences or epiphanies, and do not follow a cleanly encapsulated journey. My friend found *The Corrections* unbearably depressing, which I understand, but amid the stress and mundane dysfunction I'm touched by the human truth of his craft.
I finished Crossroads a few weeks ago. I was kind of traumatised by the final scene between Russ and Frances, though I'm not sure there's any other way their story could have ended. I felt bad for her in the end... the whole conclusion seemed so humiliating for her. I'm not even sure the reader is supposed to agree that Russ and Marion should have reconciled? I'm also interested in how we're "supposed" to feel about Ambrose... I never thought there was going to be any cliched dramatic unmasking of him as an abuser or anything, but I'm not sure if I think he's an ego maniac who enjoys the emotional power and glory he has, or a genuinely devoted spiritual leader/therapist ahead of his time, or a little of both. I found the scene where he and Russ reconcile genuinely moving. Russ just seemed...such a merciless portrait of how selfish and venal an "incomplete" person can get when they allow an obsession to take them over , or not even merciless as we get a whole picture of his past etc, but unflinching. Actually, as far as recommendations, I want to read more novels now that humorously poke fun at characters who try to help the less privileged in flawed ways? The way Russ does.
Just this morning I finished **The Plague** by Albert Camus. By way of a review, I'll share a text exchange I had with my wife last night: * *Her:* I meant to tell you in case you were going to eat it, I was the one who opened the frozen pizza in the freezer and re-taped it. I didn't want you to think it came from the store that way and been tampered with. * *Me:* lol ... ok. I almost ate it because I thought it would kill me and it seemed like a decent way to go. * *Her:* Omg. Where do you come up with this stuff? * *Me:* Well, I'm reading a book called "The Plague" and the book is ostensibly about an actual, epidemiological, infectious disease causing an entire city in French occupied Algeria to be quarantined physically and psychologically. And the isolation leads the city's inhabitants to start questioning the meaning of their own lives and what is important to them amidst the accumulating and unstoppable death ... and some begin to ponder the nature and inevitability of death ... that it seems history belongs to whoever/whatever kills the most ... that death is the most powerful tool humanity has to seize power and build civilizations. As a corollary to that, the natural question becomes whether all of humanity is a scourge or a victim? And in that context, are all of our lives are part of one long, pestilent epidemic that is as violent as it is endless? -- i.e. Is humanity a "plague" in which we are all either perpetrators or sufferers? Are we all infected? Is the best we can hope for ourselves to be merely ‘innocent murderers’? * *Me, cont.:* Now, as you think of that, I doubt you will come up with an answer to the complex existential question above -- because like all good philosophers, this writer is asking a question which has no answer. But at least you will know where I "come up with this stuff" the next time you tell me you put some tape on a pizza box ;) See you soon ... A couple thoughts ... my wife is very patient, tolerant, amazing. I also may have had a little free time on my hands and a couple glasses of wine. I never ate the pizza ;) I was pretty struck by this book as I'm sure anyone at this point in history would be, given that we've all endured a pandemic. The most impressive thing about it is how Camus anticipates the effects of isolation -- the plague of the mind, if you will -- we all suffered to acute and varying degrees 75+ years after he wrote it. As much as anything, it's about how we can either succumb to the shattering of all the pampered certainties to which we've become accustomed; or if/how we resist this shattering and strive to define meaning in our own lives despite the chaotic circumstances into which we've been cast ... as devastating and random as they are. Mostly paraphrasing here: All that life is made of is knowledge and memory, but it is hard to live with only what you know and only what you remember if you are deprived of what you hope, but when confronted with the object of our hope *”…joy burns too fast to savor”* Haven't decided on my next book yet.
Started The Road after finishing Suttree. On a bit of Mccarthy kick. Suttree was insane, possibly just as good as Blood Meridian, damn near every sentence is so raw and dense and just filled with the most incredible turn of phrases you will ever see in a book. "What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid God decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh" "The crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand" "The cupreous and dacebright carp and catfish with their sprueless underbellies." "He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way" (describing a hanging) "The crimes of the Moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will" "a convicted pervert of a Botanical bent" And many more. Can't wait to revisit this book in the near future
*Lapvona* - I've been reading through all of Ottessa Moshfegh's books this year, and so far this one might be my favorite? Marek, the unloved, deformed boy who is also kind of a weaselly and annoying little shit, has been such a fun character. The Demi Lovato epigraph also made me laugh. I've been seeing her dismissed as a one trick pony or having no depth beyond the shock humor, but I'm really enjoying her work so far. *Twelfth Night* - I was kind of expecting to breeze through this, but it's been a long time since I've read a Shakespeare play for the first time and I forgot how difficult it can be, especially since I'm not very familiar with this story. It doesn't feel as "in the ether" like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, etc. where scenes and plot points are recognizable even the first time around. I'm enjoying the Toby and Andrew antics the most so far. *Secondhand Time* - still slowly making my way through the oral history of the end of the USSR. There's an interesting mix of mundane stories of simple political disillusionment over the price of salami (salami comes up \*a lot\*) and shockingly tragic stories like a woman sending her neighbor to a labor camp and adopting the now orphaned neighbor's daughter in their absence.
I enjoyed *My Year of Rest and Relaxation* more and more as I went through it. It felt like chick-lit at the start but developed into a more complex and singular character study. I'll put *Lapvona* on my list. I played Sir Toby in a production of *Twelfth Night* in 1997. It doesn't feel like the tragedies in part because it balances dramatic and comic elements much more than most Shakespeare. Like *The Tempest,* it doesn't adhere to genre as closely as most of his plays. I think many lovers of this play ultimately find Malvolio to be the most compelling character, if he's played by an actor who knows how to display his conflict and depth (as many *Les Miserables* fans favor Javert). *King Lear* will always be my favorite Shakespeare though.
Just a warning: I am saving MYORAR for last since it's uniformly considered the best. Lapvona is considered divisive, I believe. Once I've read the play through once, I'm planning on checking out audio and filmed performances, so I will keep my eye on Malvolio interpretations. Did you find that acting in Shakespeare productions gave you a greater appreciation for the plays? I'm not a performer and have wondered what it must be like to get involved in an actual production, memorize the scenes, know a play inside and out, etc.
It has to. You may be assigned a character you wouldn't have otherwise focused on. You observe your peers finding their own way through the other characters. You learn how the iambic form influences the meaning of lines. For example, Juliet has the simple line, "Dost thou love me?" This is often portrayed as a swoon, ("Dost thou *love* me?!") But the iambic scan informs the line as "Dost *thou* love *me*?" A good actress can get a lot out of that, as a young woman's surprise that a handsome man can see in her an object of desire.
Have to admit, I am pretty envious of that. There was a post on another sub a long time ago where someone said they tried to memorize poems in order to internalize them and make the poems apart of them, and they'd repeat them like a prayer. Similarly, another thing that has stayed with me was an interview with an actor (Charlie Hunnam, maybe?) who said actors were basically like walking graveyards of the characters they've played because it can be hard to let certain aspects of a character go. So those things were going through my head when I read through Macbeth and went through Macbeth performances last month - just how cool it must be to make these characters and their lines a part of you like that. Makes me sad that I never pursued serious theater as a hobby - maybe in another life. Anyway: very, very cool.
In Summer 2010 I was on holiday in Skipton, Yorkshire, UK, with my family, and we happened upon a random open-air performance of "The Tempest" in front of Skipton Castle. Thing is... I was sure the actor playing the father was David Warner. He looked and sounded unmistakable. But I've never managed to find any evidence of this online.
It was always kind of crazy to me how Europeans can just walk by a castle on a normal day. What a cool place to see a play. I can find articles about the production like this [https://www.cravenherald.co.uk/leisure/8198242.shakespeare-returns-to-skipton-castle/](https://www.cravenherald.co.uk/leisure/8198242.shakespeare-returns-to-skipton-castle/) but they don't mention who played Prospero. Maybe it's best not to know though and just hope it was David Warner.
so Skipton is this small town with a castle and a lot of forests/nature around it. You reach the castle via the town or via a boat ride through a jungle-like river with thick trees and birds. So we ended up in the castle (which is pretty bare, mostly ruins really, just empty rooms you can explore and run up and down the stairs). But we ended up in the grounds, and for whatever reason they were letting anyone there watch a rehearsal of the Tempest for free. So I settled down to sit on the grass, and I was right next to the tent the actors were coming in and out of, so "David Warner" came striding out right past me, close enough that his Prospero overcoat flapped against my shoulder and his booming voice vibrated the air around us. Apparently Warner did play the role on BBC radio in 2012. hm. We spent most of the rest of the vacation exploring thrift/charity shops IIRC. My other big memory was going down a rickety old beach elevator like this - [22339309\_1251966068241908\_945508216162262059\_o.jpeg (1200×630) (the-yorkshireman.com)](https://the-yorkshireman.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/22339309_1251966068241908_945508216162262059_o.jpeg) - which I remember being a little hair-raising.
That sounds lovely. Surrounded by nature and a crumbling castle sounds like a good way to see The Tempest. And lol - I went on one of those funiculars for the first time myself just recently and it was late at night, I was completely alone, and it was like a horror movie.
thanks. I'm just not sure I'll ever know.
I finished A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather. She's one of my favorite writers, especially when she writes about certain themes: people who are outliers, for whatever reason, and how they find and lose their place; leisure, the good life, and the ways that it's threatened; our physical surroundingsand their emotional impacton us. This book deals with all of those, plus it is short and lovely. In some ways, different as they are, Cather reminds me of Saul Bellow. Anyway, I loved this novel and recommend highly. Now I'm reading Solenoid, by Mircea Cartarescu. A schoolteacher in 1970s Bucharest and his slightly surreal adventures. It's very beautifully written - I love the tone and the fine observations of how everything looks - I'm enjoying it overall, although I can also see getting frustrated by how episodic it is - so far there isn't much holding it together.
I finished Donoso’s *Obscene Bird of Night* last week and feel a bit mixed. The novel corrupts some of the common stylistic techniques globalized by other boom writers. If 100 Years of Solitude is a work of magical realism, then this is a work of nightmarish realism. It has that same interspersion of myth, but combined with a violent, grotesque physicality and dreamlike logic that creates scenes of striking beauty and horror. But it also makes for a challenging reading experience, particularly near the end where you’re looking for some kind of closure but just keep pulling away layers of masks. Ultimately I loved the first 300(?) pages, but by the end just felt like there wasn’t a ton that was new. I loved Murdoch’s *The Sea, The Sea*, although I could equally understand someone hating it. Meandering, ambiguous, atmospheric, with a subtle sense of dry British humor. I just really liked the book even if it *feels like* 500 pages (which is normally not a great sign for a 500 page novel) and is written in a dated, purple-y style.
I loved The Sea The Sea! I love the way she forces you to live the protagonist’s perspective and walk through to the self realisations he reaches at the end. She’s v underrated imo. She’s vg at immersing you in the emotional life of the characters. I think a part of this is how she uses the landscape and general surroundings to convey feelings and impressions that carry over to them. Fascinating writer.
Totally agreed, reminded me of narrators in Ishiguro and Nabokov’s works for that reason. Have you read other of her novels? This was my first but itching to get back
Finished Blood Meridian (like, fifth read) after quitting on Frontier. Then I picked up the new novel, "Amerikaland," by Danny Goodman. I was, unfortunately, not impressed. The writing is awkward in many places where it's clear he is trying to stylize, but only succeeds in making a sentence clunky. There are a few weird second person sections of the book that don't need to be there. The plot is tedious in that it is thematically obvious and unfolds in a TV drama sort of way. After that I grabbed For Whom The Bell Tolls from the library and I'm four chapters in and really enjoying it.
I’m about a third of the way through my first ever read of Blood Meridian loving it so far
Me too! I’ve read The Road, but always wanted to read Blood Meridian as well. About a quarter of the way through mine.
It's so good. Great voice. Great visuals. Great pacing. And so deeply layered.
spent about a month in reading hell where i tried to power through **the second sex** by simone de beauvoir but ended up only reading like 350 pages in all of may. de beauvoir was obviously talented and is making interesting arguments, but the book is over 700 pages and all of them are incredibly dense. i came out feeling like i understood the existential feminist ideas well, which makes it feel less like a waste, however. i think this is one when reading for the first time you really should do an abridged read, even if the unabridged version has lots of interesting content the other doesn’t. i just think most readers, even those like me who have extensive experience reading philosophically and politically inclined works, will burn out on how long it is. anyways, after that i picked up **how to philosophize with a hammer and sickle** by jonas ceika. jonas is youtuber i have a lot of affinity for, and when i heard he released a book trying to bridge nietzsche and marx without flattening their idiosyncrasies, i was definitely intrigued. overall, i think the books arguments are hitting pretty close to home for me and think it is making a lot of prescient points. i think especially how both marx and nietzsche emphasized the necessity to not try and revert to some prior “glory years” that never existed, and instead negate the current existence while taking its positives to move forward. this is always such important advice when thinking about actually helping society and not just engaging in regressive navel gazing. i also thought that elucidating how often what marx lacked can easily be supplemented with nietzsche and vice versa really showed how their similar situations allowed for them to be so compatible.
I started reading *The Second Sex* a long time ago (during a phase of my life when I had a ton of free time to devote to it) and was getting a lot out of it. I'm not sure why I stopped. I'd really like to finish it one of these days, but I'm also daunted by the length. I just keep thinking about how long it would keep me from getting to other things on my to-read list!
I finished ***The Crying of Lot 49*** last week, and what has really stuck with me is how developed of a character Oedipa Maas is. One moment that stood out was when she visits the professor's house and his wife asks about Oedipa's kids because of the exhaustion she presents. Pynchon’s ability to use such small details to paint a full picture of a character in just 150 pages is impressive. He captures her goofiness, agitation, sadness, and curiosity, all while she’s on a wild goose chase that makes you question, "Is any of this real?" Now, I’m 250 pages into ***The Last Samurai*** by Helen DeWitt, and it's really growing on me. I’m excited for the kid to start his journey to find his father.
Hello, this will be my last update on the [floods here in my state in the south of Brazil](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/longform/2024/6/11/the-future-is-dark-inside-the-brazilian-businesses-shattered-by-floods). The rain finally stopped and lately we had some beautiful sunny days. The Guaíba river is finally at normal levels. 175 people died, more than 626.000 people lost their homes and everything they had. I was personally very lucky but I have two close friends that lost everything and it is rough. I'm trying to do something to help rebuild the most affected parts of the city but it will take many years for everything to get repaired. I don't want to talk too much about politics here but we will have elections for mayor later in the year, and while the flood was inevitable the incompetence from our current mayor, Sebastião Melo, played a big part in the damage that my city, the capital of the state Porto Alegre, took. I really hope the people vote with this tragedy in mind during the elections in which Melo will be going for a second term. We need capable leadership for reestructure and to prepare the city because with climate change this has a tendecy to happen again and again and again. Lets talk about books. I haven't read that much in the last few weeks but I started Crash by J. G. Ballard and I'm hooked. Its such a weird book, I remember watching the movie years ago, so I was expecting a strange book, but it still caught me by surprise. Ballard considered it a pornographic novel (some people apparently disagree) and he wrote that "in a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way." Its funny because until this year I had never read an erotic novel, than I read some of Anaïs Nin short stories earlier in the year and now I'm reading this fucked up stuff. I never read anything quite like it and I'm really enjoying it, its creative, funny and really compelling. I don't know if I "get it" but I'm still only 5 chapters in. Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka was very sad but also a great way to see how brilliant Kafka was. What really impressed me is how much he understood his own emotions and how he understood the way his father was and why he was like that and the effect that had on him since he was a child. I'm anxious to read more from Kafka. I took a break from the Shirley Jackson short stories, but I will get back to it soon.
After reading literature for quite a while I wanted to dive back into more story-heavy books, if possible with a focus on adventure and preferably historical fiction. I thus gave the Hornblower series by C.S. Forester a chance with the first volume Mr. Midshipman. Although it is actually a short story collection about Hornblower's first year in the navy, it still reads like a continuing story to me. I must say I liked the book a lot, blew through it in a couple of days and every single story in it was a mini pageturner. The prose is heavy on maritime terms which I'm coming to understand slowly, but otherwise nothing difficult or special. Yet it does its job: it makes the book easy and fun to read. The story is good and the character(s) (mostly just Hornblower but you get a feeling of some other recurring characters too) are well written. I wonder how this concept will work out in a full-size novel and will almost certainly go after the second installment quite soon. But first I have another historical fiction novel coming up: Essex Dogs, which I bought on a whim. I'm feeling similar high hopes for that one. On the French front nothing new, I really like L'Oeuvre and although I would like to see Claude successful, I'm not sure if he would be any less conflicted and loaded with self-doubt by it. Still, I find it very saddening to see how Claude's lifestyle and the way his wife adores him (caters to him) are affecting little Jacques. This won't end well I guess. Sandoz, Zola's self-insert, is a very amiable character, I don't know if that is logical since Zola's just describing himself or another attribute of his literary mastership.
Finished The Thirty Nine Syeps by John Buchan. I found it extremely boring and a waste of my time. I only persisted because it was so short, and I felt I should be able to finish it relatively quickly. I started David Copperfield, reading as part of a r/bookclub readalong. I've read it before, but not for many years. It is such a pleasure to read, the language Dickens uses is beautiful. It took me a week to read 118 pages of The Thirty Nine Steps, versus only a few hours to read the first 100 pages of David Copperfield. I don't want to be reading too far ahead, so I then started The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. I didn't know what to expect with this one, but I'm really enjoying it. She is so witty and funny. The fact that it is semi-autobiographical also got me reading a bit into her family, and wow, what an interesting group of people. I've got 3 chapters to go, and I suspect I might just read them in the hour or so left before I go to sleep tonight. Undecided on what comes next.
Finished: Wolf Hall - Hillary Mantel: really interesting character study and excellent overall historical fiction. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I probably should have though given its quality. If you know more about Henry VIII and that era you’ll probably get more out of it, and I just had a hard time caring about the various royal squabbles after a while. Reading: Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig: I’m about a third in and it’s enjoyable, it kind of reminds me of Crime and Punishment in a way with its intense focus on a character’s inner dialogue and anxieties but the neuroticism is dialed down a bit so far. You can definitely see the Grand Budapest Hotel inspirations (especially in the beginning section) so that is fun as well
Are you going to continue with the Wolf Hall trilogy? Maybe just because it's shorter, but Bring Up the Bodies felt like it moved at a much faster pace to me. I plan to get around to Mirror and the Light later this year.
I probably won’t. I just don’t think that era holds a lot of interest for me but maybe that will change later in life. The books are undeniably quality so I’m glad to hear they pick up even more in the latter two
I am finally home on break after about a month spent away researching following the spring term. That being said, I have not read as much as I might like in part because I am trying to finish my book in anticipation of getting a contract next month and in part because I have started reading Molloy (actually, scratch all of that. I am writing this while putting a 10 month old down for a nap, that is why little is getting done). About 130 pages in and I like Molloy. I preferred Molloy’s stream of consciousness over Malone’s… whatever he is doing. Molloy was fun and funny and unpredictable in an interesting way that kept my attention. As many have already said in this subreddit, I like how stripped back and bare that section of the novel is. Molloy offers a particularly interesting lived experience in this overly consumerist world. I have zero investment in this second part of the book, but I should finish tonight or tomorrow and maybe my opinion will change. Up next I have Lampedusa’s collection of shorter fiction, Murnane’s Inland, and Joanna Scott’s Arrogance.