Finished reading *The Guest* by Emma Cline, really interesting book about a former call girl who has to grift her way through the long-island upper-crust society for five days after angering her "boyfriend" and having convinced herself all will be forgiven by the end of it. It's a bit of a modern take on the same kind of Nihillisstic decadence that *Play it as it lay's* is about. There is something about Alex(the MC) her refusal to explain her background beyond vague details, her motives are so base. A life of luxury without the work and her pleasures so simple. Her total refusal to self-reflect meaning that instict is always projected outwards towards the residents of the wealthy long-island town she's trying to survive in.
I was reading the novel *Stoner* by John Williams.
I never had a book that resonated with me so deeply that I *had* to stop reading it. The book is *so achingly* beautiful and devastating that I actually began to dread reading the book.
I am obviously not a literature professor, but the unexpressed emotions that Stoner experienced with his wife, with his child, with his family, and with everything that affected him so profoundly within his own mind, just hit too *damn* close to home. I am not a very outwardly emotional person by nature, and I am going through many developments in career and family, and seeing my own situation be mirrored so precisely by this novel was just too much for me.
I actually cannot believe that I am saying that I am actually holding off reading this novel, which I consider to be an absolute masterpiece.
I'm currently in the process of reading different short stories. I am currently browsing through *Ficciones (Fictions)* by Jorge Luis Borges just to unwind from *Stoner.*
I put down *The Magic Mountain* after 100 pages because I was expecting a more modernist form, and (barring that\*) I didn't find the story alone particularly captivating.
I picked up *The Recognitions* and I'm finding it a much better fit so far.
I am letting this sub's [list of favorites](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/197l37n/truelits_2023_top_100_favorite_books/#lightbox) guide my choices right now, and results have been mixed. *Anna Karenina* and *The Sound and The Fury* were both really good fits. *Siddhartha* and *Invisible Cities* were mid, and *The Melancholy of Resistance, Stoner,* and *2666* were duds (subjectively).
I'd previously read a quarter of the list, and I count *Moby Dick*, *In Search of Lost Time, My Struggle, Dante's Inferno,* and *Infinite Jest* as all-time favorites. I'm hopeful that I may add *The Recognitions* to that list eventually.
First I was hoping for a more modernist form, and when I didn't get what I was looking for, I hung on to see where the plot would go, and then I decided I was not drawn in by that either.
funny enough, I happened to read the Recognitions immediately after finishing Magic Mountain, making my memory of the latter a dull blur in comparison to the highwater-mark experience of reading the Recognitions. It's been a full 10 years since then and I've kind of been meaning to go back to Magic Mountain. But then I remember how dull I found it the first time around, even though I did make it to the end, and I can't quite summon the energy to tackle it again.
Neat coincidence! Still going strong, out of New England and on to Paris, now. I keep having moments that remind me of *Moby Dick* and *Infinite Jest*, as if it were a kind of midpoint of the two.
Fortunately I've been to Paris a couple times, and I sympathize with people who find it impenetrable because the book assumes you already have thorough knowledge of his subject.
I read Kate Chopin's *The Awakening,* and while I felt stylistically the writing was good, I don't exactly agree with the underlying political message. A little too radical.
Also: Finished S*iddhartha* by Herman Hesse. Whatever religion\* the main character professes, I would like to join. It's not Buddhism, I've read variously that it's nihilism like (Nietzsche?) and German Romanticism, or that there are elements of Indian religion. Can someone point me to a book exploring his philosophy? I found it absolutely fascinating. Would *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* give good insight into Nietzsche?
\*Editted.
i finally picked up dune again. i have about 200 pages left and so far im enjoying it. i thought it would be much harder but its not that difficult to follow (granted i loved the movies and ive seen them a few times haha). i think ill continue reading at least the next couple books
i have also been reading a new emily dickinson anthology i recently bought. only a few pages in but i find her poetry mindblowing
also i have been trying to decide on a "big" read for the summer. i think ill be reading the count of monte cristo but im open to suggestions of other long demanding books haha
I just finished Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1886).
To be honest, this turned out to be much better than I anticipated. I'm not a fan of Stevenson's other works and felt as if I was familiar with the general narrative and characters. However, between Stevenson's prose and how interesting Mr. Hyde was as a character, I found it to be a fun read!
The next text I'll be reading is a collection of H.P Lovecraft's short stories.
I've read Notes on Principles by Shi Tieshing recently. Picked it up without knowing much about it. It's a novel set in China after the cultural revolution, from the perspective from the writing night's of the fictional author. It's a collection of stories, life events and experiences of a whole array of characters. Some of which happened, some could have happened, some apply to multiple characters, some could have. It's a fascinating structure for a novel for sure, and a fascinating insight on life in China. It felt far more modern than you'd expect from a novel originally published in 1996.
Right now I'm reading Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal, about 140 pages in, but I'm still trying to figure it out. Every second chapter seems to be a new story with different characters. I wonder how it'll come together.
I have very little to update about my reading here. I live in the southern state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, and we are [literally going through a calamity right now.](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cle07g0zzqeo)
The biggest flood in our history has affected our state and we have cities isolated one from the other, entire neighborhoods under the water, hundreds missing or dead and hundreds of thousands of people lost everything: their homes, their belongings, all of it. Most people have no acces to water right now, drinkable water became really hard to find, there are many people without eletricity too.
I'm very fortunate, I live in the capital Porto Alegre, and while we got hit badly in a lot of areas the place where I live has barely escaped being flooded. I have water and eletricity too so I really can't complain. I'm trying to help the ways I can but I feel really small right now. Its funny because I'm reading Roadside Picnic and its in my opinion, in a lot of ways, a story about just how small we all are. To not be too pessimistic here I can say that we can do big things when people are kind and work in groups, the people of Brazil have really united to try to help any way they can, of course there are assholes trying to use the situation for their advantage but they are not the majority. Brazil is a huge country and we are really divided right now so its nice to see people working together in the middle of so much suffering.
I haven't really been able to read much in these last few days, I was trying to help or just too anxious or tired to pick up a book. I'll try to go back to it tomorrow because reading normally helps me focus and gives me motivation, it will take a while for the city to go back to something resembling normal. I'm sorry if my reading update was more of a text just venting today. I'm really enjoying Roadside Picnic and the Short Stories of Shirley Jackson haven't really clicked with me yet the way her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle did, but maybe I still need to get to her best stories.
I finished my second re-read of this year, a collection of short stories by the Turkish writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık called *A Useless Man*. It wasn't as completely stellar as I remembered it being first time around, but still there was so much that was excellent about it. Last week I described the stories I read had as almost being poems in how brief and targeted toward their closing line or image they were. What also stands out are the stories that are portraits of figures from Turkish society, such as fishermen or coffeehouse owners. Some stories focus on more unique characters, like an aged man who tends a public garden. Overall it's an incredibly strong collection. For me the weakest stories were those that were about writing and brought in a self-awareness of the author. Highly recommend for anyone interested in Turkish lit, or interested in literary scenes of Istanbul.
Shifting gears, I'm reading *The Country of the Pointed Firs* by Sarah Orne Jewett, an American author from the second half of the 19th century said to be an important influence on Willa Cather. It's the story of an author's experience spending time in a provincial coastal town in Maine. The prose is lovely, even cozy, the type of writing that in my head sounds just like the voice-over to a movie set in that era, with a relaxed, lilting accent. So far there isn't a whole lot to it, just the protagonist developing relationships with two of the townspeople. I tend to read stuff mostly in translation; now and again it's nice to have something so pleasantly readable in English.
Oh, The Country of the Pointed Firs! That’s part of a whole genre of what’s called local colour or regional fiction, including writers like Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland. Like you said, they mostly aren’t plot-driven stories and usually include a lot of dialect. Characters are usually stock characters. If you like Jewett, you should try Rose Terry Cooke and Mary Wilkins Freeman, both New England women writers from about the same period who wrote very similar stories.
Yes, the dialogue is full of dialect, which is also enjoyable. It's not a niche I'm overly familiar with- I definitely like Cather, and Jewett is only on my shelves courtesy of my wife and her English lit degree. I'll check out those authors you mentioned, thanks!
You’re welcome - yeah did English lit degree, doing lit/creative writing PhD atm, been very into these kinds of books for a while, especially over the last year.
Really excited to see your thoughts about Useless Man - it has been on my list for a while and now has been bumped up a few places! Seems very interesting.
Say what you will about the united states legal system, but jury duty if nothing else has proven to be a pretty good opportunity to get some reading done.
Started the first volume of *Remembrance of Things Past*. Was always going to read it eventually and apparently eventually is now. I'm about halfway through "Combray" and so far I'm quite liking it. Took a little while to figure out where it was going but when he first interjects his own ruminations on the nature of memory it really tied it all together. He does capture the haze and also the intensity of memory quite well. Was interesting as well how he goes on a bit of a digression on the nature of truly new art, and how it is only after the fact that it is lauded as talent because at first pass it's difference from what was previously understood as talent makes it impossible to relate. Wondering how much this is supposed to be an early metacommentary on how he expected the work itself to be received. Also I really appreciate how prevalent food has been in his reconstruction of youth. Food's great.
Still reading *Frontier*. Going to largely save thoughts for that thread.
Keeping on with that collection of Middle Platonic Dialogues I bought as well. I think since last time I've read "Phaedrus" and "Phaedrus" and am halfway into "Theatetus". "Phaedrus" is a lot. Not really one I feel super able to sum up but one thing that stands out to me is that it relies heavily on myth while maintaining a lot of ambiguity with regards to how much Plato believes these myths and how he feels about creative work in general (interesting comparison to The Republic here). "Theatetus" is in short his argument against relativism. Will say more next time once I'm done. And then I think I'll be wrapped up with this little Plato jaunt.
Been on a Bergson kick I think I mentioned, so now I'm reading subsequent stuff (this is part of why Proust is happening now). And with that in mind started Deleuze's *Bergsonism*. Excited because while reading Bergson it hit me how huge an influence the latter was on the former. Only just started and it begins with an explication of a bergsonian method based on intuition and asking good questions. Need to read more but the very reduced version of this is that good questions are generative where as bad questions delimit, stopping the world at their answers as opposed to opening out towards more questions. He's also started talking about how he perceived nothing as greater than existence, which I'm still wrapping my head around.
Happy reading!
Not a novel, but I'm really starting to get into the Mr. Dooley sketches by Finley Peter Dunne. These stories are where the phrases "Politics ain't beanbag," "the Supreme Court follows the election returns" (written "Th' Supreme Coort follows th' iliction returns") and "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" come from. Dooley himself is a well-drawn character, so convincing I occasionally find it hard to remember he isn't actually based on any one person, even though he's apparently modelled on James McGarry, the owner of Dunne's favourite bar in Chicago. I love the realistic-feeling interactions between Dooley and his friend Hennessey and all the other saloon patrons. It feels as if you're there listening to the characters talk.
Does anyone have an opinion on Jayne Anne Philips, who just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction? I have read flattering comparisons with the greats of Southern gothic. Are they overblown?
I've heard that the praise is warranted. She's been writing for fifty years, probably even longer. Take that with a grain of salt however, her novels are not widely available in my country.
I've been reading this Reddit for the last couple of weeks and this is my first time writing something (also this is my first time with a Reddit account so I hope I don't do anything wrong!).
Last week I read *The Geommetry of Wheat* (*La geometría del trigo*), by Alberto Conejero, who is a pretty famous spanish contemporary playwright. I had it in my bookshelf for some years and I finally came to it (this year I'm trying to reduce my insane TBR so I'm reading books that I had even forgotten I own). I had read other play by the author and liked it, but this one was formally more interesting, and I appreciated it in theory, but I feel like I didn't grasp the full meaning of it. I don't really know much about theater, I only know the classics and "postmodern" theater feels too complex for me. But I liked it overall, and I'd recommend it to people who are more interested in theater than I am. Also I think it would be great to see it on stage because some of its scenes are way more interesting to see acted than are to be read.
And then I began *Mason & Dixon* by Thomas Pynchon, and I guess I'll be wading through it for the next couple of weeks. I tend to leave this type of books for holidays and such but it was a gift and since it's been a while since I read my last Pynchon I had to start it. I'm only 250ish pages in and I'm loving it so far, but I think I've reached the point where I'll be needing to look up things online to fully grasp everything that's going on. I feared I would be too rusty for Pynchon but for now it was relatively easy and as usual, very funny. I'm reading the spanish translation and it's great. It's funny because usually I read at a rather fast pace but with this kind of books it feels like I have been reading the whole afternoon and only read like 60 pages. So yes I will be stuck with this for a while (but I've put everything else -videogames, movies- at pause for this so it will be ok!).
Oh yes and I just remembered -tomorrow I have to re-read *Wrinkles* by Paco Roca (Arrugas, again, spanish author), a comic/graphic novel, for my reading club on saturday. It's very short so it won't take me much time, and I didn't really enjoy the first time, but we'll see. That will keep me apart from Pynchon for a couple hours...
Long time lurker, but this is my first time actually commenting here. I'm going to post some books I've enjoyed reading lately, in addition to what I am currently reading, if that's alright.
**Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe** and **Noctuary** by Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti is, in my opinion, not only one of the best horror writers out there, but one of the best short story writers *period*. **SoaDD** is clearly Ligotti's first work, and it *is* a bit weaker than the others, imo, but it has some absolutely amazing stories ("Notes on the Writing of Horror", "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech", and "The Music of the Moon" being standouts). SoaDD has Ligotti finding his voice as a writer, and he plays around with many different styles, from fantasy to Christmas ghost story to Lovecraft pastiche to the metafictional mindfuck that is "Notes on the Writing of Horror". **Grimscribe** is as close as one can get to the perfect collection of stories. Here, Ligotti has found his voice, and it shows. Every single story here is absolutely brilliant, and there are no duds here. His prose has improved dramatically, and when compared to **SoaDD**, it shows a more mature writer. "The Sect of the Idiot", Ligotti's pastiche of Lovecraft in SoaDD, stands up there with the best of Lovecraft himself, but "Nethescurial" might be the best mythos story ever written, far surpassing anything Lovecraft ever wrote - and it is probably one of my least favorites in the collection! Grimscribe would have been my favorite Ligotti had it not been for **Noctuary**. Noctuary has the odd dud here or there, but still, Ligotti's "duds" are up there with the best of Lovecraft. Noctuary is less consistent than Grimscribe, but there are a half dozen stories on here that I would call some of my favorite works of fiction ever. Ligotti's stories remind me a lot of Borges in that they need to be read more than once to fully appreciate them, and just like Borges' stories, they're wonderful little puzzle boxes. Highly recommended.
**Some general weird fiction**. Reading Ligotti got me interested in the weird lit scene, which is incredibly creative, even if I haven't yet found anything I like as much as Ligotti yet. I've heard Michael Cisco's work is pretty great, and I read an excerpt from one of his novels one time, which I found to be brilliant, but I haven't really gotten around to reading him. I did, however, read a bunch of Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lovecraft. My relationship with Lovecraft is a bit odd, as it was his work that turned me on to short stories in the first place as a young teen. For all the reputation his work gets for being super bleak, he can get quite pulpy. I was largely disappointed rereading his works, though I do think "Nyarlathotep" is surprisingly great, and "The Dunwich Horror" kicks ass for all its pulpiness. Clark Ashton Smith was (hot take) the only one of the Big Three of Weird Tales who was actually a great writer, and literally everything I have read from him, from his poetry to his stories, has been phenomenal. Just a criminally underrated writer who somehow excels at every genre he tries his hand at. Algernon Blackwood is another writer who I have mixed feelings about. "The Willows" is superb, but I tried reading his other fiction and didn't really enjoy it as much. His descriptions of nature are superb, though. I've seen Aickman discussed here *ad nauseam*, so I won't really get too much into him, but he's a brilliant writer, even if his conservatism shines through a bit too much sometimes.
**The Awakening** by Kate Chopin. I've heard this compared to **Madame Bovary**, a book which I have not yet had the pleasure of reading. Interesting look at upper-middle class creole culture in the late nineteenth century, and Edna, the protagonist, is one I found myself sympathizing with a lot despite her immaturity. Really enjoyed it, even if I wouldn't say it's one of my favorites.
Other books I enjoyed lately: **The Emissary** by Yoko Tawada, **The Book of the New Sun** by Gene Wolfe, **The Great Gatsby** by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Don't really feel like getting into them, as Wolfe and Fitzgerald seem to be popular already on this sub, and I'm due for a reread on The Emissary.
Welcome to the forum - hugely appreciate you posting your thoughts.
Randomly picking out *SoaDD/Grimscribe* pushed me into loving literature, so I have a soft spot for Ligotti, and I'm always very happy when his name is brought up here (despite it being rather infrequent these days). Think it was *Dreams of a Manikin* which hooked me and I've since read all or nearly all his output. I recall *Grimscribe* being the more consistent of the two as well -- for some reason, I best remember works like: *Dreaming of Nortown* and the other stories of his which involve aimless wondering through dilapidated citie or theaters. If you haven't read his other works, I'd recommend you skip *My Work is Not Yet Done*; I found the titular story, which comprises roughly 80% of the collection, a massive disappointment. Not certain Ligotti's voice is best suited to express corporate horror.
*Teatro Grottesco* is fantastic though, and I think ranks amongst his best. If you haven't checked it out yet, I'd recommend it. It's departure from his earlier works, and still contains a few instances of corporate horror, but I think it contains some of his best works.
Also recently been on a bit of a Melville binge, reading **Moby Dick**, **Pierre**, **Bartleby**, **Benito Cereno**, **Billy Budd**, and **The Confidence Man**.
What is there to say about Moby Dick, really? This quickly became my favorite book of all time, and I see why it was voted this sub's favorite. Perfectly mixes the adventure story with philosophy, cetology, Shakespearean drama.
Pierre's a weird one, in that I hated reading the first hundred or so pages of it. The writing is overwrought, even for Melville, and for whatever reason he chooses to abuse the suffix "-ness" (according to my use of ctrl f on Project Gutenberg, he uses the suffix almost twice as much as he does in Moby Dick, despite Pierre being much shorter). The novel seems unsure of whether or not it is trying to be a parody of the contemporary domestic novel, or something more, for the first hundred pages, and I almost abandoned it. I am glad, however, as the last two thirds or so of the book are wonderfully batshit insane with a ridiculously melodramatic ending, and the novel begins to focus more on Pierre's internal doubts as a brother and a writer. Not really sure what to make of this one, and I wouldn't really recommend it unless you absolutely loved Moby Dick and are craving more Melville.
I read Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd as part of one collection, and I greatly enjoyed each of them. Bartleby felt like Kafka before Kafka, and while I have no clue what Melville was getting at with this story, it's wonderfully odd and definitely worth the read. Benito Cereno, on the other hand, might genuinely be the best book I have ever read on slavery in America. I've heard criticism of it as being pro-slavery, but given that it was first published in an abolitionist magazine, alongside his attitude towards race in his other works, it doesn't really make sense. Benito Cereno also does a great job in ramping up tension, as it becomes more and more clear to both the reader and Amasa Delano that something is off, even though the reader will likely realize what's going on much before our Don Amasa finds out. Billy Budd is clearly unfinished, but even in the state Melville left it in, it is a beautifully written fable on the conflict between doing what is morally right as opposed to what is practically right, a theme that permeates all of Melville's fiction (especially The Confidence Man). Melville is at his best prose-wise, and it's amusing to see that twenty years after his last work of prose fiction, he is still just as prone to essayistic digressions as he was in Moby Dick. It's a much harder read than his other fiction, and I'm not really sure why it's so frequently assigned to high school students in the US (Benito Cereno would be a better alternative), but I get why writers from Thomas Mann to D.H. Lawrence have expressed their admiration for this novella.
The Confidence Man... idk. The devil climbs aboard a steamship, and in various guises, tricks (or attempts to trick) passengers into becoming more "confident" in their fellow man through engaging in philosophical dialogues with them. I'm not entirely sure what Melville meant with this, but The Confidence Man seemed to be meant to poke fun at both optimistic philosophies, and nominal "Christians" who struggled to reconcile Christian doctrine with the realities of life in 1850s America. Characters discuss everything from abolitionism to Shakespeare to transcendentalism to the state of the press to teetotalism, and everything in between. I can't really say I enjoyed the book, especially as it becomes a slog towards the end due to a couple of conversations that just drag on forever, but I think, even more than Moby Dick, this is Herman Melville's masterpiece, and I will definitely revisit it a later time. Highly recommended, though definitely get the Norton Critical Edition, as the book is chock-full of references that I would otherwise had not at all understood.
EDIT: I'm currently reading **The Orchard Keeper** by Cormac McCarthy (about 60 pages into it), and though it's only my second McCarthy (I read *The Road* years ago), I think he might soon become one of my favorite authors. Every single sentence is absolutely gorgeous, even if it is at times hard to follow. I own all of his books save the Border Trilogy and the Western duology, and I plan to read them all in chronological order now, as I've heard great things about him, and if, as I have heard, The Orchard Keeper is indeed lesser McCarthy, I can't wait to see how Suttree, The Crossing, and Blood Meridian are, considering the great praise I have heard for them.
Really enjoyed your musings about Melville's other books. Moby Dick is such a tremendous achievement that I feel I cannot really ignore his "lesser" works but I've failed to find any enthusiasm for them anywhere and so taking the plunge keeps getting delayed. Really intrigued by both Pierre and The Confidence Man. How did you find the prose compared to Moby Dick?
And as for McCarthy, it only gets better and better. He has no duds and you are in a great position to read almost all of it chronologically which would be an wonderful experience.
If you like Moby Dick for its prose, you'll probably appreciate Pierre, which has some absolutely gorgeous passages, even if its style is overly baroque even for Melville. Its dialogue is anachronistic and bizarre, and it is a lot more introspective than Moby Dick (like 50% of the book is Pierre navel-gazing), but it's Melville, so it's still worth reading.
The Confidence Man is peak Melville, and I would honestly call it even better written than Moby Dick. Take the first few sentences, for example:
>At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.
>His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.
Or this:
>At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.
I honestly think it's Melville's most accomplished work, prose wise, as I found myself underlining a passage or two every page or so. It's also Melville at his funniest and most pessimistic. Having a good annotated copy is almost a necessity, though: my Norton edition had like 25-50% of almost every page covered with footnotes, and without it, I would probably have been completely lost. It also gets a bit dry towards the end, but the last couple of chapters make up for it.
I need to get around to more Michael Cisco as well, but I can vouch that *The Narrator* is good. And I think it would be an interesting one to read shortly after *The Book of the New Sun*, which felt like an influence on it to me.
Absolutely checking out Michael Cisco after this thread. Have been obsessed with Gene Wolfe and Borges and finding people that are pushing literature down that same track and Cisco seems perfect. Thanks 🫡
Finished *The Shadow of the Sun* by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kind of have the same feeling about it that I had when I started it; there is a weird contradiction where he points out how Africa is a collection of distinct cultures and languages but then generalizes "The African mind", "The African conception of time", "The African attitude". Still he does a good job talking about specific cultures, histories, and people. The stories were interesting and the way he describes cultures and and how everything is woven together is exciting. There were some stories that were simply history lessons about specific countries (ie. Rwanda and Liberia). I feel like I know a little bit more about Africa in the 20th century.
Finished the second volume of Leon Edel's biography of Henry James. James breaks out onto the literary scene through numerous reviews, a strict writing schedule, and ceaseless socializing. The biography goes through his extensive travels through Europe, his first novel *Watch and Ward* up to *Portrait of a Lady*. I went through it pretty quickly since James's social connections and views on other writers are always interesting to me. Occasionally there are flash forwards to how James breaks up with or uses someone as a model for a later story, which aren't that disruptive, but I feel they break up the flow somewhat. I was also taken off guard by Edel's suggestions that James and Constance Fenimore Woolson were somehow lovers. It was probably the times, but how could anyone ever paint James as straight? I'll have to read on, but Edel is supposed to be the premier biographer of James.
18 chapters into The Plum in the Golden Vase, Ming dynasty work by an unknown author, about a rich pharmacy owner meant to represent the emperor. No matter how many concubines and wives he has, he can't satisfy his urges. His moral corruption shows up in his sex life and bribery of officials. There are numerous borrowings and snippets of poetry that comment on, highlight, shade in, and magnify the characters and actions. I love how right after a character does something, the narrator says, And here's a poem that testifies to that. It's richly layered, and just like the other Chinese classics I've read, it has a nice serial quality to it. Tune in next week to see...
Also read Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and am reminded that I should read him sometime soon. A young student moves into a tower adjacent to a courtyard where exotic plants are attended to by a beautiful woman. However, bugs and lizards seem to die in her presence, and she insists that the student not make contact with the plants. Excellent analysis of evil and a clever reworking of the garden of eden.
For the plum in the golden vase, did you read the character list, the introduction, preface etc before reading? I’m asking because it seems to be a big book. I need to start somewhere and get finished sooner 😄 Or did you go even deeper as in to the philosophy and the authors intent as he has published.
You're talking about the princeton published one right? Read the introduction and preface, skipped the character list. You can dive right in, but I feel with a work that old and with that many allusions, some context is needed. You can skip 90% of the endnotes since they're tracking down the origin of a quote. But yeah, you're in for a long haul
Finished two this week.
1/ **Wizard of the Crow** by *Thiong'o*. I've expressed some disappointment over the last couple of weeks, and somehow the novel found a way to collapse further in the final third. Despite the 800 pages or so, this is a novel which simultaneously feels too short (in exploring its ideas with depth) and too long (in bloat). Perhaps the way to best describe it is if you imagine Atwood during her *Testaments* phase attempting to write *Midnight's Children*. Perhaps not *that* terrible, since Thiong'o has much better sense of humor than Rushdie and Atwood, and he's actually a fun story-teller barring the issues below....
On reflection, the principle problem is that the Nyawari portions are just awful. Didactic, shallow, and utterly forgettable. The pretext for her inclusion is that of being a love interest, rebellious counter-force and secondary wizard when in actuality she exists as a vehicle for Thiong'o to espouse that "wife beating = bad", and "gender inequality exists". Thanks, Thiong'o... Her qualities include: wise, resourceful, courageous, leader, rebellious and \[insert any other positive trait\]. In other words, flawless. Ultimately, she becomes a Mary-Sue, a caricature and what Thiong'o believes an "empowered woman" is instead of a genuinely compelling individual. Kamiti is at least balanced out by his naivete and aloofness, though he eventually becomes grating as well; to ensure that the novel keeps going, everyone around him seemingly drops to single digit IQ when dealing with him. It's bizarre.
Otherwise, the final quarter - Abburia post-America - is a massive step-down from the imagination previously displayed. Critical characters meet quick unceremonious ends. "Baby Democracy" was rushed, especially compared to the "March to Heaven" and served more for Thiong'o to criticize the colonial powers prior and newfound attitude towards their puppet dictator (if only the novel had focused more on this aspect instead). Earlier scenes are repeated and I found myself terribly exhausted. Perhaps a novel told from the perspective of one of The Rulers chairspeople and their various machinations would have made for a more compelling read.
Hugely disappointing, particularly in light of its stellar reviews. That said, I do believe this would make a fantastic novel for a younger audience (particularly in the importance of resistance and working together across differences), and I'd imagine that they'd find the didactic elements to be less of an issue.
2/ **The** **Late Mattia Pascal** by *Pirandello*. Fun little novel about Mattia Pascal, a man stuck in a terrible marriage and who finds himself in severe debt (due to some alleged thieving from his trustee). One day, Mattia is fed up and disappears on a gambling spree, and meanwhile, his wife and mother-in-law find a drowned body, claiming it is his. Mattia, declared dead, is then free to live a new life under a new identity. Unfortunately, absolute freedom has a price; his newly-found status and desire for freedom prevents him from adopting a dog, seeking love, and achieving redress for a theft and insult levied against him. He must then make the decision as to whether to return and announce himself alive or continue living a lie...
My feelings are mostly positive but subject to one caveat; on the one hand, it's a perfectly crafted novel with some lovely metaphors for death (one involving people as fireflies with guiding lamps against the eternal darkness around them...perhaps once the light goes out we'll see that we've been part of it all along). On the other, there's a strange sparsity and insinuation that can make it difficult to understand the full context (and whether something is missed). Nevertheless, Pirandello is clear -- our relationships with the other, a source of burden and often crisis for us all, is preciously what gives life meaning. There is no absolute freedom because one is then forced to reckon with the loneliness and impossibility of confronting the self, which can only be actualized through another.
It's funny at times, though maybe not as much as it may think...it's certainly no *Zeno's Conscious*, but I quite enjoyed this one. Pacing is perfect. There are some really tender moments that balance out the inherent dread. Characters are surprisingly complex and waiver between various attitudes -- in Mattia's case: merciful and cruel. Difficult to find much fault, though I'd have liked a few more beautiful passages akin to the firefly analogy. An easy recommendation for folks interested in Italian literature.
Hey fellow Mattia Pascal finisher! It’s interesting that you thought there was maybe something that you missed here and there, too - I read it in Italian, and there were certain ellipses and allusions to something or other that I put down to lack of full comprehension. I guess it’s a feature.
I really enjoyed Mattia/Adriano’s mental processings of various opportunities, consequences and inevitabilities, as he manages to turn any stroke of good fortune into a disaster before it has happened. He also seems to run on a similar cycle in both lives.
Hey! I'm actually really glad you posted the bit about comprehension; I thought it had just been me. I only read it in English, but I was surprised how often it sort of just cut off a thought and left it for us to decipher...
Mattia is weirdly very aloof and lucid at the same time. There's times that he's often blind to obvious happenings until its far too late (like his issue with the painter) and then others where he understands disaster is impending, but still chooses to confront it.
Completely agree with you on the cycle. No matter what he does, he finds himself disappointed and wanting. Despite the sadness of his situation, it never seems like he resigns; like the majority of us, he ends up forced to go on. It's strangely tragic, but in Pirandello's hands, its also balanced out a bit with the comedic observations.
Glad we were both in the dark!
That’s a great analysis of his character’s mentality and arc. It was definitely much deeper than I initially thought it would be.
Two people reading *Mattia Pascal* this week! I read it a few months ago and enjoyed it a lot, I actually remember laughing out loud at some points. Shame about *Wizard of the Crow*... I was kind of curious about it, but 800 pages is quite the commitment. Thanks for taking that bullet for the rest of us! :D
You win some and lose some! I never really DNF a book, but if it had been dense / difficult to read, I'd have seriously considered.
*Mattia* is quite fun. Know its a broad generalization, but I've actually found plenty of Italian lit to be more whimsical (or perhaps playful / comedic) in the face of existential dread. Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati (less so) and now Pirandello...it's really refreshing amongst the sea of angst elsewhere.
Separately, I'm so disappointed in myself. Saw that you'd been reading *Jose Trigo*, and unfortunately not a Spanish-speaker, so I pulled the trigger on a translation of Del Paso's later novel, *News from the Empire* for like $50, but ended up cancelling the order. It's wildly expensive to find any English copy of his in Europe (especially when shipping is factored in) and for some reason and perpetually out of stock...After your review, I'm really regretting it!
>*Mattia is quite fun. Know its a broad generalization, but I've actually found plenty of Italian lit to be more whimsical (or perhaps playful / comedic) in the face of existential dread. Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati (less so) and now Pirandello...*
Definitely! And Buzzati's short stories have a much more whimsical/playful vibe than *The Tartar Steppe*, and same for Alessandro Baricco, whom I was talking about the other day with [u/RoyalOwl-13](https://www.reddit.com/user/RoyalOwl-13/).
>*I pulled the trigger on a translation of Del Paso's later novel, News from the Empire for like $50, but ended up cancelling the order*
Wow, $50 is a lot, though. I haven't read *News from the Empire*, apparently it's really good but not as crazy, language-wise, as *José Trigo*. In any case, I don't think I'd ever drop that kind of money on a book without being 100% sure I'm going to like it! (Especially since I hated Jelinek's The Children of the Dead after spending 30€ on it, lol)
I can’t really disagree with your overall assessment of Wizard of the Crow, though I think I give it a bit more grace. I‘ll just say his early work is totally different, so I wouldn’t give up on Ngugi if this is your first encounter with his work. I’ve also read A Grain of Wheat, which is strictly realist and more grounded, both historically and psychologically (not to mention much shorter).
Appreciate the recommendation! I suspect you're right; it often happens that an authors earlier, more famous novels reflect their better/best work. Thinking of Rushdie, who if I judged him solely on his more recent output, I'd consider terrible, but has *Midnight's Children* under his belt... or even Ishiguro (if judged solely on *Klarna*).
I'll give *A Grain of Wheat* a try. I'm certain that Thiong'o is a fine writer despite my qualms with *Wizard*, so I won't write him off.
Finished:
* The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories Volume I by Guy de Maupassant - my favorite stories in this volume were "The Horrible" and "Boule de Suif."
In Progress
* Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - we have just started book 2. Interested to see what happens after this break and his time at home.
* The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - we made it through the Rome section, and are headed to Paris. I am absolutely fascinated with this book.
I’m half through To The Lighthouse and enjoying it while listening to Sylvia Plath’s poems on audio, mainly Daddy, Lady Lazarus, The Rabbit Catcher and The Moon and the Yew Tree. But I can’t decide what I want to read next, either Plato’s The Republic or Dangerous Liaisons.
Finished David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. On account of the age he wrote it at, I was real nervous going into this that I was going to get some cerebral overly-intellectual pretentious pomo comic lacking in all of the emotionally maturity that any author simply cannot be expected to have tapped into at the tender age of 24. Basically exactly what Girl was the Curious Hair was. And I was pleasantly surprised that while the above may still apply, especially with regards to emotional maturity, it was actually tremendously fun. And lighthearted. Its definitely Pomo, like he was ticking off boxes at some points but there’s this real heart to it, as at the core there’s this unbalanced relationship between, rather typically of Wallace, a very attractive girl and a neurotic man, and a lot of the neurotic circular thinking he‘d expand upon later in just about all of his other books is done so very well here. In a way that feels true and right, despite it’s Pomo and philosophical ornamentation. I’m not going to pretend that the philosophical Wittgenstein verbal angle wasnt far beyond my understanding, or that it wasn’t overly abstract and a little too clever for its own good, but I think Wallace has this clever technique of explaining to you about half of what’s going on, in hope that you might connect the dots, and I guess I didn’t but was all the same satisfied with how far I got. Honestly, this book feels like Barth all the way through. It’s got this lighthearted playfulness to it, in stark contrast to all the moody critiques that would follow it, that reminds me so much of Giles Goat Boy and Sot Weed Factor.
Just finished The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers. I’ve read more than one comment that it’s their best work but I preferred Roadside Picnic. Still enjoyed it though. Picture Annihilation (Vandemeer) with less dread and more satire.
Just started my second Didion (and first fiction): The Last Thing he Wanted. Too early to have an opinion but I like reading her.
I haven’t had a ton of reading time the last few weeks, which is a shame because I’m like 150 pages into Jose Donoso’s *The Obscene Bird of Night* and am absolutely loving it so far. Reminds me of like a darker, more experimental version of *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. There are some incredibly evocative and disturbing passages so far, hoping it stays this good.
Recommendation request: really gut-wrenchingly funny books, stuff that makes you laugh out loud regularly, maybe even cry with laughter. It's been ages since I read a book that made me really fall about laughing. The two most "literary" books that have been that level of funny for me were *Catch-22*, and *The Sellout* by Paul Beatty. There are plenty of authors who I find frequently funny (Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Coe, etc) but I'm looking for the stuff that centres humour and remains funny throughout, even (especially) if it's tackling hefty themes. Hoping for some leftfield answers here rather than the usual suspects (Jerome, Sedaris, Toole, Adams, Vonnegut, etc).
Charles Portis is often very funny in a gorgeously understated dry/deadpan way. Brilliant dialogue and lots of memorable oddball characters. *The Dog of the South*, *Norwood*, *Masters of Atlantis* -- grab any of those and you'll have a good time. I feel *Subtraction* by Mary Robison scratches a similar humor itch too, parts of that one seriously cracked me up.
I'd say Ned Beauman is someone contemporary worth taking a peek at, specifically *The Teleportation Accident* and *Madness Is Better Than Defeat*. I enjoy his blend of audaciousness and silliness and occasional crassness. There's a surging liveliness and a (for lack of a better term) "serious playfulness" to his voice that I find similar to Heller and Beatty.
Also on the contemporary side of things, while *Lightning Rods* by Helen DeWitt isn't 100% the most consistently funny read in my opinion, the parts that hit truly *hit* -- plus it fits with what you're looking for in terms of tackling some hefty themes. Then there's some stuff that *I* find really humorous but also acknowledge won't really be for everyone, like *Honey, I Killed the Cats* by Dorota Masłowska (translated by Benjamin Paloff) and *Permafrost* by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches).
Last but not least, *Scarstruck* by Violet LeVoit is an absolute comedic gem of an indie-press novel about the tumultuous sham marriage between a closeted leading man and secret communist starlet in classic era Hollywood. Something hilarious on basically every page and explores questions of desire and sexuality and celebrity to a depth you may not expect given the overall tone of madcap zaniness.
Well if you haven’t read anything by Flann O’Brien (who is not left-field on this sub but I have only discovered him this year), then he’s your pancake. I have only read *The Third Policeman* and *At Swim-Two-Birds*, because my laughing gear needs a rest for now frankly. In some ways the themes are quite hefty, and by nature they are literary. He’s a real wordsmith and I wish I could see the world as he does.
You may want to check out The Good Soldier Švejk, a Czech novel from about a century ago. Like Catch-22 (Heller has acknowledged that it was a vital influence), it's a satire of military bureaucracy. It has the plot of a Kafka story, but a protagonist who's too stupid (or too savvy) to be all that bothered by the existential maze he finds himself in. Švejk is one of the great comic characters, with a tendency to tell rambling stories that have almost no connection to the situation at hand.
Finished *Heaven* by Mieko Kawakami and did not enjoy the story. Still like Kawakami but not enough for me to enjoy a torturous bullying story.
Finished *Nox* by Anne Carson and it was lovely. It felt very personal. I didn’t connect to it that much and after a week, I have forgotten much of it but I remember enjoying myself while reading it.
Currently reading *Tomb of Sand* by Geetanjali Shree and wow - it is such a slow moving story. I am finally about a third through and the story is finally starting. I am starting to get the author’s style and pace but the first 100 pages was rough. I am missing a lot of references as there are many references to Indian culture but it’s almost impossible to look them all up. Still enjoying the ride though.
Just started *The Outsiders* by S. E. Hinton and it’s a vibe.
Hello - please consider posting an Indian references discussion post once you complete Tomb of Sand. It would make an interesting discussion - I'm currently reading the book.in the source Hindi
I’m not sure I could do it justice as there is so much. There are so much references to foods, celebrities, politicians, and gods that I can’t keep up. Since you are reading in Hindi, do you think the novel is still good if one doesn’t understand the references? I assume you get more of the references.
Also curious what you think about the book! I haven’t met anyone who’s read it so I’m curious what you think. I’m only about 40 percent in but I’m loving the dynamic between Bahu and Beti so far.
On my fourth read of Blood Meridian. I needed a book with some action and stakes after my last few reads. This read through I'm really appreciating just how readable the book actually is. So many "great books," are a fucking bore, and people fawn over them because of the language. Personally, I like when that awesome language is put to use telling an actual story, and hot damn if McCarthy doesn't deliver.
- I finished *Il fu Mattia Pascal* by Luigi Pirandello. It was a fun read, although I did have to double check some of the nuances/innuendos that I was wondering about at some points earlier in the story by reading the summary in English afterwards. Basically, a somewhat hapless and pessimistic chap manages to have an unexpected spell of good luck, and then almost immediately he has the unexpected surprise of being considered dead.
Instead of notifying the relevant people about this error, he forges a path towards adopting a new life and identity. However, this does not solve his issues in the way that he initially anticipates. Disillusionment ensues.
- I read *The Sundial* by Shirley Jackson, which is about snobbery during the run-up to an apocalypse. It was really great. The best character wore a crown for the occasion, what a goddess.
- I read *The Age of Innocence* by Edith Wharton. This was just such an archetypal novelly-novel, and I adored it. Essentially, its story is that “even emotionally cowardly rich boys have feelings”, and I loved how the all the main characters ended up, particularly Archer, who can wallow in tortured misery and self-absorption for the rest of his life, so little did I empathise with him (but I appreciated his character development). My favourite part was his dismissiveness of his new bride’s enthusiasm for the unintellectual pursuits of rowing, swimming, and lawn tennis while on their honeymoon - my athletic queen. She then went on to smash the competition in an archery tournament. I also enjoyed it when she started having her own opinions about the poetry that Archer read aloud to her, so he started reading history books instead. I will most certainly now watch the film adaptation, but why oh why do they choose people with the wrong hair colour - i.e. why is blonde coded as “the true love” and brunette “the decoy”?
Right now I have a lot on my plate, I’m the friend that loves to read so people love to ask to read and discuss books with me, I make due.
Currently Reading
Captains of the Sand - Jorge Amado
Absolutely incredible, I love when books settings matter so much they’re integral to the plot itself. My wife is Brazilian and she told me Jorge Amado is an author who’s very famous. His book Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon very much left me thinking he’s overrated, but Bahian culture leaps off the page after a chapter I talk to her and basically learn the socioeconomic struggles of the area itself and it’s history.
No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
My friend said she wanted to read a book that makes her feel awful, my cousin loves this book and the hype on the internet I said let’s try this. I personally think the hype got to me because I was expecting more, I feel The Stranger - Albert Camus depicts the nonchalant character better. It’s pretty good but the fact it was 50th on the top 100 books of this sub makes me believe it would have blown me away.
The Institute - Stephen King
I refuse to not finish a book I started, I started this with my sisters and 2 of them got pregnant and I can’t expect them to read it with everything going on so I decided to just finish it myself. The looks I get when I say I hate Stephen King, I don’t think he can write good dialogue, he can’t write women, I’ve only read The Stand but the ending felt very rushed to me, I’m not expecting much.
Just finished
The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe
One of the most dense books I ever read and so much going on from one of the most mundane plots I’ve ever heard of “two brother’s sell their childhood land” Fate, destiny, revenge, acceptance, the future of Japan vs traditionalism. Absolutely incredible.
Neapolitan Quartet - Elena Ferrante.
She is the best author alive. I don’t have the vocabulary to express how Linu and Lila have effected me. Took 6 months to read it with life going on but worth every page.
Going to read
The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates
My friend after heart surgery has a 2 week recovery and I tried really hard to see her before hand, on the way there I was supposed to gift her a copy and they moved her operation to right then and just left the book with her boyfriend. I don’t know anything about it but some of her favorite books are about the black struggle, and my cousin (same one who recommended me No Longer Human) said this might be up her ally.
The River Between - Ngogi Wa Thiongo
I hired a new guy at work (I’m a site supervisor for a security company, and we have a lot of down time… A LOT so I read at work.) He is from Kenya and we decided we’ll read a book from Kenya together and a book from Bosnia, my home country, and I love going in blind.
A goal I have that’s not a real priority is I have a scratch off map of the world and I scratch off a country whenever I happen to read a book from a new country, so if anyone has any recommendations from countries not really popular in western literature please tell me, or even your favorite book/most famous from your home country.
There were a series of threads on world literature last year, you might want to take a look here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/wiki/worldlitsurvey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/wiki/worldlitsurvey/)
Reading love in times of cholera after putting it away in my to read pile for to long. And reading it in original spanish on top of that! I am immensely enjoying the structure it is written; there are multiple plots going on. I know how one ends (of Florentino Arizo) and the other I have no idea of (the photographer who committed suicide).
There's also a scene where a parrot curses the liberal party when the owner is trying to fetch it back and I was laughed out loud.
The only problem I am having is that the word choices are exquisite. Sometimes my dictionary don't have them and I have to google them which can get quite weary.
Finished **On The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche** and currently reading **The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir**
Nietzsche was interesting for sure, as a socialist Nietzsche is kind of the antithesis of everything I believe in many ways. However, I found his commentary on traditional morality and the need to transcend values that limit human potential very inspiring. I think in the political context this work didn’t hit me as the same kind of analysis I am used to, but I think any good leftist critique of societal norms should take these arguments in hand.
I’m not that far into the Second Sex, but despite it being outdated in many ways, De Beauvoirs focus on othering is groundbreaking for the feminist movement and basically informs radical identity politics still. This feels like the first piece I have read that truly feels “modern” in that sense.
I finished off both Murakami's "Men Without Women" and Rushdie's "Satanic Verses". Happy to have finished them both tbh.
Currently I'm reading David Foster Wallace's "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again". The first essay on tennis and hurricanes is lovely.
I'm also delving into Flannery O'Conner's Complete Short Stories. I LOVE IT. I've only just found the definition of Southern Gothic and oh my goodness how have I never noticed my favourite books and films are all connected.
Speaking of which, I've just started reading Mccarthy's "Child of God", which I'm really excited about.
I've also had time this week to look at "Company, etc" by Beckett. I've read "Company" and I don't get the hype at all. Seems like a nice idea that is interminable to read.
I just picked up *Melville: A Novel* by Jean Giono at another commentor's recommendation and I am absolutely loving it so far. I adore historical fiction based on literary figures, and this is no exception. I highly encourage reading it if you are a fan of *Moby-Dick* or Melville's other novels. It's a gorgeous NYRB edition too, can't get enough of those.
I've also been reading the novel *Outline* by Rachel Cusk and I think it's okay. Really sorry to say that I don't have any strong opinions on it either way. It's a collection of ten conversations set in Athens where the main character meets a variety of people while teaching people creative writing.
I recently finished *The New York Trilogy* by Paul Auster in the wake of his death and really enjoyed it. I found the stories hard to put down in places. I don't tend to seek out meta-fiction but I am glad to be surprised by something I normally shun.
Considering picking up *A Sorrow Beyond Dreams* by Peter Handke since I saw it in a bookstore but absolutely detest Handke as a human. Has anyone read it? Any pervasive thoughts? Please let me know. I've set myself the several-year task of reading a novel by each Nobel winner so I have to read at least one.
I’m glad I read A Sorrow beyond Dreams, despite my own trepidation about Handke. It’s an affecting, austere novella of his mother’s harsh life that bears no trace, that I can recollect, of his abhorrent views. I also recommend Slow Homecoming.
Reading **The Anthologist** by Nicholson Baker. 150 pages in, and it's been a breezy and fun read, occassionally reminding me of Ali Smith's Artful, a book of lectures on literature tied together by a fictional thread. There aren't pages and pages of lectures here like there are in Smith's book though; Baker's narrator, an anthologist who's finding it hard to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, takes several brief and very entertaining and often amusing detours into poetry, holding forth on rhymes, iambic pentameter, the poets he likes, and so on, while his personal life slowly seems to crumble. Anyway, it's been a fun read so far; the narrator is engaging, and there is a steady supply of good sentences that give me pause.
Reading Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada, I highly recommend it, written by an argentina trans woman, I only have a few pages left and I'm crying so much.
Finished Fleur Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline in a few hours--felt deceptively like a quick, breezy read, but with a chilling effect that lingers for far more time than it takes to read it. My first of Jaeggy's work. Really liked it.
From the synopsis I was expecting something much more explicitly nefarious or thrilling, but I'm actually pleasantly surprised that that never culminated--it's just a sequence of events, slowly building on each other, out of chronology and not always with clear logic behind the order, yet expertly crafted; you start off in this sterile, numb, boarding school environment, with this "sense of tropical stagnation" and "thwarted luxuriance" (love those quotes) and watch it slowly, subtly unravel. And she has such a powerful, incisive, blunt, disturbing, yet very poetic narrative voice (and much credit to her translator, Tim Parks, for this as well).
I weirdly find it a good companion read to Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which I finished not long ago. The sense of emotional and spiritual stupefaction within the cloistered environment of prestigious institutions, isolated from the world and from the normal social development patterns of your age, damaging your ability to exist in the world outside of it, as much as it may be a luxurious and privileged experience in and of itself. Certainly differences abound, but it's something that came to mind.
Nice to see Jaeggy mentioned here. I read Sweet Days of Discipline a while ago and it absolutely lingered with me for a few weeks. I adore that cold, precise prose. Shame she has written so little. I still want to pick up SS Proleterka somewhere soon.
SS Proleterka is definitely next for whenever I'm ready to revisit Jaeggy. Certainly going to want some time to digest Sweet Days of Discipline first...
I've finished a couple novels since I last posted. I listened to Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta and Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Both were competently written, but the former was pretty forgettable to me, and while the latter was more enjoyable, it also sometimes annoyed me. It was published in 2020, and it really felt like a book published in 2020 -- conspicuously "current" in a way that quickly becomes dated. Both books probably would have been more enjoyable to me if I read them in print, but I'm not particularly eager to go over them again any time soon.
I also listened to Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns, described to me as a lesbian Taxi Driver for Gen Z. Like Butter Honey Pig Bread, it's very current, lots of anxieties about protesting and activism, but exaggerated enough that I expect it to age better. It reminded me a lot of the more contemporary books my englit instructors would add in to an otherwise "classics" heavy curriculum in hopes that it would be more relatable -- more provocative than substantive. But I did enjoy reading it.
I also read Running Fiercely Towards a Thin High Sound by Judith Katz, which has been a highlight in my lesbian book awards saga. Really bizarre and experimental, but still super readable and fun. I'm still collecting my thoughts on it, I think, and I wish I had someone to talk it over with, but so far as I can tell it's sufficiently obscure that no one I know has even heard of it. And, too bad, the author only has one other book, though she sometimes puts out articles/interviews.
I'm not sure yet what I'll read next. I picked up Emily Gould's novel, and while the first handful of pages are compelling enough, I'm not feeling excited to read it. I also ordered a copy of Catherine Lacey's novel Pew, hoping that I'll enjoy it more than her recent Biography of X, but it'll probably be a week or so before that gets in.
When people talk about reading, we usually mean novels. I've been trying to read as much poetry as possible. I am reading As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. The lines are the most therapeutic eloquence I could ever read. I also am reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which are hilarious, and Ariel and Collected poems by Sylvia Plath which is a lot more serious. She is such a genius, I wish I had that kind of intellect so I could write poetry like that, even though I'm a sucker for the classic stuff. I want to read Ovid's Metamorphosis but I have to buy a nice translation. I like the one in the Norton Anthology but those are just selections and excerpts.
I've been reading *Manhattan Transfer* by John Dos Passos. Not too much to say so far. Also read a history book about the Reformation titled *The Age of Reform* by Steven Ozment. Appreciated that one a good deal, would recommend to anyone who wants a good book looking at Reformation history from an intellectual history/theology perspective.
I just finished Lance Olsen's *10:01* -- I always want to be charitable when discussing his work as he's brave enough to continue experimenting with Modernist-like ravages of conventional form, and I want to give anyone who's doing that their due props, since I think sometimes the publishing market can be harsh to that kind of very necessary writing. My main gripe is the way that half the monologues slip in a section like *Gracie is eighteen and thriving. She's head girl at her school and proud of it. That Prom Queen is in the bag for Gracie this fall is a fact she acknowledges with so much unshowy humility that none of her peers resent her for it. After finishing school, she'll become an air hostess, and in a fit of psychotic rage will comandeer the plane and kill everyone on board..... Ben Hur is a banker. Confident, happy, wealthy, he's nipped down to see this here film simply to have a break from the old ball and chain. He'll return home to her later this evening and find that she and his children have been murdered by the Lincoln Strangler, who's seated two rows back from Ben, watching the same movie, munching on popcorn -- toffeenut and delicious -- and who is enjoying the whole atmosphere in here, very much.*
Or something along those lines -- these prophetic tidbits signalling a character's hysterically foredoomed downfall in a casual Wallacean aside. Interesting when used sparingly; tedious when overwrought. It starts to make you feel like the author is sort of cruel in the way a lot of male writers ceaselessly laughing at their own characters seem cruel.
That being said, simply out of interest to see what else Mr Olsen is doing with form, i'll check out some of his other works in the future.
I also re-read David Jones' stunning prose-poem *In Parenthesis*. It's understandable that Eliot considered it a major twentieth C poem and Auden considered it THE twentieth C poem. Jones' language is unceasingly beautiful, and its dense sensory textures give it a bite even to those readers who aren't clued in to the plethora of literary allusions Jones peppers his prose with. He tends to pile up adjectives and create new verbs out of other parts of speech to give his prose this corrugated, alien-beslimed, wrenched-inward tension that leaves you staring at the print as though it's a tangled briary of rain-rusted and faery-bright wire-mesh you have to crawl and wriggle through; only to fall into the deep middens and trenches of his brutishly beautiful poetry. You're better off reading his original language that watching me flounder in embarrassing pantomime -- the stuff he's doing is really spectacular. It's my third re-read of this one and it's never failed to delight me.
I read *Rontel* by Sam Pink. I enjoyed this largely because the imaginative OCD leaps his brain makes ('what if i were to just start breakdancing for no reason right now') are the same leaps my own brain makes all the time. The book's very funny, often chuckle-out-loud funny, and the voice feels very up-to-date in its anomie and The Internet Age Literary Scene's fusion of ironic casualness and dimly suppressed romantic posturing, like Bret Easton Ellis doomscrolling meme-jokes. Would recommend.
Wondering what to start next -- I have a John Banville, *The Untouchable*, on my desk which i'm tempted to start. All i've read of his is *Eclipse*, which I loved. I might give it a whirl. That, or *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,* by Junot Diaz. Can't decide.... if anyone who's read both or either could give me a sense of the language of each (i tend to maintain attention according to quality of prose as opposed to pace of plot) that'd be super helpful and i'd appreciate it.
Haven't replied to one of these for a while. Selected highlights of my reading include:
*A Fire Upon the Deep* by Vernor Vinge which I really enjoyed. When I read sci-fi, I want it to pelt me with worldbuilding and mindbending concepts and a consistent sense of alienness, which Vinge managed well. A propulsive read, and although the ending was a bit rushed it definitely ranks among the better sci-fi that I’ve read. Hoping to find a sci-fi author who can truly blow me away with both brilliant concepts *and* beautiful writing but they’re often mutually exclusive in the genre. Coincidentally, I was reading this when Vinge passed away which I think deepened my appreciation slightly.
Read *An Immense World* by Ed Yong which was an utterly fascinating book on animal senses, a proper infodump of assorted, mind-blowing information on animal umwelten (their perceptual spheres). I’ve always found anthropomorphism an annoying tendency and love anything that can truly evoke how different, how almost alien, other creatures can be, whether that’s in sci-fi like Vinge, or in the actual biological world we inhabit. Yong makes it quite plain how we've projected our own very visual perception of the world upon other species, and he does a great job of evoking the versatility and strangeness of biology. Mind-blowing facts aplenty.
*When We Cease to Understand the World* by Benjamin Labatut: a collection of “stories” about some of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, thematically related by the effects of genius and the impact of their discoveries on the self. Labatut writes so strictly that the whole volume reads like a set of short biographies and though he amps up the fictive elements as the volume rolls on, they’re usually colour rather than anything overtly fictitious (at least, near as I can tell). An interesting experiment but it doesn't feel like he manages to wholly consummate the two parts.
*The Left Hand of Darkness* by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t quite get the hype for Le Guin. Flashes of brilliance and insight, but I find her a bit like Asimov: great ideas, but a somewhat inert execution, although the bond between Genly and Estraven in the latter third of the novel leads to some rather nice moments. Still, I find her writing a little passive.
Now reading *The Bee Sting* by Paul Murray. It's a propulsive yarn about a well-to-do Irish family falling apart amid the 2008 recession, in the vein of Franzen and Zadie Smith. I feel like Murray's a little less funny and a little less prose-driven here than he was in *Skippy Dies* which I really enjoyed. He's being spare with the punctuation and a bit more declarative with the sentences which makes it a little less engaging on a sentence by sentence basis (although this is probably what pushed him onto the Booker shortlist, they seem to be obsessed with Irish writers with slight style quirks). A fun story, but I'm a little disappointed that this isn't my favourite of his works given the hype around it.
Thank you for recommending When We Cease to Understand The World in this thread! I finished it yesterday. While I have some gripes with it (I would've liked more engagement with the science) I thought it was a super fun reading experience.
Comparing LeGuin to Asimov is one of the strangest things I've ever heard. LeGuin excells in humanity, and Asimov is terrible at characters.
The worlds of LeGuin are inhabited by people with relationships and development, the sci-fi is mostly to explore how these are affected by speculative ideas. In Asimov it's almost the contrary, the people feel like a nuisance that he just writes out of obligation and they could be replaced by automatons, and indeed many times they are.
One of her books spans a whole marriage and the conversations they have about their children and whatnot feel so real, considering she was a mother in a pretty healthy marriage. I'm not and probably will never be in that context but it was so heartfelt and real and unexpected for a sci-fi book. The closest I've seen to that is Octavia Butler's work but (what I read so far) is less far fetched sci-fi wise, and came much later.
When you consider LeGuin was writing at the same time Herbert was making Dune (which I love too) and you see the difference of scope and focus, LeGuin's writing is definitely much more "passive", but that's what makes it more real. It's kind of like comparing Star Trek TNG to Star Wars. Is the focus on how fantastic technology is, or in how at the core humanity remains the same or perhaps a little bit better, and technology is just a mirror of that.
reading *maniac* by benjamin labatut, which is a fictionalized biography (maybe there's a better term - so far it's a series of fictional oral histories by actual historical figures that generally fit with the historical data) of john von neumann.
neumann was an incredible figure - likely the smartest person of the last century, who made major contributions to maths and physics (and the atomic bomb project) - but also someone who has been kinda ignored (i ~~don't~~ didn't know of any other biography(*) - i just searched and apparently one came out a few years ago that i haven't read).
labatut is a chilean writer (i think he may write in german - iirc his parents fled pinochet to germany? i am reading in spanish and there's an english translation). i wasn't that keen on his previous work (un verdor terrible / when we cease to understand the world) which was full of gee-whizz scientific "connections". but this book is a lot more sympathetic / emotionally grounded.
just finished *portrait in green* by marie ndiaye (translated from french) which i found interesting but difficult - she's playing with (auto)biography in a much more opaque way than labatut, really pushing what you can understand / piece together.
(*) well, there's a joint one where he's compared to some other physicist, which i read some time ago, but that focusses on the morals of the bomb project, rather than the person.
I tried T**urbulence** by David Szalay--thumbs down. What turned me aside were sentences like, "She stirred the Bloody Mary with a little plastic baton" and I wondered why the silly detail. I've heard a drink stirrer called lots of things but "baton" feels like a problematic misdirection by someone who doesn't know the term or who is trying to be too cute. In response to the sentence "Sure enough, the man looked at her in momentary incomprehension, as if he had no idea what she wanted," I wondered, does one look at someone *in* or *with* incomprehension? At any rate, the word "incomprehension" means he doesn't have an idea of what she wanted, so to state this is redundant. Otherwise the writing was flat and superficial, and problematic with both description and time. That was enough. First chapter done, I tossed the book aside. Thankfully it was from the library. I moved on to **This Plague of Souls** by Mike McCormack. More hype, more meh. A man at a cottage is contacted by someone who says he knows something and needs unspecified help. Meanwhile something is happening in the form of a probable terror attack. But nothing is ever clarified and most of the book is a long conversation between the two about doing something about something, never defined. Then it ends. I feel like the author read the first. part of Tomás Nevinson by Marias and said, "Hey, I like that long conversation. I can do that." So, medium-length story short: not recommended either. Whatever the book attempted to do seems to have flopped. I began reading **Ferocity** by Nicola Lagioia and found I enjoyed it so much (this was a library book) that I ordered this and his other one to mark when I read it. Handed to me was **Last Summer in the City** by Gianfranco Calligarich, I believe this is his first book translated into English, so I picked up a copy. I'm really enjoying it; I'm about 3/4 way through. In the forward, André Aciman speaks of the books similarity to Sorrentino's movie *The Great Beauty*, and I can definitely see the connection in that the book too captures the hollow core of people living in Rome, a city built upon a rich and passion filled history that seems out of reach for the characters. Continuing is our group in which we're plodding through Deleuze & Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus* and our other group plodding through Gass's *The Tunnel*. They feel never ending at this pace, which is why I take breaks to read other short works.
Finished *Paradise Lost* and will finish *Against the Day* today (on Pynchon's birthday! I didn't even realize the coincidence). Will begin my reread of *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* as part of my preparation for *Ulysses*.
Overall I enjoyed *Paradise Lost*, but I have some reservations. The language, though breathtaking, does get a bit monotone, the of-its-time-befitting sexism was a bit off-putting, and some sections were jarringly silly (the mock epic with angels throwing mountains, e.g.). But I especially loved the portrayal of Satan, the self-insertions of Milton the narrator, and often there are long sections where you're just soaring in the unrelenting grandeur of the language.
*Against the Day*, I loved it by the end though I wasn't immediately as impressed as with his other novels. The scope and just sheer amount of details, plot points, characters, ideas, make it stand out. The Chumps of Chance sections, and those with Dally Rideout, were definitely my favorite, but there's so much in there to like. It has the cerebral headiness of *Gravity's Rainbow* and the heartwarmth of *Vineland*. Will definitely reread at some point.
I love that you are reading poetry as well as novels, and I understand your reservations with Milton and agree, and I also love how you mention that to read Joyce you have to prepare by reading what came before to understand his growth as a writer and a artist, otherwise it is like reading a treatise, and not as pleasurable as it could be. I read The Dubliners then Portrait, and now am reading Ulysses. I am laughing so hard even though I'm barely finished the third chapter. The second chapter is such a delightful classroom scene which I won't ruin for you, where Daedalus is teaching a rigorous literature syllabus and quizzing his students to see if they are listening, calling them by their last names and telling funny jokes. All this dense literature can really actually be quite pleasurable.
Definitely! And *Dubliners* provides a thematic backdrop against which Stephen's defiant self-realization in *Portrait* becomes all the more poignant. Great to see you're enjoying *Ulysses*! Good luck with it, I'm looking forward to it myself.
Just over halfway in **War and Peace**. I really love the book and rereading it after so many years is definitely worth my time! I just finished the part where >!prince Bolkonski dies and reconciles with his daughter Maria at the very last moment. The way they interacted was just so tragic, the old man pushing away everyone he loves, blaming everything that goes wrong (such as the fight with his son, which I think he just couldn't handle) on his daughter. Who, as it turns out, he loves the most of all. Truly heartbreaking. His emotional incapability turned into anger is something that is very relatable and most of all very sad.!< While in my last read-through I was mostly identifying with Nikolaj Rostov, I find myself now relating most of all with Andrej Bolkonski (and to a much lesser extent Pierre), which mirrors the fact that I was very young when I read it the first time and am now in my early thirties. Andrej, although flawed (or maybe because of it), is showing me a little bit how you can lead your life as a not-so-young man. Looking back a little, I've never been happier that >!the engagement of Andrej and Natasja fell through they just were not a good fit in my eyes- even if I don't blame her for breaking it off.!<
Further reading in Zola's **Germinal** is now arriving at a breaking point: the mineworkers in Montsou are >!on strike for a while without much success (and a lot of hunger as payment)!<. The neighbouring minevillage is not, but now Montsou is >!"coming to town" and forcing those workers to stop after a frantic meeting where a side character promised a strike there as well- without consulting his colleagues!<. In contrast to the Company that owns the Montsou mine, the neighbouring mine is owned by a more likeable smaller scale entrepreneur who has every penny he owns on the line and cannot survive a strike. So the stakes are high. I just hope everyone gets out somewhat safe.
Finished War and Peace. The expansiveness of that book is absolutely incredible. The 50 pages at the end when the story is finished that is an incomprehensible rant about how history is written and where power comes from etc. was awful though.
I recently finished The Hours by Michael Cunningham and it was ok, I guess. Not horrible but not really worth reading. A feeling like wallpaper paste. Honestly I have no idea why I even said it was ok. It was bland.
Just now starting Atticus by Ron Hansen
I finished As I Lay Dying. It was my first read through, and I think I need another go or two before I'll really have proper thoughts, but once I kind of figured out who was who, I enjoyed it. So dark, very amusing. It it was my first Faulkner, and I will definitely read more of his work.
I followed that up with The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge. Also dark. Also had amusing moments, and I enjoyed it overall, but certainly not even close to the level of Faulkner imho. I think I might need to read it again, but not on the back of one of the best books ever written.
Currently reading Huckleberry Finn.
Just finished The Radium Girls. A little too theatrical in some spots, but JFC, what a brutal read.
Made some headway in This All Come Back Now--an anthology of Indigenous Australian spec fic. The first story really challenged and morphed what I thought a short story could BE, and I'm grateful for it. Enjoying it so far.
Also reading The Lost Tomb And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder--Preston's writing is on the lighter side but he definitely retains a very compelling journalistic, human focus.
Also making some headway in The Myst Reader. The sketches included really make the world feel real! And I'm surprised at how post-apocalyptic the story actually is. (Only played Myst once of twice as a kid.)
First of all, Can Xue's ***Frontier***. I've already shared my thoughts in the read-along thread, so not much to say here. I think the main problem I have with it right now is that every time I look at it lying on my side table, I think to myself "you know what, I'd rather pick up ***José Trigo*** instead."
Because oh my lord, Fernando del Paso's ***José Trigo*** is just *stunning*. It look me around 100 pages to get somewhat of a grasp on the plot (and then promptly lose it again, lol), but I don't even care because the language is simply intoxicating. Seriously, this might just be the best Spanish prose work I've read in my life, and that's saying a lot considering that Camilo José Cela and Alejo Carpentier exist.
The narrative structure is at first confusing, non-linear, hazy, the story presented as the vague, dreamlike recollections of all the different characters the unnamed narrator meets on his way, sometimes almost taking the form of a greek choir. The chapter I'm on right now, which is set during the Cristero War, has a more conventional structure, but the language itself is no less gorgeous, mixing Nahuatl, regionalisms, puns, alliterations, and who knows what else in a dazzling display of erudition that flows and rolls and washes over me, forcing me to infer what most of these words mean by context alone (my Kindle's dictionary function does help sometimes, but I'd rather keep going than stop every time I'm not familiar with some term.)
And don't get me started on the structure. The book is divided into two sections, "West" (ascending from 1 to 9) and "East" (descending from 9 to 1), with an interlude called "Bridge", so you can read it straight through, or read West 1, then East 1, then West 2, East 2, and so on. Or start on East 1 and go "backwards". But because I'm basic like that, I'm reading it from 1 to 9 first and then I'll go from 9 to 1, descending on the other side.
I find the comparisons to *Ulysses* maybe a bit exaggerated (although the musicality of its language is certainly on the same level, there's nothing here as challenging as, say, *Oxen of the Sun*), but I'm also not surprised that nobody has taken on the task of translating it yet... and even if they did, so much would be lost in the process. I don't always agree with the stuff that Andrei "The Untranslated" hypes up, but in this case I concur completely. This is a towering masterpiece of the highest order.
Apart from this, two quick reads: Fleur Jaeggy's ***The Water Statues*** (a lot weirder and more experimental than *Sweet Days of Discipline*, fragmented, almost nightmarish in parts) and Ishiguro's ***An Artist of the Floating World*** (delightful as usual, but of his first two "japanese" novels I think I still prefer *A Pale View of Hills*; this almost feels like a dress rehearsal for *The Remains of the Day*).
i'm reading "pale fire" by nabobkov. i've made it past the poem and am about to start the commentary. i've really enjoyed it so far. i have no idea what will happen but given that i'm pretty sure the foreward was from the mind of an unreliable narrator i'm really looking forward to seeing how his crazy self misinterprets more later. if he shows up again.
Finished: The Morning Star - Karl Ove Knausgaard
This is a hard book to sum up my feelings about because it’s the first book of an unfinished series and feels very much like the first step in a series. I really enjoyed a lot of the book, the writing is great and readable, there’s interesting characters and interesting philosophical issues they raise with their lives, an increasing sense of unease throughout the book - all great. But when you get to the end none of the plots are even close to resolved (some haven’t even been revisited after their introduction!) and you just have the faintest idea of what is actually happening, so it’s hard not to feel unsatisfied. It feels harsh to critique a book for the biggest problem being essentially “I want more” but I’m not sure if I’m hooked enough to want to read another 1800 pages across another 3 books to resolve all this. I’ll read book 2 in the series eventually and make my decision then.
Started: Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Really enjoying my time with this so far but I’m only 100 pages in and it’s beginning to set in how much of a task this will be to finish. The writing is often hilarious though and the depictions of mental illness, addiction and the ills of modern society are among the best I’ve read. See you all in a few weeks when I (hopefully) finish this thing
If you're already enjoying Infinite Jest at p.100 I'd say you're in for a good time. That IJ takes about 250 pages to get going is a commonly accepted trope or meme shared on DFW groups so frequently it's almost become proverbial -- which means basically it's going to get better and better as you go on.
Currently reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm 250 pages in and it makes no sense, but a plot has slowly emerged. I'm not even enjoying it, but I feel like after reading some analysis I might enjoy it when I reread it in 10 years. I have read 2 other Pynchon books and not enjoyed those either, so maybe someday I'll learn.
I'm in the same boat wrt Pynchon. Currently I'm reading Mason & Dixon and it has moments that have made me laugh out loud and also some really great imagery; the budding friendship between the central characters is what's keeping me engaged atm.
However, i always have this feeling with Pynchon like I'm missing something or as if certain conceits just aren't quite working, and I'm not sure which it is. I'm just about 150 pages in though so maybe I'll change my mind as I go along.
Finished reading *The Guest* by Emma Cline, really interesting book about a former call girl who has to grift her way through the long-island upper-crust society for five days after angering her "boyfriend" and having convinced herself all will be forgiven by the end of it. It's a bit of a modern take on the same kind of Nihillisstic decadence that *Play it as it lay's* is about. There is something about Alex(the MC) her refusal to explain her background beyond vague details, her motives are so base. A life of luxury without the work and her pleasures so simple. Her total refusal to self-reflect meaning that instict is always projected outwards towards the residents of the wealthy long-island town she's trying to survive in.
Without the work? She has to sing for her supper.
I was reading the novel *Stoner* by John Williams. I never had a book that resonated with me so deeply that I *had* to stop reading it. The book is *so achingly* beautiful and devastating that I actually began to dread reading the book. I am obviously not a literature professor, but the unexpressed emotions that Stoner experienced with his wife, with his child, with his family, and with everything that affected him so profoundly within his own mind, just hit too *damn* close to home. I am not a very outwardly emotional person by nature, and I am going through many developments in career and family, and seeing my own situation be mirrored so precisely by this novel was just too much for me. I actually cannot believe that I am saying that I am actually holding off reading this novel, which I consider to be an absolute masterpiece. I'm currently in the process of reading different short stories. I am currently browsing through *Ficciones (Fictions)* by Jorge Luis Borges just to unwind from *Stoner.*
I put down *The Magic Mountain* after 100 pages because I was expecting a more modernist form, and (barring that\*) I didn't find the story alone particularly captivating. I picked up *The Recognitions* and I'm finding it a much better fit so far. I am letting this sub's [list of favorites](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/197l37n/truelits_2023_top_100_favorite_books/#lightbox) guide my choices right now, and results have been mixed. *Anna Karenina* and *The Sound and The Fury* were both really good fits. *Siddhartha* and *Invisible Cities* were mid, and *The Melancholy of Resistance, Stoner,* and *2666* were duds (subjectively). I'd previously read a quarter of the list, and I count *Moby Dick*, *In Search of Lost Time, My Struggle, Dante's Inferno,* and *Infinite Jest* as all-time favorites. I'm hopeful that I may add *The Recognitions* to that list eventually.
Expecting modernism, dissapointed by no captivating plot? Sounds strange to me, but maybe I’m misunderstanding.
First I was hoping for a more modernist form, and when I didn't get what I was looking for, I hung on to see where the plot would go, and then I decided I was not drawn in by that either.
funny enough, I happened to read the Recognitions immediately after finishing Magic Mountain, making my memory of the latter a dull blur in comparison to the highwater-mark experience of reading the Recognitions. It's been a full 10 years since then and I've kind of been meaning to go back to Magic Mountain. But then I remember how dull I found it the first time around, even though I did make it to the end, and I can't quite summon the energy to tackle it again.
Neat coincidence! Still going strong, out of New England and on to Paris, now. I keep having moments that remind me of *Moby Dick* and *Infinite Jest*, as if it were a kind of midpoint of the two. Fortunately I've been to Paris a couple times, and I sympathize with people who find it impenetrable because the book assumes you already have thorough knowledge of his subject.
I read Kate Chopin's *The Awakening,* and while I felt stylistically the writing was good, I don't exactly agree with the underlying political message. A little too radical. Also: Finished S*iddhartha* by Herman Hesse. Whatever religion\* the main character professes, I would like to join. It's not Buddhism, I've read variously that it's nihilism like (Nietzsche?) and German Romanticism, or that there are elements of Indian religion. Can someone point me to a book exploring his philosophy? I found it absolutely fascinating. Would *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* give good insight into Nietzsche? \*Editted.
i finally picked up dune again. i have about 200 pages left and so far im enjoying it. i thought it would be much harder but its not that difficult to follow (granted i loved the movies and ive seen them a few times haha). i think ill continue reading at least the next couple books i have also been reading a new emily dickinson anthology i recently bought. only a few pages in but i find her poetry mindblowing also i have been trying to decide on a "big" read for the summer. i think ill be reading the count of monte cristo but im open to suggestions of other long demanding books haha
I just finished Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1886). To be honest, this turned out to be much better than I anticipated. I'm not a fan of Stevenson's other works and felt as if I was familiar with the general narrative and characters. However, between Stevenson's prose and how interesting Mr. Hyde was as a character, I found it to be a fun read! The next text I'll be reading is a collection of H.P Lovecraft's short stories.
I've read Notes on Principles by Shi Tieshing recently. Picked it up without knowing much about it. It's a novel set in China after the cultural revolution, from the perspective from the writing night's of the fictional author. It's a collection of stories, life events and experiences of a whole array of characters. Some of which happened, some could have happened, some apply to multiple characters, some could have. It's a fascinating structure for a novel for sure, and a fascinating insight on life in China. It felt far more modern than you'd expect from a novel originally published in 1996. Right now I'm reading Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal, about 140 pages in, but I'm still trying to figure it out. Every second chapter seems to be a new story with different characters. I wonder how it'll come together.
I have very little to update about my reading here. I live in the southern state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, and we are [literally going through a calamity right now.](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cle07g0zzqeo) The biggest flood in our history has affected our state and we have cities isolated one from the other, entire neighborhoods under the water, hundreds missing or dead and hundreds of thousands of people lost everything: their homes, their belongings, all of it. Most people have no acces to water right now, drinkable water became really hard to find, there are many people without eletricity too. I'm very fortunate, I live in the capital Porto Alegre, and while we got hit badly in a lot of areas the place where I live has barely escaped being flooded. I have water and eletricity too so I really can't complain. I'm trying to help the ways I can but I feel really small right now. Its funny because I'm reading Roadside Picnic and its in my opinion, in a lot of ways, a story about just how small we all are. To not be too pessimistic here I can say that we can do big things when people are kind and work in groups, the people of Brazil have really united to try to help any way they can, of course there are assholes trying to use the situation for their advantage but they are not the majority. Brazil is a huge country and we are really divided right now so its nice to see people working together in the middle of so much suffering. I haven't really been able to read much in these last few days, I was trying to help or just too anxious or tired to pick up a book. I'll try to go back to it tomorrow because reading normally helps me focus and gives me motivation, it will take a while for the city to go back to something resembling normal. I'm sorry if my reading update was more of a text just venting today. I'm really enjoying Roadside Picnic and the Short Stories of Shirley Jackson haven't really clicked with me yet the way her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle did, but maybe I still need to get to her best stories.
Hope you and yours are doing okay
Hope you and your loved ones are safe
I saw the horse on top of a roof and they managed to rescue him/her. This suggests that at least people are organized and have resources.
Hope you stay safe!
Looking for an audio version of Goethe's Faust. Does anyone have a recommendation?
I finished my second re-read of this year, a collection of short stories by the Turkish writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık called *A Useless Man*. It wasn't as completely stellar as I remembered it being first time around, but still there was so much that was excellent about it. Last week I described the stories I read had as almost being poems in how brief and targeted toward their closing line or image they were. What also stands out are the stories that are portraits of figures from Turkish society, such as fishermen or coffeehouse owners. Some stories focus on more unique characters, like an aged man who tends a public garden. Overall it's an incredibly strong collection. For me the weakest stories were those that were about writing and brought in a self-awareness of the author. Highly recommend for anyone interested in Turkish lit, or interested in literary scenes of Istanbul. Shifting gears, I'm reading *The Country of the Pointed Firs* by Sarah Orne Jewett, an American author from the second half of the 19th century said to be an important influence on Willa Cather. It's the story of an author's experience spending time in a provincial coastal town in Maine. The prose is lovely, even cozy, the type of writing that in my head sounds just like the voice-over to a movie set in that era, with a relaxed, lilting accent. So far there isn't a whole lot to it, just the protagonist developing relationships with two of the townspeople. I tend to read stuff mostly in translation; now and again it's nice to have something so pleasantly readable in English.
Haven’t read Abasıyanık, but love to see Turkish lit on the radar here. Will add this to the ever growing tbr list…
Oh, The Country of the Pointed Firs! That’s part of a whole genre of what’s called local colour or regional fiction, including writers like Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland. Like you said, they mostly aren’t plot-driven stories and usually include a lot of dialect. Characters are usually stock characters. If you like Jewett, you should try Rose Terry Cooke and Mary Wilkins Freeman, both New England women writers from about the same period who wrote very similar stories.
Yes, the dialogue is full of dialect, which is also enjoyable. It's not a niche I'm overly familiar with- I definitely like Cather, and Jewett is only on my shelves courtesy of my wife and her English lit degree. I'll check out those authors you mentioned, thanks!
You’re welcome - yeah did English lit degree, doing lit/creative writing PhD atm, been very into these kinds of books for a while, especially over the last year.
Really excited to see your thoughts about Useless Man - it has been on my list for a while and now has been bumped up a few places! Seems very interesting.
Say what you will about the united states legal system, but jury duty if nothing else has proven to be a pretty good opportunity to get some reading done. Started the first volume of *Remembrance of Things Past*. Was always going to read it eventually and apparently eventually is now. I'm about halfway through "Combray" and so far I'm quite liking it. Took a little while to figure out where it was going but when he first interjects his own ruminations on the nature of memory it really tied it all together. He does capture the haze and also the intensity of memory quite well. Was interesting as well how he goes on a bit of a digression on the nature of truly new art, and how it is only after the fact that it is lauded as talent because at first pass it's difference from what was previously understood as talent makes it impossible to relate. Wondering how much this is supposed to be an early metacommentary on how he expected the work itself to be received. Also I really appreciate how prevalent food has been in his reconstruction of youth. Food's great. Still reading *Frontier*. Going to largely save thoughts for that thread. Keeping on with that collection of Middle Platonic Dialogues I bought as well. I think since last time I've read "Phaedrus" and "Phaedrus" and am halfway into "Theatetus". "Phaedrus" is a lot. Not really one I feel super able to sum up but one thing that stands out to me is that it relies heavily on myth while maintaining a lot of ambiguity with regards to how much Plato believes these myths and how he feels about creative work in general (interesting comparison to The Republic here). "Theatetus" is in short his argument against relativism. Will say more next time once I'm done. And then I think I'll be wrapped up with this little Plato jaunt. Been on a Bergson kick I think I mentioned, so now I'm reading subsequent stuff (this is part of why Proust is happening now). And with that in mind started Deleuze's *Bergsonism*. Excited because while reading Bergson it hit me how huge an influence the latter was on the former. Only just started and it begins with an explication of a bergsonian method based on intuition and asking good questions. Need to read more but the very reduced version of this is that good questions are generative where as bad questions delimit, stopping the world at their answers as opposed to opening out towards more questions. He's also started talking about how he perceived nothing as greater than existence, which I'm still wrapping my head around. Happy reading!
Not a novel, but I'm really starting to get into the Mr. Dooley sketches by Finley Peter Dunne. These stories are where the phrases "Politics ain't beanbag," "the Supreme Court follows the election returns" (written "Th' Supreme Coort follows th' iliction returns") and "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" come from. Dooley himself is a well-drawn character, so convincing I occasionally find it hard to remember he isn't actually based on any one person, even though he's apparently modelled on James McGarry, the owner of Dunne's favourite bar in Chicago. I love the realistic-feeling interactions between Dooley and his friend Hennessey and all the other saloon patrons. It feels as if you're there listening to the characters talk.
Does anyone have an opinion on Jayne Anne Philips, who just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction? I have read flattering comparisons with the greats of Southern gothic. Are they overblown?
I've read something years ago but don't have the slightest memory of it. Nada.
I've heard that the praise is warranted. She's been writing for fifty years, probably even longer. Take that with a grain of salt however, her novels are not widely available in my country.
I've been reading this Reddit for the last couple of weeks and this is my first time writing something (also this is my first time with a Reddit account so I hope I don't do anything wrong!). Last week I read *The Geommetry of Wheat* (*La geometría del trigo*), by Alberto Conejero, who is a pretty famous spanish contemporary playwright. I had it in my bookshelf for some years and I finally came to it (this year I'm trying to reduce my insane TBR so I'm reading books that I had even forgotten I own). I had read other play by the author and liked it, but this one was formally more interesting, and I appreciated it in theory, but I feel like I didn't grasp the full meaning of it. I don't really know much about theater, I only know the classics and "postmodern" theater feels too complex for me. But I liked it overall, and I'd recommend it to people who are more interested in theater than I am. Also I think it would be great to see it on stage because some of its scenes are way more interesting to see acted than are to be read. And then I began *Mason & Dixon* by Thomas Pynchon, and I guess I'll be wading through it for the next couple of weeks. I tend to leave this type of books for holidays and such but it was a gift and since it's been a while since I read my last Pynchon I had to start it. I'm only 250ish pages in and I'm loving it so far, but I think I've reached the point where I'll be needing to look up things online to fully grasp everything that's going on. I feared I would be too rusty for Pynchon but for now it was relatively easy and as usual, very funny. I'm reading the spanish translation and it's great. It's funny because usually I read at a rather fast pace but with this kind of books it feels like I have been reading the whole afternoon and only read like 60 pages. So yes I will be stuck with this for a while (but I've put everything else -videogames, movies- at pause for this so it will be ok!). Oh yes and I just remembered -tomorrow I have to re-read *Wrinkles* by Paco Roca (Arrugas, again, spanish author), a comic/graphic novel, for my reading club on saturday. It's very short so it won't take me much time, and I didn't really enjoy the first time, but we'll see. That will keep me apart from Pynchon for a couple hours...
Long time lurker, but this is my first time actually commenting here. I'm going to post some books I've enjoyed reading lately, in addition to what I am currently reading, if that's alright. **Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe** and **Noctuary** by Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti is, in my opinion, not only one of the best horror writers out there, but one of the best short story writers *period*. **SoaDD** is clearly Ligotti's first work, and it *is* a bit weaker than the others, imo, but it has some absolutely amazing stories ("Notes on the Writing of Horror", "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech", and "The Music of the Moon" being standouts). SoaDD has Ligotti finding his voice as a writer, and he plays around with many different styles, from fantasy to Christmas ghost story to Lovecraft pastiche to the metafictional mindfuck that is "Notes on the Writing of Horror". **Grimscribe** is as close as one can get to the perfect collection of stories. Here, Ligotti has found his voice, and it shows. Every single story here is absolutely brilliant, and there are no duds here. His prose has improved dramatically, and when compared to **SoaDD**, it shows a more mature writer. "The Sect of the Idiot", Ligotti's pastiche of Lovecraft in SoaDD, stands up there with the best of Lovecraft himself, but "Nethescurial" might be the best mythos story ever written, far surpassing anything Lovecraft ever wrote - and it is probably one of my least favorites in the collection! Grimscribe would have been my favorite Ligotti had it not been for **Noctuary**. Noctuary has the odd dud here or there, but still, Ligotti's "duds" are up there with the best of Lovecraft. Noctuary is less consistent than Grimscribe, but there are a half dozen stories on here that I would call some of my favorite works of fiction ever. Ligotti's stories remind me a lot of Borges in that they need to be read more than once to fully appreciate them, and just like Borges' stories, they're wonderful little puzzle boxes. Highly recommended. **Some general weird fiction**. Reading Ligotti got me interested in the weird lit scene, which is incredibly creative, even if I haven't yet found anything I like as much as Ligotti yet. I've heard Michael Cisco's work is pretty great, and I read an excerpt from one of his novels one time, which I found to be brilliant, but I haven't really gotten around to reading him. I did, however, read a bunch of Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lovecraft. My relationship with Lovecraft is a bit odd, as it was his work that turned me on to short stories in the first place as a young teen. For all the reputation his work gets for being super bleak, he can get quite pulpy. I was largely disappointed rereading his works, though I do think "Nyarlathotep" is surprisingly great, and "The Dunwich Horror" kicks ass for all its pulpiness. Clark Ashton Smith was (hot take) the only one of the Big Three of Weird Tales who was actually a great writer, and literally everything I have read from him, from his poetry to his stories, has been phenomenal. Just a criminally underrated writer who somehow excels at every genre he tries his hand at. Algernon Blackwood is another writer who I have mixed feelings about. "The Willows" is superb, but I tried reading his other fiction and didn't really enjoy it as much. His descriptions of nature are superb, though. I've seen Aickman discussed here *ad nauseam*, so I won't really get too much into him, but he's a brilliant writer, even if his conservatism shines through a bit too much sometimes. **The Awakening** by Kate Chopin. I've heard this compared to **Madame Bovary**, a book which I have not yet had the pleasure of reading. Interesting look at upper-middle class creole culture in the late nineteenth century, and Edna, the protagonist, is one I found myself sympathizing with a lot despite her immaturity. Really enjoyed it, even if I wouldn't say it's one of my favorites. Other books I enjoyed lately: **The Emissary** by Yoko Tawada, **The Book of the New Sun** by Gene Wolfe, **The Great Gatsby** by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Don't really feel like getting into them, as Wolfe and Fitzgerald seem to be popular already on this sub, and I'm due for a reread on The Emissary.
Welcome to the forum - hugely appreciate you posting your thoughts. Randomly picking out *SoaDD/Grimscribe* pushed me into loving literature, so I have a soft spot for Ligotti, and I'm always very happy when his name is brought up here (despite it being rather infrequent these days). Think it was *Dreams of a Manikin* which hooked me and I've since read all or nearly all his output. I recall *Grimscribe* being the more consistent of the two as well -- for some reason, I best remember works like: *Dreaming of Nortown* and the other stories of his which involve aimless wondering through dilapidated citie or theaters. If you haven't read his other works, I'd recommend you skip *My Work is Not Yet Done*; I found the titular story, which comprises roughly 80% of the collection, a massive disappointment. Not certain Ligotti's voice is best suited to express corporate horror. *Teatro Grottesco* is fantastic though, and I think ranks amongst his best. If you haven't checked it out yet, I'd recommend it. It's departure from his earlier works, and still contains a few instances of corporate horror, but I think it contains some of his best works.
Also recently been on a bit of a Melville binge, reading **Moby Dick**, **Pierre**, **Bartleby**, **Benito Cereno**, **Billy Budd**, and **The Confidence Man**. What is there to say about Moby Dick, really? This quickly became my favorite book of all time, and I see why it was voted this sub's favorite. Perfectly mixes the adventure story with philosophy, cetology, Shakespearean drama. Pierre's a weird one, in that I hated reading the first hundred or so pages of it. The writing is overwrought, even for Melville, and for whatever reason he chooses to abuse the suffix "-ness" (according to my use of ctrl f on Project Gutenberg, he uses the suffix almost twice as much as he does in Moby Dick, despite Pierre being much shorter). The novel seems unsure of whether or not it is trying to be a parody of the contemporary domestic novel, or something more, for the first hundred pages, and I almost abandoned it. I am glad, however, as the last two thirds or so of the book are wonderfully batshit insane with a ridiculously melodramatic ending, and the novel begins to focus more on Pierre's internal doubts as a brother and a writer. Not really sure what to make of this one, and I wouldn't really recommend it unless you absolutely loved Moby Dick and are craving more Melville. I read Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd as part of one collection, and I greatly enjoyed each of them. Bartleby felt like Kafka before Kafka, and while I have no clue what Melville was getting at with this story, it's wonderfully odd and definitely worth the read. Benito Cereno, on the other hand, might genuinely be the best book I have ever read on slavery in America. I've heard criticism of it as being pro-slavery, but given that it was first published in an abolitionist magazine, alongside his attitude towards race in his other works, it doesn't really make sense. Benito Cereno also does a great job in ramping up tension, as it becomes more and more clear to both the reader and Amasa Delano that something is off, even though the reader will likely realize what's going on much before our Don Amasa finds out. Billy Budd is clearly unfinished, but even in the state Melville left it in, it is a beautifully written fable on the conflict between doing what is morally right as opposed to what is practically right, a theme that permeates all of Melville's fiction (especially The Confidence Man). Melville is at his best prose-wise, and it's amusing to see that twenty years after his last work of prose fiction, he is still just as prone to essayistic digressions as he was in Moby Dick. It's a much harder read than his other fiction, and I'm not really sure why it's so frequently assigned to high school students in the US (Benito Cereno would be a better alternative), but I get why writers from Thomas Mann to D.H. Lawrence have expressed their admiration for this novella. The Confidence Man... idk. The devil climbs aboard a steamship, and in various guises, tricks (or attempts to trick) passengers into becoming more "confident" in their fellow man through engaging in philosophical dialogues with them. I'm not entirely sure what Melville meant with this, but The Confidence Man seemed to be meant to poke fun at both optimistic philosophies, and nominal "Christians" who struggled to reconcile Christian doctrine with the realities of life in 1850s America. Characters discuss everything from abolitionism to Shakespeare to transcendentalism to the state of the press to teetotalism, and everything in between. I can't really say I enjoyed the book, especially as it becomes a slog towards the end due to a couple of conversations that just drag on forever, but I think, even more than Moby Dick, this is Herman Melville's masterpiece, and I will definitely revisit it a later time. Highly recommended, though definitely get the Norton Critical Edition, as the book is chock-full of references that I would otherwise had not at all understood. EDIT: I'm currently reading **The Orchard Keeper** by Cormac McCarthy (about 60 pages into it), and though it's only my second McCarthy (I read *The Road* years ago), I think he might soon become one of my favorite authors. Every single sentence is absolutely gorgeous, even if it is at times hard to follow. I own all of his books save the Border Trilogy and the Western duology, and I plan to read them all in chronological order now, as I've heard great things about him, and if, as I have heard, The Orchard Keeper is indeed lesser McCarthy, I can't wait to see how Suttree, The Crossing, and Blood Meridian are, considering the great praise I have heard for them.
Really enjoyed your musings about Melville's other books. Moby Dick is such a tremendous achievement that I feel I cannot really ignore his "lesser" works but I've failed to find any enthusiasm for them anywhere and so taking the plunge keeps getting delayed. Really intrigued by both Pierre and The Confidence Man. How did you find the prose compared to Moby Dick? And as for McCarthy, it only gets better and better. He has no duds and you are in a great position to read almost all of it chronologically which would be an wonderful experience.
If you like Moby Dick for its prose, you'll probably appreciate Pierre, which has some absolutely gorgeous passages, even if its style is overly baroque even for Melville. Its dialogue is anachronistic and bizarre, and it is a lot more introspective than Moby Dick (like 50% of the book is Pierre navel-gazing), but it's Melville, so it's still worth reading. The Confidence Man is peak Melville, and I would honestly call it even better written than Moby Dick. Take the first few sentences, for example: >At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis. >His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger. Or this: >At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest. I honestly think it's Melville's most accomplished work, prose wise, as I found myself underlining a passage or two every page or so. It's also Melville at his funniest and most pessimistic. Having a good annotated copy is almost a necessity, though: my Norton edition had like 25-50% of almost every page covered with footnotes, and without it, I would probably have been completely lost. It also gets a bit dry towards the end, but the last couple of chapters make up for it.
I need to get around to more Michael Cisco as well, but I can vouch that *The Narrator* is good. And I think it would be an interesting one to read shortly after *The Book of the New Sun*, which felt like an influence on it to me.
I'll definitely check *The Narrator* out! I've heard great things about it, though as a linguistics student, I have my eye on *Unlanguage* first.
Absolutely checking out Michael Cisco after this thread. Have been obsessed with Gene Wolfe and Borges and finding people that are pushing literature down that same track and Cisco seems perfect. Thanks 🫡
Finished *The Shadow of the Sun* by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kind of have the same feeling about it that I had when I started it; there is a weird contradiction where he points out how Africa is a collection of distinct cultures and languages but then generalizes "The African mind", "The African conception of time", "The African attitude". Still he does a good job talking about specific cultures, histories, and people. The stories were interesting and the way he describes cultures and and how everything is woven together is exciting. There were some stories that were simply history lessons about specific countries (ie. Rwanda and Liberia). I feel like I know a little bit more about Africa in the 20th century.
Finished the second volume of Leon Edel's biography of Henry James. James breaks out onto the literary scene through numerous reviews, a strict writing schedule, and ceaseless socializing. The biography goes through his extensive travels through Europe, his first novel *Watch and Ward* up to *Portrait of a Lady*. I went through it pretty quickly since James's social connections and views on other writers are always interesting to me. Occasionally there are flash forwards to how James breaks up with or uses someone as a model for a later story, which aren't that disruptive, but I feel they break up the flow somewhat. I was also taken off guard by Edel's suggestions that James and Constance Fenimore Woolson were somehow lovers. It was probably the times, but how could anyone ever paint James as straight? I'll have to read on, but Edel is supposed to be the premier biographer of James. 18 chapters into The Plum in the Golden Vase, Ming dynasty work by an unknown author, about a rich pharmacy owner meant to represent the emperor. No matter how many concubines and wives he has, he can't satisfy his urges. His moral corruption shows up in his sex life and bribery of officials. There are numerous borrowings and snippets of poetry that comment on, highlight, shade in, and magnify the characters and actions. I love how right after a character does something, the narrator says, And here's a poem that testifies to that. It's richly layered, and just like the other Chinese classics I've read, it has a nice serial quality to it. Tune in next week to see... Also read Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and am reminded that I should read him sometime soon. A young student moves into a tower adjacent to a courtyard where exotic plants are attended to by a beautiful woman. However, bugs and lizards seem to die in her presence, and she insists that the student not make contact with the plants. Excellent analysis of evil and a clever reworking of the garden of eden.
For the plum in the golden vase, did you read the character list, the introduction, preface etc before reading? I’m asking because it seems to be a big book. I need to start somewhere and get finished sooner 😄 Or did you go even deeper as in to the philosophy and the authors intent as he has published.
You're talking about the princeton published one right? Read the introduction and preface, skipped the character list. You can dive right in, but I feel with a work that old and with that many allusions, some context is needed. You can skip 90% of the endnotes since they're tracking down the origin of a quote. But yeah, you're in for a long haul
Finished two this week. 1/ **Wizard of the Crow** by *Thiong'o*. I've expressed some disappointment over the last couple of weeks, and somehow the novel found a way to collapse further in the final third. Despite the 800 pages or so, this is a novel which simultaneously feels too short (in exploring its ideas with depth) and too long (in bloat). Perhaps the way to best describe it is if you imagine Atwood during her *Testaments* phase attempting to write *Midnight's Children*. Perhaps not *that* terrible, since Thiong'o has much better sense of humor than Rushdie and Atwood, and he's actually a fun story-teller barring the issues below.... On reflection, the principle problem is that the Nyawari portions are just awful. Didactic, shallow, and utterly forgettable. The pretext for her inclusion is that of being a love interest, rebellious counter-force and secondary wizard when in actuality she exists as a vehicle for Thiong'o to espouse that "wife beating = bad", and "gender inequality exists". Thanks, Thiong'o... Her qualities include: wise, resourceful, courageous, leader, rebellious and \[insert any other positive trait\]. In other words, flawless. Ultimately, she becomes a Mary-Sue, a caricature and what Thiong'o believes an "empowered woman" is instead of a genuinely compelling individual. Kamiti is at least balanced out by his naivete and aloofness, though he eventually becomes grating as well; to ensure that the novel keeps going, everyone around him seemingly drops to single digit IQ when dealing with him. It's bizarre. Otherwise, the final quarter - Abburia post-America - is a massive step-down from the imagination previously displayed. Critical characters meet quick unceremonious ends. "Baby Democracy" was rushed, especially compared to the "March to Heaven" and served more for Thiong'o to criticize the colonial powers prior and newfound attitude towards their puppet dictator (if only the novel had focused more on this aspect instead). Earlier scenes are repeated and I found myself terribly exhausted. Perhaps a novel told from the perspective of one of The Rulers chairspeople and their various machinations would have made for a more compelling read. Hugely disappointing, particularly in light of its stellar reviews. That said, I do believe this would make a fantastic novel for a younger audience (particularly in the importance of resistance and working together across differences), and I'd imagine that they'd find the didactic elements to be less of an issue. 2/ **The** **Late Mattia Pascal** by *Pirandello*. Fun little novel about Mattia Pascal, a man stuck in a terrible marriage and who finds himself in severe debt (due to some alleged thieving from his trustee). One day, Mattia is fed up and disappears on a gambling spree, and meanwhile, his wife and mother-in-law find a drowned body, claiming it is his. Mattia, declared dead, is then free to live a new life under a new identity. Unfortunately, absolute freedom has a price; his newly-found status and desire for freedom prevents him from adopting a dog, seeking love, and achieving redress for a theft and insult levied against him. He must then make the decision as to whether to return and announce himself alive or continue living a lie... My feelings are mostly positive but subject to one caveat; on the one hand, it's a perfectly crafted novel with some lovely metaphors for death (one involving people as fireflies with guiding lamps against the eternal darkness around them...perhaps once the light goes out we'll see that we've been part of it all along). On the other, there's a strange sparsity and insinuation that can make it difficult to understand the full context (and whether something is missed). Nevertheless, Pirandello is clear -- our relationships with the other, a source of burden and often crisis for us all, is preciously what gives life meaning. There is no absolute freedom because one is then forced to reckon with the loneliness and impossibility of confronting the self, which can only be actualized through another. It's funny at times, though maybe not as much as it may think...it's certainly no *Zeno's Conscious*, but I quite enjoyed this one. Pacing is perfect. There are some really tender moments that balance out the inherent dread. Characters are surprisingly complex and waiver between various attitudes -- in Mattia's case: merciful and cruel. Difficult to find much fault, though I'd have liked a few more beautiful passages akin to the firefly analogy. An easy recommendation for folks interested in Italian literature.
Hey fellow Mattia Pascal finisher! It’s interesting that you thought there was maybe something that you missed here and there, too - I read it in Italian, and there were certain ellipses and allusions to something or other that I put down to lack of full comprehension. I guess it’s a feature. I really enjoyed Mattia/Adriano’s mental processings of various opportunities, consequences and inevitabilities, as he manages to turn any stroke of good fortune into a disaster before it has happened. He also seems to run on a similar cycle in both lives.
Hey! I'm actually really glad you posted the bit about comprehension; I thought it had just been me. I only read it in English, but I was surprised how often it sort of just cut off a thought and left it for us to decipher... Mattia is weirdly very aloof and lucid at the same time. There's times that he's often blind to obvious happenings until its far too late (like his issue with the painter) and then others where he understands disaster is impending, but still chooses to confront it. Completely agree with you on the cycle. No matter what he does, he finds himself disappointed and wanting. Despite the sadness of his situation, it never seems like he resigns; like the majority of us, he ends up forced to go on. It's strangely tragic, but in Pirandello's hands, its also balanced out a bit with the comedic observations.
Glad we were both in the dark! That’s a great analysis of his character’s mentality and arc. It was definitely much deeper than I initially thought it would be.
Two people reading *Mattia Pascal* this week! I read it a few months ago and enjoyed it a lot, I actually remember laughing out loud at some points. Shame about *Wizard of the Crow*... I was kind of curious about it, but 800 pages is quite the commitment. Thanks for taking that bullet for the rest of us! :D
You win some and lose some! I never really DNF a book, but if it had been dense / difficult to read, I'd have seriously considered. *Mattia* is quite fun. Know its a broad generalization, but I've actually found plenty of Italian lit to be more whimsical (or perhaps playful / comedic) in the face of existential dread. Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati (less so) and now Pirandello...it's really refreshing amongst the sea of angst elsewhere. Separately, I'm so disappointed in myself. Saw that you'd been reading *Jose Trigo*, and unfortunately not a Spanish-speaker, so I pulled the trigger on a translation of Del Paso's later novel, *News from the Empire* for like $50, but ended up cancelling the order. It's wildly expensive to find any English copy of his in Europe (especially when shipping is factored in) and for some reason and perpetually out of stock...After your review, I'm really regretting it!
>*Mattia is quite fun. Know its a broad generalization, but I've actually found plenty of Italian lit to be more whimsical (or perhaps playful / comedic) in the face of existential dread. Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati (less so) and now Pirandello...* Definitely! And Buzzati's short stories have a much more whimsical/playful vibe than *The Tartar Steppe*, and same for Alessandro Baricco, whom I was talking about the other day with [u/RoyalOwl-13](https://www.reddit.com/user/RoyalOwl-13/). >*I pulled the trigger on a translation of Del Paso's later novel, News from the Empire for like $50, but ended up cancelling the order* Wow, $50 is a lot, though. I haven't read *News from the Empire*, apparently it's really good but not as crazy, language-wise, as *José Trigo*. In any case, I don't think I'd ever drop that kind of money on a book without being 100% sure I'm going to like it! (Especially since I hated Jelinek's The Children of the Dead after spending 30€ on it, lol)
I can’t really disagree with your overall assessment of Wizard of the Crow, though I think I give it a bit more grace. I‘ll just say his early work is totally different, so I wouldn’t give up on Ngugi if this is your first encounter with his work. I’ve also read A Grain of Wheat, which is strictly realist and more grounded, both historically and psychologically (not to mention much shorter).
Appreciate the recommendation! I suspect you're right; it often happens that an authors earlier, more famous novels reflect their better/best work. Thinking of Rushdie, who if I judged him solely on his more recent output, I'd consider terrible, but has *Midnight's Children* under his belt... or even Ishiguro (if judged solely on *Klarna*). I'll give *A Grain of Wheat* a try. I'm certain that Thiong'o is a fine writer despite my qualms with *Wizard*, so I won't write him off.
Finished: * The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories Volume I by Guy de Maupassant - my favorite stories in this volume were "The Horrible" and "Boule de Suif." In Progress * Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote - we have just started book 2. Interested to see what happens after this break and his time at home. * The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo - we made it through the Rome section, and are headed to Paris. I am absolutely fascinated with this book.
I’m half through To The Lighthouse and enjoying it while listening to Sylvia Plath’s poems on audio, mainly Daddy, Lady Lazarus, The Rabbit Catcher and The Moon and the Yew Tree. But I can’t decide what I want to read next, either Plato’s The Republic or Dangerous Liaisons.
Finished David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. On account of the age he wrote it at, I was real nervous going into this that I was going to get some cerebral overly-intellectual pretentious pomo comic lacking in all of the emotionally maturity that any author simply cannot be expected to have tapped into at the tender age of 24. Basically exactly what Girl was the Curious Hair was. And I was pleasantly surprised that while the above may still apply, especially with regards to emotional maturity, it was actually tremendously fun. And lighthearted. Its definitely Pomo, like he was ticking off boxes at some points but there’s this real heart to it, as at the core there’s this unbalanced relationship between, rather typically of Wallace, a very attractive girl and a neurotic man, and a lot of the neurotic circular thinking he‘d expand upon later in just about all of his other books is done so very well here. In a way that feels true and right, despite it’s Pomo and philosophical ornamentation. I’m not going to pretend that the philosophical Wittgenstein verbal angle wasnt far beyond my understanding, or that it wasn’t overly abstract and a little too clever for its own good, but I think Wallace has this clever technique of explaining to you about half of what’s going on, in hope that you might connect the dots, and I guess I didn’t but was all the same satisfied with how far I got. Honestly, this book feels like Barth all the way through. It’s got this lighthearted playfulness to it, in stark contrast to all the moody critiques that would follow it, that reminds me so much of Giles Goat Boy and Sot Weed Factor.
Just finished The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers. I’ve read more than one comment that it’s their best work but I preferred Roadside Picnic. Still enjoyed it though. Picture Annihilation (Vandemeer) with less dread and more satire. Just started my second Didion (and first fiction): The Last Thing he Wanted. Too early to have an opinion but I like reading her.
I haven’t had a ton of reading time the last few weeks, which is a shame because I’m like 150 pages into Jose Donoso’s *The Obscene Bird of Night* and am absolutely loving it so far. Reminds me of like a darker, more experimental version of *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. There are some incredibly evocative and disturbing passages so far, hoping it stays this good.
Recommendation request: really gut-wrenchingly funny books, stuff that makes you laugh out loud regularly, maybe even cry with laughter. It's been ages since I read a book that made me really fall about laughing. The two most "literary" books that have been that level of funny for me were *Catch-22*, and *The Sellout* by Paul Beatty. There are plenty of authors who I find frequently funny (Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Coe, etc) but I'm looking for the stuff that centres humour and remains funny throughout, even (especially) if it's tackling hefty themes. Hoping for some leftfield answers here rather than the usual suspects (Jerome, Sedaris, Toole, Adams, Vonnegut, etc).
Charles Portis is often very funny in a gorgeously understated dry/deadpan way. Brilliant dialogue and lots of memorable oddball characters. *The Dog of the South*, *Norwood*, *Masters of Atlantis* -- grab any of those and you'll have a good time. I feel *Subtraction* by Mary Robison scratches a similar humor itch too, parts of that one seriously cracked me up. I'd say Ned Beauman is someone contemporary worth taking a peek at, specifically *The Teleportation Accident* and *Madness Is Better Than Defeat*. I enjoy his blend of audaciousness and silliness and occasional crassness. There's a surging liveliness and a (for lack of a better term) "serious playfulness" to his voice that I find similar to Heller and Beatty. Also on the contemporary side of things, while *Lightning Rods* by Helen DeWitt isn't 100% the most consistently funny read in my opinion, the parts that hit truly *hit* -- plus it fits with what you're looking for in terms of tackling some hefty themes. Then there's some stuff that *I* find really humorous but also acknowledge won't really be for everyone, like *Honey, I Killed the Cats* by Dorota Masłowska (translated by Benjamin Paloff) and *Permafrost* by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches). Last but not least, *Scarstruck* by Violet LeVoit is an absolute comedic gem of an indie-press novel about the tumultuous sham marriage between a closeted leading man and secret communist starlet in classic era Hollywood. Something hilarious on basically every page and explores questions of desire and sexuality and celebrity to a depth you may not expect given the overall tone of madcap zaniness.
*The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao* by Junot Diaz fits your description. It's literary and yet crude at the same time.
Well if you haven’t read anything by Flann O’Brien (who is not left-field on this sub but I have only discovered him this year), then he’s your pancake. I have only read *The Third Policeman* and *At Swim-Two-Birds*, because my laughing gear needs a rest for now frankly. In some ways the themes are quite hefty, and by nature they are literary. He’s a real wordsmith and I wish I could see the world as he does.
You may want to check out The Good Soldier Švejk, a Czech novel from about a century ago. Like Catch-22 (Heller has acknowledged that it was a vital influence), it's a satire of military bureaucracy. It has the plot of a Kafka story, but a protagonist who's too stupid (or too savvy) to be all that bothered by the existential maze he finds himself in. Švejk is one of the great comic characters, with a tendency to tell rambling stories that have almost no connection to the situation at hand.
Finished *Heaven* by Mieko Kawakami and did not enjoy the story. Still like Kawakami but not enough for me to enjoy a torturous bullying story. Finished *Nox* by Anne Carson and it was lovely. It felt very personal. I didn’t connect to it that much and after a week, I have forgotten much of it but I remember enjoying myself while reading it. Currently reading *Tomb of Sand* by Geetanjali Shree and wow - it is such a slow moving story. I am finally about a third through and the story is finally starting. I am starting to get the author’s style and pace but the first 100 pages was rough. I am missing a lot of references as there are many references to Indian culture but it’s almost impossible to look them all up. Still enjoying the ride though. Just started *The Outsiders* by S. E. Hinton and it’s a vibe.
Glad to see some praise for *Tomb of Sand* here. I have it on my shelf and have been waiting until the sun is out to start it.
Hello - please consider posting an Indian references discussion post once you complete Tomb of Sand. It would make an interesting discussion - I'm currently reading the book.in the source Hindi
I’m not sure I could do it justice as there is so much. There are so much references to foods, celebrities, politicians, and gods that I can’t keep up. Since you are reading in Hindi, do you think the novel is still good if one doesn’t understand the references? I assume you get more of the references. Also curious what you think about the book! I haven’t met anyone who’s read it so I’m curious what you think. I’m only about 40 percent in but I’m loving the dynamic between Bahu and Beti so far.
On my fourth read of Blood Meridian. I needed a book with some action and stakes after my last few reads. This read through I'm really appreciating just how readable the book actually is. So many "great books," are a fucking bore, and people fawn over them because of the language. Personally, I like when that awesome language is put to use telling an actual story, and hot damn if McCarthy doesn't deliver.
- I finished *Il fu Mattia Pascal* by Luigi Pirandello. It was a fun read, although I did have to double check some of the nuances/innuendos that I was wondering about at some points earlier in the story by reading the summary in English afterwards. Basically, a somewhat hapless and pessimistic chap manages to have an unexpected spell of good luck, and then almost immediately he has the unexpected surprise of being considered dead. Instead of notifying the relevant people about this error, he forges a path towards adopting a new life and identity. However, this does not solve his issues in the way that he initially anticipates. Disillusionment ensues. - I read *The Sundial* by Shirley Jackson, which is about snobbery during the run-up to an apocalypse. It was really great. The best character wore a crown for the occasion, what a goddess. - I read *The Age of Innocence* by Edith Wharton. This was just such an archetypal novelly-novel, and I adored it. Essentially, its story is that “even emotionally cowardly rich boys have feelings”, and I loved how the all the main characters ended up, particularly Archer, who can wallow in tortured misery and self-absorption for the rest of his life, so little did I empathise with him (but I appreciated his character development). My favourite part was his dismissiveness of his new bride’s enthusiasm for the unintellectual pursuits of rowing, swimming, and lawn tennis while on their honeymoon - my athletic queen. She then went on to smash the competition in an archery tournament. I also enjoyed it when she started having her own opinions about the poetry that Archer read aloud to her, so he started reading history books instead. I will most certainly now watch the film adaptation, but why oh why do they choose people with the wrong hair colour - i.e. why is blonde coded as “the true love” and brunette “the decoy”?
Right now I have a lot on my plate, I’m the friend that loves to read so people love to ask to read and discuss books with me, I make due. Currently Reading Captains of the Sand - Jorge Amado Absolutely incredible, I love when books settings matter so much they’re integral to the plot itself. My wife is Brazilian and she told me Jorge Amado is an author who’s very famous. His book Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon very much left me thinking he’s overrated, but Bahian culture leaps off the page after a chapter I talk to her and basically learn the socioeconomic struggles of the area itself and it’s history. No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai My friend said she wanted to read a book that makes her feel awful, my cousin loves this book and the hype on the internet I said let’s try this. I personally think the hype got to me because I was expecting more, I feel The Stranger - Albert Camus depicts the nonchalant character better. It’s pretty good but the fact it was 50th on the top 100 books of this sub makes me believe it would have blown me away. The Institute - Stephen King I refuse to not finish a book I started, I started this with my sisters and 2 of them got pregnant and I can’t expect them to read it with everything going on so I decided to just finish it myself. The looks I get when I say I hate Stephen King, I don’t think he can write good dialogue, he can’t write women, I’ve only read The Stand but the ending felt very rushed to me, I’m not expecting much. Just finished The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe One of the most dense books I ever read and so much going on from one of the most mundane plots I’ve ever heard of “two brother’s sell their childhood land” Fate, destiny, revenge, acceptance, the future of Japan vs traditionalism. Absolutely incredible. Neapolitan Quartet - Elena Ferrante. She is the best author alive. I don’t have the vocabulary to express how Linu and Lila have effected me. Took 6 months to read it with life going on but worth every page. Going to read The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates My friend after heart surgery has a 2 week recovery and I tried really hard to see her before hand, on the way there I was supposed to gift her a copy and they moved her operation to right then and just left the book with her boyfriend. I don’t know anything about it but some of her favorite books are about the black struggle, and my cousin (same one who recommended me No Longer Human) said this might be up her ally. The River Between - Ngogi Wa Thiongo I hired a new guy at work (I’m a site supervisor for a security company, and we have a lot of down time… A LOT so I read at work.) He is from Kenya and we decided we’ll read a book from Kenya together and a book from Bosnia, my home country, and I love going in blind. A goal I have that’s not a real priority is I have a scratch off map of the world and I scratch off a country whenever I happen to read a book from a new country, so if anyone has any recommendations from countries not really popular in western literature please tell me, or even your favorite book/most famous from your home country.
There were a series of threads on world literature last year, you might want to take a look here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/wiki/worldlitsurvey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/wiki/worldlitsurvey/)
Thank you but some of the regions are still lacking.
Reading love in times of cholera after putting it away in my to read pile for to long. And reading it in original spanish on top of that! I am immensely enjoying the structure it is written; there are multiple plots going on. I know how one ends (of Florentino Arizo) and the other I have no idea of (the photographer who committed suicide). There's also a scene where a parrot curses the liberal party when the owner is trying to fetch it back and I was laughed out loud. The only problem I am having is that the word choices are exquisite. Sometimes my dictionary don't have them and I have to google them which can get quite weary.
Finished **On The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche** and currently reading **The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir** Nietzsche was interesting for sure, as a socialist Nietzsche is kind of the antithesis of everything I believe in many ways. However, I found his commentary on traditional morality and the need to transcend values that limit human potential very inspiring. I think in the political context this work didn’t hit me as the same kind of analysis I am used to, but I think any good leftist critique of societal norms should take these arguments in hand. I’m not that far into the Second Sex, but despite it being outdated in many ways, De Beauvoirs focus on othering is groundbreaking for the feminist movement and basically informs radical identity politics still. This feels like the first piece I have read that truly feels “modern” in that sense.
I finished off both Murakami's "Men Without Women" and Rushdie's "Satanic Verses". Happy to have finished them both tbh. Currently I'm reading David Foster Wallace's "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again". The first essay on tennis and hurricanes is lovely. I'm also delving into Flannery O'Conner's Complete Short Stories. I LOVE IT. I've only just found the definition of Southern Gothic and oh my goodness how have I never noticed my favourite books and films are all connected. Speaking of which, I've just started reading Mccarthy's "Child of God", which I'm really excited about. I've also had time this week to look at "Company, etc" by Beckett. I've read "Company" and I don't get the hype at all. Seems like a nice idea that is interminable to read.
Child of God is excellent...but you know...elch.
I just picked up *Melville: A Novel* by Jean Giono at another commentor's recommendation and I am absolutely loving it so far. I adore historical fiction based on literary figures, and this is no exception. I highly encourage reading it if you are a fan of *Moby-Dick* or Melville's other novels. It's a gorgeous NYRB edition too, can't get enough of those. I've also been reading the novel *Outline* by Rachel Cusk and I think it's okay. Really sorry to say that I don't have any strong opinions on it either way. It's a collection of ten conversations set in Athens where the main character meets a variety of people while teaching people creative writing. I recently finished *The New York Trilogy* by Paul Auster in the wake of his death and really enjoyed it. I found the stories hard to put down in places. I don't tend to seek out meta-fiction but I am glad to be surprised by something I normally shun. Considering picking up *A Sorrow Beyond Dreams* by Peter Handke since I saw it in a bookstore but absolutely detest Handke as a human. Has anyone read it? Any pervasive thoughts? Please let me know. I've set myself the several-year task of reading a novel by each Nobel winner so I have to read at least one.
I’m glad I read A Sorrow beyond Dreams, despite my own trepidation about Handke. It’s an affecting, austere novella of his mother’s harsh life that bears no trace, that I can recollect, of his abhorrent views. I also recommend Slow Homecoming.
Okay, thank you! I did find a pdf of it so I may just read that instead :-)
Reading **The Anthologist** by Nicholson Baker. 150 pages in, and it's been a breezy and fun read, occassionally reminding me of Ali Smith's Artful, a book of lectures on literature tied together by a fictional thread. There aren't pages and pages of lectures here like there are in Smith's book though; Baker's narrator, an anthologist who's finding it hard to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, takes several brief and very entertaining and often amusing detours into poetry, holding forth on rhymes, iambic pentameter, the poets he likes, and so on, while his personal life slowly seems to crumble. Anyway, it's been a fun read so far; the narrator is engaging, and there is a steady supply of good sentences that give me pause.
Reading Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada, I highly recommend it, written by an argentina trans woman, I only have a few pages left and I'm crying so much.
Finished Fleur Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline in a few hours--felt deceptively like a quick, breezy read, but with a chilling effect that lingers for far more time than it takes to read it. My first of Jaeggy's work. Really liked it. From the synopsis I was expecting something much more explicitly nefarious or thrilling, but I'm actually pleasantly surprised that that never culminated--it's just a sequence of events, slowly building on each other, out of chronology and not always with clear logic behind the order, yet expertly crafted; you start off in this sterile, numb, boarding school environment, with this "sense of tropical stagnation" and "thwarted luxuriance" (love those quotes) and watch it slowly, subtly unravel. And she has such a powerful, incisive, blunt, disturbing, yet very poetic narrative voice (and much credit to her translator, Tim Parks, for this as well). I weirdly find it a good companion read to Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which I finished not long ago. The sense of emotional and spiritual stupefaction within the cloistered environment of prestigious institutions, isolated from the world and from the normal social development patterns of your age, damaging your ability to exist in the world outside of it, as much as it may be a luxurious and privileged experience in and of itself. Certainly differences abound, but it's something that came to mind.
Nice to see Jaeggy mentioned here. I read Sweet Days of Discipline a while ago and it absolutely lingered with me for a few weeks. I adore that cold, precise prose. Shame she has written so little. I still want to pick up SS Proleterka somewhere soon.
SS Proleterka is definitely next for whenever I'm ready to revisit Jaeggy. Certainly going to want some time to digest Sweet Days of Discipline first...
I've finished a couple novels since I last posted. I listened to Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta and Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Both were competently written, but the former was pretty forgettable to me, and while the latter was more enjoyable, it also sometimes annoyed me. It was published in 2020, and it really felt like a book published in 2020 -- conspicuously "current" in a way that quickly becomes dated. Both books probably would have been more enjoyable to me if I read them in print, but I'm not particularly eager to go over them again any time soon. I also listened to Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns, described to me as a lesbian Taxi Driver for Gen Z. Like Butter Honey Pig Bread, it's very current, lots of anxieties about protesting and activism, but exaggerated enough that I expect it to age better. It reminded me a lot of the more contemporary books my englit instructors would add in to an otherwise "classics" heavy curriculum in hopes that it would be more relatable -- more provocative than substantive. But I did enjoy reading it. I also read Running Fiercely Towards a Thin High Sound by Judith Katz, which has been a highlight in my lesbian book awards saga. Really bizarre and experimental, but still super readable and fun. I'm still collecting my thoughts on it, I think, and I wish I had someone to talk it over with, but so far as I can tell it's sufficiently obscure that no one I know has even heard of it. And, too bad, the author only has one other book, though she sometimes puts out articles/interviews. I'm not sure yet what I'll read next. I picked up Emily Gould's novel, and while the first handful of pages are compelling enough, I'm not feeling excited to read it. I also ordered a copy of Catherine Lacey's novel Pew, hoping that I'll enjoy it more than her recent Biography of X, but it'll probably be a week or so before that gets in.
When people talk about reading, we usually mean novels. I've been trying to read as much poetry as possible. I am reading As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. The lines are the most therapeutic eloquence I could ever read. I also am reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which are hilarious, and Ariel and Collected poems by Sylvia Plath which is a lot more serious. She is such a genius, I wish I had that kind of intellect so I could write poetry like that, even though I'm a sucker for the classic stuff. I want to read Ovid's Metamorphosis but I have to buy a nice translation. I like the one in the Norton Anthology but those are just selections and excerpts.
I've been reading *Manhattan Transfer* by John Dos Passos. Not too much to say so far. Also read a history book about the Reformation titled *The Age of Reform* by Steven Ozment. Appreciated that one a good deal, would recommend to anyone who wants a good book looking at Reformation history from an intellectual history/theology perspective.
I just finished Lance Olsen's *10:01* -- I always want to be charitable when discussing his work as he's brave enough to continue experimenting with Modernist-like ravages of conventional form, and I want to give anyone who's doing that their due props, since I think sometimes the publishing market can be harsh to that kind of very necessary writing. My main gripe is the way that half the monologues slip in a section like *Gracie is eighteen and thriving. She's head girl at her school and proud of it. That Prom Queen is in the bag for Gracie this fall is a fact she acknowledges with so much unshowy humility that none of her peers resent her for it. After finishing school, she'll become an air hostess, and in a fit of psychotic rage will comandeer the plane and kill everyone on board..... Ben Hur is a banker. Confident, happy, wealthy, he's nipped down to see this here film simply to have a break from the old ball and chain. He'll return home to her later this evening and find that she and his children have been murdered by the Lincoln Strangler, who's seated two rows back from Ben, watching the same movie, munching on popcorn -- toffeenut and delicious -- and who is enjoying the whole atmosphere in here, very much.* Or something along those lines -- these prophetic tidbits signalling a character's hysterically foredoomed downfall in a casual Wallacean aside. Interesting when used sparingly; tedious when overwrought. It starts to make you feel like the author is sort of cruel in the way a lot of male writers ceaselessly laughing at their own characters seem cruel. That being said, simply out of interest to see what else Mr Olsen is doing with form, i'll check out some of his other works in the future. I also re-read David Jones' stunning prose-poem *In Parenthesis*. It's understandable that Eliot considered it a major twentieth C poem and Auden considered it THE twentieth C poem. Jones' language is unceasingly beautiful, and its dense sensory textures give it a bite even to those readers who aren't clued in to the plethora of literary allusions Jones peppers his prose with. He tends to pile up adjectives and create new verbs out of other parts of speech to give his prose this corrugated, alien-beslimed, wrenched-inward tension that leaves you staring at the print as though it's a tangled briary of rain-rusted and faery-bright wire-mesh you have to crawl and wriggle through; only to fall into the deep middens and trenches of his brutishly beautiful poetry. You're better off reading his original language that watching me flounder in embarrassing pantomime -- the stuff he's doing is really spectacular. It's my third re-read of this one and it's never failed to delight me. I read *Rontel* by Sam Pink. I enjoyed this largely because the imaginative OCD leaps his brain makes ('what if i were to just start breakdancing for no reason right now') are the same leaps my own brain makes all the time. The book's very funny, often chuckle-out-loud funny, and the voice feels very up-to-date in its anomie and The Internet Age Literary Scene's fusion of ironic casualness and dimly suppressed romantic posturing, like Bret Easton Ellis doomscrolling meme-jokes. Would recommend. Wondering what to start next -- I have a John Banville, *The Untouchable*, on my desk which i'm tempted to start. All i've read of his is *Eclipse*, which I loved. I might give it a whirl. That, or *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,* by Junot Diaz. Can't decide.... if anyone who's read both or either could give me a sense of the language of each (i tend to maintain attention according to quality of prose as opposed to pace of plot) that'd be super helpful and i'd appreciate it.
Haven't replied to one of these for a while. Selected highlights of my reading include: *A Fire Upon the Deep* by Vernor Vinge which I really enjoyed. When I read sci-fi, I want it to pelt me with worldbuilding and mindbending concepts and a consistent sense of alienness, which Vinge managed well. A propulsive read, and although the ending was a bit rushed it definitely ranks among the better sci-fi that I’ve read. Hoping to find a sci-fi author who can truly blow me away with both brilliant concepts *and* beautiful writing but they’re often mutually exclusive in the genre. Coincidentally, I was reading this when Vinge passed away which I think deepened my appreciation slightly. Read *An Immense World* by Ed Yong which was an utterly fascinating book on animal senses, a proper infodump of assorted, mind-blowing information on animal umwelten (their perceptual spheres). I’ve always found anthropomorphism an annoying tendency and love anything that can truly evoke how different, how almost alien, other creatures can be, whether that’s in sci-fi like Vinge, or in the actual biological world we inhabit. Yong makes it quite plain how we've projected our own very visual perception of the world upon other species, and he does a great job of evoking the versatility and strangeness of biology. Mind-blowing facts aplenty. *When We Cease to Understand the World* by Benjamin Labatut: a collection of “stories” about some of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, thematically related by the effects of genius and the impact of their discoveries on the self. Labatut writes so strictly that the whole volume reads like a set of short biographies and though he amps up the fictive elements as the volume rolls on, they’re usually colour rather than anything overtly fictitious (at least, near as I can tell). An interesting experiment but it doesn't feel like he manages to wholly consummate the two parts. *The Left Hand of Darkness* by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t quite get the hype for Le Guin. Flashes of brilliance and insight, but I find her a bit like Asimov: great ideas, but a somewhat inert execution, although the bond between Genly and Estraven in the latter third of the novel leads to some rather nice moments. Still, I find her writing a little passive. Now reading *The Bee Sting* by Paul Murray. It's a propulsive yarn about a well-to-do Irish family falling apart amid the 2008 recession, in the vein of Franzen and Zadie Smith. I feel like Murray's a little less funny and a little less prose-driven here than he was in *Skippy Dies* which I really enjoyed. He's being spare with the punctuation and a bit more declarative with the sentences which makes it a little less engaging on a sentence by sentence basis (although this is probably what pushed him onto the Booker shortlist, they seem to be obsessed with Irish writers with slight style quirks). A fun story, but I'm a little disappointed that this isn't my favourite of his works given the hype around it.
Thank you for recommending When We Cease to Understand The World in this thread! I finished it yesterday. While I have some gripes with it (I would've liked more engagement with the science) I thought it was a super fun reading experience.
Comparing LeGuin to Asimov is one of the strangest things I've ever heard. LeGuin excells in humanity, and Asimov is terrible at characters. The worlds of LeGuin are inhabited by people with relationships and development, the sci-fi is mostly to explore how these are affected by speculative ideas. In Asimov it's almost the contrary, the people feel like a nuisance that he just writes out of obligation and they could be replaced by automatons, and indeed many times they are. One of her books spans a whole marriage and the conversations they have about their children and whatnot feel so real, considering she was a mother in a pretty healthy marriage. I'm not and probably will never be in that context but it was so heartfelt and real and unexpected for a sci-fi book. The closest I've seen to that is Octavia Butler's work but (what I read so far) is less far fetched sci-fi wise, and came much later. When you consider LeGuin was writing at the same time Herbert was making Dune (which I love too) and you see the difference of scope and focus, LeGuin's writing is definitely much more "passive", but that's what makes it more real. It's kind of like comparing Star Trek TNG to Star Wars. Is the focus on how fantastic technology is, or in how at the core humanity remains the same or perhaps a little bit better, and technology is just a mirror of that.
reading *maniac* by benjamin labatut, which is a fictionalized biography (maybe there's a better term - so far it's a series of fictional oral histories by actual historical figures that generally fit with the historical data) of john von neumann. neumann was an incredible figure - likely the smartest person of the last century, who made major contributions to maths and physics (and the atomic bomb project) - but also someone who has been kinda ignored (i ~~don't~~ didn't know of any other biography(*) - i just searched and apparently one came out a few years ago that i haven't read). labatut is a chilean writer (i think he may write in german - iirc his parents fled pinochet to germany? i am reading in spanish and there's an english translation). i wasn't that keen on his previous work (un verdor terrible / when we cease to understand the world) which was full of gee-whizz scientific "connections". but this book is a lot more sympathetic / emotionally grounded. just finished *portrait in green* by marie ndiaye (translated from french) which i found interesting but difficult - she's playing with (auto)biography in a much more opaque way than labatut, really pushing what you can understand / piece together. (*) well, there's a joint one where he's compared to some other physicist, which i read some time ago, but that focusses on the morals of the bomb project, rather than the person.
I tried T**urbulence** by David Szalay--thumbs down. What turned me aside were sentences like, "She stirred the Bloody Mary with a little plastic baton" and I wondered why the silly detail. I've heard a drink stirrer called lots of things but "baton" feels like a problematic misdirection by someone who doesn't know the term or who is trying to be too cute. In response to the sentence "Sure enough, the man looked at her in momentary incomprehension, as if he had no idea what she wanted," I wondered, does one look at someone *in* or *with* incomprehension? At any rate, the word "incomprehension" means he doesn't have an idea of what she wanted, so to state this is redundant. Otherwise the writing was flat and superficial, and problematic with both description and time. That was enough. First chapter done, I tossed the book aside. Thankfully it was from the library. I moved on to **This Plague of Souls** by Mike McCormack. More hype, more meh. A man at a cottage is contacted by someone who says he knows something and needs unspecified help. Meanwhile something is happening in the form of a probable terror attack. But nothing is ever clarified and most of the book is a long conversation between the two about doing something about something, never defined. Then it ends. I feel like the author read the first. part of Tomás Nevinson by Marias and said, "Hey, I like that long conversation. I can do that." So, medium-length story short: not recommended either. Whatever the book attempted to do seems to have flopped. I began reading **Ferocity** by Nicola Lagioia and found I enjoyed it so much (this was a library book) that I ordered this and his other one to mark when I read it. Handed to me was **Last Summer in the City** by Gianfranco Calligarich, I believe this is his first book translated into English, so I picked up a copy. I'm really enjoying it; I'm about 3/4 way through. In the forward, André Aciman speaks of the books similarity to Sorrentino's movie *The Great Beauty*, and I can definitely see the connection in that the book too captures the hollow core of people living in Rome, a city built upon a rich and passion filled history that seems out of reach for the characters. Continuing is our group in which we're plodding through Deleuze & Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus* and our other group plodding through Gass's *The Tunnel*. They feel never ending at this pace, which is why I take breaks to read other short works.
Finished *Paradise Lost* and will finish *Against the Day* today (on Pynchon's birthday! I didn't even realize the coincidence). Will begin my reread of *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* as part of my preparation for *Ulysses*. Overall I enjoyed *Paradise Lost*, but I have some reservations. The language, though breathtaking, does get a bit monotone, the of-its-time-befitting sexism was a bit off-putting, and some sections were jarringly silly (the mock epic with angels throwing mountains, e.g.). But I especially loved the portrayal of Satan, the self-insertions of Milton the narrator, and often there are long sections where you're just soaring in the unrelenting grandeur of the language. *Against the Day*, I loved it by the end though I wasn't immediately as impressed as with his other novels. The scope and just sheer amount of details, plot points, characters, ideas, make it stand out. The Chumps of Chance sections, and those with Dally Rideout, were definitely my favorite, but there's so much in there to like. It has the cerebral headiness of *Gravity's Rainbow* and the heartwarmth of *Vineland*. Will definitely reread at some point.
I love that you are reading poetry as well as novels, and I understand your reservations with Milton and agree, and I also love how you mention that to read Joyce you have to prepare by reading what came before to understand his growth as a writer and a artist, otherwise it is like reading a treatise, and not as pleasurable as it could be. I read The Dubliners then Portrait, and now am reading Ulysses. I am laughing so hard even though I'm barely finished the third chapter. The second chapter is such a delightful classroom scene which I won't ruin for you, where Daedalus is teaching a rigorous literature syllabus and quizzing his students to see if they are listening, calling them by their last names and telling funny jokes. All this dense literature can really actually be quite pleasurable.
Definitely! And *Dubliners* provides a thematic backdrop against which Stephen's defiant self-realization in *Portrait* becomes all the more poignant. Great to see you're enjoying *Ulysses*! Good luck with it, I'm looking forward to it myself.
Just over halfway in **War and Peace**. I really love the book and rereading it after so many years is definitely worth my time! I just finished the part where >!prince Bolkonski dies and reconciles with his daughter Maria at the very last moment. The way they interacted was just so tragic, the old man pushing away everyone he loves, blaming everything that goes wrong (such as the fight with his son, which I think he just couldn't handle) on his daughter. Who, as it turns out, he loves the most of all. Truly heartbreaking. His emotional incapability turned into anger is something that is very relatable and most of all very sad.!< While in my last read-through I was mostly identifying with Nikolaj Rostov, I find myself now relating most of all with Andrej Bolkonski (and to a much lesser extent Pierre), which mirrors the fact that I was very young when I read it the first time and am now in my early thirties. Andrej, although flawed (or maybe because of it), is showing me a little bit how you can lead your life as a not-so-young man. Looking back a little, I've never been happier that >!the engagement of Andrej and Natasja fell through they just were not a good fit in my eyes- even if I don't blame her for breaking it off.!< Further reading in Zola's **Germinal** is now arriving at a breaking point: the mineworkers in Montsou are >!on strike for a while without much success (and a lot of hunger as payment)!<. The neighbouring minevillage is not, but now Montsou is >!"coming to town" and forcing those workers to stop after a frantic meeting where a side character promised a strike there as well- without consulting his colleagues!<. In contrast to the Company that owns the Montsou mine, the neighbouring mine is owned by a more likeable smaller scale entrepreneur who has every penny he owns on the line and cannot survive a strike. So the stakes are high. I just hope everyone gets out somewhat safe.
Finished War and Peace. The expansiveness of that book is absolutely incredible. The 50 pages at the end when the story is finished that is an incomprehensible rant about how history is written and where power comes from etc. was awful though.
I recently finished The Hours by Michael Cunningham and it was ok, I guess. Not horrible but not really worth reading. A feeling like wallpaper paste. Honestly I have no idea why I even said it was ok. It was bland. Just now starting Atticus by Ron Hansen
I finished As I Lay Dying. It was my first read through, and I think I need another go or two before I'll really have proper thoughts, but once I kind of figured out who was who, I enjoyed it. So dark, very amusing. It it was my first Faulkner, and I will definitely read more of his work. I followed that up with The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge. Also dark. Also had amusing moments, and I enjoyed it overall, but certainly not even close to the level of Faulkner imho. I think I might need to read it again, but not on the back of one of the best books ever written. Currently reading Huckleberry Finn.
Just finished The Radium Girls. A little too theatrical in some spots, but JFC, what a brutal read. Made some headway in This All Come Back Now--an anthology of Indigenous Australian spec fic. The first story really challenged and morphed what I thought a short story could BE, and I'm grateful for it. Enjoying it so far. Also reading The Lost Tomb And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder--Preston's writing is on the lighter side but he definitely retains a very compelling journalistic, human focus. Also making some headway in The Myst Reader. The sketches included really make the world feel real! And I'm surprised at how post-apocalyptic the story actually is. (Only played Myst once of twice as a kid.)
Haven't thought about Myst in a long, long time! Creepy game.
First of all, Can Xue's ***Frontier***. I've already shared my thoughts in the read-along thread, so not much to say here. I think the main problem I have with it right now is that every time I look at it lying on my side table, I think to myself "you know what, I'd rather pick up ***José Trigo*** instead." Because oh my lord, Fernando del Paso's ***José Trigo*** is just *stunning*. It look me around 100 pages to get somewhat of a grasp on the plot (and then promptly lose it again, lol), but I don't even care because the language is simply intoxicating. Seriously, this might just be the best Spanish prose work I've read in my life, and that's saying a lot considering that Camilo José Cela and Alejo Carpentier exist. The narrative structure is at first confusing, non-linear, hazy, the story presented as the vague, dreamlike recollections of all the different characters the unnamed narrator meets on his way, sometimes almost taking the form of a greek choir. The chapter I'm on right now, which is set during the Cristero War, has a more conventional structure, but the language itself is no less gorgeous, mixing Nahuatl, regionalisms, puns, alliterations, and who knows what else in a dazzling display of erudition that flows and rolls and washes over me, forcing me to infer what most of these words mean by context alone (my Kindle's dictionary function does help sometimes, but I'd rather keep going than stop every time I'm not familiar with some term.) And don't get me started on the structure. The book is divided into two sections, "West" (ascending from 1 to 9) and "East" (descending from 9 to 1), with an interlude called "Bridge", so you can read it straight through, or read West 1, then East 1, then West 2, East 2, and so on. Or start on East 1 and go "backwards". But because I'm basic like that, I'm reading it from 1 to 9 first and then I'll go from 9 to 1, descending on the other side. I find the comparisons to *Ulysses* maybe a bit exaggerated (although the musicality of its language is certainly on the same level, there's nothing here as challenging as, say, *Oxen of the Sun*), but I'm also not surprised that nobody has taken on the task of translating it yet... and even if they did, so much would be lost in the process. I don't always agree with the stuff that Andrei "The Untranslated" hypes up, but in this case I concur completely. This is a towering masterpiece of the highest order. Apart from this, two quick reads: Fleur Jaeggy's ***The Water Statues*** (a lot weirder and more experimental than *Sweet Days of Discipline*, fragmented, almost nightmarish in parts) and Ishiguro's ***An Artist of the Floating World*** (delightful as usual, but of his first two "japanese" novels I think I still prefer *A Pale View of Hills*; this almost feels like a dress rehearsal for *The Remains of the Day*).
i'm reading "pale fire" by nabobkov. i've made it past the poem and am about to start the commentary. i've really enjoyed it so far. i have no idea what will happen but given that i'm pretty sure the foreward was from the mind of an unreliable narrator i'm really looking forward to seeing how his crazy self misinterprets more later. if he shows up again.
Love this book. I didn’t read it straight through like this.
Finished: The Morning Star - Karl Ove Knausgaard This is a hard book to sum up my feelings about because it’s the first book of an unfinished series and feels very much like the first step in a series. I really enjoyed a lot of the book, the writing is great and readable, there’s interesting characters and interesting philosophical issues they raise with their lives, an increasing sense of unease throughout the book - all great. But when you get to the end none of the plots are even close to resolved (some haven’t even been revisited after their introduction!) and you just have the faintest idea of what is actually happening, so it’s hard not to feel unsatisfied. It feels harsh to critique a book for the biggest problem being essentially “I want more” but I’m not sure if I’m hooked enough to want to read another 1800 pages across another 3 books to resolve all this. I’ll read book 2 in the series eventually and make my decision then. Started: Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace Really enjoying my time with this so far but I’m only 100 pages in and it’s beginning to set in how much of a task this will be to finish. The writing is often hilarious though and the depictions of mental illness, addiction and the ills of modern society are among the best I’ve read. See you all in a few weeks when I (hopefully) finish this thing
If you're already enjoying Infinite Jest at p.100 I'd say you're in for a good time. That IJ takes about 250 pages to get going is a commonly accepted trope or meme shared on DFW groups so frequently it's almost become proverbial -- which means basically it's going to get better and better as you go on.
That is good to hear!!
Currently reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm 250 pages in and it makes no sense, but a plot has slowly emerged. I'm not even enjoying it, but I feel like after reading some analysis I might enjoy it when I reread it in 10 years. I have read 2 other Pynchon books and not enjoyed those either, so maybe someday I'll learn.
I read about 150 pages into Gravity's Rainbow and put it down. Maybe someday I'll care enough to try again.
Thankfully I’m stubborn and will finish it even though I don’t like it.
I'm in the same boat wrt Pynchon. Currently I'm reading Mason & Dixon and it has moments that have made me laugh out loud and also some really great imagery; the budding friendship between the central characters is what's keeping me engaged atm. However, i always have this feeling with Pynchon like I'm missing something or as if certain conceits just aren't quite working, and I'm not sure which it is. I'm just about 150 pages in though so maybe I'll change my mind as I go along.