Read True Grit at work this week. I’ve only seen the Cohen’s movie in full and small bits of the first adaptation. It’s great.
My favorite part of the movie was the speech and the whole book is written in that voice. Comfy nuerodivergent vibes aside from the hard-ass facade put on by the narrator and the period dialect. I’m not a fast reader and I got through this in a handful of hours with my feet up.
10/10
I’m reading Wuthering Heights for the first time in over twenty years and it’s still a tough read for me.
one day in the early 70s my grandpa drove my dad around all of the graveyards near where the narrator’s farm is described to have been looking for rooster cogburn’s grave and it was still years before my dad put it together that the novel was entirely fictional. not sure whether my grandpa knew it or not, he might have just liked the excuse for a relaxing day trip
Finished this earlier today:
Pretty good! I’m glad I read it. I did not necessarily enjoy reading this book but I’m happy I ate my vegatables with this one because there was a whole lot about the origins of many staple American foods, grains, greens, meats, and so on that I didn’t know the first thing about. Here’s my review.
I started reading it because a friend had recommended it when I asked about books that talk about the act of cooking itself - like of preparing, cooking, and presenting the food as a “creative” act, in the moment of making it into a meal - and it is absolutely not about that at all, so, I had to sort of give up on that expectation early and let the story take me where it wanted.
It is largely about how soul food, southern cooking, black cooking, all cannot possibly be separated from the history of slavery and forced labor on which the nation was built, and it’s real interesting seeing the origins of a lot of dishes we consider traditionally American. Things like how French cooking would be taught to enslaved chefs so they could cook those things for the plantation owner, and how those cooks would then pass on that knowledge through their family, adding French affects to the unique meats, greens, grains, and beans of America.
A lot of it is about the institution of slavery and the unimaginable suffering brought upon the enslaved, the countless angles of horror to it all, and the utter indifference shown by their keepers. Through this nightmare, cooking and eating were often the merciful moments, these snatched-away pleasures black communities made the most of.
So yeah I didn’t get what I was after but it was a good book!
@gary and another friend helpfully suggested that some cookbooks might be closer to the act of creation itself than the narrative books on cooking - Hetty Lui McKinnon, Asako Yuzuki, Samin Nosrat, authors in that vein.
Haven’t seriously read much since finishing Shadow Ticket in November. But I started Kafka’s first novel this week, Amerika, and so far I really like it. This translation is great, it just reads so smartly and swiftly. The story is very funny.
The Trial is about all I’ve really read of Kafka’s before this. And though I fell in and out of love with that novel as it went along, I still think about the specific feeling that the ending gave me and in those moments I am forced to concede to my love for it.
Wuthering Heights is less of a slog when Cathy and Heathcliff are teenagers. Still a bad time but better to read.
yeah there was no way Pynchon was gonna set a thing in milwaukee and not spend thousands of words on the dairy industry
a fun book, and since I don’t expect another I’m making the most of every thoroughly exercised gangster cliche
I’ve been reading The Wheel of Time, I just finished the first book and have moved on to the second one. Honestly better than I expected. My dad was reading these when I was a kid and I guess he never suggested them to me because there are some descriptions of graphic violence but joke’s on you dad I wound up reading way worse a year or two later
Finished Swing Time by Zadie Smith, specifically by listening to the very very well-done audio book read by Pippa Bennett-Warner. She is far and away the best audio book VA I’ve heard.
I’ve had a string of pretty unsatisfying reads, so this was a welcome change in that the narrative here was full and weighty and about shit. There is not simply description there is observation and judgement and affection and emotion, I loved it. Really love how Smith writes, it’s such a treat. Here’s my review.
Now did I actually like the story? Eh. I think it does the trick in terms of being a reason for the narrator to travel through the world and face the consequences of class, race, wealth disparity, ignorance, history, all that human stuff. I didn’t necessarily like the way the narrator just endured and had things happen to her, rather than make strong choices, but I definitely understood her reasoning and it’s a very realistic character, like all of them are.
The meat of this thing is in the way it’s all described and pondered and processed, it’s very flavorful. That’s the stuff that sticks with me. It’s an enormously sad book and I really enjoyed how you live through that sadness, in a million different mundane ways. I could read this author write about anything.
Definitely intend to tackle another of her books in the near future, this was a very refreshing book.
Read through Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space a couple chapter a day for the past couple weeks. Basically a deep dive into the shuttle program that starts with some useful background from the Apollo missions and their various successes and tragedies and ends with the release of the Rogers Commission Report. It really gets into the weeds with regards to the various forces pulling and steering NASA while still keeping a focus on the people who had to actually fly into space. At points it almost reads as a horror story as you see the signs of disaster years in advance as do several of the more reasonable individuals at the time, but the forces of bureaucracy and budget and just plain callous stubbornness sadly won out. It is scary how if not for the actions of basically a single person with a conscience and a bit of bravery the worst actors would have in all likelihood managed to get it written off as a flukish “act of god”; it is equally depressing that none of them felt any legal repercussions in the interest of having to come together and heal.
started eugene onegin
i was not expecting it to be like that (laudatory)
You ever end up finishing this?
Using it as part of my reintroduction to literature feels like a bit of a foolish move, especially cuz I’ve never been great with old English (struggled a lot with Shakespeare in school for similar reasons)
That being said, I’m hopeful my appreciation for the Kate Bush song and how often the word ‘ejaculate’ gets casually thrown around will be enough to get me through
I know that at least myself and @jujotech love Wuthering Heights. But I am the type of person who has an advance degree in literature, so my praise may not be the kind you’re looking for.
It’s a great novel! Wait til you get to the evil shit that happens after the kids turn into adults. That is the real good stuff in the book, imo.
Yeah, I’ve only got through the first two chapters so far but I’m already pretty gripped by how Brontë writes the conceited little twerp whose perspective we share. Was very satisfying when he got mauled by Heathcliff’s dogs
If you can appreciate that sort of irony already, I am nearly certain you will find lots more in the rest of the book to enjoy.
I am also a fan of Wuthering Heights as a novel and also the majestic 1988 japanese adaptation Yoshishiga Yoshida made
Reading The Last Samurai and while I hated Some Trick and had some fun with Your Name Here this is a bit too “”“clever”“” for its own good.
Still working my way through it. It’s a bit of a tough read because of the writing style of the time and that I find pretty much almost every character detestable in their own way. It’s a bad time by design.
Edit: I should clarify that I like it, it’s just a bit of a rough read for me.
My Libby reign of terror continues.
I have finished reading Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (ugh) by Bill Buford, about 50/50 by reading it and by listening to the author read the audio book:
Here’s my review, and here’s a snippet I posted earlier that I liked:
This book annoyed me a whole bunch. The humor didn’t land, the author wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, the main guy he worked under and writes about - Mario Batali - is a sexist pig who had a whole slew of sexual harassment allegations recently, and there’s a whole lot of tangents in here about things I couldn’t really bring myself to care much about about. Things like what Tuscans arbitrarily consider pure or impure, the exact history of how certain dishes left Italy and evolved, or anything involving the Food Network celebrity era.
But, ended up really liking the nitty-gritty “dirty realism” (his phrasing) of his day-to-day in each kitchen, in pasta-making and in butchering. He doesn’t just take the performative and boastful chefs/personalities at their word, he is curious, he digs, gaining an actual understanding of the whys and the hows, diving into the history and the real reason recipes and techniques are the way they are. I found all of this very interesting and well worth the read.
Also appreciated him spending chapters just talking about what is involved in carving up meat, or in creating the perfect length pasta, or in developing a “kitchen awareness” that lets one sense when something needs attention or has finished. All of that was great, and is the kind of thing I was hungry for when looking for writing about the act of cooking.
So I ultimately am glad I read it and think it was a useful read, but didn’t really enjoy reading it much. Another “eating my vegetables” book.
I have promised a friend I would try reading Gideon the Ninth, a series I’ve been curious about, so I’m giving that a go now. It has a lot of the tumblr-ass elements people have complained about, but I think the reader of the audio book crucially gets the immature tone of the character right, so I’m actually largely enjoying it. We’ll see if that keeps up as the story develops!
My latest read was a non-fiction game studies book by the author of a book that I really enjoyed during grad school called A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. I found the way that book encouraged focusing on the way games act like machines to make you feel things, experience subjectivities not always readily accessible in day-to-day life, was really refreshing while studying the ol’ ludological/narratology terrain. It’s still stuck with me, especially the assertion of the author’s use of “videogame” instead of video game on the point that these things create and rely on audio-visual-kinetic sensation that games in other formats cannot.
The book of his I just read though came out a few years later, and it’s called The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production. Its thesis is something I think that is very apparent to folks here, that game making is a cultural artistic human practice out of which an industry has formed, and that it’s dangerously conflating things to say that the games industry is that which produces XBLA indie hits and the latest $70 triple-A thing. Actually, a few sb folk are mentioned in the book during some of its most interesting parts, like @thecatamites gets a quotation and @ellaguro gets mentioned a few times too.
This was a real cathartic read as the business of game production in the tech industry is going through a crisis, and my own company is probably gonna shutter in a week or two. It’s helped affirm some things about my own moral standing to industrial production and games and game production practices as cultural artifacts and phenomenon. I recommend it, if you are interested in the Australian game development culture, or to hear interviews from veterans within the traditional games industry and professional indies and students, or have been thinking about what role game design degrees are supposed to play in the whole scheme of things.
finishing up Kafka’s first written but last published, and still incomplete novel, Amerika, which has turned out to be very funny and exasperating in the way you come to his novels for. it is set in an America that it is full of people that will exploit you or at best look for the quickest way they can no longer be responsible for you, even if that means just making up lies. It is proving to be easily one of the least ideal fantasy novel settings to imagine yourself living in.