yeah, meandering into abstract dreamscapes is much better than half-hearted lady-vengeance-pining
oh yeah it totally is.
This was an accurate assessment of BEJMDPD
I’m reading the sequels to The Three Musketeers
I finished reading Twenty Years After
and am almost finished The Man in the Iron Mask
I wish there had been more adventure, less dancing and financing.
I do really like how quickly a plot point twisted and how it twisted.
Binged on contemporary South Korean lit this week: Han Kang’s the vegetarian, short story the fruit of my woman (link) and human acts, and Bae Suah’s nowhere to be found and highway with green apples. All good, some very good (Human Acts), all crushingly depressing.
The poison of interpersonal relations, particularly wrt male violence and the fucked up nature of the family, national trauma (“after you died i couldn’t hold a funeral so my life became a funeral”, han kang writes of the gwangju uprising), urban isolation, post-industrial drudgery. Han Kang in particular writes beautifully about skin. skin as semi-permeable membrane, always being mottled likes its hung across stained-glass church windows, suffused by bruises or sunlight.
Its definitely taken a toll on me, though: this past week I have felt horrifically depressed.
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Damn, good luck. I am debating about diving in at some point soon, so let me know if this is a mistake.
readable and fairly comprehensive overview of events that tooks place in the middle east around the time of the arab spring (early 2011) through the beginning of 2016
i liked it, not super dense and pretty interesting
I got behind.
Clifford D. Simak’s The Autumn Land and other stories: rural sci-fi. I read a few of Simak’s book while growing up, and I can see how the exciting novelness of the sci-fi tropes presented in the boring tedium of country living appealed to me so much.
McCafferey’s Dragonflight: so I remember reading something, people moaning about people moaning about how long George R. R. Martin takes to write whatever that the TV stuff has to wait, and they (the derivative moaners) suggest that, if people want a detailed euro fantasy with dragons series, why not Pern? I can’t wait to see a host of Hollywood actor pronouncing K’naf & P’qer and loudly proclaiming how bold/high-spirited/strong-willed their weyrwoman is. Pacing was fine, the deus ex machinas were lame.
Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga: I was expecting something like Book of the New Sun, I immediately got annoyed by how everyone talked like a good gentlesir, then I got it. It’s a joke! The whole book is a shaggy dog story of how Cugel returns home after being transported to foreign lands by a magician, supporting himself with elaborate, cunning plots to acquire wealth (which usually succeed & rarely remain in his possession for more than a few pages).
Book sale this weekend, hope there’s more BotNS & Dying Earth!
Yeah all of Dying Earth is comedies, though the first book in the series, the titular Dying Earth is my favorite and also least overtly farcical.
The dialogue is really delightful once you realize the tone it’s going for is ‘pretentious con artists fucking with each other.’
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finished fortunata & jacinta which was great, like a slyer, less overwrought balzac - i associate a lot of the larger 19thc novels with that clunking shift in gears when they move from depicting some scene or detailed aspect to the plot machinery of Who Will Get The Inheritence? or Let’s Marry Everyone, but this was notably more fluid and managed to put it off until the last 30 pages or so. lots of good digressions, my favourite was an extended piece running thru the nighttime cafe debates of madrid, and people and ideas circulating between them…
started reading that one after it was recced heavily in f. jameson’s book on realism which was great and that i want to reread. i finished archeologies of the future recently but found that one more muddled maybe because i don’t know as much scifi. maybe also just that it’s easier to think of realism as this provisional unstable format than utopianism given that the latter arguably still has more work to do.
reading goethe’s elective affinities now mostly because i like the title but also have been curious about goethe for a while. i hear his style doesn’t translate to english at all well but i’m enjoying it so far, very crisp and lucid and nicely sharp while still having enough thoughtful propulsion to not just be “look at these suckers”.
I’m reading Around the World in 80 Days which is a fun enough romp, and I’m also listening to my first Audio book, American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic
I find the parallel trends of very long titles in American nonfiction and anime to be very amusing.
I just started reading Death’s End as I think I am incapable of stopping after the first two entries in a trilogy. I’m too early on to tell if it is more Three Body Problem or Dark Forrest, but it has already dropped an interesting hypothesis in the first twenty-five or so pages which is always appreciated.
I liked it far more than TDF, since it’s in large part about extrapolating the dark forest metaphor to its logical extreme and that was pretty much the best part of TDF. Some of my problems with TDF carried over to it as well though, like the author’s kind of weird fixation on masculinity, but it’s still probably my favorite of the trilogy.
finished elective affinities, enjoyed it altho kind of wished it had maintained the weightless emotional clarity of the opening chapters. still unpacking
read memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner in one long rush, really liked this one. like a stevenson story mixed with the uncanniness and unfolding nightmare quality of the third policeman. some genuinely affecting metatextual parts as well.
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Lispector is v good. read The Passion According to GH and left with the suspect feeling that i had plagiarised it before having read it- something about the repetition of the word “accretion” in the recent translation. Lots of Freud in there, esp. Civilisation and its Discontents. Hour of the Star pulls the unlikeable narrator stick and mostly gets away with it, though i did not find it as rich as GH. And did not expect the recurring racial pathology in either. Lispector’s characters have a pathological focus on the figure of the mulatto and weirdly a quick google doesnt turn up any good analyses of it.
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Lispector season continues: A Breath of Life is very good. I keep having the experience of Lispector diving into some image or word that fuckin hung me out to dry a year ago- i feel like i have spent a good year or two plagiarising her without ever having read her.
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I really need to read her, I read Hour of the Star a while ago but feel like I was in the wrong mood or something for it since I mostly bounced off. Passion According to G.H. was one of the books I brought to my new flat but I haven’t cracked it yet.
Read some books while I was on holiday
Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin - enjoyed this altho felt the main dualism of will vs being was a little thin. I loved the descriptions of Portland in flux, the sense of place that was both concrete and strange. I loved the turtles!!!
The Day of Judgment, Salvatore Satta, got this not knowing anything abt it and I really liked. Kind of opens like it’s going to be another minor realist novel but then keeps shifting until it’s not so much about individuals as individuation per se, the way the characters emerge while still being half rooted in this frieze of history and tradition and place that keeps them partly indecipherable to standard novelistic techniques. He died while writing and apparently the last sentence he wrote for it was “Amid all the confusion, Mussolini came back upon the scene”, which I feel would have been a much better final sentence for it than the edited epilogue his family provided.
Gulliver’s Travels I also liked. Furious spite slowly climbing from the bushes.
On Another Man’s Wound, Ernie O’Malley, reputedly best of the Irish war of independence memoirs, good descriptions of place and activity but fav aspect was sense of the author’s own fascination with how things worked, how people met and organised and where they went, how guns and people moved around, how exactly to burn down a police station, how new networks popped up in jail between prisoners and sometimes with jailers. Some telling casual asides as well on things like the growing split between nationalism and labour, or between military and government sides. There’s a biography of the author out somewhere which sounds interesting as well - he bopped around America and Peru after the civil war, was friends with John Ford as well as Beckett, Jack Yeats and what was present of modernist art groups in Ireland, and is listed in the credits to The Quiet Man as “IRA Consultant”.
