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uggy posted:I just finished The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. The Russian version of Catch-22, I think it's extremely well written and very funny. Voinovich was able to make me laugh more than I ever have for a book, which is awesome. Every single part of it was good, and now I want to read the sequel. Agreed! I finished it over the summer, and am keeping an eye out every time I'm at used bookstores for the sequel. I've read a couple interviews with Voinovich, he returned to Russia in the 90's and spends a lot of time writing angry old man editorials about Putin, Solzhenitsyn, and the state of Russia in general. I've just finished Waterland by Graham Swift for an English course. It was a pretty good book, and seemed to me in parts very much like a British counterpart to Midnight's Children. It's a strange narrative from the viewpoint of a history teacher who is fighting for control of his class with an angst-ridden 1980's goth, but spends a lot of time blending the story of a murder that the prof was connected with in his teenhood into the greater whole of history.
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Nov 26, 2006 04:48
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Waterland by Graham Swift.It's narrated in a very anecdotal style by a history teacher named Tom Crick from the fenlands of Eastern England. Since it's the 1980's, the class is very apathetic to the idea of history when so many of the students fear that nuclear war will eliminate the future. So instead of the French Revolution, he begins to tell them about his childhood, specifically about his family history, the history of the fens, the murder of a friend in 1943, his time served in the army amid the ruins of Germany, and the human desire to fill up nothingness, even just with stories. It was a very enjoyable read, I'd probably give it a 4.5/5.
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Dec 18, 2006 09:55
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Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. Incredible book to read that has me very excited to read both more Rushdie and more Indian Literature in 2007. 5/5.
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Dec 26, 2006 19:43
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I finished The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord last night. For such a short book (154 pages) I think any sort of comprehensive response could fill volumes. Summarily, I feel that it raises a lot of good points on society driven by commodity and cultural imperialism, but underlying so total an assault on (then) accepted norms and ideology there seems to be a dangerous current towards hyper-ideology. It is as if Debord is saying "think outside the box" but meaning "there's this bigger box that the one we're currently in resides in, let's go chill in that one." A lot of parallels can be drawn between millenarian/gnostic movements and Debord's situationism as well, to it's misfortune. I'll probably read it again sometime after I've gotten a better grip on the entire Hegelian vs Marxist spat. Definitely a good read to understand much of what happened in the West, particularly Western Europe in the 60's and 70's, but not without a swathe of shortcomings. (7/10)
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Dec 31, 2006 20:17
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The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges. I have to kick myself for not reading it sooner; this is the fiction I was meant to read. I was particularly impressed by Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. creating a secret society just to imagine an entirely different planet seems like it would be fun to do, unless it has already happened and we're all living in the shadow of Tlon... 
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May 25, 2007 02:15
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Just finished Mythologies by Roland Barthes today. Enjoyed the essays, all of which took a look at some aspect of high and low French culture in the mid 1950's and showed how everything becomes part of a myth that the bourgeoisie status quo is 'natural'. I have to admit I was disappointed that he didn't really cover how a leftist thinker throwing rocks like himself could very well be incorporated into myth, though.
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Aug 21, 2007 04:06
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Finished A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe last week. An alcoholic, self-absorbed cram school professor's son is born with a brain hernia, coming of age story ensues. I enjoyed it, and it seems like it marks an important change in 20th century Japanese lit. Where you'd have even Yukio Mishima talking with a lot of subtlety and ambiguity about being an outsider in a society that values conformity, Oe's always upfront, sometimes to a point that makes the reader uncomfortable. It's also probably the only thing you'll ever read by a nobel prize winner where the main character considers killing an ex-girlfriend and raping her corpse. Japan.  Next up: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.
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Oct 1, 2007 06:24
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The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass & The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. The Tin Drum was an excellent read, but the quality kind of varied chapter to chapter, and the ending was a letdown. It's worth reading though for books 1 & 2 alone. Similarly the 2nd half of The Beat Hotel didn't interest me as much as the 1st. William S. Burroughs creating cut-ups and becoming a scientologist just didn't read as well as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso drunkenly harassing old surrealists. (As an aside, does anyone have an opinion if Burroughs cut-up novels are worth the effort of reading?)
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Oct 27, 2007 14:54
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RobertKerans posted:
Finished with a couple books last week, Borges' Collected Fictions for the second time this year. An incredible read (especially the books from the 40's-60's), but at the same time very daunting to me as someone attempting to become a writer. Think you've got an amazing new idea for a short story? Yeah, it's already been done, probably by Borges, and with incredible skill and imagination. Also finished a slow crawl through Rooms For Rent in the Outer Planets, a best-of from Canadian poet Al Purdy. I still don't know what I think of his poetry as a whole, he's got incredible oratory skills (ex: "At the Quinte Hotel" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKeczB3wrg ), but the "drink-fight-working class 'ero" thing can wear thin.
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Nov 6, 2007 08:59
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about cut-ups
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The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima. Though I was worried that it would be as boring as Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, but it was a very good read. I thought the chapters focusing on the 'objectivists' and their vivisections and Ryuji were especially well written. The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. I loved the setting, the characters and the plot, but the ending wasn't handled nearly as well as the rest of the story. It really felt it should have been longer, and Hertz Shemets turning out to be Schpilman's killer seemed tacked on. The book definitely put me in the mood for some Raymond Chandler, maybe I'll read The Big Sleep next.
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Nov 21, 2007 12:20
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Like every other goon, I just read Cormac Mccarthy's The Road and loved it. This book should be mandatory reading for the Ishmael/End civilization crowd. I also recently finished up Zizek Presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction. This book was a series of lectures, essays and interviews with Mao Tse-Tung from the mid thirties to the years immediately preceding the cultural revolution, chosen and prefaced by Slavoj Zizek. It was an interesting read, Mao is certainly a more engaging writer than many others writing on Marxist theory (see: Lenin and his pages of statistics, or: Footnotes? What are those!?  ). It was funny to see Mao getting progressively more out of touch with reality. The essays from the thirties were mostly about making theory and practice work with more cohesion in a primarily agrarian setting, but by the time the essays from the sixties rolled around he was more focused on teleportation technology and sheep and insects evolving prehensile thumbs and waging war on state socialism I'm about halfway through Lolita at the moment; this is my first read of Nabokov and I'm in love with his writing style.
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Dec 1, 2007 23:36
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The Old Man & The Sea. Somehow I made it through my teenhood without having to read this in school, and all questions of meaning aside, it's a beautifully written story. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. Another great little book. I don't have much experience with Steinbeck other than this and Grapes of Wrath, so I'm left wondering if all of his books are so different in tone? Wittgenstein for Beginners. Read this because I've been banging my head on Tractatus Logico Philosophicus for a week. It didn't really help my understanding any. In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell. A collection of essays from the early to mid 1930's arguing in favor of non-proletarian socialist change and against national socialism and communism. His analysis of why Communism in Russia does and will continue to suck through the 20th century is well done, but his arguments for socialist world government are dated and silly.
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Dec 18, 2007 05:11
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Re-read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. It isn't really that gripping of the story the second time around, but the narration is great. Tete-a-tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone De Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley. With a title like that you wouldn't really expect much to really much of a bio focused on tying their personal experience with their writing, but on the other hand, I am an idiot. Not really worth the read. The General in His Labyrinth by G.G. Marquez. I fictional account of the last travels of Simon Bolivar. I'm going to have to re-read this someday when I actually know the first thing about South America, but Marquez tells a good story despite my ignorance
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Dec 30, 2007 12:18
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White Noise by Don DeLillo I loved the dry humor of the first two parts, but part three was just dry for the most part. The ending somewhat saved it for me. Should I bother with any of DeLillo's other novels? Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov I've been whittling away at this for a while now. Thoroughly in love with Nabokov's writing style, but it's like a rich food that can only be had in limited servings. Consistently some of the best prose I've ever read, and a story that is as engrossing as it is unsettling.
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Jan 4, 2008 15:55
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No Country For Old Men by Cormac Mccarthy. It was alright, though I might benefit from doing a re-read sometime. I liked the ending and everything, but I guess I was expecting more from the book what with all the hype & Mccarthy-Mania sweeping the land. I'm looking forward to reading the border trilogy sometime soon. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I thought it was an excellent novel. Having only seen the David Lean adaptation, I wasn't expecting all the long-winded dialogs, but they were usually interesting and well-translated except for the few painful passages of Zhivago and Lara droning on about their love for each other 
SLAUGHTERCLES fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Jan 16, 2008 |
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Jan 16, 2008 11:26
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This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. This book is a transcription of a lecture series given by Borges at Harvard in the late 1960's. Amazingly, all of these lectures were given from memory, since Borges was almost completely blind at that point in his life. I'd highly reccomend it to anyone already a fan of his work. America by Jean Baudrillard. This book was a weird mix of travelogue and post-structural cultural theory about (Baudrillard's travels around) America during the 1980's. The more of Baudrillard I read, the more he turns out to be a cranky old man who occasionally has brilliant insights and consistently writes beautifully. In particular, his observations about New York City, while dated, are great. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. Not knowing anything about Chesterton that he was an ultra-orthodox Catholic I found some of the plot twists, such as "oh, Sunday is big-G God" annoying, or downright stupid, to say nothing of the ending "It was all a dream". That being said, a lot of the leadup to the book's terrible second half was entertaining. I think I may read the book again to see if it's better without any annoying surprises, but on the whole this book was mostly an interesting concept for a short story, not a 200 page novel. Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Zizek. Typical Zizekian a.d.h.d. in regarding the American response to 9/11. Probably the only (semi?)serious philosopher to write about the ideological message behind "The Land Before Time". I don't think I necessarily agree with many of his conclusions or lines of argument, but it was still a good read.
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Jul 7, 2008 01:20
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