'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

― Frederik B, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The one I've read is the Haddawy translation (as you can see from the link its a reconstruction from the earliest text, sounds like a fool's game) but for me it gave the flavour for that spider web of a prose. In my mind you could see what both Boccaccio and Proust got out of it.

I'm reading a recent Penguin Classics edition translated by Malcolm C. Lyon, and trying not to think about what a textual nightmare this book must be. I don't want to start shopping for translations. As long as it's clear and the humour transfers, I'm happy.

The storyteller herself is such a tantalizing and romantic character that I keep wishing for a hiatus where we could see more of her immediate story. Only a minor disappointment with the 1001 Nights that the bits of framing at every chapter break are pretty much the same.

Currently reading Therese by Francois Mauriac. It's fine but mixes the traditional novel and traditional themes with a hint of modernism in a way that reads very dated today.
Also Women of Algiers In Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, which I am honestly finding pretty boring.

lol i thought frederik was xping to tom's 'short books', i was like damn son good job

i am reading… g.e. moore. sometimes, it seems worthwhile and interesting despite my belief that it cannot go anywhere. other times, i just wanna take dude aside and tell him to get real.

i spent about twenty minutes reading the principia ethica about an hour ago. i just

i've never read that, i'm reading 'main problems', where he spends 50 (100, 200) pages working up to proving that material objects exist

also that space exists

probably that existence exists

At one point I felt vaguely obligated to read Principia Ethica for the Bloomsbury connection, but for now I'm content to let Moore's books exist without my participation.

words exist, but can we use words to prove words refer to something else. seems circular to me

I can't begin to guess what is a reasonable number of pages for proving that material objects exist. You could tell me that that's a big proposition or a trivial proposition or an incoherent proposition and I'd have no idea what to say.

"Check out my hand yo", can't remember how he manages to spin that into 100 pages.

that's actually a different proof, here he's workin on 'we all see the same envelope here probably fer sure'

http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_by_david_foster_wallace_available_on_the_web.html

lol ows bell's fawning refs to moore were what reminded me i wanted to read him

interesting that so much of that dfw stuff is around. it's funny, it used to be the offcuttish stuff that ended up in 'flesh and not' that were the easy things to find

short stories by conrad and balzac. conrad is kind of a boss. balzac feels like reading asimov in the real world.

I hope you mean the younger better Asimov, though I haven't read any short stories by B (when did he find time)

i haven't read the novels, when does one find the time

the introduction is some bullshit. when one comes to sum up the output of h de b, "short" is not the word that comes to mind!!!! yeah thx for that, wish i'd bought the reduced goncourts collection instead

Pere Goriot, director of Huis-Clos University, , thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young sans-culotte in a hot fury.

By "he," I meant Honore, not you, thomp, so you see my paren is actually brill. Has Vautrin showed up yet? Always like him, so far.

no i got that it was a feeble attempt at witticism

Just flippant, but also had never occurred to me that he wrote short stories. Now I'm seeing very mixed comments on his plays, incl. Vautrin.

i started by following this:

http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/suggested-reading-order-of-the-human-comedy/

which mixes everything together - 300 page books next to 18 page short stories.

Thanks! Looks very handy.

oh god no

This NYRB pb was probably the first thing I read from them, and I'd probably say its my go to Balzac. Like this pairing quite a bit.

Peter Handke - A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. I think there is something to the coldness and distance that Handke sets up. And jeez I am ratcheting up on the number of novels/books about suicide.

Peter Stamm - Seven Years.

Ya Unknown Masterpiece is great

I recently started Bouvard & Pecuchet (the edition from ILB's other favorite publishing house, Dalkey Archive) & it is seriously just the most charming thing ever

What I am NOT reading, having attempted the muysteriously much-praised Gone Girl. What an awfully-written thing it is. This is the hero waking up in chapter 1:

"My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless. At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks..."

How fucking padded can you get? It's the John Lanchester's Capital school of writing.

I'm always grateful for comments like this, because it makes me feel like less of an asshole for having zero interest in the latest airport-novel trend.

Don't think of it as the author's padding, but the character's: look out, here comes the Unreliable Narrator As Self-Obsessed Asshole (sure are a lot of those). May never make it though the book, esp. after coming across Mary Gaitskill's autopsy report:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_03/12173 Mind you, a usually reliable source who is a great fan of Gaitskill and the novel told me that she thinks this review is bonkers (and friends who got MG to read it were "baffled" by her reaction, she says here).

I have to agree with Gaitskill, though i didn't make it far into the book. "That the emotional violence is rendered in smarty-pants chirping makes it more grating than painful." is spot-on to me--the two main character voices were intensely irritating.

The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton’s words, a “fable of modern art.”

Obv knew that History of the Thirteen is threaded through Out One, but didn't realise - until I looked it up, just now - that La Belle Noiseuse is derived from this short story. And Celine and Julie was partly inspired by an early James story - hey, everything's connected, just as Out One suggests.

Oh yes when I first read I had already watched the film and was thinking 'er is this the plot for...'

So was reading Seven years and Peter Stamm is someone I need to read more of. One thing he does in this chamber drama is take anything in life that is common to us: a wedding, a party or xmas party, family gathering, a meet of your gfs parents for the first time, and from all that zone in on moments of awkwardness, alienation, conflict. Still have half of it left, but nothing that was worthwhile was every told.

In turn this provides a very convincing portrayal of: (1) his ultimately hollow desire for a woman that looks the part on paper, and who seems to love him, and also (2) his actual love (a feeling he does not name) for the unattractive uneducated catholic Polish girl who crucially loves him unconditionally, who does and tells him by the end of the first day they meet.

Just posted, all categories:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/10/14/national-book-award-finalists-announced/17267937/

Wuthering Heights, I am embarrassed to admit, for the first time.

On a similar note, ambitiously starting up Tess of the D'Ubervilles to tonight.

Ernst Weiss: Jarmila

Travelling businessman in 1930s Bohemia is annoyed by shitty cheap-arse watch, gets talking to local clockwork toy/watch-maker, learns of his violent and complicated love life - 85 pages, very good, author committed suicide in 1940 when Nazis invaded Paris

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

ok it seems i am really reading the critique of pure reason (first ed.)

there should be support groups for getting through books like that.

i've been reading 'the twenty-five years of philosophy' with some ole grad school people, this has somehow stimulated me to go back to the sources - THE source

strangely, intensive reading of the tractatus this year has made all kinds of fascinating things light up in the critique that i really would have had to muddle through before

those moments are what make reading philosophy so deeply pleasurable--not least because it's often won with such difficulty!

thanks for mentioning the Forster, btw. Gonna check that out!

yeah it's helped too, the leading note of his reading is very effective at brushing aside any obscuring overemphasis on the prolegomena that might wrongfoot your reading of the critique

i wouldn't say… deeply pleasurable—i mean, it's still kant. it's funny, being and time is hella not readable, at least prior to the months of perplexity and obscurity you have to put up with, but it's a very -elegant- book, by comparison. i feel bad for kant now, he's just obviously trying so hard, but as a thing to be read, the book is just this inelegant monstrosity (i think i finally understand the table of contents now too, ha). and even though i'm ok on the jargon, it still makes me anxious to read, because it's like every other sentence re-raises the risk of your losing track of what every single made-up word means.

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, 17 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this country Weiss is vaguely known for Marat/Sade. Its an English disease for a writer to be known way more for his plays than for this novels. Whatever sells/puts bums on seats I suppose.

This wasn't a bad article about H!tler's state of mind/whether he was clinically sane.

Yeah, there are sentences in the CRP and TLP that could almost be interchanged. "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." Similar sense that cognition on the one hand and language on the other are characterized by a kind of tragic necessity to always be going beyond their established limits.

The Critique of Judgment and Philosophical Investigations make another interesting pairing. I've seen papers that discuss the rule-following paradox by talking about free play of imagination and understanding.

I've started William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino. It reads a bit like a textbook, but it's also pretty informative, so I don't mind too much.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage.