It's really interesting reading Satantango because 1) it's refreshing my memory of the movie, which is awesome because I loved the movie and was totally floored and rapt for the 7 1/2 hours of its runtime (and also useful for the 90s list in the movie section) and 2) while the movie is very austere and external to the characters it portrays, the novel is written in a very poetic style with lots of grand metaphors and images and also spends quite a lot of time in the heads of various characters. I was iffy during the first chapter (some obvious typos didn't help), but I've gotten into the groove now and am loving it.

I finished Satantango. I would be interested in knowing, if possible, my respective responses to the film and the novel if I had encountered them in reverse order. Having seen the film first - and finding it to be one of the most incredible film experiences of my life - the novel could hardly compare. It's great, don't get me wrong, it's just not the towering achievement the film adaptation is. But it's also different. The tone of the story is created through prose instead of through visual images, obviously, and Krasznahorkai is damn good at creating that tone - almost as good as Bela Tarr, I would say. It's also, as I mentioned earlier, interesting to see inside the characters' heads, something not afforded us in the film (which I think is a strength of that work, though that isn't to say it's a weakness of the novel because it isn't). It's also highly metaphorical and image-laden, which helps drive home the apocalyptic overtones and the scenery without over-repetition of the image of the constant rain and tattered house and which also creates a much more surreal work than the real-time overkill of the film. I think the novel suffers from a bit of padding, particularly in the second half. Just a couple of pages here and there, but it definitely doesn't all come into quite the same tidy whole that I think the film does, and in that regard it seems pretty obvious that this is Krasznahorkai's first novel. I hear his subsequent ones only get better, so I'm excited to read more from him because, in Satantango at least, he has such a refreshing and powerful approach to the basic problem of a consciousness confronting an impersonal world beyond his or her control and understanding.

Completed Anti-Oedipus, which I probably only 1/5 understood. Now turning my attention to The Anti-Christ (Nietzsche, of course).

http://archive.org/details/questofhistorica00schwrich
on our kindle =] ... it dawned me only recently i can add free books to a kindle. /doh

Just finished the Einstein bio by Walter Isaacson. With the exception of books about Kurt Cobain I don't really enjoy bios, but this was a total delight all the way through. Already re-reading my favourite chapters, which include those about his politics and ridic love letters. Also going back to try and sort through the physics lessons, which were one of the few incompletely written and hard to penetrate sections of the book.

Just finished Stephen King's (writing as Richard Bachman) The Long Walk. I think it's second only to The Stand in terms of the emotional impact.

That is no faint praise.

I'm about two thirds of the way through If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and I become more disheartened the closer I get to the end of reading this. It's a rare thing when you find a book you love so much it makes riding the metro to work the highlight of your day.

Finally finished The Rest Is Noise. Not any kind of work of genius or anything, but it did make for a compelling, accessible overview of (mostly) classical music in the 20th century. I'm currently reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach.

Finished the first Hitchhiker's Guide audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry. My intro to the series & it was a hell of an experience.

I finished reading Henry Staten's Nietzsche's Voice—reflections here. That's the last book of the summer for me—now it's a matter of reading stuff for my academic work and seeing what else I can squeeze in. I hope to continue reading and writing about Emerson's Essays and Lectures on weekends, which is the big project. Other than that, I also want to read some Melville (The Piazza Tales) and Henry James (The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove), but I don't know when I'll have time for them.

Oh, and to keep up with my German I'll be reading Kafka's Sämtliche Erzählungen.

Finally got a good deal on The Book of Symbols. I've been flipping through it all day and it is amazing. It takes a great open-ended approach which intuitively suggests various directions for each image rather than just X = Y. This combined with the internet is a very powerful tool for art analysis generally and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in such things.

Who wrote that? Having trouble narrowing it down, what with all this psychic bullshit that comes up.

Well you may have the correct book because it's very influenced by Jungian psychology. The "author" is the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Symbols- ... 3836514486

I was wondering if that was the one. Had some ridiculous results. Now all I've gotta do is try to find a .pdf version, because I just straight up can't afford that.