Just finished Lolita. Don't really want to do a long review, but it was a lot of fun too read, and just in general was awesomeness.

Charles Brockden Brown
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-walker: 7

This is one of the strangest novels I've ever read. It seems like it's trying to do a million different things and go a hundred different places without ever actually straying too far off the beaten path. It's another novel I read for Early American Literature. It's mostly a psychological thriller, but the author seems also to be attempting to tackle the adventure novel, the mystery (if such a genre even existed then...), and lots of philosophizing on the uncontrollable nature of humanity. At times it's incredibly engaging, but other times, particularly the "adventure novel" section in the middle where the protagonist wanders the wilderness for a hundred pages, it really lags. It's also full of so many unbelievable coincidences that it's hard to take seriously at times. I'm glad I read it, though, however inconsistent it may be.

amazing, if you like jazz, read it, the end.

Now reading:

Ian Hacking (editor) - Scientific Revolutions (papers in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science)
Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival
Franz Kafka - Diaries 1910-1923
Barry Kernfeld - What to Listen for in Jazz
Don DeLillo - White Noise

Trying to do 1-2 essays a day in the Hacking (4/8 read so far). Reading the Chomsky and DeLillo straight through as my normal fiction/non-fiction pairing of books. Reading the Kernfeld in spurts that may be separated by days. Reading and rereading the Kafka in spurts as well, probably over the course of months as I delve into his inner life. Absolutely fascinating so far.

How many hours a day do you read, Pnoom?

Anywhere from 1-4 hours depending on the day.

Impressive. When I'm really into a book I can do 2-3 or a little more, but a lot of days I won't read at all, sadly.

Anyway, right now:
Watchmen - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
Notes From The Underground - Dostoevski

pnoom, you must read a lot of words per minute. i wish i was a faster reader some times.

I am a pretty fast reader (too fast, actually), and I'm trying to slow down and re-read key passages more often.

See i'm the opposite. I'm a slowish reader (in my free time at least) and when i hit a key passage it's like "okay, take a breath, read this, then read it 5 more times" and i can't move on until i feel like i've completely absorbed it-otherwise my mind wanders back to thhe key passage and i get anxious i missed something. There might even be some ocd to it. It probably wouldn't hurt to just speed up, since often times a lot of the key nuances in certain passages aren't fully explained until later anyways.

Right now I am reading Mother Night.

Don DeLillo
White Noise: 8

Not only was this a powerful distopian novel (powerful in large part because it wasn't futuristic at all, but completely modern, which gave it a gut-wrenching reality), but every other page described some everyday event in a new and compelling way. My only complaint is that the ending was abrupt and left me unsatisfied.


Ian Hacking (editor)
Scientific Revolutions: 9

A really useful collection of 8 essays in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science. Gave me a great feel for the breadth of ideas floating around, and introduced me to Paul Feyerabend, who I'm not sure I like, but I'm going to buy his Against Method so I can struggle with it.

Alice Munro
Selected Stories: 10

Tore through this for the second time when I went to visit my grandparents for a week. Read it much more closely than the first time and all I can say is: new favorite living author by far. These are beautiful, truthful, subtle, and emotionally devastating stories.

Munro is not one for propulsive narrative, but purposefully so. There are no grand abstract themes, universal "points", or symbolic characters in her writing like you'll find in someone like Dostoevsky (if she is similar to any Russian it is certainly Chekhov based on what I've read of him) but what you have instead is the sense of life captured in perfect detail. The point is not surface social realism but a kind of psychological-experiential realism that mimics how we perceive life, and Munro manages this without lapsing into stream-of-consciousness self-indulgence.

One of my favorite things about these stories (and this is one of the reasons why its impossible for her to have propulsive narratives) is that the emotions, needs, and wants of all of the characters are unclear, even and perhaps especially to the characters themselves, and so much of the "drama" of the story consists in how the characters have to give artificial order to their lives based on momentary whims that they do not completely understand. Unlike many other stories where the reader does a simple equation of the characters needs vs. other characters' needs vs. the larger world's needs = the meaning of the story, in Munro's stories all of these needs are themselves unclear. It's not just a matter of the reader interpreting the characters, but the characters interpreting themselves in order to whittle down the complexity of existence to a manageable chunk. All we are left with is longing and different attempts to process it into understanding and then move to a behavior, and needless to say a lot ends up lost in translation.

These stories demand to be read closely, slowly, and repeatedly, but also to be experienced personally. If you are unwilling to see yourself in these characters you will find them incredibly boring, full of "unlikable" or "incomprehensible" characters. But if you humble yourself before the stories and read them with active interest they will devastate you.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find (after reading all the stories) that Munro's introduction is an excellent primer to understanding her work--after reading some other reviews I'm convinced that she (like Henry James and D.H. Lawrence) is her own best critic. She explains how her stories are not just roads from A to B, but houses to wander around in, entering and exiting and re-entering the different rooms (paragraphs) and seeing how they relate to each other. Jumping back and forth, rereading passages, entering into the complex emotional echo chamber and attempting to come to grips not with some ultimate meaning, but the textural richness of its sprawling ground-level insights and tonal gradations.

Anyway, this is probably my favorite short story collection, with The Stories of John Cheever close behind. Anyone who is interested should probably start with "The Beggar Maid". After that, my favorites were (in the order they appear in the book): "Walker Brothers Cowboy", "Dance of the Happy Shades", "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You", "Royal Beatings", "Chaddeleys and Flemings", "Dulse", "The Moons of Jupiter", and "The Progress of Love"--that said, all of these stories are among the best I have ever read.

Drew, I wish you'd written that before I used my Borders gift card.

Italo Calvino
The Nonexistent Knight: 7.5
The Cloven Viscount: 8

These two novellas are simply great. The word I've heard most often associated with Calvino is "light," and it's very true. He's not dense. He's about as far from dense as you can get. His words float above the page, it seems, as you race from one page to the next. But "light" doesn't mean inconsiderable. The imagination he displays in these two short tales is extraordinary. The Nonexistent Knight follows an empty suit of armor that fights for Charlemagne's army the same as any corporeal knight. The Cloven Viscount concerns an Italian noble who is split perfectly in half by a cannon ball. One half turns out to be entirely good and the other entirely evil - but neither is accepted or liked when he returns to his hometown. These descriptions are short and perhaps don't capture the extent of his imaginative force in these two stories. Calvino completely reimagines the Middle Ages - the battles, the social strata, the philosophies. He adds his own humorous touch to just about everything. I'll admit at times it does have a sort of stereotypically postmodern feel to it. It reminds me a great deal of John Barth and other metafictive writers. But Calvino is just such a superb storyteller that it doesn't even matter. I probably could have read this entire book (250 pages with both novellas) in a single sitting it's so engrossing. I wholeheartedly recommend these.

Albert Camus
The Stranger: 8.5

Just finished this last night. I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say. It's the first Camus I've read, so I'm not terribly familiar with his philosophy, which might shed a bit more light on the inner workings of the mind Meursault (not that this is in any way necessary to enjoy the book in itself). I have to say I'm just in awe of this particular writing style. It's so minimalistic that every detail that's included (or ommitted) becomes incredibly important. If the author went back and revised, switched a couple of details with a couple others, it would completely recontextualize a scene. At times the narrator is frustratingly indifferent - frustrating not because it's unbelievable (which it is) but because, I guess, it's been bastardized, its impact lessened by so many imitators that I can't seem to get out of my head. So at times I'm like, "But that's stupid. How can he be indifferent to that? Is the author just trying to be 'edgy'?" But then I'll reach a passage where the narrator is truly baffled by the behavior of another character, perfectly normal behavior I might add, such as in the court proceedings. And I love the desperation and almost paradoxical love of life he finds near the end. Brings the book home and adds a human element - which is, in retrospect, probably the scariest part of the novel. So many of the narrator's thoughts and observations are akin to things I've thought, so much of what he grows weary of in everyday life is stuff I myself can't stand. So I begin to root for him and want him to get off. But then I have to take a step back and realize, "Holy shit, he killed a man in cold blood and I want him to get off? I'm crazy!" Good book by the way.

Most people seem to prefer The Stranger, but my favorite Camus is The Plague.

i dug the fall a lot.