Dostoevsky is calling me. This semester cannot be over soon enough.

Haven't read Dostoevsky in a bit, but he's always great.

This brief interjection that occurs around the middle of Dream of Fair to middling women probably offers a better review than I could write:

"The only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity."

It's a total mess of a book. It's soaked in Beckett's talent, his wit and erudition and ear for language, but it's also a complete mess. It's very Joycean in its multilingual puns, forays into foreign languages, and a 15-20 page section about a third of the way through that, to me, read like complete nonsense. Not just a confusing passage, but deliberate total nonsense. Quite an ambitious first novel (that was not published until after his death), but I don't think the young Beckett - only 26 I believe when he wrote it - was able to pull it off.

Also I finally returned to and finished Fear and Trembling. My previous verdict still stands: should've been a 20-page essay. Not worth the time.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

This short novel tells the complex history of a mexican ghost town. It begins with a son's quest to reconnect with his farther upon the instructions of his dying mother. The village she remembers is bathed in the glow of nostalgia, but the village the son finds is filled with the decrepit remnants of a once vibrant town. The narration soon leaves the son and travels between the spirits that haunt these streets. Slowly the tale of Pedro Páramo unfolds before us.

This story is unlike any I've read. It lulls you into a trance with beautiful imagery and leaves you chilled as it drags you into the purgatory of this cursed town and the exploits of its deceased citizens. The line of narration is picked up and dropped and jumbled. Time is of little consequence, as Rulfo travels between the present and past freely often only giving subtle clues to the time period. The same goes for who is narrating. All I can say is it is magical. It reminds me of a Frida Kahlo painting; it combines surreal ideas with mexican culture to form a powerful work of art.

10/10

Giordano Bruno - The Heroic Frenzies

Four pages into the first dialogue (of ten) = new avatar.

Reading this insanely long web serial called Worm (http://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/). Probably the best piece of fiction about superpowers I've ever read. 9/10

I'm currently reading Spoon River Anthology. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a collection of poems told from the perspective of the dead inhabitants of a midwestern town. I just started, but it seems good so far, not that I no much about poetry.

Miscellaneous things I'm in the middle of:

Henry James - The Sacred Fount
Emerson - Essays: First Series
Deleuze/Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus
Paul Feyerabend - Three Dialogues on Knowledge
William Sharp MacLeay - Horae Entomologicae: or Essays on the Annulose Animals
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)

Add: Jean Gayon - Darwinism's Struggle for Survival

started sons and lovers. early, but I am a big fan of the writing style. Direct but descriptive.

So the copy I ordered of Crime and Punishment is all underlined and full of asinine marginalia so I think I might just read this old neglected copy of The Waves instead. Thoughts?

I read The Waves too long ago to say anything actually meaningful, but I remember it being probably Virginia Woolf's strangest or at least most experimental novel. (I'm not sure anything tops the strangeness of Between the Acts.)

What I got for Christmas:

Cat's Cradle - Like it so far, only the second Vonnegut I have read after Slaughterhouse
Breakfast of Champions
Pale Fire - Read it already, but I wanted a hard copy.
Ada

Hey Chem,
Highly recommend, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan

Titan and Breakfast are both much better than Slaughterhouse. Don't remember Cat's Cradle too well.