Now Reading Thread

[derek]

I think better later on is perhaps the wrong way to look at it. I'd thoroughly recommend reading the entire book and then seeing how you feel then.

It's a strange one, but I think you need to attempt to understand your criticisms as a required response to the text. The critical work on this is legion, so I'd say finsish the book, mull it over and maybe dip into some of the secondary literature afterwards.

 

[MannequinLimbs]

Appearance and Reality - P.M.S Hacker.

 

[kmik]

Well Mann is clearly an intellectual and the work is of at least some philosophical value, so there's no wonder he's approved of by the critics. It's just that if you don't enjoy this work at the "analytic" level (understanding of symbols, all this philosophizing about time) then there's nothing left to enjoy. Maybe I'll return to it one day

 

[Justin S.]

Parmenides' Fragments

Parmenides - Plato

Parmenides - Heidegger

 

[speed]

Saint Augustine's Confessions

David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day

John Banville The Sea

 

[speed]

I started to read "The Magic Mountain" yesterday like 150 pages in but it seems like a very boring book. He explicitly states his themes and his symbolism is either embarrassingly obvious (he prefers his grandfather's portrait to his grandfather) or too cryptic, and the characters are carriers of ideologies rather than people. Anyone read it? Does it get better later on ?

I;m also not a fan of Mann. I tried Buddenbrooks and Doctor Faustus. Both were torture to read, and I skimmed over most of Doctor Faustus (which was sort of about Schoenberg).

 

[kmik]

Good to know. I've also finished reading the first volume of Proust, and it is absolutely amazing: probably the best prose I've ever read and really one of the greatest works of fiction.

 

[speed]

Good to know. I've also finished reading the first volume of Proust, and it is absolutely amazing: probably the best prose I've ever read and really one of the greatest works of fiction.

Ive been saving him for a long time. Its such a daunting task--not only in sheer weight and poundage, but intellectually--to pick up such a series. It doesnt help that I ve read so much about it, that I already know what its about, etc.

St Augustine's Confessions was quite good. I really must make a thread on his conception of time. He was an excellent writer, even if one doesnt agree with him. I always hled a belief the ancients--Seneca, Cicero, Plato, Quintillian, etc--were such excellent writers and Christians like St Augustine and Tertullian mucked things up stylistically and intellectually; but truly, I have reconsidered this opinion after reading St. Augustine.

 

[kmik]

Ah, Proust is pure pleasure. In his writing, he's in the tradition of Stendhal and Tolstoy: very elegant, clean, psychological, a pleasure to read (really unlike, say, Dostoevsky, where drunk Russians start philosophizing about God for two pages and everything is somewhat "rushed"). His characterization is so great - even minor characters, his hypocrite bourgeoisie is so much funnier than everything else. Generally more sublime, more observing - he digs deeper even than the things that nmost novelists don't even touch; and his philosophy is fascinating, well put in his novel.

I think the books stand on their own. Swann in Love at least you can read separately, you might lose something but it's great. At some points Proust can get "boring" (in retrospect, I think not at all, but there is great attention to details), but this is literature of the first rate and once you get into it you can't be in any doubt about that

 

[waif]

the life of pi

 

[Einherjar86]

For class: The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov

For fun: The Darkness That Comes Before: Book One of the Prince of Nothing Trilogy by R. Scott Bakker (really good, dark, philosophical read)

 

[speed]

Alain Robbe-Grillet died this week: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/books/19robbe-grillet.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2257878,00.html


Truly, one of my favorite writers. I strongly encourage anyone interested in literature to pick up one of his books. Here's a synopsis:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/grillet.htm

 

[panzerfaust666]

Cormac McCarthy-The Road
Nietzsche-Twilight of the Idols, the Antichrist
Michel Focault-History of madness

 

[Resurrect]

At the moment i'm reading 'The Subtle Knife' by Philip Pullman, and i'm almost at the end, but I haven't sat down and read properly for a bit now, unfortunately, luckily I have the next book in the series for when I finish this one.

 

[WeAreTheLastMen]

That whole trilogy is amazing. I read them when I was in fifth grade (maybe sixth). I just picked them up and realized that they're just as brilliant now.

 

[kmik]

So I decided to give Moby Dick another take... It's hard enough with the English but if someone finished it - exactly how much it digresses ?

 

[speed]

So I decided to give Moby Dick another take... It's hard enough with the English but if someone finished it - exactly how much it digresses ?

Hm, I've never read it, and probably never will.

I really enjoyed reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. A rare obvious book of philosophy/ literature that I think worked quite well, and didnt come off as forced or pretentious.

 

[Demiurge]

Relevance Logic and Entailment by Dunn and Restall

It is fair to say that I have become obsessed with formal logic and rarely read about anything else unless I must.

 

[Justin S.]

Petersburg - Bely

The Truth in Painting - Derrida

 

[Demiurge]

It is fair to say that I have become obsessed with formal logic and rarely read about anything else unless I must.

Anyone else have a strong interest in logic?