The Books/Reading Thread

[viewerfromnihil]

The winter break reads:

 

[The Ozzman]

Bought this with a gift card:

 

[Einherjar86]

The winter break reads:

Nice.

You read these all over the break? I'm impressed. I couldn't even make it through a less-than-400 page leisure novel; but I admittedly spent most of my time writing a paper, which cut into my reading time.

Anyway, 19th-century Russian novels man - fucking monstrous.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Heard this was intense. I'm going to start tonight

 

[viewerfromnihil]

Nice.

You read these all over the break? I'm impressed. I couldn't even make it through a less-than-400 page leisure novel; but I admittedly spent most of my time writing a paper, which cut into my reading time.

Anyway, 19th-century Russian novels man - fucking monstrous.

Thanks I didn't read all of The Second Sex. I visited family for about a week when I was two-hundred pages in, lost my momentum and wasn't able to pick it back up. Still, I covered the important portions on otherness. With the Bismarck work, too, I made it about half-way through before getting bogged down. Narrative political history can be a bit of a slog. Indeed on 19th century Russian novels. The Brothers Karamazov was great, but the prolonged preachy portions turned me off a bit. Anna Karenina was beautifully crafted, but I found myself appreciating the work more so than enjoying it. War and Peace was much better, in my opinion (being a history major probably plays into my opinion ). Kafka was thoroughly entertaining. I loved his The Stoker. It's unfortunate that he was unable to complete Amerika before his death. I only had to make slight revisions to a paper, so, other than my job (about 40 hours per week), I had plenty of time. It helps that I have no social life outside of getting drunk with my brother

For school, I'm reading Heidegger's Being and Time right now. Great stuff! In the third section of the first chapter, he observed the scientific paradigms and paradigm crises that Kuhn would later articulate into the language that we use now. The only frustrating part is that the class is not grasping the differences between being, Being, and Dasein, so I'm not getting quite as much out of the discussions as I would like. It was a bad idea for the university to make a four-hundred level philosophy course open-enrollment.

 

[Einherjar86]

Damn, Heidegger's no joke either. To be honest, he's one philosopher whom I do not feel comfortable talking about (because I'm out of my depth). My only knowledge of Heidegger comes through various writers such as Foucault and Derrida; and it's safe to say that their stance on him is less than faithful to the original text.

Fredric Jameson actually has a great book called A Singular Modernity in which he compares Heidegger and Foucault, basically saying that they perform similar operations in different fields (Heidegger in ontology, Foucault in epistemology). It's a pretty fascinating argument.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

That sounds fascinating. I have to admit, though, I haven't read Foucault. What work of his would you recommend that covers his epistemology best?

 

[Einherjar86]

The work I'm most familiar with is The Order of Things; but if you have interests in specific cultural institutions (health, sexuality, prison/punishment, etc.) then you might look to one of those books. Any of them will give you an idea.

I think that The Order of Things is a great introduction though to Foucault's concept of episteme and internal dynamics of different historical epistemes.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

The Order of Things sounds like the work by Foucault I've wanted to pick up. I've heard that he had a profound effect on historiography, which is my favorite field of history, but I wasn't sure which of his works dealt directly with the topic. Thanks!

 

[Einherjar86]

For those looking for a compelling and thought-provoking work of contemporary fiction, I highly recommend Tom McCarthy's novel C. I just finished it, and it was fantastic.

Pre-ordered his new book, should be arriving in the mail next week:

From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.

U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.

In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.

 

[Zephyrus]

For my research in preparation for a paper I'll give at a conference the week before MDF. So far it's demolishing the thesis of my abstract (which nevertheless had gotten accepted) so I'll have to contend with this book quite a bit when writing the paper.

 

[The Ozzman]

I found a hardback copy of Dune for 6 dollars at Half Price Books so now I own it.

I finished Extremity Retained. A must for death metal fans.

 

[unknown]

I suppose this can fit here. Today I went to the LA Zine Fest. I was pretty stoked on going as I had never been before. After battling for parking and getting inside (admission was free), I wandered around for maybe an hour and that was it. I'm apparently not queer, hipster, politically active, or ironic enough to enjoy the offerings. There were no small press literary zines that interested me. Plenty of shit poetry zines and shit lit zines in general. No horror, no weird fiction, no metal zines...nothin. There were some punk ones, but I'm not really into punk anymore to care.

I did get a bomb pastrami on rye though from the Canter's food truck, and there were a ton of cute girls, so it wasn't a complete bust

 

[rms]

I'm about 80 pages through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I already enjoy it way more than Blade Runner.

 

[Cronopio]

You mean the movie?

 

[Einherjar86]

It's a great novel. Strange... but great.

 

[rms]

You mean the movie?

Yeah, not the other short story

 

[Anom@nder Rake]

I don't think I posted an update on the Clark Ashton Smith collection I read.... well he's an excellent writer! He has awesome prose and in many of his stories he creates tension almost instantly. The problem with his writing, at least in this first collection, is that his stories often end abruptly. He's really good but so far I haven't read a 666/10 sacrifice for satan classic story. The collection is published by Night Shade Books and the editors put a lot of work into it. Smith often submitted his stories to publishers but was forced to change his stories to appeal to the masses. There are letters written to and from Lovecraft that are included and it's cool to read his reactions to his friends stories. The editors did a good job looking through Smith's manuscripts and finding the "best" versions of his stories which are presented in this collection. Night Shade published 5 collections of Smith's work but the collections are published chronologically to the order that they were written. The first collection is good shit and I can't wait to dive into the second collection

 

[unknown]

It'd be interesting to compare Smith's "director's cut" versions of the stories with the stories that ended up in publication. I remember when I submitted a story once to a journal, the editors wanted some pretty heavy editing done. Some of the edits I understood, but other edits completely changed the tone of the sentence or scene. When I was editor of Watermark (our peer reviewed scholarly journal) for two years, I tried to make a conscience effort to really only make necessary edits. A lot of it was just formatting errors and issues like getting Old English text to format correctly and shit like that.

 

[tungmetal]

I'm new to the thread and the forum, but I am a big fantasy guy. I'm nearing the completion of a song of ice and fire, for the fourth time. There's just so many nuances to the story, that I discover new details on almost every page.

I've have also been reading Ellefsons book