The Books/Reading Thread

[H.P. Lovecraft]

don't pretend you know what tumblr is, old man. even goatse, tubgirl, joecartoon, rathergood, ebaumsworld, spiderman has made you gay, pain4, 1337 speak, askjeeves/lycos/altavista search, napster/audiogalaxy/dc++/kazaa/imesh/morpheus, geocities and xanga are after your time. have you even heard of teletext? we have these things called fax machines now you know.

Smoke signals and stone tapping are my favorite variants of social media, honestly.

 

[CiG]

STONE TABLETS FTW.

 

[CiG]

I freaking love DC Elseworlds.

 

[Manic Ferocity]

don't pretend you know what tumblr is, old man. even goatse, tubgirl, joecartoon, rathergood, ebaumsworld, spiderman has made you gay, pain4, 1337 speak, askjeeves/lycos/altavista search, napster/audiogalaxy/dc++/kazaa/imesh/morpheus, geocities and xanga are after your time. have you even heard of teletext? we have these things called fax machines now you know.

I can't keep up with all the baggage...

 

[Einherjar86]

Been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett lately. The third chapter of my dissertation is on the apocalyptic and technological concepts in Beckett's postwar writing (circa 1947-1961). Shit is fucking metal, if you ask me.

I'm pretty sure Arcturus took the title of "For to End Yet Again" from Beckett's work of the same name; and hell, the guy wrote a short prose piece called "Imagination Dead Imagine," which sounds like the title of a black metal album, poor wording and all (although in Beckett's case it's intentional).

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

Been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett lately. The third chapter of my dissertation is on the apocalyptic and technological concepts in Beckett's postwar writing (circa 1947-1961). Shit is fucking metal, if you ask me.

I'm pretty sure Arcturus took the title of "For to End Yet Again" from Beckett's work of the same name; and hell, the guy wrote a short prose piece called "Imagination Dead Imagine," which sounds like the title of a black metal album, poor wording and all (although in Beckett's case it's intentional).

Love that wicked old Irishman, some of my utter favorite plays.

 

[Einherjar86]

Endgame has to be one of my favorite works of literature from the twentieth century. Gives me chills and makes me laugh all at once.

"There's nothing funnier than unhappiness."

 

[rms]

read that and watched the film, not too smart to understand that work if my memory is right

 

[Einherjar86]

It's a really weird play.

 

[Einherjar86]

Great article:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-books-can-sap-the-soul-and-poison-readers-with-ideas

[...] the lessons of Wilde, Mirbeau and their ilk can help us understand how the act of storytelling is, necessarily, an exertion of power – of the voiced over the voiceless – that we can view through a political lens. We can see this already in the earlier 19th-century examples, which are – with the rule-proving case of the ‘feminised’ Dorian Gray – constructed along gender lines. Men tell stories about themselves; women are formed by the stories men tell about them. Men create themselves; women are creations.

More than a century after Kierkegaard, feminist critics have argued that our understanding of narrative conventions are governed by vectors of sexual inequality. And by the predominant understanding of the linguistic, narrative act as male, even as the un-narrativised world is always female: just look at Genesis, where God’s speech colonises the feminised waters of the void.

The American literary critic Nancy Miller points out that the very way we judge the events of novelistic narrative as plausible or implausible is rooted in social codes (and patriarchal expectation). When it comes to identifying with a character and understanding her behaviour, ‘verisimilitude’ measures conformity to a social ideal. Novels, Miller says, do ‘not imitate life but reinscribe received ideas about the representation of life in art. To depart from the limits of common sense… is to risk exclusion from the canon.’

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

http://spurleditions.com/nights-as-day-days-as-night

Translated from French by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot. Hailed as an “important literary document and contemporary pleasure” by Lydia Davis, Nights as Day, Days as Night is a chronicle of Michel Leiris’s dreams. But it is also an exceptional autobiography, a distorted vision of twentieth-century France, a surrealist collage, a collection of prose poems. Leiris, author of the seminal autobiography Manhood, here disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being. He captures the profound strangeness of the dreamer’s identity: that anonymous creature who stirs awake at night to experience a warped version of waking life.

Whatever the setting (from circus shows to brothels, from the streets of Paris to Hollywood silent films), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace. Beautifully translated by Richard Sieburth, these dream records often read like an outsider’s view of Leiris’s life and epoch. This outsider is the dreamer, Leiris’s nocturnal double, whose incisors grow as large as a street, who describes the terror he feels at being executed by the Nazis, and who can say in all seriousness, “I am dead.” It is an alternate life, with its own logic, its own paradoxes, and its own horrors, which becomes alienating and intimate at once. With hints of Kafka, Pirandello, and Nerval, Nights as Day, Days as Night is one of Leiris’s finest works of self-portraiture.

 

[Cronopio]

^^ Sounds like a really interesting book.

 

[TageRyche]

I had two reviews published in the new issue of Mystery Scene magazine.

Zodiac by Sam Wilson
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

 

[Einherjar86]

Just re-read Conrad's The Secret Agent to teach it to my class. Tough text to teach, but I think it's my favorite Conrad novel. Now re-reading Dracula, which we're discussing this week. Super-psyched.

But I think I'm most excited to teach this to my students. Not only an amazing SF novel, but one of my favorite books since 2000. Deserves way more attention than it currently gets:

 

[EspaDa]

Just re-read Conrad's The Secret Agent to teach it to my class. Tough text to teach, but I think it's my favorite Conrad novel. Now re-reading Dracula, which we're discussing this week. Super-psyched.

But I think I'm most excited to teach this to my students. Not only an amazing SF novel, but one of my favorite books since 2000. Deserves way more attention than it currently gets:

I bet you have already read Heart of Darkness, but have you read Lord Jim?

 

[Einherjar86]

I bet you have already read Heart of Darkness, but have you read Lord Jim?

I have, it's excellent. I enjoy the first half more than the second half, but it's a great book overall. In general I tend to be drawn to Conrad's later work, after his seafaring phase--The Secret Agent, but also Under Western Eyes, which is a weird book. That said, I still enjoy his earlier work, including Lord Jim.

Still haven't read Nostromo--really want to get to that someday, especially given the reference in Alien.

 

[Einherjar86]

Great haul at Harvard Bookstore the other day:

 

[TageRyche]

I finished the Jon Land/Heather Graham thriller The Rising yesterday. Here's what I thought of it!

 

[Carpe Mortem]

Can anyone recommend some great short story compilations or segmented nonfiction for my poop readings? And by segmented, I a. Am not making a pun and b. Mean a different subject matter every segment.

 

[Einherjar86]

Most of the short fiction I read is science fiction or weird fiction. A few collections that I've really enjoyed are:

Burning Chrome (William Gibson)
Stories of Your Life and Others (Ted Chiang)
Futureland (Walter Mosley)
Looking for Jake (China Mieville)

Also, for a bit more canonical flair, these two are very good:

Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (edited by Leon Edel)
American Gothic Tales (edited by Joyce Carol Oates)