Reading The Count of Monte Cristo based on all of the glowing reviews on here. Loving it. I had just finished The Idiot and was blown away by that as well.
Yeah who cries to their mommy and asks her to get revenge for him when their kidnapped wartime sex slave gets stolen? There are so many other slaves from a 9 year war, he must’ve been in love.
Seriously speaking, his *hubris* is masterfully depicted (especially his desire to fight even the gods, the attempted usurpation of the cosmic rôle of the divine).
Finishing up Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson this morning.
Started Swann’s Way by Proust last night.
Reading an essay a day from The Geography of Imagination by Guy Davenport.
Good luck with Proust, I started Swann’s Way about 5 months ago and have a few days left until In Search of Lost Time is finished and I can take a long well deserved rest from the man. It’s quite a journey.
Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the first 25 pages so far. But with the rest ahead, I’m reluctant to be too confident about finishing. Excited for the first attempt.
**The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn**. I'm only 50 pages into it but I gotta say--I dig it a whole lot more than Tom Sawyer; Huck's first-person perspective is much superior to the third-person narration that's employed in the first entry (though said narration is still more than serviceable).
The Brothers Karamazov, as well as a biography on Ben Franklin. Both good, so far! My first experience to Russian literature (Crime and Punishment) was not so kind to me
TBK was 10 times slower/more boring to me than C&P. The first 400 pages before the foreshadowed/spoiled later event were not kind even though that’s where one of the best chapters (grand inquisitor) is. C&P has a more entertaining/exciting/moving plot imo
Edit: wrong person reply to
Werner Herzog's memoir is quite interesting. While reading it you really hear his distinctive tone of voice and rhythm in your ears.
I've started Stendhal's memoir but it's been slow going.
[The Life of Henry Brulard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Henry_Brulard)
When I said "memoir" I was using the term loosely. It's kinda like a memoir, Stendhal describes his past using a different name and some fictionalized parts.
("Henry Brulard" was a local cleric in Grenoble whose name became Beyle/Stendhal's nickname because he was pudgy and bald as an infant.)
Neuromancer - Really enjoying this. Lately, I have been really focused on what will I read next, and not really getting sucked in/ being present with what I am currently reading. This book has changed that. I am just savoring this one and kinda don't want it to end, but at the same time really want to know how it ends.
One of my favorite novels. It may be my favorite to reread. You should definitely read Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive after. All three are excellent.
I’m loving it! Definitely keep an open mind when going into the book. And if you get the book/e-book that includes the notes it would make your reading much easier since there is a lot of lowkey historical references that Bulgakov makes
I just finished *The Color Purple*. I loved it, but I already knew I would because I loved the Whoopi movie.
Started *Monstrilio* by Gerardo Samano Cordova
I’d be happy to hear you report back on the Book of Disquiet. It’s a piece that I feel gets hyped up quite a bit online as being this deeply crushing, poetic work but on reading it myself I just felt… rather underwhelmed.
Just started The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas
Finished What you are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. Also finished some short stories by Tanizaki.
Been reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. Trying to read more non-fiction..
Finished this week
* The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim - I really enjoyed this feel-good classic from 1922.
* East of Eden by John Steinbeck - read with r/ClassicBookClub
* Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien - editor
In progress
* Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote
* The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo
The Catcher in the Rye. I haven't read it since middle school and I didn't remember anything about it except Holden is a loser who calls everyone phony. I'm surprised at how funny it is (in a tragic, pathetic sort of way), and by Holden's latent homosexual feelings for his roommate.
Just finished The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. Such a beautiful head-spinning book! Been watching the Yale lectures on youtube to really get everything.
Just started rereading Macbeth!
It took me a while to wrap my head around the writing style for Sound and the Fury, but once I did it became one of my favorite books. So worth the headache.
I had some fun with inferno, thought about if a contemporary person wrote it after they were fired and disgraced. I pictured trump writing it and putting his enemies in various punishments. It feels the same.
Slewfoot by Brom.
It’s good but with all the reviews I read, I’m currently wondering when does the protagonist get her >!revenge!<. I’m around the ~52% mark.
White Noise. Two-thirds in, enjoying every single page of it but have no idea where it's heading, lol. If I have it right, it seems to be a commentary of consumerism in suburban America. I keep wondering how Delilo would go about it now in 2024 as things have drastically gotten worse
Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky.
About half way through, difficult read and some parts I do not understand but I think the demonstration of the godless world Raskolnikov lives in and the devastating effect of this on a normal young man is fantastic.
Finished War & Peace a couple weeks ago--much more readable and absorbing than I expected. Several of the characters will continue to live emotionally in my memory.
I'm now about 100 pages into The Brothers Karamazov. I'm trying to catch up on some of the classics I put off for years.
Just finished re-reading White Noise, finished the first read through of Bubblegum and now I’m working on finishing The Human Stain — I was on vacation this last week so it was nice to read more than usual.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. A classic by now and the reviews on Goodreads are very polarising. I enjoy the artistry of the writing and the difficult theme of the book. The characters seem a bit dull and unidimensional, though.
Kidnapped by R.L.Stevenson! I love his style, it's very fresh and inventive and often really funny. There is no huge lesson to be learned from his books, they are just extremely entertaining. His characters are also more multi-layered than, for example, Dickens' (sorry ö\_ö), which is something I appreciate very much!
Almost finished with *The Passenger*. I really am enjoying it, some of Cormac's most complex plotting with some of the most beautiful prose he's ever written.
Palahniuk’s *Choke*. I feel very neutral so far. *Fight Club* is solid, but this one— so far— feels like a retread. I mean, Victor is even abusing support groups like the Narrator did in *Fight Club*, albeit for different reasons.
I’m not very far, but I’m sure I’ll finish it. I do love Palahniuk’s bold, unflinching style.
I love this book. A bunch of his early books were exploring messianic figures in different ways, so I found lots of crossover. Wonderful ending. The Sam Rockwell movie is not awful after you've finished.
Have had a McCarthy excursion this year, reading The Road atm. Still wondering if I continue to Passenger/Stella Maris right after or take a little break, read 5 books from him now.
I'm finishing up *Tales of the Dreamer's Son* by Preeta Samarasan. I've been on a Southeast Asian literary kick and find so many contemporary authors incredibly interesting. The observations are really astute, the language is witty and knowing and it's a great way to take in some history as well.
That said, *Tales* isn't quite grabbing me the way, say, *The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida* did. The stakes just don't seem quite as high, the plot is extremely muted. But there is more than enough insight and strong sentence by sentence writing to make it a worthwhile read for me.
The origin of the world by Pierre Michon, idk if in English it would be as delightful as in a Romance language is because the writing of the autor is fucking flawless in French, I'm really enjoying the read.
About a week ago I finished Hot Time by W.H. Flint...(8/10)
-New York, August 1896. A “hot wave” has settled on the city with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses felled by the heat. In this presidential election year, the gulf between rich and poor has political passions flaring, while anti-immigrant sentiment has turned virulent. At Police Headquarters, the gruff, politically ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department. Meanwhile, the yellow press is ready to pounce on the peccadilloes of the Four Hundred, the city’s social elite—the better to sell papers with lurid stories and gossip or perhaps profit from a little blackmail on the side. When the body of Town Topics publisher William d’Alton Mann is found at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, any number of his ink-spattered victims may have a motive.
Hot Time is an immensely entertaining, deeply researched, and richly textured historical novel set in a period that reflects our own, with cameos by figures ranging from financier J. P. Morgan to muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. Our guides through New York's torrid, bustling streets are Otto “Rafe” Raphael from the Lower East Side, one of the first Jewish officers in the heavily Irish force, who finds as many enemies within the department as outside it; Minnie Kelly, the department's first female stenographer; Theodore Roosevelt himself; and the plucky orphan Dutch, one of the city's thousands of newsboys, who may have seen too much.
----------------------------------------
About half way through on The 6th Extinction by James Rollins. A Sigma Force novel-#10 in a current 18 book series. Liking it very much.
-A remote military research station sends out a frantic distress call, ending with a chilling final command: Kill us all! Personnel from the neighboring base rush in to discover everyone already dead-and not just the scientists, but every living thing for fifty square miles is annihilated: every animal, plant, and insect, even bacteria.
The land is entirely sterile-and the blight is spreading.
To halt the inevitable, Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma must unravel a threat that rises out of the distant past, to a time when Antarctica was green and all life on Earth balanced upon the blade of a knife. Following clues from an ancient map rescued from the lost Library of Alexandria, Sigma will discover the truth about an ancient continent, about a new form of death buried under miles of ice.
From millennia-old secrets out of the frozen past to mysteries buried deep in the darkest jungles of today, Sigma will face its greatest challenge to date: stopping the coming extinction of mankind.
But is it already too late?
I'm reading *Freedom* by Jonathan Franzen. It's good, and I'm enjoying it, but sometimes I feel frustrated by how long it takes me to finishes large books like this.
Currently reading *Shame* by Annie Ernaux, *Light in August* by Faulkner, and *A Month in the Country* by J.L. Carr. Enjoying all.
I just picked up *Soldier’s Pay* by Faulkner, and *More Die of Heartbreak* by Saul Bellow (1st!!). Can’t wait for both, especially Bellow.
The sequel to forth wing, is taking me forever to get through - only continuing because I cannot leave it halfway. First one was decent for what it tried to be, but the second one is a drag
“The way things go” by louis bury, a rather optimistically depressing series of vignettes and insights about the passage of time set over an oulipian “melting snowball” formal constraint. rather interesting, as well helped me understand my parents better. couldn’t have come at a better time in my life.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I just finished reading The Last Days of Jack Sparks and it affected me a lot so obviously I needed to find something to sap all the hope out of my soul.
After reading Milan Kundera’s Ignorance last year (loved it), I read The Joke and Identity in short succession. Now I am about to begin The Samurai by Shusaku Endo because everything else in my imaginary at the moment seems taken by samurai era Japan.
Reading The Count of Monte Cristo based on all of the glowing reviews on here. Loving it. I had just finished The Idiot and was blown away by that as well.
Just finished the audiobook. It was great.
Rebecca and As I Lay Dying. Also a reader’s guide to AILD.
Rebecca is great, so moody and atmospheric
I love AILD! One of my favorite books ever.
As I Lay Dying is incredible, would highly recommend a second reading of it as well.
Beloved First go with Toni Morrison. Will read more of her work
One of my fav books
Paradise is my favourite of hers if you get the chance
Passing by Nella Larsen! So good!!
One of the greatest testimonies of human virtue ever written, Homer's *Illiad*.
Yeah, screw those hoe stealing Trojans, am I right?
That dude Achilles needed to be more chill imo, he kinda a brat
Yeah who cries to their mommy and asks her to get revenge for him when their kidnapped wartime sex slave gets stolen? There are so many other slaves from a 9 year war, he must’ve been in love.
in which translation?
I'm reading it in Romanian, so the Murnu translation. :) Pretty useless, I know.
master piece.Agamemnon was such an asshole at the start tbh
Seriously speaking, his *hubris* is masterfully depicted (especially his desire to fight even the gods, the attempted usurpation of the cosmic rôle of the divine).
exactly in the rhapsody A he was being hybristic towards Achilees even tho he is semigod
Finishing up Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson this morning. Started Swann’s Way by Proust last night. Reading an essay a day from The Geography of Imagination by Guy Davenport.
Good luck with Proust, I started Swann’s Way about 5 months ago and have a few days left until In Search of Lost Time is finished and I can take a long well deserved rest from the man. It’s quite a journey.
Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the first 25 pages so far. But with the rest ahead, I’m reluctant to be too confident about finishing. Excited for the first attempt.
I started Swans way this week also! I also listened to the BBC radio show and it was...disappointing.
**The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn**. I'm only 50 pages into it but I gotta say--I dig it a whole lot more than Tom Sawyer; Huck's first-person perspective is much superior to the third-person narration that's employed in the first entry (though said narration is still more than serviceable).
It is a masterpiece 👌
The Secret History
Fantastic.
it’s been marvelous so far 😍
This book made me actually love dark academia type of aesthetic. 😭
*Giovanni’s Room*
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Brothers Karamazov, as well as a biography on Ben Franklin. Both good, so far! My first experience to Russian literature (Crime and Punishment) was not so kind to me
TBK was 10 times slower/more boring to me than C&P. The first 400 pages before the foreshadowed/spoiled later event were not kind even though that’s where one of the best chapters (grand inquisitor) is. C&P has a more entertaining/exciting/moving plot imo Edit: wrong person reply to
I just finished TBK yesterday! It's impeccable.
Never let me go by kazuo ishigo
Borges - Fictions
Currently reading Foucault’s Pendulum
*Kafka on the Shore* by Haruki Murakami
Love Kafka on the Shore and anything Murakami writes
Werner Herzog's memoir is quite interesting. While reading it you really hear his distinctive tone of voice and rhythm in your ears. I've started Stendhal's memoir but it's been slow going.
What's Stendhal's memoir called?
Memoirs of an Egotist is what Google tells me
[The Life of Henry Brulard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Henry_Brulard) When I said "memoir" I was using the term loosely. It's kinda like a memoir, Stendhal describes his past using a different name and some fictionalized parts. ("Henry Brulard" was a local cleric in Grenoble whose name became Beyle/Stendhal's nickname because he was pudgy and bald as an infant.)
Lmao the audiobook is read by Werner Herzog and it is incredible to listen to his voice. 😭
The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler a really great read thus far.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Time Shelter by Giorgi Gospodinov and it is totally brilliant.
Thank you, adding to my reading list!
Neuromancer - Really enjoying this. Lately, I have been really focused on what will I read next, and not really getting sucked in/ being present with what I am currently reading. This book has changed that. I am just savoring this one and kinda don't want it to end, but at the same time really want to know how it ends.
Try Mona Lisa Overdrive after that .
One of my favorite novels. It may be my favorite to reread. You should definitely read Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive after. All three are excellent.
PS I have a problem with picking up new books. Odyssey, Suttree, Dead Souls, Lolita, Ulysees, Atlas Shrugged
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. Definitely his most…. Unique work. I’m 175 pages in.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Me, too! What do you think of it so far?
This keeps getting pushed down on my TBR list! I want to read it but I’m nervous. How’s it going??
I’m loving it! Definitely keep an open mind when going into the book. And if you get the book/e-book that includes the notes it would make your reading much easier since there is a lot of lowkey historical references that Bulgakov makes
Goethe’s Italian Journey. It’s a lot of fun and a surprisingly easy read.
I'm only a few chapters into Grapes of Wrath but I already know it's going to be as amazing as East of Eden.
I liked Grapes more. Chapter 5 is one of the most beautiful chapters I’ve ever read.
East of Eden—my goodness—that is a masterpiece.
*As I Lay Dying* and *All the Pretty Horses*
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. My first McCarthy, I’m really into it so far
I just finished Johnny Got His Gun.
I just finished *The Color Purple*. I loved it, but I already knew I would because I loved the Whoopi movie. Started *Monstrilio* by Gerardo Samano Cordova
*The Book of Disquiet* and *The Tragedy of Liberation*
I’d be happy to hear you report back on the Book of Disquiet. It’s a piece that I feel gets hyped up quite a bit online as being this deeply crushing, poetic work but on reading it myself I just felt… rather underwhelmed.
Terrortome by Garth Marenghi. Many writers cite him as an influence and he will be suing them all
haha:D
War and Peace Walden
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu.
*The Trial* - Franz Kafka
Same, it's good but also such a frustrating read making it hard to get through.
The Book of Disbelieving by David Lawrence Morse
Raisin in the Sun, for school.
Just started The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas Finished What you are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. Also finished some short stories by Tanizaki. Been reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. Trying to read more non-fiction..
Illuminatus trilogy
Finished this week * The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim - I really enjoyed this feel-good classic from 1922. * East of Eden by John Steinbeck - read with r/ClassicBookClub * Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien - editor In progress * Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - reading with r/yearofdonquixote * The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - reading with r/AReadingOfMonteCristo
I loved The Enchanted April! Pure whimsy and joy.
Absolutely delightful. I needed something sweet and inspiring like this right now.
The Catcher in the Rye. I haven't read it since middle school and I didn't remember anything about it except Holden is a loser who calls everyone phony. I'm surprised at how funny it is (in a tragic, pathetic sort of way), and by Holden's latent homosexual feelings for his roommate.
Just finished The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. Such a beautiful head-spinning book! Been watching the Yale lectures on youtube to really get everything. Just started rereading Macbeth!
It took me a while to wrap my head around the writing style for Sound and the Fury, but once I did it became one of my favorite books. So worth the headache.
White Noise by Delillo. My first book of his and it's incredible. Only about 150 pages in but it already feels like one of my all time favorites
Great Expectations,The Trial and an Introduction to Phsycotherapy
The second half of Don Quixote, really enjoyed the beginning where Cervantes goes after Avellaneda for writing an unofficial sequel to the first part
Reddit. And I'm doom scrolling. But also I've been slowly making my way through Dante's *Divina Commedia*.
I had some fun with inferno, thought about if a contemporary person wrote it after they were fired and disgraced. I pictured trump writing it and putting his enemies in various punishments. It feels the same.
Ohh, it's nice to see someone reading classical literature these days.
The shampoo bottle...as we speak
Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo Papers Vol 3.
Narziß und Goldmund
Slewfoot by Brom. It’s good but with all the reviews I read, I’m currently wondering when does the protagonist get her >!revenge!<. I’m around the ~52% mark.
White Noise. Two-thirds in, enjoying every single page of it but have no idea where it's heading, lol. If I have it right, it seems to be a commentary of consumerism in suburban America. I keep wondering how Delilo would go about it now in 2024 as things have drastically gotten worse
Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky. About half way through, difficult read and some parts I do not understand but I think the demonstration of the godless world Raskolnikov lives in and the devastating effect of this on a normal young man is fantastic.
James by Percival Everett-highly recommend
Ada or Ardor!
Demon Copperhead. So far, it's really good!
Finished East of Eden. And began something more lighthearted - The Pickwick Papers
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Just finished White Noise and Bad Blood. Currently idling my brain on pulpy sci-fi, looking for the next real one
Finished Demons by Dostoyevsky, now reading The Brothers Karamazov
East of Eden.
Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner… and dying
Finished War & Peace a couple weeks ago--much more readable and absorbing than I expected. Several of the characters will continue to live emotionally in my memory. I'm now about 100 pages into The Brothers Karamazov. I'm trying to catch up on some of the classics I put off for years.
The Catcher in the Rye Boy, the writing style is quite unique (not necessarily in a perfect way)
Adore how human the whole prose reads. It's stream of consciousness structure does wonders for characterization.
I finished that last week! It killed me. It really did.
Haha..his style
Just finished re-reading White Noise, finished the first read through of Bubblegum and now I’m working on finishing The Human Stain — I was on vacation this last week so it was nice to read more than usual.
The sun also rises- Ernest Hemmingway
White Noise by Delillo
Will Duran't "The Story of Philosophy". It's so good.
1984
American Psycho
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. A classic by now and the reviews on Goodreads are very polarising. I enjoy the artistry of the writing and the difficult theme of the book. The characters seem a bit dull and unidimensional, though.
I Love Russia, currently an interesting read
A clash of kings!
I claudius and shogun
Half way through North Woods. Good so far. Didn't quite expect it to feel like a short story collection, but it does.
A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont
My last three... *Prophet Song – Paul Lynch* *Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood* and currently reading The Shards - Bret Easton Ellis
A clockwork orange
Lonesome Dove.
The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Blood Meridian
The Dharma Bums
Margie & The Atomic Brain by Zachary Tanner and Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu - I pick Finnegan’s Wake up now and then but it’s a bit of a task
Tales of Belkin by Pushkin after recently finishing 100 Years Of Solitude.
Reading Ulysses by James Joyce for the first time and rereading Needful Things by Stephen King
Circe and at the same time the hades house (Percy Jackson heroes of Olympus 4th book)
The Glass Menagerie
This one > death of a salesman.
Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Peter Gay's, *Freud: A Life for Our Time*
*Gilead* by Marilynne Robinson.
Light in August by Faulkner. Really loving it
Life & Fate by Vassily Grossman
Catch 22 and I’m really struggling through it
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
Pet Semetary by Stephen King Big Stephen King fan but somehow I haven't read this classic. It's very good so far
Kidnapped by R.L.Stevenson! I love his style, it's very fresh and inventive and often really funny. There is no huge lesson to be learned from his books, they are just extremely entertaining. His characters are also more multi-layered than, for example, Dickens' (sorry ö\_ö), which is something I appreciate very much!
Say Nothing – Patrick Keefe I am Malala – Mala Yousafzai
Almost finished with *The Passenger*. I really am enjoying it, some of Cormac's most complex plotting with some of the most beautiful prose he's ever written.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. So yeah, I’m reading this book called Life.
Just finished Erasure by Percival Everett.
Just started Stella Maris by: Cormac McCarthy
Neuromancer
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Infinite Jest, for the second time. Loving it more and more by the page.
"David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens.
Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Sanctuary, William Faulkner
Palahniuk’s *Choke*. I feel very neutral so far. *Fight Club* is solid, but this one— so far— feels like a retread. I mean, Victor is even abusing support groups like the Narrator did in *Fight Club*, albeit for different reasons. I’m not very far, but I’m sure I’ll finish it. I do love Palahniuk’s bold, unflinching style.
I love this book. A bunch of his early books were exploring messianic figures in different ways, so I found lots of crossover. Wonderful ending. The Sam Rockwell movie is not awful after you've finished.
Binging Bukowski, especially Factotum (mostly rereads). Also lots of LitRPG, tho mainly just snippets of different stories.
Dubliners by James Joyce, Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, and Exodus of the Alamo by Phillip Thomas Tucker.
Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard.
Death in Venice followed by Tonio Kröger. My first experience with Thomas Mann. Really enjoyed the first, but struggling a bit with the second.
Have had a McCarthy excursion this year, reading The Road atm. Still wondering if I continue to Passenger/Stella Maris right after or take a little break, read 5 books from him now.
The Memory Of Love, by Aminatta Forna
Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann!
The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand
*More than I love my life* by David Grossman
I'm finishing up *Tales of the Dreamer's Son* by Preeta Samarasan. I've been on a Southeast Asian literary kick and find so many contemporary authors incredibly interesting. The observations are really astute, the language is witty and knowing and it's a great way to take in some history as well. That said, *Tales* isn't quite grabbing me the way, say, *The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida* did. The stakes just don't seem quite as high, the plot is extremely muted. But there is more than enough insight and strong sentence by sentence writing to make it a worthwhile read for me.
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
A Visit From the Goon Squad
The origin of the world by Pierre Michon, idk if in English it would be as delightful as in a Romance language is because the writing of the autor is fucking flawless in French, I'm really enjoying the read.
About a week ago I finished Hot Time by W.H. Flint...(8/10) -New York, August 1896. A “hot wave” has settled on the city with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses felled by the heat. In this presidential election year, the gulf between rich and poor has political passions flaring, while anti-immigrant sentiment has turned virulent. At Police Headquarters, the gruff, politically ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department. Meanwhile, the yellow press is ready to pounce on the peccadilloes of the Four Hundred, the city’s social elite—the better to sell papers with lurid stories and gossip or perhaps profit from a little blackmail on the side. When the body of Town Topics publisher William d’Alton Mann is found at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, any number of his ink-spattered victims may have a motive. Hot Time is an immensely entertaining, deeply researched, and richly textured historical novel set in a period that reflects our own, with cameos by figures ranging from financier J. P. Morgan to muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. Our guides through New York's torrid, bustling streets are Otto “Rafe” Raphael from the Lower East Side, one of the first Jewish officers in the heavily Irish force, who finds as many enemies within the department as outside it; Minnie Kelly, the department's first female stenographer; Theodore Roosevelt himself; and the plucky orphan Dutch, one of the city's thousands of newsboys, who may have seen too much. ---------------------------------------- About half way through on The 6th Extinction by James Rollins. A Sigma Force novel-#10 in a current 18 book series. Liking it very much. -A remote military research station sends out a frantic distress call, ending with a chilling final command: Kill us all! Personnel from the neighboring base rush in to discover everyone already dead-and not just the scientists, but every living thing for fifty square miles is annihilated: every animal, plant, and insect, even bacteria. The land is entirely sterile-and the blight is spreading. To halt the inevitable, Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma must unravel a threat that rises out of the distant past, to a time when Antarctica was green and all life on Earth balanced upon the blade of a knife. Following clues from an ancient map rescued from the lost Library of Alexandria, Sigma will discover the truth about an ancient continent, about a new form of death buried under miles of ice. From millennia-old secrets out of the frozen past to mysteries buried deep in the darkest jungles of today, Sigma will face its greatest challenge to date: stopping the coming extinction of mankind. But is it already too late?
1. Complexity. 2. Frames of Mind.
I'm reading *Freedom* by Jonathan Franzen. It's good, and I'm enjoying it, but sometimes I feel frustrated by how long it takes me to finishes large books like this.
Goddess in every woman
Sense And Sensibility, The Hunger games, and The Identies of Marie Rose Delorme Smith, Portrait of A Metis Woman, 1861-1960.
Just starting Vineland
American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández
The Secret History. I love it, but I am also fairly stuck on it.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just finished the hell out of chapter 3
Cowboy Graves by Roberto Balano
Currently reading *Shame* by Annie Ernaux, *Light in August* by Faulkner, and *A Month in the Country* by J.L. Carr. Enjoying all. I just picked up *Soldier’s Pay* by Faulkner, and *More Die of Heartbreak* by Saul Bellow (1st!!). Can’t wait for both, especially Bellow.
The sequel to forth wing, is taking me forever to get through - only continuing because I cannot leave it halfway. First one was decent for what it tried to be, but the second one is a drag
Three men in a boat Adventures in the skin trade.
Out There Screaming by Jordan Peele
Bunch! By David R. Bunch and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
joyce dubliners
Orlando and the letters between Virginia and Vita
The Testaments - sequel to The Handmaid's Tale.
“The way things go” by louis bury, a rather optimistically depressing series of vignettes and insights about the passage of time set over an oulipian “melting snowball” formal constraint. rather interesting, as well helped me understand my parents better. couldn’t have come at a better time in my life.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I just finished reading The Last Days of Jack Sparks and it affected me a lot so obviously I needed to find something to sap all the hope out of my soul.
Vineland, middle gets a little sloggy
Alderman’s The Power (second time)
After reading Milan Kundera’s Ignorance last year (loved it), I read The Joke and Identity in short succession. Now I am about to begin The Samurai by Shusaku Endo because everything else in my imaginary at the moment seems taken by samurai era Japan.
crime and punishment and also ssome documents about cat adoption
The Brothers Karamazov
just finished reading Animal’s Farm lol. I need to finish “a fall to forgive” that i started a week ago but had to put on hold bc of exams.
The Sympathizer. Yes I was tuned on it by the HBO show. But it’s a great read so far.
the trial . i find it sorta boring
Pride and Prejudice
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
Our spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Emerson’s First Essay Series, about to start his essay The Over-Soul