I finished it in about a month by reading forty pages or so a day, mostly skipping the chapters which are really essays and keeping a character list handy. This was a decade ago so I don't remember much, except I felt satisfied at the end and thought the effort was worth it, although Anna is ultimately more loveable. It's not a "difficult" book, just super fucking long.

today i’m hating that you guys are putting up pictures of book covers instead of titles because my internet (the whole internet?) seems to be having some sort of DNS problem and nothing is loading.

what beast is this? gonna guess anna karenina.

i second the recommendation to consume it as a soap opera. which is what it is—a long, overpopulated, meandering entertainment. slow & steady is the way to do it. and more enjoyable really. i dd a chapter or two a day and it went by so fast.

wait wait no— it’s “war and peace”, is it? that i have not tackled yet.

but i enjoy tolstoi’s essays! maybe even more so than the narratives. his novels and tales are actually moral essays, i mean—they really all try to address the question of “how to live.” they aren’t just pointless yarns.

oh yeah it wasn't the intertubes but just my wifi router or a connection somewhere. whoohoo!! FIXED. i can see now.

His fiction certainly got moralistic, but the power of war and especially Anna is the neutral realism, at least for my tastes. The way he describes a wheat harvest or a dog hunt is the major reason I read at all in the first place. He loved life, at least at one point he did, and he got that love on page, which I can't say for too many other writers.

his fiction was *always* moralistic (at least everything i’ve read by him has always had a strong moral core), but in a good way. he wasn’t like angry jezebel commenters calling garbage everyone they disagree with. instead he explored the potentialities of the actions and choices we make and took them to their final consequences.

everyone in anna karenina— levin, kitty, anna, vronsky— follows certain trajectories according to their choices, but they aren’t branded as “good” and “evil” the way the american populace does with its victims. they come to you fresh and neutral and under pressure (from their desires, from their circumstances, from society) and blind to the path ahead of them.

tolstoi sees them think and vacillate and attempt and fail and commit to certain actions, but he doesn’t hate or blame or fingerpoint them— he sees and shows their humanity. he was a moralist, but he wasn’t a fucking puritan.

and you’re right that he was great at realism, but his theory of realism was expounded in a book-length essay, “what is art?”. boils down to this: the job of the artist is to make the familiar unfamiliar. to shine a new light to it. to make it strange. “otstranenie” or something. and yeah, that also explains why crazy people are good artists and squares aren’t— the squares already have fixed concepts of the world. boring fucks.

anyway, to me he was a profound thinker. and his creatures illustrate his depth of thought about vital matters. just a brilliant fucking writer, more important than most. i guess what i’m trying to say is— don’t skip his essays!

oh speaking of angry jezebel commenters, in the kreutzer sonata he does have a character that embodies moralistic rage— the prisoner who killed his wife, which the narrator interviews. but that’s just a character, not the whole work. and still— his condemnation of romanticism, while old-timey and stuck in outdated gender roles, still contains a core of truth that one can relate to today, especially in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s (it’s just that XIX century aristocrats got there much earlier than the rest of the world).

oh, speaking of which— you ever read “dangerous liaisons”? fanfuckingtastic.

I tend to divide Tolstoy into pre and post "Christian" conversion.

I mean, he came to renounce his earlier work and wrote stories with titles like "God Sees the Truth but Waits." I insist there are two Tolstoys, although I guess I never really thought through what the similarities might be.

Have you read War and Peace? He'll completely stop the action for twenty pages to give his theory on history. I have nothing against his essays, but it's annoying when they are crammed into a novel. That was my only criticism of his non-fiction.

I still read Anna and think, "Yeah, that's how the world works" rather than "What a good point" or "I see where he's coming from" or "Geez, he was tough on that character." Maybe I just ignored the moralism in favor of the realism.

Les Dangeraux Liasons has been on my to-read list for awhile. I'll get to it.

The movie showed Uma's tits, so I'm not sure how the book will compare, but I might give it a go.

ha ha ha

“cruel intentions” is that too, but it has buffy in it, and neve campbell i think? and no tits. they were just kids.

the novel though is one of the best ever. it’s just told in letters—a brilliant device. the guy who wrote it was a general of napoleon who specialized in building fortresses—and maybe you can see that in the construction of his novel. just fantastic. one of the best things i’ve ever read, and i read it translated, and it’s just genius.

No Neve in it.

oh, right, in my head i got it mixed up with the poster for “wild things” (not sure why— i’ve never seen that).

and i had forgotten, buffy is the asshole in this one. reese witherspoon plays madame the tourvel or the volanges virgin or both (i barely remember her in it which is probably why i injected nieves into the cast).

I could see mixing Neve up with Selma Blair who is in it.

Finished Beastly Inventions by Jean Craighead George. awesome stuff. animals got the weirdest skillz! https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/...skillz-of.html

yeah Selma Blair. I like her more than Neve.

Buffy rules though. Buffy wins the internet.

Russia in Revolution, S.A. Smith,

https://global.oup.com/academic/prod...cc=us&lang=en&

damn I love college press

Returning from a "Master Writers Class with Caleb Carr" at the Center for Fiction on 47th Street-

* said more 4 hours a day a writer is producing gibberish
* talked about a number of different writers he appreciated (he's read War and Peace 3x) which seemed to be a lot of 19th century writers - but did regard both Graham Greene and William Gibson highly
* said that much of a mystery book is composed of dialogue so the dialogue has to be good
* a mystery always starts with its ending
* he compared certain successful parts of a novel to a music improvisor, who is playing a riff and then goes off and then has to figure out a way to get back into the riff
* writing is hard work

the The Alienist is an excellent NYC novel as well as disturbing mystery

Finished AGUIRRE: A recreation of a Sixteenth Century Journey https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/...teps-into.html

I read “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. It was ... clever? And fun? But... honestly, not great. I mean I totally enjoyed it, but people treat it like a modern classic just because it addresses out society’s obsession with virtual opium, but as a story, it doesn’t have much meat to it, and it ended like every hero’s journey fuckaround ever.

Now I need a new book. Plowing through “Love and Other Demons” by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and a bunch of Lovecraft stories I’ve already read. I need something new that isn’t something I usually read. Like a boxing biography or something.

i just got my brand-new reading glasses!

NICE

God, Gabriel García Márquez was fucking amazing.

How often does a writer come around who can master newswriting, and then go on to basically rewrite the rules of creative fiction, creating a sub-genre or two while he’s at it?

Goddamn motherfucking Dickens is what he is. Only, sweet Jesus, maybe even better?

he’s better.

Right now, I’m actually inclined to agree. I grab one of his books for a re-read because I’m bored and have nothing else, and I end up not sleeping and just reading the hell out of the thing. Fucking top-tier.

glad someone uses those books. I cant stand them (Dickens and/or Marquez)

right now and forever he’s infinitely better.
reducing the guy to the silly label of “magical realism” is to misapprehend the guy’s linguistic virtuosity and sheer power of invention and tremendous sense of humor. i put him up there with cervantes, who invented the modern novel.

i just found this interview with him, which starts great. check what happens when the interviewer pulls out a tape recorder”

https://www.theparisreview.org/inter...garcia-marquez

off to read the rest!

—-

fuck. it asks for subscription! dicks.

—

so i went googling “garcia marquez cervantes” and i found this

https://newrepublic.com/article/1174...ish-literature

and i have to agree— cien años is better than don quijote.

jeezus nothing ever blew my mind for such a long time than that book except maybe for borges, but then i figured out borges’s trick, and gabo’s i haven’t yet and i probably never will.

finished The Age of the Earth - G. Brent Dalrymple
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2550

... k.

I question so much about you so often. I think you like it that way.

can't stand them. Dickens was forced down my throat ion AP English classes in 9th grade and senior year. I hated it so much. I found it to be the dullest assignments ever given in these advanced english classes. That is, until I went to University and had to read Marquez and found out what truly insufferable prose is.

qué pena me da tu caso... :D

me da pena que gente tiene que leer esa porqueria

aludía a esta famosa canción, con tan chistoso coro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrZB7D0ZgQY

¿qué te pasó en esa universidad? ¿qué carajos te hicieron?

puedo entender diferentes críticas a garcía márquez, que abundan; pero eso de que su prosa es mala me parece cosa sin fundamento. ¿a qué específicamente te refieres, aparte de tus sentimientos? a ver si explicas...

digo, por ejemplo: cita el párrafo que más te moleste y muestra de qué manera es mala prosa. a ver si es cierto. eso de nada más repetir insultos, pues... he's rubber you're glue :D

I used to feel that way about a couple authors in the past, too. We got Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville and George Eliot taught by poor teachers in High School. I later rediscovered them in as an adult and in a great college class.

it's not necessarily bad teachers but mandatory reading that can ruin the pleasure for a person. often for good.

i haven't ever recovered from 5 years of grad school

if reading is like sex, then mandatory reading is like... i might get ptsd if i start talking

anyway, thanks to your recommendation i've had this kapuczinksi (sp?) book on selassie for a while now. i read a few pages that were good but then i was afraid or something. i'm still looking it at it, uncertain...

I have tried Dickens again and Marquez again for to five years ago, and it was EVEN WORSE.

i found this old review that deals with actual prose. and not the original but the translation. it actually deals with the prose itself:

Huh. Well, I actually think high school and perhaps even college is a bit young to grasp Marquez. With Dickens you have to have an appreciation for craft, regardless of your opinion of his stories. Kind of like Shakespeare. You can hate it, but it’s not bad. Overrated, maybe. But it’s just not bad writing. It’s actually very good writing, even when it’s dull AF.

i first read cien años when i was 12 or 13 but it was in spanish so i did not need the anthropological mediation of an education to get it immediately.

unlike most things i read at that age, i have kept coming back to it over the decades and it's never old.

shakespeare funny enough i like better in translation than in english, because i have difficulty with his brilliant but for me inaccessible turns of expression, so instead of appearing luminous they register in my reduced ability as overwrought and self-conscious, and ultimately alienate me. i don't blame him for it, the problem is my painful lack of intimacy with the language--in other words too much friction and i need vaseline ha ha ha. so yeah, i'd rather read shakespeare in smooth translation where i can better grasp his psychological genius rather than his verbal virtuosity. my loss, i know, but best i can do.

Wait, is English not your first language? Either way, you are better at using it than a vast majority of human beings on the planet. I have trouble believing that’s Shakespeare would vex you at all.

But yeah... reading Shakespeare isn’t the most exciting thing. Experiencing his work, however you do it, is better than just sitting at home reading the compete works or whatever.

i used to go to the shakespeare theater in dc (cheap standing room tix) and not have a fucking clue what went on.

best way for me to get shakespeare in english (no joke) is to watch it as a movie with subtitles. i most remember macbeth as the laurence olivier version from a library vhs tape ha ha ha. and richard III was... the guy who plays loki.hiddles... something. NONONONONO... henry IV, that’s right. and the guy who plays falstaff in it is the greatest.

i do have a ba in english and attended a shakespeare class... for like 2 sessions. it was a bunch of political theory bullshit. i wanted an appreciation not the sociological autopsy of a so-called dead white man.

but yeah, no, reading it in spanish is awesome, h ah ha. othello blew my mind when i was a teenager. i should do it again soon.

Have you ever seen Orson Welles’ “MacBeth?” It’s pretty goddamn great. He did an “Othello” too (and a “Merchant of Venice” but I’ve neber seen those.

What made me interested in Shakespeare was reading “King Lear” in a high school English class. We didn’t have an AP program until my junior year, so I was stuck in regular English with the other kids and the kind-of-dumb teacher who basically used a CliffNotes version of the thing. I read the real play on my own and it blew me the fuck away. Like... OK, every political drama ever can go ahead and call this thing Daddy.”

Orson Welles’ MacBeth is badass though.

I’ve had difficulty with other Shakespeare film adaptations. Very hard to make appealing. Hard to bring the weight of the tragedy or comedy into a modern setting without totally fucking it all to hell.

oh man man man my first king lear was kurosawa’s RAN.

i still watch it every so often. a glorious fucking movie. from the very first shot.

it’s an amazing version.

watch it on a good screen. for tv, plasma works, or one of the new UHDs that don’t wash out the image like a soap opera. the cinematography is out of this world.

haven’t seen the orson welles macbeth but his touch of evil is as disturbing as the scottish play. maybe more as it features charlton heston in brownface. but i’ll keep an eye out for it— i really love welles’s films

anyway the bbc did some of the histories with a series called “the hollow crown” and they were great. i think you can trust the bbc with period pieces— it’s all they do!

For the Marquez-heads http://www.dw.com/en/gabriel-garcia-...xas/a-41751099

Archive put online for free by Univ of Texas