Loved your review of The White People.

Nice blog, Rob. Please review some Nabokov.

First I need to read some Nabokov!

My reading is usually 95% non-fiction, 5% fiction. I am currently reading the above referenced novel, Mort(e) http://sohopress.com/books/morte/ , where ants are planning humanity's end and brainwash other animals into fighting their war. It is weird.

All librarians need to read some Nabokov.

what do you recommend to begin with?

Lolita. His best masterpiece. I say that because I think he has several masterpieces. Buy the annotated edition, as the literary, cultural, and other illusions throughout the book are simply astounding. Plus, as a librarian, you should know how to address the dweebs who think the book is some kind of pedo porn.

Speak, Memory. A brilliant, ecstatically written memoir.

After those two, Transparent Things, to see if you understand it any better than I do.

he works in a library!

this semester's (tiny) reading list for class:





+ loads more, as I will be writing my BA thesis this semester.
but I will talk about the literature I'll be using as soon as I start working on it... which I should have done yesterday. Heh.

I know. (I don't get it.)

If you like that I'd strongly recommend Joe Sacco's books about the war in the former Yugoslavia, firstly Safe Area Gorazde.

Berserk by Kentaro Miura. Second vol 2 of a relentlessly violent, gruesome and oppressive medieval swordplay type thing.

And this:



Chaos by James Gleick, very interesting in parts, tedious journalism for the rest.

I agree on the Gleick. My fave book of his is Genius, about my hero Richard P. Feynman

I received this book in the mail this morning:



I already finished it. I really liked it. I like reading books written by people my age.

His powers did wane over time, and this is probably his least satisfying work, or would have been if Original of Laura had remained unpublished. But I seem to remember some mind-blowing bit about a pencil in a drawer.

But about time he wrote a dud. Since the mid-1920s (!!) he'd been pouring out some of the most delightful fiction my eyes have ever read.

His first novel, Mary, is a bit slight, but a good intro to his themes. (He spent five decades writing about the same four or five things, which isn't a criticism, just a description).

Then begins an impressive streak of finely-woven fiction fun, little bursts of pleasure coming in at 250 pages or less. Some are better than others, but all are good. Invitation to a Beheading, Despair and The Defense are common favorites of the period.

His Russian phase ends with The Gift, which ranks among his best work. But it is dense, and reveals its pleasures slowly and only to patient readers. It doesn't have much of the immediate joy which shimmers off the others.

He switched to English and wrote two more short, great ones The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister, then Lolita. The book is long, diffuse, and grows a little tedious halfway through. It's a grand summation, which has its value, but I usually prefer all the earlier stuff he was summing up.

Pnin is a classic, and is very touching, a quality that can be somewhat rare in Nabokov.

Pale Fire is, in my lowly opinion, the best novel he wrote.

After an amazing start, Ada runs out of steam, and so does Nab's career. Look at the Harlequins is okay, but a slightly younger Nab would've crushed it.

His short story collection is a desert island pick, and if a wave threatened to wash away all my choices, this might be the one I'd save. It's packed with everything that made him great, and contains some new tricks he wasn't able to pull off in novels.

His only goal was to give a certain type of reader a rollicking good time, and I think he succeeded many times over. But yeah, he fucking blew it with this one.

Thank you, evollove, for that great retrospective! I need to pick up Pale Fire and Pnin, soon as I finish my Barth (Lost in the Funhouse and End of the Road).

i meant why buy when everything is at your fingertips free of charge at the library

what he needs is not to buy but to read

sorry, it's my anticonsumerist bias pointing out language/culture tics

my form of "political correctness" if you will (everyone has their causes)

please don't take it personally-- my target is the culture at large which sweeps us all

camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente

If it is not free at the Library I work at, I can get it through Inter-Library Loan, which is AWESOME, or there is always the internetwebs search for "(insert book title here) pdf" or for older books, Project Gutenberg.

for example. You wanna read Hemingway?

Old Man & The Sea http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvin.../oldmansea.pdf

The Sun Also Rises
http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content...24grammata.pdf

Complete Short Stories of Hemingway
https://theteacherscrate.files.wordp...-hemingway.pdf

Speaking of buying books, I just bought these. I've read Redux but not the bottom books. The hardbacks are in pristine condition. I bought all for $5 total, from the public library's store.

Most of the books I read are library loans. However, I have to have my own copies of my favorite books. The above, for example.

Another reason I buy books is that I am a slow reader. I have to renew and renew library books, then recheck them out, and on and on. However, the college library here has lonnngg loan times, basically the whole academic year, and then whole summer.

Lovecraft - Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories