currently in the middle of:

monsieur pain (roberto bolaño, 198...2?. published in this century)



featuring a similarly highly subjective, imprecise narrator as we’d find in the latter “una novelita lumpen,” and it’s at times hard to tell what is dream and what is reality, this is a book about... books? not really, but the story circles around a latin american poet in paris in the 1930s, and there are countless literary allusions, mainly to do with poets and poetry.

the strangest thing of all is that this cover picture i linked above is hosted by... walmart! mallarmé at walmart- who knew it was possible? well...

parts of it might be slightly alien to inhabitants to the anglosphere, but some familiarity with the literary scene of paris in the years before the war, spanish civil war, etc, would be helpful to approach it.

On the back half of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night

i tried reading that once in the original and failed

maybe could work with a kindle version, thanks to dictionaries. otherwise might break down and locate it en inglés

you gonna post a review in the blog?

monsieur pain, by the way, was bizarre and brilliant and incomprehensible as fuck, but in a good way. i mean, you can follow this book, but—where do you follow it to?

i have not read any criticism about bolaño, thank fuck, i have avoided it purposefully, especially the academic kind. but it reminds me somewhat of paul auster’s new york trilogy, except that... there’s a driving logic in paul auster that is totally missing here. this one just... goes! (but where? where??)

brilliant little book. a fast read, too, although confusing, but fast. by this i mean the main character falls asleep has a dream wakes up you follow him and then wonder—“wait—is he still dreaming?” well, in the story, no, but... he might as well be.

will do, once I am done. I will attach a PDF version to download as well.

Dan Simmons - Hyperion


super cool so far, oldschool kinda sci-fi, reminds me of the masterwork of Isaac Asimov. Really digging that.

just started this morning

LA LITERATURA NAZI EN AMÉRICA (Roberto Bolaño, 1996)



i cracked this open for the first time in a very serious waiting room and i had to really hold myself back to avoid laughing my ass off and spooking everyone there

these fictional biographies read, to me, like the apex of social satire. A+++++...

there was a prelude to that form in the epilogue of monsieur pain, which preceded this novel by decades, but those biographical notes were more or less serious, whereas these ones seem to me really transcendent of their borgesian origins.

maybe i’m judging too soon, but yeah, seems to me this is the most exquisite high comedy. im fucking stoked!

^ indeedy! One a my favorites!

40 pages...2 chapters...before I've reached the end of the 20th Century. I'm just past the 9/11 attacks section.

And finished. Good book, would recommend, though it definitely slows down in depth content once Washing Machine era is hit.

Christmas present.

that looks fucking great lololol

It's a lot of fun; if you're familiar with his other work it'll be right up your alley.

Here's an excerpt, where he got Serena Williams to try and hit drones with tennis balls.

hahahahaaa


great

The Terror by Dan Simmons :cool:

Finished

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/...s-awesome.html

First book of 2020 for me is, I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid.

I will begin my way through Sun Ra's Reading List for the class he taught back in day day, with a book called The Two Babylons: or, the Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife - Alexander Hislop (1916)

Here is the full reading list. This would have been a HELL of a University class.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Radix

Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons

The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oahspe

Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones

Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968

David Livingston: Missionary Travels

Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro

Rutledge: God's Children

Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Temple University

John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It's At, United States Information Agency

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972

Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921

The Source Book of Man's Life and Death (Ra's description; = The King James Bible)

Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956

Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944

Blackie's Etymology



I am not gonna read Blavatsky's books, because I already did, and they suck fucking ASS

very unusual list ;)

Finished Star Trek - The Deep Space Nine Companion. https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/...ne-mother.html

I found it on Ebay for $30. Used copies sell for $80-$100. for the Niner nerds.