Siri Hustvedt's The Summer Without Men
(halfway through already, afterwards I will have to read The Enchantment of Lily Dahl)

^ Have it, never read it, despite its brief length. How many stars would you give it out of five? And did you read Sorrows of an American? Forgot I had it and saw it the other day.

some books about raising goats and chickens and green building and rain harvesting and shit like that

william gibson pattern redftoufuckyou.

tried to find a good john coltrane and thelonious monk bio.

frank herbert

One cool thing about my book blog is that I get to see where the viewers are, and over half of my views are from China! http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/ I hope this means that people in China are seeking books that cannot be read there, and not that the Chinese government is looking at my blog to check up on me.

this came up on a facebook post. A list of "best of 2014" from independent presses.

welll worth a look for sure!

http://bookriot.com/2014/12/05/large...indie-presses/

I'm still reading the Cheever stories book. About 1/4 of the way through. Fascinating. A brilliant short-story writer.

I can't stop reading the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr. The premise starts as he is a detective in Berlin under the 3rd Reich but the story over several novels takes place around the globe.

I will take a break to read the new Michael Connelley once I finish Field Gray.

New reviews up http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/

Half of the "hits" to my review blog come from China. Is that chinese people trying to find books and stuff or is it the Chinese government tracking me and all the mad shit AI say about them? ha!

Finished this



and this

finished this yesterday:



and started this:

1Q84

just got this for Xmas, looking forward to it, pretty controversial


some review high(or low) lights include:

"mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism"
"depicts Israel as an utterly evil state "
"the 'I hate Israel' handbook"
“Hamas Book-of-the-Month” selection

I will eventually order this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/6054923048/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5 A1OLE

and be like, the 5th person outside of China to read it.

This book mainly reads the three works of early Baudrillard, and challenges the current research findings on his philosophical journey. Zhang Yibing also reads Baudrillard's other works to fully situate him theoretically. He asserts that Baudrillard's texts cannot be classified as postmodernist or neo-Marxist in any period. Zhang belongs to the third generation of Marxist philosophers in China and is renowned for his textological researches, having developed a unique reading methodology. Since the end of 1960s, Baudrillard wrote three important works: For a Critique of Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death, which furiously attacked Marx, aiming to refute historical materialism and deconstruct Marx's theory of labour value. The Mirror of Production in particular was intended to demolish the logic of Marxist theories from within, by deconstructing and disordering them. This was ignored by many Marxist researchers. What was real thinking behind, and historical context of, the shift in his critique, and how was symbolic exchange combined with death? The author with his sharp insight shows that the Early Baudrillard's thought is trapped in the logic of symbolic exchange, based on the grassroots' romanticism (radicalism) of Mauss-Bataille. He then keenly follows the secret of Baudrillard's transformation process in his critical logic, his passage from the dissolution of the ideographic material to the symbolic value of coding structure, then to quasi-real existence without a model, until finally his symbolic miscoding of death becomes a hopeless waiting for Baudrillard's tentative salvation of the world. This is indeed a death trilogy, which occurs in Baudrillard's academic scenery and in which the real existence is murdered. The thinking of late Baudrillard is a discourse like virus and paranoia. This kind of logical violence of theoretical terrorism has become an absurd modern academic caricature of excessive rational interpretation. In this book the reader will also find Zhang's innovative interpretation and updating of Marx's historical materialism.

I am not really interested in an updated account of historical materialism, but Baudrillard fascinates me more than any other thinker.

INFINITE JEST

is the joke on me?????????

so you're not liking it?

i've never been interested in any of the mcsweeney's crowd. don't know why. i'd check their website and space out and not care.

but here "1088" reasons to read that book:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jameskicksa/...est#.au59JZVAB

i'm still not convinced

i mean i just opened the first page on the amazon "look inside" thing and my eyes went blurry :(

You guys are making me feel better. Frankly, I couldn't even finish Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and short stories are my thing.

That article is pretty funny... I like how it starts of v jokey but then chucks in a few serious ones at the end.

I dunno if I'm enjoying it. I'm not hating it - I would have stopped reading it if I was. Some of the threads I am really enjoying, and I think David Foster Wallace must really have been some kind of genius. It's weird cause I'm about 75% through and I recently read a lot of the negative reviews of the book (critics & on amazon) and actually it seems like I actually like the stuff that other people don't (e.g. the non-linear storyline, lots of ridiculous detail, lack of focus etc).

I think some parts are really profound, but what I like best about it is all the minutiae of non-profound stuff that is in some way really human.

What I don't like about it is that I feel like it might be some kind of emperor's new clothes style trick :S like am I just such a navel gazey pseudo academic pretentious faux intellectual show off wanker that I like the book just because I think it makes me smart????

Anyway, not that I care really since it's just a book I'm reading.

It's taking a long time but I am definitely reading it (contrast Moby Dick which I have tried to read like a million times and feel like I am enjoying yet I never get past about page 200).

I dunno. It's making me think which is good!

i've always liked non-linear stories etc but i think i burned myself out on them many years ago with stuff like cortazar's "rayuela" and on the minutiae part it was james joyce. so the novelty aspect of that is lost on me at this point. i think i've read too much too soon and that has made me impatient or maybe a cynic.

damn, maybe i should try reading some fiction today. it's been ages.

yeah i've always liked non-linear stuff. tbh i've never seen it as such a big deal (like hello the ODYSSEY is non-linear, it's hardly a new thing).

but the minutiae thing is pretty new to me. i don't just think it's a gimmick either. having said that i haven't read any joyce who by all accounts is the master of minutiae so maybe i'm not qualified.

has anyone read my struggle? i'm kinda tempted.....

i think my challenge is to either find characters i care about or to learn something i don't know. the former is hard to do with first-world problems (not to say it doesn't happen, but it's hard); the latter i get more from how-to books than from fiction these days. e.g, i'm bent on exhausting the literature about cob house building.

right now i want to vegetate and read all day and i'm thinking i should read some fiction but instead i keep thinking about building directly on bedrock without a foundation. have i gone nuts? yes. yes i have.

==


okay here's question for all: who are your favorite characters in fiction?

I am increasingly finding this to be bullshit. Why is the emotional/spiritual/social etc life-experience of a "first world" human less valid than others? And do you really understand everything about your own existence at your specific location and time, or can fiction that takes place in contemporary America perhaps illuminate some aspect of such an existence you hadn't previously considered?



Leo Bloom was the first to pop into my head.

i don't know. when i first came to the us i had this classmate who swore revenge upon the world because he had grown up poor. he declared, with tears in his eyes, that they had an old car!

having come from a country full of starved people and having to ride tuberculous minibuses all my life i laughed to his face at that sort of spoiled shit. like the world owed him.

now don't get me wrong-- it's not that i can't empathize with the pain of social shame, however artificial. and it's not that i cannot empathize with a bourgeois or even an aristocratic character. of course i can. since the beginning of time we've read about heroes and princesses and that sort of shit.

what i'm actually refering to is a notion so nebulous that i have to keep writing about it until i can put my finger on it and find out what i'm thinking. because really i don't know what i'm thinking until i can ramble about it for a while. so thanks for the excuse but sorry i can't explain right now.

but fuck, i'm just having a really hard time empathizing with the characters of contemporary american fiction. and it's a gut feeling and i'll have to figure out why. i begin and i want to kick them in the ass.

anyway, favorite characters, randomly:

the real ulysses -- and athena in the oddisey

sancho panza

lázaro (from lazarillo de tormes)

henderson

the tomboy one from little women

c. auguste dupin

huck finn

melquíades

bras cubas

molly aka molly millions from william gibson's various stories

fronesis from lezama's paradiso

dante in the divine comedy (i don't like the ideology of that book but i like the character)

nick adams

la fanfarlo

la marquise de merteuil + le vimcomte de valmont (horrible but fascinating people)

the man from the underground

macandal from el reino de este mundo

fave fiction characters

Henry Chinaski
Billy Pilgrim
Ahab

Reading Parfum.again because I simply adore this book. It is the most remarkable fiction I've ever read, and I feel the same rapture every.single time I read it, indeed its the only novel ive ever been able to enjoy several times through like a favorite film.

My all time favorite character from a book is the fucking Count of Monte Cristo.. that dude is a.straight G

oh, fucking a right!

yes, it is!

http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/1...infinite-jest/

really interesting review of infinite jest which explains why you and symbol mans first reaction might be the most sensible one.

reading that article i realized the "first world problems" thing. I AM NOT THE IN-GROUP. and when they don't transcend their in-group, or just rehash the same ideologies, i am out.

in this case, while i live in america, i do not share the preoccupations or cultural touchstones of the american middle class.

so, i can only connect w/ the stuff that reaches beyond those confines.

anyway i tried again w/ infinite jest and went 2 pages more w/ the hal incandenza interview.

as a consolation i went to my storage and dug out some old books. i might reread "lazarillo de tormes" just for shits & giggles. that book is such a classic-- nearly 500 years old and it will still give me belly laughs.

thanks for linking this - an interesting read (though i stopped a little before the end as i haven't quite finished reading the book yet...!)

comparisons to mein kampf put me off the argument slightly...?! unnecessary & incendiary (lots of other examples would have sufficed instead without the same hysteria attached).

i do agree with this stuff about snobbery in literature. like i referred to 'emperor's new clothes' in an earlier post. but i think the review misses something that i find enjoyable (perhaps not enjoyable but engaging) in the utter mundanity of the characters' lives. that's what i find to be the human element of the book even in the most absurd moments i still recognise something base and mundane that i can relate to.

and also

fave charaters in literature (not necessarily most likeable, just characters i have enjoyed i guess?):

Sophocles' Oedipus (CLASSIC)

Actually lots of classical characters purely cause i'm a classics nerd and love the stories and also because so many of them are just amazingly crafted.

Mercutio (badass)

Santiago

Dionisio Vivo (a childhood fave)

Patrick Bateman (LOL)

Gloria Gilbert (bitch)

Harriet Cleve Dufresnes

&c.

Because you're working through an issue, I won't give you too much shit. But this doesn't make sense to me.

You only read about your own group? How boring. Anyway, what group might that be? Personally, I'm white, American, on the lower end of middle-class. Yet before all that I identify as Jewish (less than 2% of the US population) or even vegetarian (about 6% I think). Am I in or out? Especially at CHRISTmas time, I feel a bit out.

But the real answer is there is some unsettled tension. Hey, drama! (See Philip Roth's short story "Defender of the Faith")

You also haven't explained why one sort of human pain is more legitimate than another. If the love of your life to whom you have been married for 20 years decides they want to leave you forever, this is no less devastating just because you have a belly full of McDonald's.

(And on a personal level, you're saying any pain I might experience "doesn't count" just because I am not hungry and politically oppressed. Yeah, the kid who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas can go fuck himself, but anyone who dismisses anything I felt after the sudden death of my father, for example, can go fuck themselves as well. )

As far as rehashing ideologies, I don't see this happening much in serious literature. The point, often, is to critique. Anyway, this isn't simply a contemporary American issue. Perhaps you've noticed there are virtually no Sovet-era Russian novels worth reading?

I read short stories almost exclusively, and the great advantage of that is variety.

I take your point to the extent that after ten stories in a row set in American suburbs, I get restless. I want to read about other people and places. Then, eventually, I think to myself, "If I read one more story about some docile Asian chick from a harsh patriarchal culture who learns to self-actualize, I'm gonna join the KKK," and I thirst for a story about a wealthy college graduate who, darn it, just doesn't know what she wants. Then I'll get tired of that and read some Nadine Gordimer stories about South African aparthiet. Get tired. Move on. Etc.

maybe i misunderstood but i thought !@#$%!'s post was saying that literature should be able to appeal to people both outside and inside the 'in group'. i.e. that it should be able to appeal on some basic level to lots of different groups of people, and that if it can't then it's rubbish. so not saying that middle class american literature CAN'T do this but that it's a bit crap because it often doesn't.

i agree with you that pain is relative. suffering isn't some kind of competition and i think at the heart of it we suffer over essentially the same things, just on a different scale.

but i do wonder why we always think suffering is the root of good art/literature??????? this is something that has always stumped me. not that i necessarily don't think that, but i certainly don't understand it.

Someone wants something, can't get it=drama

Someone is happy=boring

I meant more suffering on the part of the author? this idea of the tortured artist.

plus i always think characters and stories that are so black and white are too artificial - you need a bit of both.

about 50 pp into this

yeah! you tell him!




you didn't misunderstand. thank you for reading for comprehension. you're wonderful.

Dodge all you want. You, sir, have a prejudice.

i said exactly the opposite of what you're fighting about and i'm not in the mood to argue silliness. really, i just woke up and i have bigger problems than this today.

ps- maybe you didn't read db's link to the criticism of infinite jest ("alas, poor wallace"), which is what provides context for the discussion of writing only for the in-group. whether this is true or not of DFW, that's the framework i was using to (maybe) understand.