Das Book: the very new reading thread

[das kranke Tier]

Call me a douche, but I'm currently enthralled with American Gods.  I can't put it down.  I've got to try and finish it and get my reading done for school before Monday night. 

[YojimboMonkey]

I KNOW OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T ANYONE EVER TELL ME ABOUT DIOMEDES

Greg, each man must discover Diomedes on his own.

Welcome to manhood, son.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Call me a douche, but I'm currently enthralled with American Gods.  I can't put it down.  I've got to try and finish it and get my reading done for school before Monday night. 

there's nothing lame about that. i love neil gaiman's writing, and that book in particular is one of his best.

[das kranke Tier]

Word.  It's the first novel I've read of his and needless to say, I'm pretty damn impressed.

[milesofsparks]

so I just finished The Brothers Karmazov, setting a new personal record for longest time to read a book.  5 months I think?  which is no reflection on the book or my enjoyment of it, just how crazy my life has been and how little reading I've been doing.  also, it's a big heavy book so I don't carry it around much.

so, now I thought I'd switch to a little light reading.  so today I bought this:



I've often read excerpts of it, but never the whole thing.  whole thing, here I come.  unfortunately,  the font sux.  I may expire from graphic design shock before I finish...

[Doctor Bob]

Are you going to read it from start to finish?  Eek.  It's a fascinating artefact, but I've never really considered it a book in the traditional sense- more a file, or an entire filing cabinet, in fact.  For me it's in a category with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a couple of others (The Poems of Alexander Pope, for example) - big books for dipping into randomly when you're supposed to be doing other things.  It always yields some gems, but I think if I had to read it cover to cover I'd balk.

Good luck with it.  And give my regards to Angela (2nd floor, to the right).

PS Have you read Georges Perec's Species of Spaces?

[coldforge]

big books for dipping into randomly when you're supposed to be doing other things. 

This is more or less my lifeblood, and for better or for worse the only sort of book i ever do pick up these days. A new good addition is Clive James' Cultural Amnesia.

[milesofsparks]

Are you going to read it from start to finish? 

I'm going to give it a try (might take another 5 months, though).  keep in mind I am the girl who read the encyclopedia in jr. high and still reads big sections of the dictionary for no good reason (though not cover to cover, I admit).  I just recently found out that bemused doesn't mean what I thought it meant at all.  huh.

PS Have you read Georges Perec's Species of Spaces?

I meant to read it, but I read A Void first and hated it, so I don't think I can handle another by him, even if it is architecty.

[Doctor Bob]

"...for no good reason"??  Since when did anyone need a good reason to read the dictionary aside from the fact that it's the dictionary?  I have three- Chambers for definitions, Oxford for etymology, Collins because it's pocket-sized.

I just recently found out that bemused doesn't mean what I thought it meant at all.  huh.

Did you think it was a second-rate version of amused?  (A-mused, B-mused, etc.- sorry, lame gag.)

I meant to read it, but I read A Void first and hated it, so I don't think I can handle another by him, even if it is architecty.

A Void probably wasn't the best place to start (like starting your Lou Reed adventure with Metal Machine Music?).  I read it after a few others and enjoyed it, but in the same way I enjoy linguistic parlour games.  I think it's enough to know that the book exists, and that the achievement was achieved (spoiler: it was written without the use of the letter E).  But don't let it put you off the rest of his oeuvre.  He's on record as saying that he wanted all his books to be different types- sociology, fiction, memoir, word games, etc.  I've read a few (W, or The Memory of Childhood; A Man Asleep; Things; A Void; Three by Perec), but I've never managed Life A User's Manual despite repeated attempts.  Still, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is up there in my all time favourite books, and aside from Species of Spaces itself, the ...Other Pieces in the Penguin version are almost as fascinating as his way of looking at space.

[Andrew_TSKS]

so my copy of "the anti matter anthology" by norman brannon, a collection of interviews from my favorite zine of the mid 90s, came in the mail saturday. i was feeling downright goddamn awful yesterday but i read a whole bunch of the interviews in the book and they kinda helped me feel better. a bit. if nothing else, richie birkenhead from into another talking about his own positive experiences with therapy inspired me to look into therapy for myself, so ... there's that, i guess.

[Anne the Man]

I was in a pretty good mood before, then started reading The Beauty Myth and began to feel like I'd swallowed lots of bricks. The statistics about how people feel about rape were particularly disturbing.

[alistarr*]

i'm nearing the end of doris lessing's The Grass Is Singing, and it's been very fast going and though "enjoy" is pretty much the wrong word for an uncomfortable, sad, angry novel like this i've definitely found myself constantly wanting to sit back down with it. 's good.

[C of heartbreak]

So I finished Infinite Jest. It didn't really feel that long to me and I'm kinda sad now that it's over. Naturally curious about the ending, I've been poking around online and am astonished by the amount of criticism/conspiracy theory the book has spawned. If any of you have any thoughts on the book I'd be glad to hear them.

Now I'm onto apparently another piece of meta-literature: Nabokov's Pale Fire

[Andrew_TSKS]

re: infinite jest--i once (before i read the book) read something online that stated that if you went back and read the first part over again after having read the entire book, you'd want to read the entire book over again immediately. i tried this when i finally read it and, though i resisted the urge, i did indeed kind of want to read the entire thing over again.

as far as what's actually going on there at the end, the resolution is reasonably telegraphed throughout the book, if you ask me. i am pretty sure i know what actually happens to the characters by the end.

[coldforge]

Apparently DFW intended to write the whole book as a fractal. Was it here that that was mentioned?

[C of heartbreak]

Andrew--I actually went back and read the first part several times while I was reading it, and I was pretty sure I was going to have to read the whole thing again at least once. Not now, though.

And yeah, I'm pretty certain about the main plot events, but there's a lot of little stuff that is entirely unresolved. Though really I'm not too concerned with plot issues; I'm more interested in things like the allusions he uses and whether the book is a fractal (interesting).

[Andrew_TSKS]

what does that even mean when such a word is applied to a book?

[milesofsparks]

what does that even mean when such a word is applied to a book?

yeah--I was just going to ask that.  I haven't read the book, but I can't imagine how self-similarity would work in a book...

[coldforge]

It means, and I've never read it, that some element of the large structure—plot, settings, characters; maybe you can chart the settings he chooses, or the course of events along a kind of parabolic shape, say—is also going to be repeated on a smaller scale, say, within each section or chapter.

[milesofsparks]

yeah, I'm still not getting it, somehow.  I guess I have to read it.

[coldforge]

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I don't know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.

MS: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were -- and I don't know this kind of science, but it just -- I said to myself this must be fractals.

DFW: It's -- I've heard you were an acute reader. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it's interesting, that's one of the structural ways that it's supposed to kind of come together.

[C of heartbreak]

mos--If you read it, don't focus on fractals the first time through, because it really is very enjoyable just to read.

[Doctor Bob]

Did DFW mean 'acute' or 'astute'?

[coldforge]

Oxford American gives 2. having or showing a perceptive understanding or insight for acute, too.

[santaclaustral]

und



arrived from Amazon today.

I am pretty excited about 2008 being the year I started reading again.