What are you reading?

[Faust]

I have to read that Sebald novel. Thanks for the reminder and a beautiful quote.

[galia]

same, this reminded me how much I like sebald

[garbage_queen]

...my favorite...

[shah]

[amsicora]

a classic

[theconsumer]

The hipster in the mirror

The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff. And hipsters aren’t the only ones unnerved. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those who read him in effect become responsible to him — forced to admit a failure to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world.

[Czx]

Has anybody read "The book that nobody read" (yes, pun)? It was recommended to me at my "Modern Philosophy" lecture and the concept sounds interesting but I'm wondering if the content itself is too.

[Cookie_Monster]

The catcher in the rye is one of my favorite books ever. It's amazing how well it stands against the test of time.

[noise]

mostly classics at the moment

jean genet- the thief's journal
kafka- the trial (which already i like less then nabokov's similar invitation to a beheading, still neat tho)
giovanni papini- the failure
donald norman- the design of everyday things
claudian- the rape of prosperpine (thanks à rebours!)

[MJRH]

klaus kinski, all i need is love

the first chapter is like a deranged cinnamon shops.

i am going to love this book.

once again, i'm indebted to you. almost finished, this book has been an amazing trip...

I have to paint. I must express myself. Not like actors and pensioners or politicians do. It's mania. Obsession. An urgency, just like a pregnant woman having to give birth. I sketch day and night. I use coal, because coal lives, glows, burns the most. I draw on any scrap of paper I can find, on cardboard lids, on walls. I hang my own shirt on the wall. I can't sleep anymore, I waltz sleeplessly for a couple hours or run through the English Garden all night long. In the gray of morning, around three-thirty, I'm already sketching trees, their bodies, their arteries, their foreheads touching the sky, their souls, their cries, the sky, the clouds, the grass, bushes, plants, flowers, sunflowers. But also people's bodies, faces, eyes, hands. Eyes and hands again and again, they are the most expressive. The most erotic. I can sense all of creation growing in me, growing through me, through my heart, my veins, my sex organs feeling like I must explode. I work eighteen hours a day and in feverish haste, as if I had the fear I would die of impatience and excitement to live. I know that everything about life is erotic, everything that lives. I sculpt as well. Then I smash and tear everything up and burn it all.

Kinski's prose consistently reminds me of that one scene in a Henry Miller book, i forget which one, where he gets drunk on water.

[Patroklus]

i want a post-literature non-book to read
like what do i get into after polishing off beat lit?
home skillet rec'ed illuminatus trillogy but that's defined as "sci fi" and if it's defineable i figure it aint post-lit

[Faust]

/\

I recently very much enjoyed Wolf Hall. It's the first historical novel I ever read - needed a vacation book - and found the prose engaging and offbeat. Going to read the sequel, Bring up the Bodies next. The fact that Mantel got the Booker Prize for each of them speaks volumes.

[trentk]

Patroklus - is this something like what you're looking for?

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthis-infernalis

(not literature, not a scientific treatise on the vampire squid, not philosophy, not a fable)

[Giantsway]

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men- Wallace is easily one of my favorite writers, and I am slowly working my way through his works.

[Patroklus]

Patroklus - is this something like what you're looking for?

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthis-infernalis

(not literature, not a scientific treatise on the vampire squid, not philosophy, not a fable)

no, weirder, and harder to enjoy. basically i want a book that is self-consciously not readable. i'm not even sure what that would be. maybe just a bunch of blank pages and every now and then there would be a page covered totally in ink.