What are you reading?

[bukka]

I might pick it up although I am more interested in the borrowing of technical terms (think Freudian analysis) by the pop-culture sphere and their reworking into something that refers to but barely resemble their original use.

That sounds fascinating. Did anyone published smth about this? (Doing the study sounds like a nightmare though)

[Fuuma]

That sounds fascinating. Did anyone published smth about this? (Doing the study sounds like a nightmare though)

Hmm, I've read bits and pieces I'm sure but as a book topic, I really can't think of something. Anyone?

[AKA*NYC]

Carrère is an interesting biographer, as he doesn't try to hide the fact that sometimes he doesn't know, or that he doesn't like such and such thing in his subject, or that he essentially speaks of himself. His Limonov too deserves some attention.

thanks m-m! i didn't know about this book. next on my to read list. very glad this exists. i've had a longstanding fascination with limonov. i think the self-conscious bio is an official thing now: roberto saviano is another practitioner who comes to mind.

[GucciAmen]

Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.

Just did a quick search of it online, looks amazing! Thanks! Russian writers really are something else... On the recent topic of Buddhism in this thread, Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is a great novel for anyone interested in a quick read.

[BrianK]

[Senpai]

I've been really enjoying what paper monument has been publishing lately. Just read "I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette" on my plane flight and found it pretty amusing. There's even a funny little essay on how to dress as an artist.

http://www.papermonument.com/i-like-your-work/

[Faust]

Re-reading Fahrenheit 451. Was there ever a book written that gets more prescient with each year?

[BSR]

Re-reading Fahrenheit 451. Was there ever a book written that gets more prescient with each year?

all the books by kafka

[galia]

Also 1984, except what was seen as horrible back when it was written is mostly celebrated today

[Fuuma]

Also 1984, except what was seen as horrible back when it was written is mostly celebrated today

As long as the tyranny and surveillance is done through private means it's not tyranny and surveillance, or so I'm being told.

[galia]

As long as the tyranny is fun, too

[trentk]

Anyone who is into modes of intelligence that exist between science and art will probably love this book.

some excerpts:
"It is not just ordinary words [in archaic language like Sir Thomas Browne's] which step out before us in hieratic actor's masks but the most elementary grammatical relationships and clause structures: subject - predicate, and attributive and its noun, co-ordination & subordination - all at once pop to the surface in these antiquated sentences like protruding veins or bone structures slipping out of overcooked fish: one sees before one's eyes the embryonic grid of the language's logic, the still flexible wax bones: "how nature Geometrizeth" - as Browne writes."
"A rationally clarified thought bears the same relationship to a metaphor as a fully-grown human body does to an embryo: the metaphor fills anew the soul's embryonic forms, elemental bends and flexures - metaphors are the tadpole form of reason."
"Women: mobile architecture. Architecture: mathematized sexuality. What is my essence (which might also be a satisfactory explanation for my boredom)? My essence is an absolute need for absolute and unbroken intensity (God, politics, a woman, perpetual chatter - it doesn't matter what) and a perpetual need for form, pure or concealed plasticity, biological or geometric design."
"Apropos Haydn and the unreliability of the human nose for structure: more than once, Haydn was conspicuously free in his treatment of sonata form (throwing the main subject away, et cetera), despite which, I savor his sonatas as form fortissima - the sonata structure is retained to the point of bigotry in the works of certain romantic composers, yet they still arouse an impression of disintegrating chaos. My structure-sensitive nerves are not stimulated by the structural elements of a work, but by other properties."
"That is precisely what 'elegance', true aristocratism is - mystical distance from both abstractions and the one-sided passions of vital things."
"the fashionable-geometrical 'mask' - is anything lovelier than such scraps of clothing which, by and large, leave a woman wholly naked, but in one or two places nevertheless make room for such an abstract, stylized, and extra-human motif, that fiction can sit in triumph over the body's naively boisterous freedom?"
"I like a bedroom at daybreak; there is something universally human about it, a laboratory and fate simultaneously. The laths of the roller blinds: with their blackness, their complicated systems of filtering light, and their even more complex reflections on the open panes of glass — those laths are symbols, realities, of line, geometry, form, dramatic monotony, baroque simplicity, satisfiers of an autumnal instinct of mine. It’s the same as the keyboard of a piano: at home I keep the lid of the keyboard constantly open in order to see the sensuous abstraction, the amorous cubism, of the white and black lines. Just as non-linear black roses of music grow into the air out of the primitive linearity and numericalness of the keys — so here the billowing, highly non- orderly paradoxes of the lighting propagate out of the fairly cheap physical orderliness of the roller blind. Every parallel, refrain, and repetition excites me: the rings of ripples on lakes, the escaped powers of ovals on branches, of acacias, fence laths, etc. Un poète des parallèles: that poet is not classical and does not write rhyming couplets, that is for sure. From the bedroom can be seen the Moon, stars, flowers, every muscle, mask, and décolletage of the atmosphere step by step. ‘Garden’: that is some magnificent middle way between biological wildness and scientific laboratory, resembling the old pieces of the ‘goldsmiths’ art on which crystal, a diabolical ‘libertinage’ of precious stones, and the pedantic ordering business of a working craftsman and artist are brought together. The tree that happens to be overlooking the window and is in keeping with it is quite different from trees in general."

[k3mist]

re-reading 2 books at the same time. one in the metro, one at home.

in metro, Ubik by PKD. read this while learning English (12 years ago?), and finished it not understanding anything. so want to know what actually happens!

at home, Nadja by André Breton. this is also a re-read, highly recommended. Its a surrealist novel. it very unique, beautiful sentences and lets you know about a different world. don't want to spoil anything but if you like surrealist books..this is a must!

[beyondthemeans]

Has anyone had the chance to read this book?



Didn't pick it up, since I thought this guy was a bit of a hype right now, but just read this article about him in the New Yorker and now I'm a bit curious.
Someone able to share some thoughts on the book?

[Monoral]

Picked this up for 1 swedish krona, quiet good actually although too many obvious symbolism and a little bit predictable at times. Still it did really pulled me in.