catching up on the reading i should have done in high school. just ordered some Joyce (Complete Novels), Kafka (Complete Stories), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), and Beckett (Complete Dramatic Works). it will be my first for Joyce and Wallace, while the only Kafka i've read is Metamorphosis. i've read a good chunk of Beckett's plays, but my hope is to read all his plays.

I can't think of anything you just bought that it's not better that you didn't read it in high school, especially Joyce. Does the Joyce include Dubliners? Because really you should probably read Joyce's stuff chronologically (Dubliners-Portrait-Ulysses-Wake).

its gonna take me years of reading experience just to navigate this sentence lol

unfortunately not. but i could rent it from the library in the meantime before i read the other three.

The sentence means: it's probably best that you're first reading those books now rather than in high school. Unless you were an amazing reader in high school, you probably would have gotten much less out of them than you will now.

And you don't absolutely have to read Dubliners first. But there is conceptual unity across his works (Dubliners basically gives you the setting for the three novels) and so it can be worthwhile to read them in order. Dubliners is also by far the easiest of the three works. Also it has "The Dead", which holy shit that.

Belated birthday present
Herman Melville - Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd (Library of America)
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (best one-volume philosophy reference work)

Used bookstore
Ian McEwan - Atonement (hi Drew)
Hans George Gadamer - Reason in the Age of Science (hi Sean, who isn't on this forum but has been pushing Gadamer on me for over a year)

Barnes & Noble (I hope, going later today)
Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
Samuel Beckett - Endgame

Yes! Melville's got so much great stuff outside of Moby-Dick.



Drew, my girlfriend loves this movie, so I was watching it yesterday and it's kind of piquing my interest to try the novel again. I've got a pretty big to-read pile on my nightstand at the moment, but maybe in the not-so-distant future I'll give it another go.

The only non-Moby Dick I've read is Bartleby, The Scrivener, but since that is amazing I have wanted that volume for a while. It'll probably be a while before I really can dive into it, but it is now there for the reading, so \o/.

Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner

Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor
Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

NO MORE BOOK BUYING

Zero History - William Gibson
The Petting Zoo - Jim Carroll

Hi, $13 used but basically pristine hardcover Gabler Ulysses. It's so nice to have you in my life.

Lies.

Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems.

I'm in heaven right now.