I'm beginning what I hope to be a productive winter break with Vineland, my one lacuna with Pynchon, and another attempt at finishing Blood Meridian, the first half of which I read this summer.

it was alright for what it is. pretty entertaining if you don't want to think about anything deep and can ignore atrocious writing. i'd just see the movie. all of the reviews say stuff along he lines of "really good given the source material fincher had to work with." i'm seeing the movie later, but i can already see what everyone means by that. it's like a dan brown novel in that 80% of the text is just explaining stuff to the reader with unnecessary detail like we even care about half of it or even needed it explained in the first place. it makes me think stieg larsson had aspergers since lisbeth salander is sort of characterized as someone with aspergers and the obsessive and excessive detail in the narrative (lisbeth isn't the narrator) feels like someone with aspergers telling a story without any filter or restraint on superfluous information. like the reader doesn't care that mikael blomkvist mailed out exactly 200 christmas cards, or a million other trivia like that. you'll see what i mean if you read it. i mean this complaint isn't that big of a deal, since the book is what it is but it just annoyed me while i as reading. it could have been deliberate i guess.



now i am reading: A DANCE WITH DRAGONS

i'm so fucking excited.

Has anybody else read Glamorama? That book infuriated me, but I can't stop thinking about it and really want to read it again.

What's an example of a book with great imagination and insight into humanity? Really just feel like reading something very creative.

Any other suggestions, too?

War & Peace is insight into humanity in every other sentence plus the entire work taken as a whole. I seriously cannot think of a better book for that.

Though really, every worthwhile book is insight into humanity (and creative) in some form or fashion.

Those two will occupy you for at least two months, though.

Infinite Jest

A

It took me about three months to read the first half, but when it finally caught me I was able to finish it before 2011 ended. I spent a week or two just thinking about it, trying to figure out what I just read. The ending, for example, I'm still trying to rack my brains why he decided to end the book proper (not counting the first chapter, which I reread an hour or two after I finished it) with a flashback to Fackelman's death. Was it just because, in this book that slowly unfolds a bunch of bad memories that the main characters try their best to repress, that it should logically end with the most gruesome vignette? Either way, even though it had the ability to hurl me into a depression, I think IJ has a lot more heart in it than a good amount of any other books I've read (including anything by Wallace, fiction or non-fiction), and seems its damned hardest to be an encyclopedia of different emotions. Sometimes I think it achieves it, other times not, but considering that it does what it wants well for over 900 pages of its text, I'd say it's 1) definitely within my top ten favorite books and 2) something I really want to re-read. All those interpretations online that the ending drove me to made me realize it was one of those books where every sentence has a purpose to the story…damn. I got so caught up in the lives of Gately, Joelle, and the Incandenza family, that I was blinded to some of the more subtle things happening in the background, I guess. But still, I think the characters are the main draw to this book (something I can't quite say about any of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair) if I get that caught up in their struggle. With this book's characters, I think Wallace achieved something that all fiction writers kind of strive for: Over the last few weeks I've found myself wishing many of his characters were real.

Portnoy's Complaint

B+

So I've heard this was one of the funniest books ever, which was kind of just what I needed to wash IJ down. And I think I got what I was hoping for out of Portnoy, but I also appreciated its self-awareness and -criticism that (for some reason) I thought would be absent. In a lot of ways, Roth's reminded me of a more off-the-wall Salinger, with the precise dialogue and hypocrisy of the narrator, so I'm gonna make it a point for 2012 to read as much of Roth as possible.

Right now, I'm slogging through Coover's The Public Burning, which I started late last semester in school, but quit for a while to focus on my finals, and then to focus on finishing Infinite Jest. So far, Coover's book is very surreal, crazy and imaginative—but I don't think as "fun" as that seems to imply: so far I feel kind of feel like I'm reading a badly edited and inaccuracy-filled textbook—like Coover's trying to begrudgingly cram in Mandelson's requirements for an encyclopedic narrative. The first two parts almost seem like a promise for an insane climax coming up, so I hope Coover meets me half-way there instead of Nixon awkwardly perspiring around Ike (or "Uncle Sam", idk) for 300 more pages while the narrator disrupts that for more out-of-the-news headlines.

Man, I need to re-read Infinite Jest. I don't remember exactly when I read it, but I was in high school, so it's been five or six years. Such an amazing work of art.

I just finished reading the Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich. I love everything I've read by her. She is just such a good storyteller.

I am currently reading Red River by Lalita Tademy. Loving it so far. There are more themes of masculinity, whereas in Cane River the themes were more mother/daughter related.

i started reading norwegian wood by murakami. it's wonderful so far. the descriptions of taru's relationship and dorm experience at the beginning felt like what my diary would have contained if i had ever kept one the last few years.

i'm also still in the middle of the magus by john fowles, elegant universe by brian greene and dance with dragons. i can't finish books these days. i used to read about 1 per week before college. my appreciation of what i read is way up, but my consumption is way down. i'm getting lazy.

Harry Blamires - The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
James Joyce - Ulysses (Gabler)
Don Gifford - Ulysses Annotated
Clive Hart and David Hayman (eds) - James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays
Stuart Gilbert - James Joyce's Ulysses

Ulysses much? For school or pleasure? Joyce was such a brilliant kook. I loved Dubliners, but in general I am a bigger Yeats fan than a Joyce fan when it comes to Irish lit.

Both. I'm taking a seminar on Joyce this semester because I loved Ulysses over the summer and wanted to read it in a more rigorous setting. So it's for a class, but it's a class I'm taking for pleasure.

My basic reading plan is this (we're doing two episodes a week, this is the first week):

1. Read the Blamires summary of the episode I'm about to read
2. Read the Ulysses episode (Gabler) alongside the Gifford annotation
3. Read the corresponding papers/chapters in the Hart/Hayman and Gilbert books
(repeat steps 1-3 for the second episode for that week)
4. Re-read the episodes of Ulysses before class, this time in the Modern Library edition, with no outside sources

I've so far done steps 1-3 for the first two episodes (will be re-reading them before class on Thursday), and I think that Ulysses will easily be my favorite book by the end of the semester, given how much I've loved them.

That sounds amazing. I took a Yeats class in university that sounds similar to that. We even performed some of his plays, very fun. Dang I miss university! I can't wait to go back for my graduate/doctoral work.