What are you currently reading?

[Spotted Horses]

Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.



The main character, Dirk something, gets his now broken. Now for the rest of the novel his dialog is intelligible because of his broken nose. This lead to the metaphysical question, "why am I reading this crap?"

This is a one in a hundred books that I can't find the motivation to finish. Abandoned about 1/3 of the way thoough.

[steve ridgway]

Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.



The main character, Dirk something, gets his now broken. Now for the rest of the novel his dialog is intelligible because of his broken nose. This lead to the metaphysical question, "why am I reading this crap?"

This is a one in a hundred books that I can't find the motivation to finish. Abandoned about 1/3 of the way thoough.

LOL it clearly raises at least one very important question .

I am reading Matt Kaplan, David Attenborough's First Life about the history of life on Earth, that I found in a charity shop. Three cheers for reality .

[Elgarian Redux]

Started:

Kott's discussion of The Tempest (recommended to me back in 1998) gave me food for thought for many years to come.

We have a room in our house whose walls are almost entirely covered with pictures relating to The Tempest, and the artist who made them was the chap who recommended Kott to me. Brilliant.

[Spotted Horses]

I've read a lot of Roth, but not that one.

[Mandryka]

I've read a lot of Roth, but not that one.

If you're Jewish and brought up in New Jersey/New York then I'd love to know what you think about it.

[Spotted Horses]

If you're Jewish and brought up in New Jersey/New York then I'd love to know what you think about it.

I'm from New York, but not Jewish. I don't think you have to be Jewish to appreciate Roth.

[JBS]

If you're Jewish and brought up in New Jersey/New York then I'd love to know what you think about it.

Roth's Jewish characters are like Woody Allen's Jewish characters and the cast of Seinfeld: their Jewishness is merely a superficial feature. I'm Jewish and grew up in South Florida, meaning I knew plenty of Jews from New York and New Jersey.  Some of them resembled Roth's characters in outside circumstances of money, etc. But nothing deeper.  Roth's characters are 20th century American types; they reflect general middle/upper class experience, not Jewish experience. If you want 20th century American Jewish types and American Jewish experience, look for Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok.
(And if you want a depiction of angst/neurosis that make Roth and Allen look like novices, read Chaim Grade's The Yeshivah, which is set in pre-war Europe and reflects Grade's experience as a rabbinical student.)

[Spotted Horses]

Roth's Jewish characters are like Woody Allen's Jewish characters and the cast of Seinfeld: their Jewishness is merely a superficial feature. I'm Jewish and grew up in South Florida, meaning I knew plenty of Jews from New York and New Jersey.  Some of them resembled Roth's characters in outside circumstances of money, etc. But nothing deeper.  Roth's characters are 20th century American types; they reflect general middle/upper class experience, not Jewish experience. If you want 20th century American Jewish types and American Jewish experience, look for Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok.
(And if you want a depiction of angst/neurosis that make Roth and Allen look like novices, read Chaim Grade's The Yeshivah, which is set in pre-war Europe and reflects Grade's experience as a rabbinical student.)

My family (on my mother's side) came from a neighborhood called Belmont, in the Bronx, New York. It is also called "Arthur Avenue," after one of the main streets where there was an Italian Market. If you watch the film "Marty" you will see that culture depicted, including an opening shot which included the Arthur Avenue Market, just a block away from where my Mom lived. When I see Facebook pages of Jewish friends from the Bronx, New York I see almost identical photographs taken in neighborhoods a few blocks away. (Incidentally, the film Marty was written by a Jew.) The Cathoics and Jews didn't mix so much in those days but their cultures strike me as having a lot in common.

If you want to appreciate Roth's take on Jewish-American culture in the mid 20th century you might read American Pastorale, and it's depiction of a glove factory in Newark.

[Mandryka]

It's just that Alex Portnoy's mother in Portnoy's Complaint seems a fabulous caricature, but maybe not!

Re Woody Allen, I once heard a radio programme about Roth where someone said he invented the Woody Allen  type of character in Portnoy's Complaint.

 @Spotted Horses @JBS

[AnotherSpin]

Of course, Tabucchi's remarkable book contains much more than descriptions of a journey through southern India. Yet for me, that aspect is also of particular interest, as it resonates with my own impressions from similar travels. Some of the parallels are strikingly precise.

[SimonNZ]

Being so impressed by the Jan Kott book above immediately starting another:

[ritter]

A present from a dear friend of mine (a Frenchman): Enrique Vila-Matas' París no se acaba nunca (Never any End to Paris).



Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) is widely regarded as one of the most prominent Spanish prose writers of the present day. The book is a fictionalised account of his two-year stay in Paris as a young man, emulating his hero Hemingway (the title is a line from A Moveable Feast). Vila-Matas rented a chambre de bonne from Marguerite Duras in the legendary building of 5 Rue Saint-Benoît.

Apart from the subject matter, which interests me very much (and is what led my friend to offer me the book), Vila-Matas blurring of genres (fiction and autobiography, in this case "disguised" as a lecture on irony) is quite fascinating.

More info in this Wikipedia article.

[AnotherSpin]

[Florestan]

[Florestan]

Konstantin Paustovsky - Romantics

[AnotherSpin]

I've only just cracked open Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid, a mere few dozen pages in, and already it's clear this is no ordinary novel. The Romanian author weaves a hypnotic tapestry of the mundane and the metaphysical: a failed writer turned schoolteacher in Bucharest, haunted by dreams of levitating solenoids and the infinite regress of memory. The prose is dense yet luminous, each sentence a small detonation of imagery and thought, as if composed in the heat of a lucid dream.

I'm determined to see it through to the end; at over six hundred pages, it demands a certain devotion. If the rest fulfills even half the promise of the beginning, I'll gladly return with a proper reckoning.

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



Starting:



I hadn't heard of the formidable and hugely impressive Alice Paul before watching the 4-hour PBS documentary "The Vote" on the American suffragists, and they put her at the very center of the story. Glad to find that Oxford University Press have published this biography based on collections of oral history by those who knew and worked with her.

[LKB]

I decided to put my fancy edition of The Lord of the Rings to use a couple of weeks ago, but at a very leisurely pace. I expect Frodo & co. shall arrive at Imladris sometime in the Spring...

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Considering about buying the book.

[Florestan]

The title is misleading (Histoire du Romantisme). Portraits et Souvenirs would have been much more appropriate.

Anyway, Gautier was a man of taste and feeling, cultured, sensitive and with a fine sense of humor, including self-irony*. All these ingredients make for an eminently agreeable reading. Highly recommended for lovers of French literature and culture. @ritter @Mandryka @Papy Oli

* for instance, he writes something to the effect of: People say that at the premiere of Hernani I would menacingly clench my fists under the nose of the bourgeois. This is not true, not because I was lacking the wish to do so but because I was lacking large fists. And elsewhere: At a fair I hit a tin-made Turk with my fist, scoring a force of 320 lbs. It's the achievement I've been most proud of my entire life.