What are you currently reading?

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

The Thief's Journal: Jean Genet.

[aligreto]

DH Lawrence: Love Among The Haystacks and Other Stories





This collection of short stories is a re-read for me and it was an enjoyable one.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

DH Lawrence: Love Among The Haystacks and Other Stories





This collection of short stories is a re-read for me and it was an enjoyable one.

I love "Love Among the Haystacks" ! I like it's subtlety, sensuality, and atmosphere.

[Mandryka]

I've read a few Modiano's books. I enjoyed reading them, but I don't remember a single thing about them.

Indeed.

[Mandryka]

The Thief's Journal: Jean Genet.

I read this in English when I was about 18, and it had a real impact, so much so that I went on a sort of homage to the seedy old drinking places in Rotterdam old port looking for Stilitano. Then I reread it about five years ago in French and found it unbearably dull and adolescent, with its eroticisation of crime.

I'm kind of open to the idea that Genet is a great author who has somehow eluded me though -- there's also Satre's St Genet to think about.

[Crudblud]

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Mostly going over my head, but I've come to expect that of first reads of philosophical treatises.

[aligreto]

I love "Love Among the Haystacks" ! I like it's subtlety, sensuality, and atmosphere.

Yes, and also the tension that exists between the two brothers is quite palpable. It is an excellent story indeed.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

I read this in English when I was about 18, and it had a real impact, so much so that I went on a sort of homage to the seedy old drinking places in Rotterdam old port looking for Stilitano. Then I reread it about five years ago in French and found it unbearably dull and adolescent, with its eroticisation of crime.

I'm kind of open to the idea that Genet is a great author who has somehow eluded me though -- there's also Satre's St Genet to think about.

I was 16 years old when I read the book first time, and I was shocked. Still I like the work. I used to like Sartre but his works don't appeal to me anymore.

[Artem]

Strong recommendation for The Unwinding. The others I'd pass.

[SimonNZ]

Strong recommendation for The Unwinding.

Good to hear. I've got it waiting on the shelves after hearing a string of highly intelligent long-form interviews with the author.

He was/is one of those interviewees who aren't getting through their marketing bullet points, but letting each conversation go where it will, never say the same thing twice but still convey that you know your subject completely, and where each conversation shines a different light on the book, each highly persuasive in its own way.

[Artem]

Packer is a great writer. You don't want to put the book down. It was also interesting to me how timeless that book felt even though it was published almost 10 years ago on a subject of US history culminating at a certain point in time. I will definitely get his book about Iraq next.

[ritter]

Taking a break from André Salmon's fascinating (but also very long) memoirs, with a short novella by Jean Giono, Faust au village.



I had never read anything by Giono, but this short book, dealing with fantastic elements, is very attractive. Very "local" (Giono was the "literary ambassador"of the region that covers northern Provence and the southern Dauphiné), with lots of geographic detail —real and imaginary—, but beautifully written in a folksy way, and quite entertaining.

[SonicMan46]

Cuba: An American History (2021) by Ada Ferrer - bio of her below from Amazon - well rated there and also at Goodreads - just starting but so far quite enjoyable.  Dave

Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, which won the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Hill, the American Historical Review, and she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. Born in Cuba and raised in the US, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island regularly since 1990. (Amazon Review)

[Mandryka]

Difficult because it's often not obvious whether you're reading a dream being narrated, or a memory - this is deliberate. Modiano's idea is precisely that the boundaries between the experienced present, the half remembered past and dreams are porous. Probably a masterpiece.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Failure, Colin Feltham.
Nice, successful, philosophy book.

[SimonNZ]

Started:

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Started:

It's on my list.

[Spotted Horses]

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson.

A literary ghost story, but I didn't find it as attractive as the other Shirley Jackson works I've read, which focused on dark humor and social commentary.

[Spotted Horses]

I was 16 years old when I read the book first time, and I was shocked. Still I like the work. I used to like Sartre but his works don't appeal to me anymore.

A lot of things I liked when I was a teen no longer engage me, especially books of philosophy.

[Florestan]

A lot of things I liked when I was a teen no longer engage me, especially books of philosophy.

+ 1.