I have this annoying habit of starting multiple books at once. So I am currently somewhere in the middle of the following:
Dostoevsky:
Crime and Punishment. I happen to have a Polish translation, which makes it more difficult to read than in English, but I figured it would be slightly closer to the original than an English version... anyway it is excellent of course.
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Also:
There is a Kierkegaard quote just before the text: "... the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. "
I was not certain what this means exactly at first, but the theme of the book seems to revolve around the idea that mundaneness and everyday reality is a quiet desperation, or something like that. I am finding a hard time describing it. There is a short article
here that explains it quite well. It is fascinating reading.
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And finally this book, which I picked up for $1 out of curiosity, has been eating away my time the last few days:
... the title is silly and so are a few things in the content (sometimes trying to be novel-like or an annoying writing style) but there is a great deal of interesting, detailed information and primary documents, and the whole thing is strangely absorbing. The references to writings by Thoreau, Jacques Ellul and Joseph Conrad and others are quite interesting too. Of course it isn't great literature but oh well.
