In which I review every book I've ever read [Archive]

Melville

04-23-2010, 02:52 AM

1. Papillon (Henri Charriere, 1969)
Genre: adventure/pseudo-autobiography
My rating: 5

An entertaining adventure story, with lots of memorable prison breaks and sex with South American natives. Loosely based on the true story of the author’s time spent breaking out of various prisons and having sex with natives.

Quote: It was a knockout blow—a punch so overwhelming that I didn’t get back on my feet for fourteen years.

2. Five Equations that Changed the World (Michael Guillen, 1995)
Genre: popular science/biography
My rating: 1

Guillen tells the stories of some famous physicists and their equations that changed our understanding of the world and led to our current era of technological wonders. Unfortunately, he relates the stories as stories—and as vapid, simplistic ones—rather than as histories. He offers lame insights into the minds of historical figures, and he then says that their scientific discoveries were founded on the psychological quirks that he assigns to them. It’s a very poor description of science, dishonest in its treatment of history, and not very interesting storytelling in its own right.

Quote: For the last several months, thirteen-year-old Isaac Newton had been watching with curiosity while workmen built a windmill just outside the town of Grantham.

3. Altered States (Paddy Chayefsky, 1978)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 2

The main character is a scientist who cares only for cold rationality. In a keen bit of foreshadowing, he describes love as a mere fluctuation of chemicals. He begins experimenting with altered states of consciousness. He goes into an isolation tank and takes some hallucinogens. Next thing you know, he’s devolving into primitive man and finally into an amorphous blob. His experiments having gone too far, he realizes that only his wife’s love can save him!

4. The Grounding of Group Six (Julian F. Thompson, 1983)
Genre: juvenilia
My rating: 1

A group of trouble-making teenagers are sent to camp for the summer, only to realize that their frustrated parents have sent them there to be killed! But the guy assigned to kill them doesn’t have the heart for it, so in lieu of getting killed, they proceed to live it up in the woods and have sex. The prose is a kind of farcical attempt at rat-a-tat hardboiledness.

Quote: The people in their group, Group 6, were all sixteen, all five of them, and none of them was fat.

5. The House of Stairs (William Sleator, 1974)
Genre: young adult/sci-fi
My rating: 4

A group of teenagers wake up in a bizarre house of stairs with no exit. The house feeds them only when they dance. Later, it feeds them only when they beat one another. We eventually learn that it’s all part of a dastardly experiment designed to probe human behaviour…as was the style at the time. Commentary on dastardly experiments and human behaviour is implied.

Quote: His hands moved involuntarily to reach up and push the blindfold away from his eyes; and once again they were stopped by the cord that bound his wrists. But he did not struggle against the cord. Peter never struggled.

6. The Accidental Tourist (Anne Tyler, 1985)
Genre: self-discovery/men learning to loosen up
My rating: 1

A guy who lives according to rigid, absurd routines is divorced by his wife. After getting together with an eccentric, unintelligent, irritating woman, he learns the value of loosening up.

Quote: Macon wore a formal summer suit, his traveling suit—much more logical for traveling than jeans, he always said.

7. Il Postino (Antonio Skarmeta, 1985)
Genre: South American poeticism
My rating: 3

A small-town Chilean postman learns about life and love from the poet Pablo Neruda. The novel's simple, fluid prose, punctuated with the occasional bit of floweriness, strives to capture the simple romance of the thing, though not without a trace of irony. Anyway, I preferred the movie.

Quote: He had made up his mind that, at an opportune moment, when the bard seemed to be in a good mood, he would hand the book to him along with his mail in the hope of procuring an autograph he could subsequently boast about to hypothetical gorgeous women he would someday meet in San Antonio, or possibly even in Santiago, which he planned to visit upon receipt of his second check.

8. King Arthur: His Knights and Their Ladies (Johanna Johnston, 1980)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

A very brief, simplified retelling of the story of King Arthur and his knights and their ladies. There are some good stories in there, but this telling of them is pretty bland.

9. Stuart Little (E.B. White, 1945)
Genre: children’s literature
My rating: 4

A woman gives birth to a mouse. The mouse leaves home for some sort of adventure, but then the story ends abruptly. wtf.

Quote: When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.

10. Weasel’s Luck (Michael Williams, 1989)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

A cowardly character finds himself in the midst of a fantastical adventure. Lame wink-wink genre tropes abound.

Quote: While the others were celebrating, I was cleaning my eldest brother Alfric’s chambers, sweeping away the daily confusion of soiled clothes, of bones, of melon rinds. It was like a midden in there, like an ogre’s den.

Melville

04-23-2010, 02:56 AM

11. Kaz the Minotaur (Richard A. Knaak, 1990)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 2

After the end of the first Dragonwar, the renegade minotaur Kaz wanders around and has some adventures. Wouldn’t you know it, a villain of the Dragonwar is still lurking about, threatening to arise and wreak more Dragonwars at any moment…and only Kaz can stop him!

Quote: The one was an ogre, a course, brutish figure well over six feet tall and very wide. His face was flat, ugly, with long, vicious teeth, good for tearing flesh from either a meal or a foe.

12. God’s Equation (Amir Aczel, 2000)
Genre: popular science
My rating: 1

In case you haven’t heard, the universe seems to be expanding at an increasingly rapid rate. This whole book is about how that accelerating expansion can be explained by including a constant (the “cosmological constant”) in Einstein’s Equation. The constant plays the role of a fluid with negative pressure everywhere in space. Up until recently, the idea of including such a constant was though to be an ad hoc adjustment, and after Einstein originally introduced it to make his model of the universe eternal, he soon rescinded the idea and called it his greatest blunder. But now a lot of cosmologists like it because it fits observations. I’m not sure that this story warrants a whole book.

Quote: He knew why sunsets were red and why the sky was blue—Saul Perlmutter is an astrophysicist.

13. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1968)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 3

A very dry, overly explanatory version of the film. Clarke was upset that Kubrick changed so much. Thank god he did. The book has none of the enigma, none of the splendiferous views of humanity’s evolution, and no equivalent of the superb technique of the film. The view of humanity and evolution seems entirely externalized and materialistic, lacking in any real insight into what makes humanity what it is; it’s a social and empirical view of humanity, rather than a phenomenological one. It also seems far less interested in humanity’s evolution than it is in describing how that evolution was caused by an alien race. Clarke always seems interested primarily in explaining the nuts and bolts of how everything works. At the end, the Star Child destroys the Earth’s nuclear weapons. Meh.

Quote: In this barren and desiccated land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive. The man-apes of the veldt were none of these things, and they were not flourishing; indeed, they were already far down the road to racial extinction.

14. 2010: Odyssey Two (Arthur C. Clarke, 1982)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

A follow up mission is sent to Jupiter to figure out what went wrong with the 2001 mission. David Bowman shows up as some kind of pure-energy phantom, rather than as the Star Child. Not much of interest happens. Jupiter turns into a sun, or something.

Quote: Even in this metric age, it was still the thousand-foot telescope, not the three-hundred-meter one.

15. 2061: Odyssey Three (Arthur C. Clarke, 1987)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

Some people land on Haley’s comet. Then they land on a moon of Jupiter to look at a giant mountain made of diamond. Apparently the core of Jupiter was an enormous diamond, and when Jupiter turned into a sun, it sent giant pieces of diamond flying. Or something. Again, not much really happens in this book.

Quote: Dr. Heywood Floyd stared thoughtfully at the ever-changing panorama of the beautiful planet, only six thousand kilometres away, on which he could never walk again.

16. 3001: The Final Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1997)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

You know that astronaut who went drifting off into space in 2001? Well, in this book, some people find him and bring him back to life. He finds that the earth is now some kind of utopia with giant, diamond space elevators. There’s a threat of annihilation, but it all works out in the end. All of these books, beyond the first one, seem like a colossal waste of words. They’re all hopelessly dry and uneventful, with exceedingly little to say about their subject matter. They don’t seem to offer anything to anyone who isn’t fascinated by space and/or aliens. Bah.

Quote: Captain Dimitri Chandler [M2973.04.21/93.106/Mars//Space-Acad3005]—or “Dim” to his very best friends—was understandably annoyed. The message from Earth had taken six hours to reach the spacetug Goliath, here beyond the orbit of Neptune.

17. Some Fear Street book (R.L. Stine, a recent decade)
Genre: young adult horror
My rating: 1

I don’t remember the name of this book, but I’m pretty sure it involves a giant river of blood, and in the end the teenaged heroes realize that one or more of them had been dead the whole time. Or maybe they realize that they had killed somebody…possibly each other. Or something like that. In any case, I remember it sucking pretty hard.

Quote (from some other Fear Street book): Nora’s pen scratched against the paper. Dry again. Wearily she thought of dipping the point into the inkwell, changed her mind and, yawning, set the pen down on the small writing table.

18. Eaters of the Dead (Michael Crichton, 1976)
Genre: adventure/historical novel
My rating: 4

A 10th-century Arabian ambassador travels to northern Europe, where he becomes involved in the Norsemen’s Beowulf-inspired battle against a group of relic neanderthals. It’s framed as a “discovered” diary of the ambassador, and it’s heavy on the culture clash element of the story, when it’s not focused on the gory battle. I remember it being fairly entertaining. Lots of gory battling.

19. The Problems of Philosophy (Bertrand Russell, 1912)
Genre: analytic philosophy
My rating: 2

Russell gives a brief rundown of some of the major problems that are studied in philosophy. He focuses on what we can know and how we can know it. Unfortunately, I think basically everything he says is wrong. He starts off with the “obvious” statement that we can be certain of individual sense data; this statement is obvious in that it’s obviously wrong, since we do not begin with a discrete set of distinct data, but with a whole, undifferentiated perception. Breaking up the perception into discrete units is already an abstraction, and its results are not an immediately known certainty. The rest of the book doesn’t improve much on that beginning. Repeatedly, Russell profoundly misstates various philosophers’ ideas, particularly Kant’s and Hegel’s; and after stating them in a way that makes them seem false, he then dismisses them as such. He seems to strive for simplicity and clarity, but he then misses points by oversimplifying them. He endlessly takes things for granted, which is a fundamental problem in a book all about determining what we can know for certain. He also neglects to carefully define many of his ideas, and he occasionally gets lost in circular definitions.

20. The Legend of Huma (Richard Knaak, 1988)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

You remember Kaz the Minotaur? Well, that was a sequel to this book. So if you read the books in reverse order, then this one will tell you about Kaz’s backstory in the first Dragonwar. It’s a good war. Dragon-riding knights, minotaurs, and goblins all battle to the death. There are some pretty sweet wizards too.

Quote: The village, called Seridan, had been set upon by plague, starvation, and madness, each seeming to take turns and each killing many of the inhabitants. A lifetime ago, the village had been prosperous.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:01 AM

21. The Dungeon Master (William Dear, 1984)
Genre: true crime
My rating: 2

A private investigator tells the true story of his investigation into the disappearance of a teenager. It was initially thought that the teenager had gone nuts by playing a live-action version of Dungeons and Dragons in utility tunnels. But then it turned out that Dungeons and Dragons had nothing to do with anything.

22. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Harlan Ellison, 1967)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

In this short story, an evil computer kills the entire human race except for a few individuals, whom he torments for eternity. Itâ€™s poorly written, just piling up overstatements without any trace of nuance, wit or depth, and it centers on the most facile depiction of evil and misanthropy that I can imagine.

Quote: It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.

23. Surely Youâ€™re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (Richard Feynman, 1985)
Genre: memoir
My rating: 1

Feynman is probably the most characterly character in the history of physics. Heâ€™s renowned for doing unorthodox things. In this book, he basically comes off as an ostentatious, conceited jackass. At a restaurant, he leaves his tip inside an upside-down glass full of water, as a problem-solving test for the waitress. And he brags about his bongo-playing skills. Jackass.

24. Terminal Man (Michael Crichton, 1972)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

A man has seizures followed by blackouts in which he violently attacks people. Surgeons implant electrodes in his brain, with the notion that they can be used to abort a seizure. Unfortunately, it all goes wrong, the electrodes stimulate sexual pleasure, and the man starts purposely having seizures and going berserk. Uninteresting schlock.

Quote: Certainly Ellis had the attitude of a man determined to correct defects, to fix things up. That was what he always said to his patients: â€œWe can fix you up.â€

25. Farmer Giles of Ham (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

A lighthearted fantasy set in a make-believe version of old England, it satirizes medieval dragon-slaying legends. Itâ€™s so slight that it isnâ€™t very memorable, unfortunately.

26. Knowledge of Meaning (Larson & Segal, 1995)
Genre: linguistics textbook
My rating: 3

I wrote an essay about how this bookâ€™s philosophical stance is misguided and verges on meaninglessness. The authors integrate formal semantics into Chomskyâ€™s version of axiomatic linguistics. Their basic premise is that all humans are born with a system of semantic rules encoded in their brain. Unfortunately, that premise doesnâ€™t play into any of the actual semantic systemsâ€”axiomatized, symbolic rules for assigning meanings to sentencesâ€”that the authors devise. As such, itâ€™s essentially a meaningless premise. The actual semantic systems are interesting enough, but they donâ€™t accomplish much, and they certainly have nothing to say about the operations of our brains.

27. Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1984)
28. Dragons of Winter Night (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1985)
29. Dragons of Spring Dawning (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1985)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

Nothing but clichÃ©d epic fantasy, in which a band of disparate characters embark on a quest to save the world. Deeply uninteresting in every way.

Quote: Flint Fireforge collapsed on a moss-covered boulder. His old dwarven bones had supported him long enough and were unwilling to continue their complaint.

30. Dragons of Summer Flame (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1995)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 1

Set a couple decadesâ€”and many novelsâ€”after the above trilogy, this story involves a huge war and the death of most of the seriesâ€™ central characters. Why did I squander so many hours of my youth reading all these? I donâ€™t know. I though they were garbage even at the time.

Quote: The knightsâ€™ black armor, adorned with skull and death lily, had been blessed by the high cleric, was supposed to withstand the vagaries of wind and rain, heat and cold. But their Dark Queenâ€™s blessing was apparently not responding to this unseasonable heat wave.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:03 AM

31. The Legacy (R.A. Salvatore, 1992)
32. Starless Night (R.A. Salvatore, 1993)
33. Siege of Darkness (R.A. Salvatore, 1994)
34. Passage to Dawn (R.A. Salvatore, 1996)
35. The Silent Blade (R.A. Salvatore, 1998)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 3

These novels follow the adventures of Drizzt Do’Urden, a dark elf. The gist of the stories is that Drizzt is awesome and kicks a lot of ass. Open one of these books to a random page, and chances are you’ll read about Drizzt being awesome and kicking ass. Not only does he wield two scimitars in battle, but he has some kind of magic panther as a pet. Awesome.

Quote: No race in all the Realms better understands the word vengeance than the drow. Vengeance is their dessert at their daily table, the sweetness they taste upon their smirking lips as though it was the ultimate delicious pleasure. And so hungering did the drow come for me.

36. The Shining (Stephen King, 1977)
Genre: horror
My rating: 1

King’s prose is amateurish in its bluntness. His depiction of a descent into madness is superficial, and rather than enriching it, the horror elements only make it pointless.

Quote: Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men.

37. Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke, 1972)
Genre: sci-fi
My rating: 1

Astronauts journey to a mysterious spacecraft, which Clarke details at great length. Unfortunately, nothing happens there.

38. Elegies (Theognis, 6th century B.C.)
Genre: bemoaning of fate
My rating: 8

This collection of poems purports to give advice. But it’s mostly Theognis bitterly complaining about life. And he’s magnificent at it.

Quote:
But one thing's worst of all, more terrible
than death or any sickness: when you raise
children and give them all the tools of life,
and suffer greatly getting wealth for them,
and then they hate you, pray you'll die
and loath you as a beggar in their midst.
...
Ah, Poverty, you slut! Why do you stay?
Why love me when I hate you? Please betray
me for another man, and be his wife;
why must you always share my wretched life?
...
For man the best thing is never to be born,
never to look upon the sun's hot rays,
next best, to speed at once through Hades' gates
and lie beneath a piled-up heap of earth.

39. The Te of Piglet (Benjamin Hoff, 1992)
Genre: philosophy
My rating: 1

This book purports to elucidate the meaning of Te (virtue/power) via an analysis of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. But it’s mostly just Hoff complaining about modern life, with little apparent structure or unifying theme. And he’s not very good at it: a mediocre ranter at best. Allow me to quote some of his half-assed complaints*: “Modern people bloat life with pointless complications.” “Feminists make words too complicated.” “People run on paved paths rather than on natural grass.” Meh. He also casts most of Milne’s characters, such as Tigger, Owl, and Eeyore, as villains, dismissing the breadth of sympathy in the original stories. It’s all very overbearing in its scattershot bitterness. And usually I can’t get enough bitterness.

According to Wikipedia, “In 2006, Hoff published an essay online denouncing the publishing industry and announcing his resignation from book-writing.” That sounds about right.

*Not exact quotes.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:05 AM

40. Time of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
41. War of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
42. Test of the Twins (Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, 1986)
Genre: fantasy
My rating: 4

This trilogy is the sequel to the Dragons of Autumn, Winter, Spring trilogy. It centers on the only compelling character from that trilogy: a consumptive wizard with hourglass eyes, who started off as something of a hero but then went mad with power and dreams of becoming a god. In order to make those dreams a reality, he travels back in time with his entirely heroic twin brother. I can’t remember why time travel is involved in his quest to take over the universe, or how his twin brother comes along with him. But anyway, he’s a great tragic villain. And the relationship between him and his brother is actually well developed, and it becomes increasingly sad as the story progresses. I admit it: these books made me cry. Everything else in them is pretty lame though.

Quote: The dark waters of time swirled about the archmage’s black robes, carrying him and those with him forward through the years.

43. The Count of Monte Cristo, abridged-for-modern-readers version (Alexander Dumas, 1846; translator Lowell Blair)
Genre: adventure
My rating: 7.5

It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I discovered this novel is like 1300 pages long. The version I read as a kid is less than half that length. A friend of mine informed me that I missed out on many hundreds of pages describing Paris nightlife. Anyway, the basic story is pretty cool. A guy is framed, loses his beloved, is sent to an island-prison, stages an awesome escape by trading places with a dead man, finds an enormous fortune stashed on another island, and then plots his revenge on those who framed him. His revenge puts other revenge stories to shame. He doesn’t just kill people or anything so banal as that: he systematically destroys their lives with dazzling style. Eventually, he decides that he should value what he has in life, rather than bemoaning what he has lost and seeking revenge for its loss. But he comes to that decision only after wreaking his horrible vengeance. That seems like an easy way out, but whatever. The point is that the cover of the book calls it the most exciting adventure story ever told.

Quote: He told himself that it was the hatred of men, not the vengeance of God, which had plunged him into the abyss where he now found himself. He doomed these unknown men to all the tortures his fiery imagination could contrive, but even the cruelest ones seemed too mild and too short for them, for after the torment would come death, which would bring them, if not rest, at least the insensibility which resembles it.

44. Fifty Famous Fairy Tales (unknown author, 1965)
Genre: fairy tales
My Rating: 6.5

For some reason this book doesn’t seem to have an author. It credits the illustrator (Robert J. Lee), but no author. That seems pretty strange. Anyway, the stories are mostly European (Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer, etc.), with a few thrown in from the Arabian Nights. The only thing I remember about the book is a very short story in which a mother and daughter start weeping about the death of the child that the daughter imagines she might eventually have. It’s pretty funny.

I like how fairy tales are so random, with things happening seemingly arbitrarily and often violently. They seem imbued with a certain odd mix of spontaneity, inexplicability, and whimsy, giving them an absurd humor and otherworldly wonder. More stories should be like that.

Quote: “Ah,” she thought, “some day I shall be married and I shall have a baby boy and name him Stoyan.” But no sooner had she thought this than she imagined that the child would die.
“Oy, O!” she cried. “My poor dead son.” And she wept.
The girl was gone so long that her mother came to look for her. The good woman was greatly astonished to find the girl sitting under the tree and weeping as if her heart would break.
“Daughter, daughter,” cried the woman. “What ails you?”
“Boo-hoo-hoo,” sobbed the girl. “If I should have a son and he should die! Oy, O! My poor dead little Stoyan.”
On hearing this the woman burst into tears also and cried out, “Oh, my poor dead grandson. Oh, the pity of it.”

45. Nothing but the Truth: A Documentary Novel (Avi, 1991)
Genre: young adult social commentary
Rating: 4

A teenager is punished for humming during the national anthem. The incident is blown out of proportion and incites a media frenzy and a national debate about freedom of speech and patriotism. Finally, the teenager is transferred to another school which proudly supports his right to sing along to the national anthem. But in the book’s final lines, we discover that the kid doesn’t know the words. The whole thing is a commentary on the state of modern education and media, you see. The story is told with a variety of styles, making use of diary entries, memos, and play-like dialogues. I don’t remember it too well, but I’m sure the mix of styles furthers the story’s themes of misinformation and politicking run amok by embedding it within an uncertain, intersubjective textual structure. Pretty clever.

Quote: Coach Jamison saw me in the hall and said he wanted to make sure I’m trying out for the track team!!!!

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:07 AM

46. The BFG (Roald Dahl, 1982)
Genre: immoral tales for children
Rating: 1

There’s a big friendly giant with big ears who doesn’t eat children. He and a young girl hatch a plot to stop all the big unfriendly giants from eating children. When I read this as a kid, I was enraged by the fact that the giant had no qualms about eating bacon for breakfast.

Quote: Her throat, like her whole body, was frozen with fright.
This was the witching hour all right.

47. Celestial Encounters: the Origins of Chaos and Stability (Diacu and Holmes, 1999)
Genre: popular science
Rating: 7

This is probably the best popular science book I’ve read, with a lot more technical detail than is usual, but still with a lively discussion of the history and scientists involved in it. The main subject is dynamical systems theory; in particular, it centers on the n-body problem, which consists of determining the motion of n objects subject to one another’s mutual force of gravity. This is the underlying problem of celestial mechanics, which essentially consists of determining planetary orbits. In 1885, King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway offered a prize to whoever could determine the solution to the n-body problem. The prize was awarded to PoincarÃ© (now one of the most famous mathematicians in history), who actually failed to solve the problem, but in so doing created an entirely new field of mathematics. His pioneering work led to the modern theory of dynamical systems, which is the study of the qualitative behaviour of solutions to systems of ordinary differential equations. Starting from this story, the book proceeds to survey the history of celestial mechanics and dynamical systems theory. The main thing to know about dynamical systems theory is that the set of solutions to a set of equations forms a cool shape in something called phase space, and dynamical systems textbooks and research articles are hence filled with lots of cool pictures of these shapes.

I don’t know if this book would be understandable to people lacking in mathematical background, but I find the subject to be one of the more interesting ones in science.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:37 AM

Books I actually find interesting will appear eventually.

monolith94

04-23-2010, 03:59 AM

The 2001 - 3001 series isn't nearly that bad. Neither is the BFG, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, or Rendezvous With Rama. Ridiculous. They're not great literature but they're unworthy of 1s.

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:17 AM

The 2001 - 3001 series isn't nearly that bad. Neither is the BFG, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, or Rendezvous With Rama. Ridiculous. They're not great literature but they're unworthy of 1s.
Your vehemence is appreciated. My ratings are not intended to represent some objective measure of quality. I found Clarke's books intensely uninteresting and Feynman's intensely irritating. My rating for the BFG is entirely based on my rage as a child.

EDIT: this post sounds more serious than it was intended to be. It's all in good fun. Of course the ratings, not to mention the reviews, are ridiculous. Not only am I not intending objectivity, I'm also not intending consistency or cogency.

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:33 AM

48. Heart of Darkness (Conrad, 1902)
Genre: existential river-journey
Rating: 10

The ultimate (hero's) journey down a river and an examination of what that means: removal of the existential constraints of society, the structures of social ideals, conceptual apparatuses, and relationships. Appropriately, then, imperialism is construed as largely absurd: a rudderless voyage into the unknown, into a place where the invading society’s social reality and ideals are bereft of their foundation. However, in this vacuum of social constructs, in the removal of said existential constraints, the river-borne men have the opportunity to make of themselves existential gods, free to define their own ideals, ideals they can impose upon the new world into which they drift. And this transcendence of social reality, this Ãœbermenschian capacity to define ideals, places the invaders in an existentially dominant position, compelling the locals to see in them religious idols. Ideally suited to this thematic exploration, Conrad’s prose cloaks the river in an enrapturing mood of doom, omnipresent and irresistible. Absolute hubris and the resulting existential horror have never been more perfectly expressed.

Quotes:

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceedings, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.

I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

“The horror! The horror!”

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:41 AM

49. Discipline & Punish (Foucault, 1975)
Genre: continental philosophy
Rating: 7.5

Foucault’s thesis is that the creation of the modern justice system, with its use of prison terms as its default punishment, stems less from the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and more from the emergence of a new overarching system of power: with the rise of capitalism and the middle class, power relationships became based on perpetual observation and discipline, designed to create and enforce a complex social structure with maximal economy and efficiency, and the justice system naturally followed suit by enforcing that structure's norms. Sometimes Foucault's interpretations seem a bit far fetched, but his style of extracting underlying ideologies from mountains of primary sources is always interesting. The focused thesis also makes this more compelling than, say, Madness and Civilization.

Quote: Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle.

Milky Joe

04-23-2010, 04:50 AM

Winston*

04-23-2010, 04:54 AM

My favourite part of Heart of Darkness was the racism.

I don't understand the BFG review Melville.

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:54 AM

So lemme ask, does this book have anything to do with existentialism?
I tried to include at least one reference to it in each sentence, but decided that would be a bit much.

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:56 AM

I don't understand the BFG review Melville.
My child-self thought the giant, as well as the author, was a reprehensible hypocrite!

Derek

04-23-2010, 05:01 AM

Genre: immoral tales for children

:lol:

I also love the "abridged-for-modern-readers version" tag for Count of Monte Cristo. I suppose "shortened-for-lazy-or-ADD-riddled-teens version" wasn't as catchy.

Winston*

04-23-2010, 05:04 AM

My child-self thought the giant, as well as the author, was a reprehensible hypocrite!
Your child self thought a giant eating pig meat and a giant eating human meat was equatable? I think your child self had a misguided sense of moral outage.

Melville

04-23-2010, 05:15 AM

Your child self thought a giant eating pig meat and a giant eating human meat was equatable? I think your child self had a misguided sense of moral outage.
I can't recall the precise details of my child-self's thought process, but I think he thought that the giant's ethical considerations about eating the one should be accompanied by an ethical consideration about eating the other, rather than a blithe assumption that one was wrong while the other was right. My child-self demanded philosophical perspicuity.

Melville

04-23-2010, 05:18 AM

Might add some more to this one later.

50. Moby Dick (Melville, 1851)
Genre: whaling exegesis and mad philosophy
Rating: 10

“Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation.” —Hawthorne

On why the exegeses on whaling and mad philosophies, which constitute much of the book, besides being masterpieces of ironic humour and glorious, burning bombast, are not only essential, but form the thematic and structural foundation of the novel: As the opening section of quotations outlines, the novel's purpose is an examination of humanity's attempt to understand the unknown (as Melville would say, all that lies beyond human ken). This "understanding" is construed as a violent act of ratiocination and definition, forcing the unknown into physical and conceptual bounds. The whaling jargon is essential as a representation of this process; the violent act of making-known must be realized and precise within the text. More importantly, the novel is about the endless ambiguities within this attempt to conquer the unknown. These ambiguities are emphasized by the structure of the book, which operates as a sequence of oscillations between modes of discourse—the grand epic, the discussions of whaling, the discussions of the metaphorical or metaphysical import of the white whale, Ishmael's ongoing autobiography of sorts, and so on. The text itself realizes and exemplifies the ambiguities within its own narrative.

Quotes:

On cannibals: Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, then for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

On sperm whales' water spout being vapour: He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

On the significance of Moby Dick's whiteness: The palsied universe lies before us a leper.

On misery: "I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?"

lovejuice

04-23-2010, 05:21 AM

Melville

04-23-2010, 05:25 AM

just curious. have you ever had to use this book?

http://www.exactas.org/modules/UpDownload/shots/thumbs/62.jpg

I hate hate hate hate hate it so much. this is the book that makes me not studying physics for phd.
Nope. In undergrad I used a book by Gasiorowicz, and in grad school I used a book by Hecht. But I barely opened either of them. They were both pretty bad.

Sven

04-23-2010, 05:34 AM

I love this. Will be keeping an eye out for updates, for sure.

Melville

04-23-2010, 08:01 AM

51. A Brief History of Time (Hawking, 1988)
Genre: popular science
Rating: 8

With this book, Stephen Hawking convinced me to pursue an education in physics. Damn his eyes.

Highlights include a discussion of why time runs forward rather than backward. Lowlights include a misleading discussion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Quote: If one assumes the no boundary condition for the universe, we shall see that there must be well-defined thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time, but they will not point in the same direction for the whole history of the universe. However, I shall argue that it is only when they do point in the same direction that conditions are suitable for the development of intelligent beings who can ask the question: why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

lovejuice

04-23-2010, 08:40 AM

24. Terminal ManUninteresting schlock.
you forgot to mention the most inane part. the man is afraid machines are going to take over the world. what kind of nut-case doctors put an electode in such a brain?

26. Knowledge of Meaning (Larson & Segal, 1995)
Genre: linguistics textbook
My rating: 3

Their basic premise is that all humans are born with a system of semantic rules encoded in their brain.
do you also have some problems with chomskian linguistic theory, since I think this is pretty much what it is? (I've never read Chomsky's linguistic book though, but that's the impression I got from reading Pinkus.) because i do.

Melville

04-23-2010, 09:31 AM

you forgot to mention the most inane part. the man is afraid machines are going to take over the world. what kind of nut-case doctors put an electode in such a brain?
Ha. I'd forgotten that. It's been at least 15 years since I read it, I think.

do you also have some problems with chomskian linguistic theory, since I think this is pretty much what it is? (I've never read Chomsky's linguistic book though, but that's the impression I got from reading Pinkus.) because i do.
Yeah, I have the same problem with Chomksian linguistics in general: he says that he's talking about concrete, innate physical systems in the brain, but his actual theories are only models of usage. In order to make any connection with the brain, he'd require a mapping from his symbolic systems to those of cognitive science, and finally, to the actual processes in the brain. The underlying argument seems to be that if we assume that an innate system S1 exists in the brain, and an isomorphic mapping f:S1->S2 exists that maps the system in the brain onto the system S2 that models language usage, then the first system and the map together induce the model of usage. Hence, from Chomsky's assumptions, we can say that there is a model of usage, and that is the level on which his axiomatic linguistic theories operate. Conversely, we can say that if no such model of usage exists (i.e. if no such model can accurately model all human usage), then Chomsky's assumptions are wrong. Historically, this was basically Chomsky's path in his criticism of Behaviorist linguistics. However, the success of a model of usage really says nothing at all about the innate processes in the brain, if any, or the map between them and the model of usage (in particular, what are the uniqueness properties of this map?). At this point, the system S1 and the map f are not merely black boxes, but operationally meaningless; they have not been discovered or formulated, and they play no role in Chomsky's actual theory, only in his justification of using the theory.

Sorry, I'm tired and frazzled. Not sure if this makes sense.

B-side

04-23-2010, 11:50 AM

Melville, you magnificent bastard.

lovejuice

04-23-2010, 01:46 PM

Melville, you magnificent bastard.

you are wrong. he's a magnificent bastard/doctor of philosophy.

B-side

04-23-2010, 03:12 PM

you are wrong. he's a magnificent bastard/doctor of philosophy.

That last bit is part of why he's so magnificent.:D

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:29 PM

Melville, you magnificent bastard.
Awesome. Finally I've earned an appellation worth having.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:42 PM

52. The Conference of the Birds (Farid Ud-Din Attar, 1177)
Genre: religious mystic poetry
Rating: 8

Sufism, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a brand of Islamic mysticism with a wealth of tremendous religious poetry. The Conference of the Birds, written in the 12th century by Farid Ud-Din Attar, is one such great Sufi poem. It tells a story of the birds of the world gathering together to go on a journey to meet God, led by a bird called a hoopoe. Within this broad allegorical structure, the poem consists mostly of subsidiary allegories, in the form of parables the hoopoe tells in response to the other birds’ question about the Way (to God).

For me, the whole thing was pretty informative, since I didn’t know much about Sufism before (despite reading a couple Sufi poems). What I learned is that Sufism is all about eradicating the Self, which Attar repeatedly calls the ultimate religious idol; as with Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and probably other religions, the Self is portrayed as an illusion that pulls people away from a true, eternal unity (in this case, God). Given the meaning of Islam (Submission), I guess this view of the Self isn’t too surprising. But what makes the whole thing interesting is the idealization of rabid, passionate love as a means of attaining enlightenment. The idea is that in such obsessive love one’s focus is entirely outward, making one forget one’s Self; if this love goes unreciprocated, then one is left in a state of bewildered emptiness (which should be familiar to anybody who’s suffered a bad breakup), which makes it possible for one to embrace the true unity of all things; if the love is reciprocated, then the lovers achieve unity…allowing them to accept the unity of everything else, I suppose. Attar also presents the self-immolation of a moth and the ravings of madmen as ideal ways of life.

Besides being informative and philosophically interesting, the poem is very lively and entertaining. The combination of allegory and rhyming couplets occasionally reminded me of Dr. Seuss—in a good way.

Quote:
'A lover', said the hoopoe, now their guide,
'Is one in whom all thoughts of self have died;
Those who renounce the self deserve that name;
Righteous or sinful, they are all the same!
Your heart is thwarted by the self's control;
Destroy its hold on you and reach your goal.
Give up this hindrance, give up mortal sight,
For only then can you approach the light.
If you are told: "Renounce our Faith," obey!
The self and Faith must both be tossed away;
Blasphemers call such action blasphemy—
Tell them that love exceeds mere piety.
Love has no time for blasphemy or faith,
Nor lovers for the self, that feeble wraith.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:46 PM

53. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel GarcÃ*a MÃ¡rquez, 1985)
Genre: South American ode to romance-of-the-everyday
Rating: 5.5

I was somewhat surprised by the general tone of the book. Given its title and reputation, I thought it would be a lot more…romantic, or something. Instead, it seemed almost like an attack on melodramatic romance. Florentino’s 50-year ‘obsession’ with Fermina doesn’t really seem all that impressive or romantic. The book keeps saying that he’s madly in love with her, but it never evokes or describes this love. He seems to maintain his ‘love’ for her just as a matter of course, and it seems pretty mundane by the time Dr. Urbino dies. At one point the narrator says that Florentino had been in a ‘private hell’ for 50 years, but I’d just read 200 pages describing those 50 years, and they seemed anything but hellish. Sure, his continual ‘love’ affairs all end with him longing for Fermina, but that hardly strikes me as being a private hell. Perhaps it would seem hellish if his longing was perpetually evoked by the text, but the text seems to specifically avoid such an evocation. The longing is repeatedly mentioned, but never described; instead, the love affairs are described, which belies the purported longing. Similarly, Florentino’s love letters are repeatedly mentioned, but they are never shown to the reader. It’s as if the author specifically wants us to see Florentino’s love as empty and illusory.

Compare this with the opening chapter about Dr. Urbino. He supposedly doesn’t love Fermina as passionately as Florentino does: the later chapters repeatedly say that he favours stability over passion, that he doesn’t initially love Fermina at all, that his love consists mostly of familiarity, and so on. And yet he comes off as far more romantic in that first chapter than Florentino does in the rest of the book. His last words to Fermina are “Only God knows how much I loved you”; he says “It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.” Even his love for his parrot seems more passionate than any of Florentino’s loves. Everything he does seems imbued with a little passion: even the tremendous success of his opera house “never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during intermissions” (by far my favourite line in the book). The language itself seems more romantic in this opening chapter than in any that follow; sentences repeatedly start in the banal and end with a melodramatic flourish, just as Urbino’s seemingly mundane concerns lead to true passions. In the later chapters, the language seems to level everything– sure, it’s still fairly flowery, but there are no flourishes, making everything equally important… and more importantly, making everything equally unimportant.

And this seems to be a central idea: Florentino’s ‘love’ for Fermina is so single-minded and unvarying that it exists to the exclusion of all else. Thus, life itself is robbed of the romance (“the ordinary magic of everyday life,” as USA Today calls it on the inside front cover) that Dr. Urbino experiences in it. With that romantic context removed, even Florentino’s single-minded love becomes banal. So, after his initial bout of choleric love in the second chapter (the only time his love is really evoked), we get three chapters of banalities. Stuff happens, but what happens isn’t terribly important; the events aren’t even described in any particular order, because even the passage of time is just so terribly banal. Even Dr. Urbino and Fermina’s relationship is made banal in these sections, though not to the extent of Florentino’s affairs. Finally, after Dr. Urbino’s death, temporality returns, as Florentino reenters the world. But by then he realizes that he can only win Fermina’s love in the same way that Dr. Urbino did: with a solid foundation of routine. Thus, even his choleric love has been killed, and he has literally caused the death of those most taken by it (his young lover America and the pigeon girl). And, unfortunately, by leveling the world into banalities with his ‘obsession,’ he’s also destroyed the romance of life that Dr. Urbino had. So, his never-ending romantic riverboat journey is on a lifeless river, under the flag of a cholera that he no longer even suffers from. “Desperate to infect [ot]her[s] with his own madness,” he’s killed the world, and divested himself of that madness of which he was so proud.

I could be misinterpreting the whole thing. It could be that Florentino’s mad love is actually meant to be a good thing, that the river has been killed simply by banal ‘progress’, and the love that Florentino and Fermina find actually injects some life back into it, symbolized by the lone manatee. But it seems to me that the lone manatee symbolizes the life that ‘stable’ romance injects back into the river that was destroyed by mad romance. Admittedly, my reading is pretty simplistic, and it’s no doubt contradicted by any number of things in the text. But, in any case, the one thing I’m sure of is that America is the only sympathetic character in the whole book. She was the only one who actually experienced the hell that Florentino thought he did. Curse his oily hide!

Quote: It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of unrequited love.

Melville

04-23-2010, 03:51 PM

54. Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare, 1597)
Genre: Elizabethan romantic drama
Rating: 6

I only just read Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet for the first time. I didn’t much care for it. The characters seemed ciphers; the love story, undeveloped. The fact that Romeo was madly in love with a different girl mere moments before swooning over Juliet kind of makes the romance unbelievable and weightless. However, I think there was a lot of interesting thematic stuff related to how love interacts with society.

It seems to me that the play divides society into three broad groups: the titular individuals, the lovers; the everyday society of the two feuding families; and the kind of abstract remainder, all the other people in the city, with its social superstructure of church and state, represented by the friar and the prince. The lovers and the families share the same destructive tendency toward rashness and ill-temperance, and in that sense, the lovers’ actions are in line with their social milieu. The social superstructure condemns their rashness, but lets it slide (as the prince says in the end, he winkingly let the feud continue).

But outside of this broad similarity, Shakespeare explicitly stands the lovers in contradistinction to the families. Most obviously, the lovers bridge the divide created by the feud. Romantic love takes one outside of everyday social structures, by singling out a single Other, orienting one’s being toward that Other, and pushing society to the background. And in so doing, it allows the lovers to bypass their families’ feud. But it doesn’t just unite the lovers outside of society in the neverland of romance: When the romance is working, it serves to pacify. At least two characters note that Romeo’s love “feminizes” him, in the sense that it pacifies him. In this pacified state of love, Romeo is brought out of the limiting confines of the feuding families and into the broader order of the community. When a member of the enemy family demands to fight him, he at first refuses; partly, he does so because he’s all aswoon with love and has no interest in operating within a ridiculous feud, but he also cites the prince’s condemnation of the feud—that is, he is operating in the larger collective structure, rather than in the insular, destructive structure of the families. Furthermore, the social superstructure actively attempts to lift the lovers out of the confines of their families, as the friar explicitly aids them in getting married and in escaping. So love is explicitly categorized as an overcoming of everyday social barriers and a movement toward larger collectivity. That’s essentially stated right in the prologue, but I thought I would add some words to it.

As I mentioned, this effect of love is due to a kind of pacification—or feminization. And in some sense, the bloody-minded feud, the arrogant division between the two social groups, and the controlling nature of Juliet’s father can all be read as faults of excess masculinity; the lovers’ love, which ultimately ends the feud, is a feminine subversion of that patriarchal order. Maybe it’s also worth noting the historical role of marriage in overcoming provincialism, uniting tribes, etc. All of this reminds me of the early view of sex, presented in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as a pacifying, socializing force rather than something unruly and outside of proper society. In a more complicated existential setting, it also reminds me of the picture of love in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Yet this effect of love occurs only when the romance is working. Once it all goes to pot, the love itself becomes destructive, because it is no longer pacifying but frenzying. When going to Juliet’s tomb, Romeo no longer says that he is feminized: instead, he says that he is made wild. Love brought the lovers outside the realm of their everyday social bonds, but that process is unstable. Given the right set of circumstances, it can move them into the broader collective, acting as individuals on a larger stage, rather than as mere representatives of family, confined by upbringing and inborn social bonds. But given a slightly different set of circumstances, the removal of the social bonds leads to wildness, frenzy, violence heedless of any norms. And thence, everybody ends up dead.

I don’t think Shakespeare is presenting this as a universal structure, nor am I sure of how clear cut it is. And perhaps I’m trying too hard to match the play with Kierkegaard’s dual analyses of love in Either/Or. But it’s interesting nonetheless. The other aspect of the play that I found interesting was the degree of internal commentary, with various characters commenting on the nature of Romeo & Juliet’s love; e.g., the friar early on says that Romeo loves “by rote”, just falling madly for one girl after the next. There’s some nice interplay between this and the structure I described above.

Quote:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry

B-side

04-23-2010, 03:55 PM

Awesome. Finally I've earned an appellation worth having.

I had to look up "appellation". This is what you do to me.

Melville

04-23-2010, 04:52 PM

55. Solaris (Stanislaw Lem, 1961)
Genre: sci-fi
Rating: 8

This is a great book, likely the best sci-fi Iâ€™ve read other than Dune. Lemâ€™s prose is painfully pedestrian, consisting largely of flat dialogue and tedious, â€œthis-and-this-and-then-thisâ€ descriptionsâ€”but that weakness is overcome by the strength of the bookâ€™s central metaphors, which are beautiful and compelling.

First among these is the living, conscious sea on the planet Solaris. Like the great, white whale of Moby Dick, it stands as a metaphor for the unknown, a playing ground for humanityâ€™s quest for meaning and understanding amidst impenetrable mystery. And like the white whale, it is assigned multiple meanings within that unifying theme. It is a symbol of the single consciousness itself, proceeding with apparent design but according to ultimately inexplicable inner workings; it is Otherness on a vast scale, the ineffableness of anotherâ€™s mind; most prominently, it is God in the limit of his traditional assignation of a being whose existence is its essence: pure operation, pure movement, something that cannot but do as it does, that cannot but be a creator. With its mysterious, unified consciousness and its ripples of vague creation, which soon vanish as burst bubbles, it also invokes the Buddhist view of existence as a great sea, the ripples on the surface of which form our individual consciousnesses and the material existence of which we are conscious, with these ripples being part of the whole but having the illusion of distinctness. However, despite the richness of this central metaphor, I donâ€™t think Lem quite gives it the depth and grandeur it deserves, instead bogging it down with menial descriptions of the phenomena on the sea.

The second central metaphor, and the one which I thought more original and far more poignant, is the ex-lover that the sea creates from the protagonistâ€™s memory. She had killed herself after the protagonist left her. She is the weight of memory, the weight of regret, the embodiment of a moment that one cannot escape, a moment that defines everything in its wake. She is the longed-for return to the past, the revival of memory, the wish to dislodge it from its impossible distance and make it tangible, alive, present. And she is the essence of a person in love: she cannot exist without her loved one; her being is constituted as being-for-him. Lem makes this tragic relationship effectively sad. He evokes the protagonistâ€™s regret, his overpowering wish to be with her and to right his wrong; and, too, he evokes her despair at the tenuous nature of her existence, an existence borne only in his eyes. Also, I like that their situation immediately riddles their relationship with distances, petty lies and illusions. Even the impossible return to the past, to that illusory wellspring, the trace of memory, is filled with heartrending disappointment, with the same flaws that brought ruin to their original relationship. But that only makes the protagonistâ€™s yearn for it even more poignant.

Unfortunately, I couldnâ€™t help compare it to better treatments of the same themes. Its exploration of humanityâ€™s relationship to the unknown pales next to the scope and nuance of Melville. And Lem is no Tarkovsky: the film adaptation improves enormously both on the bookâ€™s artistry and on its exploration of love, self-hood, and memory. However, itâ€™s nonetheless a great book.

Quote: I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.

monolith94

04-23-2010, 06:22 PM

Read The Book of the New Sun for some scifi that I think you'd enjoy.

Spaceman Spiff

04-23-2010, 09:44 PM

Very cool thread.

Have you read any of:

Blood Meridian
Confederacy of Dunces
Tintin
Any Raymond Chandler
Ice
Watership Down
Any Pynchon
Any Robbe-Grillet

?

Melville

04-23-2010, 10:04 PM

Read The Book of the New Sun for some scifi that I think you'd enjoy.
I'll add it to the Bester-Ballard-Sturgeon-Valis-and-Russian-guys-that-Qrazy-recommended list of sci-fi to check out.

Very cool thread.

Have you read any of:

Blood Meridian
Confederacy of Dunces
Tintin
Any Raymond Chandler
Ice
Watership Down
Any Pynchon
Any Robbe-Grillet

?
Yes
No
No
The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye
Never heard of it
Yes
Gravity's Rainbow
No

Melville

04-24-2010, 02:51 AM

56. Sculpting in Time (Tarkovsky, 1986)
Genre: film theory
Rating: 6.5

Tarkovsky is my favourite film director. Yet his view of cinema is way too dogmatic: it must present the artist's direct experience of the world, and anything else it can do debases that basic requirement. And the distinctions he draws between film and the other arts, based on his dogmatic definition of cinema, are way too strict.

His view of editing is especially problematic. He says that it does not provide rhythm, that the rhythm is inherent in the flow of time in each shot. This seems, as they say, counterfactual, and he never provides enough specifics to make clear how rhythm is contained within each shot. He also says that the notion of montage necessarily reduces films to a play of concepts, rather than directly conveying the artist's experience of time. This seems to me to undervalue the importance of concepts in our experience, and it also seems like an unnecessary consequence of juxtapositions: why must the impact juxtapositions rely on concepts?

He also seems to contradict himself quite frequently. So the whole book is quite problematic. However, it is worth reading: its poetic descriptions of what cinema (as Tarkovsky envisions it) can accomplish, how it can reveal and extract the power, feeling, and wealth of meaning of a moment as it unfolds in time, are startlingly perceptive and compelling.

Quote: In any case it is perfectly clear that the goal for all art—unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a salable commodity—is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence.

Melville

04-24-2010, 03:56 AM

57. The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne, 1852)
Genre: the downfall of utopias
Rating: 9

Hawthorne tells the story of a New England commune. As one would expect, it is at first filled with high social ideals and grand utopian hopes. But it gradually disintegrates—not due to external pressures, avarice, or the limitations of socialist economics, but due to the force of personal relationships and histories. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is that it reifies this disintegration by shifting its own narrative into gothic melodrama. Mysterious histories and hidden relationships between the characters are revealed. These relationships are realistic enough: it's nothing very out of the ordinary that disrupts utopian social models, but real, concrete human affairs. But the novel casts these relationships in the gothic moods and tones they deserve: the humanity of the affairs, what allows them to so constrict and disrupt the utopian ideal, consists of what we inject into them, the melodrama of which we make them, the intensity of our feelings as we live them, and the ways in which we relate to them as stories.

Quote: "It is a genuine tragedy, is it not?"

ledfloyd

04-24-2010, 05:36 AM

i really loved love in the time of cholera when i read it. it's been several years though so i can't really provide a solid argument.

monolith94

04-24-2010, 04:36 PM

I'll add it to the Bester-Ballard-Sturgeon-Valis-and-Russian-guys-that-Qrazy-recommended list of sci-fi to check out.

Valis and Bester are great. I've still got to get around to Ballard and Sturgeon, I'm thinking first Sturgeon, then Ballard.

D_Davis

04-24-2010, 05:11 PM

Sturgeon and Ballard are so vastly different in theme and style, that it's sometimes amazing to think that were, relatively, working in the same genre (at least for a part of their respective careers). In one hand you have Ballard's clinical, sterile, cold, and emotionally detached examinations of urban culture and the impact of technology on humanity, and in the other hand you have Sturgeon's warm, emotionally fueled and heart-felt studies of humanity's soul and our relationships with one another.

Kurosawa Fan

04-24-2010, 07:15 PM

Very cool thread.

Have you read any of:

Confederacy of Dunces
Any Pynchon

Confederacy is one of my favorite books, and the only Pynchon I've tackled thus far is The Crying of Lot 49, which was fantastic as well.

Spaceman Spiff

04-24-2010, 07:43 PM

You haven't read any Tintin, Melville? What kind of childhood did you have?

Oh, and Ice (Anna Kavan) sounds amazing by the way. Just picked it up, and can't wait to read it.

monolith94

04-24-2010, 10:01 PM

lovejuice

04-25-2010, 01:57 PM

57. The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne, 1852)
Genre: the downfall of utopias
Rating: 9
as you know i love this book.

Benny Profane

04-25-2010, 03:10 PM

How many pages is The Blithedale Romance? I see some editions on Amazon ranging from 124 to 428 pages.

D_Davis

04-25-2010, 03:26 PM

Yeah, from that description I definitely feel as though I'll tend to like Sturgeon more.

I can see you totally digging Ballard as well.

You could even say that Ballard was more about humanity's increasing isolationism at the hands of modern urban living and technology, as in Concrete Island, and a number of short stories, while Sturgeon focused on the need for human beings to grow closer to one another, as is evident in the idea of the homo gestalt in More than Human, the hive mind in The Cosmic Rape, and even the expression of sexual love in Godbody. Although I would argue that the authors both focused on similar problems, but Ballard on the negative consequences of humanity's actions, while Sturgeon focused on the positive qualities of human relationship.

Melville

04-25-2010, 05:13 PM

You haven't read any Tintin, Melville? What kind of childhood did you have?
I'd never even heard of it before my late teens. I didn't think it was that commonly read outside Europe.

How many pages is The Blithedale Romance? I see some editions on Amazon ranging from 124 to 428 pages.
My copy is about 250 pages.

Qrazy

04-25-2010, 05:34 PM

So roughly (give or take) how many books have you read? Apologies if you've answered this already.

Melville

04-25-2010, 05:42 PM

So roughly (give or take) how many books have you read? Apologies if you've answered this already.
Not many. There are about 450 books on the list I'm working from for this thread. I'd guess that leaves off 100 or so that I read as a kid and have forgotten. I'm also excluding hundreds of picture books (Dr. Seuss, Bearenstein Bears, a whole series of weird autobiographies of famous people, etc.).

EDIT: actually, it's probably a lot more than 100 that I'm forgetting, since there were a few years where I read almost all day long.

megladon8

04-25-2010, 09:41 PM

Thank you for making me not feel so weird about being rather ho-hum on "Love in the Time of Cholera".

Qrazy

04-26-2010, 01:13 AM

Not many. There are about 450 books on the list I'm working from for this thread. I'd guess that leaves off 100 or so that I read as a kid and have forgotten. I'm also excluding hundreds of picture books (Dr. Seuss, Bearenstein Bears, a whole series of weird autobiographies of famous people, etc.).

EDIT: actually, it's probably a lot more than 100 that I'm forgetting, since there were a few years where I read almost all day long.

That's still a commendable amount.

lovejuice

04-27-2010, 12:38 AM

I'd never even heard of it before my late teens. I didn't think it was that commonly read outside Europe.
it kinda is in thailand. so is asterix.

Melville

04-27-2010, 04:51 AM

That's still a commendable amount.
Pretty sure lovejuice could get through that many books in a weekend. And apparently kuehnepips could do it in an afternoon.

it kinda is in thailand. so is asterix.
Maybe it's just North America where it isn't so widely read.

Philosophe_rouge

04-27-2010, 07:34 AM

This is so awesome, I don't know what to say.

kuehnepips

04-27-2010, 08:04 AM

Pretty sure lovejuice could get through that many books in a weekend. And apparently kuehnepips could do it in an afternoon.

:lol:

Except Friday.

lovejuice

04-28-2010, 12:23 AM

Thank you for making me not feel so weird about being rather ho-hum on "Love in the Time of Cholera".
I always want to read and review it for the newspaper, expecting myself to be lukewarm toward it.

endingcredits

04-28-2010, 02:56 AM

*To be read in the Dos Equis guy voice*
I don't always read. But when I do, I prefer

Martin Heidegger
Henri Bergson
Walter Rudin
John Milnor
V.I. Arnold
James Joyce
Melville
Poe
Sam Beckett
Solzhenitsyn
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Phillip K. Dick
William Gibson

Melville

04-28-2010, 04:08 AM

*To be read in the Dos Equis guy voice*
Why am I just now hearing about these commercials?

Martin Heidegger
James Joyce
Melville
Sam Beckett
Awesome.

Walter Rudin
John Milnor
V.I. Arnold
That's some hardcore reading.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Is this the guy you mentioned yesterday?

Melville

04-28-2010, 04:10 AM

58. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1921)
Genre: dystopian frenzy
Rating: 10

Astounding. Explosive. Prose of mad rhythms. Words like fire. Lacerating psychology. Sublime frenzy. Totalitarianism as insane logic, kinematics, ritual. Love as insane liberation—from both the Self and the They. Love as imagination, imagination as soul, as living, trembling receptivity.

Or, in Zamyatin's own words, "The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity—but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage."

Quote: I saw him grab her rudely with his shaggy paws, rip her thin silk, sink his teeth—yes, I remember clearly: his teeth.

59. Pride & Prejudice (Austen, 1813)
Genre: insipid social commentary and romance
Rating: 1

My most loathed novel. Wit in service of the mundane, the proudly banal middle. An endorsement of the prejudices that it purports to attack, so charmed by its vapid central characters and so mocking of its peripheral ones that it forgets to tell us anything significant about any of them. Austen not only forgives but even takes delight in the faults of her main characters while creating others solely to mock. I sympathized only with Mr. Collins, a character I was obviously supposed to love to hate, solely because he wasn't in on the author's joke. Tedious and despicable.

Quote: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

60. Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein, 1961)
Genre: sci-fi/New Age sex-romp
Rating: 2

The first half is an unremarkable thriller; the second half, an advocatory exposition of sexual liberation and New Age spirituality. It's kinda lame. Kinda really lame.

Quote: Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.

Melville

04-28-2010, 04:21 AM

lovejuice

04-28-2010, 05:28 AM

60. Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein, 1961)
Genre: sci-fi/New Age sex-romp
Rating: 2

with that promise, yeah, it's not very good. heinlein believes in his ridiculous orgyligion too much to explore the pro and con of it. the moon is a harsh mistress actually addresses the issue, and is quite a good book, imo.

Melville

04-28-2010, 05:32 AM

orgyligion
:lol:

Barty

04-28-2010, 06:05 AM

Sven

04-28-2010, 06:16 AM

Quote: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

This line is prominently featured in the nook advertisements, which I see every day pretty much, many times, working at B&N as I do. It drives me bonkers, more and more, every time I see it.

Derek

04-28-2010, 07:28 AM

Which Ballard collection do you think is most up my alley?

I can't speak for Davis, but I'm just finishing up The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard and it's consistently great. At 19 stories/300 pages is able to cover his many facets, though his fascination with time and space in every sense of the words is pervasive, without being an overwhelming task.

Also, I bought We and will be reading it soon. You have set the bar high. :)

Melville

04-28-2010, 05:46 PM

This line is prominently featured in the nook advertisements, which I see every day pretty much, many times, working at B&N as I do. It drives me bonkers, more and more, every time I see it.
Have you read the book? The line is tongue-in-cheek, but it's indicative of the novel's irritating tone.

I can't speak for Davis, but I'm just finishing up The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard and it's consistently great. At 19 stories/300 pages is able to cover his many facets, though his fascination with time and space in every sense of the words is pervasive, without being an overwhelming task.
I remember Davis offered to send me his copy of that, but at the time I was trying to minimize my acquisition of books. I really should've taken him up on the offer. Time and space are two of my favorite subjects.

Also, I bought We and will be reading it soon. You have set the bar high. :)
Nice. Let me know what you think of it.

Melville

04-28-2010, 06:32 PM

Hmmmm..my favorite economics institute just literally yesterday put out a brand new copy of this in their store.
You can read it and The Blithedale Romance together. They make an interesting pair of critiques of the rigid, unreal logic of socialist idealism. Throw in Darkness at Noon, too.

endingcredits

04-28-2010, 09:47 PM

Why am I just now hearing about these commercials?

I can't answer that.

Why am I just now hearing about these commercials?
Awesome.

I am thinking about re-reading Being and Time. This will be #3 for me.

Why am I just now hearing about these commercials?
That's some hardcore reading.

As far as math books are concerned, I consider these to be among the most appetizing.

Why am I just now hearing about these commercials?
Is this the guy you mentioned yesterday?
Yes.

D_Davis

04-28-2010, 09:54 PM

Which Ballard collection do you think is most up my alley?

I would just read the collection, The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard (http://books.google.com/books?id=1Cs-PfjalSAC&dq=The+Best+Short+Stories+of+J G+Ballard&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=LK7YS7fVJZGOswO0p7mdBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false).

The link above goes to the Google books version!

This is my favorite collection of short stories. There was also a recently-released complete collection of short stories, totally worth the asking price.

D_Davis

04-28-2010, 09:56 PM

I can't speak for Davis, but I'm just finishing up The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard and it's consistently great. At 19 stories/300 pages is able to cover his many facets, though his fascination with time and space in every sense of the words is pervasive, without being an overwhelming task.

This is the one. A brilliant collection from start to finish. Ranges from his most straightforward narratives to his experiments with language and form.

Stay Puft

04-29-2010, 12:31 AM

59. Pride & Prejudice (Austen, 1813)
Genre: insipid social commentary and romance
Rating: 1

Lovin' it. This is a great thread.

I haven't read Pride & Prejudice as of yet because I once forced my way through Emma, a novel I found every bit as loathsome for reasons similar to those you describe here. Worst piece of literature I read during my time as an undergrad.

dreamdead

04-29-2010, 02:37 AM

Psst, Melville. Question for at the Comic book thread.

Loving this thread, incidentally. I'll be reading, and simultaneously teaching, Hawthorne's novel in the fall. You have my hopes high.

Melville

04-29-2010, 08:35 AM

I am thinking about re-reading Being and Time. This will be #3 for me.
That's a lot of Being & Time. Have you read any of Critique of Pure Reason, Phenomenology of Spirit, Being & Nothingness, or Phenomenology of Perception?

The link above goes to the Google books version!
No preview available, unfortunately. I'll have to go the old-fashioned paying route.

I haven't read Pride & Prejudice as of yet because I once forced my way through Emma, a novel I found every bit as loathsome for reasons similar to those you describe here. Worst piece of literature I read during my time as an undergrad.
Yeah, I won't be reading anything else by her.

Psst, Melville. Question for at the Comic book thread.
Sorry, I'll answer that now.

D_Davis

04-29-2010, 02:54 PM

No preview available, unfortunately. I'll have to go the old-fashioned paying route.

That's weird. I have access to the whole book on G-books.

Kurosawa Fan

04-29-2010, 03:12 PM

Yeah, that link took me to the entire book on Google as well.

D_Davis

04-29-2010, 03:28 PM

Yeah, that link took me to the entire book on Google as well.

Maybe it's only available in the US? Not sure how the G-Books licensing works.

Melville

04-29-2010, 04:29 PM

Maybe it's only available in the US? Not sure how the G-Books licensing works.
Yeah, the copyright holder must have denied access in Canada. I've had the same problem when providing Google Books links to someone in the UK.

kuehnepips

04-30-2010, 06:41 PM

Lovin' it. This is a great thread.

I haven't read Pride & Prejudice as of yet ...

Agree with you that this is a great thread; what I don't get is, why would he read this? I mean, he absolutely knew that would happen, ergo: why read Austen at all? Why even try?

Melville

04-30-2010, 07:07 PM

Agree with you that this is a great thread; what I don't get is, why would he read this? I mean, he absolutely knew that would happen, ergo: why read Austen at all? Why even try?
I was expecting to at least moderately like it. It's my sister's favorite book, and I generally respect her opinion.

kuehnepips

04-30-2010, 07:52 PM

I was expecting to at least moderately like it. It's my sister's favorite book, and I generally respect her opinion.

There is no fucking way anyone can generally respect ... yeah, shut up Nada.

Your sister much older?

Melville

04-30-2010, 08:39 PM

Your sister much older?
She's about four years older, but she read it at a younger age than I did. Seems like it's most popular among girls in their late teens and early twenties.

Melville

05-01-2010, 08:45 PM

61. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)
Genre: rural propaganda for children
Rating: 2

This belongs to a long literary tradition espousing the view that all of life’s woes and ill-temperaments are immediately cured by living close to the land and listening to the straight talk of good, honest country folk. I can barely abide by this literary tradition even in its most nuanced and effective forms—and here it is just made cloying. Pervasive, simplistic moralizing runs amok in what could have been a wonderful book. Interesting characters and scenarios are immediately absolved of their interest by the force of good, healthy living on the Yorkshire moors; a light, flowing storytelling style is ruined by endless commentary on what’s for the best for the characters. As part of its moralizing, it also puts forth some questionable, simplistic cognitive-behavioral psychology.

Quote (better than the rest of the book): One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.

Sven

05-01-2010, 08:59 PM

Melville

05-02-2010, 04:22 AM

I related to Mary a surprising amount. I liked the information that would trickle in about India, and I think the general "growing up" angle, divorced from garden metaphors and country wisdom, was nice.
I thought Mary was almost a non-character: quickly defined, but then just as quickly, unbelievably altered by healthy living on the moors and sage advice from country folk. And I thought that the "growing up" aspect of the novelâ€”at least what I think you mean by it: the children accepting and overcoming their failings, learning to face the world, accepting others and living with them as equals, etc.â€”is framed entirely in terms of the pervasive, simplistic moralizing and equally simplistic psychology, which I couldn't stomach; and most of that moralizing and psychology is itself framed in terms of the simplistic view of good country living and good, honest country folk. Hm. I guess I should quote some examples rather than just make that strong assertion...but I can't be bothered at the moment.

Melville

05-02-2010, 05:01 AM

62. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neal Hurston, 1937)
Genre: african american & womenâ€™s literature
Rating: 4.5

A sort of black folktale in which a free and easy man comes along and rescues a woman from social strictures, and they live together free and easy, despite all hardship. It's a clichÃ©d concept of freedom and love explored in a simplistic, uninteresting way. And the characters are uniformly goofy and simple. That goofy simplicity is in keeping with the book's folktale style, but the tale is too detailed and realistic to achieve the affecting directness of actual folktales, so the simplicity feels dull and inconsequential at best and a reinforcement of racial stereotypes at worst. (Wikipedia tells me that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison went further in their criticisms of that aspect of the novel, calling it a â€œminstrel showâ€ and a â€œblight of calculated burlesque,â€ respectively.)

Quote: She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to see.

Melville

05-02-2010, 05:15 AM

63. The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Amos Tutuola, 1952)
Genre: folktale drunk on palm wine
Rating: 8

A Nigerian folktale of Tutuola's own invention, written in Pidgin English. Like any good folktale, it has the sense that anything can happen; but it improves on the usual model with its particularly easy air of being completely out of control. It’s been criticized for showing Nigerians as amoral drunkards and witlessly superstitious. But never mind that, because it's awesome craziness.

Quotes:
We could not travel on the Deads' road because of fearful dead babies, etc.

We had sold our death to somebody at the door for the sum of Â£70:18:6d and lent our fear to somebody at the door as well on interest of Â£3:10:0d per month, so we did not care about death and we did not fear again.

Sven

05-02-2010, 07:12 AM

I guess I should quote some examples rather than just make that strong assertion...but I can't be bothered at the moment.

I'm perfectly open to your arguments. It is not exactly a book I feel I could defend against criticism. I just remember thinking that I was into it much more than I expected to be.

lovejuice

05-02-2010, 10:02 AM

Surprisingly, expecting to hate it, I found myself rather smitten with The Secret Garden. I agree with your irritation at the simple wise folk motif, but for some reason that was not at the fore for me as I was reading it. I related to Mary a surprising amount. I liked the information that would trickle in about India, and I think the general "growing up" angle, divorced from garden metaphors and country wisdom, was nice.
It was looooong time ago (twentyish years), but I remember quite loving it as well. In fact, it might be among the very first books in English that I can't put down.

I can't offer any argument, but what strikes me even then is some hidden sexual, even incestuous, tension among the three. They sure will grow up to be one disturbing trio. Perhaps worthy of peopling Emily Bronte's novel.

Melville

05-04-2010, 12:20 AM

I just remember thinking that I was into it much more than I expected to be.
Burnett is a strong storyteller, for sure.

I can't offer any argument, but what strikes me even then is some hidden sexual, even incestuous, tension among the three. They sure will grow up to be one disturbing trio. Perhaps worthy of peopling Emily Bronte's novel.
:lol: That did not occur to me.

64. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, 1915)
Genre: Modernist pseudo-autobiography
Rating: 10

Joyce tells an autobiographical tale: he tells it as a sequence of discrete modes of consciousness and pivotal, formative ideas, rather than a continuous accumulation of life events. As the novel moves from one discrete section to the next, Stephen (Joyce’s literary stand-in) grows from an infant, only conscious of the immediate world, to an adult, pre-eminently self-conscious and actively conceptualizing the world. Over the course of this movement, Stephen gradually takes over the narration. At the movement's terminal points, the very first sentence presents a story about Stephen as told by his father—

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
—and the very last sentence presents a statement written by Stephen to his father (and to God, but whatever...)—

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

This transition represents not just Stephen’s growth into adulthood, but also a convergence of Stephen with Joyce himself. That is, at the beginning Joyce is presenting his childhood and himself as a child, an alien world and an alien person to his current world and current person. The third person narration is necessitated by this difference. By the end, however, Stephen has become identical, or nearly identical, with Joyce, and so the narration has switched into the first person. However, Joyce is still writing about himself, rather than writing himself—the person that he writes about is always at a distance from him. The final section of the novel is in the form of a diary; the diary serves as an attempt to get as close as possible to a final, fixed self-identification. Its entries present Stephen's thoughts, and hence Joyce's, as they occurred, erasing the disjunction between Joyce-the-writer-now and his former self, subsuming the Joyce who evolves after completing the novel under the identity of his finalized self-portrait. Of course, the very fact that these final pages are from a diary, something written rather than something lived, serves to remind us of the lingering differance (in the sense of Derrida) within this final fixity: the self-portrait is an artifice that is never identical with its creator.

Melville

05-04-2010, 12:48 AM

65. Sonnets to Orpheus (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1922)
Genre: poetry
Rating: 8

In A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce (or the stand-in for his youth, at least) says that art should invoke a stillness in one's being. This collection of poetry exemplifies such an invocation. It's occasionally almost Emersonian in its description of nature and sensuous life, but far more serene, gentle, inclusive. Its effect is cumulative, rather than based on the power of individual verses, but I'll toss up a quote anyway:

...A few notes of music, a tapping, a faint
humâ€”: you girls, so warm and so silent,
dance the taste of the fruit you have known!

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
drowning in itself, how it struggles through
against its own sweetness. You have possessed it.
Deliciously it has converted to you.

endingcredits

05-04-2010, 02:28 AM

That's a lot of Being & Time. Have you read any of Critique of Pure Reason, Phenomenology of Spirit, Being & Nothingness, or Phenomenology of Perception?

I have read all or parts of the above with the exception of Phenomenology of Perception. I recall reading that it was a rebuttal to Sartre's separation of the object and subject.

Melville

05-04-2010, 02:42 AM

I have read all or parts of the above with the exception of Phenomenology of Perception. I recall reading that it was a rebuttal to Sartre's separation of the object and subject.
Didn't you say you've never taken a philosophy course? You put me to shame.

I've read only a small portion of Phenomenology of Perception, but it seems like one of the essential works of existential phenomenology. It's shtick is a description of Being in terms of embodied consciousness, as opposed to, say, Sartre's description where the body is a subsidiary aspect of Being. That sounds like it could tie in with what you're suggesting. Sartre's separation of object and subject is definitely in need of some ambiguation: much as I love Being and Nothingness, its description of objects in terms of Being-in-itself, even with the nuances Sartre gives that description, is overly reductive.

Melville

05-09-2010, 11:17 PM

66. Story of the Eye (Bataille, 1928)
Genre: avant garde erotica
Rating: 8.5

Bataille tells a tale of ecstatic perversity. It’s minimalist in characterization and narrative, creating a world of nothing but erotic delirium, violence, and bizarre fetishes that conflate far-flung objects and ideas. The prose is measured and drawn, rather than being delirious in accord with the novel’s atmosphere. As such, the erotica may seem flat and dilettantish to some, but I found it effective in evoking a dreamlike mood.

However, my main interest in the novel lies in its brief closing section, in which Bataille explicitly relates the events of the tale, and its particular assortment of fetishes, to more mundane pieces of his childhood. This structural oddity retroactively forms the novel’s core. Without it, the novel would be perhaps too easily susceptible to vapid psychoanalytic interpretations; with it, such interpretations are made trivial, and the novel points beyond them to the whole sweep of Bataille’s vision: transgression and ecstasy, the outside-of-itself, as the transmundane. In our average everydayness, we synthesize the manifold of experience within a set norm, a set of expectations and conceptual understandings of ourselves and the world. In transgression and ecstatic moments, the average everydayness is ruptured, the topology of the manifold is altered, obscure connections are made.

This closing section hence reinforces the haze of obscure and fetishistic connections in the tale itself. Foremost and most feverish among these, and one of the most memorable images I’ve encountered in any art, is the climactic image of the titular eye: in it, death and sex and memory—and indeed, the ecstatic itself—peer back, like the void, into the eyes of the onlookers, both the transgressor and the reader.

Tangentially, The Past is a Grotesque Animal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2p9fDJsHNo), the second-most-played song in my iTunes library, references this book. Apparently Bjork also said everybody should read it.

Quotes would be extremely unsafe for work.

EDIT: Brightside, did you ever get around to reading this?

B-side

05-10-2010, 12:33 AM

EDIT: Brightside, did you ever get around to reading this?

I read the first part of this post half-expecting to get a shout-out in here somewhere. Does that make me pretentious?:lol:

I haven't yet. I suck so hard at reading. I find it kinda taxing. I'm certainly interested, though. Ugh.

Melville

05-10-2010, 12:55 AM

I read the first part of this post half-expecting to get a shout-out in here somewhere. Does that make me pretentious?:lol
Self-involved, maybe? :P

It would only take a couple hours, probably less, to read. And it involves eggs, testicles, and eyeballs. Right up your alley, I'm sure. ;)

Melville

05-10-2010, 01:08 AM

67. Moderato Cantabile (Duras, 1958)
Genre: nouveau roman ("but critics take pains to distinguish Duras's style as distinct and inimitable," says wikipedia)
Rating: 5.5

Something I never thought I’d encounter: a boring book by Duras. It begins memorably with a scene leading to a glimpse of a dead woman and her distraught husband/possible killer. The rest of the book deals with another woman’s obsession with this event. But its relentless externalization is at odds with the flux of identity and obscure longings in this obsession, making them somewhat random, even silly. It doesn't get inside them like Duras' later stuff does.

Quote: The man sat down beside the dead woman, stroked her hair and smiled at her. A young man with a camera around his neck dashed up to the cafÃ© door and took a picture of the man sitting there smiling. By the glare of the flashbulb the crowd could see that the woman was still young, and that the blood was coming from her mouth in thin trickles, and that there was blood on the man’s face where he had kissed her. In the crowd, someone said:
“It’s horrible,” and turned away.

68. Nadja (Breton, 1928)
Genre: Surrealism
Rating: 8

A man has fleeting meetings with a woman. This narrative is left vague, dreamlike, mysterious, and spontaneous. Intermingled with it are the man’s essay-like reflections. Further intermingled are a collection of photos.

Interestingly, the founders of Surrealism originally thought that visual arts weren't well suited to their goals. Although that now seems like an obviously silly standpoint, I can see where they were coming from: automatic writing does seem to spring more immediately and spontaneously from the subconscious mind onto the finished page than a painting springs onto the canvas, since so much more time must be put into "crafting" the painting (that may not be true now, since craft is no longer essential in the fine arts, but it was more true at the time). Although far from a masterpiece, Nadja evinces this, succeeding quite well in accomplishing the Surrealist goal of laying bare the spontaneous movements of consciousness.

Quotes:
If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”…This sense of myself seems inadequate only insofar as it presupposes myself, arbitrarily preferring a completed image of my mind which need not be reconciled with time, and insofar as it implies—within this same time—an idea of irreparable loss, of punishment, of a fall whose lack of moral basis is, as I see it, indisputable.

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

B-side

05-10-2010, 01:41 AM

Self-involved, maybe? :P

It would only take a couple hours, probably less, to read. And it involves eggs, testicles, and eyeballs. Right up your alley, I'm sure. ;)

You know me so well. I'd really prefer to have a physical copy, but considering I'd do anything for Melville, I'll do that.

/Meat Loaf

Melville

05-10-2010, 02:15 AM

69. Molloy (Beckett, 1951)
Genre: dissolution of text and identity
Rating: 10

The human Self is not an unvarying thing, not a single unity. It is a synthetic whole, a synthesis synthesizing itself from disjoint elements of perception, body, state of mind, self-consciousness. The synthesis is effected by the continuity of memory and action, by transcendental apperception of self, by one’s conscious idea of oneself, by reification in the gaze of the Other, and by a unifying conceptual framework, both one’s own and that of the social whole. Beckett examines this synthesis by dissolving it, revealing every element in a state of decay and breaking apart from the others. He gives us two characters “crumbling…dispossessed of self.” He dwells on their grotesque, painful, ever-rotting physicality, the errant extremes of their emotions. They are the kind of miserable, erratic individuals found in Dostoevsky and Hamsun, but here they are taken to their outermost limits. They are all ramblings and gesticulations. The first is a pitiful fellow, held together only with absurd routines and vague connections to his mother; the second, a cruel one, holding himself together by insistence on his own rules, by brutally lashing the world and the people within it with his will and his ideology. By the end, the latter character resembles the former: they have become the same by both dissolving into the minimal elements of human reality. Above all, neither can stop narrating: the narration, the telling of their own story, the use of words circumscribe, to connect, and to unify: language, that body of concepts that defines the world and allows us our intersubjective relations, is the final thing maintaining their being. But the narration is cut apart, broken with comma upon comma upon comma splice, by ambiguity and rapid contradiction. Like everything else, it is crumbling.

In short, it's a masterpiece.

Quotes:

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind.

And if I speak of principles, when there are none, I can’t help it, there must be some somewhere.

I drown in the spray of phenomena.

How little one is at one with oneself, good God.

It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language.

I have been a man long enough, I shall not put up with it any more.

B-side

05-10-2010, 02:32 AM

Melville

05-10-2010, 02:41 AM

70. Malone Dies (Beckett, 1951)
Genre: further dissolution of text and identity
Rating: 9

Beckett continues his disintegration of human reality, telling a tale consisting solely of the ramblings of a dying man lying alone in a room. The man wonders where he his and what heâ€™s doing there. He speaks in â€œquarter-truths, quarter-inclinations.â€ He tells of the objects that define his being by being his: a stick and a notebook, for example. (He ponders how to define what belongs to him; this is as important as anything else.) He tells a story to amuse himself. His story makes little sense, its protagonist changes names willy-nilly. By the end, it becomes poignant, telling of the rise and fall of a love affair and its grotesque physicality. By the end, the narrator and the character canâ€™t be distinguished. By the end, it matters little whether they are one and the same, because the narrator creates himself, exists as a pseudo-permanent thing, only in his telling, in his creation, of his own story.

Quotes:
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

I have lost my stick, That is the outstanding event of the dayâ€¦Now that I have lost my stick I realize what it is I have lost and all it meant to me.

No matter, any old remains of flesh and spirit will do, there is no sense in stalking people. So long as it is what is called a living being you canâ€™t go wrong, you have the guilty one.

The sight of her so diminished did not damp Macmannâ€™s desire to take her, all stinking, yellow, bald and vomiting, in his arms.

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me my soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it nobody ever noticed?

B-side

05-10-2010, 02:45 AM

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me my soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it nobody ever noticed?

Ooh. I really like this. I really like the sound of that other Beckett book as well.

Melville

05-10-2010, 02:49 AM

My only experience with Beckett is in film form. Film was very interesting, and stars an elderly Buster Keaton attempting to evade the gaze of the camera. Apparently, the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi'. You probably know more about the context of that than I do.
Nah. I've never read Berkeley. I'm tempted to start rambling about phenomena and noumena, and being-in-itself and being-for-others, but that sounds like a lot of work.

B-side

05-10-2010, 02:50 AM

Nah. I've never read Berkeley. I'm tempted to start rambling about phenomena and noumena, and being-in-itself and being-for-others, but that sounds like a lot of work.

Well, if it's any consolation, I would've read it all with a bemused look on my face.

Melville

05-10-2010, 03:02 AM

Well, if it's any consolation, I would've read it all with a bemused look on my face.
:lol:

Ooh. I really like this. I really like the sound of that other Beckett book as well.
Molloy actually contains more along the lines of that quote from Malone Dies. It's much more emotional.

71. The Unnamable (Beckett, 1953)
Genre: text and identity now thoroughly dissolved
Rating: 10

In this final book in Beckettâ€™s trilogy, not even character remains. The movement toward stasis found in Malone Dies is complete: there are only thoughts thinking themselves, ever rambling but never moving. The unnamable narrator tells brief tales of himself sitting, forever immobile and incommunicative, in a chair, other people orbiting as planets about him; he tells of a character living in a jar in front of a restaurant, and the joys of having a tarp placed over oneâ€™s jarred head; he tells of a pile of mush with an eye, alone in a room, others peeking in. He is obsessed with the vacuity of words. They are always the words of others. Their meaning is questionable. But they keep spilling out. In one of the greatest stylistic moments I've ever read, the novel ends with dozens of pages of great seas of run-on sentences sliced into horrifying, headlong rhythms.

This trilogy sits firmly in my top 10 books of all time.

Quotes:
To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about.

So long as oneâ€™s thoughts are somewhere everything is permitted.

Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing.

What can you expect, they donâ€™t know who they are either, nor where they are, nor what theyâ€™re doing, nor why everything is going so badly, so abominably badly, that must be it. So they build up hypotheses that collapse on top of one another, itâ€™s human, a lobster couldnâ€™t do it.

Iâ€™m in words, made of words, othersâ€™ words

The question may be asked, off the record, why time doesnâ€™t pass, doesnâ€™t pass from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, othersâ€™ time, the time of the ancient dead and the yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and no prospects, buried under the seconds, saying any old thing, your mouth full of sand, oh I know itâ€™s immaterial, time is one thing, I another, but the question may be asked, why time doesnâ€™t pass, just like that, off the record, en passant, to pass the time, I think thatâ€™s all, for the moment, I see nothing else, I see nothing whatever, for the time being.

Milky Joe

05-10-2010, 03:14 AM

This trilogy sits firmly in my top 10 books of all time.

Firmly and rightly it would sit in mine as well, if I had one.

B-side

05-10-2010, 03:17 AM

Molloy actually contains more along the lines of that quote from Malone Dies. It's much more emotional.

Take solace in knowing you've officially put Beckett's books on my radar. I really need to dive into literature.

ledfloyd

05-10-2010, 09:47 AM

well, i've been considering reading those books for a long while. that's enough to push me over the edge.

endingcredits

05-11-2010, 12:35 AM

Wow... 10/10 for The Unnamable. Being a Beckett fan, I should probably go to the library this minute.

Melville

05-12-2010, 06:35 PM

Wow... 10/10 for The Unnamable. Being a Beckett fan, I should probably go to the library this minute.
I'd suggest reading Malone Dies first, as there's a nice progression between the three novels. Also, I should have mentioned that for the first half or so of The Unnamable, I thought it progressed to a pretty silly extreme. But in retrospect, during the second half, I saw that it worked.

Qrazy

05-12-2010, 07:53 PM

When did you read the trilogy?

Melville

05-12-2010, 07:57 PM

When did you read the trilogy?
Just in the last couple weeks.

Qrazy

05-12-2010, 08:13 PM

Melville

05-12-2010, 11:49 PM

Nice. Glad to see you liked it. Granted it took you over a year to follow up on my rec (http://www.match-cut.org/showpost.php?p=138078&postcount=2181) but I"ll let it slide since I still haven't completed my top 100 film list. :P I will reiterate the Watt rec though.
Hm. I have no memory of that—just as I had no memory of your recommendation of We, which is also now in my top 15. I guess I should pay more attention when you recommend books. This is why I need you to make a list. :P

Milky Joe

05-13-2010, 02:30 AM

Murphy is also excellent. Also Texts For Nothing serve as a good little sequel to the trilogy. Though possibly a bit redundant.

Oh yeah, and the short story "First Love" is absolutely essential.

Melville

05-13-2010, 06:41 AM

Murphy is also excellent. Also Texts For Nothing serve as a good little sequel to the trilogy. Though possibly a bit redundant.

Oh yeah, and the short story "First Love" is absolutely essential.
I'll put them on the to-read list.

72. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis, 1950)
73. Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis, 1951)
74. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis, 1952)
75. The Silver Chair (C.S. Lewis, 1953)
76. The Horse and His Boy (C.S. Lewis, 1954)
77. The Magician’s Nephew (C.S. Lewis, 1955)
78. The Last Battle (C.S. Lewis, 1956)
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 2–5

I like children’s books whimsical to the point of nonsense, and preferably mordantly humorous. I don’t like them genteel, simplistically moralizing, and overtly explanatory; nor do I care for tales of children “growing up” by learning cheap moral lessons. Anyway, I remember very little of the Narnia books, but I remember them falling into the latter category. When I was in my early teens, I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I thought the Christian symbolism was awkward, obnoxious, and exemplified the aforementioned aspects I dislike. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a big fan of the series, but I did love The Horse and His Boy, which I thought was hilarious, and to a lesser extent, The Magician’s Nephew, which I thought was the most genuinely magical. Now, all I remember of the former is some dialogue about the boxing of ears; of the latter, a chase on a cobblestone street lined with lampposts. And the best image in the series is undoubtedly a lone lamppost in snowy woods. Old-timey lampposts are awesome.

Quote: “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

Melville

05-13-2010, 08:52 AM

79. The Book of Three (Lloyd Alexander, 1964)
80. The Black Cauldron (Lloyd Alexander, 1965)
81. The Castle of Llyr (Lloyd Alexander, 1966)
82. Taran Wanderer (Lloyd Alexander, 1967)
83. The High King (Lloyd Alexander, 1968)
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 3-6

When I was a kid, for a time Lloyd Alexander was tied with Dickens as my favourite author. He’s best known for this series, The Chronicles of Prydain, which is a children’s high-fantasy, epic-quest, boys’ adventure kind of thing. In retrospect, that sounds really dull. I say meh to boys’ adventures; and high fantasy seems ill-suited to children’s stories, because the world-building ends up too slight and sanitary. Anyway, even when I was a kid, I preferred a different Alexander series: the Westmark Trilogy.

Quote: "Long ago I yearned to be a hero without knowing, in truth, what a hero was. Now, perhaps, I understand it a little better. A grower of turnips or a shaper of clay, a Commot farmer or a king—every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone."

84. Westmark (Lloyd Alexander, 1981)
85. The Kestrel (Lloyd Alexander, 1982)
86. The Beggar Queen (Lloyd Alexander, 1984)
Genre: young adult fantasy
Rating: 6

Here’s the Westmark Trilogy. It’s all about subterfuge and bloody war. I remember it being a lot more understated, gripping, nuanced, and meaningful than the Chronicles of Prydain, but maybe my youthful mind was just beguiled by its grittiness and violence. In The Kestrel, the protagonist, who’s become frenzied in the midst of war, notices that he has other people’s blood caked under his nails. Now that’s a boys’ adventure story.

Quote: "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?"

monolith94

05-13-2010, 01:02 PM

High fantasy seems ill-suited to children's stories??? That just makes no sense to me at all.

Melville

05-13-2010, 06:50 PM

High fantasy seems ill-suited to children's stories??? That just makes no sense to me at all.
Well, I guess it's just the typical kind of high fantasy that I think is ill-suited. If there's an epic quest and a lot of world-building, I want the quest to be serious and the world to be dense. Alternatively, I love a lot of fairy tales and folk tales, which are minimalist and whimsical, just taking for granted that fantastical things happen. The children's high fantasy I've read falls in a middle-ground that I find dull. I like extremes.

B-side

05-14-2010, 01:54 AM

I like extremes.

We're not so different, you and I.

Melville

05-14-2010, 05:02 AM

We're not so different, you and I.
I wouldn't say otherwise.

84. Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne, 1926)
85. The House at Pooh Corner (A. A. Milne, 1928)
Genre: children’s literature
Rating: 8–9

Guileless prose, deftly captured characters (my favourite being, of course, Eeyore, though I love Pooh himself too), small and wonderful non-adventures, and the mood of a drifting cloud. The Hundred Acre Wood is a serene Faerie land—enchanting and outside of time.

The books get bonus points for inspiring the crazy-singing Russian animated version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqdiEUp6s4E

Quotes:
And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn't stop.

"Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?"

"If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear."

B-side

05-14-2010, 05:48 AM

I wouldn't say otherwise.

Shh. It helps my e-cred to be compared to you, so just let it slide.

Melville

05-14-2010, 06:07 AM

Shh. It helps my e-cred to be compared to you, so just let it slide.
But...I wouldn't say otherwise. That is, I would not be entirely disinclined to disagree with the inference that it is not true that you and I are not so different. Orwell be damned, I'll use all the wishy-washy double negatives I want.

B-side

05-14-2010, 06:25 AM

But...I wouldn't say otherwise. That is, I would not be entirely disinclined to disagree with the inference that it is not true that you and I are not so different. Orwell be damned, I'll use all the wishy-washy double negatives I want.

This is why it helps me; you use all them there smart words. I don't even know how to use a semicolon properly! Unless I just did, in which case... awesome.

Melville

05-14-2010, 10:01 PM

Two late 18th/early 19th Century books regarding perversion by religious ideals and the pursuant murdering of families:

86. Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale (Charles Brockden Brown, 1798)
Genre: American Gothic
Rating: 8

A model of good manhood goes insane (or experiences a religious revelation, or is tricked by a sinister ventriloquist, or some combination of the above) and murders his family at the behest of religious visions (and/or said sinister ventriloquist), hearkening to and making ambiguous and dreadful the tale of Abraham.

Things of note:

It is apparently considered the first great American novel.
It focuses on the instability of the human mind, implicitly questioning Christianity’s insistence on a human soul (i.e., a constant Self) and the Enlightenment’s belief in a rational basis of society, and explicitly questioning how this instability affects bonds of friendship and love.
It bespeaks the era’s concern with the reconciliation of religious revelation, empirical science, and sense-based psychology.
It has a compelling, horrifying mood.
It was probably a major influence on Hawthorne and Melville in its concerns with the mysteries, ambiguities, and instabilities underlying personal and social reality.

Quote:
Thou art gone! murmuring and reluctant! And now my repose is coming—my work is done!

87. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself. With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor (James Hogg, 1824)
Genre: Gothic horror/religious satire
Rating: 9

Satan leads a man to blasphemy and murder by preaching an extreme version of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation by grace. That is, good people, regardless of what they do, are guaranteed salvation.

Things of note:

It was ignored for a century until Gide wrote of it, “It is long since I can remember being so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented by any book.”
It focuses on the consequences of perverting Christian theology.
It's primarily satirical, and quite humorous as such, unlike the wrought seriousness of Wieland.
It uses a lot more literary pyrotechnics than does Wieland: e.g., an unreliable narrator, multiple versions of events, and a structure consisting of a “found” diary within a framing narrative within a framing narrative (i.e., levels of ambiguity at least two deep, a text within a text within a text, an everyday man getting a glimpse of a possible glimpse of something possibly beyond the world of the everyday).
It offers a grueling portrait of a man ruined by his self-involvement, proud disdain, misogyny, and misbegotten ideals (and Satan), and thence slowly sinking into the utmost depths of desperation.

Quotes:
With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it.

That I was a great, a transcendent sinner, I confess. But still I had hopes of forgiveness, because I never sinned from principle, but accident; and then I always tried to repent of these sins by the slump, for individually it was impossible; and though not always successful in my endeavours, I could not help that; the grace of repentance being withheld from me, I regarded myself as in no degree accountable for the failure.

Mysterious Dude

05-14-2010, 10:07 PM

I think Justified Sinner might be my favorite book.

Melville

05-14-2010, 10:07 PM

I think Justified Sinner might be my favorite book.
Nice. It is awesome.

This is why it helps me; you use all them there smart words. I don't even know how to use a semicolon properly! Unless I just did, in which case... awesome.
But...I didn't use any smart words. I was going to include the word "specious", or possibly "spurious", but decided it would just lessen the impact of the pointless convolution.
Your use of the semicolon is syntactically correct, but a colon seems more appropriate, assuming that "this" refers to what follows the semicolon and not to the post you quoted.

B-side

05-15-2010, 12:09 AM

But...I didn't use any smart words. I was going to include the word "specious", or possibly "spurious", but decided it would just lessen the impact of the pointless convolution.
Your use of the semicolon is syntactically correct, but a colon seems more appropriate, assuming that "this" refers to what follows the semicolon and not to the post you quoted.

:D

Duncan

05-15-2010, 10:31 AM

Has there ever been a non-sinister ventriloquist?

endingcredits

05-15-2010, 09:20 PM

Melville,
Will you be reviewing graphic novels as well? The title of your thread would not disallow it. Double negatives FTW.

Sven

05-15-2010, 09:22 PM

Will you be reviewing graphic novels as well?

Or, for that matter, comic books?

Milky Joe

05-15-2010, 10:01 PM

Has there ever been a non-sinister ventriloquist?

I guess that all depends. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc-mZVPGKSk)

Melville

05-16-2010, 03:52 AM

Has there ever been a non-sinister ventriloquist?
I dunno. Seems unlikely.

Melville,
Will you be reviewing graphic novels as well? The title of your thread would not disallow it. Double negatives FTW.
No, I'm sticking with written texts, skipping comics and even picture books. I think they're a wholly different medium—or at least comics are; picture books could generally have their pictures removed and still be books, though very different books, but I just can't be bothered. Of course there's a wide grey area in between, but I've gotta draw a line somewhere. The likelihood of me finishing this thread is pretty minuscule anyway, even with these restrictions.

Spaceman Spiff

05-18-2010, 02:54 AM

This is what I was talking about with regards to the french writers who weren't 'Nouveau Roman' guys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Melville

05-18-2010, 03:32 AM

This is what I was talking about with regards to the french writers who weren't 'Nouveau Roman' guys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
Ah. Exercises in Style has been on my to-read list for a few years. But the books sound pretty gimmicky.

endingcredits

05-18-2010, 03:56 AM

Ah. Exercises in Style has been on my to-read list for a few years. But the books sound pretty gimmicky.

Exercises in Style reads like exercises in uninspired redundancy.

kuehnepips

05-18-2010, 01:43 PM

Exercises in Style reads like exercises in uninspired redundancy.

Not in the German version.

Melville

05-21-2010, 12:50 AM

Exercises in Style reads like exercises in uninspired redundancy.
Guess I'll leave it in limbo on the list. It does seem like a gimmick that would be hard to make compelling. Even in German.

However, what is "drawn" supposed to signify in this context? I'm not sure that I've ever seen it used in such a way.
Yeah, I'm using it in a made-up way. I mean drawn-out like ribbons of hot toffee. Here are a couple sentences from the first few pages: "I began realizing that she shared my anxiety at seeing her, and I felt even more anxious that day because I hoped she would be stark naked under the pinafore"; and "Thus a love life started between the girl and myself, and it was so intimate and so driven that we could hardly let a week go by without meeting." The phrasing, the terms like "began realizing", all the adjectives and adverbs, and the passive voice in the second example give the sentences a soft, blunted tone and a stretched-out rhythm.

Melville

05-21-2010, 01:19 AM

88. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy, 1985)
Genre: Western / Faulknerian mythic history
Rating: 7

A bloodsoaked vision of the Old West and Manifest Destiny, it carves from historical movements a mythical American prehistory. In this, Faulkner’s vision of the South is its obvious forebear; There Will Be Blood, its descendant. Again reminiscent of Faulkner in his Absalom, Absalom! mode, it’s all long sentences of headlong rhythms and abstruse words. The prose and the hazy, grotesque, brutally violent world it presents are singular and entrancing…for a while. But it is monotonous, relentlessly one-note. If it were half its length, it might be a favorite.

It gets bonus points for the ending, one of the greatest pieces of prose I’ve ever read, with a rhythm varying between halting and frantically headlong, a hypnotic use of repetition, and perfect, small descriptions in the midst of it. It describes an indelible image: a Satanic figure, the Judge, naked and pale and hairless, dancing and fiddling. It’s deliriously orgiastic, otherworldly, repulsive and compelling:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletimes and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favourite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Melville

05-21-2010, 01:56 AM

89. Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut, 1973)
Genre: silliness and self-referentialia
Rating: 3

I just can’t get behind Vonnegut’s silliness. I want books that are explosive, or books like tar, thick and dense and inescapable. I want edification. Vonnegut’s writing is small, casual, and glibly iconoclastic. This book, especially, irritates me. Its central idea is that the world is just too damn complicated to make sense of, so one may as well talk randomly about penis size. While that is a reasonable conclusion, Vonnegut doesn't put much effort into making sense of things, or showing how they are too damn complicated, before giving up and moving onto the penises.

Quote (referring to the founding fathers of the US): The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

Melville

05-21-2010, 05:29 AM

For no particular reason, I decided to rank my favorite authors. Below each one, I've listed the books I've read by him or her, in descending order of preference.

EDITED to update

1. Dostoevsky - devastating psychological insights

Brothers Karamazov - 10
Notes from Underground - 10
Crime and Punishment - 10
The Crocodile - 10
The Double - 9.5
The Idiot - 9
Great Short Works - 8
The Devils - 7.5

2. Melville - irony, bombast, and the unknown and ambiguous

Moby Dick - 10
Pierre, or the Ambiguities - 9.5
The Confidence Man - 8
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories - 7.5

3. Hamsun - vivid, simple portraits of the vagaries of emotion

Hunger - 10
Pan - 10
Mysteries - 9
Under the Autumn Star - 8.5
Growth of the Soil - 8
A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings - 8
Victoria - 7

4. Heidegger - explications of what it means to exist

Being and Time - 10
Introduction to Metaphysics - 9
Basic Writings - 6.5

5. Faulkner - time, history, memory, and stream-of-consciousness gothic melodrama

The Sound and the Fury - 10
As I Lay Dying - 9
Light in August - 8
Absalom, Absalom! - 7.5
Go Down, Moses - 6.5

6. Beckett - the absurd and the breakdown of human existence

The Unnamable - 10
Molloy - 10
First Love and Other Shorts - 9.5
Malone Dies - 9
Waiting for Godot - 8
The Complete Short Prose - 7.5
Murphy - 6.5
Endgame - 6
Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho - 6

7. Sartre - existential phenomenology of real, emotional experience; most of my thoughts about life and art are tinged by Sartre

Nausea - 10
Being and Nothingness - 9.5
No Exit - 6.5
Existentialism is a Humanism - 6.5
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions - 5.5

8. Joyce - formal wizardry used to capture the breadth of humanity

Ulysses - 10
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - 9
Dubliners - 7.5

9. Duras - evocations of the moment, of memories that won't let go, of obscure emotions and longings

The Ravishing of Lol Stein - 9.5
The Lover - 9.5
Blue Eyes, Black Hair - 9
Summer Rain - 8.5
The Malady of Death - 8
Emily L - 6
Moderato cantabile - 5

10. Kierkegaard - literary philosophy, irony, and the original description of the irrevocable distances within our existence

Either/Or - 9
The Sickness unto Death - 9
Fear and Trembling - 9
Repetition - 8
The Concept of Anxiety - 7.5

B-side

05-21-2010, 08:56 AM

^That will come in handy. Thanks.

Spaceman Spiff

05-21-2010, 01:45 PM

88. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy, 1985) The prose and the hazy, grotesque, brutally violent world it presents are singular and entrancing…for a while. But it is monotonous, relentlessly one-note.

While I agree with this, I think it works great here, and that's part of what makes the book so hypnotic to me. There is nothing else to this world than butchery, cannibalism, murder and the most agnoizing and horrific brutality possible.

Melville

05-21-2010, 03:52 PM

^That will come in handy. Thanks.
You can also check out my list of favorite books, available on my blog.

While I agree with this, I think it works great here, and that's part of what makes the book so hypnotic to me. There is nothing else to this world than butchery, cannibalism, murder and the most agnoizing and horrific brutality possible.
Hm. Guess monotony isn't for me. The prose and the violence felt really dull to me after a while. If nothing newâ€”thematically, narratively, or stylisticallyâ€”is being offered, then I feel like the book should have ended already.

Benny Profane

05-21-2010, 03:56 PM

I think Glanton is the most bad-ass character ever, in any medium. I trudged through the book, but had a more positive reaction than you, by a few degrees only. I really needed the dictionary for that one.

ledfloyd

05-21-2010, 04:04 PM

does heidegger's support of nazism not make you question his ideas?

Raiders

05-21-2010, 04:16 PM

Much like movies, I don't really agree often with Melville, but having just spent the last 40 minutes in this thread, it is highly entertaining.

Raiders

05-21-2010, 05:44 PM

Does that mean that this time around you are finding that you are agreeing with Melville and are thereby deriving entertainment from the enlightenment he is providing.... or, is it more that you still aren't buying into anything he is saying but it's somehow been a rip-roaring good time nonetheless?

:lol:

I guess somewhere between b) and c). I am enlightened in regards to his own tastes and observations and though I still disagree with quite a bit of it, the thread is a fun read.

Melville

05-21-2010, 05:57 PM

I think Glanton is the most bad-ass character ever, in any medium.
Hm, I don't even remember him. Actually, the only character I remember is the judge. He's a spectacular creation.

does heidegger's support of nazism not make you question his ideas?
Nope. As I recall, he recanted eventually (though never apologized) and said that he saw something in the movement that wasn't really there. Being and Time, which is really what I love him for, doesn't have any bearing on Nazism. His later stuff does get a bit mystical and in love with "the human spirit", but even then it jives with Nazism only in a very vague sense.

the thread is a fun read.
Can't ask for more than that.

Benny Profane

05-21-2010, 06:31 PM

Hm, I don't even remember him. Actually, the only character I remember is the judge. He's a spectacular creation.

Glanton was the leader of the gang. The Judge was kind of a bizarre sidekick.

Spaceman Spiff

05-21-2010, 07:18 PM

Glanton was the leader of the gang. The Judge was kind of a bizarre sidekick.

The Judge was the real leader of that gang. Clearly more awesome, as well.

Raiders

05-21-2010, 07:32 PM

Yeah, Glanton is definitely much less of a character than Judge Holden. I remember both, but Holden is certainly a magnificent creation. I imagine Glanton is restricted more to historical truths since there are multiple accounts of him and his gang whereas Holden is only in the Chamberlain book where his exploits seem wholly crafted and this translates beautifully to McCarthy's book.

ledfloyd

05-21-2010, 07:39 PM

Nope. As I recall, he recanted eventually (though never apologized) and said that he saw something in the movement that wasn't really there. Being and Time, which is really what I love him for, doesn't have any bearing on Nazism. His later stuff does get a bit mystical and in love with "the human spirit", but even then it jives with Nazism only in a very vague sense.
i haven't read being and time. nor do i really have any substantial experience with heidegger. on a gut level though i find anyone who supported what hitler did quite revolting. i will read being and time though. as we share quite a few favorite authors (melville, doestoevsky, beckett, sartre, kierkegaard) and it's just something i should read. i need to get around to joyce and faulkner.

Melville

05-21-2010, 07:50 PM

i haven't read being and time. nor do i really have any substantial experience with heidegger. on a gut level though i find anyone who supported what hitler did quite revolting.
He never supported the extermination of the Jews. At least I never heard that he did. He supported the "inner truth and greatness of the movement" as a historical expression of the human spirit in the "confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity"; he viewed it as a reaction against what he viewed as the homogenizing and devaluing of the spirit in the US and USSR.

Raiders

05-21-2010, 08:06 PM

I'm not going to claim to be any great scholar, but I have read Mein Kampf and have done some research on Nazism, and those snippets would have me believe Heidegger wasn't actually a supporter as much as he was taking partial tenets of the movement/political regime and using them to express his own opinions. Then again I have never read any of his works, so I can't say for sure.

Benny Profane

05-21-2010, 08:12 PM

ledfloyd

05-21-2010, 08:22 PM

those snippets would have me believe Heidegger wasn't actually a supporter as much as he was taking partial tenets of the movement/political regime and using them to express his own opinions.
he was a member of the nazi party.

"The German people must choose its future, and this future is bound to the FÃ¼hrer."

he did rectify those statements after germany lost the war. but it's still troubling, and it makes you wonder how he would've reacted had the nazi's won.

Qrazy

05-22-2010, 03:57 AM

Melville

05-22-2010, 04:53 PM

Well I have to say Heidegger's Letter on Humanism had very different connotations for me after I found out he had been a Nazi. While I did and still do appreciate the rigorousness of his metaphysics, and tangentially respect much of his work... I do feel that his refusal to be metaphysically assumptive meant abstaining from certain crucial moral decisions which is all reflected in the fact that he became a Nazi.
I agree that his refusal to commit to a system of ethics probably made it easier for him to support the Nazis, or to think the parts of Nazi ideology that he disliked didn't outweigh what he wanted to view as its essence. (And I think Raiders is likely right that he just picked certain aspects of National Socialism that he thought conformed with his views of the spirit and historicity. The contradictory and philosophically vague nature of something like Mein Kampf probably makes it easier to separate different aspects of it and decide that only some of them are the essential ones.) He definitely waffled on the whole thing, presumably because he wasn't morally committed either way. However, I don't think that should impact how we view his philosophy. We can always take his metaphysics and impose an ethical code on top of it. And I think that his view of authenticity, owning up to one's own Being, within the context of an existence that is essentially a Being-with-others, actually offers a very clear route to a system of ethics. His later views on the spirit, the uncanny, the originary power of language and art, etc. also offers a route, though it would seem to lead toward a Nietzschean ethics.

I feel like we've had this conversation before...

Qrazy

05-22-2010, 06:23 PM

I agree that his refusal to commit to a system of ethics probably made it easier for him to support the Nazis, or to think the parts of Nazi ideology that he disliked didn't outweigh what he wanted to view as its essence. (And I think Raiders is likely right that he just picked certain aspects of National Socialism that he thought conformed with his views of the spirit and historicity. The contradictory and philosophically vague nature of something like Mein Kampf probably makes it easier to separate different aspects of it and decide that only some of them are the essential ones.) He definitely waffled on the whole thing, presumably because he wasn't morally committed either way. However, I don't think that should impact how we view his philosophy. We can always take his metaphysics and impose an ethical code on top of it. And I think that his view of authenticity, owning up to one's own Being, within the context of an existence that is essentially a Being-with-others, actually offers a very clear route to a system of ethics. His later views on the spirit, the uncanny, the originary power of language and art, etc. also offers a route, though it would seem to lead toward a Nietzschean ethics.

I feel like we've had this conversation before...

Yeah, pretty sure we have, but it's a good conversation nonetheless.

Melville

05-22-2010, 09:31 PM

Yeah, pretty sure we have, but it's a good conversation nonetheless.
True. Discussions of Heidegger are wonderful cures for intellectual torpor and general malaise.

kuehnepips

05-22-2010, 09:44 PM

True. Discussions of Heidegger are wonderful cures for intellectual torpor and general malaise.

Yes. Esp. for you guys who hate women.

Melville

05-22-2010, 09:46 PM

Yes. Esp. for you guys who hate women.
http://planetsmilies.net/confused-smiley-17420.gif

kuehnepips

05-22-2010, 09:55 PM

http://planetsmilies.net/confused-smiley-17420.gif

C'mon, he was a greater misogynist than Schopenhauer and Nietzsche combined. And you know that.

Melville

05-22-2010, 11:39 PM

C'mon, he was a greater misogynist than Schopenhauer and Nietzsche combined. And you know that.
Actually, I've never heard any suggestion that he was a misogynist, and I don't recall any evidence of it in his writing (of which I've read admittedly little). I don't remember any mention of gender at all in Being and Time. I guess some aspects of his metaphysics in Introduction to Metaphysics could be accused of being "gendered" in the way that feminist philosophers call things phallogocentric, giving metaphysical primacy to traditionally (though I'd say not intrinsically) male characteristics, but that's far from misogyny. If he was a misogynist, his misogyny isn't a core aspect of his philosophy or a reason why discussing him would be a cure for intellectual torpor.

endingcredits

05-24-2010, 04:56 AM

True. Discussions of Heidegger are wonderful cures for intellectual torpor and general malaise.

Agreed.
However, discussions that degrade from his works into his affiliation with National Socialism tend to have the opposite effect on me. Yawn.

Melville

05-24-2010, 10:12 AM

Agreed.
However, discussions that degrade from his works into his affiliation with National Socialism tend to have the opposite effect on me. Yawn.
Yeah, I'm generally uninterested in biographical readings of art and philosophy. But I think it is interesting and eventually necessary to consider the ethical implications, if any, of Heidegger's philosophy. And his support of National Socialism enjoins such considerations, though it only really offers a very murky view of them, especially because of his waffling and vague statements on the matter. But biography aside, his metaphysics and definition of truth gives primacy to certain things that are largely opposed to logical/conceptual systems and in favor of bold, originary movements; and though he pointedly abstains from making claims about ethics, this would seem to strongly constrain the ethical systems that could be compatible with his philosophy. His views of historicity and human existence as a thrown, caring being-with-others likewise impose constraints. If we follow one of the traditional paths of ethics and say that goodness is acting in accord with one's fundamental nature, then the metaphysical/existential descriptions largely determine the ethics. ( In that case Heidegger's 'authenticity' is synonymous with 'goodness'.) Even if we take a different stance on what constitutes goodness, it will be impacted by the underlying metaphysics. Or we could go the other way, as Qrazy suggested: maybe Heidegger's metaphysics is too weak (in the sense of its assumptions) to provide an ethical system, even given the good=in-accord-with-nature definition, and if we desire an ethical system, which of course we do, then we must make additional assumptions, and Heidegger's refusal to make such assumptions itself carries an ethical connotation.

Hm. That's probably just repeating what's already been said. Oh, well.

endingcredits

05-24-2010, 04:04 PM

But biography aside, his metaphysics and definition of truth gives primacy to certain things that are largely opposed to logical/conceptual systems and in favor of bold, originary movements; and though he pointedly abstains from making claims about ethics, this would seem to strongly constrain the ethical systems that could be compatible with his philosophy.

Heidegger's distaste for conceptual systematics and thirst for bold originality are fairly weak constraints. Nietzsche had similar tastes with even stronger constraints but still the space of permitted ethical systems is huge.

Melville

05-25-2010, 02:50 AM

Heidegger's distaste for conceptual systematics and thirst for bold originality are fairly weak constraints. Nietzsche had similar tastes with even stronger constraints but still the space of permitted ethical systems is huge.
Defining truth and giving metaphysical primacy to certain modes of being seems like a much stronger constraint than merely a distaste or a thirst would be.

Nietzsche's philosophy is already a value system: he says outright that "good" (though he rejects the traditional connotations of the term) is synonymous with embracing the fundamental nature of existence—perpetually saying Yes to life and No to ideals/idols, in his terms. Given his view of life as a physiologically driven, willed striving for power, that's a pretty strong constraint. Certainly he leaves a whole lot of leeway, in that each person who is so able is free to (and should) adopt their own moral code, but then the meaning of the moral code is specific: it is an armoring of oneself, part of one's willed striving. Furthermore, unlike Heidegger's philosophy, Nietzsche's philosophy rejects the possibility of imposing a universal ethical system on top of it: the strong, by definition, have the right to form their own moral codes. So while the constraints on the allowed moral codes might be very weak, the fact that they are required to be weak is itself an immense constraint.

endingcredits

05-25-2010, 06:03 AM

Defining truth and giving metaphysical primacy to certain modes of being seems like a much stronger constraint than merely a distaste or a thirst would be.

I spoke loosely. My point was to note that the class of allowed ethical systems appears to me to be immense. I guess I agree with Qrazy on the weakness of Heidegger's metaphysics.

Melville

05-25-2010, 06:10 AM

I spoke loosely. My point was to note that the class of allowed ethical systems appears to me to be immense. I guess I agree with Qrazy on the weakness of Heidegger's metaphysics.
Gotcha. Now tell me why Phys. Rev. D is always screwing up the indices in my equations.

endingcredits

05-25-2010, 07:03 PM

Gotcha. Now tell me why Phys. Rev. D is always screwing up the indices in my equations.

They're incompetent. Arxiv pre-prints seem to be more reliable and accurate then actual publications.

D_Davis

05-25-2010, 07:49 PM

No, I'm sticking with written texts, skipping comics and even picture books. I think they're a wholly different medium

Yes.

Melville

05-26-2010, 06:11 PM

They're incompetent. Arxiv pre-prints seem to be more reliable and accurate then actual publications.
It would be really helpful if they had any understanding of the stuff they were copy-editing. And they inserted the text "Reference [54]:" into the middle of the information for Reference [54] in my bibliography. Copy-editors just ain't what they used to be.

Melville

06-12-2010, 07:07 PM

90. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945)
Genre: traditional Victorian style novel
Rating: 3.5

This kind of book is extremely dull to me: heavy on narrative, light on everything else. Its mannered prose and cast of even more mannered rich English people don’t help. Its overarching themes—nostalgia for youth, as emblematized by the passing of the country manor lifestyle, and fraternal love as a precursor to romantic love as a precursor to religious faith—are simply tacked on at the end, delayed by a bland narrative that does very little to develop them or set the stage for them. At least the first half centers on colourful and in some cases entertaining characters, my favourite being a sleepily cruel father; the second half instead centers on a completely uninteresting, emotionally stagnant, blithely amoral romance between two undeveloped, bland characters, dragging the novel through much tedium of little meaning before reaching the climactic theme-tacking moment.

Like the themes, the emotions of the romance and the nostalgia seem unearned and barren—the narration insists on them but never evokes them or provides proper foundations for them. In particular, the country manor doesn't do much to invite the nostalgia that the novel bestows upon it. Instead, there's just lifeless narrative.

However, it's not all narrative: Waugh occasionally takes a break for wispy musings (see below) and tedious descriptions.

Mostly notable for the seas of semicolons.

Quote:
Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

EDIT: This comes off much more negative than my overall experience of the book. I liked the first half well enough.

Melville

06-13-2010, 01:02 AM

91. Analects (Confucius et al., 5th Century BC)
Genre: instructions for upstanding living
Rating: 4

How to philosophize with a crochet hook.

Quote: Being good as a son and obedient as a young man is, perhaps, the root of a man’s character.

92. Satyricon (Petronius, 1st century)
Genre: Roman social satire/misadventures of man-boy love
Rating: 5.5

Ribald.

Quote: A boy gorged on a diet like this can no more acquire real taste than a cook can stop stinking.

lovejuice

06-13-2010, 02:44 AM

90. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945).
I like the novel slightly more than you do, but we agree that the first half is more accomplished and memorable.

Melville

06-13-2010, 05:56 AM

93. Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier, 1913)
Genre: romance/inverted magic realism
Rating: 8.5

An elegy to lost love, an evocation of the sad inevitability of time, in the form of a modern chivalric romance: a questing youth stumbles upon an engagement party that seems an enchanted otherworld, falls in love therein, tries forever to return, but is foiled by the slow, dread entanglements of the everyday world and his own failings—he finds the woman, but never again the enchanted moment. The tale is told with an almost minimalist delicacy. Magical and melancholy.

Quote: Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time—a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence—and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period...what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.

B-side

06-13-2010, 06:05 AM

I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.

I like this.

Melville

10-18-2010, 03:43 AM

94. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1997)
Genre: post-post-modernism
Rating: 6.5

I admired it more than I liked it. Mostly I liked the way it uses its prose to evoke and reify its core understanding of life. It presents life as a struggle under an immense weight of information, but information in a large sense: not just facts, concepts, and so on, but events, perceptions, objects, relationships, habits, memories, and thoughts. Its style is well suited to this, a ceaseless mass of details, information atop information, endnotes to endnotes, stories upon stories, convoluted sentences of purposefully awkward prose, technical jargon and slang. Its characters are burdened by this mass, some more than others. Its first chapter is about a character unable to talk, unable to control his engagement with the world at all, because heâ€™s broken and swarmed by this mass. The rest of the book gives the impression that it will lead back to that scene, but it never quite gets there, because there always remains an uncountable infinity of stuff in the wayâ€”life is the infinite jest. Most of the characters try to escape it through drugs, and the book dwells at length on the extreme limits of their misery, the crushing weight of the world around them, the grotesque tales that make up their worst experiences. Other characters adopt an ironic stance, distancing themselves from life by making light of it, treating the information only as information, as something to be played with. Some characters do both. Likewise, the prose is simultaneously deeply ironic and even more deeply earnest; thereâ€™s a sad futility to its ironic humor, to its convoluted sentences and awkwardness (e.g., its recurrent use of multiple contiguous conjunctions such as â€œand but thoughâ€).

But for me, this whole approach, the mass of ceaseless details, made the book extremely tedious at timesâ€”itâ€™s 483,994 words, and I felt every one of them. I loved portions of it, primarily those detailing the addictsâ€™ tales of despair, where the emotional weight of the details is made palpable. But a lot of the scenes just keep going and going with little to maintain my interest. Thatâ€™s especially true of many scenes at the tennis academy, where the endless details felt less purposeful, less emotional, more inclined toward an irony I often found dull, and detailing teen male interactions and sports, which arenâ€™t subjects I care to read endless details about. (But conversely, a lot of the scenes with the addicts are dull, and a lot of the scenes at the academy are great, especially the interactions between Hal and his brothers, most especially his grotesquelyâ€”the book really is big on grotesquesâ€”disabled brother Mario, who, unlike everybody else, takes life as it comes, but whoâ€™s never made into a caricature of acceptance.) And the whole subplot dealing with Quebecois wheelchair assassins felt extraneous; perhaps because it had relatively little emotion and its humor fell flat for me, every scene in that subplot felt like a slog. Actually, all the political stuff I could have done without.

So, in short, I appreciated a lot of what it does, but it didnâ€™t really work as well for me as I would have liked.

Quote: The so-called â€˜psychotically depressedâ€™ person who tries to kill herself doesnâ€™t do so out of quote â€˜hopelessnessâ€™ or any abstract conviction that lifeâ€™s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in who Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fireâ€™s flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling â€˜Donâ€™t!â€™ and â€œHang on!â€™, can understand the jump. Not really. Youâ€™d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Melville

10-18-2010, 03:46 AM

95. Children of Hurin (Tolkien, 2007)
Genre: epic fantasy/medieval-legend simulacra
Rating: 8.5

As an attempt to achieve Tolkien's goal of creating modern ancient English myths, this is probably more successful than Lord of the Rings. While that book starts off in a children's-storybook style and ends with sentences like "But the white fury of the Northmen burned the hotter, and more skilled was their knighthood with long spears and bitter", this one is written throughout in a modernized epic tone. And it consistently evokes an atmosphere of darkest Nordic myth: it's dense with doom and dragons. But like Lord of the Rings, it's a simulacrum, a copy of something that never existed, a myth suited to modernity. As such, it ends with a scene of existential humiliation worthy of Dostoevsky. Good stuff.

Quote: But Mablung came and looked on the hideous shape of Glaurung lying dead, and looked upon Turin and was grieved, thinking of Hurin as he had seen him in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and the dreadful doom of his kin.

96. Old Peter's Russian Tales (Arthur Ransome, 1916)
Genre: fairy tales made mollycoddling
Rating: 3.5

A twee tone and too much description remove what makes fairy tales interesting: the striking randomness, the feeling of a world unbound from norms both physical and social.

Quote:
All the time he was doing this Vanya and Maroosia were snuggling together close by the stove, thinking what story they would ask for, and listening to the crashing of the snow as it fell from the trees outside. Now that old Peter was at home, the noise made them feel comfortable and warm. Before, perhaps, it made them feel a little frightened.
"Well, little pigeons, little hawks, little bear cubs, what is it to be?" said old Peter.

97. The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosiński, 1965)
Genre: historical fiction/dwelling in depravity
Rating: 5.5

A tour of absurdly cruel and superstitious country folk in the villages of Eastern Europe during World War II. The protagonist learns amorality from this tour. There's little depth, lots of repetitive cruelty and superstition. Viewed as a (very fictionalized) version of history, it's fairly ridiculous, lacking any nuance; viewed as a parable, it suffers from insufficient succinctness.

Quote: The world seemed to be pretty much the same everywhere, and even though people differed from one another, just as animals and trees did, one should know fairly well what they looked like after seeing them for years. I had lived only seven years, but I remembered a lot of things.

98. Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow, 1989)
Genre: mobster crime/coming of age
Rating: 4

A kind of airy tale of growing up poor and becoming gofer for a gangster. All I really remember is the titular character having slimy sex with a mob boss's wife in the woods, and said mob boss slitting someone's throat at a barbershop.

Quote: He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness.

99. Swiss Family Robinson (Johann David Wyss, 1812)
Genre: family adventure
Rating: 2

A family is stranded on a tropical island, where they hope to drink wine but end up with vinegar, train animals by biting their ears, and learn that father knows best. It would have benefited from a coconut battle with pirates.

Quote: Already the tempest had continued six days; on the seventh its fury seemed still increasing; and the morning dawned upon us without a prospect of hope, for we had wandered so far from the right track, and were so forcibly driven toward the southeast, that none on board knew where we were.

100. Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie, 1911)
Genre: children's fantasy
Rating: 3

A banal slog of goofy villains and romanticized childhood, in which a bunch of little boys have adventures and get mothered by a little girl. Mostly I remember the jealous fairy returning from an orgy.

Quote: Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it

101. Beginning Logic (Lemmon, 1978)
Genre: textbook
Rating: 7

I wish more people had a working understanding of basic logic. Consequences would never be the same.

Quote: Corollary I: All theorems of the propositional calculus are tautologous.

102. The Cenci (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819)
Genre: Romantic play
Rating: 4

A girl is driven mad in Romantic style by being raped by her father. Could've used a lot more madness.

Quote: "Hell's most abandoned fiend did never, in the drunkenness of guilt, speak to his heart as now you speak to me."

103. The Scarecrow of Oz (L. Frank Baum, 1915)
Genre: children's fantasy
Rating: 2

I remember almost nothing of this, but I do remember a crippling lack of anything interesting...flying monkeys especially.

104. Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, 1945)
Genre: children's literature, the crazy kind
Rating: 7.5

My favorite kind of kids' book: minimal, wild with verve, and disregarding sense.

Quote: "No Fridolf, bother all this learning. I can't study anymore because I must climb the mast to see what kind of weather we're going to have tomorrow."

105. Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery (Deborah & James Howe, 1979)
Genre: children's literature, the blandly silly kind
Rating: 2

A vampire rabbit lives on the blood of vegetables. Wallace and Gromit are nowhere to be found.

B-side

10-18-2010, 07:06 AM

Nice to see this back.

ledfloyd

10-18-2010, 07:42 AM

infinite jest is one of those books that i didn't love while i was reading it but in the time since i've read it, it has become one of my favorites.

Kurosawa Fan

10-18-2010, 12:56 PM

That quote from Infinite Jest makes me want to drop everything and start reading it. Maybe I'll make that the only book I read during my Christmas break.

dreamdead

10-18-2010, 02:07 PM

Not that your rating on Doctorow suggests you want to try more of his work, but The Book of Daniel is quite interesting on a metafictional level, exploring facets of psychosexual and historical conceits about America and masculinity. I could see that one being much more up your alley.

Melville

10-18-2010, 06:33 PM

Nice to see this back.
It'll probably vanish again now...or at least consist of only extremely brief reviews of books I have little to say about.

infinite jest is one of those books that i didn't love while i was reading it but in the time since i've read it, it has become one of my favorites.
It definitely has a lot to like. But getting through it took so long that by the time I was finished, all my thoughts about it had long since settled, so I don't think my opinion will change much.

That quote from Infinite Jest makes me want to drop everything and start reading it. Maybe I'll make that the only book I read during my Christmas break.
It does a pretty good job of insisting on the depths of despair. I think you'd like it more than I did. At the very least, I doubt you'd think it was a waste of time; there's plenty to appreciate in it.

Not that your rating on Doctorow suggests you want to try more of his work, but The Book of Daniel is quite interesting on a metafictional level, exploring facets of psychosexual and historical conceits about America and masculinity. I could see that one being much more up your alley.
That does sound more to my liking. Have you read Ragtime? I've heard it's his best.

dreamdead

10-19-2010, 07:43 PM

That does sound more to my liking. Have you read Ragtime? I've heard it's his best.

I have not, no. I've heard good things about that and his City of God. But I'm a sucker for a good McCarthyist take-down, and The Book of Daniel's treatment of the Rosenbergs via the Isaacsons is mighty good stuff.

Raiders

10-19-2010, 08:50 PM

Interestingly the only thing I have read from Doctorow is a short story titled "Willi" which I read in a short story collection in undergrad. It is probably among my favorite short stories ever, though.

lovejuice

10-20-2010, 01:07 AM

That does sound more to my liking. Have you read Ragtime? I've heard it's his best.
I don't know if it's his best, but I love the hell out of it. I own but have yet read Billy Bathgate. From what you mention, it doesn't sound very appealing.

B-side

10-20-2010, 07:34 AM

91. Analects (Confucius et al., 5th Century BC)

Quote: Being good as a son and obedient as a young man is, perhaps, the root of a manâ€™s character.

Ew.

Melville

10-21-2010, 09:11 AM

106. Emily of New Moon (LM Montgomery, 1923)
Genre: mawkish tales for children
Rating: 2.5

It exemplifies a certain nauseating children's-book style—cloyingly quaint and dainty, simplistic and sentimental, laced with words like "must" and "mustn't", "little" and "big", "lovely" and "quite". It presents a world of cotton and sap, of neatly delineated emotions and quaint caricatures. Bad things happen in the story, but it coyly evades them, easily rectifies them, or smothers them in twee romanticism. And passages like this make me bilious:

"Thank you," said Emily shyly, looking up at him with great grey eyes that looked blue under her long lashes. It was a very effective look which lost nothing of effectiveness from being wholly unconscious. Nobody had as yet told Emily how very winsome that shy, sudden, up-glance of hers was.
"Isn't he a rip-snorter?" said the boy easily. He thrust his hands into his ragged pockets and stared at Emily so fixedly that she dropped her eyes in confusion—thereby doing further damage with those demure lids and silken fringes.

These two characters are children...Gah. Boo to quaintness. Boo to twee-toned visions of childhood. "Boo!" I says.

kuehnepips

10-21-2010, 01:50 PM

That quote from Infinite Jest makes me want to drop everything and start reading it. Maybe I'll make that the only book I read during my Christmas break.

Don't.

Milky Joe

10-21-2010, 05:23 PM

Don't.

So well reasoned! If you put as much thought into reading the book as you did into this post, I'm sure your negative opinion of it is totally justified.

B-side

10-22-2010, 02:47 AM

Has Milky Joe ever made a post that wasn't drenched in unreasoned indignation and sarcasm?

Melville

10-22-2010, 03:41 AM

Has Milky Joe ever made a post that wasn't drenched in unreasoned indignation and sarcasm?
That's like asking if kuehnepips has ever made a post longer than five words. Some questions should just be left unanswered. Especially the rhetorical ones. I just finished responding to a non-sarcastic Milky Joe post in another thread.

B-side

10-22-2010, 03:47 AM

That's like asking if kuehnepips has ever made a post longer than five words. Some questions should just be left unasked. Especially the rhetorical ones. I just finished responding to a non-sarcastic Milky Joe post in another thread.

I'm half-joking, of course. I've just happened to notice a rather amusing trend of caustic posts coming from Milky Joe. I don't remember him being this bad before, so maybe it's a recent thing.

To be fair to kuehnepips, she doesn't owe anyone a thesis backing her opinion, especially considering no one had prompted her to do so until now by way of Milky's silly remark.

Melville

10-22-2010, 03:55 AM

I'm half-joking
I'm wholly joking.

B-side

10-22-2010, 04:01 AM

I'm wholly joking.

You clever minx.

Melville

10-22-2010, 04:04 AM

You clever minx.
My facetiousness hit a snag somewhere around 'unasked'. Unfortunately I usually have only a dim understanding of what my posts mean before I post them.

B-side

10-22-2010, 04:05 AM

Unfortunately I usually have only a dim understanding of what my posts mean before I post them.

Ha, you're not alone there.:P

Melville

10-22-2010, 06:23 AM

107. A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1929)
Genre: attack on twee-toned visions of childhood
Rating: 7.5

Like Lord of the Flies, the tale tells of a group of children removed from social structures and thence doing grave wrongs. In this case, they take up with a group of pirates; larks and murders ensue. But while Golding's novel grimly explores the notion that there is no innocence, that there is an underlying savagery in humanity, in its religious and social foundations, a savagery that exists in all of us down to the level of the youngest children, Hughes' instead dismisses the notion of innocence altogether. His children wildly misconstrue the meaning of events. They do wrong without knowing what they're doing. With a lively style, the book mocks the myth of a childhood Eden: innocence isn't morality, but amorality born of ignorance; one cannot be moral without eating of the apple.

Bonus points for the cover, taken from Henry Darger's epic tale of heroic hermaphroditic children, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff317/FaulknerFan/darger.jpg

Quote:
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

kuehnepips

10-22-2010, 09:04 AM

Some questions should just be left unanswered. Especially the rhetorical ones.

You never cease to amaze me. Six words.

lovejuice

10-22-2010, 04:23 PM

107. A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1929)
Genre: attack on twee-toned visions of childhood
Rating: 7.5
this book looks and sounds awesome.

Melville

10-22-2010, 06:01 PM

You never cease to amaze me. Six words.
:lol:

this book looks and sounds awesome.
It's good stuff.

Melville

11-08-2010, 08:07 AM

108. Her (Ferlinghetti, 1960)
Genre: surrealism, the irritating kind
Rating: 1

It begins as a surreal vision of sexual obsession, in which the outmoded conceptual dichotomy of form and content is dissolved, and in the resulting mire, the flesh, both of the Self and the Other, is conflated with Being. But it quickly abandons this subject and devolves into insipid free association, sequences of images devoid of emotional or intellectual content, tired mixtures of crudeness and flowery poetics. It's steeped in a tone of tepid worldliness, a self-awareness that avoids taking anything seriously, glibly reducing everything to superficial cliches (e.g., attraction to an ideal of femininity and sexuality rather than to an actual woman). Abysmal and obnoxious.

Quote: I see God grips the genitals to catch illusionary me stunned down in air of death's insanity to kiss me off he plays the deepsea catch he reels me in

Milky Joe

11-08-2010, 08:06 PM

Well, that's the Beat generation for you.

Melville

11-08-2010, 08:21 PM

Well, that's the Beat generation for you.
Yeah, I don't think they're up my alley. But other than this, Howl, and the first few pages of both On the Road and Naked Lunch, I haven't read anything by the Beats or Beat associates.

Irish

11-08-2010, 08:28 PM

Yeah, I don't think they're up my alley. But other than this, Howl, and the first few pages of both On the Road and Naked Lunch, I haven't read anything by the Beats or Beat associates.

It's a pretty shallow area. But, you're a better man than I. Long time ago I was on a major beat generation kick and I couldn't get through ten pages of Her. In fact, you're the only person I've come across, online or off, who's ever mentioned it!

Milky Joe

11-08-2010, 08:54 PM

Yeah, I don't think they're up my alley. But other than this, Howl, and the first few pages of both On the Road and Naked Lunch, I haven't read anything by the Beats or Beat associates.

Most of the time it's more fun to read about the Beats—their actual lives—than it is to read their work. They were all extremely intelligent, and were likely great fun to hang out with. Reading about them, you begin to feel like they're your friends too. But maybe you have to be 16 for that to really work.

But if you wanted to read the best of the best, I'd probably say read Kerouac's Desolation Angels and Big Sur plus Ginsberg's collections Howl ("America" being one of the great poems of the 20th century), Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Then go hog-wild on Burroughs, because he's awesome.

Irish

11-08-2010, 09:00 PM

But if you wanted to read the best of the best, I'd probably say read Kerouac's Desolation Angels and Big Sur plus Ginsberg's collections Howl ("America" being one of the great poems of the 20th century), Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Then go hog-wild on Burroughs, because he's awesome.
What was it about DA that you found so engaging? It was a straw/camel's back experience for me, a fat drunken Jackie being so lazy as to transcribe his journals almost word for word and trying to pass that off as a book.

The other stuff you mention -- wholeheartedly agree. America especially is an amazing piece of work. Burroughs is a litte tougher. You gotta be a certain kind of person, at the right time, to really dig him. The bonus is that you'll know if you're that kind of person by reading the first page of something like Cities of the Red Night.

Milky Joe

11-08-2010, 09:06 PM

What was it about DA that you found so engaging? It was a straw/camel's back experience for me, a fat drunken Jackie being so lazy as to transcribe his journals almost word for word and trying to pass that off as a book.

Well, honestly I feel like that's a better version of Jack to have than a fat, 'drined up Jack taking 3 weeks to try and remember everything that happened in a span of 6 months. Though The Subterraneans certainly has its pleasures. I just think the prose in DA is maybe his most experimental, poetic and beautiful, not to mention the spiritual, sort of existential side of it is more worthwhile than the almost unbearable romanticism of On the Road. Big Sur is the opposite, where it all comes crashing down around him. It's probably his best book. I still haven't read Dr. Sax though and really want to.

Irish

11-08-2010, 09:12 PM

Well, honestly I feel like that's a better version of Jack to have than a fat, 'drined up Jack taking 3 weeks to try and remember everything that happened in a span of 6 months. Though The Subterraneans certainly has its pleasures. I just think the prose in DA is maybe his most experimental, poetic and beautiful, not to mention the spiritual, sort of existential side of it is more worthwhile than the almost unbearable romanticism of On the Road. Big Sur is the opposite, where it all comes crashing down around him. It's probably his best book. I still haven't read Dr. Sax though and really want to.

Damn, that's evil -- you're making me want to go back and check out some of that stuff again. Good post.

It strikes me you might dig Visions of Cody. I think that one is his most polished, professional and lyrical.

Also, if you can grab a copy of Good Blonde & Others, it might be worth a look. It's a posthumous collection of some of his shorter pieces but I think some of them approach the kind of thing you find appealing in DA.

Milky Joe

11-08-2010, 09:17 PM

Aye, I actually own Visions of Cody but was always so daunted by how damned long and dense it is. If I'm not mistaken that was Kerouac's own favorite book of his. I've seen Good Blonde on shelves and been intrigued before. I'll check it out sometime.

One day I'll read The Town and the City. It'd be interesting to see what a 'real' Kerouac novel is like. Of course, then I look at my shelf and all the other unread books I have (Kafka, Stendhal, Gaddis, Hamsun, de Sade, Flaubert, etc...) and think: I have better things to read. :)

Irish

11-08-2010, 09:24 PM

Aye, I actually own Visions of Cody but was always so daunted by how damned long and dense it is. If I'm not mistaken that was Kerouac's own favorite book of his. I've seen Good Blonde on shelves and been intrigued before. I'll check it out sometime.
Looooooooong after I got sick of the beats, I picked up Good Blonde when it came out. Reading the first story was a jolt -- you bastard, why couldn't you always be like this. It's the title piece, and it's short but I'm guessing ten years gone by now and I still remember the experience of it vividly.

And yeah, my god is Cody dense. Worth it, though, if you want something by him that covers familiar territory while operating at a higher level than On the Road or Dharma Bums.

One day I'll read The Town and the City. It'd be interesting to see what a 'real' Kerouac novel is like.
I always had the impression, based on the biographies, that it was more or less him aping Thomas Wolfe, so I skipped it.

Benny Profane

11-08-2010, 10:29 PM

On the Road - reading someone else's travelogue is boring.

Only Kerouac I've read and wont be reading more.

endingcredits

11-09-2010, 01:13 AM

On the Road - reading someone else's travelogue is boring.

Only Kerouac I've read and wont be reading more.

I found Kerouac much more to my liking later on when his alcoholism took over and his zeal for adventure was extinguished. I remember really enjoying Big Sur as work of a man tormented by love, regret, and the afflictions of alcoholism. A lot of his early to middle period stuff, especially all the nonsense that came out of his affair with Buddhism, is mediocre or pure crap in the latter case.

Melville

11-09-2010, 03:02 AM

109. The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (Cocteau, 1929)
Genre: tragedy of enchantment
Rating: 7

Two siblings isolate and eventually destroy themselves with their own world of whimsy, dragging a few people in with them. The story operates in a realm of fantasy, of myth that it repeatedly refers to, of spontaneous, unreflective emotions removed from reality. For much of the book's length, that atmosphere is enchanting, but as the story moves into tragedy, and the characters into manipulation and self-destruction, it's made somewhat silly by its weightlessness and the wispy unreality of the characters.

Quote: The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

Melville

11-09-2010, 03:18 AM

110. The Story of O (Pauline RÃ©age, 1954)
Genre: erotica
Rating: 3

Erotica devoid of sensuality, character, and characters. A bland cataloguing of dominance and submission, with no insight into them.

Quote: "If you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that's no good ... you have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears."

Melville

12-20-2010, 05:01 AM

111. Strait is the Gate (Andre Gide, 1909)
Genre: love and religious straits
Rating: 6

Two sisters love one guy. The younger gives him up so the older can have him. The older gives him up so God can have him. The guy is left understandably crushed and confused.

Unfortunately, I was left even more confused. Both sisters give up life along with the guy, the first settling into a placid, meaningless domestic life, the other believing her act a religious martyrdom and, congruent to that belief, wasting away unto death. The first I could understand, but the second left me baffled, even given excerpts from the girl's diary. The style is extremely delicate, feeling as if it's barely touching the surface of its subject; maybe that makes it hard to understand if one doesn't intuitively grasp what it's touching on. Or maybe I just read it wrong.

Quote: "Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for as long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?"

Melville

12-27-2010, 12:28 AM

112. The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)
Genre: how love relates to religion, again
Rating: 8

With a gloriously bitter narrator and brutally intense emotion, Greene analogizes religious faith to love. Like in Strait is the Gate, the core narrative consists of a woman sacrificing her love to save her loved one (there's even a diary to explain her actions, too). But in this case her sacrifice is born not from some vague martyrdom or a vaguer notion of saving his soul, but from desperate emotion and a deal with God to save his life (a la Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice). In Strait is the Gate, the sacrifice leads only to confusion and misery, and if anything, causes the loved one to lose his faith; in The End of the Affair, the sacrifice is the inception of the narrator's faithâ€”though he is not gladdened by the gain of it. He struggles against both love and faith, against how they take him beyond himself, make him feel under the power of something else, but he is inexorably entangled by them, and Greene explores the vagaries of these entanglements with searing incisiveness. Although I can understand having faith, I have trouble understanding how one can get it (without being raised into it, that is). But by likening it to love, and by incisively studying the course of both, Greene makes it understandable.

Unfortunately, all the secondary characters are lame caricatures, and there are some half-assed subplots muddying the brilliance. But they're easily forgotten; in fact, I have forgotten them.

Quote: I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

Melville

12-27-2010, 02:19 AM

113. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
Genre: contrived miserablism
Rating: 4

Fussy, lame-simile-laden prose endlessly describing countrysides. A rough jackass who forcefully seduces (that is, old-timey date-rapes) the heroine, a poor country lass. A resolutely dopey but ostensibly chivalrous and free-thinking guy who views the heroine not as a person but, befitting his dopiness, as a lame ideal of unsullied country lasses. An absurdly passive heroine whom social norms insist is sullied by having been seduced; though not the lame ideal the dope would have her be, she is presented by the book itself as little more than a symbol of a natural, innocent, unsullied soul. For no apparent reason, she worships (literally) the dope and suffers terribly because of it. This could be explained by love's propensity for blindness, but every other girl in the dope's vicinity also falls despairingly in love with him, again for no apparent reason...which really fits pretty well with the book's unifying style: all things contrived to serve simplistic philosophizing; characters who are more cogs than people. For most of the book, Tess is made to suffer by society's (and aforementioned dope's) backward notions of sulliedness; in the end, the book asserts it's not just society, but Nature and Fate themselves that have made her their plaything. I blame Hardy instead.

Quote: Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

endingcredits

12-27-2010, 03:36 AM

Tess of the D'Urbervilles was made for reading? I was under the impression that it was designed for removing excrement from the anus.

Melville

12-27-2010, 03:53 AM

114. The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1948)
Genre: torment...also love and religion again
Rating: 8

I guess Greene torments his characters almost as much as Hardy does. But Greene does it proper: with hard, wearied prose and a protagonist who destroys himself—just a man worn down by life, getting himself into an impossible situation by falling in love, dragging himself ever deeper into it the more acutely he's aware of its suffocating impossibility, oblivious to the realities outside it. He also sacrifices his soul for the sake of his wife, as was the style at the time. Contains one of the most emotionally grueling sequences of scenes in literature, an immensity of Catholic guilt, despair, and terror.

Quote: He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

kuehnepips

12-27-2010, 06:39 AM

[b].. I was under the impression that is was designed ...

And you call me vulgar.

Melville

12-27-2010, 06:49 AM

115. Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan (Mother of Michitsuna, trans. Seidensticker, 974)
Genre: nikki bungaku (Japanese diaries)
Rating: 5.5

The actual diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan who lives painfully defined by her role as a second wife. She perpetually feels unloved and alone and spends year after year in deepening depression, sadly bemoaning her fate, being ignored by her husband while dragging herself on. It's a strange era: everybody writes allusive poetry to each other all the time, people may only travel in certain directions each day, and they have to stay alone in their houses for days during periods of cleansing. It's all social strictures, ceremony and surface. Nobody seems very happy.

Quote: The autumn cicadas took up their humming. "Noisy insects, singing in the grass"—I thought of the well-known verse—"what sorrow makes you cry out when so when I bear mine in silence?" This was a strange and sad time for me. The month before, I had had a sign that I was to die this month, and I wondered whether the time might be approaching.

116. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in 11th-Century Japan (Sarashina, trans. Morris, 1059)
Genre: nikki bungaku
Rating: 6.5

Another actual diary, this time that of a meek young girl in Heian Japan who loves to do nothing but read stories, but is sent by her father to live in a palace to improve her station in life. She feels alone and ill-equipped for the rigid social structures and ceremony of the nobility's lifestyle. She and her father weep painfully at their parting. She weeps at her loneliness. She weeps at the memory of cold weather. Catastrophic weeping abounds. It's told in much livelier, ingenuous style than Gossamer Years, though, with a sense of innocence and wonder.

Quote: Now I really began to regret having wasted so much time on my silly fancies, and I bitterly reproached myself for not having accompanied Mother and Father on their pilgrimages.

Melville

12-27-2010, 11:51 PM

117. The Crocodile (Dostoevsky, 1865)
Genre: absurdist satire
Rating: 9.5

A man is swallowed by a crocodile and thinks it a perfect opportunity to better mankind and win fame with his genius. A scathing satire of egotism and Utopian thinking. Brilliantly absurd in its matter-of-fact tone and ridiculous, petty yet grandiose characters. Probably the funniest thing I've read.

Unfortunately the Constance Garnett translation seems to be the only one widely available, and her translations are always relatively stodgy, flattened and verveless.

Quote: I am constructing now a complete system of my own, and you wouldn't believe how easy it is! You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.

Melville

12-30-2010, 03:49 AM

118. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939)
Genre: propaganda of the poor
Rating: 3.5

600 pages preaching that all people are part of a common soul. But not rich people.

Quotes: "'Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it."

The quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.'

"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need—go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help—the only ones."

Melville

12-30-2010, 06:39 AM

119. The Soldier and Death (Arthur Ransome, 1920)
Genre: Russian folk tales
Rating: 8.5

A soldier puts death in a sack. This is how I like my folk tales: overturning the world, unbinding it by replacing order with bizarre happenstance.

Quote: "Do you know what this is?" says he to Death.
"A sack," says Death.
"Well, if it is a sack, get into it!"

Melville

12-30-2010, 06:49 AM

120. Braveheart (Randall Wallace, 1995)
Genre: historical fiction
Rating: 2.5

The author's last name is Wallace, just like Braveheart himself. I'm descended from Robert the Bruce, which strikes me as a much cooler name. Anyway, the book is high cheese. Needed more Mad Mel.

B-side

12-30-2010, 03:17 PM

High cheese? Is that like provolone?

Melville

12-30-2010, 08:20 PM

High cheese? Is that like provolone?
I was thinking something softer. Something downright gooey. Something with a ranker flavor than its ripening deserves.

121. Foe (J.M. Coetzee, 1986)
Genre: postmodern metafiction
Rating: 4

A woman is stranded on a desert island with an old man named Cruso. Later, she wants to write her story but lacks the requisite skills, so she tells it to Daniel Defoe for him to write. But he transforms it into the tale of Robinson Crusoe, and his power to communicate, to craft reality into a story, subtly and then completely destroys her actual reality—her history and sense of her own identity are subsumed by him taking control over her story and eventually removing her from it entirely.

The problem with this is that Coetzee makes Defoe's story a lot more compelling than hers. So she's marginalized into nonexistence not by her inability to communicate, but by a better story. In a way, that makes a stronger point: the idea could have been simply that women's reality is subjugated to patriarchal control of the modes of discourse (or more generally, the marginalized person's story is replaced by the dominant person's); instead it becomes that the power of storytelling itself, the power of the person capable of controlling the story, overwhelms the reality of the metaphorically dumb person. But in another way, it just makes me wish I were reading Defoe's book instead.

Quote: For readers reared on travelers' tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees where brooks run to quench the castaway's thirst and ripe fruit falls into his hand, where no more is asked of him than to drowse the days away till a ship calls to fetch him home. But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place.

Melville

01-15-2011, 10:07 PM

122. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J.K. Rowling, 1997)
Genre: children's literature
Rating: 1

Awful in every way. The whole book is centered on lame, even deplorable ideas. First, it divides people into the wizardly and the non-wizardly in a class system. That's a fairly lame idea already, but other than deriding some of the snobby elitists among the wizardly class, it is itself ridiculously elitist, presenting its only non-wizardly people as an overblown, idiotic parody of middle class small-mindedness, conformity, and materialism, and making the elevation into the wizard class an unequivocally good thing. Second, it makes the magical into the mundane. Otherworldly and magical things, things beyond the everyday, are trivialized by transposing them into a world of magic shops and wizard schools essentially no different from non-magic shops and non-wizard schools. (It doesn't help that all the magical things are stock elements, with absolutely no originality or imagination.)

Outside its center of lameness, the book fails in all its basic storytelling elements. It's written in a completely standardized kids-book style, full of simplistic exaggerations, stock phrases, and twee comments from the narrator. Even if that style didn't irritate me with its obviousness and simplification, it's utterly indistinct here: the words have no verve. It does nothing of note to create suspense, excitement, pathos, vivid imagery, or anything else. And the dialogue is flat and unnatural, lacking any distinct voices.

Similarly, all its characters are cliches—the know-it-all girl, the goofy, good-hearted guy, the classist snob, etc.—that are given no definition or nuance beyond their stereotypes. Actually, they're so vague that they lack even the definiteness of their stereotypes. The villains are given still less: Snape is mean and punishes kids unfairly, Voldemort is evil and kills people, and that's it. And the characters' personality and feelings are related in the most simplistic ways. Harry Potter himself is just a cliched cipher of wish-fulfillment, the mistreated kid with no friends who's really the most special of all kids and destined for greatness.

The overarching narrative is still another cliche: a journey away from home, in which kids learn and grow, and a move into an upper-class world full of possibilities and glamor and excitement. Within that, everything is just more lame cliches of school life and childhood friendships. There's also the kids being tested, doing some of that learning and growing, by foiling an evil plot. But the evil plot is painfully contrived (especially the ridiculous bit where all the characters conveniently get to show what they're good at—blech), so undeveloped that it barely registers, and carrying no weight. It also revolves around the ultimate cliche of misdirection: the person you least expect did it! And he's a non-character, defined only by being nervous and stuttering enough to be the person you'd least expect.

Finally, Quidditch is the stupidest sport ever.

Quote: “Where’s the cannon?” he said stupidly.

endingcredits

01-15-2011, 10:33 PM

So you're saying it's cliche? :D

Melville

01-15-2011, 11:34 PM

So you're saying it's cliche?
Being repetitive is my job.

Melville

01-16-2011, 01:06 AM

I just realized I didn't provide a link to Dostoevsky's Crocodile. Here it is: http://www.online-literature.com/dostoevsky/3367/
Fans of Dostoevsky and/or absurd Russian satire should read it.

Raiders

01-18-2011, 01:43 AM

118. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939)
Genre: propaganda of the poor
Rating: 3.5

I... I... oof. Sometimes I think it is best I stay out of this thread.

Benny Profane

01-18-2011, 01:03 PM

Steinbeck is to romanticized drunken poverty what Ayn Rand is to romanticized cold-hearted capitalism.

I like them both.

Melville

01-19-2011, 07:40 PM

I... I... oof. Sometimes I think it is best I stay out of this thread.
Nonsense. You love this thread. And I do think Grapes of Wrath has plenty of positives, especially its immense concluding image of human fellowship, but I couldn't fit that in my review.

endingcredits

01-19-2011, 08:17 PM

Steinbeck is to romanticized drunken poverty what Ayn Rand is to romanticized cold-hearted capitalism.

I like them both.

Have you read Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory? It is the ultimate in romantic fast-talkin' poor man's drunken wordsmith-y awesomeness.

D_Davis

01-19-2011, 09:09 PM

Have you read Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory? It is the ultimate in romantic fast-talkin' poor man's drunken wordsmith-y awesomeness.

I didn't know he wrote fiction. Is that weird?

I'd like to read that. I love me some romanticized poor-man lit.

endingcredits

01-22-2011, 05:34 PM

I didn't know he wrote fiction. Is that weird?

I'd like to read that. I love me some romanticized poor-man lit.

Bound For Glory is nominally an autobiography, but it reads like fiction.

Benny Profane

12-05-2011, 07:51 PM

bump.

Melville

12-06-2011, 08:28 AM

bump.
Romantic obsession and physics research don't leave much time or mental energy for writing reviews, even the very short ones I was writing for this. But I'm thinking I'll get back to it at Christmas, starting with reviews of the books I read this year.

Melville

01-03-2012, 08:09 PM

123. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, 1947)
Genre: writerly misery and mescal
Rating: 5.5

While the narrative—a man destroying himself with alcohol and despair after splitting with his unfaithful wife, even (and especially) after she comes back to him—is relevant to my interests, the style is irksome. It prefigures a common type of very writerly prose I really dislike in contemporary literature: a self-aware tone seeming to constantly strive for cleverness, laden with flowery similes and pithy comments or pat metaphors about the characters (or worse, people in general). Some of it works, but I can't abide it for the most part. Likewise, much of the characterization felt contrived in a self-aware way, particularly in the wife's thoughts (her soft-hued dreams of marital rejuvenation especially), which seemed largely shorthand for conveying a stereotypical feminine mindset, but also in the knowing tone of the stories of a young man's foiled, naive dreams of romanticized politics, romanticized musicianship, and romanticized hardships in the merchant marine. The protagonist was better, with his mix of self-possessed poise and ridiculousness, concern and self-absorption, grandiose spiritual and philosophical muddles that serve to help him escape from the immediate world and, of course, his radical self-destructiveness. His letter of abject brokenness that goes purposely unsent also nicely sets up his closed-off, miserable trajectory for the rest of the book and leaves a painful undertone to linger during later moments that are primarily humorous (even if pretty much all the humor involving him felt overworked and flat to me). His drunken outburst toward the end, in which he declares that his wife had no right to say it isn't too late for him to turn things around, is also great. Though the ending seems to undercut his path to self-destruction by throwing in some crooked cops to do the job.

Quote: The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.

Qrazy

01-03-2012, 08:35 PM

I haven't read the book but I really didn't like that one as a film. It felt like second rate Tennessee Williams to me.

Melville

01-03-2012, 09:09 PM

I haven't read the book but I really didn't like that one as a film. It felt like second rate Tennessee Williams to me.
Are there any philosophies of ethics that give a good objective foundation for the ethical good? I was watching a debate between Sam Harris and some Christian philosopher (divine command theorist, in particular), in which the latter (a) insisted that god defines what is good by virtue of his being and (b) insisted that Sam Harris, in defining 'good' in the utilitarian sense, was merely redefining the word that way, not giving it an ontologically objective foundation. But obviously (b) applies to (a) as well: he's just defining the good to be god, with no apparent logical connection as to why someone should agree with god's commandments if god did exist. It seems like most ethics theories fall into those two categories: something is right because god says so, or something is right because it makes things 'better' for us. More often, with the exception of some early Greek philosophy and utilitarianism, the latter category is derived from or restated as the definition 'the good is living in accord with one's nature or with the nature of existence as a whole'; even Nietzschean ethics would fall under that category. Kant's categorical imperative seems like the closest thing to a meaningful basis for objective ethics, in so far as it's derived from the meaning of 'objective', though I'll have to re-read that derivation again someday to see if it holds up at all. I don't remember any theories that try to give ethics a more concrete objective reality, such as Plato's Form of the Good or Augustine's description of the good existing independent of god, being very clear in either what that objective existence means or how it is related to everyday moral valuations. (Note that I don't have any eagerness for a universal ethics. People will always disagree with each other about what is good, and for the most part we'll live in sufficient accord despite those disagreements, or failing that, settle them by hacking each other up with machetes.) Speaking of Tennessee Williams, I've heard good things about his story about sexual cannibalism.

Qrazy

01-03-2012, 11:47 PM

Anyone who has attempted to define an objective foundation for ethical good has more or less failed in my book. I would say the major contemporary trends are consequentialism, refined versions of deontology (Kant) and setting aside good to focus on justice instead (Rawls).

In the analytic spectrum G.E. Moore had much to say about good. He was probably a consequentialist overall. He held that good was indefinable (cannot be analysed in terms of other properties) and non-natural (empirically unverifiable).

"In order to express the fact that ethical propositions of my first class [propositions about what is good as an end in itself] are incapable of proof or disproof, I have sometimes followed Sidgwick's usage in calling them â€˜Intuitions.â€™ But I beg that it may be noticed that I am not an â€˜Intuitionist,â€™ in the ordinary sense of the term. Sidgwick himself seems never to have been clearly aware of the immense importance of the difference which distinguishes his Intuitionism from the common doctrine, which has generally been called by that name. The Intuitionist proper is distinguished by maintaining that propositions of my second classâ€”propositions which assert that a certain action is right or a dutyâ€”are incapable of proof or disproof by any enquiry into the results of such actions. I, on the contrary, am no less anxious to maintain that propositions of this kind are not â€˜Intuitions,â€™ than to maintain that propositions of my first class are Intuitions."

---

My personal view is that many of these theories ought to work in tandem. First off 'the good' rapidly becomes too broad a term to be useful (we've probably discussed this before). Broad in the sense that what is good means a number of different things in a number of different situations. So it is more beneficial to view things as relations, better or worse than, rather than good or bad. But we still need to define... better or worse than what, and for who?

Something that is better for one person or set of people might be worse for another and vice versa and I don't only mean in a practical or resource distributive sense, but in a moral sense. Actions operate in relation to the values of the culture in which they are performed.

The categorical imperative coupled with Rawls veil of ignorance (which is just a tweaked CI anyway) should be a starting point for making moral decisions. But before making the moral choice we ought to then weigh that on a consequentialist scale. Yes we should not tell a lie but if lying will save many lives then we should perform that lie because the harm from lying is much less than the harm from the loss of all those lives.

I would venture that the majority of times the moral decisions we have to make are really conflicts between what we desire and what we know to be 'right', so doing the 'right' thing is only hard because we are putting aside what we desire, not because we aren't sure what the 'right' thing is. By 'right' though I do not mean any objective valuation of rightness, only what appears to be right based upon the information we have in the social group we are in at the time in history in which we are in it.

I do believe there is not nor can be any objective reality for goodness. Morality is a human construction brought about to promote our own survival and insure some justice within our society. This does not make it any less valid than a moral reality ordained by god though. How then can we say one thing is right and another wrong? Why should all persons in a society have the same rights as everyone else? It is an issue of justice and by extension the categorical imperative.

The mistake the Christian philosopher makes is in the belief that we need an objective foundation in order to maintain a belief, perform an action or perceive the world. Morality aside, I am not at all convinced we have a solid epistemological foundation either. Sure we can say well God defines what is right and wrong and furthermore defines what is true or false. But if I'm treading water in the ocean, I don't want to be told I'm standing on solid ground. And this to me is what the Christian philosopher is saying. He's screaming but without God our solid ground would disappear and we'd just be treading water! Well, we're already treading water, it is better to acknowledge that fact.

But despite the lack of objective foundation morality is still more than Maugham's Cronshaw (Of Human Bondage) would have us believe. We do not do what is right only out of fear of the police. And we don't only do it out of the practical extension of the imperative, which is to say, the idea that by doing this right thing now it will encourage others to do right by us in the future of our own lives. We do what is right because we accept the principle that it is right based upon our firm understandings of justice and virtue. Of course we could also choose to do what is wrong and reap the practical benefits of it (take someone's wallet), but most of us would know it was wrong and feel the pangs of conscience as a result. Of course this conscience is itself a relative thing dictated by our upbringing, our society and perhaps to some degree by our genetic make up and our own inductive reasonings.

---

I'm not familiar with that Williams story.

Melville

01-04-2012, 09:53 AM

The mistake the Christian philosopher makes is in the belief that we need an objective foundation in order to maintain a belief, perform an action or perceive the world. Morality aside, I am not at all convinced we have a solid epistemological foundation either. Sure we can say well God defines what is right and wrong and furthermore defines what is true or false. But if I'm treading water in the ocean, I don't want to be told I'm standing on solid ground. And this to me is what the Christian philosopher is saying. He's screaming but without God our solid ground would disappear and we'd just be treading water! Well, we're already treading water, it is better to acknowledge that fact.
Yeah, this was my problem with the Christian philosopher's argument: God defining actions to be moral doesn't change the facts on the ground. Even if god existed, and even if we could know what he deemed right in every situation, we would still have to decide whether or not we agree with his edicts. Words are defined however we like, and we could define 'morally right' to be 'in perfect accord with God's commands at every juncture' (he may deem different things right for different people in different situations, so this can be as precise a notion as you like), but there is no logical necessity to take that definition over any other, and it may conflict with our own moral sense (particularly if the actual God turned out to give immoral edicts by our own standards, which the God of Abraham frequently did)—so we are still left to decide for ourselves what is right, though we'd have more information. (Also, even if there were some logical necessity, there needn't be a reason for us to accept the value of the logical inference that led to it.) If the argument isn't that God's commands are good by definition, but that they are woven into the fabric of existence in some way or given some objective existence by him, then the definition is simply altered to the other one I mentioned: 'what is right is acting in according with the nature of existence'. And again, that's a reasonable axiom but is no more intrinsically binding than any other; we are left free (or with the illusion of freedom) to decide for ourselves. And it makes God kind of irrelevant to our decisions, except insofar as he gives us information about existence through revelation. Existence is what it is, and we exist as beings capable of posing moral questions and defining morality, regardless of God or some other existent thing we might choose to define as a measure of good.

I would venture that the majority of times the moral decisions we have to make are really conflicts between what we desire and what we know to be 'right', so doing the 'right' thing is only hard because we are putting aside what we desire, not because we aren't sure what the 'right' thing is.
I disagree with this. Particularly if you are primarily a consequentialist (which many, if not most, people are, in my experience), but even if not, it's often very difficult to determine what is the morally right action.

Of Human Bondage
Good?