What are you reading?

JOE1951 said:
Oh god

The office I work in has two Joyce fans constantly quoting Finnegans Wake and Ulysses while referencing Marshall McLuhan. Conversations with them are always interesting even if I'm not sure what they talking about :confused:
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heh, I havent read it myself (cant see how its really possible ;)), I got through 3 pages :p ...
 
Poptart said:
Vlad is the best. I think I've read almost everything he published*--including the notes on lectures from his days in the ivy leagues.

* 1. Ada
2. Pale Fire
3. Lolita
4. King, Queen, Knave

You?
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I agree...Vlad is the best. It just doesn't get any better. I think learning English at 3 or 4, but it still not being his native language allowed him to view it more aesthetically than someone is capable of viewing their own language. Since he started so early he had all the grace of a native speaker, but the artistic distance of a foreigner. Anyway. I have read most of his stuff, but oddly, not two on your list. I don't think I ever got around to reading Ada or King, Queen, Knave. I will surely do so at some point. My favorites:
1. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (is that fair for a favorite? it is all his short stories...)
2. Invitation to a Beheading
3. Pnin
4. Speak, Memory
 
My favorite Nabokov is the Gift about N.'s days in Berlin. It opens with this quote:

"The oak is a tree. The rose is a flower. The deer is an animal. The sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable."
P. Smirnovskii, Textbook of Russian Grammar

[The source of this quote was recently discussed on languagehat.com] The first several pages of the Gift contain a great word picture of a 1920/30's Berlin neighborhood.

I have just finished the first two short novels of Roberto Bolano, recently translated into English: Distant Star and By Night in Chile. Pitch-perfect narrators tone, incredible books. Pinochet and Neruda are casual characters in By Night.

Am in the middle of Kakfa's America, new translation by Michael Hoffman, ("He put out a hand and called out: 'Come here!' in a voice so firm you could have beaten it with a hammer"). And I am looking at books on Cy Twombly, Bill Brandt and at Cartier-Bresson's surrealist-tinged work of the year 1933--by far his best stuff (with the exception of some of the portraits and the 1960/70s photo of the couple asleep in the train compartment).
 
gabrielma said:
I still haven't finished "Ulysses". To read it, at this pace, it's going to take me as long as it took Joyce to write it.
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heh...it is my greatest accomplishment as an english major to have escaped without have to read Ulysses. I have read the first chapter probably 10 times I've restarted it so many times. Maybe you and I should have a friendly bet to spur us on to finishing it?

Currently reading a book of short stories by Alice Munroe
 
Yeah, he had some serious first lines. How about this one for the first line of his autobiography, Speak, Memory:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Hahaha, imagine starting your autobiography with that!
 
cp_ste-croix said:
heh...it is my greatest accomplishment as an english major to have escaped without have to read Ulysses. I have read the first chapter probably 10 times I've restarted it so many times. Maybe you and I should have a friendly bet to spur us on to finishing it?
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I've tried reading it. Got through the first third and just jumped to end to Molly Blooms stream of conscious solioquy at the end. It's actually quit enjoyable.

BTW, for those confounded Ulysses readers:Ulysses for Dummies

I work at a university so all these references interest me. I remember hearing about an english major writing his final theses on "How many time each letter of the alphabet occurs in the novel Ulysses." :rolleyes:

Needless to say, I'm a little jaded about "higher education"

sigh...
 
textbook, physics for engineers. thank jesus im switching to economics next semester. I was never ment to be an engineer, heh.
 
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Well, it's so short I started it on the train yesterday and shall probably finish it today. Superb so far.
 
Everything I know about Finnegan's Wake I read in Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.

My attention is currently split between Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History, and Wheelock's Latin.

Hic haec hoc, huius huius huius, huic huic huic...
 
Joyce has the honour of writing the only books I never managed to read more than a couple of pages of. Started Finnegans Wake and gave up after a couple of pages. Same with Dubliners. I never managed to get through Sterne and Gödel, Esher, Bach either, but that had different reasons. At least they weren't as boring a Joyce. Really, if you have nothing to say, then quoting a dictionary won't help.
 
Just finished some local history for research into the building I've been photographing. Now onto The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art by Martha Buskirk.

bldg-v1.jpg

Kodak Instamatic 500 / Verichrome Pan
 
Half way through Dead Souls, getting back to Being and Time, and still dinking around with The Order of Things.

It seems like in the time it takes me to read one non-fiction I end up reading between 2 and 4 fictions. That and I occasionally get the feeling I'm reading things outside of the optimal "order" and that I need to jump ship to something that precedes what I'm currently working on.
 
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