bibliographing

Last week, during my vacation, I sat down a few times with Penguin Classics’s Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer.* I liked how modern so much of them seems. Parts of the section on books and writing could practically have been published today by some curmudgeon or other. I thought it was a bit funny [...]

Is there a book that you wish you could “unread”? One that you disliked so thoroughly you wish you could just forget that you ever read it?
Now, on the one hand the answer to this question is “no,” because the whole reason I do my best to finish books I am hating is so [...]

More graphs! After the positive response to Monday’s post, I must say, I knew I had found my Spirit Readership. These are based on a slightly different set of books than the others, as I realized I had somehow left out The Spider’s Palace from my first graphs. For shame! I’ll start with the boringest [...]

Nikolski is the story of three people connected tenuously through a used bookstore in Montreal’s Little Italy, specifically through a curious history of pirates that passes through that bookstore. That little book is a gem; we are first introduced to it by Noah, a teenager born and raised on the road in Western Canada.
The day [...]

As you may have been able to tell, I’ve been feeling a bit scattered lately with my nonthemed reading. Of course, a theme was new for me, and this is how I’ve always read I’m sure. But it is starting to seem so disorganized! I’ll show you, with a scatter plot. This is how I’ve [...]

It appears lately I can only blog for a week at a time, and then I fail. Well, I’m off work and traveling this week, so last week was pretty busy with prevacation stuff to take care of. And I could really use this vacation, I’m sure it will help the blogging along with the [...]

Smith, that is.
Are you in adversity? Do not mourn in the darkness of solitude, do not regulate your sorrow according to the indulgent sympathy of your intimate friends; return, as soon as possible, to the day-light of the world and of society. Live with strangers, with those who know nothing, or care nothing about your [...]

It felt good last week to be back in a pretty bloggy mode. I’m hoping to continue it, though I don’t have so much material built up yet. Yesterday I read The Old Man and Me, by Elaine Dundy, though you’ll have to wait for the full scoop until it’s closer to its release. I [...]

Yesterday I said I was writing about Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, but that’s not strictly true. I was really writing about “Notes from the Neogene,” “unquestionably one of the most precious relics of Earth’s ancient past, dating from the very close of the Prechaotic, that period of decline which directly preceded the Great Collapse.” [...]

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a real feat of absurdity. How trite to simply describe it as Kafkaesque but there’s no escaping it. A nameless narrator wanders around “the Building” on a Mission he doesn’t understand, for days on end, meeting no one who makes sense, seeking refuge in bathrooms, wondering all the time [...]