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I was thankful for mel’s push to finally read Parade’s End, because I knew I would love it, and within less than a page I did. By the time I reached this passage I was mad for it. Macmaster is going over the proofs of his first book: He had expected a wallowing of [...] Leo Tolstoy’s Confession is an extended essay on his conversion from a typical debauched Russian aristocrat/artist to a rather unusual strain of Christianity, with a stopover in the Russian Orthodox Church along the way. It’s a rather typical conversion story: he thought he was in the right, and such-and-such is how he justified his [...] In The Kreutzer Sonata (c. 1889), a man traveling on a railway carriage finds himself eavesdropping on and then inserting himself into a conversation between some of the other travelers about marriage, love, and divorce. This man, our narrator, is then approached by another party in the carriage, Pozdnyshev, whose strong opinions on the [...] As I’d hoped to, I made some more progress this past week wrapping up the Russians, and this week will be the real wrap-up before I get into April, the Month of Enormous and Possibly Misguided Group Reading Projects (including 2666, The Brothers Karamazov, and Parade’s End). That means this week I’m finally confronting [...] In The Exclamation Mark, Hesperus Press has collected stories written during a short period in Anton Chekhov’s life, from 1885 to 1886. Lynne Truss’s foreword notes how helpful this approach can be when dealing with a prolific short story writer, and I definitely agree. I am down with semi-random “collected works” when I don’t [...] I was looking the other day at one of these “blah blah blah books to read before you blah blah” lists and, of course, mentally comparing my progress to the other person’s, wondering how much I’d done, you know the drill. And thinking how (as it’s been said many times before) these lists are utterly pointless for their quirkiness, their biases, their sometimes just bizarreness. (The Guardian‘s list classifies Ada and The Mysteries of Udolpho as “science fiction and fantasy”; Lolita as “love”…) But then I was thinking, you know what they actually aren’t pointless for? Giving a snapshot of how much you’ve read of the sort of thing that gets put on these lists. My reading life started long before this blog, and I’ve talked plenty about its abundant gaps. So I thought I’d go to the one that’s “so hot” for the past while, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, to come clean about that snapshot. As I recently, dorkily tweeted, today I became the foursquare “mayor” of 57th St. Books. (Please don’t ask why I use foursquare; sometimes I latch onto shiny things.) To celebrate the honor, I picked up The True Deceiver and Borges’ collected fiction. Yum! I’ve also been tweeting a bit about 2666, where I’m now [...] Poor Folk is much later than the other epistolary novels I’ve read thus far; published in 1846, it appeared more than a century after the pop culture phenom of Pamela and over 50 years after Lady Susan, the latest one I’ve read at this point, was likely written (though it wasn’t published until 1871). [...] If Dostoevsky does Gogol’s “ambitious poor clerk[s],” but with a theory to blame for their failure, what is Makar Devushkin’s excuse for his behavior? Devushkin is a simple man and he has a simple excuse: fate. His poverty is not his fault. He is a good government clerk, capable, competent, but of course he [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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