Teh Log

raah!

Albert Camus- The Outsider - Hohoh, existentialism. There's alot of analysing that needs to go into this book. Apart from the really obvious existentialism related statements there is some stuff which is really hard to interpret. That robot woman for example? What the hell? Good read though

raah!

Andrey Kurkov - A Matter of Death and Live - Read this a while back, it was good, but I did find he used commas a bit too much so I thought the prose was a bit halting and over-complicated.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road - Verrrry grood read. I ended up reading it mostly in terms of how McCarthy describes different sources of morality. But just descriptively the book well worth reading too. The baby on the spit I thought was a bit predictable. But perhaps that is only because he had such a build up and vague description followed by "ooh it was babay!". Good good.

raah!

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness - This is a novel which certainly wouldn't suffer from a second reading. There is so much scope for different interpretations that it would be like reading a different book. I didn't like the books apparent "criticism" of imperialism. It seemed to suggest (or rather say directly) that the idea was good but that it was merely badly implemented. So the arguments become less philosophical and more political or historical. I did think it was a bit supremacist as well, which is almost a necessary prerequisite for any positive conception of imperialism. But I'd really need to read it again before I made any statements about what the book was or wasnt, and I'm not gonna read it again, probably. Very godo book though.

Eliot Rosewater

Your right about the imperialism in HoD. African author Chinua Achebe wrote an apparently controversial essay about the book, entitled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (wiki link).

Its not hard to see why. Throughout the book Conrad refuses to humanize the natives, instead referring to them as "shadows" or "phantoms". His treatment of them is much more perverse than this though, imo. For example in the scene on the boat it seems as if Conrad only mentions the natives being there as an slight afterthought. He doesn't treat them as characters at all, more like props.

Its one of my favorite books, and perhaps best illustrates my view that when judging a book you should separate the message of the book from the way that message was brought across. I don't agree with the imperialist undertones, however the whole book is carried through brilliantly, imo. I love the way he uses the "narrative within a narrative" technique because it drives home the "otherworldness" or remoteness of that he is describing, giving the events and Kurtz a cult like feel. Usually in a book the narrator separates us and the plot, in HoD two narrators separate us.

Sorry for the ramble. I was very surprised when people didn't like it for the Bookclub last year ye see, given its length and the ease with which I had read it.

raah!

Mmm, that's an interesting view of literature indeed. I would normally avoid books which are merely a collection of descriptive prose, but certainly that would be a factor in how I rate the book. Mind you , I do like to read philosophy as well. What's more, his points were hardly badly argued either, I just didn't like them

I've also discovered that apocalypse now is based on this book, I think I'll re-watch it with that in mind. I'm looking forward to having a read of that article too.

Tar.Aldarion

If you like a Song of Ice and Fire I think you will love the Malazan Books of the Fallen Series. My favourite series. Do you enjoy fantasy? Possibly the Prince of Nothing series too..


Also, nt quite the same genre as those mind... House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski.

raah!

Mmm I'll be sure to make a choice of those, I'll do some wikipediaing in the summer and decide then. Or you could recommend one more insistently :P

At the moment Malazan sounds better. I do enjoy me a piece of fantasy.But I read a lot of the sword of truth series before realising what an utter load of trite it was, so that put me off a bit

Tar.Aldarion

raah! wrote: »

Mmm I'll be sure to make a choice of those, I'll do some wikipediaing in the summer and decide then. Or you could recommend one more insistently :P

At the moment Malazan sounds better. I do enjoy me a piece of fantasy.But I read a lot of the sword of truth series before realising what an utter load of trite it was, so that put me off a bit

Malazan books are my favourite books ever.

raah!

Nikolai Gogol - The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol - This was published fairly recently and contains a nice bunch of Gogol's shorter fiction including the overcoat. Found it very amusing. I think Gogol is best when he is just laughing at things, and that's what he does in most of these stories. Many of these are more ridiculous than the most ridiculous of science fiction/fantasy stories. I think there were at least two incidences of people riding mythical beings across the lands. Once a witch and once a devil, there may have been more. Anyway, good stuff.

raah!

Ernest Hemingway - Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Enjoyed this book overall. Like most of hemmingway's stuff I found he was able to give a really good sense of the atmosphere and feeling of the time in the simple language he is famous for. Made me go looking at bullfights on youtube. Didn't warm to that Brett character at all at all. Even though this was very good, I think I'd rate it beneath all the other hemingway I've read. For some reason I have started to confuse main characters in hemingway's books with the protagonists in Orwell's. I don't care to look further into this.

raah!

Anne Enright - The Gathering - Had a good time reading this. It was a fairly good picture of an irish family and all that, but I thought she contradicted herself at times. But I guess the book was more about describing and remembering things rather making any sort of arguments. I noticed I don't read that many woman authors.

raah!

Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Really enjoyed reading this book. Though I was very shocked by the constant use of "******" and what have you, I don't think this detracted from the book in anyway. Tom sawyer's arrival at the end and that sequence of events was a bit irritating though, and I was glad when he got shot in the leg. It really reminded me of don quixote too, those last few chapters. Huck's way of dealing with the accepted values of the time I found very interesting, I particularly liked where he decides to go to hell. I'm gonna go rafting somewhere, also.

raah!

Aldous Huxley - Ape and Essence - I bought this primarily because the name tied in with things I was thinking about at the time, and it turned out the actual book was about exactly those things. This was my first taste of a novel by huxley apart from the doors of perception and I think I'll go and buy some more. His constant referencing can be good and bad I guess, but I think it adds alot to the books in general, and it's never extremely obscure.

raah!

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Not the sort of drug literature I'm used to at all at all. Though I guess it's similar to 'on the road' in some ways. It is a strange generation for which unthinking self destruction is the flag ship. Nonetheless, was a nice enough read and there are patches of very good prose, particularly his cynical summaries of the drugs movements in the sixties. I read this book in 3 different peoples houses, I just kept encountering it.

raah!

John Steinbeck - The Pearl - Mmmm, I like his criticisms of capitalism and other such related things. But I do not like the reasons for which he criticises them "everyone should stay in their place" etc. His account of the differences between mend and women is as interesting as it was when I read it in everyone else's account them. In my opinion, an ability to idealise and think abstractly is a good thing. So for me to say that women are less good at that would be to say that they are inferior. Anyway, it was a grand novella. I liked the whole "music of the enemy" till it was horribly cheapened when I heard it being described as simply the musical score for the movie that steinbeck intended the book to be. But I'm sure it wasn't as simple as that. I'm gonna finish don quix now and then read moby dick.

Also reading bertrand russells history of philosophy again along with a book on t he presocractic philosophers, which is fairly terribly written and translated in my opinion, but it has all the original texts included. My main beef is that every translation of any of the presocractic original texts has been different from the one's preceeding it. I'm no ancient greek scholar so I'm at a loss.

raah!

Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote - They don't make books like this anymore :P. It is immediately obvious when reading this that it was written in a time when one could assume a much more educated readership. It is filled with complex conceits, is constanting proving things through arguments, and replete with references to ancient greek/roman texts. Nonetheless I don't really have the same knowledge of these things that Cervantes would have expected from his readership but still enjoyed the book immensly. The book can be hilarious at times, and also very englightening. Because it was so old, I encountered metaphors which I couldn't help but say "this must have been the first time this was used".

The characters are brilliant, and I really enjoyed their different ways of arguing their points. Don Quixote has long flowery speechs, whereas sancho simply argues from proverbs, stringing them together to proove his point like a scientist would do with empirical evidence.

It's a very long book, and if you read too much at a time I think it gets borning, having said that it took me a year to read it, but I also read many other books since I started it, and was also not able to get at it for 3 or so months. I think the fairly non-linear story adds to how difficult it is to read through, but the stories inserted into are in themselves worth reading.

I think it was a very good translation, though I've read no others. But having read this left me marvelling at the very art of translation itself. Translators are themselves artists, especially when it comes to translating a rhyming poem and making it rhyme. That seems insurmountably difficuty to do without changing alot of the poem to me. But in either case, if he did not change the poem appreciably, then he must have had a great knowledge of both languages, and excecised great skill in selecting which words to use.If he did change the poem appreciably then it can be safely considered his own piece of art. So either way translation is an art, in my opinion.

Edit: I've just read the introduction to the book (I have the penguin version) and it turns out that I am in agreement with much of what the translator himself thinks a good translation should be. There was aslo a very interesting thing about don quixte being a self conscious and self referential work in contradiction to some modern literary postmodernists' belief that this is a twentieth centuary discovery.

raah!

Herman Melville - Moby Dick - I passed entire days just reading this book, and they were well spent. Through describing whales and whalers Melville discusses a wide range of philosophical themes in shakseperean language. It is a book which deserves a very close reading for full understanding of it's themes, but even a surface appreciation of the language and scenery of the book would make it a classic. The characters were brilliant, not extremely psychologically complex, but philosophically. The personalities of the characters are more extensions of their views that results of their surroundings or atmosphere, and this sentiment is continued in the idealist/rationalistic themes of the book.

This is a book I will definitely return to to read individual chapters. The language in the book is amazing, and certain chapters capture many of the themes running through the entire book entirely and microcosmically.

I think the book may have been about man's struggle with the cruelty of nature, and that cruelty itself. I don't htink it comes to any conclusions in particular. While the book eneds as it does, I think in the character of pip a counter argument appears, particularly in the line, which I quite liked "So man's insanity is heaven's sense."

raah!

Ian Stewart - Does God Play Dice?: The New Mathematics of Chaos - I really enjoyed this book, though it couldn't have come at a worse time. The book was a reccommended as an introduction to a module in a course from which i have just transferred. This new course I am in does not have this module, and has doomed me to a life of mathematically hollow learning.

raah!

Patricia Fara - Science : A Four Thousand Year History - I am still unsure as to whether I think this book was a worthwhile read or simply irritating. She does a good job of writing such a history as this in the compact form she does, and makes excellent use of famous paintings and quotations to illustrate a particular historical stance or idea. I particularly liked the earlier parts about Babylon, China, the Middle East, the etymology of the words ‘science’ and ‘scientist’.

However, her frequent feminist, mildly kuhnian and highly irritating interjections soured much of the book for me. Many pages of the book are spent in showing the ignorant reader how scientific ideas do not occur in a vacuum, and that science was not the product of a few isolated geniuses. And of course this is true, but this is an idea she often over extends without basis. Mentioning that Newton was well able to advertise his work, for example. In this it is clear that she was following her line of “credit goes to who convinces people, rather than to whom the idea first occurs”, but this is patently absurd when said of Newton, unless she’d like to point out anyone else who came anywhere near to what he was doing at the time. In this it seems that she is over-enthusiastic in her iconoclastic endeavours to the point where it seems as though she actually has some sort of anti-science bias.

She goes to great pains to show us how women weren’t acknowledged by history. Several times she recounts how woman were essentially used as calculators in ww 1 and 2, and how history glosses them over. At least three times she remarks how “crystallography has an unusual number of female luminaries”. She uses the word “but” almost constantly and mostly unnecessarily, assuming the reader to be the sort of Eurocentric chauvinist she spends the entire book arguing against.
Anyway, I spent way too long reading this book, and this has probably led me to dwell more on the annoying negative aspects, which increased towards the end, than on the positives. Overall I think the book is worth reading, and contains a lot of information which probably wouldn’t be found in other popular histories of science. Like accounts of “Babylonian Science”.

raah!

James Joyce - A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - I hadn't planned to read this book at all, but circumstance conspired to place it in my hands. I was reading about epictetus, and then naturally ended up on his wikipedia page, wherein an extract from this book was found. A few days later, I got up from bed to get a glass of water or something, and I was terrible inebriated. I saw the book and picked it up and started reading, next thing I know I'm 40 pages in and losing one of my toes to frost bite.

The main cause of my previous disiclination towards reading joyce was that I found dubliners to be somewhat lacking in ideas, insights or anything other than description and plot. That's not to say that they weren't there and this is an opinion which more than likely had arisen due to a negligent reading. Anyway, I always thought that the perfect novel should contain each of the three: description (good language) , plot and a small bit of philosophising and original thinking.

The book started out well, there is a long sermon about hell in the middle which is really rather boring. I'm not sure if this is even joyce's own writing, I heard it was a word for word transcription of a sermon he had heard, but I'm not sure about that. The book picks up after this, especially around chapter 5 when he gives us his theory of aesthetics.

While I found the character to be extremely whiney , he was certainly an interesting and complex one. His fondness and lecterous gawkings after women were certainly something I can empathise with. There is a brilliant part in the book where he describes his waking up to an inspiration and then describes the creation of poem. The poem then is quite good as well.

So, overall I thought it was a good book, and I would reccommend it over dubliners anytime. Why people would call Joyce a genius (or whatever it is that they call him) is far more apparent in this book than it was in dubliners.

KnifeWRENCH

raah! wrote: »

The book picks up after this, especially around chapter 5 when he gives us his theory of aesthetics.

I thought the opposite. The whole "theory of aesthetics" thing was a pile of self indulgent **** imo.

I really enjoyed the first three chapters of the book, but once the crisis of faith thing had finished and "conflicted, confused young man" Stephen had turned into "pretentious, ungrateful, arrogant young student" Stephen, I was quite disheartened.

The writing is technically excellent and I can see why it's acclaimed. I just completely stopped sympathising with the character near the end and that spoiled my enjoyment of the novel.

raah!

Did you not even like the part where he talks about the inspiration for his poem and all that? I think that was my favourite part in the entire book. The one about the girls "ardent days" or ways, or whatever they were.

KnifeWRENCH

Meh. Was too disillusioned with the whole book by then tbh. The poem itself was excellent, but the inspiration thing didn't resonate with me because I'd stopped caring about Dedalus by that stage and didn't care if he became a good writer or not.

raah!

Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor - Got this as a present. All the previous years presents from this person were very good. This was the worst thing I've read in a long while. At first I was flying through, enjoying it, expecting it to really pick up when he developed the character or plot or perhaps expanded on some of the things he was saying. It never did though. I did still get some enjoyment out of it, but I wouldn't really reccommend this to anyone. The pages of the book are numbered backwards.

raah!

Leo Tolstoy - Tolstoy's Short Fiction - This was a very good collection of Tolstoy's more important short fiction including the brilliant "The Death of Ivan Ilych". It was a Norton critical edition fully of very good critical essays and notes at the back, as well as exceprts from tolstoy's journals, and things like his first ever literary effort. These were so good that on finishing each story some sort of chemical reaction took place in my. The stories cause intstant physiological happinness. I would reccommend this to anyone and everyone. It would be a good spring board into his longer novels. I think I will buy anna karenina soon.

raah!

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus - This an essay/collection of essays in which Camus expounds his notion of the absurd. The version i read was published by Penguin under there "great ideas series" title.

For the most part I enjoyed it, but sometimes I found his style over-wrought, and would even go as far as to say that perhaps I had read a bad translation. The structure of some of the sentences was unnecessarily complex. They may well have been like this in the french also. Reading Camus' account of the absurd sheds alot of light on "the stranger" and his other novels (I haven't read his other ones but as far as I know they are all supposed to be illustrations of this absurd sensibility). I liked his analysis of Dostoyevsky's work, and his over-wrought style was at times very poetic. Some parts of the book I did not understand, I do not think it warrants re-reading as he is fairly clear at the start what he means by the absurd, and then goes on to give examples, and I felt I got the jist of it.

Anyway, grand book, would reccommend reading if anyone wants to read any Camus at all.

raah!

Albert Camus - The Fall - Good stuff! This book resonated with me and my best friend dostoyevksy. The amplitude of my thought has increased, ho ho ho. I enjoyed reading this alot though, and it was very pleasant to find themes being discussed in this book which I had been discussing with friends and the like a few days before reading it.

There was alot of depth in those 90 or so pages, it could certainly do with a re-read. I can tell that alot of the book would have been much more difficult to intepret if I hadn't read the myth of sisyphus first. This is essentially another novel about the absurd and how to stay on that absurd plane of thought he discussed in the Myth of Sisyphus, with the same references to dostoyevsky and kafka and the like. I particularly liked the part where he is talking about shouting "filthy poor" at builders and "smacking children in the metro", which seemed to me a direct reference to dostoyevsky's "If I'll be bad, I'll be very bad" and "everything is permitted" from Demons and the brothers Karamozov.

I found the main character in this book to be much more believable than mersault from the outsider. This seems like a real person espousing this absurd philosophy. Mersault seemed no more than a vehicle for this philosophy, that there was no more depth to him than his existentialism.

An interesting comparison with Tolstoy struck me whilst ending this book too. Clamence judges himself so he can judge everyone and be free from judgement. Tolstoy, as is very clear from reading any of his didactic fiction (and most everything I've read of him contains some sort of moral lesson) , judges himself, and then as a result has to judge everyone. But his end is not simply to escape judgement. And I suppose this difference is because Camus thinks Tolstoy would be silly to try and attain an actual innocence, or improvement. Clamence recognises his duplicitous nature and then accepts it. Tolstoy recognises it and tries to change.

Anyway, this was a great book, but he's no Tolstoy when it comes to showing the duplicity and vanity of people, nor is he a Dostoyevsky when it comes to existential despair. He's still a very very good writer.

Here's a song one can sing along to whilst listening to camus. It says "I could dress in black and read Camus...", so it's clear why it's suitable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVEhNHIzJec

raah!

The Village of Stepanchikovo –Dostoyevksy – I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and was quite surprised by many of the revelations it provided. I’ve always liked Dostoyevksy’s humour, and this is his only novel which could come close be being described as a ‘comic novel’. It didn’t seem to do very well with the critics, was dismissed as trivial etc. because it’s not the usual serious philosophical Dostoyevsky people are used to. Nor did it contain the same depth of character or psychological depiction found in his other works. However, where he did describe his characters it was very interesting. The main character of the novel, Foma Fomich was one such interesting character.

This is an untalented and nasty manipulator of the other characters in the book. He spends his time convincing the various idiots he encounters of his genius and taking advantage of Dostoyevsky’s long suffering saint-like stock character in the form of the Colonel Rostanev. Foma truly is a nasty character, to the point where reading the book is quite uncomfortable at times. Never have I been so filled with an urge to punch the face of a fictional character. It is just as much a testament to Dostoevsky however, that he can create these disgusting things that disgust in a real way.

Foma is driven by his ideas of self worth and has clung to these ideas despite all evidence to the contrary. We constantly see him striking different poses and putting on various shows of his moral and intellectual worth. There is a scene in the book where he turns down a load of money, and wants again to give everyone an impression of his moral worth. But that his actions were led only by expediency is made quite clear to the reader, not so to the characters in the novel. In ‘The Fall’ ,Camus is trying to show us how people can do these good things for selfish reasons, in Dostoyevsky’s Foma we have an extreme and perhaps less universal example of this. But in Foma’s case there is no ambiguity, him turning down the money in this scene was just as disgusting as every other pride driven self-centred action of his in the book.

While Foma Fomich was completely over the top, he was a very real character, and I have encountered many such fellows in my life. Foma Fomich here reminds also of Cartman, in the episode of South Park where Cartman steals Jimmy’s joke. A character who, on failing to find some reason for their unreasonable self worth, simply deceives themselves and proceeds to present this distorted self-image to the public. He is also in some way reminiscient of Iago from Othello, and has in my mind made Iago a much more realistic character. He is much more realistic however, Iago spins off the trial to being some metaphysical ‘evil’ entity, while Foma is all the time tied to his pride and posturing. The emergence of Foma from an insulted pride which turns in on itself is briefly stated in novel, but it serves to explain all his future actions, whereas to Iago we must simply attribute a “mindless malignity”. Anyway, Dostoyevsky was also pleased with Foma, he wrote this to his brother:

“There are in it two vast typical characters which I have been creating for and noting down for five yeras, which have been formed perfectly, characters that are completely Russian and until now poorly portrayed in Russian Literature”

Naturally I don’t see Foma as a purely Russian Phenomenon, but the quote serves to show Dostoyevsky liked him too. Anyway, I was shocked and amazed to see that in Foma Fomich Dostoyevsky launched a rather direct attack on his best friend Gogol, that same Gogol from who’s Overcoat he had emerged. He even goes as far as to put the words of Gogol directly into the mouth of this puffed up paragon of hypocrisy, Foma Fomich. It turns out that Gogol had written an unfashionably reactionary piece called “Selected passages”, in which he extols an ideal kind of serfdom. Bellinsky, a famous Russian critic at the time wrote Gogol a letter giving out to him over this “Selected Passages”, and Dostoyevsky read this letter out to the Petra-something circle, and this was one of the factors involved in his arrest, mock execution and exile to Serbia.

Apart from all that, the Novel is quite funny (in a way which is ironically redolent of Gogol’s humorous social commentaries), and rather dramatic and fast paced. It’s filled with suspense, and has page turning qualities to match the most thrilling of thrillers. Often chapters end in a cliff hangers!

raah!

David Nicholls - One day - I think this is the closest I've ever came to reading something that could be considered Chick Lit. It was grand though, and it wouldn't be fair to seriously call it chick lit. Anyway, It was on the table in my house so I decided to read it to ensure I wasn't able to hand an assignment in on time. It was a grand enjoyable book, but like a fizzy drink, it's merits derived solely from its consumption. That is to say, I took little away from the book.

Certain phrases were quite humerously over-used in the book. People were "padding" everywhere. Even when wearing shoes they were "padding" out of rooms. Several scenes consisted of poeples dissatisfaction with each other manifesting in passive agressive behaviour which they are like "oh, how passive agressive I'm being". The word 'fibrile' was used one too many times to describe the main character too.

Anyway, I'd rather have the time I spent reading it back, though I did enjoy reading it, is the summary

Edit: I have said those things I typed there to people before. And in the book, there is a part where emma (second name) says to the unfunny man "don't put on a show for me", but then the unfunny exhibitionist points out that emma herself had been out to impress him in a similar way by saying things she had said before just to impress him. In this she resembled old Clamence doffing his hat at a blind man. And in fairness I did like that in the book, and had I note already heard and observed this elsewhere then I would have taken that away from the book.

raah!

Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy - This were a very nice brief overview of the history of modern physics, and the philosophical implications of quantum theory, delivered by a fellow who knows what he's about. In the history of physics part he relates things back to the greeks alot. Most of this was little more than a statement of superficial resemblence, but I really liked the comaprison between the probability waves of matter and the aristotelian concept of 'potentia'

I also learned something about the bohr model which I wasn't given in my more rigorous education, but I guess that's because it's not really important to know everything about an obsolete model.

So, overall, good book, nice read, and nicely outlines the harrowing philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. Now I know why "because it works" is so often taken as an acceptable explanation to the myriad retarded questions I ask in class. Thought if someone asks "why does this fit the data?" and the response is "becuase it fits the data", then that isn't a very good state of affairs. Not at all.