What are you reading today/book club

[rjbman]

[Cowboy]

[talkin2snakes]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... nniversary

saddens me that bruce chatwin is not much read these days, for all that (as i've said before) his whole 'well off white guy espousing nomadic lifestyle' stance was a bit suspect he was way better than all those annoying posh idiots like colin thubron, tim butcher and also this new lot who soothe their first world 'trauma' by training hawks/going to live in a hut in orkney or whatever boring nonsense.

[rjbman]

[INNIT]

used the reading break to read (and reread) a few things for myself:

"the good man of nanking" - the personal diaries of a german man named john rabe who established a safe zone in nanking during the 1937 japanese invasion, saving thousands of lives. his diaries were very emotional for me and made me want to be more courageous. cried several times.

"beloved," toni morrison - really havent read enough of toni morrison (or, to be honest, any african american author) but quite enjoyed this novel. it exposed and dwelled upon the deep wounds of slavery without engaging in the kind of hollywood pornotroping that makes my stomach turn. also lots of spooky ghost stuff

"finnegans wake," joyce - i reread this because i wanted to write about it in my thesis but i think it's one of those works that i should just personally enjoy and not close read. best bit is still the part where the washerwomen turn to stone.

"habeas viscus," weheliye - okay boring theory book that i actually had to read for class (but i've been wanting to read it for awhile now anyways sooo). probably good if you want to jump into contemporary black studies and dont know where to start (has a firm basis in OG black feminism). best bit is where he analyzes that MIA video where the police kill red-haired kids.

"the river between" ngugi - i wanted to end off reading break with a beautiful novel that transported me firmly out of my alienated existence and this really did it for me. takes place in kenya and follows the gikuyu people during the early days of white settler invasions. colonialism lingers and interrupts the flows of what is otherwise meaningful and fluid existence. his prose is simple and wonderful.

[bels]

Just finished "We have always lived in the castle" nice and witchy

[Copeland]

Fiction recs from 2017?

[rjbman]

if you're down with scifi, i loved walkaway by cory doctorow

[HexKeySet]

[Roosterruby]

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil- this book has saved my ass for the past few weeks

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch- my favorite memoir and a huge source of kinship for me, as Yuknavitch is also a big alcoholic who has lost a lot of love

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson- nice and snarky

[INNIT]

finished "the crying of lot 49". the main character's gradual descent into an alienated world of total disintegration/collapse perfectly describes my experience of grad schools thus far

[npuox]

American Psychopat ( Reading today before I go in the bed )

[comix_corp]

i'm trying to read through samson agonistes by milton but man is it hard. it's like he tries to find the most roundabout way to say something on purpose. then he repeats it in an even more complex way. samson has complained about his haircut like three times now with three different poetic conceits and i'm only three pages in.

i've been taking breaks from it by reading some of the poems in sinan antoun's poetics of the obscene in premodern arabic poetry, which is a serious, scholarly text about some very not-serious dirty old arabic poets from the 9th century. in the year 850 europeans were probably still writing like "i love you jesus why did you die" in latin or something, but in the arab world, we were ascending to such artistic heights as:







i love it

[Ques]

has been storming the internet as of late, but I think it's still a worthwhile read, hype discounted. The way she teases out who Robert really is was really well done. Frustrating how people forget that it's fiction, and not a personal essay, but what can you do.

by Yiyun Li is a really exemplary piece that wonderfully toes the line between character building and subtly imbedded political commentary. She was recommended to me by Cherbydis and I plan on reading more of her when I can get ahold of it. I find it fascinating how modern day Chinese fiction has in so many ways splintered, with writers growing up outside of China, the more recently departed diaspora a la Li, and then those who have stayed. Do writers of the diaspora still count as writing Chinese literature?

has been on my reading list for a while, but I finally got around to it yesterday, and couldn't put it down. Ended up devouring it in just two sittings. I'm a real sucker for repressed homoeroticism in literature, and the victorian aesthetes in general, so this was a perfect match for me. I feel like this pairs really well with Donna Tartt's , which I reread recently and enjoyed even more the second time around. Highly recommend both.

[rjbman]

[106-2]

Christie is a total guilty pleasure of mine so I was super pleased this was chosen. I'd probably rate this second in terms of her novels I've read, and yeah the ending is great. To anyone who saw the film without having read the book, I feel 4 U - they got the characterisation of Poirot way wrong, painting him as so really brash and egotistical where in the novels he's portrayed as (usually) much more reserved (I think I've repressed all memory of the fight scenes too).

If anyone read this and fancied more Poirot (or Christie), my favourite is the ABC Murders (first favourite)

[JewTurk]

Finished Soleri's The Bridge Between Matter & Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit. It seemed to be a collection of essays he wrote over the course of 11 years, they definitely stand better together than separate. Some of the reading was very enjoyable but near the end it felt like he was writing in such large ambiguities it was hard at times to see what he was getting at. Other essays were much more well developed. There's a .pdf available on archive.org @ https://archive.org/details/bridgebetweenmat00sole . It was an interesting look at how to cultivate "spirit", and culture through a society as opposed to a more individualistic approach. Which went along really well with Watt's The book on the taboo against knowing who you are which I had just finished prior, I think I'm going to read The Way of Zen next as I really enjoy Watt's writing style, very palatable/easy reading.

Anyone read Soleri's by chance, or one of the specific essays in it? I want to see how The City in the image of Man compares with the collection of essays.

Turns out, about 2 months ago, Soleri's daughter came forward about Soleri's sexual misconduct with her in her youth, you can read the article on Medium:

https://medium.com/@soleri/sexual-abuse ... ecb8e99648

Where do you all fall on the line about reading authors who have moral issues in their background?



I'll probably grab a copy of The Death and Life of... because I've been really interested in the urban planning/ecological footprint stuff as of late.

[rjbman]

would be down to do it for first book club book of 2018... anyone else interested in urban planning etc? (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

[rjbman]

ok! we will read Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - try and have it read by February 11th!

[JewTurk]

[zevolution]

I am currently reading "Parables for the Virtual" by Brian Massumi because I'm on a theory kick, and besides because Theory has always brought me a certain sort of pleasure and fire-in-the-belly type feeling that not much else does.

Sort of a useless read though because i'm abt to graduate from undergrad and I have mixed emotions about grad school. if anyone wants to chat about grad school please contact me

[INNIT]

[wogbog]

reading Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to find and wondering why it has taken me so long (i think it's been sitting on my shelf for close to a decade) because every story here!! she has a way with words

[Ques]

i just finished Nevada by Imogen Binnie and I'm feeling some sort of special way about it. it's the first book by a trans author that i've read that doesn't feel targeted at a cis audience (not that there's anything wrong with that). there is no magically simple narrative bookended by a digestable binary, the dysphoria, dissociation, the depression is all left out there to fester, nothing's been packed away. the book was hard for me to read, but, at the same time, i couldn't put it down and finished it in a single marathon sitting. binnie incorporates a few techniques that i've seen used by other authors recently––karl ove's attention to the minutia of life, the queer autotheory of precadio's testo junkie, and the plethora of writers who've been doing away with quote-bound dialogue––in a way that highlights the simultaneous distance and proximity the protagonist has to her own existence. she is so innately bound up in her physical embodiment and the tensions she faces just living in the body she does, and yet, as a defensive mechanism, she has to put as much distance as possible between herself and the world. the narrative drifts from first person to third and then all the way over to second, sometimes within the space of a single page, or even paragraph––the reader is left just as dislocated as maria, scrambling to latch on to anything. the way Binnie ends the novel is bold, impressively so. i felt like i knew how she was going to do it for a while, and then she completely surprised me, in a way that initially upset me, and i've still yet to process completely. i won't spoil it here, as i hope that fellow-taggers will go out and read the novel themselves (it's free on amazon with their 30 day trial of kindle unlimited if, like me, you don't currently have access to a physical copy of the book, otherwise please go support her with your money!), but if anyone does read it and wants to talk about it please reach out !

[wogbog]

title story was all i'd read for a long time too! i really enjoyed it this time around (i think i was somewhat baffled by it when i read it for class) but the other more day-to-day stories are connecting w me more and hitting me harder. there's so much going on with the writing and events of them

[kickingthefly]

sort of related to the above, this is a social activist hedge fund that brian massumi put me onto (he's a member). might suit up and coming young tech types looking for ways to waste money

http://www.robinhoodcoop.org/

[INNIT]

reading dave eggers' "the circle" and i am sure that it's the 1984 of our time (i don't like his prose but his concepts are spot on).

whoaaa apparently there's a movie too? is it any good?

[sunblam]

[tweefwend]

Just binge read "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

really amazing read.

No spoilers, here's one favorite excerpt from the read:

" we live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient - it's not useful - to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it. "

[rjbman]