Yeah, I read it when it came out. I read another of hers, can't recall which. She recently did the new book section for Harper's Magazine. I tended to like her recommendations, the few I read of those.losthighway wrote: Sat Dec 09, 2023 8:34 pmMe too. She must have a new one since that one. [Edit] It's way older than I thought and she has written several more including this year's The Fraud.
Re: What are you reading?
492Forbidden Music by Michael Haas.
We're headed for social anarchy when people start pissing on bookstores.
Re: What are you reading?
494These Fevered Days
A literary historian lays out 10 turning points in the life of Emily Dickinson. I've fallen prey to some historian's fetishizing lately (went through a witch thing a couple months ago, Massachusetts is looming large in my imagination). This woman teaches Dickinson to lit students in Dickinson's living room. When she read that ED responded to a moment of crisis by storming up to her attic and reciting Shakespeare, she did it herself to hear the acoustics. It's one step shy of the author wearing her clothes.
As a lit nerd, ED is the holy Grail both for her staggering work and her reclusiveness. The use of sources sometimes allows the author to put the shadowy figure hidden upstairs in her Amherst home out on the grass teasing her friend. At its best it feels like Laura Dern staring at a trumpeting brontosaurus. Sometimes it gets a little dull parsing how x college roommate was the daughter of an uncle who started an academic institution in Ohio blah, blah.
The most captivating detail is how Emily abandoned her long sought after opportunity for higher education- something of a radical feminist notion at the time, because the seminary she attended demanded an eventual declaration of faith to Jesus. After being forced to consider her feelings Emily came down hard on the side of agnosticism (not a trendy notion in her family or community). It was a move that came at some personal cost.
A literary historian lays out 10 turning points in the life of Emily Dickinson. I've fallen prey to some historian's fetishizing lately (went through a witch thing a couple months ago, Massachusetts is looming large in my imagination). This woman teaches Dickinson to lit students in Dickinson's living room. When she read that ED responded to a moment of crisis by storming up to her attic and reciting Shakespeare, she did it herself to hear the acoustics. It's one step shy of the author wearing her clothes.
As a lit nerd, ED is the holy Grail both for her staggering work and her reclusiveness. The use of sources sometimes allows the author to put the shadowy figure hidden upstairs in her Amherst home out on the grass teasing her friend. At its best it feels like Laura Dern staring at a trumpeting brontosaurus. Sometimes it gets a little dull parsing how x college roommate was the daughter of an uncle who started an academic institution in Ohio blah, blah.
The most captivating detail is how Emily abandoned her long sought after opportunity for higher education- something of a radical feminist notion at the time, because the seminary she attended demanded an eventual declaration of faith to Jesus. After being forced to consider her feelings Emily came down hard on the side of agnosticism (not a trendy notion in her family or community). It was a move that came at some personal cost.
Re: What are you reading?
495Trainspotting. I was hoping the movie would be enough of a departure from the book to still enjoy reading it (usually I try to read a book before seeing a film adaptation but I'd already seen the movie a million times), and thankfully I've found that it was. It's much less linear than the movie and the chapters shuffle around the first-person perspective of different characters, which I like.
First Irvine Welsh book for me but I'm planning on checking out Skagboys and Filth in the near future.
First Irvine Welsh book for me but I'm planning on checking out Skagboys and Filth in the near future.
Re: What are you reading?
496Still chipping away at Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Brilliant, but there's a lot of it.
at war with bellends
Re: What are you reading?
498Hello. Is anyone still around here? Seems like there was a mass exodus or something.InMySoul77 wrote: Wed Dec 06, 2023 11:58 am Selected Nonfictions by Jorge Luis Borges. This man was almost impossibly well read. Must have been some sort of speed reader. Philosophy and the art of fiction are mostly covered, though he also commented on films and politics from time to time.
Borges wrote a lot about labyrinths.