Books! What are you currently reading or just finished?

[Loitering]

@disquiet It’s apparently in the æther…

[infovore]

I loved Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land - an author returns home to Palestina, the Jewish homeland in North Africa that Jews have lived in since the early 20th century; he soon confusingly finds multiple realities converging, where the dice fell in very different ways for the Middle East and its diaspora. It’s sensitive, clever, full of hints and throwaway clues where other writers might binge on lore.

I’m now reading his Central Station, set in future Tel Aviv, where Central Station is man’s primary spaceport, rising high above the city with its own weather system, and the city below remains a nodal point between cultures. It’s good.

[Angela]

oh boy…

---

But really…
I’m reading the Secret History of Wonder Woman and it’s very cool. It’s well written and the story of the people that created Wonder Woman is something. There was a movie made about the same subject called Professor Marsden and the Wonder Women which @Rodrigo and I are going to watch today.

[oot]

Is that cover real???

[Rodrigo]

Sadly, it appears to be…

[scene]

Finally got to reading this and it’s been really helpful! Thank you.

I’ve been reading the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler, too, and it’s some of the best sci-if I’ve read in a good long while. It’s a shame she passed away so young in life.

Also thinking of starting Nixonland and going on to the rest of the political/historical texts by Perlstein.

[ubu]

i finished the waves by Virginia Woolf last week. been thinking about it a lot since then, i think it’s gonna stay with me for a while. that simple structure is fascinating to me. as are the questions of identity and of the permeability/impermeability of the self raised in it

[Bloopy]

I loved the Edith Grossman translation. I just finished the false Quixote recently which was interesting… but by the end I was dragging my feet just to finish. There’s no comparison to the Cervantes, but I’m looking forward to coming back to a second read of the real thing and having a bit more context for all the ragging on it in the real second book. “Avellaneda” whoever he was really was in love with authority and wasn’t such a great writer – the characters are really repetitive and shallow, basically straw men to point and laugh at from a perspective of wealth and privilege. Looking forward to returning to the real thing which I remember being subversive and sympathetic – not to mention actually funny. Avellaneda’s idea of funny is basically to be mean and judgemental.

Very interesting how similar the structure of the two second parts are though. I wonder if Cervantes adapted his to parody the Avellaneda, or the false book just ripped off Cervantes. (Apparantly Avellaneda saw an early manuscript?)

I’m reading Smollett’s translation since it’s what I happened to have on hand. I like wrapping my head around the somewhat archaic language. It means it’s not quite a page turner for me, but some bits are worded so fabulously that I have no desire to seek out another translation at this point. I don’t do a lot of reading now so it’s extremely rare for me to read a book twice anyway.

[dailybells]

some bits are worded so fabulously that I have no desire to seek out another translation

I’d like to try another translation the next time I read it! I’m pretty sure I’d like to read it again. When I finished… I felt like I’d lost contact with a close friend.

But I have a feeling Cervantes comes through despite the translation, at least I’d like to compare. I wish I could read it in the original though…

PS – which part are you on right now? I don’t remember it really becoming a page-turner for me until somewhere around part II honestly. Part I is good, but part II is… Part II is what makes the whole thing for me. So in any case IMHO if you are on part I and it’s slow going, know that part II adds another dimension and has nearly 10 years of extra experience and I mean, it’s real good. Real real good.

[Bloopy]

I’m in part 2, just past where they attended the lavish wedding that didn’t go as planned. As I said earlier, I’m finding part 2 even that much funnier than part 1!

[dailybells]

Oops I didn’t see your posts about this earlier – I kinda wonder if that wedding sequence is why Sancho gets made out to be a glutton in the false Quixote!

[bereenondo]

I’m currently reading Resonances: Noise and Contemporary music, which is a wonderfully diverse book discussing the aesthetics, philosophy, importance and use of noise both in popular music and avant-garde. There’s 20+ writers, and the topics range from Metal Machine Music to shoegaze and russian punk, as well as Iannis Xenakis’ sound synthesis and the works of Filthy Turd.

The book is on loan from the public library, and I can’t praise enough the selection of interesting books they have…currently I’ve got on reservation the Patch & Tweak book, Ocean of Sound by David Toop, a book about the San Francisco tape music center and Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveiros, to name a few. In addition I’m currently taking part in a DIY synth workshop at the central library of Helsinki, and the central library even has a recording studio which anyone with a library card can reserve (and not a lousy one either, they’ve got a few eurorack cases and Moog One for instance there). Libraries <3

[ht73]

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Fire and heat provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they have been for us the occasion for unforgettable memories, for simple and decisive personal experiences. Fire is thus a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything. If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Arnong all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse. It is a pleasure for the good child sitting prudently by the hearth; yet it punishes any disobedience when the child wishes to play too close to its flames. It is well-being and it is respect. It is a tutelary and a terrible divinity, both good and bad. It can contradict itself; thus it is one of the principles of universal explanation.

[Loitering]

Now:

Avid Reader

Also, this:

Twentieth-Century Boy

[eclectics]

Just finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August , after a friend recommended it highly.
I was quite blown away. Great story, great writing.

[mrsoundboyking]

In the middle of “Supervisions with Donald Meltzer : The Simsbury Seminars” — psych pros bring in their most difficult cases for D.M. to comment on. Yo, the extent to which some people are mentally ill is shocking and revealing. You can not tell who is mad… perhaps it is you or me… Very interesting for a student of human nature.

[motorhead412]

Just finished this up last night

[pleurodesis]

Just started José Saramago’s “Baltasar and Blimunda” and also

[Angela]

The cover looks cool–I love the more busy covers. Did you like it as a whole? What kind of thing is it like?

[motorhead412]

Yes, I liked it as a whole. The League books are Alan Moore’s interpretation and re-contextualization of many many many fictional characters and elements (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Orwell’s 1984 etc). The series starts in 1898 (Vol. I) and ends with this final book in the far future.