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Aug. 23rd, 2010 01:44 amI love my books except when I have to move them, at which time I detest them. I wonder if I'll have caved and gone iPad, or Kindle, or whatever's relevant, by the next time we move. I've never seen a Kindle but the iPad screen seems pretty readable. I'm ambivalent about those things - how can they not lead to the death of long books, even medium sized books? Also, I have all of these @#$%^& books already.
The books I'm starting and not finishing now are Russian ones. I associate the Russians with Autumn because that's when I had the class introducing me to their literature (I'd been studying their language for four years up to then, go figure). And this will be the first real fall I've seen in a while. Here the leaves on the tops of the few maples all die and mostly sit there, while the lower ones live on. Kind of gross to see. And the live oaks obviously stay live. And in Vancouver everything just got rained flat, and most areas were just fir anyway so there wasn't a proper turning except in the park. And with the rain you didn't feel like going all the way to the park.
I'm reading Dostoevsky and Chekhov but thinking about Turgenev, who I packed already. Hemingway advises reading all of him; Chekhov thought only 1/8th to 1/10th would survive, such as Fathers and Sons, The Dog and Asya; Henry James gives the impression of liking everything, too, but I see he singles out On the Eve as his favorite of the novels and cites as among the most striking stories A Correspondence, The Wayside Inn, The Brigadier, The Dog, The Jew, Visions, Mumu, Three Meetings, First Love, The Forsaken, Asya, The Journal of a Superfluous Man, The Story of Lieutenant Yergunov, King Lear of the Steppe. So maybe I'll start with Asya and The Dog - three votes out of three. Never read either, or several of those others.
I wonder what I'll make of him this time 'round - he's one of a group of authors I sequentially thought must be the most fantastic in the world, before I'd read many of the world's other authors. Gore Vidal, Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Pushkin, Byron, Thomas Love Peacock held this title, among others (in various seasons of 18-20). Peacock, Stoppard and Byron I've revisited and they're still superb (at least Nightmare Abbey, Rosencrantz, Don Juan are - though I've also been meaning to reread Gryll Grange). Dropped a fair bit in rank, maybe, but not much in absolute value. I think I loved Turgenev best of all - his superlativeness hit me most intensely, as it were. And I think he converted me to literature; Vidal and the playwrights didn't really count as lit to me, somehow, and Onegin seemed like a charming one-off. But Fathers and Sons was one of those boring looking nineteenth century novels, after all, and when I read it it spoke to me at whatever level's needed to stop you and make you wonder why nothing else has ever done this, where more of this might be found. What your problem's been to be doing whatever you've been doing instead; a lot of playing pool in bars and watching artsy films, at the time. Proven suddenly pathetic.
Though thinking of that makes me want to play pool. Haven't in ages.
The books I'm starting and not finishing now are Russian ones. I associate the Russians with Autumn because that's when I had the class introducing me to their literature (I'd been studying their language for four years up to then, go figure). And this will be the first real fall I've seen in a while. Here the leaves on the tops of the few maples all die and mostly sit there, while the lower ones live on. Kind of gross to see. And the live oaks obviously stay live. And in Vancouver everything just got rained flat, and most areas were just fir anyway so there wasn't a proper turning except in the park. And with the rain you didn't feel like going all the way to the park.
I'm reading Dostoevsky and Chekhov but thinking about Turgenev, who I packed already. Hemingway advises reading all of him; Chekhov thought only 1/8th to 1/10th would survive, such as Fathers and Sons, The Dog and Asya; Henry James gives the impression of liking everything, too, but I see he singles out On the Eve as his favorite of the novels and cites as among the most striking stories A Correspondence, The Wayside Inn, The Brigadier, The Dog, The Jew, Visions, Mumu, Three Meetings, First Love, The Forsaken, Asya, The Journal of a Superfluous Man, The Story of Lieutenant Yergunov, King Lear of the Steppe. So maybe I'll start with Asya and The Dog - three votes out of three. Never read either, or several of those others.
I wonder what I'll make of him this time 'round - he's one of a group of authors I sequentially thought must be the most fantastic in the world, before I'd read many of the world's other authors. Gore Vidal, Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Pushkin, Byron, Thomas Love Peacock held this title, among others (in various seasons of 18-20). Peacock, Stoppard and Byron I've revisited and they're still superb (at least Nightmare Abbey, Rosencrantz, Don Juan are - though I've also been meaning to reread Gryll Grange). Dropped a fair bit in rank, maybe, but not much in absolute value. I think I loved Turgenev best of all - his superlativeness hit me most intensely, as it were. And I think he converted me to literature; Vidal and the playwrights didn't really count as lit to me, somehow, and Onegin seemed like a charming one-off. But Fathers and Sons was one of those boring looking nineteenth century novels, after all, and when I read it it spoke to me at whatever level's needed to stop you and make you wonder why nothing else has ever done this, where more of this might be found. What your problem's been to be doing whatever you've been doing instead; a lot of playing pool in bars and watching artsy films, at the time. Proven suddenly pathetic.
Though thinking of that makes me want to play pool. Haven't in ages.
