proximoception: (Default)
proximoception ([personal profile] proximoception) wrote2010-01-02 12:23 am

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The If on a winter's night a traveler categories might help.

Books You've Been Planning to Read [to the end] for Ages: Turn of the Screw, Lost Illusions, Tales of Jacob, Doctor Faustus, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Daniel Deronda, The Man Without Qualities, Kim, Lord Jim, Demons, The Idiot, Invisible Man, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Don Quixote, Lucien Leuwen, Letting Go, Clarel, Mardi, The Confidence Man, Pierre, Economy of the Unlost, Eros the Bittersweet, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Lost Steps, The Betrothed, The Radetzky March, Urn Burial, The Garden of Cyrus, The Bostonians, Canzoniere, On Things, The Lusiads, The Relic, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, Tristram Shandy, Blow Up & Other Stories, Cards of Identity, Red Cavalry, Gargantua & Pantagruel, Lolita, Pale Fire, A Lost Lady, Valery's and Mallarme's poems in French, The Essays of Elia, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics, White Noise, Hundred Years of Solitude, something by Ursula K. Le Guin, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thucydides, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Pindar's Odes, Rousseau's Confessions, Augustine's Confessions, Hume's Treatise, something by Kierkegaard, Tractatus Philosophicus, The Genealogy of Morals, The World As Will & Idea, The Excursion, Sphere, Sordello

Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Reread [last finished 1993-2001]: If on a winter's night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, As I Lay Dying, The Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Silas Marner, Women in Love, The Magic Mountain, Swann's Way, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Faerie Queene, Elective Affinities, Werther, Faust 2, Brand, Emperor and Galilean, Love's Labor's Lost, The Tempest, Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, Richard 2, Comedy of Errors, Laon & Cythna, The Cenci, The Prelude, Nightmare Abbey, St. Mawr, Tolstoy's short novels

Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them: I'll count books I didn't quite finish here--Ulysses, Murphy, Franklin's Autobiography--and ones I was loving but was somehow ripped away from--The Waves, Under Western Eyes, Confessions of Zeno, The Mill on the Floss, Resurrection--or that I've read around in extensively with pleasure but never tackled completely, consecutively--Walden, Leaves of Grass, The Republic

New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You: Four Freedoms, Conversation Hearts, In Other Words, Voyage/Shipwreck/Salvage

Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified [with which I'll include some of the easily justified]: The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony, Julian, Creation, Godel Escher Bach, Adventures of Maqroll, Taras Bulba, Tree of Smoke, Face of Another, Homage to a Lame Wolf, Invention of Morel


Adding a Non-Calvinic category:

Books Recommended By People Who Would Know: [Julie] Blindness, All the Names, The Cave, Kafka on the Shore, Grapes of Wrath, Of Human Bondage; [[livejournal.com profile] nightspore] Name of the World, Northanger Abbey, Watt, Independent People, Life: A User's Manual, Munro's Stories, Merrill's Poems, Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis, By Night in Chile, Your Face Tomorrow; [[livejournal.com profile] grashupfer] Wittgenstein's Mistress, Infinite Jest, The Names, Tender Is the Night, Emerson's Journals; [[livejournal.com profile] andalus] Preambles & Other Poems; [[livejournal.com profile] fluxbox] Austerlitz; [my father] Jurgen, Chaucer's Troilus in the original

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2010-01-02 05:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Murphy's actually pretty great, but not in any plot momentum way. I was sated shortly before the end, so I stopped. I'm still in awe at several passages. And Magic Mountain is entirely great. Never did read Hopscotch--and I'm not sure if I do like James. Or rather, I like him a lot but not being able to like him completely makes me like him very little in comparison to so many others. I read too slowly to read for anything but love.

[identity profile] nightspore.livejournal.com 2010-01-02 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
You'll fall in love with James. Eventually. Did you get to the chess game with Mr. Endon in Murphy? Beckett worked it out with Marcel Duchamp, who was a chess master (Humphrey Bogart played at master level too, by the way, but I don't think was ever certified a master). The end of Murphy is teh awesome. And so's the end of Watt.