(no subject)

[proximoception]

What the hell, I'm game.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Fahrenheit 451 just kidding. Maybe The Faerie Queene since no one else will do it.


Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I don't think so? Perhaps I'm unimaginative.


The last book you bought is:

Got a whole bunch at once, the most remarkable one being a paperback selection of Tolstoy essays against drunkenness and laziness, apparently published by a cult. "Copyright 1975 by The Church of the Way, Inc." On the back cover it is explained that "The Way is the universal spiritual tradition of mankind. It is not one among many philosophies but the Truth behind all truth. It is not a religion and not a science, although all real religion and all real science stem from it. The Way is the primary source of all coherence, all significance, all sanity, all strength, and all joy. It offers freedom: it demands everything you have. The editors of 24 Magazine are themselves concerned with living the Way and with helping others to find and follow the Way. For information write..." Was $1.25.


The last book you read:

Reread The Metamorphosis for school. Previously, The Blithedale Romance.


What are you currently reading?

John Crowley's Little, Big. Amazing so far, a sort of fairy tale where all supernatural elements delicately embody truths too close to home for effective plain statement. A bit like Mulholland Drive in its turning around of escape conventions. An escape into.


Ten books you would take to a deserted island.

Shakespeare's works
Remembrance of Things Past
War and Peace
The Faerie Queene
Shelley's poems
Ibsen's plays
Faust
Moby-Dick
Anna Karenina
Tolstoy's shorter works

These are favorites but maybe it would be better to have something to argue with, like The Bible or Plato's Dialogues. Finnegans Wake presumably is much different from reading to reading. Be nice to have one or two vast literature anthologies like Oxford's or Norton's. Maybe something contemporary too, to remind me of home. Sabbath's Theater is the best book I've read written in my own lifetime; but let's see where Little, Big goes.

Comments

[phronesis.livejournal.com]

Ten books you would take to a deserted island.

Shakespeare's works
Remembrance of Things Past
War and Peace
The Faerie Queene
Shelley's poems
Ibsen's plays
Faust
Moby-Dick
Anna Karenina
Tolstoy's shorter works

These are favorites but maybe it would be better to have something to argue with, like The Bible or Plato's Dialogues. Finnegans Wake presumably is much different from reading to reading. Be nice to have one or two vast literature anthologies like Oxford's or Norton's. Maybe something contemporary too, to remind me of home. Sabbath's Theater is the best book I've read written in my own lifetime; but let's see where Little, Big goes.

Is your selection based purely on your favorites - I would agree with some, but, with the risk of missing loved ones, I might choose certain things for the sake of continual reading such as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica or the OED, Finnigan's Wake seems like a good choice as well - otherwise I can't argue with Shakespeare or Proust, Faust and Ibsen, though dear seem a little harder to accept but mostly likely because I would need to throw quite a bit of philosophy in my list which complicates the process.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Those are my favorites, yes. Eight men. Well, seven and a half: there's a strain in Shakespeare I'm particularly comfortable with, dominating his late 1590s plays and coming back halfway in his last few works. The Sublime Shakespeare of the tragedies and bitter comedies I find it harder to connect with, though maybe a few years alone on that island would do the trick.

Surely philosophy would wear out faster than literature. Though maybe there would always be something new in Russell's History or some other reference volume. And people no one fully understands, like Hegel and Heidegger, might have some Finneganesque values.

[phronesis.livejournal.com]

Hegel and Heidegger would be high on the list, but I would require a complete works kind of access.

Don't forget Dante!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Joyce, asked the same question, but only allowed one book, thought for a while and then said, "I would like to say Dante, but in the end I think it would have to be the Englishman. He is richer."

Little, Big is beautiful beyond words. As good as Sabbath's Theater or Mason & Dixon (read it, read it!)? No. But finish it -- only about one in a hundred who start it do finish it. And it's just so good; it rivals Marquez.

Re: Don't forget Dante!

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I admire Dante's fighting skills, but I'm not sure whose side he's on. Let's call him an alternate, along with Milton, Dickinson etc.

I will finish. Scarce one in a thousand is as interested in being one in a hundred as I.

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

I want to read Little, Big. I read Crowley's The Translator over a year ago and instantly hated it, but it somehow metamorphosed in my mind into something rich and beautiful far beyond my actual experience of reading the sentences the comprised it. Got under the skin, as the cliche goes.

The Faerie Queene too. Someday.

I hesitated over Milton as well, along with Tolstoy and Pynchon. On reflection, Pynchon probably makes it (I've never finish GR, but I want to!). Maybe Tolstoy too--for Anna Karenina at least. But he's so much like nature itself, he would be redundant on the island. (I don't understand this when people say it about Shakespeare--really a writer as glaringly artificial as Joyce, and in the most artificial of literary media--but about Tolstoy it seems appropriate).

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare's artificial in that he'll toss a clock, nine bananas, a love letter and a gallon of turpentine into a garbage can and somehow shake it into a storm. But it's still a storm. Surely this was one of the things Tolstoy hated about him, his not hiding the peels etc.

You'll never read FQ if you see it as a task. Try Book 1 across a couple afternoons sometime, it's a fair sample and a semidetached epic itself.

[princenarcissus.livejournal.com]

This may sound frightening, but I tend to read the The Faerie Queene in the same manner as I approach Finnegan's Wake - via short, pleasurable, and always illuminating literary bursts. I can easily pick up either book and plunge in, at random, to almost any page and return with something rewarding. Like diving for pearls. And for this reason, both are two of the only books I haven't read in their entirety (outside of a giant Norton anthology) that I could imagine including on a desert island list.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That's how I tend to return to it, and perhaps how he intended it to be read (at least the latter books). But plowing all the way through was one of the great experiences of my life.

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

About Shakespeare, I had in mind the materiality, the weight, the inescapable self-consciousness of the language: it's a storm of words. Whereas Tolstoy is the only major writer I've read where the words efface themselves and you are, as the book reviewers say, simply there.

Sounds like good advice on FQ. I read excerpts from Book One in college and found it very entertaining at the level of the image.

[bieiris.livejournal.com]

I started with Remembrance of Things Past eight years ago and I still have Time Regained left to read. I'd love to read the seven volumes in French, but I don't dare do it.
I haven't read Anna Karenina, but Kreutzer Sonata really impressed me.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Every part of Remembrance is the best part, but Time Regained is the best part, so you're lucky. I love all Tolstoy but especially early: Childhood/Boyhood/Youth, The Cossacks, Family Happiness, Sebastopol Sketches, various War and Peace setpieces.

Proust reads pretty easily in French when you've gone through it once in your native language. Probably a good way to speed up your French, even.