What are you reading right now?

ando here · 01-08-2022, 05:52 PM

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live Joan Didion

jadis · 01-08-2022, 07:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ando here

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live Joan Didion

During my two years in NYC that was the writer all the cool girls (and their gays) liked. She's great!

adidasss · 01-08-2022, 10:58 PM

I only read The year of magical thinking and thought it was a weirdly neutral report about the loss of her husband with some emotional clarity thrown in at the end as an afterthought. Last night we watched The centre will not hold on Netflix and after seeing how weird she was, it all made more sense. I figure she's "on the spectrum" or something. She writes very well but not sure if I would connect to any of her other writing.

**Frownland** · 01-09-2022, 01:36 AM

The bulk of Slouching Towards Bethlehem really captures the essence of California in a way that I've only seen Pynchon achieve. Thank God I'm retarded enough to find something relatable in her writing.

She is the platonic ****lib in a lot of ways though.

ando here · 01-09-2022, 02:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jadis

During my two years in NYC that was the writer all the cool girls (and their gays) liked. She's great!

She was constantly scoping the terrain; mental, physical and certainly the sociological. It gave her broad appeal. The Netflix doc is lopsided and ill conceived, imo. Of course she was weird. The personal lives of these mostly solitary types are rarely intriguing so the nature of your inquiry is important. Unless you’ve got a highly social figure like Sontag or Baldwin whose relationships with a wide array of people can contribute to whatever framework you’re constructing there’s the constant danger of a myopic view - and a deadly dull experience. People keep attempting them and unless their aim is something above and beyond recounting the life of the writer, boy are they tough to sit through!

FETCHER. · 01-11-2022, 10:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FETCHER.

Ernest Cline - Ready Player Two. I’m enjoying what I have read so far but have had to remind myself to pick it up and get reading. Really wondering where the storyline is going to go. I am only around 100 pages in, generally don’t like the first stage of a book because I worry that it’s going to be ****. Has anyone here finished it?

It was ****e, don’t read it.

Currently reading Delia Owens - Where the crawdads sing. In comparison to the last book it’s been really effortless to get through.

**Marie Monday** · 01-23-2022, 08:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jadis

What the French call l'Âge classique (from late 16th to early 18th centuries) does have the advantage of "linguistic purity": the vocabulary is "soutenu" and restricted (Roland Barthes called Racine "l’homme aux deux mille mots") so knowing the few thousand Latinate words that are used in the literary registers of English gets you a long way. On the flip side, it's highly stylized and many of the words are used in ways that are subtly different from contemporary French, so I wouldn't focus on that era unless you want to be a scholar of French classicism or something.

I would avoid the 19th century: everyone thinks they're going to enjoy Madame Bovary or the Three Musketeers but it's full of lengthy descriptions of stuff like taverns and horses and chapels where you'll have to look up 5 words in every sentence. Impractical.

Many of the people I know who made the biggest progress in French started by reading plenty of nonfiction: it's just simpler than literary fiction and you can get it from wherever. From news agencies on Twitter to biographies of celebrities you like. Someone I know took herself to a new level by reading on her phone a French translation of an English-language Cure biography she found as an ebook (on Google's book app, whatever it's called) cause she was a Cure fan and knew a lot about them already, so she could figure out a lot from context as opposed to looking up every single word she didn't know.

Thanks, that's good advice. I don't read much non fiction but that seems like a good place to start. I also ordered the first Claudine novel by Colette.
In the mean time I'm reading another French book, l'ultime secret by Bernard Werber. A French friend of mine lent it to me; the book is bad but the French is easy to understand with a little help of Google translate.
And on the side I finally started reading Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex (in English because that's beyond my level of French). I've only read the introduction but so far it's excellent.
edit for update: her take on biology is at times very dubious though. About pregnancy: '[...] loss of appetite and vomiting [...] signalise the revolt of the organism against the invading species' ...um sure Simone

Another update which I forgot about: a while ago I read the Mischa Mengelberg book that someone gave me, and it was great. Very funny, very playful. Lots of whimsical writings about music, absurdist little plays and poems that twist language and play with it. His Dutch is beautiful; he also writes in German and English occasionally (his English is adorably off-kilter, as happens when someone tries to cast English in the grammar and idiom of another language)

**Marie Monday** · 01-23-2022, 08:50 AM

Oh also shoutout to another book I've read lately, My Antonia by Willa Cather. She somehow manages to give an extraordinary vividness to nature, people, and situations with fairly minimal means. It's a gorgeous book

moosegoose · 01-25-2022, 08:33 AM

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. Abrupt and intoxicating read so far.

Quote:

“The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we've alive.”

**Exo** · 01-25-2022, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by moosegoose

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. Abrupt and intoxicating read so far.

I enjoyed Annihilation a lot. Wasn't too keen on the second one though.

01-08-2022, 05:52 PM	#7431 (permalink)
ando here Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2020 Location: NY, NY Posts: 1,802	We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live Joan Didion __________________ "A musician plays music. Other people name it." - Artie Shaw

01-08-2022, 10:58 PM	#7433 (permalink)
adidasss Slavic gay sauce Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Abu Dhabi Posts: 7,993	I only read The year of magical thinking and thought it was a weirdly neutral report about the loss of her husband with some emotional clarity thrown in at the end as an afterthought. Last night we watched The centre will not hold on Netflix and after seeing how weird she was, it all made more sense. I figure she's "on the spectrum" or something. She writes very well but not sure if I would connect to any of her other writing. __________________ “Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle. Last.fm

01-09-2022, 01:36 AM	#7434 (permalink)
Frownland SOPHIE FOREVER Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: East of the Southern North American West Posts: 35,541	The bulk of Slouching Towards Bethlehem really captures the essence of California in a way that I've only seen Pynchon achieve. Thank God I'm retarded enough to find something relatable in her writing. She is the platonic ***lib in a lot of ways though. __________________ Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.* d e a f b o x