i read this for dystopia week, but just realised that i never mentioend it here! i read it in one day, it’s well short, but it’s sooo good. seriously. he manages to write largely in this invented, slangy, bastardised language and you know what’s going on, even if you don’t know what each word means you can work it out, and it’s so MENACING. also this cover is awesome, i have this edition and it’s so much better than other covers. for once.
THE WASTE LAND
so okay, i didn’t read it in a book by itself. it’s one poem in a book of ts.s. eliot’s poems that i have yet to finish (the four quartets are just sitting there, mocking me). but it’s so incredible. i love the stuff at the end, all the broken things, all the vulgarities… everything. beautiful.
i let this die a bit. sorry. anyway i finished this today, it’s good but not AS good as i was hoping… i think it may be better understood if i consider it for a while. and i was reading it for science, which isn’t really the point of the book. i love this cover.
so. if you’re into modern american literature at all then you’re unlikely to have failed to hear the news that david foster wallace killed himself on friday (i think it was friday). i was reading infinite jest anyway, but i hadn’t read much for a week or two. this made me pick it up again and i’m trying to get through it and it’s hard going but i really, really like it and i can’t believe he died so young. it’s so terrible. terrible for him and his family and everyone he knew, but terrible for everyone else. he was so talented! but anyway, i’m not going to repeat every obit written by someone who hadn’t read him or whatever. i’m not very far in, but i love hal. i love the way this is written. i love how fucking smart this is.
if you even vaguely like tennis, look up the article david foster wallace wrote about federer for the NYtimes. it’s incredible. RIP.
Kemah power lines (via S. J. Alexander)
(c) 2009 S. J. Alexander under CC-BY-NC-SA license.
god i love this. there are power lines in our bloodlines, and all that nonsense.
this is the second novel that i’m reading for dystopian week next term - i’ve already done a clockwork orange and loved it. i’m almost halfway through 1984 and it’s SO GOOD. i didn’t think i’d like it this much - dystopian novels aren’t really my kind of thing, and the idea of animal farm (the other orwell book i have to read) just really annoys me. i love the way orwell writes. i like all the stuff about the invented language, the antique shop, his clandestine meetings with julia, everything. it’s so awesome. wish i had this cover, though, my edition is weirdly shit-looking.
i’ve just started reading this - what a headfuck! crazy. but i do quite like it, which is a good thing, right?
BLEAK HOUSE. this book took me so long to read. really, really long. i mean, not the actual reading… but i started it so long ago and only just finished it. i got really into it over the past few days though, and am now almost sad that it’s over. it reminded me a bit of kavalier & clay - not in subject matter, but because it’s got such a world, and the characters are drawn so well. i’m watching the miniseries on youtube at the moment, and it is so good!
jane eyre. i don’t think the bronte sisters and i are going to get on. this is a book that’s so obsessed with hell and nostalgic rhetoric that so far it just seems lifeless, for all of jane eyre’s assertiveness towards the end of her stay with her aunt she never seems like a real child, just a small adult who is swamped by the long fussy words used by her older self. i don’t like it so far at all.
