Finished reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray: What a brilliant and delightful correspondence (which ended when Murray moved to Harlem, a few blocks from Ellison, making it unnecessary for them to write โ their gain, our loss). ๐
Currently reading: Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray ๐
Currently reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray ๐
Currently reading: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ๐
(Decided to save Solzhenitsyn for later)
Welp, I’m going in. If you don’t hear from me in a month, call the FBI, or a priest. ๐
Finished reading: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne. Somewhat disappointing; the author died before the book was altogether complete, and left some organizational confusion. But the subject could scarcely be more fascinating. ๐
Currently reading: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne ๐
Currently reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray by Ralph Ellison ๐
Currently reading: The Complete Short Novels by ะะฝัะพะฝ ะะฐะฒะปะพะฒะธั ะงะตั ะพะฒ ๐
Currently reading: The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A.J.A. Symons ๐
Finished reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Just as I had remembered it: brilliant and bombastic, magnificent and maddening. ๐
Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ๐
Currently reading: Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett ๐
Currently reading: Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition by Josef Albers ๐
Currently reading ๐
Currently reading: The History of the Computer: People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World by Rachel Ignotofsky ๐ (It’s delightful!)
Finished reading: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Impressive in many ways and often delightful, but essentially itโs The Further Adventures of the Glass Family. If you had always hoped that Salinger would in his hermetic withdrawal write a big sprawling ambitious 500-page novel, well, here it is. I donโt mean that as either a compliment or an insult. ๐
Currently reading: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt ๐
Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler ๐. I wanted to love this book but I didnโt. Itโs just too didactic. Like Richard Powersโs The Overstory, it has an inescapably clear extractable message and the story is always subordinated to that message. Alice Gribbinโs Tablet essay on the visual arts makes the point well: โArtworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art worldโs many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of that audience.โ When I read Nayler or Powers, I feel that I am being asked to extract a specific message and if I do that I will have done my readerly work. In each of these cases the message is wonderful, necessary, life-giving โ but it is a message, and I prefer my messages presented straightforwardly and my stories to be considerably less straightforward. โTell the truth but tell it slantโ is what stories and poems are for; these books are quite upright in their telling.
Currently reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler ๐
Currently reading: Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson ๐
Currently reading: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer ๐
Currently reading: Their Finest Hour (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill ๐
Currently reading: The Gathering Storm (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill ๐
Currently reading: The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn ๐