1. hannahdotbyrd: I recently read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, and I’d highly recommend it. By using an account of a young Hmong girl, Fadiman illuminates a much larger issue- the tragic effects of a lack of cultural understanding. 

    hannahdotbyrd:

    I recently read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, and I’d highly recommend it. By using an account of a young Hmong girl, Fadiman illuminates a much larger issue- the tragic effects of a lack of cultural understanding. 

  2. J is for The Infinite Jest

    I thought about saving this for the second go ‘round, but why bother waiting? Also, what other books you got starting with J? Some Marquis de Sade stuff? Yeah, that sounds more like second round stuff.

    I have not read this yet. I will not read this any time soon. My summer is filled with…

    A Tale of Two Cities
    The Trial
    Wide Sargasso Sea
    The Crucible
    Brave New World (maybe; read it in high school)
    Frankenstein (ditto)
    Macbeth (a third)
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next (man, idk I gotta look at my syllabus again)

    …books for next year. I also want to read Goodbye, Columbus, The Kite Runner, and I don’t know, so many other books. A Natural History of the Senses, although first I need to finish The Moon by Whale Light. 1Q84. The Magician King. The History of Love. Comanche Moon. Out of the Silent Planet. Oh yeah, and I still have to read that pesky Gatsby. I don’t need to read The Infinite Jest or Joyce just yet. If I never get to them because I’m reading these others, I will not be unhappy.

    I will read The Infinite Jest someday. And Gravity’s Rainbow. I will read them for the language. Women and Men too. I will read them for the challenge, for the persistence they will require of me, the focus. And I will read them for their expansiveness, their reach. Their everything.

  3. I is for Invisible Man

    The world is raucous and painful and conflicted. So infrequently do we find what we are looking for or what we need, and even more infrequently are those two the same thing. This is one of the many things Ellison portrays with immaculate skill in Invisible Man (and really it’s just apropos for me right now).

    I love so many things about this book. It’s so important. It’s such an important part of who I am. It was the first book I started during the school year and saved to finish and savor in the summer. I loved the elegance layered over the rawness, the control Ellison exhibited. I love that it was his one great novel. I love that he was a musician, a composer, that his mind worked that way, saw how a myriad of diverse elements could come together to make a cohesive whole. I love that he wrote about education and politics, communism and unionism. I love that his settings feel thoroughly depicted, described with care and character. I love that the narrator has no name and nothing comes easy and he’s always thinking. I love that it starts with a prologue. I love the Melville epigraph. I love the way the book feels in my hand. There is something perfect to it.

    I love that it tackles invisibility with its every fiber. I love that it says there is something people aren’t talking about, aren’t seeing. I love that it names the problem and does it’s best, I think, to consider ways the problem can be approached.

    Ultimately, I don’t know if it comes across as generally optimistic about those problems. As with so many books, I don’t really remember the ending. I need to read it again.

  4. On the 11th Day of Every Month…

    mentalflossr:

  5. He had been invited to introduce a story and was pulling down books from the shelves to reread a few of the old obscure favorites. They had to be obscure, he thought, or there was no point in introducing one of them. The books were scattered on the floor, and he had to be careful to avoid tripping over them or kicking one of them into the corner. Some of the stories, once reread, no longer seemed quite so appropriate for the occasion, however. Conrad Aiken’s “The Woman-Hater” still had its shockingly beautiful paragraph two pages from the end, when the college kid is kissed by a woman he doesn’t know and wakes up like Sleeping Beauty, but the rest of the story seemed too drab, too perfunctorily written. Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” about a boy’s descent into schizophrenia, was still perfect in its evocation of a child’s mental vertigo but was, it seemed, constantly anthologized. Evan Connell’s “Arcturus” was too long for inclusion in an anthology, as was Isak Dinesen’s “Sorrow-acre.” Kipling’s “They” could effectively give anyone the shivers. All the same, it seemed, upon reexamination, too tricky by half and culturally unpleasant in the way that Kipling could sometimes be. Anyone introducing such a story might feel an urge to apologize for it—a bad way to start. Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine” was bulletproof but, like “Arcturus,” too long and hardly obscure. He didn’t know enough about some writers and their traditions, Yasunari Kawabata’s or Bessie Head’s, for example, to introduce one of their stories. And he didn’t feel like introducing writers who needed no introduction, at least from him: Chekhov or Alice Munro or Italo Calvino. Dozens of others.

    Sighing happily, he took down Lars Gustafsson’s Stories of Happy People and reread “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases.” Probably it was the story he had wanted to introduce all along.

    - Charles Baxter in “You’ve Got to Read This”

  6. coverspy: My Idea of Fun, Will Self (M, 20s, handlebar mustache, Vitruvian Man tattoo on left arm, Outpost Cafe in Clinton Hill) http://bit.ly/MGIlDF

    coverspy:

    My Idea of Fun, Will Self (M, 20s, handlebar mustache, Vitruvian Man tattoo on left arm, Outpost Cafe in Clinton Hill) http://bit.ly/MGIlDF

  7. laceyandcorey: By Kenneth Patchen 

    laceyandcorey:

    By Kenneth Patchen 

  8. Have you read any Andre Brink? What did you think?
    kimber-lite

    I’m not familiar with Andre Brink, but he looks like an interesting writer! In terms of South African writers, Nadine Gordimer has been on my to read list forever. I wonder: Is she or Brink at all similar to Coetzee? How widely are authors like these read in South Africa?

    What are your thoughts on Brink?

    PS - I’ve also read Courtenay, but he seems like a different kind of writer.

  9. "Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), in that it hangs on an impossibility, one which it rarely ventures to speak. This is the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s fiction is clearly about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about something which it hardly ever talks of. Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between. To say that the child is inside the book - children’s books are after all as often not about children - is to fall straight into a trap. It is to confuse the adult’s intention to get at the child with the child it portrays. If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp. There is, in one sense, no body of literature which rests so openly on an acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee. Children’s fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in. […] Children’s fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child. How often has it been said recently that what is best about writing for children is that the writer can count absolutely on the child’s willingness to enter into the book, and live the story? This is to describe children’s fiction, quite deliberately, as something a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction."

    The Case of Peter Pan: Or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose 

    I am not usually a big fan of psychoanalytical readings, but this book is mind-blowing, you should read it if you’re interested in doing anything on / with children’s literature. 

    (via andyispoesizing)

  10. (be happy)

    (be happy)

About me

Pursue understanding. Deconstruct systems in order to taste building blocks. Happiness waits else/everywhere. And the heart(h). Do spheres not pull at each other?
Moby-Dick, Forward

Read the Printed Word!
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