by Zora Neale Hurston
Jesus Christ, why haven't I read this book??? ]]>
by H.P. Lovecraft
i've never been able to get past the first two/three pages. and i've tried many times. what the hell was happening? it's like he was making a conscious effort to write in a completely opposite style. a boring style. sucks. ]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
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i did more thinking in the course of reading this book than i've done in the last three years. which is not exactly to say that i learned anything or indeed understood a word of it, as my brain is like a lump of clay. and yet still i felt a certain stirring inside, and my dreams have become startling and strange. entirely worth it just for the final essay, "the meaning of a literary idea." i went to find a quote from it, but found that every sentence of it was inextricably bound to the ones that came both before and after, so i would have to transcribe the whole thing here in order to do it justice. and i am not going to do that. so you should just go and read it. especially if you're not one of those people who feels obliged to understand everything.
oh, okay... one sentence:
The ultimate questions of conscious and rational thought about the nature of man and his destiny match easily in the literary mind with the dark unconscious and with the most primitive human relationships. Love, parenthood, incest, patricide: these are what the great ideas suggest to literature, these are the means by which they express themselves. I need but mention three great works of different ages to suggest how true this is: Oedipus, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamozov.
see, it's hard to stop transcribing... and now i feel guilty about cutting him off...
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well-written, dark and surprising stories about a group of people i've never encountered in literature before (although they are at times somewhat reminiscent of (and much realer than) the cannibals in cormac mccarthy's The Road). bunch of uneducated guys in the woods shooting and skinning and eating things and often killing people by accident or on purpose. lots of bones and dogs and mud and liquor; very few women and nothing approaching a love story. this is some dark stuff, though never cartoonish or gothic. the prose itself is what i would call propulsive, hurtling along and through the story, pushing the unimportant stuff aside and always headed straight to the end of the story which is also of course the heart of the matter. and yet at the same time every sentence is finely crafted and beautiful. my favorite parts were the story "the ballad of duane juarez" and the last bit, a novella called "poachers." thanks, brian. ]]>
by Larry McMurtry
funny, i was just planning to read that! ]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
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