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	05/26 Ryan is currently reading: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
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July 22

Ryan marked as to-read:
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Paperback)
by Nikolai V. Gogol
bookshelves: to-read

my rating:

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July 04

Ryan gave

to:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (paperback)
by Italo Calvino

my rating:

Ryan said: "Let me preface by saying I love Calvino. I find the Baron in the Trees to be his best work, in part because it's his only book with "traditional" characters, but also because it's brilliant storytelling that engages the complexity of the hu...more Let me preface by saying I love Calvino. I find the Baron in the Trees to be his best work, in part because it's his only book with "traditional" characters, but also because it's brilliant storytelling that engages the complexity of the human experience. The novellas The Non-Existent Knight & The Cloven Viscount, are also excellent fables, despite the pedantic nature of the latter. Invisible Cities is his most "literary" and intriguing and it is the book I most consistently re-read. Like reading Borges, Calvino is fascinating because of the intricate patterns he weaves as he attempts to unlock the hidden symbolisms in language and experience.

Calvino's stories are hit and miss in the collections "Numbers in the Dark" and "Difficult Loves." He's better with fables than stories that deal with political subtext.

I've read his essay anthologies: The Uses of Literature, Why Read the Classics?, and if anyone has ambitions of being a fiction writer, the most important book you will ever read is "Six Memos for the Next Millennium." Period. If you want to write fiction, read that series of Calvino lectures. Forget any and all other "How-to" books. Calvino understands the craft of writing. I teach a creative writing course at a community college and I always tell my students that if they want to learn how to write better, read Calvino, especially his "Six Memos."

That being said, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is Calvino at his worst. It is a gimic. Nothing more, nothing less. As is typical of much postmodern literature, it fails to realize that "originality" of narrative structure and plot is overrated and what literature ought to do is reflect the human experience, not games and gimics of language (thank you Mr. Beckett). What we do learn, however, from this novel is a definition of that fancy academic term, postmodern (and I mean in terms of genre, not historical chronology): "Postmodernism: a faux literary movement by writers who are too afraid to write a story and actually say something, selecting to peddle gross ambiguity and language games rather than tell us matters of the human heart. A literary movement that hides under the banner of 'experimentation' and intellectual discourse (cue the term "meta-narrative"), and screams of triteness and self-indulgent drivel. See also: David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth. See also: the current genre fad in M.F.A. writing programs where graduate students are taught they can no longer write stories and poems but must write stories and poems that are about stories and poems and then laugh at the irony and elitism of such a gesture."

If on a Winter's Night, A Traveler doesn't deserve a review. Read everything else by Calvino, but don't read this....less "

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June 27

New comment on Ryan's review of East of Eden (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Ryan wrote: "My apologies. Yes, I should definitely give you some context for understanding the nature of the cou...more "

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May 30

Ryan marked as to-read:
East of Eden (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
by John Steinbeck
bookshelves: to-read

my rating:

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July 22

Ryan gave

to:
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Paperback)
by Michel Foucault

my rating:

read in July, 2008

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May 26

Ryan marked as to-read:
Satan in Goray: A Novel (Paperback)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
bookshelves: to-read

my rating:

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June 27

Ryan gave

to:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Paperback)
by Mark Twain

my rating:

read in June, 2008

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May 06

Ryan added a quote:
"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." — Cormac McCarthy

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April 27

Ryan added a quote:
"True religion is not a meditation on death, but a meditation on life." — Gaetan Soucy

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Ryan added a quote:
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To the last syllable of recorded time/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." — William Shakespeare

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see all 77 of Ryan's books »

Ryan's favorite quotes

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

tags: inspirational, religion

129 people liked it

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
— Albert Camus

tags: beauty, humanity, inhumanity

23 people liked it

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
— Jorge Luis Borges

19 people liked it