Jon Reading Books > Recent Status Updates

I'm not reading much lately, but I am enjoying this. I'd highly recommend the Grossman translation, which comes packed with copious footnotes illuminating Cervantes' wit that would have otherwise been wholly lost in translation.

Folio Society edition includes some amazing original Jonathan Burton artwork:

https://i.imgur.com/90eFJpN.jpg

Washing the Pynchon taste out of my brain with some Cervantes.

Like reading an unusually intelligent ADHD sufferer who's just done way too much cocaine.

Banging them out today given how slow everything has become at work. Thanks, Coronavirus.

Always so disappointing to see slavery enthusiastically supported via codification in the Qur'an, as in the Bible before it. I didn't necessarily expect different, but still.

If Kindle could stop marking every book I open as "finished" that would be fucking extraordinary.

"And those (women) you fear may rebel, admonish, and abandon them in their beds, and smack them. If they obey you, seek no other way against them."

Women 4:33

The Cow is the opening surah, noteworthy in its retellings of both Old and New Testament content, including Adam and the Garden of Eden, Moses and the Exodus, Saul, Jesus and Mary, and others. I wonder how many Christians realize this stuff is in here.

On the downside, it's quite harsh against unbelievers, regularly referring to us as evildoers and constantly reminding us we're destined to burn in hell.

Joyce is such an incredible writer. I'm going to have plenty of highlights from this one.

Really enjoying how introspective this is.

How disconcerting as a non-believer to read such hostility towards non-believers in the first handful of pages:

"Beware of the Fire whose fuel is mankind and stones, made
ready for the unbelievers"

Yup, we're reading this one this year. Hopefully it's an easier read than my KJV experience last year... We'll soon see.

Yep, I'm reading this again, for the 3rd time, because I'm a slovenly fanboy.

I've picked up the ridiculously expensive Folio Society special edition—which is lovely—and I'll be reading at a very slow pace as I continue to carve through the lit I've planned to get through this year.

I once read someone call a book "more enjoyable to appreciate than to read", and I'm feeling that with The Aeneid like I did with the Iliad. They were constructed as poetry, after all, and they just don't read the same prosaically. Very repetitive, very indulgent, but not so much fun to read.

Mann's slips regularly into more philosophical meandering but manages to blend it into the narrator's journey rather better than similar diversions I've seen in stuff like Dostoyevsky. It's a pretty novella so far, and I'm enjoying what Mann's giving me to think about.

Virgil is revisiting some of the same territory as Homer, though to lesser effect. I was looking forward to Aeneas and Dido's reunion in the underworld, only to have it end rather abruptly. So far the majority of the story is simple exposition with no real stakes, though in pretty words, and clearly crafted for contemporary Roman readers in mind.

This Ahl translation is pretty good thus far—I'd recommend it.