Alex > Recent Status Updates

Shit. I really like this. Some of the stories give me that magical Borges feeling, yet they are somehow more conventional (jaded post-millenium impression?). I was wrong about Cortazar and so on and so forth... But this collection still seems wildly different from Hopscotch.

Putting this aside until the time is again right.

I'm really enjoying this, so yes, I'm sure that a charitable reread of Hopscotch lurks somewhere in my future.

I am officially putting this back on my "currently reading" list. I had been dipping in to it on occassion since putting it down for god knows what reason during the late summer of last year. I'm in dire need of a literary pick-me-up, due to the drudgery that is Terra Nostra and the melancholia of Gilead. More cartoons, please!

There's so much I want to read this summer that I wish I good start right now: Richardson, Vollmann, Stegner, Williams, Woolf - the list goes on... So many authors to discover and revisit.

I told myself that I would marathon-read over the long weekend. It didn't work out.

I'm glad Valentin agrees with me about the panther woman being the best story.

The awkward parts make me wonder if it's the translation or the writing. It's still holding my attention. What it's really doing is making me want to take a stab at JR, what with all that dialogue. Or maybe I'll resume The Recognitions.

The first genuine page-turner I've read in awhile.

So far I'm not feeling At the Gates of The Animal Kingdom as much as Reasons to Live. I hope Moody wasn't bullshitting me about Hempel getting better and better.

Just went back and read the intro by Rick Moody. It sucked. The Four Fingers of Death is currently being recalled from my to-reads.

Beautiful.

I have entered The New World.

Gonna try to finish the "Old World" portion this weekend...

My enthusiasm has leveled off.

I picked this up some time ago simply for the nyrb font and goofy cover photo. If the quality of the first 25 pages is any indication of what is to follow, then I have successfully judged a book by it's cover. Macaulay is a trip.

I hadn't expected Hume's prose to be so tasty.

"...I... take out the Gorosabel rifle, slip off its safety catch and aim through the window at the extreme outcroppings of the rock spur; after holding my aim for two or three seconds I stop, put the rifle back into the chest we picked up in the South of India and lock up the chest, then I take a deep breath and my wife says behind my back: Did you take aim again at the extreme outcroppings of rock spur?"

So long, paragraph breaks. Hello obsessively repetitive, elongated sentences.

What's this, Bernhard - paragraph breaks?

I'm pleasantly surprised that this is more fucked up than I thought it would be.

Setting this aside. The DeLillo vibes were bumming me out. I'm really not into the whole plain-spoken-to-the-point-of-absurdity thing.