books 1/1-3/31

[ferdiath]

Hello. I'm going to round up my reading situation for the first three months of the year.I did not do the reading plan I had intended, because I had intended to start by finishing up loose ends in reading from the year before, and I also still haven't done that <3.

• Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe

I've read this one once before I am. I mean it's fun. I'm a fan of it. This is definitely the version I am the most familiar with so, if nothing else, it was nice to have it fresh in my head before starting Goethe's Faust.

• New and Selected Poems, Volume 1 - Mary Oliver

I'd been reading this slowly starting about September/October 21, doing a poem or two a day depending on how I was feeling. Now i'm trying to keep it at a poem a day, but when I forget I'll usually forget a few days and then come back to it. I'd like to find my favorites and share them but sadly I immediately lent the book to my sister to read and so therefore I cannot do that. All I will say is Mary Oliver sure as hell can write some poems. So many of them make me stop and just kind of go "ohhhh" for a minute before starting my day again.

• The Paris Review Issue 236 - TPR

I was so close to being caught up in The Paris Review (heartborken) but that is, simply, the case with subscriptions. Anyways, it's a collection and I always like it well enough. I was immensely fond of Allan Gurganus' Art of Fiction 248interview. There's a lot I ended up underlining that interested or resonated with me. not going to hand off all of it but in particular: "Empathy is a writer's pilot's license. Without it, you are grounded. You aren't creating characters. You're judging them." and "As mortals we'll never make a perfect thing. But it's our obligation to try."

I also have markoffs from the other interview, Kwame Anthony Appiah's Art of Nonfiction 10. Philosophy is something I only understand in the literal sense of application within literature, so the perspective of the theoretical was interesting.

I came to understand the verification principle, which is the idea that you don't really understand a statement unless you can figure out what it would take to show that it was true. Not for it to be true, but to show that it's true, or to understand what it would be to show that it was false--to verify or to falsify...but the process of thinking in this deliberate, careful way about whether you understand a claim, what it would be to support the claim or refute the claim--all of that turned out to be quite exciting, because you could apply it to all sorts of things.

He's talking specifically about religion in this case, but I thought it was interesting. Faith is a complicated topic for me, too, and his perspective of "I guess what I felt was, when I first lost my faith, that this was a loss, and I wasn't sure I wanted to impose it on anybody else." just kind of hits something in my brain I'm not entirely sure I would like to explain, but y'know.

I don't have any direct quotes, but I thought Peyton Burgess' A Supernatural Landscape of Love and Grief Not Unlike Your Own was good as well, but, well, guy who liked Infinite Jest (derogatory).

OH ALSO this one contained the excerpt of a comic adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women (Anne Carson) done by Rosanna Bruno, which I really liked by virtue of it being a comic. The Paris Review is, don't get me wrong, pretentious literati shlock, but I like that more stuff is becoming pretentious literati nonsense. Even if right now it's.. .y'know. It's a step on the way.

• The Paris Review Issue 237 - TPR

THE BEYOĞLU MUNICIPALITY WASTE MANAGEMENT ORCHESTRA IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOD . YOU SHOULD READ IT. I WILL NOT QUOTE THE WHOLE THING BUT I WANT TO BUT

"Do you think he's died?" I asked Mehmet. We were in the cab of the truck, watching Hamdi drag a large bin full of sardine tins across the street.
"Who?"
"The old composer."
"Old men are in the habit of dying," he said.

It's so good. i Will . god it's so good. I liked both of the interviews but I don't remember them sticking out too much with me. I also thought Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof by Joy Katz was good, but I believe when I read that my grandfather went back into hospice again (not to say that made it any more/less good, just to say that it meant I cried a lot while reading it in ways I probably wouldn't have otherwise). This edition also has a story that really threw me for a loop in a bad way because there was . attempted SA of a minor. And that kind of hit out of nowhere so . yeah. The Jim Moore, George Bradley, and Michael Klein poems were good. That's all.

• Faust - Johann Goethe

HONESTLY. this is my first time reading Goethe's version of Faust and I truly have no thoughts on it. I think it's interesting in contrast with Doctor Faustus, where there's a much more clear contract conclusion and Faustus does try and repent (too late) in a way Faust doesn't really. It was fun. Probably I'll read it again, I think it's one of those books I need to read multiple times.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare

I read this because of Edel Delight. Last time I read Midsummer was middle school so it was overdue for a reread. but. yeah.It's still Midsummer.

• Dune - Frank Herbert

I WILL ATTEMPT TO BE BRIEF (1/???) no just kidding I think I've said most of what I have to say about this book already. I didn't really enjoy it tbh but also I did a lot, so that's sort of a fun middle position to be in. Quite frankly the worldbuilding was relatively lackluster in the first book imo. Arrakis isn't established overly much, and beyond that the plot kind of doesn't justify the worldbuilding. A lot of this is being retroactively shaded better in my brain because of the way Messiah introduces more nuance (and more interesting elements to the worldbuilding). In Dune it was really hard to feel like the stakes were anything because Paul was good at everything he did and there was a certain sense of, like, he's making choices to avoid Jihad (and will likely succeed), but starting the second book with the idea that he's failed that, and there already is a Jihad going on in his name, and now his only options are to do things that mitigate the ultimate damage that he could cause is more interesting, I guess. He talks about his personal desire to take Chani and just run away, but his understanding that if he has control over the war, he can avoid it traveling down some of the more extreme or violent paths it might under a more radical leader. BUT he is still causing war, and I think that sort of internal struggle is at least more interesting. I am still disappointed the Harkonnens (as it stands now) are all completely dead just because Feyd-Rautha ended up being a meh character, but he has a kid somewhere iirc so maybe that'll come back.

My opinions are never very solid so it's not like if I say I hate the series right now that it'll ever change. It is definitely a book that's very endemic of 60s scifi writing in a way that I get, but it's not exactly fun to read.

Anyway I was going to list of the books I'm "Currently Reading" and like gameplan getting through them but good lord I cannot do the second one.

1. The Aeneid - Virgil
2. Beowulf (literally do not know which translation I'm supposedly reading right now. Probably Chickering?)
3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dick
4. Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert
5. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study - Stuart Gilbert
6. New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 - Mary Oliver
7. The Paris Review 238 - Emily Stokes
8. Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake - Clive Hart
9. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
10. Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut
11. Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books - Ursula K. Le Guin
12. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

I need to . solve this. I'm almost done (finally) with the Ulysses study..........and then I have to get back into Three Musketeers.....I would like to say I do these more frequently, but given the kinds of books I read, less frequent is probably better in terms of having something to say. but!