I tried to read Birth of the Prison but had a little trouble and stopped.

In addition to Ulysses:



For my Roman History class

Neat, that's what my brother's reading.

I'm reading:

Although it gets on my nerves that "Also sprach Zarathustra" is translated into "Thus spake Zarathustra". "Sprach" in german is just the ordinary past tense. Translators should write their own book if they want to be creative.

An essay.
Descartes's Météores and the Rainbow Fountain
SIMON WERRETT

and various science books on how to generate artificial rainbows.

It's one of my fave delillo novel.
I usually don't like his writing in first person, not difficult, but a little bit "heavy" although he's considered the master of "minimal post-modern", but here is perfect, very personal and fluent, bizarre and deep.
cool dialogues, that family is wonderful, the kids are amazing.
have a nice time reading it!

at the moment I'm reading great jones street, always by don delillo, but honestly is nothing special... also here first person narration, lot of contemplation on old-fashioned details, the story is not even that interesting... talks about a rockstar hiding from celebrity.
RUNNING DOG is another cool one by dondelillo, and so is MAOII. once he came in italy for a reading festival years ago and he is a really smart and polite person, he answered many stupid questions in a very intelligent way.

finished naked lunch yesterday and started this bad boy:

Finished Heidegger's lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In keeping with the class material, I've began Gadamer's Truth and Method as well as Bruno Latour's The Pasteurization of France.

Ulysses, page 260. It took me 4 hours to read 80 pages 2 days ago.

that's pretty fucking fast for ulysses

Several books on Diane Arbus, and Richard Hamilton.

i started this on the wy to work this morning:

george orwell - down & out in paris & london

I didn't think any sane being read that unless it was mandatory.

that is one fucking awesome book. more fun in paris than in london. chicken/elevator = YES.

Ha, no shit. True story: My college freshman English prof (none other than David Morrell, author of First Blood and many other "thrillers") assigned us Ulysses. He told us to read the first and last 50 pages or something like that and he would tell us all about the rest in between. And this was for an English lit course for my major, not a core class. I loved him for that. He was a great teacher.

It's more of a test of my willpower. The way I see it, if I can read Ulysses, I can read anything. My major consists of reading A LOT of Latin translated to English and it drives me insane and I don't have time to learn fluent Latin right now. Latin jokes, puns, and insults do not translate well at all into English. Apuleius can kiss my golden ass.

My goal is to have it finished in two more weeks or less. Page 292, right now.

if it's a test of athleticism then you should go after finnegan's wake. that's where i throw the towel.

and shouldn't you change your major to something you can actually read in the original? this reminds me of the professor of hitler studies who couldn't read german.

Well, what I said is a half-truth. My major is History, but I haven't decided on which branch yet, so I'm in an early Roman Empire class right now because I know the professor pretty well. Ideally, my concentration will not be Roman History. I'll still take all his classes, though, along with whatever I choose to focus on.

I'm going to go back after I finish Ulysses and read Portrait of the Artist (I was about 1/4 finished with it....a year ago), then finish off the rest of Joyce.

I'm skim-reading In Search Of Lost Time again, because Proust is easily my favourite writer: the way that he describes the tones and textures of things, the subjects that he writes about (the psychological idiosyncrasies of people, his philosophies, 'society') and the long, intertwining storyline which is so full of surprises (and retrospective irony)... I just can't comprehend that there will ever be anything written that can match it. And he was gay.

I'd be grateful if anyone could help me with these questions:

1) I love New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. What is his second-best book?

2) I once tried to read Anna Karenina but stopped after 200 pages, at the point where Levin goes back to his farm and Tolstoy starts describing ancient Russian farming-techniques. I just thought 'why am I reading this?'. Should I try again, and be more patient?