What are you currently reading?

[Fëanor]

The Diplomat on Netflix ... an outstand show.  Intriguing twists & turns in every episode.  Season 2 didn't disappoint and Season 3 is promised.

[Kalevala]

The Diplomat on Netflix ... an outstand show.  Intriguing twists & turns in every episode.  Season 2 didn't disappoint and Season 3 is promised.

Hi Fëanor.

I think you accidentally put this on the wrong thread?

Best,

K

[Fëanor]

Hi Fëanor.

I think you accidentally put this on the wrong thread?

Best,

K

Opps!! Sorry.

[San Antone]

I finished the last book in the Adam Dalgliesh series by P.D. James and picked up again the Ruth Rendell books featuring Inspector Wexford. 

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad. Emily Thomas.

[ritter]

Starting Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant).



This is regarded as one among the more significant of  Aragon's early achievements (apparently he himself gave great importance to this book). It's an undefinable genre (it's in prose, but significantly included in volume 1 of the Pléiade edition his poetic works). It describes in great detail areas of Paris (one area was to be demolished soon after the book was written), but this minuteness allows for surrealist elements to be introduced in the text. So far, very enjoyable (the more I read Aragon, the more I like his writing).

[T. D.]

I just ordered this via interlibrary loan:


I've read a lot about Congolese history, which is rather ugly.

Also planning to see this related film, which will be nearby in early Dec: "Soundtrack to a coup d'etat"

[ritter]

Starting a book I was bound to read sooner or later, Robert Antelme's L'Espèce humaine.



The introduction to this Pléiade edition of the book (included on an anthology of texts on WW2 concentration camps, published in 2021) starts as follows: "Robert Antelme is the author of just one book — and it is a great book, the book of an author who has written only to say what he could not remain silent about".

Antelme, at the time the husband of Marguerite Duras, was deported —having been arrested for being in the French resistance— in 1944 to Buchenwald and its satellite camp Gandersheim, and his repatriation after the end of the war (thanks to Francois Mitterrand and Duras' companion Dionys Mascolo) was touchingly retold many years later by Duras in La Douleur (a book I read when it was first published, and later saw a stage adaptation of, directed by Patrice Chèreau and with a superb Dominique Blanc). The 2017 film Memoir of War (directed by Emmanuel Finkiel) is based on the same material.

L'Espèce humaine is widely regarded in France as a major text dealing with deportation and the concentration camps, and its author has achieved a mythical (almost saintly) status in some quarters.

I have these two "ancillary" books in my library which —along with the profuse notes of the Pléiade edition— should help make the most out of this reading experience. I do t expect it to be easy, but do hope it proves rewarding.



The first one is a collection of texts by or on Antelme (with significant contributions by Maurice Blanchot) and the second one is Dionys Mascolo's late homage to his friend Antelme (when the latter had suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated for the last years of his life).

[SimonNZ]

I just ordered this via interlibrary loan:


I've read a lot about Congolese history, which is rather ugly.

Also planning to see this related film, which will be nearby in early Dec: "Soundtrack to a coup d'etat"

I'll be very interested to hear what you think of that book. Lumumba is a figure I find fascinating, and his story intersects with a lot of other moments in history that are, equally fascinating.

I saw Soundtrack To A Coup d'etat in a film festival a few months ago. Its not just good but brilliant. Even if you're feeling a bit under the weather that day don't miss it.


This reminds me that I've still got this recent book waiting to be read:



Will need to move it near the top of the pile

[Ganondorf]

Began to read my first Cormac McCarthy novel - All the Pretty Horses, the first part of the Border Trilogy. I intend to read the other parts as well.

[SimonNZ]

Putting some other reading on hold to get straight into this new release:

[Mookalafalas]

I started this due to a recommendation from the Washington Post--or maybe NYT. I'm about 2/3 through. It is by turns engaging and tedious. Absolutely the most repetetive book I've ever read. Dora, Nemo's friend with the memory disorder, would not get lost reading this book. Looking it up to post it here, I see it won last years Nobel Prize. Really? I felt it's one continuous sentence (really 80 million comma splices) stream of consciousness seemed more contived than inspired, but it is oddly readable--I'm nearing the end and just started it a day or two ago, and I'm reading a couple other things, too, so I guess it must be holding my attention... It's first book of a trilogy. I sort of hope I don't read the rest.

[Brian]

Putting some other reading on hold to get straight into this new release:

A bar in our neighborhood is doing a Murakami-themed trivia quiz night tonight. I wonder how popular it will be.

[SimonNZ]

NB
The passage about the abandoned child is actually from Basho's first travelogue, Nozarashi Kikō, which Wikipedia translates as Records of a Weather Exposed Skeleton, written about 10 years before Narrow Road. It's a rather disturbing passage and one Basho clearly meant to be disturbing.

Just found that today in a Penguin Classics volume I hadn't seen before. They translate the title as "Bones On The Wayside":

[JBS]

Just found that today in a Penguin Classics volume I hadn't seen before. They translate the title as "Bones On The Wayside":

I have that one, although I've only dipped in and out of it.

TD