Metal Reviews

Agreed. I think you (and everyone into 'the great novels') should at least give Brothers Karamazov a try.

i was told to start off with The Gambler or C&P instead, and that TBK and Notes are his densest.

The Idiot was supposed to be readable despite its length, guess not.

TBK is just long. I've only ever gotten three quarters of the way through before school or other obligations take me away from it. C&P is solid, enjoyable reading. I wouldn't consider Notes dense. Regardless, don't let Idiot slow you down from picking up others.

I've been reading a lot of Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss on Benjamin in order to write a paper on historiographical method. Reading about 1930s German arcades and political art during the rise of Hitler is pretty cool.

On the last couple dozen pages of The Moonstone. Good potboiler with humour and grace. Starting Heidegger's Being and Time and WB Yeats' anthology of Irish folk/fairy tales for holiday reading.

*shudder*

I only have a week more of writing, I should plan my holiday reading. Probably some Adorno, maybe a music textbook, possibly a book about HP Lovecraft and object-oriented ontology.

Pretty much everyone at my school came here to study Heidegger so I figure I should at least learn a lil more about him. Gonna listen to Dreyfus lectures while readin' through it so hopefully I won't be totally lost.

Did someone recommend the Dreyfus lectures? I like him, but most other folks don't. Which copy are you using? I would seriously recommend the SUNY version and not the McQuarrie translation: http://www.amazon.com/Being-Series-Cont ... 1438432763

The trick with reading him is basically committing to it and plowing through it regardless of how well you're understanding it. Initial ten pages are clear, then twenty pages suck and then ten pages will make sense. You read forty more pages and the first set of pages that gave you trouble will make sense. Rinse and repeat. Heidegger, moreso than Kant or Marx even, radically influenced my thinking. Sartre does phenomenology, but Heidegger does it well. It is worth the effort. He improves your thinking and makes reading a lot of other folks much easier. You'll be well rewarded if you put the time into it. As time passes since having read it, the more I understand it.

I've got the MacQuarrie translation. The Dreyfus lectures were the only ones I found, I've heard his take on the book is a little idiosyncratic but still worth listening to.

Depending on your broader interests, Dreyfus might be right up your alley. Dreyfus is a weird dude, going from writing on Foucault and hermeneutics to writing about cognitive science and AI. If you're interested in either of those two routes, Dreyfus will be more helpful to you than getting an authentic Heideggerian reading of Being and Time. Because like fuck those guys.

Read Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick on the plane today. I feel like this and Hocus Pocus lean closer to misanthropy than to satire. Maybe that's been his thing all along? I read the other stuff a while ago. Anyways, it was solid.

Read Nabokov's The Originals of Laura today. It was short. Hints at what the book might've looked like and been about, but really was only 1/5th or 1/10th of a novel. worth perusing for an afternoon at a library if you're a fan and want to fill in the blanks with your fantasy ! ~

Decided to tackle Against the Day over the holidays. I get excited about starting a new Pynchon book moreso than any other author, even when I didn't know who he was and read a couple pages of Mason & Dixon at a bookstore. He has that mystique to him.

bought a bunch of books for Brazil, before i remembered i don't ride the train here (mainly because there isn't one.

Roberto Bolaño - Savage Detectives
Nabokov - Lolita - only cheap Nabokov there but fuck it, €3.5
Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-five

plus, in French,
L'Elegance du Herisson - claro ue ajuda mas e a longo prazo?
The Little Prince

I bought the complete History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, eight hardback volumes from an eighties straight reprint of the original. Me like.

I'm jealous! As brilliant as Gibbon was over the whole scope of the work(I've only read parts and summaries), he was really unfair to the Byzantine successor empire, though to be fair much has been discovered since he wrote it which showed them a far more dynamic civilization than originally assumed.

didn't really enjoy Slaughterhouse-five. also finished The History of Love, it's a nice story with nice themes, but the book-within-the-book was pretty crap, a trait shared with Everything is Illuminated - the author is married to Jonathan Saffran Foer to boot. one line i found exceptionally nice:



also finished The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and absolutely loved it. think i'll have to really dive into Kundera's work.

now reading Superfreakonomics (quite a lot of fun) and Lolita.

Finished up Mace Windu's novel Shatterpoint.

Its great to see his character explored in length, they actually humanized him and made him much different from Jackson's cardboard performance in the PT. His bond with Depa feels real and when he talks to her/about her you can genuinely feel like he cares for her, not to mention the insane amount of fights he had to get to with star ships/CIS lackeys and Kar Vastor in order to get to her only to fight her. He went through a lot but the book was great, and gave excellent explanations of his fighting style/shatterpoint. 8/10

Might take a break from SW novels/comics and either try reading Brave New World or some philosophical works.

M.D Lachlan - Fenrir - Craw triology #2
Robert Jordan - Crown of Swords - Wheel of Time #7
Chris Wooding - The Ascendancy Veil - The Braided Path triology #3
Phillip Parker - The Northmen's Fury: A History of the Viking World
Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice - Farseer triology #1

Co-reading all of these.

Dexter: Darkly Dreaming (Jeff Lindsay)

Hey Mike. It's good to have you back.