RXTT's Intellectual Journey reviews the Codex Seraphinianus
http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/

today i'm reading about compost-heated greenhouses ha ha.

i have a massive pile of manure compost from a corral. wheeeeee!

compost = reincarnation

we costructed some nice simple hoop houses using 2" pvc conduit "hooped over" rebars sunk in the ground and covered with plastic. They worked great for a number of years until we could build our permanent ones.

yes! that's exactly the kind i'm building. i'm doing lowered beds so i'm shoveling dirt this afternoon! (right now on pomodoro break). might do thinner pvc though.

Nabokov's Transparent Things

& in the queue, John Barth's End of the Road

Finished The Laughing Monsters. Meh. So-so.

Still reading Cheever's Stories but I need a break. My intention is to read the whole thing but, good as he is, one tires of too much Cheever.

Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.
http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/...defleshpdf.pdf

What did you think of it?

I dug The structure of the White People. I also dug how the story as told by the girl's journal was all over the place, as if it was a young girl recounting strange adventures. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2015/0...-creep-me.html

Started it this weekend and I'm really enjoying it.

True story hebrew gamatria was so complex that Sir Isaac Newton had to invent an entirely new system of math to interpret it.. calculus! Of course Newton legitimately believed he was decoding a hidden prophecy about the end of the world but...

the informers by bret easton ellis

RXTT's Intellectual Journey continues with Joseph Campbell's Masks of God: Occidental Mythology http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2015/0...tys-myths.html

well, I don't give up on books very readily, and especially if there is something there once in a while, but Against the Day was an exception. From the beginning, with the adventures of the purile "balloon boys" gang, it failed to hold much interest for me. The middle was a slog, like the Afghanistan war, just unending dust and harsh, jarring changes of plot. I put it down for a couple of weeks and came back at page 890 with 200 more to go to find these awful unerotic sex scenes and revenge violence mixed in with his unending descriptions of womens clothing. Festishistic, and not in a good way. After Mason Dixon and his other works, this was a real failure. So little humor, such poorly drawn characters. I've tossed it and started on Rupert Everett's Erasure, which has given me, in the first 25 pages, more than ATD did in almost 900. A real relief to drop it.

THIS TIME IN EARNEST

Antonio Melechi, Servants of the Supernatural

haven't been reading in a while, but just found this one in bookstore today. looking forward to it.

 

That looks cool greenlight. Tell me how it is!

I am now reading some fiction, supposedly one of the weirdest novels of the last year or so.

Not necessarily reading, but I at least finally own hardcover copies of all 5 available books from A Song of Ice and Fire.

My book review blog has reached 2,500 unique worldwide hits. 21 from Russia in the past week alone! http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/

Finishing up TRANSPARENT THINGS. What the hell was this about, Vlad? LOL.

Loved your review of The White People.

Nice blog, Rob. Please review some Nabokov.

First I need to read some Nabokov!

My reading is usually 95% non-fiction, 5% fiction. I am currently reading the above referenced novel, Mort(e) http://sohopress.com/books/morte/ , where ants are planning humanity's end and brainwash other animals into fighting their war. It is weird.

All librarians need to read some Nabokov.

what do you recommend to begin with?

Lolita. His best masterpiece. I say that because I think he has several masterpieces. Buy the annotated edition, as the literary, cultural, and other illusions throughout the book are simply astounding. Plus, as a librarian, you should know how to address the dweebs who think the book is some kind of pedo porn.

Speak, Memory. A brilliant, ecstatically written memoir.

After those two, Transparent Things, to see if you understand it any better than I do.

he works in a library!

this semester's (tiny) reading list for class:





+ loads more, as I will be writing my BA thesis this semester.
but I will talk about the literature I'll be using as soon as I start working on it... which I should have done yesterday. Heh.

I know. (I don't get it.)

If you like that I'd strongly recommend Joe Sacco's books about the war in the former Yugoslavia, firstly Safe Area Gorazde.

Berserk by Kentaro Miura. Second vol 2 of a relentlessly violent, gruesome and oppressive medieval swordplay type thing.

And this:



Chaos by James Gleick, very interesting in parts, tedious journalism for the rest.

I agree on the Gleick. My fave book of his is Genius, about my hero Richard P. Feynman

I received this book in the mail this morning:



I already finished it. I really liked it. I like reading books written by people my age.

His powers did wane over time, and this is probably his least satisfying work, or would have been if Original of Laura had remained unpublished. But I seem to remember some mind-blowing bit about a pencil in a drawer.

But about time he wrote a dud. Since the mid-1920s (!!) he'd been pouring out some of the most delightful fiction my eyes have ever read.

His first novel, Mary, is a bit slight, but a good intro to his themes. (He spent five decades writing about the same four or five things, which isn't a criticism, just a description).

Then begins an impressive streak of finely-woven fiction fun, little bursts of pleasure coming in at 250 pages or less. Some are better than others, but all are good. Invitation to a Beheading, Despair and The Defense are common favorites of the period.

His Russian phase ends with The Gift, which ranks among his best work. But it is dense, and reveals its pleasures slowly and only to patient readers. It doesn't have much of the immediate joy which shimmers off the others.

He switched to English and wrote two more short, great ones The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister, then Lolita. The book is long, diffuse, and grows a little tedious halfway through. It's a grand summation, which has its value, but I usually prefer all the earlier stuff he was summing up.

Pnin is a classic, and is very touching, a quality that can be somewhat rare in Nabokov.

Pale Fire is, in my lowly opinion, the best novel he wrote.

After an amazing start, Ada runs out of steam, and so does Nab's career. Look at the Harlequins is okay, but a slightly younger Nab would've crushed it.

His short story collection is a desert island pick, and if a wave threatened to wash away all my choices, this might be the one I'd save. It's packed with everything that made him great, and contains some new tricks he wasn't able to pull off in novels.

His only goal was to give a certain type of reader a rollicking good time, and I think he succeeded many times over. But yeah, he fucking blew it with this one.

Thank you, evollove, for that great retrospective! I need to pick up Pale Fire and Pnin, soon as I finish my Barth (Lost in the Funhouse and End of the Road).

i meant why buy when everything is at your fingertips free of charge at the library

what he needs is not to buy but to read

sorry, it's my anticonsumerist bias pointing out language/culture tics

my form of "political correctness" if you will (everyone has their causes)

please don't take it personally-- my target is the culture at large which sweeps us all

camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente

If it is not free at the Library I work at, I can get it through Inter-Library Loan, which is AWESOME, or there is always the internetwebs search for "(insert book title here) pdf" or for older books, Project Gutenberg.

for example. You wanna read Hemingway?

Old Man & The Sea http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvin.../oldmansea.pdf

The Sun Also Rises
http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content...24grammata.pdf

Complete Short Stories of Hemingway
https://theteacherscrate.files.wordp...-hemingway.pdf

Speaking of buying books, I just bought these. I've read Redux but not the bottom books. The hardbacks are in pristine condition. I bought all for $5 total, from the public library's store.

Most of the books I read are library loans. However, I have to have my own copies of my favorite books. The above, for example.

Another reason I buy books is that I am a slow reader. I have to renew and renew library books, then recheck them out, and on and on. However, the college library here has lonnngg loan times, basically the whole academic year, and then whole summer.

Lovecraft - Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories