Thorough, yes, but not always about Pound's work; balanced, no. Of course, with Pound, few critics acheive balance. Kenner is more concerned with showing that Modernism is Pound, in a sense. The Pound Era is also my favorite work of literary criticism, and I have read it entirely at least three times. It very absorbing, as is most of Kenner's work. Kenner's earlier study of Pound deals more directly with Pound's work, but it's not as much fun to read. (It reads much more like a dissertation.) And Pound is such a divisive figure that some critics have trouble with simply reading the poetry.

But The Pound Era is the place to begin for any reader interested in Pound and Modernism in general. It's also one of the few books of criticism I would ever recommend to the average reader.

Currently reading What is the What as per Lounge recommendations and its so great. Words cannot describe how powerful this book is.

Glad to hear that you're enjoying it orange. I felt that it dragged at times, but in hindsight that might have been more fromt he mood I was in while reading it. I still loved it overall.

What is a lazy reader? If I read a work one time and just put it away am I a lazy reader?

Also, I am very bad at being able to abstract meaning from a writer beyond the story he is telling. I miss symbolism, etc. Right now I am reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and I like it a lot but I don't see anything beyond the story itself and that makes me feel a little stupid. I also feel stupid because I have to have a dictionary beside me when I read him. Is that weird? I always thought I had a pretty good vocabulary until I started reading McCarthy.

I finished The Double by Dostoevsky and I want to retract my initial criticism earlier in the thread when I started it. Well, that's not entirely true, I still don't like some of his sentence structure but my criticism was after reading 30 pages of the 160 page story and by the time I got to page 50 I realized that the sentence structure, and the way he was writing was a reflection of the main character of the story. By page 50 I was really enjoying the story and although I was a little confused a few times (was the double a real person or was it a split personality?) I really liked it.

I have read a little more about it online and it appears, as was mentioned in this thread, that The Double is one of his lesser works, and relatively bad compared to his other stuff. Since I did like The Double it makes me want to read more of him, I just have to decide between Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. I am leaning toward Crime and Punishment atm but am open to suggestions.

I would recommend The Double.

A lazy reader is one who jumps to conclusions. Also one who lets others decide the value of a work for him, or determine his opinions of it in other ways, without caring to check it against any original thoughts or reasonable cautions he might himself have.

If you put a work aside and it has given you what you like, you are not a lazy reader. But if you read it and then claim much knowledge of an author's works in general from one work, you are being lazy. Or if you
claim much knowledge or understanding of an author or a work (or works) because you've read a single critic, or biographer, you are a lazy reader. There are even some people who have only cursorily read a single work, but have glanced through some criticism or biography, and then felt informed enough to hold quite strong, even inviolate opinions, on certain authors and their works. This happens a lot with authors who have been highly politicized by others. Many movies about religious ideas get the same treatment from people who haven't seen them yet are willing to protest outside theaters and tell anyone who will listen how terrible they are in every way imaginable.

Read The Hero with A Thousand Faces. It's like a skeleton key to myths and literature.

I just startet reading Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, and I'm halfway through The Ultimate Hitchiker's Guide, which features five addtional short stories to the original Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That's 2x 1k pages, so I don't expect to be done with them anytime soon

re: ancillary materials (esp. "biographies")

I'd like to echo Milan Kundera, from his essay Sixty-three Words:

Novelist (and his life). "The artist must make posterity believe he never lived," Flaubert said. Maupassant kept his portrait from appearing in a series on famous writers: "A man's private life and his face do not belong to the public." Hermann Broch said about himself, Musel, Kafka: "The three of us have no real biographies." Which does not mean that their lives were meager in event, but that they were not destined to be noteworthy, to the public, to become bio-graphy. Someone asks Karel Capek why he doesn't write poetry. His answer: "Because I loathe talking about myself." The distinctive feauture of the true novelist: he does not like to talk about himself. "I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers, and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life", said Nabokov. Italo Calvino warned: no one should expect a single true word from him about his own life. And Faulkner wished "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books." (Underline: books and printed, meaning no unfinished manuscripts, no letters, no diaries.) According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it follows that a novelist's biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel. The moment Kafka draws more attention than Joseph K., the process of Kafka's posthumous dying begins.

Very nice. And how ghoulish the celebration of his corpse!

omg just finished reading this thread from page 1. Must have added about 30 books to my must-read-list.

Most Danish translations of foreign books suck, so the only thing I have read in my own language the last two years is the newspapers

One of my favorite novels, Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, wonderfully mimics and, at the same time, critiques the relentless digging into the artist's life. After you're done with that, you can delve into Nabokov's Pale Fire.

anybody read/reading Freakonomics?

I've read it. It was a fun little book. I remember falling in love with it while I was reading it. In time, the lust for the novel has faded somewhat, but it's still pretty awesome.

I actually should give that a reread sometime here (probably summer).

Freakanomics is indeed a fun little book that tie in alot of elements of society/culture/etc with different concepts. definitely worth a read imo.

We did Frekanomics in the book club a long while back, before the changeover

I was going to start reading Pale Fire within a couple of weeks. Do you recommend reading Flaubert's Parrot first? Please elaborate without spoiling anything!

Just finished No Country for Old Men. The book was quite good, it was almost scene for scene identical to the movie (except that the book adds about 4 scenes, most of them at the end).

I am currently reading All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer. An account of the CIA/British Service coup to take Mossadegh out of power in Iran. I am halfway through and it is really interesting how it shines a big light on a lot of things happening in the world today. The Western involvement in the Middle East for the sake of wealth in oil is shameful and sad.

This book appears quite hard to find.

I found both of these excellent. I really liked All the Shah's Men. Shed's light on the American, Iran, Irag situation.

Wow, I'm surprised to see that you're right, it is no longer as easy to find as it used to be. Amazon does have it from their independent sellers at:

Hero with a Thousand Faces

Either one would be fine to read first, and although they're similar, they both approach biographical criticism from different angles. Barnes' book, though, is rather short and an easy read; Nobokov's is a bit denser.

If you're going to read Pale Fire, I hope you enjoy footnotes/endnotes...

Despite the fact that I get overwhelmed and sometimes feel really ignorant,

good golly I love this thread.

I just finished a short story compilation called [I]Brooklyn Noir[I], good stuff. I've just started Cormac McCarthy's [I]All the Pretty Horses.[I] It's not what I'd call a grabber, but I'm going to stick with it.

i just picked up "things fall apart" it was one of my favorite books in high school and i lost it somewhere in the many moves during and since college.

Just wanted to bump this to say thanks, I persevered and am glad I did.