I'm finishing Frances Wilson's biography of the writer Thomas De Quincey, Guilty Thing. De Quincey was like a very poor man's Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a lot of ways, both opium addicts, both Wordsworth groupies, both lazy under-achievers. He's most famous for writing Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

It's a good book, but I really grew to hate De Quincey as I grew to know him. What a ****ing loser. And yet despite his horrible scandalous miserable life, he turned out to be fairly influential as the pioneer of the subgenre junkie lit, so that's something.

In a similar (but better imo) vein, an interesting guy with an interesting book. He's attacked now as PI, but was from a family of radical abolitionists. Haven't thought of him in 50 years, but I liked reading him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_Hugh_Ludlow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hasheesh_Eater

Looks like an interesting read. I rarely hate people whose biographies I read; I suppose to me it's about whether they led interesting lives.

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I'm kind of embarrassed that I don't really know this author - I don't read anywhere near as much as I used to -

but anyway, David Foster Wallace is a modern author who is highly regarded - his major work being "Infinite Jest"

I haven't read it but I took aim at this free collection of essays and stories

the first one was really great - it was about the reaction of a small midwestern city to the 9/11 attacks - I'm planning to read several of the others

sadly, Wallace suffered from major depression and committed suicide when he was in his 40s



http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/2...n_the_web.html




on the bright side - there is an increasing amount of free literature available from various sources on the web - I'm keeping my wallet pretty well closed

I'm so glad you discovered DFW, he was the man.

Take the time to watch/listen to this, you won't regret it.

DFW is ridiculously good, but IJ is very difficult to read -- both entertaining and incomprehensible at the same time. I gave up halfway through. His shorter works are positively brilliant and +100 to the video.

I’ve tried IJ a couple of times because people whose taste I respect love the ****ing guy. Just can’t get through it. The gibberish chapters ****ing infuriate me. I am convinced it’s all a big inside joke and that’s what the title means and he lets you in on the secret on page 2,732 or something.

Just started a couple new books:

Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke. While i don't agree with him politically, I enjoy his writing. A good amount of cynicism presented in a humorous form.

Hold 'Em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky and Mason Malmouth. Foreword by Ray Zee. Just started, but that seems like a pretty good bunch to learn from.

nice. Didn't know that about Ray

how's early retirement, boss?

Not bad, thank you for asking. Took a camping trip for a couple weeks. Since returning, been puttering around the house/yard doing small maintenance projects or errands in the mornings until it gets hot, then relaxing in the shade reading 2p2 or my books.

Get back out after the heat of the afternoon, sometimes get the fire pit out and have a few beers in the evening. So far, so good.

He doesn't key you in on the joke :-(

I think the whole thing is sorta tragic. He poured his life into the book and it's got multiple layers of meaning, there's a whole cult of bros devoted to unlocking it. But if you read around, there's an interview where he says something like 'there are 5 themes to the book, people have discussed 2, 2 and a half of them'. Now he's dead and no one will really get what he was trying to say.

It's definitely a roller coaster - I hated it then moved it then hated it then... finally ended on an up swing. For my money, the online detectives seeking to solve the book as a literary puzzle are missing the basic level one emotional/moral message of the contrast between the two main characters - the druggie tennis player dude and the AA addict guy.

Finished The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer yesterday. For anyone interested in spirituality, meditation, or expanding one's toolkit to deal with fear, anxiety, or other unpleasant states of mind, this is as well-written and insightful a book as you can find imo. As a bonus, it's pretty short; the author does an amazing job writing efficiently and not wasting any words.

excellent

knew ray was an og but had no idea he was involved with that

Halfway done. Not loving it so far. It's all a little too precious for me.

He's my favorite working author, fwiw.

One of the funniest and best-written books of the generation. The first 250 pages are tough. Sometimes great literature is difficult.

My advice to those who've tried and failed before is to pick out either the Tennis Academy sections and stick to those and/or the halfway house sections [and characters] and read those. Either one would make a great novel alone.

The part with the eschatology game at the tennis academy is just amazing.

You guys are making me want to give IJ another shot. I love DFW's essays, it seems as though I could get into Infinite Jest.

It's probably a lot easier on Kindle, tbh. Much easier to look up a few words and skip back and forth to the footnotes.

I see I missed the Proust discussion. Started ISOLT about 10 weeks ago and just finished Volume 6, "The Fugitive." It's been quite a ride reading nothing but Proust for 10 weeks, but I feared if I put it down I might never have the motivation to finish. It's been one of the most enjoyable things I've read, as well as the most frustrating, not just for the anfractuous (one of the endless words I had to look up along the way) prose, but also for the main storyline of The Captive, which I found difficult to get through and couldn't wait to be over because of how distasteful I found the subject matter and the narrators ruminations. At one point I had learned of how that part of the story ended while looking at a list of characters, but it was so long ago I'd completely forgotten.

Anyway, one Volume left to go, and, I just realized, a scant 530ish pages as the final 400 pages are all commentary. I'll be done in no time.

I took me 5 years to finish Proust. One I started reading, I found it absorbing, but then I'd take a long break between books.

If you count the time I read 100 pages of Swan's Way before giving up, it's taken me 25 years

3,700 pages in and I can't spell Swann

Finished Utopia Avenue. I think Mitchell is an incredibly gifted writer, who creates characters whose fate I am incredibly invested in, but this book suffers from similar issues that I found detracted from some of his earlier works. About 80% of the time I’ve finished one of his books I am left wondering how much better it could have been with just a few different plotting decisions, which is frustrating because he is such a good writer.

The NYT review sums it up well: (mild spoiler for a plot device that any reader of his earlier work will see coming immediately)

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.

Spoiler: he argues, persuasively IMO, that our intuition has much more to do with our views and opinions than our reason does; reason is more often a post hoc narrative we find to fit our immediate emotional/intuitive takes.

Really interesting reading suggesting that debate dunking and point scoring essentially never convince anyone of anything. Only 1/6 of the way through but this seems to be where he is going. it will be interesting to see if he has recommendations as to how better to persuade.

I find Jonathan Haidt and his ideas to be very appealing, he's a sharp insightful guy. Especially by public intellectual standards, a lot of them are just out-and-out morons these days. And profoundly evil morons at that.