Othello for me.

Don't know wtf that means but it sounds pretentious as ****. Hamlet was aite, enjoyed coming to class stoned and reading that one.

Finished Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. These folks aren't waiting for Godot, they're Brooklynites, they're desperately chasing him, hunting him, but the result is the same. Fox doesn't use iconic tropes to beat us over the head, this is American Godot: mundane, insipid, quotidian and turgid.

They mistake abundance for success and introspection for understanding. There is no end to their desperation or their attempts to satisfy their emptiness, it is eternal.

Reminds me of Light Years.

Started So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano.

His words, not mine. But you seem to be the kind of person who responds to any unusual combination of words by thinking it is pretentious.

I wonder what Nabokov meant.

What was the context for the quote?

That's not true.

It just seems like a fancy sounding qualifier.

They may be his words, but lord knows why you'd assume people would understand them. We ain't all English scholars.

Interesting response!

There's a good piece on Paula Fox in the New Yorker by Joan Acocella.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...bad-beginnings

She says that The Widow’s Children is Fox’s masterpiece, but notes that Desperate Characters has received the most critical admiration (“and it is very fine”).

My favourite line from Desperate Characters was

"His {Shakespeare} verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays."

I think he was referring to the sheer quality of the writing, which I imagine he has in his mind a quantitative categorical sense of, and was optimistically hoping that that particular phrase would suffice to communicate that with brevity and without pontification. I think Nabokov evaluated writing by beauty, of course, as he would talk about its effectual tingling of the spine, but also assiduously by its technical skill, and here I can imagine the merging of those two characteristics forming intuitively a "verbal poetic texture."

My favorite lines, from near the end of the midpoint chapter:

. . . she knew he didn't believe much in the efficacy of words which were, after all, only for what could be said. The truth about people had not much to do with what they said about themselves, or what others said about them. She felt a rush of sympathy for him. He was not able to say what he meant.
"I know," she said quickly. "I know exactly what you mean." It touched her profoundly that neither of them knew.

Lol, that's amazing. Touching.

Acocella's description of Fox's childhood is harrowing!

I'm reading this now. It's quite funny, although perhaps more wry grin than laughter inducing and whilst it's not fantastic in any way, certainly has a bit of the absurd sense I got from The Third Policeman. It reads like a Wes Anderson film waiting to be made.

Finished So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano. Modiano's themes and style are unchanged.

His character isn't sure what he's looking for, if he wants to be looking for anything or if he can rely on his memory to assist him. Of course, he doesn't find something that he wouldn't know if he found.

The initiating event in this Modiano novel is different. If you're addicted to Modiano and are in need of a fix, this will work. Typically short and vague, it's a quick read.

Whatever your prior judgment of Modiano has been, it won't change.

Started Oh! A Mystery of Mono No Aware by Todd Shimoda.

"Printed in Thailand by the hospitable and capable folks at Sirvatana Interprint Public Co."

Finished 7 Second or Less about the 2005-2006 Phoenix Suns. The book was quite good. I liked the account from an insider perspective. It's a little sad that none of those Suns teams ever made it to the final. They were really fun.
I guess they can at least feel good about inspiring the current Spurs and the Golden State Warriors.

Started La Place de l'Etoile by Patrick Modiano.

I finished this last night. I liked it enough to pick up the (afaict unrelated) sequel, but am a bit bemused at the degree of some of the praise the books seems to be getting: its pacing seemed a bit off, and the humour was also uneven. Whilst you don't have to be a literary genius to see a metaphorical message in the story, perhaps I was missing some depths that the critics found.

Thx to whoever recommended The Queen's Gambit

Yesterday I think I saw something saying that book 3 of the Name of the Wind/Kingkiller Chronicles by Rothfuss might not be out until 2017? What is taking that book so long?

The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy

Neuro-science book about the self.

Interesting so far, but note to authors of non-fiction: after the introduction/prologue, quit telling me what this book is going to do and just do it.

Stalingrad by Jochen Hellbeck

Not about the military campaign so much as interviews with Russians (and Germans) who survived. Was part of a USSR project to interview viewpoints of civilians and soldiers after the battle. Most of it wasn't always flattering and the project got buried for years in Moscow Archives.

Pretty interesting stuff really - and often multiple viewpoints of different soldiers in the same unit are woven together to tell a complete narrative

RB

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" - Yoko Ogawa

From Wikipedia: The story centers around a mathematician, "the Professor," who suffered brain damage in a traffic accident in 1975 and since then can produce only 80 minutes' worth of memories, and his interactions with a housekeeper (the narrator) and her son "Root" as the Professor shares the beauty of equations with them.

Fairly short and quick read but surprisingly enjoyable.

"Hotel Iris" - Yoko Ogawa

This one I found a bit disturbing but couldn't put it down. May not be for everyone.
There is a review here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=125990583

Really enjoying Leaving the Atocha Station

I think these kind of books are in my wheelhouse. I struggle with normal fiction and nonfiction