Chris's bookshelf: read en-US Wed, 14 May 2025 07:20:28 -0700 60 Chris's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel 936818 824 Nikos Kazantzakis 0671530801 Chris 0 4.62 1938 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
author: Nikos Kazantzakis
name: Chris
average rating: 4.62
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: greek, big-book, to-read, poetry
review:

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Doom Town 60132890 202 Gabriel Blackwell 1953409091 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2, 000-beep-boop 4.76 Doom Town
author: Gabriel Blackwell
name: Chris
average rating: 4.76
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2, 000-beep-boop
review:

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As A God Might Be 35995560 599 Neil Griffiths 0993575846 Chris 0 british, to-read-pri-2 3.66 2017 As A God Might Be
author: Neil Griffiths
name: Chris
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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shelves: british, to-read-pri-2
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Schattenfroh 216520763
Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading—Schattenfroh—directed by none other than the narrator’s mysterious jailer by the same name. Undulating through explorations of Renaissance art, the German reformation, time-defying esoterica, the printing process in the 16th century, Kabbalistic mysticism, and beyond, Schattenfroh is a remarkable book that, in turn, asks the remarkable of its readers.

Interruptions, breaks, and annotations both buoy and deceive, and endless historical references, literary allusions, and wordplay construct a baroque, encyclopedic quest. Schattenfroh’s publication in English marks a seminal moment in the history of the literary form.]]>
1001 Michael Lentz 1646053826 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 0.0 2018 Schattenfroh
author: Michael Lentz
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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Narcissus and Goldmund 5955 315 Hermann Hesse 0312421672 Chris 0 german, to-read-pri-2 4.16 1930 Narcissus and Goldmund
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Chris
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1930
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: german, to-read-pri-2
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Spent Light 204549341
‘“Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,� the woman says at one point. All of it’s there, all interconnected, and she can’t stop looking. The likeness between a pepper mill and a hand grenade, for example, or the scarcely hidden violence of an egg timer.

And what if objects knew their own histories? What if we could allow ourselves to see those weird resonances, echoes, loops, glitches, just as Pawson does so beautifully and unnervingly here?


‘​Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss � because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.�
� Jennifer Hodgson

‘I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.�
� M. John Harrison

‘A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history � the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.�
� Merve Emre]]>
146 Lara Pawson 1739421221 Chris 0 british, to-read-pri-2 3.75 Spent Light
author: Lara Pawson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
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Extinction 8942442
Franz-Josef Murau—the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family—lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister’s wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate. Written in the seamless, mesmerizing style for which Bernhard was
famous, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.]]>
326 Thomas Bernhard 1400077613 Chris 0 000freqreq000, to-read-pri-2 4.24 1986 Extinction
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Chris
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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shelves: 000freqreq000, to-read-pri-2
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X in Paris 3670800
"Brodsky is a master both of technique and of language, his sentences positively crackling with unexpected insights."-- Publishers Weekly

"Brodsky possesses a masterly control of diction and rhythm, an often startling metaphoric gift, and a range of effects extending from Swiftian bluntness to Proustian elaboration."-- The New York Review of Books

"He brings the reader to reflect anew on ways of knowing and truths of being in an uncertain world."-- The New York Times Book Review]]>
196 Michael Brodsky 0941423131 Chris 0 short-stories, to-read-pri-2 3.80 1988 X in Paris
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: short-stories, to-read-pri-2
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Greek Lessons 61686012 “Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.�

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.]]>
192 Han Kang 0593595270 Chris 0 korean, nobel, to-read-pri-2 3.54 2011 Greek Lessons
author: Han Kang
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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Whale 58579147 Whale, set in a remote village in South Korea, follows the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle. Brimming with surprises and wicked humor, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions by one of the most original voices in South Korea.]]> 365 Myeong-kwan Cheon 1953861148 Chris 0 korean, to-read-pri-2 4.07 2004 Whale
author: Myeong-kwan Cheon
name: Chris
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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shelves: korean, to-read-pri-2
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Detour 4066566 552 Michael Brodsky 0615122469 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 4.25 1977 Detour
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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Dyad 4737581 299 Michael Brodsky 0941423301 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 0.0 1989 Dyad
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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Xman 1746501 540 Michael Brodsky 0941423026 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 4.25 1987 Xman
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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Three Goat Songs 4910253 166 Michael Brodsky 0941423468 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.17 1991 Three Goat Songs
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 3.17
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[Southernmost and Other Stories]]> 4597536 Also in the collection are "The Son, He Must Not Know," an investigation of a father/son relationship brought to a critical point by a toy the father purchases for his child; "Ferry" and "The Assessed," abstract examinations of storytelling; "Bagatelle," "The $50,000 a Year Man," and "Partridges, and Nothing But," which, echoing scenes out of Kafka, together analyze the working life - what it is to have to take orders, to be caught in the absurdities of an organization, the necessity to endure what Beckett called "incandescent grey" in order to survive.
Brodsky's work, like that of his literary predecessors - Beckett, Kafka, and Proust - places serious demands on its readers. But just as there is no question Brodsky is not a "light read," there is also no question but that he is developing a body of work that marks him among the most important writers and thinkers of our age.]]>
341 Michael Brodsky 1568580649 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 0.0 1996 Southernmost and Other Stories
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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* * * 883237 Book by Brodsky, Michael 367 Michael Brodsky 1568580010 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 2.67 1994 * * *
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 2.67
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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Searches and Seizures 430579 320 Stanley Elkin 0879232536 Chris 0 short-stories, to-read-pri-2 4.04 1973 Searches and Seizures
author: Stanley Elkin
name: Chris
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: short-stories, to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[The Riddle of the Traveling Skull]]> 90892 264 Harry Stephen Keeler 1932416269 Chris 0 mystery, to-read-pri-2 3.68 1934 The Riddle of the Traveling Skull
author: Harry Stephen Keeler
name: Chris
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: mystery, to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[At Least We Can Apologize (Library of Korean Literature, 07)]]> 17591566 185 Lee Ki-Ho 1564789195 Chris 0 korean, to-read-pri-2 3.58 2009 At Least We Can Apologize (Library of Korean Literature, 07)
author: Lee Ki-Ho
name: Chris
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: korean, to-read-pri-2
review:

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Abandon: A Novel 61153771
On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman, and child in a remote mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins, and not a single bone found.

Now, journalist Abigail Foster and her historian father have set out to explore the long-abandoned town and learn what happened. With them are two backcountry guides—along with a psychic and a paranormal photographer who are there to investigate rumors that the town is haunted.

But Abigail and her companions are about to learn that the town’s ghosts are the least of their worries. Twenty miles from civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they realize they are not alone.

The ordeal that follows will test this small team past the breaking point as they battle the elements and human foes alike—and discover that the town’s secrets still have the power to kill.

Part journey into old-West history, part nail-biting survival thriller, Abandon is a bloody, darkly surprising tale as only Blake Crouch could deliver.
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464 Blake Crouch 0593598520 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.33 2009 Abandon: A Novel
author: Blake Crouch
name: Chris
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
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The Names 7688455 339 Don DeLillo Chris 0 greek, to-read-pri-2 3.70 1982 The Names
author: Don DeLillo
name: Chris
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: greek, to-read-pri-2
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Ratner's Star 28701 438 Don DeLillo 009992840X Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.51 1976 Ratner's Star
author: Don DeLillo
name: Chris
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
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The Abyss 198216863 192 Fernando Vallejo 0811238512 Chris 0 3.17 2002 The Abyss
author: Fernando Vallejo
name: Chris
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: colombian, latin-american-select, to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)]]> 7968762
In this semiautobiographical novel, Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theater critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting on the front lines in World War II. As he wanders Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters—fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and café intellectuals—all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever.

A seminal work of postwar Eastern European literature, Cyclops reveals a little-known perspective on World War II from within the former Yugoslavia, one that has not been available to an English-speaking audience. Vlada Stojiljkovic’s able translation, improved by Ellen Elias-Bursac’s insightful editing, preserves the striking brilliance of this riotously funny and densely allusive text. Cyclops satirizes both the delusions of the righteous military officials who feed the national bloodlust as well as the wayward intellectuals who believe themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of international conflict. Through Stojiljkovic’s clear-eyed translation, Melkior’s peregrinations reveal how history happens and how the individual consciousness is swept up in the tide of political events, and this is accomplished in a mode that will resonate with readers of Charles Simic, Aleksandr Hemon, and Milan Kundera.]]>
576 Ranko Marinković 0300152418 Chris 0 croatian, to-read-pri-2 3.71 1965 Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
author: Ranko Marinković
name: Chris
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: croatian, to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[ѲܲԲí: The Hero with No Character]]> 61622860 ѲܲԲí, by Mário de Andrade. Written in 1927, ѲܲԲí is one of the most influential works in all of Brazilian literature. It follows the adventures of the shapeshifting ѲܲԲí and his brothers as they leave their home in the northern Amazon for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to Sao Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). ѲܲԲí was written over six delirious days–the fruit of years of study–and magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine the true Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson is many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes providing essential background information for this magnificent work.]]> 224 Mário de Andrade 0811227022 Chris 0 3.76 1928 ѲܲԲí: The Hero with No Character
author: Mário de Andrade
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: brazilian, latin-american-select, to-read-pri-2
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The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]>
188 Han Kang 0553448188 Chris 0 korean, nobel, to-read-pri-2 3.62 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Chris
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: korean, nobel, to-read-pri-2
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Three Trapped Tigers 4472502 487 Guillermo Cabrera Infante 0060105941 Chris 0 cuban, to-read-pri-2 4.60 2008 Three Trapped Tigers
author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
name: Chris
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: cuban, to-read-pri-2
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Horcynus Orca 174159355 1376 Stefano D'Arrigo 2493213556 Chris 0 italian, to-read-pri-2 4.00 1975 Horcynus Orca
author: Stefano D'Arrigo
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: italian, to-read-pri-2
review:

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ճéǻǰDz 211868312 608 Mircea Cărtărescu 2889830403 Chris 0 romanian, to-read-pri-2 4.24 2022 ճéǻǰDz
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Chris
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: romanian, to-read-pri-2
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Sea of Hooks 18192632 Sea of Hooks is a novel structured to reflect the interweaving of the two worlds inhabited by its main character, Christopher Westall. Christopher holds the spheres of ordinary days and weeks in precarious balance against the shifting field of images and voices that lies behind them. A series of traumas shatters this balance. The parallel narratives recount Christopher's youth in San Francisco, where he struggles within the icy Victorian household of his mother, and his subsequent journey to Bhutan for answers to questions that haunt him. Sea of Hooks is comprised of the shattered fragments of Christopher's world and is driven by the forces that compel him to reassemble it...at any cost.]]> 352 Lindsay Hill 1620540061 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.77 2013 Sea of Hooks
author: Lindsay Hill
name: Chris
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]>
160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Chris 0 danish, to-read-pri-2 3.87 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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shelves: danish, to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume II (Book II)]]> 208511276 Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume from one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.

Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.

And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.� She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.

Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion―taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages―a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.]]>
176 Solvej Balle 0811237273 Chris 0 danish, to-read-pri-2 4.13 2020 On the Calculation of Volume II (Book II)
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume, Book III]]> 227989309
Tara Selter er blevet fanget i den 18. november, i en dag der gentager sig. Uden held har hun forsøgt at vende tilbage til en almindelig fremadskridende tid. Hun har forsøgt at skabe årstider ved at rejse nordpå for at finde vinter og sydpå for at finde solskin og sommer. Nu opdager hun, at hun ikke er den eneste, der er fanget i den attende november.]]>
144 Solvej Balle 0811238393 Chris 0 danish, to-read-pri-2 4.50 2021 On the Calculation of Volume, Book III
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV]]> 227989313 Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world--fellow travelers within November 18th--and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one--not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day--could have foreseen.]]> 144 Solvej Balle 0811238415 Chris 0 danish, to-read-pri-2 5.00 2022 On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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Shadow Ticket 230910361
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.]]>
384 Thomas Pynchon 1594206104 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 5.00 2025 Shadow Ticket
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
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House of Day, House of Night 228644472 In the mode of Flights, a novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author.

When the narrator of House of Day, House of Night arrives with her husband in a village in remote southwest Poland, she knows no one. Before long, though, she discovers that everyone--and everything—there has a story. With the help of her neighbor, the eccentric Marta, she pieces together the fragments of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death � with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech - was an international incident. And there are the German soldiers, not long departed, who still haunt the region. Shard by shard, from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these stories capture not only a history but a cosmology.

Another brilliant “constellation novel� in the mode of her Booker-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night interweaves narrative, musings, history, and mythology, reminding us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is fascinating and boundless, and awaits any of us with the imagination to seek it.]]>
336 Olga Tokarczuk 0593716388 Chris 0 polish, to-read-pri-2 0.0 1998 House of Day, House of Night
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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shelves: polish, to-read-pri-2
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Attila 215545170
Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.

Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence. Attila is an intricate and elusive masterpiece from the explosive and disorienting imagination of Aliocha Coll, where characters from myth and history intermingle in a stunning labyrinth of allegory and metaphor.]]>
200 Aliocha Coll 1960385372 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 4.24 1991 Attila
author: Aliocha Coll
name: Chris
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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Attila 215545116 Last Words on Earth—an reimagining of Roberto Bolaño’s life—comes a book articulating the final years of Aliocha Coll, one of Spain’s most innovative writers as he completes his masterpiece,Attila(also available from Open Letter Books).


Living alone in Paris, estranged from his family, suffering from heartbreak and possibly madness, Alioscha Coll works with saintly intensity on what will be his final Attila. Once the final words have been written, he vows to end his life, convinced that his existence will lose all purpose.


Told through the viewpoint of a literary critic and journalist,Attilaexpands Javier Serena’s investigation into artists who remained dedicated to their art, to their aesthetic vision in the face of complete dismissal by the publishing world and reading public. In the case ofLast Words on Earth and Ricardo Funes (the stand in for Bolaño in that novel), things work out and he briefly becomes the star of the literary world—could the same happen for Alioscha Coll?]]>
150 Javier Serena 1960385356 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 4.18 2015 Attila
author: Javier Serena
name: Chris
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read-pri-2
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<![CDATA[The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels � from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.� Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]>
308 Paul Auster 0143039830 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.93 1987 The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Paul Auster
name: Chris
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
review:

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Tom's Crossing 227871604 The best-selling author of the million-copy classic House of Leaves returns with a magisterial, page-turning epic, about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines in mountains ready to shrug even the bravest from their backs, as one Orvop local would put, with another characterizing the astonishing journey as crazy as it was foolish as it still is just plain beyond imaginin. But them kids went for it anyway.

Not that such daring was entirely unexpected considering how some of those involved included the likes of young Tom Gatestone, already a bit of an Orvop legend, and his friend Kalin March, new to the area, the two of them takin it upon themselves to rescue a couple of neglected horses from the Porch paddocks on Willow and Oak.

Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t?

For sure no one expected the dead to rise but they did. For sure no one expected the mountain to fall but it did. For sure no one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.

As one Orvop high-school teacher would describe that extraordinary feat days before she died: Fer sure, no one expected Kalin March to tell Old Porch: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

In this sweeping tale of mythic proportions, populated by extraordinary characters, the ghosts of the American West, and bursting with unexpected humor, Danielewski tells a masterful story of determination, perseverance, and humanity in the face of long odds and adverse fate.]]>
1232 Mark Z. Danielewski 1524747718 Chris 0 big-book, to-read-pri-2 5.00 Tom's Crossing
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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Reinhardt's Garden 43627273
From Croatia to Germany, Hungary to Russia, and finally to the Americas, Jacov and his companions grapple with the limits of art, colonialism, and escapism in this dense, fast-paced comedy where dark satire and skewed history converge.]]>
168 Mark Haber 1566895626 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2 3.92 2019 Reinhardt's Garden
author: Mark Haber
name: Chris
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read-pri-2
review:

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Vaim 223032467 144 Jon Fosse Chris 0 4.50 Vaim
author: Jon Fosse
name: Chris
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: norwegian, nobel, to-read-pri-2
review:

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Zorba the Greek 22716193
First published in 1946, Zorba the Greek , is, on one hand, the story of a Greek working man named Zorba, a passionate lover of life, the unnamed narrator who he accompanies to Crete to work in a lignite mine, and the men and women of the town where they settle. On the other hand it is the story of God and man, The Devil and the Saints; the struggle of men to find their souls and purpose in life and it is about love, courage and faith.

Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the truly memorable creations of literature—a character created on a huge scale in the tradition of Falstaff and Sancho Panza. His years have not dimmed the gusto and amazement with which he responds to all life offers him, whether he is working in the mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his life or making love to avoid sin. Zorba’s life is rich with all the joys and sorrows that living brings and his example awakens in the narrator an understanding of the true meaning of humanity. This is one of the greatest life-affirming novels of our time.

Part of the modern literary canon, Zorba the Greek , has achieved widespread international acclaim and recognition. This new edition translated, directly from Kazantzakis’s Greek original, is a more faithful rendition of his original language, ideas, and story, and presents Zorba as the author meant him to be.]]>
368 Nikos Kazantzakis 1476782814 Chris 0 3.75 1946 Zorba the Greek
author: Nikos Kazantzakis
name: Chris
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: greek, currently-reading, 2025
review:

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<![CDATA[The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions Paperbook)]]> 7248740 240 Henry Miller 0811218570 Chris 0 travel, 2025, memoir 4.03 1941 The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions Paperbook)
author: Henry Miller
name: Chris
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: travel, 2025, memoir
review:

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The Murderess 7031429
Peter Levi’s matchless translation of Alexandros Papadiamantis’s astonishing novella captures the excitement and haunting poetry of the original Greek.]]>
144 Alexandros Papadiamantis 1590173503 Chris 0 2025, greek 3.82 1903 The Murderess
author: Alexandros Papadiamantis
name: Chris
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1903
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/11
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves: 2025, greek
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Conversations of Goethe 847863
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.

We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.]]>
448 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0306808811 Chris 0 4.25 1836 Conversations of Goethe
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Chris
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1836
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/09
date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: 2025, biography, diary-notebook-letters, german
review:

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<![CDATA[These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays]]> 209951184
This is a book that contains multitudes—a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson’s collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—and imagines the composer’s life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends� cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.

As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele’s drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.]]>
146 Russell Persson 1938603222 Chris 0 to-read, 000-beep-boop 3.50 These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays
author: Russell Persson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen]]> 40180076 The Comma Queen returns with a buoyant book about language, love, and the wine-dark sea.

In her New York Times bestseller Between You & Me, Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils and punctuation in The New Yorker’s celebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers another wise and funny paean to the art of self-expression, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek.

Greek to Me is a charming account of Norris’s lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, goes searching for the fabled Baths of Aphrodite, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek men�Greek to Me is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.]]>
240 Mary Norris 1324001275 Chris 0 memoir, travel, 2025 3.59 2019 Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen
author: Mary Norris
name: Chris
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/09
date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: memoir, travel, 2025
review:

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<![CDATA[Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815]]> 59094327 The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity.

In 1800, Fran�ois-� de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one, and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls.

Over the next fifteen years, his life changed utterly. He published Atala, , and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making scandal. He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and mapped the ruins of Carthage. He served Napoleon in Rome, then resigned in protest after the Duc d'Enghien's execution, putting his own life at tremendous risk. For these were also the years of Bonaparte's secret police, censorship, and warmongering--all of which Chateaubriand would come to oppose.

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815--the second volume in Alex Andriesse's new and complete translation of this epic French classic--is a chronicle of triumphs and sorrows, narrating not only the author's life during a tumultuous period in European history but the "parallel life" of Napoleon, from his birth on Corsica to his death on Saint Helena. In these pages, Chateaubriand continues to paint his distinctive self-portrait, in which the whole history of France swirls around the sitter like a mist of dreams.]]>
800 1681376172 Chris 0 4.36 1850 Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815
author: François-René de Chateaubriand
name: Chris
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1850
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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<![CDATA[Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800]]> 34356265 Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father’s castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand’s return to France after eight years of exile in England.

In this new edition (the first unabridged translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self-deprecating egoist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.]]>
584 1681371294 Chris 0 4.30 1849 Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800
author: François-René de Chateaubriand
name: Chris
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1849
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815 -1830]]> 228645106 The third part of the epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe, now in a new, unabridged English translation—the first in a century.

In 1815—with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end—François-René de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he’d so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country’s most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject. Part liberal, part ultraconservative, a warmonger with his head in the clouds, he quarreled with both Louis XVIII and Charles X and eventually tendered his resignation altogether, just in time for the July Revolution, which brought the Restoration to a close and allowed Chateaubriand to go back to praising the Bourbons, now safely exiled in the realm of the ideal.

As always in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand narrates the events of his era unforgettably. His accounts of international politics, and the papal conclave, and the revolutionary strife of 1830 (so different from the revolutionary strife of his youth) are gripping. His digressions, however, are the main event, and readers will be glad to find him wandering around Paris and Rome, reflecting on storms and ruins, moonlight and mortality.]]>
640 François-René Chateaubriand 1681379619 Chris 0 0.0 Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815 -1830
author: François-René Chateaubriand
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
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<![CDATA[Hymns To the Night and Spiritual Songs]]> 18179455
Includes the German text.

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) is the most mystical of the German Romantic poets. He is at once the most typical and the most unusual of the German Romantic writers, indeed, of all Romantic poets. His best known work, Hymns To the Night, was published in 1800.

Novalis is supremely idealistic, far more so than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Heinrich Heine. He died young, which makes him, like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, something of a hero (or martyr). He did not write as much as Shelley, but his work, like that of Keats or Arthur Rimbaud, promised much. For Michael Hamburger, Novalis' poetry is almost totally idealistic:

Novalis's philosophy, then, is not mystical, but utopian. That is why his imaginative works are almost wholly lacking in conflict. They are a perpetual idyll.

It's true that Novalis' work is supremely idealistic, and utopian. But it is also mystical, because it points towards the invisible, unseen and unknown, and aims to reach that ecstatic realm. Novalis wrote:

The sense of poetry has much in common with that for mysticism. It is the sense of the peculiar, personal, unknown, mysterious, for what is to be revealed, the necessary-accidental. It represents the unrepresentable. It sees the invisible, feels the unfeelable, etc... The sense for poetry has a close relationship with the sense for augury and the religious sense, with the sense for prophecy in general.

Glyn Hughes remarks of Novalis: 'The sustaining interest in the reading of Novalis's works is the sense of contact with a mind of visionary intensity and total commitment. The poetic achievement is in the momentary glimpses of ideal reality: what, in other contexts, we should call epiphanies. (61)

The translator of Hymns To the Night, Scottish fantasist George Macdonald (1824-95), included Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin among his literary friends. His well-known works were Phantastes (1858), Lilith (1895), Bannerman's Boyhood and the Curdie children's stories: The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882). Macdonald's books were a significant influence on both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Illustrated. With bibliography and notes. 160 pages. ISBN 9781861714350.

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160 Novalis 1861714351 Chris 0 german, poetry, 2021 4.50 1800 Hymns To the Night and Spiritual Songs
author: Novalis
name: Chris
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1800
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: german, poetry, 2021
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<![CDATA[Goethe's Faust: Seven essays (University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures ; no. 86)]]> 3065532 143 Alan P. Cottrell 0807880868 Chris 0 5.00 1976 Goethe's Faust: Seven essays (University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures ; no. 86)
author: Alan P. Cottrell
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: 2025, literary-studies, leafbyleaf
review:

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Faust: Part Two 3936870
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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400 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0199536201 Chris 0 3.67 1832 Faust: Part Two
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Chris
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1832
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: 2025, german, world-masterpieces, leafbyleaf
review:

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<![CDATA[The Marquise of O and Other Stories]]> 24480267 318 Heinrich von Kleist 1122291256 Chris 0 4.33 The Marquise of O and Other Stories
author: Heinrich von Kleist
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, german, short-stories
review:

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Evening Edged in Gold 2596750 215 Arno Schmidt 0151293767 Chris 0 to-read, german 4.54 1975 Evening Edged in Gold
author: Arno Schmidt
name: Chris
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: to-read, german
review:

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<![CDATA[The David Foster Wallace Reader]]> 25318793
This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work � essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System , Infinite Jest , and The Pale King , and legendary stories like "The Depressed Person."

Wallace's explorations of morality, self-consciousness, addiction, sports, love, and the many other subjects that occupied him are represented here in both fiction and nonfiction. Collected for the first time are Wallace's first published story, "The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen In Relation to the Bad Thing" and a selection of his work as a writing instructor, including reading lists, grammar guides, and general guidelines for his students.

A dozen writers and critics, including Hari Kunzru, Anne Fadiman, and Nam Le, add afterwords to favorite pieces, expanding our appreciation of the unique pleasures of Wallace's writing. The result is an astonishing volume that shows the breadth and range of "one of America's most daring and talented writers" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ) whose work was full of humor, insight, and beauty.]]>
976 David Foster Wallace 0316182400 Chris 0 dfw, 2023 4.43 2014 The David Foster Wallace Reader
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Chris
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: dfw, 2023
review:

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<![CDATA[Perfume: The Story of a Murderer]]> 2897
Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. With mounting unease, yet hypnotized, we see him explore his powers and their effect on the world around him. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been, he has no need of the light, and darkness is not dark to him, because nothing can mask the odors of the universe.

As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself.

At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous to find and extract from the most perfect living creatures—the most beautiful young virgins in the land� that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. As his trail leads him, at an ever-quickening pace, from his savage exile to the heart of the country and then back to Paris, we are caught up in a rising storm of terror and mortal sensual conquest until the frenzy of his final triumph explodes in all its horrifying consequences.

Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of a grown-up fairy tale, Perfume is one of the most remarkable novels of the last fifty years.]]>
272 Patrick Süskind 0394550846 Chris 0 german, 2025 4.00 1985 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
author: Patrick Süskind
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: german, 2025
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<![CDATA[Pilgrimage, complete in 4 volumes]]> 23364842 Volume II,453 pp.: The Tunnel, Interim.
Volume III, 509 pp.: Deadlock, Revolving Lights, The Trap.
Volume IV, 552 pp.: Oberland, Dawn's Left Hand, Clear Horizon, Dimple Hill.]]>
2004 Dorothy M. Richardson Chris 0 to-read, big-book 4.00 1938 Pilgrimage, complete in 4 volumes
author: Dorothy M. Richardson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read, big-book
review:

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<![CDATA[Faust, Part One: A New Translation with Illustrations]]> 56760008
With Faust, the lushly lyrical and philosophically brilliant drama on which the poet spent almost his entire life, Goethe solidified himself as a major literary figure whose work would transcend time and space to create the modern world. Now, this brand-new, dynamic translation demands we ask of our world: who will win, humanity or Mephistopheles?]]>
264 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1646050231 Chris 0 4.36 1808 Faust, Part One: A New Translation with Illustrations
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Chris
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1808
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: german, poetry, 2025, drama, leafbyleaf, world-masterpieces
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<![CDATA[The Dying Grass (Seven Dreams, #5)]]> 23399010
Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in a style in which the printed page works as a stage with multiple layers of foreground and background, The Dying Grass is another achievement from one of the most ambitious writers of our time.
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1356 William T. Vollmann 0670015989 Chris 0 favorites, big-book, 2025 Seven Dream series in this volume.

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4.19 2015 The Dying Grass (Seven Dreams, #5)
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Chris
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: favorites, big-book, 2025
review:
I think Vollmann achieved the apogee of his artistic vision for the Seven Dream series in this volume.


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<![CDATA[Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience: Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk (Anthem symploke Studies in Theory, 1)]]> 216283087
The two ‘negative� moments � represented by Huysmans’s À rebours and McCarthy’s Remainder � besides ending poorly for the protagonists, wind up with a foreclosure of aesthetic experience. For Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who attempts to sustain aesthetic experience at will via curation, the fantasy falls apart, leaving him ill and necessitating his dreaded return to society. For McCarthy’s unnamed narrator who is engaged throughout the novel with various projects of re-enactments, the story ends violently, with bloodshed and a plane hijacking. Theoretically, these novels provide a cautionary tale about the impulse to seek out and even domesticate the aesthetic object.

On the contrary, the two ‘positive� moments � represented by Proust’s Recherche and Cusk’s Outline trilogy � each involve narrators and characters who are invested in the creative act of writing. Two particular critically underrepresented passages from Proust can help articulate the ‘quiet� moment of aesthetic without relying on works of art, they are theoretically compelling in their refusal to theorise themselves, unlike the more popular passages from the novel. Cusk’s novels present the moment of disconnection � that is, the sense of an experience being dislodged from any particular narrative or plot. And yet, each of the characters in question are creative writers, meaning that this everyday feeling of alienation tends to factor into a productive, artistic impulse.

In conclusion, these four moments are tied together as they pertain to the nature (and boundaries) of aesthetic experience in general. Just as Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement seem to be grouped in pairs � disinterest and purposiveness without purpose on one hand, and universality and necessity on the other hand � these four moments can be grouped and set apart to help reconsider what we mean when we talk about aesthetic experience.]]>
192 Bryan Counter 183999343X Chris 0 0.0 Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience: Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk (Anthem symploke Studies in Theory, 1)
author: Bryan Counter
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: literary-studies, 2025, philosophy, leafbyleaf
review:

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<![CDATA[Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese]]> 766421
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene," bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language's finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore.

Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.]]>
358 Patrick Leigh Fermor 1590171888 Chris 0 to-read, travel 4.13 1958 Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
name: Chris
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read, travel
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<![CDATA[An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter]]> 152809 An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas's trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense price—an almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing, and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.]]> 88 César Aira 0811216306 Chris 0 argentine, 2025 3.95 2000 An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
author: César Aira
name: Chris
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: argentine, 2025
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Miracle of the Rose 266034 Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) and The Thief's Journal (1964). It is, however, Genet's second novel, having been written in La Santé and Tourelles prisons in 1943, directly after Our Lady of the Flowers. Like that first work, Miracle of the Rose was written in the solitude of a prison cell, on the pieces of white paper the penal authorities furnish the convicts for making paper bags.

The work is set in the State prison of Fontevrault. It is the height of the German Occupation and in the prisons of France the convicts, barely subsisting on near-starvation rations, spend their endless days weaving camouflage nets for their German conquerors. Miracle of the Rose is, first of all, an account of life at Fontevrault during that period. But Genet is no realist, and his account of prison life is an extraordinary mixture of dreams and reality, past and present.

If Fontevrault is the present of his narrative, the past is the Mettray Reformatory, the almost idyllic, flower-covered "prison colony" for boys to which he was sent for theft as a mere child. It was here at Mettray that he was initiated into the life of confinement, into the world of the criminals and homosexuals in which he was to live for the next twenty-five years. Genet's story moves back and forth between Fontevrault and Mettray almost without the reader's being aware of the transition. Doubtless, in Genet's mind, there is no transition. Both prisons and both times fuse into one immense and erotic dream.

The boys at Mettray do not pity or despise the hardened criminals at neighboring Fontevrault; on the contrary, they are the "saints" the boys look up to, the heroes they hope to emulate. More than fifteen years after his precocious arrival at the Mettray Reformatory, Genet finally reaches the Fontevrault Prison. Among the pimps and big shots, the crashers and chickens that form the homosexual hierarchy of the convict criminal society, he finds again many of his former boyhood friends and lovers.

Foremost among them is Harcamone, a character notable in the narrative for his off-stage presence. Harcamone has been condemned to death for having killed the only guard at Fontevrault who had ever shown him the least bit of kindness. During the month and a half prior to his execution, his presence from his solitary cell on death row both encompasses and dominates the prison. At one point, as Harcamone passes Genet in the prison corridor, the author has a vision in which he sees the chains that bind Harcamone miraculously flower into a garland of white roses.

Miracle of the Rose contains many such visions wherein Genet, taking the dross of "evil'' transmutes it into a work of beauty.]]>
291 Jean Genet 0802130887 Chris 0 2025, french 4.17 1946 Miracle of the Rose
author: Jean Genet
name: Chris
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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Alexander Hamilton 32603800 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.�

Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,� Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.� Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.


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731 Ron Chernow 0143034758 Chris 0 to-read, biography, history 4.42 2004 Alexander Hamilton
author: Ron Chernow
name: Chris
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]>
1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Chris 0 to-read, biography, history 4.51 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Chris
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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The Stand 228202 1141 Stephen King 0451169530 Chris 0 junk-food, horror 4.32 1978 The Stand
author: Stephen King
name: Chris
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture]]> 148821 192 Ross King 0142000159 Chris 0 3.89 1999 Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
author: Ross King
name: Chris
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read, 000-italy2026, architecture, history
review:

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<![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]>
374 Suzanne Collins Chris 0 2025, ya 4.34 2008 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Chris
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: 2025, ya
review:

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<![CDATA[Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse]]> 27829 Le Ton beau de Marot will be delighted to see his meticulous theories of translation put into practice in what seems destined to become the definitive English-language version of Eugene Onegin. It is sure to bring new and deserving readers to this neglected literary jewel.]]> 224 Alexander Pushkin 0465020941 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2, russian 3.91 1833 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Chris
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1833
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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A Death in the Family 6631933
One of Time ’s All-Time 100 Best Novels

A Penguin Classic

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident—a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.]]>
310 James Agee 014310571X Chris 0 to-read 3.93 1957 A Death in the Family
author: James Agee
name: Chris
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology]]> 228493840 In The Light of Tabor, award-winning theologian David Bentley Hart proposes an approach to the nature of Christ that is profoundly radical yet deeply classical.

For centuries, Christian theology has rested on a paradox. Beginning with the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, the major Christian traditions have held that Jesus Christ combines two distinct he is fully God and, somehow, fully human. Yet this tenet rests on irresolvable metaphysical contradictions. David Bentley Hart delves deeply into the seemingly irresoluble tensions, providing the first theological attempt to show how the logic of the earliest churches� angelomorphic Christology is continuous with later Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Hart draws on theologians from every epoch of Christian thought, from Origen to Sergei Bulgakov, while making free use of concepts from other spiritual traditions, such as Vedanta.

The Light of Tabor proposes an approach to Christology that is thoroughly monistic, both as regards Being and as regards nature. Hart demonstrates that the only coherent reading of the figure of Christ is one that fully embraces the essential unity of all things divine and natural through him, proposing an approach to Christology that affirms classical doctrine without retaining the dualistic presuppositions that have haunted theology since the age of the great councils.]]>
152 David Bentley Hart 0268210411 Chris 0 to-read, theology 4.00 The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology
author: David Bentley Hart
name: Chris
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<![CDATA[The Holy Spirit: Who He Is and Why We Can't Live Without Him]]> 209566283
Many people are unfamiliar with who the Holy Spirit is and what role He has in their lives. They may be confused about or even intimated by Him. Even many seasoned Christians have an easier time relating to God or Jesus, while the Spirit and His ways are often a mystery. Like Jesus’s disciples, we wonder why Jesus had to leave earth so that the Spirit could come.

In one sense, the Holy Spirit is surrounded by mystery because He is Spirit. But He is also personal and knowable. In fact, spiritually, we literally can’t live without Him and the life He brings us.

The Holy Spirit is Bill Johnson’s foundational book on the Spirit, including both introductory and deep truths about the third person of the Trinity. He describes what he has learned about seeking God, hosting His presence, and seeing His Spirit change the atmosphere of families and communities—bringing peace where there was anxiety and discord, salvation where hope was gone, and restoration where purpose was lost.

Johnson guides you into a close relationship with the Spirit—an eternal wellspring available for everyone, every day, everywhere, for every need and calling. Let the Spirit fill and overflow your life as He moves, shapes, cleanses, and carries you along in the adventure of God’s purposes for the world.
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209 Bill Johnson Chris 0 2025, theology 4.64 The Holy Spirit: Who He Is and Why We Can't Live Without Him
author: Bill Johnson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.64
book published:
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (The Hinges of History)]]> 27200 Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, his fourth volume to explore "the hinges of history," Thomas Cahill escorts the reader on another entertaining—and historically unassailable—journey through the landmarks of art and bloodshed that defined Greek culture nearly three millennia ago.

In the city-states of Athens and Sparta and throughout the Greek islands, honors could be won in making love and war, and lives were rife with contradictions. By developing the alphabet, the Greeks empowered the reader, demystified experience, and opened the way for civil discussion and experimentation—yet they kept slaves. The glorious verses of the Iliad recount a conflict in which rage and outrage spur men to action and suggest that their "bellicose society of gleaming metals and rattling weapons" is not so very distant from more recent campaigns of "shock and awe." And, centuries before Zorba, Greece was a land where music, dance, and freely flowing wine were essential to the high life. Granting equal time to the sacred and the profane, Cahill rivets our attention to the legacies of an ancient and enduring worldview.]]>
304 Thomas Cahill 0385495544 Chris 0 3.75 2003 Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (The Hinges of History)
author: Thomas Cahill
name: Chris
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: history, greek, 2025, ancient-greece
review:

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<![CDATA[Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, The]]> 57250130 293 Daniel Farson Chris 0 to-read, art, biography 0.0 1993 Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, The
author: Daniel Farson
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, art, biography
review:

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<![CDATA[The Surprise of Being (English and Portuguese Edition)]]> 1747408 Fernando Pessoa 0946162239 Chris 0 2025, portuguese, poetry 4.00 1987 The Surprise of Being (English and Portuguese Edition)
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025, portuguese, poetry
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Shakespeare and Company 428456 Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, D. H. Lawrence, and others already famous or soon to be.In his introduction to this new edition, James Laughlin recalls his friendship with Sylvia Beach. Like her bookstore, his publishing house, New Directions, is considered a cultural touchstone.]]> 230 Sylvia Beach Chris 0 2025, memoir 3.82 1956 Shakespeare and Company
author: Sylvia Beach
name: Chris
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025, memoir
review:

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Silent Catastrophes: Essays 217114252 From the renowned author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work.

Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity� (The Guardian).]]>
544 W.G. Sebald 1400067723 Chris 0 to-read 0.0 1985 Silent Catastrophes: Essays
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Lonely Planet Greek Phrasebook & Dictionary]]> 62874386 256 Lonely Planet 1788688309 Chris 0 3.33 1995 Lonely Planet Greek Phrasebook & Dictionary
author: Lonely Planet
name: Chris
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, greek, reference, travel
review:

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Like a Sky Inside 196405939
Let's go back even further, my father said. It's not even certain that the original purpose of what we call art was to be seen.

In a way, we could go so far as to say that art, what we call art, is made less to be seen than to be stolen.

Winner of the Prix Medicis Essai 2021]]>
160 Jakuta Alikavazovic 1735297364 Chris 0
"The history of art is a ghost story for grown-ups" (34).

"Nationalisms disgusted him. He just wanted to live in beauty" (56).

"What we call growing up is a series of betrayals" (77).

"If reality is a stylistic effect, perhaps the same is true of life?" (133).]]>
4.19 2021 Like a Sky Inside
author: Jakuta Alikavazovic
name: Chris
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: usrocprize-2024, 2024, french, 2025
review:
"I love Paris for its constant collision of secrets" (17).

"The history of art is a ghost story for grown-ups" (34).

"Nationalisms disgusted him. He just wanted to live in beauty" (56).

"What we call growing up is a series of betrayals" (77).

"If reality is a stylistic effect, perhaps the same is true of life?" (133).
]]>
<![CDATA[The Masterpiece (Les Rougon-Macquart, #14)]]> 2904944
The Masterpiece is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and provides a unique insight into Zola’s relationship with Cézanne. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to the prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.]]>
364 Émile Zola 0199536910 Chris 0 french, 2025 4.05 1886 The Masterpiece (Les Rougon-Macquart, #14)
author: Émile Zola
name: Chris
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1886
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: french, 2025
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The Unknown Masterpiece 817790
Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece,La Comedie Humaine,which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation ofFleurs du maland a Pulitzer Prize forUntitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.]]>
135 Honoré de Balzac 0940322749 Chris 0 french, short-stories, 2025 3.88 1831 The Unknown Masterpiece
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Chris
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1831
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: french, short-stories, 2025
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Saint Sebastian's Abyss 59697335 “What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.�

Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short� nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.]]>
144 Mark Haber 1566896363 Chris 0 2025 3.72 2022 Saint Sebastian's Abyss
author: Mark Haber
name: Chris
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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shelves: 2025
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<![CDATA[Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity]]> 9629 176 Ray Bradbury 1877741094 Chris 0 of-writing, 2017, essays 4.17 1973 Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Chris
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at: 2017/03/17
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: of-writing, 2017, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics]]> 117249 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), art almost ranked with religion and philosophy in its power to reveal the fundamental nature of existence. But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.

To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.

Table of Contents
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and Commentary
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICS

Chapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted
[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Art
β Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?
γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?
δ Answer to β
ε Answer to γ]

Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art
[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship
(a) Its Range
(b) It generates Rules and Theories
(c) The Rights of Genius
2. Abstract Reflection
3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]

Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic Beauty
Part I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous
1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity
[(a) Conscious Production by Rule
(b) Artistic Inspiration
(c) Dignity of Production by Man
(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]
2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense
[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?
(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste
(c) Art-scholarship
(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art
(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind
(αα) Desire
(ββ) Theory
(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual
(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist
(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]

Part II - The End of Art
3. [The Interest or End of Art
(a) Imitation of Nature?
(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -
(αα) Superfluous
(ββ) Imperfect
(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand
(β) What is Good to Imitate?
(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative
(b) Humani nihil - ?
(c) Mitigation of the Passions?
(α) How Art mitigates the Passions
(β) How Art purifies the Passions
(αα) It must have a Worthy Content
(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic
(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose
(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]

Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy
1. Kant
[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive
(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal
(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect
(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]
2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling
3. The Irony

Chapter V: Division of the Subject
[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form
2. Part I - The Ideal
3. Part II - The Types of Art
(α) Symbolic Art
(β) Classical Art
(γ) Romantic Art
4. Part III - The Several Arts
(α) Architecture
(β) Sculpture
(γ) Romantic Art, comprising
(i) Painting
(ii) Music
(iii) Poetry
5. Conclusion]

Commentary

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197 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 014043335X Chris 0 to-read, philosophy, german 3.90 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Chris
average rating: 3.90
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<![CDATA[The Betrothed: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)]]> 213517661 The Betrothed is a cornerstone of Italian culture, language, and literature. Published in its final form in 1842, The Betrothed has inspired generations of Italian readers and writers. Giuseppe Verdi composed his majestic Requiem Mass in honor of Manzoni. Italo Calvino called the novel "a classic that has never ceased shaping reality in Italy" while Umberto Eco praised its author as a "most subtle critic and analyst of languages." The Betrothed has been celebrated by Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, and is one of Pope Francis's favorite books. But, until now, it has remained relatively unknown to English readers.

In the fall of 1628, two young lovers are forced to flee their village on the shores of Lake Como after a powerful lord prevents their marriage, plunging them into the maelstrom of history. Manzoni draws on actual people and events to create an unforgettable fresco of Italian life and society. In this greatest of historical novels, he takes the reader on a journey through the Spanish occupation of Milan, the ravages of war, class tensions, social injustice, religious faith, and a plague that devastates northern Italy. But within Manzoni's epic tale, readers will also hear powerful echoes of our own day.]]>
704 Alessandro Manzoni 0812978811 Chris 0 to-read, 000-italy2026 4.57 1827 The Betrothed: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)
author: Alessandro Manzoni
name: Chris
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1827
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, 000-italy2026
review:

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<![CDATA[Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays]]> 59907922 Pirandello (1867-1936) is the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre.This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's most popular and controversial work in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So) the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover 'the truth' about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello's masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits.]]> 224 Luigi Pirandello Chris 0 4.30 1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays
author: Luigi Pirandello
name: Chris
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1921
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, italian, drama, 000-italy2026
review:

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The Stronghold 103894581
At the start of Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold , newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first the remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassable mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the enemy, whose attack is imminent.

This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his lair, to defeat once and for all, returning home in triumph. And yet time passes, and where is the enemy?

As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning, they succumb to inertia, and though death occurs, it is not from bravery. Decades pass. A lifetime passes. Drogo, however, still has his lonely vigil to keep.

Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his fantastical imagination and for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light. The Stronghold , previously translated as The Tartar Steppe , is his most celebrated work, a book that has been read as a veiled attack on Mussolini’s fascist militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War, and an existentialist fable.

Lawrence Venuti’s new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out both the human and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignancy.]]>
216 Dino Buzzati 1681377144 Chris 0 to-read, 000-italy2026 4.19 1940 The Stronghold
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Chris
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, 000-italy2026
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<![CDATA[The Private Lives of the Impressionists]]> 2145363 368 Sue Roe 0060545593 Chris 0 art, biography, history, 2025 4.02 2006 The Private Lives of the Impressionists
author: Sue Roe
name: Chris
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: art, biography, history, 2025
review:

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Victor Hugo 953944 682 Graham Robb 0330371452 Chris 0 4.00 1997 Victor Hugo
author: Graham Robb
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: biography, literary-studies, 2025, french
review:

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Tidal Lock 216425313 160 Lindsay Hill 1620540630 Chris 0 2024, usrocprize-2024, 2025 4.10 Tidal Lock
author: Lindsay Hill
name: Chris
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: 2024, usrocprize-2024, 2025
review:

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The Abolition of Man 25825420
The Abolition of Man, Lewis uses his graceful prose, delightful humor, and keen understanding of the human mind to challenge our notions about how to best teach our children--and ourselves--not merely reading and writing, but also a sense of morality.]]>
113 C.S. Lewis Chris 0 2025, philosophy, theology 4.16 1943 The Abolition of Man
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Chris
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: 2025, philosophy, theology
review:

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<![CDATA[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation]]> 1056805 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.

The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Boroff, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, one of England's leading poets, has produced an inventive translation of this Arthurian epic that resounds with both clarity and verve. As England's Sunday Telegraph wrote, "Armitage's animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf." His work, presented here with facing original text and a note on the text by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original - but responds equally to its own powerfully persuasive ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes - acoustic, physical, and metaphorical -in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true and long-awaited translator.]]>
198 Simon Armitage 0393060489 Chris 0 to-read, poetry 3.98 1375 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation
author: Simon Armitage
name: Chris
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1375
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, poetry
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Overstaying 203166776
“I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,� writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents� old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave. When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.]]>
176 Ariane Koch 1948980193 Chris 0 3.52 2021 Overstaying
author: Ariane Koch
name: Chris
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: german, 2024, usrocprize-2024, 2025
review:

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<![CDATA[Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI]]> 201182704 Co-Intelligentie presenteert Witte Huis-adviseur en hoogleraar Ethan Mollick hoe AI je werk en leven kan transformeren. Geen toekomstmuziek, maar praktische kennis om direct in te zetten. Met voorwoord van Alexander Klöpping.]]> 256 Ethan Mollick 059371671X Chris 0 to-read, ai 3.97 2024 Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
author: Ethan Mollick
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read, ai
review:

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<![CDATA[[(Understanding William H. Gass)] [Author: H. L. Hix] published on (July, 2002)]]> 127945560 0 H.L. Hix Chris 0 0.0 2002 [(Understanding William H. Gass)] [Author: H. L. Hix] published on (July, 2002)
author: H.L. Hix
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: 2024, literary-studies, biography
review:

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<![CDATA[The Review of Contemporary Fiction: William H. Gass: Vol. 24-3]]> 7830276
Susan Stewart, "The Bowerbirds"
Robert Coover, "On Mrs. Willie Masters"
Bradford Morrow, "A Girandole for Mr. Gass"
Mary Caponegro "Lookin' with Gass"
Rikki Ducornet "A Dream"
Sally Ball "About Reading"
Heide Ziegler "Three Encounters with Germany: Goethe, Holderlin, Rilke"
Michael Eastman "Photographs"
Joanna Scott "Homage to Bill Gass"
John Barth "As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy"
Ingo Schulze "Toast or Corn? Notes I made for This Speech and Then Discarded"
Heather McHugh "To His Health"
Richard Watson "Second Is Last"
Diane Ackerman "One Beautiful Mind"
Lorin Cuoco "Page 399"
Ethan Shaskan Bumas "William H. Gass Meets the -ba particle"
Paul West "At-Swim among the Noble Gasses"
Joan Elkin "Portrait"
Walter Abish "Even Vienna could not forever endure this struggle"
Michael Silverblatt "Review Essays: The Tunnel: A Small Apartment in Hell"]]>
151 John O'Brien 1564783669 Chris 0 literary-studies, 2024 4.00 2004 The Review of Contemporary Fiction: William H. Gass: Vol. 24-3
author: John O'Brien
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: literary-studies, 2024
review:

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<![CDATA[The Review of Contemporary Fiction: XI, #3: William H. Gass / Manuel Puig]]> 30313020 Arthur M. Saltzman, "Language and Conscience: An Interview with William Gass"
William H. Gass, "Simplicities"
William H. Gass, "Sweets"
Arthur M. Saltzman, "William H. Gass: Selected Correspondence"
Philip Stevick, "William Gass and the Real World"
Lucy Wilson, "Alternatives to Transcendence in William Gass's Short Fiction"
Kevin J. H. Dettmar, "'yung and easily freudened': William Gass's The Pedersen Kid'"
Melanie Eckford-Prossor, "Layered Apparitions: Philosophy and 'The Pedersen Kid'"
Richard J. Schneider, "Rejecting the Stone: William Gass and Emersonian Transcendence"
Reginald Dyck, "William Gass: A 'Purified Modernist' in a Postmodern World"
Ilan Stavans, "Kafka, Cortazar, Gass"/Heide Ziegler, "On Translating 'The Sunday Drive'"
Arthur M. Saltzman, "A William H. Gass Checklist"
Ilan Stavans, "Good-Bye to M. P."
Jorgelina Corbatta, "Brief Encounter: An Interview with Manuel Puig"
Manuel Puig, "Vivaldi: A Screenplay"
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, "In a Pampas of Dreams"
Juan Goytisolo, "On Being Morally Correct"
Suzanne Jill Levine, "Manuel Puig Exits Laughing"
Pamela Bacarisse, "Manuel Puig and the Uses of Culture"
Shari A. Zimmerman, "Manuel Puig and the Critique of Authority"
Lucille Kerr, "In the Presence of the Author"
Roberto Echavarren, "Manuel Puig: Contra Borges"
Brian Conniff, "The Learned Executioner and the Chick from Suburbia: Kiss of the Spider Woman as Prison Literature"
Jorgelina Corbatta, "A Glimpse of the Fantastic in Puig"
Steven DuPouy, "Brazilian Nights, Argentine Voices: Tropical Night Falling"
Elias Miguel Munoz, "Show and Tell: Notes on Puig's Theater"
Books by Manuel Puig

Paul West, "Deep-Sixed into the Atlantic"]]>
310 John O'Brien 1564781186 Chris 0 literary-studies, 2024 0.0 1991 The Review of Contemporary Fiction: XI, #3: William H. Gass / Manuel Puig
author: John O'Brien
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: literary-studies, 2024
review:

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<![CDATA[The Review of Contemporary Fiction: William H. Gass, Robert Lowry, Ross Feld, Vol. 25, No. 2]]> 262351 163 John O'Brien 1564784401 Chris 0 literary-studies, 2024 4.33 2005 The Review of Contemporary Fiction: William H. Gass, Robert Lowry, Ross Feld, Vol. 25, No. 2
author: John O'Brien
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: literary-studies, 2024
review:

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