Chris's bookshelf: read en-US Sun, 11 May 2025 05:52:07 -0700 60 Chris's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions Paperbook)]]> 7248740 240 Henry Miller 0811218570 Chris 0 4.03 1941 The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions Paperbook)
author: Henry Miller
name: Chris
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1941
rating: 0
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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
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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
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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 3.50 These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays
author: Russell Persson
name: Chris
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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
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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, Franďż˝ois-¸é±đ˛Ôďż� 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, ¸é±đ˛Ôďż�, 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
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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
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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
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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.

]]> 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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]]> 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 to-read, big-book 5.00 Tom's Crossing
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
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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
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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.
]]> 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:

]]> <![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
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date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, german, short-stories
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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
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date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: to-read, german
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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
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date added: 2025/05/01
shelves: dfw, 2023
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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 SĂĽskind 0394550846 Chris 0 german, 2025 4.00 1985 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
author: Patrick SĂĽskind
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
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date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read, big-book
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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.
]]> 1356 William T. Vollmann 0670015989 Chris 0 favorites, big-book, 2025 Seven Dream series in this volume.

]]> 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.


]]> <![CDATA[Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience: Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk (Anthem symploke Studies in Theory, 1)]]> 216283087
The two â€negativeâ€� moments â€� represented by Huysmans’s Ă€ rebours and McCarthy’s Remainder â€� 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 â€positiveâ€� moments â€� represented by Proust’s Recherche and Cusk’s Outline trilogy â€� 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 â€quietâ€� 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 â€� 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
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rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: literary-studies, 2025, philosophy, leafbyleaf
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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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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: CĂ©sar 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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]]> <![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 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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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.


]]> 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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read, biography, history
review:

]]> <![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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read, biography, history
review:

]]> 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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: junk-food, horror
review:

]]> <![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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read, 000-italy2026, architecture, history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

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:

]]> 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 5.00 2025 Shadow Ticket
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Chris
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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,ĚýAttilaĚý(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 ĚýAttila. 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,ĚýAttilaĚýexpands 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 ofĚýLast 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 4.10 2015 Attila
author: Javier Serena
name: Chris
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 4.33 1991 Attila
author: Aliocha Coll
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![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
shelves: to-read-pri-2, russian
review:

]]> A Death in the Family 6631933
One ofĚý 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,Ěý A Death in the Family Ěýremains 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,Ěý A Death in the Family Ěýis 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
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![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 to-read, danish 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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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, danish
review:

]]> <![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 to-read, danish 4.67 2021 On the Calculation of Volume, Book III
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, danish
review:

]]> <![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 to-read, danish 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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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, danish
review:

]]> <![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 to-read, danish 3.88 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Chris
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, danish
review:

]]> <![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
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read, theology
review:

]]> <![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.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 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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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: 2025, theology
review:

]]> <![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 3.74 2003 Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (The Hinges of History)
author: Thomas Cahill
name: Chris
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: history, greek, 2025, ancient-greece
review:

]]> 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 to-read, polish 0.0 1998 House of Day, House of Night
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, polish
review:

]]> <![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:

]]> <![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
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025, portuguese, poetry
review:

]]> 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.ĚýIn 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
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025, memoir
review:

]]> 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
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![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
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, greek, reference, travel
review:

]]> 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
review:

]]> The Unknown Masterpiece 817790
HonorĂ© 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,ĚýLa 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 ofĚýFleurs du malĚýand a Pulitzer Prize forĚýUntitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.]]> 135 HonorĂ© 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
review:

]]> 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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]]> <![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:

]]> <![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?
Îł 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
(Îł) 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?
(Îł) 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
(Îł) Romantic Art
4. Part III - The Several Arts
(α) Architecture
(β) Sculpture
(Îł) Romantic Art, comprising
(i) Painting
(ii) Music
(iii) Poetry
5. Conclusion]

Commentary

]]> 197 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 014043335X Chris 0 to-read, philosophy, german 3.91 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Chris
average rating: 3.91
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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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]]> <![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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]]> 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 4.20 1940 The Stronghold
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Chris
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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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:

]]> 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:

]]> 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
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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
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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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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:

]]> <![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:

]]> <![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
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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
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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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]]> <![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
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]]> The Way of Florida: A Novel 34448379 The Way of Florida radically reimagines the parameters and responsibilities of the historical novel.

Of the 300 crew sent inland to explore, only four survived an eight-year ordeal. Their story comes down to us via La RelaciĂłn, the ofď¬cial report published in 1542, as well as many other subsequent retellings. Persson’s The Way of Florida is arguably the most linguistically rich, sinuous, and maybe even heroic.]]> 256 Russell Persson 0995705208 Chris 0 2020, leafbyleaf
Video review: ]]> 4.22 2017 The Way of Florida: A Novel
author: Russell Persson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/08
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: 2020, leafbyleaf
review:
Back in print today!

Video review:
]]> <![CDATA[American History, Combined Edition: 1492 - Present]]> 52205454 American History are brought together in a single, accessible textbook. This sweeping narrative spans the full scope of American history from the first Native American societies to the political and cultural struggles of contemporary times. In clear, readable prose, and with attention to well-known and more obscure figures from American history, Kidd gives a robust account of the events, people, and ideas that gave shape to our nation.

Students will come away from American History well-informed, and better prepared to wrestle with the political and cultural changes that have dramatically transformed contemporary American life.

Praise for American History
“Thomas Kidd has succeeded well in providing a high quality American history text that integrates the usual political and social history with its religious dimensions.”�
—George Marsden, professor of history emeritus, University of Notre Dame
ĚýĚý
“Thomas Kidd explores the entirety of American history in this carefully researched and clearly written text. It is an ideal book for students new to American history as well as for older readers who would like a sprightly, objective, and discerning refresher.”�
—Mark Noll, professor of history emeritus, University of Notre Dame, and research professor of history, Regent College

Ěý±Ő±Ő> 704 Thomas S. Kidd 1535982268 Chris 0 to-read, history 4.48 American History, Combined Edition: 1492 - Present
author: Thomas S. Kidd
name: Chris
average rating: 4.48
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition]]> 108347
Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.

Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.]]> 664 Victor Hugo 0226359816 Chris 0 to-read, french, poetry 4.11 1949 Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition
author: Victor Hugo
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, french, poetry
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]]> <![CDATA[New Essays on The Sound and the Fury (The American Novel)]]> 35764 196 Noel Polk 0521457343 Chris 0 literary-studies, 2025 3.44 1993 New Essays on The Sound and the Fury (The American Novel)
author: Noel Polk
name: Chris
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: literary-studies, 2025
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]]> The Sound and the Fury 26197314 The Sound and the Fury
Ěý
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and Ěýone of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.]]> 351 William Faulkner 0679732241 Chris 0 2010, nobel, 2025, leafbyleaf 3.79 1929 The Sound and the Fury
author: William Faulkner
name: Chris
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: 2010, nobel, 2025, leafbyleaf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West]]> 53208150 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 337 Cormac McCarthy 0679728759 Chris 0 2010, 000freqreq000 4.22 1985 Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Chris
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: 2010, 000freqreq000
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]]> <![CDATA[Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness]]> 907548 À la recherce de temps perdu by Marcel Proust (whose cousin was Bergson's wife). Though his ideas were sometimes difficult to follow, Bergson was also a fine stylist, who once declared, "there is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language," and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
In Time and Free Will, written as his doctoral thesis, Bergson tries to dispel the arguments against free will. These arguments, he shows, come from a confusion of different ideas of time. Physicists and mathematicians conceive of time as a measurable construct much like the spatial dimensions. But in human experience, life is perceived as a continuous and unmeasurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness � something that can be measured not quantitatively, but only qualitatively. And because human personalities express themselves in acts that cannot be predicted, Bergson declares free will to be an observable fact. Students and teachers of philosophy are sure to welcome this inexpensive reprint of Bergson's classic, influential essay, long a staple of college philosophy courses.]]> 275 Henri Bergson 0486417670 Chris 0 to-read, philosophy 3.97 1889 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
author: Henri Bergson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1889
rating: 0
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]]> Invidicum 135735335 1196 Michael Brodsky Chris 5 big-book, 2024, leafbyleaf Video treatment now available:

15 Attempts at a Summary Statement Which The Narratorial Agglomeration of the Book Would Deplore:

1. In this 1200-page paradox of rhapsody and fugue, Michael Brodsky masterfully achieves nothing short of a Balanchine choreographing a prose-ballet of thought packets.
2. This is Brodsky’s Wagner-sized metapsychophysiophilosophicopharmaceudosexualogical opera cycle!
3. Invidicum gleefully evolves–or perhaps devolves–into a Rabelaisian Carnivalesque, as observed through the clinically-detached eye of Michel Foucault.
4. What emerges as a hierarchy of narrators� consciousnesses intrudes upon, suspends, corrects, disputes, hijacks, rejects, ridicules, ameliorates, collates, concatenates, and altogether intermingles with the characters� consciousnesses.
5. Furthermore, these intrusive, meta-fictional, self-aware narrators appear to be embattled with one another, in the midst of their own envy-riddled strife.
6. The act of reading this book was, on one level, an act of multi-threaded reverse engineering: following the plot and characters on one thread and parsing and processing how all of the parts were put together on another, more prominent thread that kept resetting itself every time new data was introduced.
7. Any criticism (positive or negative) you can level at the book has already been preempted within the hyper-self-aware book itself.
8. In a way I’ve never experienced at this level before, every role or figure involved in the process of publishing a book interpenetrates the lines of the story: the writer, the editor, the reader, and the critic.
9. Astonishingly, despite 1200 pages, Brodsky pulls off at least 1 novelty on every page, resulting in a collection of over 1200 novelties.
10. On one level, I think we’re witnessing a writer not invoking the Muse, but battling the Muse, in the way that Jacob wrestled the Angel in Genesis 32. Similarly, we witness thought and language engage in the same clash. In this way, the text emerges from the skirmish as both a blessing and a dislocated hip!
11. The excruciating metaphysical discrepancy between thought and language is engagingly analogized and probed and teased and pinched and dissected and–well–enriched.
12. Not since The Tunnel by William H. Gass has the link between envy and fascism been more exhaustively anatomized.
13. Brodsky conveys a commendable stubborn refusal to compromise his vision and conform to market demands–and not just in this book, but across no less than 6 decades of published writing.
14. This book, along with the entire Brodsky repertoire, offers a sumptuous feast for the scholar, an inexhaustible well of potential for every available academic framework (and perhaps begging for the pioneering of a new literary theory).
15. Lastly, it’s a joy to read (if an arduous one) for anyone immersed in the humanities. It’s packed with references and allusions to philosophy, art, film, ballet, music, opera, literature, history, and politics. One gets the sense that Brodsky has imbibed culture to the level that such exuberant contrivances leak unbidden from his pores.]]> 4.38 Invidicum
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Chris
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: big-book, 2024, leafbyleaf
review:
Video treatment now available:

15 Attempts at a Summary Statement Which The Narratorial Agglomeration of the Book Would Deplore:

1. In this 1200-page paradox of rhapsody and fugue, Michael Brodsky masterfully achieves nothing short of a Balanchine choreographing a prose-ballet of thought packets.
2. This is Brodsky’s Wagner-sized metapsychophysiophilosophicopharmaceudosexualogical opera cycle!
3. Invidicum gleefully evolves–or perhaps devolves–into a Rabelaisian Carnivalesque, as observed through the clinically-detached eye of Michel Foucault.
4. What emerges as a hierarchy of narrators� consciousnesses intrudes upon, suspends, corrects, disputes, hijacks, rejects, ridicules, ameliorates, collates, concatenates, and altogether intermingles with the characters� consciousnesses.
5. Furthermore, these intrusive, meta-fictional, self-aware narrators appear to be embattled with one another, in the midst of their own envy-riddled strife.
6. The act of reading this book was, on one level, an act of multi-threaded reverse engineering: following the plot and characters on one thread and parsing and processing how all of the parts were put together on another, more prominent thread that kept resetting itself every time new data was introduced.
7. Any criticism (positive or negative) you can level at the book has already been preempted within the hyper-self-aware book itself.
8. In a way I’ve never experienced at this level before, every role or figure involved in the process of publishing a book interpenetrates the lines of the story: the writer, the editor, the reader, and the critic.
9. Astonishingly, despite 1200 pages, Brodsky pulls off at least 1 novelty on every page, resulting in a collection of over 1200 novelties.
10. On one level, I think we’re witnessing a writer not invoking the Muse, but battling the Muse, in the way that Jacob wrestled the Angel in Genesis 32. Similarly, we witness thought and language engage in the same clash. In this way, the text emerges from the skirmish as both a blessing and a dislocated hip!
11. The excruciating metaphysical discrepancy between thought and language is engagingly analogized and probed and teased and pinched and dissected and–well–enriched.
12. Not since The Tunnel by William H. Gass has the link between envy and fascism been more exhaustively anatomized.
13. Brodsky conveys a commendable stubborn refusal to compromise his vision and conform to market demands–and not just in this book, but across no less than 6 decades of published writing.
14. This book, along with the entire Brodsky repertoire, offers a sumptuous feast for the scholar, an inexhaustible well of potential for every available academic framework (and perhaps begging for the pioneering of a new literary theory).
15. Lastly, it’s a joy to read (if an arduous one) for anyone immersed in the humanities. It’s packed with references and allusions to philosophy, art, film, ballet, music, opera, literature, history, and politics. One gets the sense that Brodsky has imbibed culture to the level that such exuberant contrivances leak unbidden from his pores.
]]> <![CDATA[William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Modern Critical Interpretations)]]> 1268779 159 Harold Bloom 0877549249 Chris 0 3.81 William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Modern Critical Interpretations)
author: Harold Bloom
name: Chris
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2019/09/18
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: literary-studies, shakespeare, 2019
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935�1962 (Volume 2)]]> 52011654 656 Carl Rollyson 0813944406 Chris 0 biography, 2025 4.06 The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 (Volume 2)
author: Carl Rollyson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: biography, 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self (Philosophical Outsiders)]]> 204877299
In this study of the philosophical thought of Pessoa, philosopher Jonardon Ganeri highlights connections between Pessoa with earlier philosophical poets, from Keats to Shakespeare and from Coleridge to Whitman. Ganeri emphasises Pessoa's originality in his theory of the human subject as a radical departure from the history of Christian or Islamic thought, highlighting affinities with ideas from works of philosophical fiction in classical India through an examination of Pessoa's own engagement with Indian poetry and philosophy. Ganeri convincingly argues for the need to consider Pessoa's writings as a philosopher, both on their own terms and as in deep conversation with the tradition of Indian thought.]]> 176 Jonardon Ganeri 0197636683 Chris 0 to-read 4.33 Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self (Philosophical Outsiders)
author: Jonardon Ganeri
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Chaos: Making a New Science 64582 Chaos introduces a whole new readership to chaos theory, one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. From Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the Butterfly Effect, to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s calculation of a universal constant, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals, which created a new geometry of nature, Gleick’s engaging narrative focuses on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science. In Chaos, Gleick makes the story of chaos theory not only fascinating but also accessible to beginners, and opens our eyes to a surprising new view of the universe.]]> 352 James Gleick 0140092501 Chris 0 to-read, science 4.04 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science
author: James Gleick
name: Chris
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chaos Theory: A Quick Immersion (Quick Immersions)]]> 188540788


“Books on chaos theory tend to fall one of two ways. The first are those that cannot resist the hype. The exotic sound of “chaos,� like “artificial intelligence,� invites authors to lean into its mysteries. The second group of books is overly technical and beyond the reach of most readers. Physicists and mathematicians especially find it hard not to include all sorts of arcane detail. This book avoids both pitfalls. Robert Bishop deftly takes the reader through each of the key topics raised by chaos, including its historical roots, and shows why so many disciplines take note. Mathematicians provide fractal geometry as a tool. Computer scientists reveal how chaos puts limits on numerical simulations. Physical scientists have discovered that chaos is ubiquitous in nature. And philosophers explore its implications for a range of longstanding questions. With one foot in physics and another in the philosophy of science, Bishop illustrates each using minimal mathematics with important technical terms explained throughout. There is no better introduction to the topic available and no scholar better suited to the task. Jeffrey Koperski, Professor of Philosophy, Saginaw Valley State University

“Sensitivity to initial conditions and path dependence, nonlinearities, strange attractors, and fractals…Bishop explains � in enviably clear language � the surprising properties and emergence of chaotic dynamics in mathematical models and real-world systems, and the differences between the two. The last chapter, on the limits chaos places on knowledge and predictability, provides insights on how individuals as well as scientists can work within those limits while at the same time embracing the remarkable wisdom they offer. Highly recommended. Alicia Juarrero, author of Context Changes How Constraints Create Coherence (MIT Press).

“It won't come as a surprise to anyone who has been following Professor Bishop's work over the years on this topic that this book represents the best primer on chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics in existence today. Michael Silberstein, Professor of Philosophy, Elizabethtown College.

“Chaos A Quick Immersion is a clear and engaging introduction to chaos theory. Assuming no prior knowledge, and using helpful analogies and examples from everyday life, it familiarizes readers with key concepts and findings of this fascinating field. The discussion is readily accessible to those new to the topic, yet without skirting over important nuances. In addition to surveying conceptual foundations, Chaos Theory nicely illustrates how ideas and tools from the mathematical study of chaos have been applied in science � in weather forecasting, ecology, physiology, physics, and more. Along the way, it calls attention to oft-overlooked challenges involved in relating mathematical and computer models to the physical world and emphasizes the importance of recognizing and navigating limits when seeking knowledge. This delightful little book will be useful to a wide range of readers interested in understanding what chaos theory is and how its insights can make a difference in science.� Wendy Parker, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic University]]> 150 Robert C. Bishop 1949845354 Chris 0 to-read, science 3.00 Chaos Theory: A Quick Immersion (Quick Immersions)
author: Robert C. Bishop
name: Chris
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read, science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2)]]> 57552529
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in this four-volume epic, the tale of young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession- showing mercy toward his victim.

The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.

“A masterpiece...the best science fiction I've read in years!� --Ursula K. Le Guin]]> 528 Gene Wolfe 1250827043 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2, 000freqreq000 4.24 1994 Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2)
author: Gene Wolfe
name: Chris
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read-pri-2, 000freqreq000
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of The Book of the New Sun]]> 57552511 “A major work of twentieth-century American literature...Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within...once into it, there is no stopping.� ­�The New York Times on The Book of the New Sun

This new Tor Essentials edition of Sword & Citadel contains a new introduction by historian and novelist Ada Palmer, author of the award-winning Too Like the Lightning.

Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by the Washington Post.

THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is unanimously acclaimed as Wolfe’s most remarkable work, hailed as “a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis� by Publishers Weekly and “one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century� by the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The Sword of the Lictor is the third volume in Wolfe's remarkable epic, chronicling the odyssey of the wandering pilgrim called Severian, driven by a powerful and unfathomable destiny, as he carries out a dark mission far from his home.

The Citadel of the Autarch brings The Book of the New Sun to its harrowing conclusion, as Severian clashes in a final reckoning with the dread Autarch, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that will alter forever the realm known as Urth.

"Wonderfully vivid and inventive... the most extraordinary hero in the history of the heroic epic.� �The Washington Post]]> 512 Gene Wolfe 1250827035 Chris 0 to-read-pri-2, 000freqreq000 4.42 1994 Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of The Book of the New Sun
author: Gene Wolfe
name: Chris
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read-pri-2, 000freqreq000
review:

]]> Extinction 8942442 Ěý
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 to-read, 000freqreq000 4.24 1986 Extinction
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Chris
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, 000freqreq000
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934]]> 53106499
Rollyson has drawn on an unprecedented amount of material to present the richest rendering of Faulkner yet published. In addition to his own extensive interviews, Rollyson consults the complete--and never fully shared--research of pioneering Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner, who discarded from his authorized biography substantial findings in order to protect the Faulkner family. Rollyson also had unrivaled access to the work of Carvel Collins, whose decades-long inquiry produced one of the greatest troves of primary source material in American letters.

This first volume follows Faulkner from his formative years through his introduction to Hollywood. Rollyson sheds light on Faulkner's unpromising, even bewildering youth, including a gift for tall tales that blossomed into the greatest of literary creativity. He provides the fullest portrait yet of Faulkner's family life, in particular his enigmatic marriage, and offers invaluable new insight into the ways in which Faulkner's long career as a screenwriter influenced his iconic novels.

Integrating Faulkner's screenplays, fiction, and life, Rollyson argues that the novelist deserves to be reread not just as a literary figure but as a still-relevant force, especially in relation to issues of race, sexuality, and equality. The culmination of years of research in archives that have been largely ignored by previous biographers, The Life of William Faulkner offers a significant challenge and an essential contribution to Faulkner scholarship.]]> 512 Carl Rollyson 0813943825 Chris 0 biography, 2025 4.06 The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934
author: Carl Rollyson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: biography, 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (McNally Editions)]]> 207300409 The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise. Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “â€tragiqueâ€� and â€tristeâ€� and â€tremendousâ€� all at once,â€� of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”]]> 240 Djuna Barnes 1961341220 Chris 0 to-read, short-stories 3.83 I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (McNally Editions)
author: Djuna Barnes
name: Chris
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud]]> 8709540

As Freud completes his portrait of Gayford, so the art critic produces his own portrait of the artist, giving a rare insight into Freud’s working practice. Through their wide-ranging conversations, the reader learns not only about Freud’s choice of models, lighting, setting, pose, and colors, but also about his likes and dislikes, his encounters and experiences, and the ways in which he approaches his relationship with each portrait subject. Gayford records Freud’s observations on the work of Michelangelo, Vermeer, Titian, Chardin, Goya, van Gogh, Mondrian, and his great contemporary Francis Bacon. The book is full of revealing anecdotes about the people Freud has met in the course of his long career, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Greta Garbo, and his grandfather Sigmund Freud.


Illustrated with photographs of Freud at work and an etching that Freud did of Gayford after the painting was completed, the book also features other paintings by Freud from the 1940s to the present, as well as images by artists discussed by Freud with Gayford.]]> 256 Martin Gayford 0500238758 Chris 0 art, 2025, biography, memoir 4.36 2010 Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
author: Martin Gayford
name: Chris
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: art, 2025, biography, memoir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Seventh Function of Language]]> 31450626 From the prizewinning author of HHhH, “the most insolent novel of the yearâ€� (ł˘â€ÍÖłć±č°ů±đ˛ő˛ő )

Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered?

In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.�

A brilliantly erudite comedy that recalls Flaubert’s Parrot and The Name of the Rose—with more than a dash of TheDa Vinci Code�The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition.

]]> 359 Laurent Binet 0374261563 Chris 0 2017, french ˛ú±ô˛ą˛őĂ© and has an equally anticlimactic ending. But the book isn’t exactly a potboiler written for the masses. Its full effect will only be realized by a particular set of readers (like me). After the first hundred pages or so, I feared Binet had already exhausted his best material, but at page 185 we get a wonderful allusion to Eco’s 1980 debut novel: “Eco listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses. His mind wanders for second, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through it.â€� On page 217 a boy on a plane plays with a Rubik’s cube, though the fascinated superintendent doesn’t know that’s what it’s called. And on page 237: “In the hotel corridors Foucault has a panic attack because he saw The Shining just before he left France.â€� For anyone who has had to puzzle through, say, Derrida’s Of Grammatology or trudge through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; for anyone who has been embroiled in arguments and debates in humanities classes that seems to circle around and around and end in a sort of neopragmatist truce--The Seventh Function of Language will prove a worthy fireside companion.]]> 3.76 2015 The Seventh Function of Language
author: Laurent Binet
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/23
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: 2017, french
review:
What literary person can resist a satire of the French 1980s intelligentsia? Roland Barthes is struck by a vehicle, hospitalized, and dies--but not before setting in motion an investigation that points to mysteries, secret societies, a Holy Grail of a purloined document, and national conspiracies. The cast features no less than Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, HĂ©lène Cixous, Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mitterand, Umberto Eco (whom I wish got more stage time), et al. From Foucault fleeing a lecture hall and yelling that he cannot be contained by authority; to the constant banter of French intellectuals in smoky, boozy cafĂ©s; to militant students foisting activism tracts on passersby and calling everyone around them fascists--there is more than enough poignant satire to provide an evening or two of good-natured amusement. An archetypal police superintendent (right-wing no-nonsense figure with disdain for the generation of intellectuals he views as simply averse to hard work) and an amateur intellectual (knows enough to act as the superintendent’s Wikipedia [sic: anachronism]) pair up for the investigation that takes them from Paris to Bologna to Ithaca (NY) to Venice to Paris. The main themes of the novel and of the time it recounts are language and semiology. Binet was born in 1972, has a literature degree from the University of Paris, and teaches French, all of which contribute to the novel’s blending of 1980s nostalgia, erudite explication of French literary theory, and preoccupation with linguistics. The ostensible plot (a purportedly powerful document that must be rescued from the wrong hands) is rather ˛ú±ô˛ą˛őĂ© and has an equally anticlimactic ending. But the book isn’t exactly a potboiler written for the masses. Its full effect will only be realized by a particular set of readers (like me). After the first hundred pages or so, I feared Binet had already exhausted his best material, but at page 185 we get a wonderful allusion to Eco’s 1980 debut novel: “Eco listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses. His mind wanders for second, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through it.â€� On page 217 a boy on a plane plays with a Rubik’s cube, though the fascinated superintendent doesn’t know that’s what it’s called. And on page 237: “In the hotel corridors Foucault has a panic attack because he saw The Shining just before he left France.â€� For anyone who has had to puzzle through, say, Derrida’s Of Grammatology or trudge through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; for anyone who has been embroiled in arguments and debates in humanities classes that seems to circle around and around and end in a sort of neopragmatist truce--The Seventh Function of Language will prove a worthy fireside companion.
]]> Ways of Seeing 2784 John Berger’s Classic Text on Art

Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times a critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

"Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review

"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling.]]> 176 John Berger 0140135154 Chris 0 art, 2025 3.93 1972 Ways of Seeing
author: John Berger
name: Chris
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: art, 2025
review:

]]> Notre-Dame de Paris 30600 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780140443530

More commonly known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo’s Romantic novel of dark passions and unrequited love

In the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral lives Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer. Mocked and shunned for his appearance, he is pitied only by Esmerelda, a beautiful gypsy dancer to whom he becomes completely devoted. Esmerelda, however, has also attracted the attention of the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo, and when she rejects his lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destroy her, that only Quasimodo can prevent. Victor Hugo’s sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved, and mourns its passing in one of the greatest historical romances of the nineteenth century.

John Sturrock’s clear, contemporary translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing it as a passionate novel of ideas, written in defence of Gothic architecture and of a burgeoning democracy, and demonstrating that an ugly exterior can conceal moral beauty. This revised edition also includes further reading and a chronology of Hugo’s life.]]> 512 Victor Hugo Chris 0 to-read, french 4.11 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris
author: Victor Hugo
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1831
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, french
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford Paperbacks)]]> 1916470 290 Winifred Gérin 0192812513 Chris 0 to-read, biography 3.67 1971 Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford Paperbacks)
author: Winifred GĂ©rin
name: Chris
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, biography
review:

]]> <![CDATA[German Romantic Poets (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)]]> 221208505 An alternative cover edition can be found here

A greatest-hits selection from some of the most popular poets of the Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Heinrich Heine, in a gorgeously jacketed small hardcover.

Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, the followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humour along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe’s “Elf King,� Eichendorff’s “Night of Moon,� and Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde . Characters from myth and folklore abound as well, most famously Lorelei, an enchantress who is associated with the 132-meter rock of the same name on the right bank of the Rhine River and who features in several poems in this volume. Also gathered here are such favorites as Holderlin’s “Bread and Wine,� Schiller’s “The Visit of the Gods,� Eichendorff’s “Nocture,� and Heine’s “The Magic Month of May,� along with works by the most famous women writers of the Romantic era, including Karoline von Gunderrode and Sophie Mereau.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.]]> 256 Charlotte Lee 1101908351 Chris 0 german, poetry, 2024 0.0 German Romantic Poets (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
author: Charlotte Lee
name: Chris
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: german, poetry, 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self]]> 59883428 From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels--poets, novelists, philosophers--who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.

When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations. At the heart of this inspiring book is the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will.]]> 512 Andrea Wulf 0525657118 Chris 0 4.11 2022 Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
author: Andrea Wulf
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: 2024, biography, german, history, philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe and everything]]> 123213907 250 Bernardo Kastrup 1782793623 Chris 0 to-read, philosophy 4.00 2014 Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe and everything
author: Bernardo Kastrup
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read, philosophy
review:

]]> Ubik 12346742 Time

Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in “half-life,� a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter’s face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all.

“More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”—Roberto Bolaño]]> 227 Philip K. Dick 0547572298 Chris 0 to-read, sci-fi 4.10 1969 Ubik
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Chris
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read, sci-fi
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue]]> 22151695
Exploring Calvin and Hobbes is the catalogue for an exhibition by the same name at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University that ran in 2014. The exhibit is Bill Watterson's personal exploration of how the wonder of Calvin and Hobbes came to be. It includes original art of Calvin and Hobbes, along with Watterson's original commentary. The show also includes art from cartoons and cartoonists that Watterson has identified as influential in the development of his art, including Peanuts, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Doonesbury, Pat Oliphant, Jim Borgman, Flash Gordon, Bloom County, and Steadman. The book also includes an extensive, original interview with Watterson by Jenny Robb, the exhibition's curator.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is the repository of the Bill Watterson Deposit Collection (including the entirety of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes artwork).]]> 160 Bill Watterson 1449460364 Chris 0 to-read, art, graphic 4.71 2015 Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue
author: Bill Watterson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read, art, graphic
review:

]]> Reading Genesis 127282468
For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis , which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.]]> 344 Marilynne Robinson 0374299404 Chris 0 bible-as-lit, 2024 4.03 2024 Reading Genesis
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Chris
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: bible-as-lit, 2024
review:

]]> The Philosophy of Translation 210129382 A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners
Ěý
Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award-winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable� cultural nuances. Here, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.]]> 248 Damion Searls 0300247370 Chris 0 4.38 2024 The Philosophy of Translation
author: Damion Searls
name: Chris
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: 2024, literary-studies, philosophy, translation
review:

]]> The Great Conversation 13643718 (131+xxx pp.)]]> 131 Robert Maynard Hutchins Chris 0 4.13 1952 The Great Conversation
author: Robert Maynard Hutchins
name: Chris
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: 2018, literary-studies, of-books
review:

]]> The Tunnel 18277467 The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.]]> 652 William H. Gass Chris 0
—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�
Original 2018 review:

After twenty-four days of finally working my way through William H. Gass's masterpiece, I can say that my nails feel as besmirched as Herr I'm-Not-German Kohler's. Gass, in his highly entertaining , states that "[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness." Quite right. And in his (whose blurb adorns the cover of my Dalkey Archive paperback), Gass makes no qualms about the aspirations and demands of his book. Silverblatt, an avid and insightful reader if there ever was one, even confesses to swaying--yet not faltering--under the heft of the first 90 pages. The Tunnel is deliberately large, complex, and difficult. How else shall we, as readers, grow?

The novel is meant to present the interleaving of William Frederick Kohler's massive academic study, Guilt & Innocence in Hitler's Germany, and his diverting attempts to write the study's introduction. But Kohler does not like introductions; he likes endings; so his stops and statrts end up churning out a heap of pages about his own life. To say that it is confessional literature is an understatement--Kohler's level of baring it all puts Dostoyevsky to shame. So searing and intimate are the pages he turns out that he takes to hiding them within the pages of his historical study. What we, the readers, then have is the stack of interleaved pages. But although, to the reader who has not yet read The Tunnel, this could sound like something akin to Burroughs's cut-ups, I found the text fairly linear and readable. Perhaps, though, this is indicative of the warping I've undergone from the ilk of books I invite into my mind.

Without a doubt William Kohler is the most embittered, angriest, loneliest man in all of literature. As much as I stay away from such superlative statements--for I haven't, of course, read all of literature--I feel confident in my assertion. Kohler will upset you if you have at least a paucity of a moral code. He resents everyone and everything around him and holds nothing back in his telling us so. A principal target of his bitterness and resentment is the female, especially his wife Martha. This is a bold move on Gass's part, delivering a novel in 1995 while the women's lib movement of the 70s and 80s was still targeting WASP writers (or what David Foster Wallace called "Great Male Narcissists") for their base misogyny. But Gass has a trick up his sleeve. Kohler, in his monumental attacks against the feminine, is not very...endowed. Yes, and it consumes him, as the reader will find. What is interesting here it that, one of the invectives against WASP mega-novels is that it is a way of asserting the phallus on the world. We are thus forced to look for something beyond this easy way out; and, in the end, Gass will begin to bring us to an understanding and, just possibly, to sympathize with Kohler.

In the midst of all this anger, all this loneliness, however, is a deeply poetic language. Indeed, Kohler states many times that he gave up poetry and took on history. So we know he has poetic tendencies. Gass, of course, is a master of the metaphor. The style and language used throughout The Tunnel will singe even the densest eyebrows. Your toes will curl at some of the sentences he pulls off. Yes, this incongruity of pulchritude and grotesquerie is what causes the reader to latch onto the text both against and out of the will. It is hard to stave off my inclination to list out all of the sentences I highlighted in orange (my designated color for passages that stylistically dazzle me), but to do so would be to reprint the book and invite copyright trouble.

The book is not a direct meditation on Hitler's Germany; it is not Kohler's scholarly thesis. It is, rather, the confessions of a brilliant yet embittered madman, struggling to make some sense of life. His myriad propositions about what history is are sometimes profound and sometimes bathetic. For me, the most striking meditation concerns what Kohler phrases "life in a chair." For anyone with an academic, bookish, intellectual bent, Gass perfectly captures the pleasures and the pains of such a life. But, make no mistake, this is a sprawling, dense book that requires more than just the bedtime reader. It is a project that invites you to explore your own self, to examine the soft, vulnerable underbelly of life that we'd rather keep hidden.]]> 4.37 1995 The Tunnel
author: William H. Gass
name: Chris
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: 2018, favorites, big-book, 2024
review:
The second dig is done. Video available on Leaf by Leaf:

—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�
Original 2018 review:

After twenty-four days of finally working my way through William H. Gass's masterpiece, I can say that my nails feel as besmirched as Herr I'm-Not-German Kohler's. Gass, in his highly entertaining , states that "[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness." Quite right. And in his (whose blurb adorns the cover of my Dalkey Archive paperback), Gass makes no qualms about the aspirations and demands of his book. Silverblatt, an avid and insightful reader if there ever was one, even confesses to swaying--yet not faltering--under the heft of the first 90 pages. The Tunnel is deliberately large, complex, and difficult. How else shall we, as readers, grow?

The novel is meant to present the interleaving of William Frederick Kohler's massive academic study, Guilt & Innocence in Hitler's Germany, and his diverting attempts to write the study's introduction. But Kohler does not like introductions; he likes endings; so his stops and statrts end up churning out a heap of pages about his own life. To say that it is confessional literature is an understatement--Kohler's level of baring it all puts Dostoyevsky to shame. So searing and intimate are the pages he turns out that he takes to hiding them within the pages of his historical study. What we, the readers, then have is the stack of interleaved pages. But although, to the reader who has not yet read The Tunnel, this could sound like something akin to Burroughs's cut-ups, I found the text fairly linear and readable. Perhaps, though, this is indicative of the warping I've undergone from the ilk of books I invite into my mind.

Without a doubt William Kohler is the most embittered, angriest, loneliest man in all of literature. As much as I stay away from such superlative statements--for I haven't, of course, read all of literature--I feel confident in my assertion. Kohler will upset you if you have at least a paucity of a moral code. He resents everyone and everything around him and holds nothing back in his telling us so. A principal target of his bitterness and resentment is the female, especially his wife Martha. This is a bold move on Gass's part, delivering a novel in 1995 while the women's lib movement of the 70s and 80s was still targeting WASP writers (or what David Foster Wallace called "Great Male Narcissists") for their base misogyny. But Gass has a trick up his sleeve. Kohler, in his monumental attacks against the feminine, is not very...endowed. Yes, and it consumes him, as the reader will find. What is interesting here it that, one of the invectives against WASP mega-novels is that it is a way of asserting the phallus on the world. We are thus forced to look for something beyond this easy way out; and, in the end, Gass will begin to bring us to an understanding and, just possibly, to sympathize with Kohler.

In the midst of all this anger, all this loneliness, however, is a deeply poetic language. Indeed, Kohler states many times that he gave up poetry and took on history. So we know he has poetic tendencies. Gass, of course, is a master of the metaphor. The style and language used throughout The Tunnel will singe even the densest eyebrows. Your toes will curl at some of the sentences he pulls off. Yes, this incongruity of pulchritude and grotesquerie is what causes the reader to latch onto the text both against and out of the will. It is hard to stave off my inclination to list out all of the sentences I highlighted in orange (my designated color for passages that stylistically dazzle me), but to do so would be to reprint the book and invite copyright trouble.

The book is not a direct meditation on Hitler's Germany; it is not Kohler's scholarly thesis. It is, rather, the confessions of a brilliant yet embittered madman, struggling to make some sense of life. His myriad propositions about what history is are sometimes profound and sometimes bathetic. For me, the most striking meditation concerns what Kohler phrases "life in a chair." For anyone with an academic, bookish, intellectual bent, Gass perfectly captures the pleasures and the pains of such a life. But, make no mistake, this is a sprawling, dense book that requires more than just the bedtime reader. It is a project that invites you to explore your own self, to examine the soft, vulnerable underbelly of life that we'd rather keep hidden.
]]> Pride and Prejudice 1532798 Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret it. But the rest of us simply fall in love with it -- and with its wonderfully charming and intelligent heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.

We are captivated not only by the novel's romantic suspense but also by the fascinations of the world we visit in its pages. The life of the English country gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century is made as real to us as our own, not only by Jane Austen's wit and feeling but by her subtle observations of the way people behave in society and how we are true or treacherous to one another and ourselves.

JANE AUSTEN (1773-1817) was born in Hampshire, England, where she spent most of her life. Though she received little recognition in her lifetime, she came to be regarded as one of the great masters of the English novel.
--back cover]]> 368 Jane Austen 0307386864 Chris 0 4.33 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: Chris
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1813
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: victorian, 2016, core, 2024, british, leafbyleaf
review:
What could I possibly add to the conversation about this book? Watch me try anyway here:
]]>