en-US Thu, 21 Dec 2023 11:12:58 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 243991
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.]]> 280 Chris Kraus 1584350342 David 1 abandoned, usa 3.53 1997
author: Chris Kraus
name: David
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1997
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves: abandoned, usa
review:
Couldn't finish. Honestly couldn't force myself to be interested for any moment of the first 100 pages.
]]> 24113 777 Douglas R. Hofstadter 0465026567 David 0 4.29 1979
author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
name: David
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves: abandoned, big-difficult-books, usa
review:
Kind of interesting, but a little too bogged down in formal logic and little too frenetic structurally to keep me interested... giving up for now. Made it about 50% through.
]]> 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 David 3 4.01 1973
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: David
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 3
read at: 2014/11/28
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, post-modernism, big-difficult-books, usa
review:

]]> 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 David 2 abandoned, crime-time, usa 3.93 1987
author: Paul Auster
name: David
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2016/10/27
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, crime-time, usa
review:
Boring and amateur. Maybe more of a review to come.
]]> 28818930 An Unnecessary Woman, Alameddine delivers a spectacular portrait of a man and an era of profound political and social upheaval.

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana'a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives.]]> 294 Rabih Alameddine 080212576X David 1 abandoned, jordan 3.85 2016
author: Rabih Alameddine
name: David
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2016
rating: 1
read at: 2019/12/26
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, jordan
review:

]]> 45961 Soul Mountain.

Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.]]> 510 Gao Xingjian 0060936231 David 2 abandoned, nobel-prize, china 3.60 1990
author: Gao Xingjian
name: David
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1990
rating: 2
read at: 2020/04/19
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, nobel-prize, china
review:

]]> 74001 824 Nikos Kazantzakis 0671202472 David 0 abandoned, greece 4.27 1938
author: Nikos Kazantzakis
name: David
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/27
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, greece
review:

]]> 38402135 From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.�� And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,�� she writes. “I’ll take it all.��

In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart “giant with power, heavy with blood”—“the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.�� In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.]]> 120 Ada Limon 1571315128 David 0 poetry, abandoned, usa 4.39 2018
author: Ada Limon
name: David
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/28
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: poetry, abandoned, usa
review:

]]> 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 David 0 abandoned, korea 4.26 2014
author: Han Kang
name: David
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/21
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: abandoned, korea
review:

]]> 43713 657 Harold Abelson 0262510871 David 0 interwebs, abandoned 4.46 1984
author: Harold Abelson
name: David
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves: interwebs, abandoned
review:

]]> 262762 Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.

Echoing Edward Said’s belief that “Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism,�� the renowned critic Clive James presents here his life’s work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, “If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.�� Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.]]> 912 Clive James 0393061167 David 0 abandoned, eventually-read 4.11 2007
author: Clive James
name: David
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/18
shelves: abandoned, eventually-read
review:

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