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Ok, I'd tried to read Labyrinths years ago and found it dry and dull. I thought that perhaps I just wasn't in the proper state of mind, or perhaps wasn't well read enough to get it. I'd also come off of a Calvino kick, so Borges felt boring. Fast forward to me thinking that I really should commit to Borges and give him a real chance.

I have to say that hard a hard time with this book. I only really like one story The Babylonian Lottery. The Circular Ruins, The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths and The Secret Miracle being alright and scant few others like An Examination of Herbert Quain and The End only fair.

Most of the time I feel like I'm stuck as some shitty academic after-party listening to the drunken rambling of a self-indulgent lit professor trying to make himself believe that he is the smartest guy in the room. I get the references, but most of this just isn't that interesting. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I."

Let me write you a Borges story:

I could write a longer story dear reader, but instead I will keep to laconic prose. I met Arkadiusz Juhász when he threw a crust of bread at my head and laughed in that way that he does. At the time, I was simultaneously reading De Natura Deorum, Hasidic Kabbalah, and Discours de Métaphysique. [Fill page one with nonsense that isn't all that important to the story, feels otherworldly, and serves only to offset and confuse the reader]. At dinner Arkadiusz Juhász described the labyrinth in his mind. He had an experience the likes of which you will never have. Jews are mysterious. He solved a puzzle that he created for himself and figured out that he is Shakespeare and everyone wrote Henry V for it has always existed. There is a long history of naming a thing, but in reality everything is the same. Arkadiusz Juhász felt disjointed from the world and wandered and time passed with little result. Perhaps he was in a sanitarium with black circling walls. Arkadiusz Juhász has written a collection of essays to describe the effect of his travels. Here is the list: Darkest Jungles 1898; The Diminishing Return 1900; Checkers and the Vanishing Point 1904; The Breadbox 1904; The Unhappy Happenstance 1906 (unfinished); Ur Nuts 1907; Life in a Ziggurat 1909 (never actually written); The Aching Feather 1910; Critical Analysis of Being Spanish 1912 (writen in Portugese and German). [Describe some of these essays]. Arkadiusz Juhász confessed to me that he was really a war criminal. But, I later found out that he may not have been. Arkadiusz Juhász died of a brain hemorrhage in 1951.