Showing posts with label Vladimir Nabokov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vladimir Nabokov. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

July Books

Here are the books I bought in July. I want to share these so I can hopefully get recommendations from others, since, as a I said in this post, I am always on the hunt for new books. Please let me know if you have any recommendations, or if you've read any of these books, and have any thoughts about them!

I recently read my first Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, and loved it, and went in search for my next Atwood, and picked this up.










I first bought this book because it is from the publisher Persephone Books, an AMAZING independent publisher that mostly publishes forgotten and out-of-print books by women. These are just hard to get a hold of in the States, as Persephone only sells in their books in the UK. You can ship them around the world, but it is expensive, you can buy them Amazon, but I am vehemently opposed to buying books on Amazon, or you can scour used book stores and hope someone has kindly donated their copies, which is how I found this book. It also helps that Monica Dickens is the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. I've already read this book, and loved it. I will be writing up on it.


I've read Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I thought was all right. I wanted to give her another try with this collection.










In college, I took a class solely on Vladimir Nabokov's work. So far I have read a ton of short stories and seven of his novels, which were all pretty great, so I want to continue chipping away at his bibliography.








This book is a gift from one of my best friends. She read it, and thought I would love it. I love receiving books as gifts, especially books that I didn't express that I wanted, but books that others think I would enjoy.








Lately, I feel like I've been hearing so much about Jeanette Winterson, and this book in particular seems to have been making the rounds on Booktube, so when I saw a used copy in perfect condition, I had to get it.









Virginia Woolf is one of my absolute favorite authors of all time, so I'm trying to make my way to reading everything she has written. Melymbrosia is interesting because it is an earlier draft of her published novel The Voyage Out. Melymbrosia was heavily edited based Woolf's friends telling her she would receive a lot of backlash because of the book's criticism of the British empire. Why would I not want to read this?





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So I'm still tinkering with ways to format these Monthly Book entries. I might just change them every time I do one, depending on the books, and whether I have something specific to say about why I bought them. I wanted to write about these books a little more because I'm really excited about them, and most are particularly meaningful to me in one way or another. But something I thought I might include is a little tally of the stores I bought them at. I want to do this to promote the amazing independent bookstores I frequent, and to kind of get a sense of where I shop. As much as this blog is for dialogue, I also want to use it to map my interests and ways of reading. Here are my bookstore tallies:

The Strand: |||
bookbook: |||

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Quick Chat: 'Be Good to Yourself,' MOBY DICK #2

After speaking with an elder in my life, whom I respect, I finally decided to fucking give up on Moby Dick. I can't do it anymore. It was killing me. I've been reading it for almost two weeks and have only read 200 out of the 500 pages of the book. I never felt a desire to pick up the book, only an obligation to finish it because a lot of other people think it's a 'masterpiece.' 

I hate not finishing books. I usually hold out to see if the ending will put things into perspective - which is what happened with Lolita - or I'm at least interested enough in wanting to see how the story ends - which is what happened with The Shipping News, a book I enjoyed, but mostly continued to read because I wanted to see how things resolved. So I struggled with giving up on Moby Dick, but here I am. Maybe this is not the right time in my life, and maybe I will pick it up again and I will love it, but for now, I don't like it, and I think the structure and writing is kind of shit. I will still recap some thoughts I had while struuuuggling through the first 200 pages. Also, if I can't get into a book in 200 pages, it's time to give up. 'Be good to yourself,' is the advice I got, and I'm going to take it. There is no righteous mandate that I read this book, or any book. I'm going to be good to myself, and read what excites me and challenges me in ways that enhance my intellectual life, rather than feel like it is slowly bleeding out.

A Few Things About Moby Dick:
  • The writing felt so inert. There are some seriously beautiful sentences, but the whole story and plot felt like they were going nowhere.
  • I liked the beginning with the homoerotic comedy of manners with Ishmael, our narrator, and Queequeg, the cannibal Ishmael befriends. Honestly, I want the novel of them falling in love, going on dumb whaling adventures together, not the slog of the life on the ship they end up on, the Pequod. 
  • The legendary Captain Ahab is a straight up idiot. The whole narrative of man-thinking-he-can-overcome-nature is an interesting one, but not compelling through the lens of Ahab's character. 
  • Here's a new recurring segment I will call Interesting or Stupid? In this segment I will try and determine if a stylistic/structural/narrative/etc. choice is actually interesting and meaningful, or if it's stupid. 
    • In the case of Moby Dick, there is a portion of the novel, from pages 141-158, where the narration switches from Ishmael to a few other characters, and the way Melville indicates this is through basically what are stage directions. For example, beneath Chapter 37's title 'Sunset,' are the directions 'The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out' (148). At first, I thought to myself, 'Hm, that's interesting. Maybe Melville will embrace the ridiculousness of this whole vengeance on this whale by including aspects of plays or something.' Like, why have a first-person narrator (Ishmael) if you're going to switch between first-person narrators in an awkward way?! Why not use fucking free-indirect speech as employed fucking beautifully by Jane Austen?! And the entirety of Chapter 40 is a scene of the different sailors on the ship, but their dialogue is set up as in a play. And then all of this just never happens again. Maybe it's all interesting, but I'm leaning more towards stupid just because it completely did not fit with the other chapters.
  • And another recurring segment: Meta Moment, in which I will discuss a meta moment - *wink wink* - in a book, because usually I think those are cool.
    • In the case of Moby Dick, on page 184, Ishmael says, 'So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.' Really, Melville? Is this your justification to the slog I have trudged through for the past two weeks?!
And that concludes my thoughts on Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Maybe I will read you again one day, maybe not. Either way, I'm moving on.