What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich


Shame I don't have the other two books to cover the entirety of the Empire's existance. I will probably finish this one by tomorrow.

[© Tweed the Younger]

I picked up a copy of Age of Extremes for $3,

how?

[Lief]

Found it in a thrift store on the Upper East Side while I was shopping for cups and plates for my apartment. I also bought The Age of Empire, but they didn't have the other two for whatever reason, even though it looked like this edition of the four books had been printed together as a set.

[Mynheer Peeperkorn von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe]

Anna Karenina in the P/V translation.

My deepest condolences


---

V. S. Naipaul - Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

[The Mikado]

I just read The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene as well as Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.

Now I'm going to do Heart of Darkness.

The amazing thing about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad's English really isn't all that good and the book can get a bit tough despite being barely 60 pages long, but it's still one of the most compelling stories you'll ever read.

[Mynheer Peeperkorn von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe]

I just read The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene as well as Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.

Now I'm going to do Heart of Darkness.

The amazing thing about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad's English really isn't all that good and the book can get a bit tough despite being barely 60 pages long, but it's still one of the most compelling stories you'll ever read.

+1

[asexual trans victimologist]

V. S. Naipaul

My deepest condolences.

Still working on my reread of Floating Clouds, and have added a concurrent reread of Kawabata's Snow Country.

[homelycooking]

Anna Karenina in the P/V translation.

My deepest condolences

I'll ignore your opinions on Tolstoy, thank you very much, Mr. "that's the end of North American literature".

[ChairmanSanchez]

I just finished Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Really, really, really good. Thoughts on the book?

[Insula Dei]

V. S. Naipaul

My deepest condolences.

Still working on my reread of Floating Clouds, and have added a concurrent reread of Kawabata's Snow Country.

Have you ever actually read Naipaul?

EDIT: Incidentally am reading Guerrillas right now.

[Emperor SJoyce]

[Vasall des Midas]

Just finished "Pornography" by Witold Gombrowicz.

[asexual trans victimologist]

V. S. Naipaul

My deepest condolences.

Still working on my reread of Floating Clouds, and have added a concurrent reread of Kawabata's Snow Country.

Have you ever actually read Naipaul?

I have.

[Insula Dei]

And you didn't like him? How strange!

[asexual trans victimologist]

And you didn't like him? How strange!

He's a formally talented writer, obviously, but I don't like the perspective from which he approaches his (themselves at times quite admirable) themes very much at all because I think his famed personal nastiness, unlike that of some other writers, does come across in his work.

[Insula Dei]

But the perspective is so vital to Naipaul's prose! I think one of the main objections to him is that so many people seem to be under the impression that's he's just another colonial apologist, the Trinidad wing of the Tory party, if you like. But it's important to keep in mind Naipaul's own comment that he doesn't care for politics. He is very much his own man, and his fiction is determined completely by that profound individuality.

[asexual trans victimologist]

Right; no, I understand and agree with a lot of the political criticisms of Naipaul but it's not really why I don't like him. I suppose I'm just not especially fond of Naipaul's particular individuality; it's a particular kind of critical, vaguely antisocial individualism that I don't respond well to, even though there are other kinds in literature that I do.

[Sibboleth]

I think one of the main objections to him is that so many people seem to be under the impression that's he's just another colonial apologist, the Trinidad wing of the Tory party, if you like. But it's important to keep in mind Naipaul's own comment that he doesn't care for politics.

That just proves that he is, indeed, a colonial apologist from the Trinidad wing of the Tory party.

[asexual trans victimologist]

I think one of the main objections to him is that so many people seem to be under the impression that's he's just another colonial apologist, the Trinidad wing of the Tory party, if you like. But it's important to keep in mind Naipaul's own comment that he doesn't care for politics.

That just proves that he is, indeed, a colonial apologist from the Trinidad wing of the Tory party.

This too. It's impossible to take a comment about not caring for politics from someone in Naipaul's position at all seriously.

[Insula Dei]

To be fair, the actual quote is about himself as a young man. The scholarship boy wishing to be Somerset Maugham who is one of his great recurrent topics. Obviously Naipaul doesn't exist in a political vacuum. I'd go as far as to say that he's one of the most perceptive observers of (post)colonial mores of our time.* But he's not 'political' in that banal way that many people seem eager to jump on so as to be able to dismiss him out of hand. Naipaul isn't nailed to one position or the other in West European intellectual and political disputes.


*:And obviously sometimes his way of seeing the world can be profoundly problematic, even borderline unacceptable.

[Vasall des Midas]

Complete bull. Naipaul is the Trinidad wing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

[ChairmanSanchez]

That was a good one for a campaign book

[CathKhan]

That was a good one for a campaign book

I should read it someday. Apparently it's at my library.

[Beet]

[J. J.]

I just read The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene as well as Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.

Now I'm going to do Heart of Darkness.

The amazing thing about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad's English really isn't all that good and the book can get a bit tough despite being barely 60 pages long, but it's still one of the most compelling stories you'll ever read.

Heart of Darkness is probably my favorite novella.  What get's me is that it is based on a real person.