Random
reeding
1. do you feel the need to finish a book you start?
2. what is the book by the author you read that book you’re pretty much done/you got that author down?
3. what book of poetry made you finally tolerate poetry?
4. what is the book you were reading and you thought, “I wish this book would keep on walking. I am blar it has ended, I am liquid-glandful and low. Keep going, book.”
5. what is the book (maybe assigned or some shit) you were reading and your serial bowl/crayonium went “Fuck I wish this book was over”?
6. what is the book you don’t want to see go electronic?
7. what’s the book people like but you doubt they read the whole thing?
8. what is the book you mark up with ink/lead/cur-ear (or did) the most?
9. what is the book you keep saying you’ll read but most likely will not?
10. what is the book you own the most copies of? one at your work, in the car floor, hollowed out for your secret letters/oregano, another in the kitchen junk drawer, one at your lover’s place, one at your spouse’s, one tonguing dust balls beneath the fridge, a page tacked on some old wall?
11. what is the book you’ve stolen the most from?
12. what is the book you are not returning–the one you actually stole?
Tags: reading
1. I feel the need, but there are some I still haven’t done
2. ??
3. The Man Suit is the one for me that people (poetry people) always have one of, the one that makes you realize what poetry can be, etc., but I read a big fat complete Cummings with some fervor before that.
4. I could have read about 100 books-worth of the first section of The Sound and The Fury.
5. I always thought Huck Finn kind of went on forever. It’s funny and good, I have just always thought it was twice as long as it could have been.
6. Hm.
7. TSATF again. One of my roommates has this book about 100 novels or something that you need to know for the GRE Lit subject test, and I saw in it that the author recommends skipping the entire first section. I’m sure it has recommendations for sections to skip in other books, too. That kind of blew my mind though. Like, the books are famous (and on the test) because of their entirety, so seems weird to advocate skipping. Guess it isn’t that weird, I don’t know.
8. I wrote some not very nice things in copies of Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel and Addonizio’s Tell Me, and some stupid stuff in the margins of a book on lit theory that make it obvious how little I understood from it.
9. I wonder if I’ll ever read Moby Dick. It’s been in my room across from my bed for about forever.
10. I own only one copy of most of my books except that I accidentally own two copies of Crime and Punishment and two of I, Claudius. I forget how I got two copies. Hm.
11. Surely, The Man Suit.
12. I stole a mess of books from one of my high school teachers. None of them particularly memorable, although a pretty nice one about how to speak properly. I think it’s called Mean What You Say. It’s a little dated.
1. Yes. After giving the book a test drive – 10 pages, 25, a chapter – , if I take it up, I’ve committed myself. If I quit on it – there’s only so much time for all the better books – , there’s no weaseling out of being a quitter. If it’s just not compelling ‘enough’, then then, I’m a quitter.
4. There are many gland-stimulative books. What’s especially weird to me is when the book’s conclusion is essential to its excitation, whether the ending is shitty or ‘happy’ for its characters: the closure compels desire. That, to me, is paradoxical. As I Lay Dying is an example; Gatsby and Gravity’s Rainbow are others. Suttree and Sentimental Education, though I don’t understand either ending.
5. Also many. A 150-page book that takes 300 pages to read: Absalom, Absalom. Proust, sadly for me, often, over the seven (in English) parts.
8. Ferosophy margins. The Archaeology of Knowledge, Heidegghead, Kan’t. That Plato, though those aren’t “philosophy”.
11. Nietzsche. But it’s not ‘stealing’; it’s viral vectoring.
1. used to feel obligated until i read running with scissors
3. the roominghouse madrigals – bukowski
4. absalom, absalom; cannery row
5. the fall; freedom
8. the idiot
9. crime and punishment
10. nine stories; franny and zooey
12. the winter of our discontent
[6. what is the book you don’t want to see go electronic?]
If on a winters night a traveler – if this is ever made available for kindle/ipad/whateverthefuck, I will seriously kill myself.
1. yes
2. do you mean novels here? its a weird question. like can i say someone’s collected works? like carver’s where i’m calling from, lydia davis’s collecteds, diane williams excitability, etc. if i had to choose a novel, i don’t necessarily think its a good thing for a novelist to be all-encompassing in one work. like im thinking dave eggers AHWOSG, or like foer’s everything is illuminated. in a way you can say this about any author and in another way you can say this about no author.
3. a new quarantine will take my place by johannes goransson
4. any beckett. anything tranceful. beckett.
5. most flash fiction published online.
6. its hard to think of a book that hasnt already gone electronic. any like really heavy book. people should have to bare the heft of books. im reading making of americans by stein right now and cant imagine considering it similarly if i wasnt tearing proteins to hold it.
7. the bible. finnegans wake.
8. i dont mark books up really. ive done it to some stories in BASS anthologies i guess.
9. i dont know. im pretty good at eventually reading the things i say im going to read. or maybe im too careful about saying which books im going to read.
10. i own two copies of am/pm by amelia grey for some reason, i think an extra was sent to me. anyone want it for free, send me your address.
11. like style-wise? beckett i guess though i hate saying that.
12. my copy of underworld by delillo was someone’s lending me it and i never gave it back, but i kind of got the sense he wasnt expecting it back so i dont know, thats what i tell myself.
Oh # 2 is meant as negative. I could read one book or 14, it’s the same.
1. Most of the time, though sometimes I get around this by saying, “Oh, well, I’ll finish it one day.”
2. “The Great Gatsby.” “Ham On Rye.”
4. “Infinite Jest.” 1,000 more pages it could have had and I would have been happy, oh so happy.
7. I’ve finished enough books of that sort to know better than to try to make judgments like that.
9. Well, finish “Moby-Dick.”
1. Life is too short to read things I don’t want to, but sometimes I’ll suffer through a tome like a marathoner suffers through his/her last mile.
2. wtf?
3. Shel Silverstein, age 7
4. This is a common feeling I have while reading, but I remember feeling it most sharply when I read Franny and Zooey
5. A Tale of Two Cities. Hands down.
6. Don’t care.
7. Lolita
8. All The Pretty Horses
9. War and Peace
10. Pride and Prejudice
11. ugh, hate to admit it, but probably ‘you are a little happier than I am’
12. New Oxford Annotated Bible.
That last mile is pain not suffering–says this marathoner.
I have a stolen copy of City Life and I love it and it was also a source of guilt for me. It was stolen from a small college library in Indiana though I didn’t steal it. The person who stole it gave it to me because we were in a workshop together and the writer-teacher gave a story of mine an absurd high compliment, saying my story was good enough to be in that collection. I know it wasn’t but this was someone who knew DB quite well, and so the bookstealer said I should have it.
For years I thought about mailing it back to the library, since I didn’t want to deprive other readers. But I loved it too much and also let myself off the hook since I didn’t actually steal it. Then one day I looked in the back and saw that no one had checked it out for ten years before it was stolen, and I felt indignant and glad about owning it. And these days with used books sold online lots of people own former library books, so it doesn’t appear unusual.
1. I try, but have begun a recent trend in not doing so.
2. ?
3. “Love is a Dog From Hell.” Not much of a fan anymore, but it led to better things.
4. “Siddhartha”
5. “Moby Dick.” I made myself do it when I was young. I have a suspicion that I would actually enjoy it if I read it again, though.
6. Not really concerned
7. Not technically an answer to the question, but it bothers me when people say they like Pynchon and have only read “The Crying of Lot 49.” I feel like they need to, at the very least, make it through “V.” before considering themselves a fan.
8. Probably Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate.” There are swear words and long tirades about how much of a cock he is all over the margins.
9. “Ada” by Nabokov. Too many other higher-priority big books.
10. “On the Road,” just because I wanted to read the scroll manuscript (only 2 copies).
11. “The Sound and the Fury”
12. “Six Plays by Chekhov”
1. You mean kill, right?
2. I like going down on retarded people, if that’s what you mean.
3. The 120 Days Of Sodom.
4. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
5. Life, like, every morning.
1. usually
4. infinite jest, winesburg, ohio and most of the murakami i’ve read
5. god emperor of dune. this is one of the books i felt i needed to finish despite how much it pissed me off. it’s what made me stop reading the series
7. infinite jest and lolita
12. when i was a sophomore in high school i kept my creative writing teacher’s copy of catcher in the rye. i didn’t really mean to steal it, but there it is on my bookshelf. i also stole a chapbook by my favorite poet, which was signed, from a library whose name i shall not disclose
3. Actual Air by David Berman [and] Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
1. do you feel the need to finish a book you start?
most of the time, not always. i abandoned saramago’s the double after 200 pages because i realized i completely didn’t care about the language or the plot (sorry blake)
2. what is the book by the author you read that book you’re pretty much done/you got that author down?
i don’t read multiple books by authors that i find mediocre
3. what book of poetry made you finally tolerate poetry?
i think the big turn around was Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. Alternatively, TS Eliot in HS y’all.
4. what is the book you were reading and you thought, “I wish this book would keep on walking. I am blar it has ended, I am liquid-glandful and low. Keep going, book.”
i am prone to find myself reading books by both agota kristof & dennis cooper very very quickly, and then i am very sad when they are over, so i want their books to go on forever i guess.
5. what is the book (maybe assigned or some shit) you were reading and your serial bowl/crayonium went “Fuck I wish this book was over”?
i’ve never finished conrad’s hearts of darkness despite the fact that i “gave a presentation on it” in ap english
6. what is the book you don’t want to see go electronic?
edmond jabès
7. what’s the book people like but you doubt they read the whole thing?
deleuze & guattari, finnegans wake
8. what is the book you mark up with ink/lead/cur-ear (or did) the most?
theory in general, because if i don’t i’m prone to drifting, artaud & bataille for both language and ideas
9. what is the book you keep saying you’ll read but most likely will not?
infinite jest. ulysses.
10. what is the book you own the most copies of? one at your work, in the car floor, hollowed out for your secret letters/oregano, another in the kitchen junk drawer, one at your lover’s place, one at your spouse’s, one tonguing dust balls beneath the fridge, a page tacked on some old wall?
bataille’s story of the eye, duh. second place: pete tombs & cathal tohill’s immoral tales: european sex & horror movies 1956 – 1984
11. what is the book you’ve stolen the most from?
bataille’s the impossible. dennis cooper’s period.
12. what is the book you are not returning–the one you actually stole?
i have actually bootlegged several out of print/impossible to get books, because i feel like if i stole it there would be another person who is like me that really wants to read said book and then gets disappointed when the single copy in world cat has been stolen
Yes, yes, yes yes to Franney and Zooey! It was like my eyes suddenly opened. There haven’t been many books that shot to the core like that one! Like your comment on the poetry, too – although I got into the rythm of Sandburg about the same time!
Actually Moby Dick wasn’t so bad! I have wondered whose death wish it was!
i didn’t want franny and zooey to keep going because i felt it ends as perfect as a book can end.
1. Absolutely not, prefer not to actually.
2. Sedaris, so never again, never.
3. The Winding Stair, Yeats.
4. The Adventures of Augie March
5. I don’t think it is an entire book ever, but certainly chapters. Had this reaction to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas recently, even though the rest is superb.
6. Anything by Ray Bradbury, as he would hate that. There is proof of this on some youtube videos but he game our commencement speech and blasted the hell out of online publishing, brandished it like cod.
7. Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Tunnel.
8. The Recognitions.
9. Middlemarch.
10. Sartre’s Nausea.
11. Confederacy of Dunces.
12. Confederacy of Dunces.
1. No
2. Breakfast of Champions
3. I always liked it, so probably an anthology textbook
4. Maybe ‘Post Office’ by Bukowski
5. Saul Bellow – The Dangling Man
7. 2666
8. A friend’s poetry book I was blurbing
9. Leaves of Grass
10. Catcher in the Rye
11. Jerzy Kosinski – Steps
12. A book about Ben Shahn
Boy, every one of those questions could stand alone as an interesting snippet post.
I’m overwhelmed to the point of confusion, data needs to be put in table format.
Don’t do that. It probably will be made available as an ebook, and that would be a lousy reason for suicide. Maybe instead of killing yourself, you could kill Jeff Bezos.
@ M. Kitchell, what’s TS Eliot in HS?
re. q.7, books people struggle heroically through, should 2666 really be in the Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest league? It happens to be long, yes, but apart from that, it seems to me to have very little of the head-fuckery of Joyce, Pynchon, or DFW. Maybe partly because unlike them, on a prose level, Bolano is just so informal and chatty.
I think the difficulty of 2666 is the subject matter, not the language. ‘The Part About the Crimes’ is hard to read, and I bet that is the part where most people give up.
1. No, I’ve dropped some after chapter one before.
2. Um?
3. I don’t remember, I’ve always liked it. I’ve been opened up to different approaches to poetry, but never in such a striking or memorable way that I could tell you when it was or how it happened. I remember getting to Paul Blackburn and thinking that was great, I hadn’t thought that way before (about poems, not life). Someone mentioned the Man Suit, which got me looking more into small-press stuff that’s going on right now (absentmag did that, too, when I came across it).
6. Books are a technology, e-books are a technology. I think e-books have ecological value even if I don’t want one. Books are still pretty new, and I’ll always value mountains over books so I don’t care if anything “goes electronic,” I’ll still have my mountains (maybe not in W Va). I try to make sure not to confuse what has made my life tolerable with necessity or rightness, and I also feel uncomfortable whenever people talk about any property of “the words on the page.” It sounds like they’re making an assumption I don’t have, and I can never really figure out what that assumption is. (That said, there are property issues with e-books that I’m not okay with, and I don’t want to be tied so directly to a distributor, especially if they begin grabbing publishing rights from houses.)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
10. I don’t own multiple copies of anything. Most of my reading is out of the library anyway–grew up with no money, and now I’m in school with a lousy part-time job, so I buy books (at least three from small presses a year) when I can, but I squander much of my money on eggs and maps.
11. When I was in high school, I stole a lot from Under Milk Wood. My writing has been too sporadic lately to say much of it now.
12. Invisible Cities.
I agree The Crimes Part is tough tough tough going (the only other book so precise about such appalling things, that I can think of, is The Kindly Ones), and there are disquieting things elsewhere in 2666, but if it’s gruesome/ harrowing subject matter that makes people give up, why have Ulysses, GR, IJ been mentioned so much, and not Primo Levi, or Edwidge Danticat? Anyway, don’t readers (to an extent, as a rule, quite often) lap up gruesome/harrowing, in the same way that people exult in the tragedic, and feel compelled to read the news?
The difficulty I found with Joyce, Pynchon, DFW was that, in their own ways, they seemed to be out to upset realism, by fucking about with the prose as straightforward mind/ language connect. Difficult to read on a micro level, multiplied by 1000 odd pages, equals struggle.
1. Yes, unless it is a book I am reading for class, then, maybe.
2. Unsure what the question asks.
3. Master and Margarita.
4. PAMELA, I mean Richardson, come on…
5. Something by de Sade probably
6. unsure…
7. some Joyce probably, Finnegan’s Wake
8. probably my Shelley – Major Works
9. the Idiot
10. probably Master and Margarita
11. probably Beckett also…
12. Czech translation of Shakespeare..because I can’t be bothered to go back to a small town library.