What BOOK are you reading right now?

To all you Moby fans--read it again. All the best books are worth that. You'll be amazed how much is new to you second time round. And third.

Melville wears an extraordinary scholarship so lightly it is easy not to notice it.

What's Amsterdam butter?

The last short sentence of Wheelbarrow, an old joke indeed, contains two words that Mailer used for a title of one of his nuttier books.

And Joyce must have been all over Moby Dick.

I must find a biography of Melville. I imagine it will be better than a university degree course.

I promised edgar I'd study up on some history of Texas and our relations with Mexico.
This is a small and simple book that explains without getting stuck in endless minute details.

Amazing cast of characters destined to shine in the Civil War. R E Lee, Grant, Beauregard, Pickett, Johnston, etc.

Did you like it?

<Straightens up. Looks hopeful>

having trouble getting into it, it's not grabbing my interest yet, i read weaveworld by barker when it first came out, and really enjoyed it, i've struggled with barker ever since, i actually prefer his young adult stuff (thief of always, abarat) to his adult stuff

this falls somewhere in between

I like some Barker myself, but I won't make a point of looking for it then. Ta.

Joining the Melville Club, I've started Moby-Dick.

I'm nearly at the end. What a great book. To think I've had it for years and it took this thread to get me started on it.

I had wondered why Melville hadn't mentioned Rabelais but he made his bow eventually aroung page 500. That guy was what I would call "well read".

I'm still reading Danube, indeed barely started. In the last few days I've read a lot about Ulm and various people in relation to it over some centuries.

When I read a book, particularly one like MD, I fold a sheet of foolscap into four and use it to note down any striking ideas or sentences or even phrases with the page number. Using a key word or two like "delerious throb" on page 418. Or how to show how silly it is to imagine that the human mind has any grasp on "infinity" on page 315. It is also a bookmark.

This paper stays with the book after I've read it. I think anybody with ambitions to write should adopt the practice. No one is good enough to write well out of their own resources. One soon slips into the sloppiness of solipsism when one tries that.

That's the problem with Danube, I've items to remember from most of the pages so far.

But you won't remember them osso. You're undisciplined.

No, I'm often The Most Organized Person In the World. I'll agree, not so much so lately. In this case I know I'm way out of my depth and will need to read Danube twice, and then research bits, and start to argue with Magris, or not. At this point, I'm reading it as a complex bath of information compiled by someone with much knowledge of the written resources and a command of expressing the nuances of disagreement from different source points of view. I do this with one good eye late at night with poor light and ants in the house. Give me a break.

Here's a quote from that amazon link I gave a few pages back:

"Editorial Reviews
Review
A discursive account of the geography, ethnology, history, and literature of the area of Europe through which the Danube surges along its way from Bavaria to the Black Sea. Magris (German Literature/Univ. of Trieste) uses the travel format as a frame for his speculations about matters as diverse as the anti-Semitism of Celine and the meaning of evil and nothingness. The trip proves heavy going all the way - with matters not helped by Magris' writing style. Labyrinthine sentences, arcane wordplay, recondite musings, abstruse bits of history confront the reader on nearly every page - e.g., describing the literary style of the obscure 18th-century writer Jean Paul as "that sinuous, uneven, exasperatingly convoluted turn of phrase in which Ladislao Mittner perceived an attempt to reproduce in syntax the mobile nexus of the One-All." For those steeped in the background of this little-known (at least to most Americans) corner of Europe, however, the work will offer stimulating and provocative insights. Magris considers the writings of Kafka and Freud, the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Marcus Aurelius, the histories of Belgrade and the Hapsburgs, and he does so with freshness and enthusiasm. Magris obviously has explored his material with nearly obsessive thoroughness, but has unfortunately chosen to approach his subject in a stream-of-consciousness manner. One topic suggests another, and the text meanders as willfully as the river that is its protagonist." (Kirkus Reviews)


I'm not sure I consider his style a fault at my age. I get more discursive as I wind along my path, as most on a2k have noticed. But... I'm a baby in bathwater with all this. Very invigorating.

That also looks like the reviewer read only the first eighty pages (and he or she skipped the whole thing about Napoleon and the difference re the particular place mode to the general, with varied pros and cons re the times up through the third reich, and much more.)

Meantime, I barely know the geography.

You might be better off reading Braudel osso. Your guy looks like a name dropper to me and a touch celebrity obsessed.

Nah, I don't take him that way. Yet. He's more obsessive, far as I can see, so far.

I have Braudel at hand, haven't read him.

Do.

The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter