Now that your semester is done and grades are in, no doubt you are itching to get back to work! I wanted to post a few titles up here to offer you some ideas about summer reading. Like -- I assume -- many of you, I am excited as all hell about the last Harry Potter book coming out in July. However, for those of you who might not be spending the summer rereading the last three Harry Potter novels, here are some suggestions.
A list of literary antecedents
Did you find yourself baffled by the allusions in the texts we read this summer? A goodly number of textual and structural allusions in English-language can be traced back to significant foundational texts from the European tradition. Here is my list of texts that I see coming up again and again, organized from most frequent to least:
- The Odyssey, Homer (I hear the Fagles translation is quite good; I was raised on the Fitzgerald)
- The Divine Comedy, Dante (Really you just need Inferno and the first bit of Purgatorio... I read the Sinclair prose translation, but I hear that Ciardi verse translation is better in every way)
- The Metamorphoses, Ovid
- The Iliad, Homer (I read Lattimore, although there are a million newer and trendier translations)
- Oedipus Tyrannos, Sophocles (Lattimore & Green was the conventional translation for this and all Greek tragedies when I was in school)
- The poetry of Horace
- Agamemnon, Aeschylus
- Don Quixote, Cervantes
- The poetry of Catullus
- The Aeneid, Virgil (I hesitate to even put this here -- a very persuasive argument was made in the Harper's review of Fagles's new translation that The Aeneid is scarcely worth reading; still, it's one of those books we're supposed to list as being a significant foundation for Anglophone letters)
This list is geared towards readers of twentieth-century literature. In any other context, and possibly even in this context, the Bible should be at the top of this list -- not until the most recent generations have we seen writers coming into their profession with only the scarcest knowledge of the Bible.
A list of literary analogues
If reading translated texts from a couple thousand years ago doesn't sound like quite your thing, how about some recommendations of somewhat more contemporary texts? This list is organized as a sequence of analogues tied to texts we read in class this semester. Because I'm not a verse reader, I will be sticking with prose.
- If you liked Middlemarch, you are a little bit out of luck, what with having already read the greatest novel in the English language. However, you might read in the work of Eliot's greatest admirers echoes of Middlemarch's thematic and structural qualities. I particularly recommend Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a late nineteenth-century gripping social drama -- like Eliot, James is concerned with social and psychological phenomena, and so, like Middlemarch, Portrait is a bit light on plot. Virginia Woolf revisited questions of relations and relationality in The Years -- one of the few books she felt genuinely satisfied about, and one that I have been longing to reread for quite a while.
- If you liked The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might really enjoy Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (often called the first detective novel) and The Woman in White. Most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have a Stevensonesque feel to them, particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although Stevenson has been largely ignored by the academy, I have been told by more than one reliable source that his other works are just an enormous pleasure to read.
- If you liked To the Lighthouse, then Mrs Dalloway is a must-read. If you've read them both, try Jacob's Room. If you haven't read A Room of One's Own then that is worth sitting down with for an hour or two -- it's a short literary essay, and Woolf's most enduring literary legacy. The other famous and successful Bloomsbury writer is E. M. Forster, who wrote several excellent novels, particularly Room With a View, Howards End (my favorite), and A Passage to India. Woolf was also, in some ways, Henry James's literary heir, so James's fiction (mentioned above) might be a good place to turn. Woolf also had an interesting literary relationship with Marcel Proust, whose work helped shape the style of her later novels. There is a wonderful new translation of the first volume of Proust's enormous A la recherche du temps perdu, called Swann's Way, by Lydia Davis.
- If you liked Endgame, you're in luck: Beckett wrote several plays and novels with the same twisted sort of nihilistic humor. I particularly recommend Malloy, a strange, short pseudo-novel that includes some of the funniest scenes in any twentieth-century fiction.
- If you liked Arcadia, you will probably like Stoppard's even more popular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (There's an amusing movie of it as well.)
- If you liked Disgrace -- and according to my statistics most of you did -- then you will almost certainly like Ian McEwan's Atonement. His subject matter is not exactly the same -- although there is sex, rape, and violence -- but the precision of his prose style is quite similar to Coetzee's. I have also heard good things about Coetzee's Foe, and his Waiting for the Barbarians is frequently cited as his most significant work.
The Shapiro syllabus
Here, because I have a blog and the inclination to indulge myself, are some books I really wish everybody would read. I don't make any special claim about them other than that they are fun and enormously satisfying reads.
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, starts off sounding like a slightly more interesting than usual coming-of-age novel, but then about 300 pages in it becomes a murder mystery, and then another 150 pages in it becomes a meditation about literature and life. Even if this sounds boring, it isn't.
- Some more contemporary lit: Zadie Smith's White Teeth is stunning and hilarious -- it is basically a novel about the madness of polyphony. Try also Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. These young authors -- JSF is barely 30 -- are throwing a wrench into earlier literary mechanisms by which pious authors try to make the whole world feel sacred. Smith and Foer and others are taking problems that are supposed to be solved and showing us that solutions are unnecessary and uninteresting.
- Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie might be the most interesting living writer in English -- if I had to guess whose books students will be reading in 200 years, I would guess Rushdie (and Toni Morrison). Midnight's Children might be a difficult book -- I didn't think so, but I've heard this complaint about it -- but it is also the book with the most interesting narrator and the most satisfyingly serpentine plot. If you would prefer a slightly more conventionally-plotted story that focuses on the history and effect of popular music, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a pretty good one.
- You have to be a certain kind of person to love it, but Henry James's The Ambassadors ranks with Middlemarch as one of the great atmospheric novels of the English language. Ambassadors is really made for the sort of reader who likes to sit down and read for two hours and get through only 30 or 40 pages: it is a book that requires rumination, and that will eventually shift the way you see the world. It is an utter masterpiece.
- As long as I'm going on about utter masterpieces, Moby-Dick is not read nearly often enough. It's silly and strange and all sorts of brilliant, and although it's long it's also the kind of book you can read one chapter a night for four or five months.
- Finally, if you're just itching for Deathly Hallows and you want some magnificent YA lit to read, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (first novel: The Golden Compass). I usually try to give an ideological caveat before recommending it -- the last novel of the trilogy is strikingly anti-church -- but the story is so wonderful and the moral language of the novels so articulate that even readers who are deeply invested in church life probably won't feel offended by Pullman's take on Catholicism and Episcopalianism.
13 comments:
You frequently cite Middlemarch as the greatest English language novel written. Why?
Personally, I liked it very much, but it certainly didn't change the way I think as much as any number of science fiction books (which, by the way, are frustratingly disregarded as un-literary, a fact which is largely true but does not diminish their ideological capacity for mind-boggling), or other, far shorter, literary novels and novellas. If a novel can do as much, or more, but be far shorter, is there something to be said for concision in great books?
Or, would you simply say that it requires rereading, refining one's tastes, etc. etc., to fully appreciate the impact Middlemarch can (or will) have on someone?
Or, do you simply acknowledge the utter subjectivity of art? When you say "greatest" do you fully acknowledge the extent to which it's viably possible that many, many others, who are intelligent enough to understand it, may not like it as much?
There are no implications here-- I just want to understand your opinions on it.
One of the main reasons I ask is i'm frustrated by MOR's claim that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the last truly great piece (roughly... I don't quite remember his claim). Saying the greatest novel written is from T.S. Eliot's time must mean, if it's been that long without anything so great, that it's an insanely daunting task to even try to match/surpass it.
These are excellent questions, anonymous commenter! I'll try to do them justice.
I wholly sympathize with your frustration at academia's disregard for science fiction. Like a lot of English geeks, I got into the sort of lit we read in 216 only after spending six or seven years as a diehard scifi/fantasy reader. In the last ten year I haven't really gone back to science fiction or fantasy, with a few obvious exceptions: Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Tolkein. I would argue that science fiction and fantasy novels try to do the same thing that books like Middlemarch try to do, and it is usually books like Middlemarch that do it better. That is, most novels try to develop a language by which we can better understand our world and better relate to the people in it. You only have to have seen one episode of Star Trek or the new Battlestar Galactica, or read one book by anyone from Asimov to Vonnegut to be able to argue that science fiction writers rely on metaphors to develop this language. What we generally overlook, though, is that novels like Middlemarch or The Ambassadors or Moby-Dick rely every bit as much on these metaphoric relations. Maybe this is a matter of taste or opinion, but in any case I hold it strongly: after eight years of reading science fiction and fantasy exclusively, and then eight years of reading "literary" fiction exclusively (or at least what Borders would put on the "literature" shelves), I feel that virtually no science fiction nor fantasy novel can stand up to the observational subtlety and interpretive power of the metaphoric relations between the fictional and real.
I think there is increasing evidence that authors and academics see science fiction and non-science fiction as participating in basically the same artistic exploration of the world. Several contemporary "literary" authors -- Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie among them -- have begun mixing metaphors from science fiction into their work. Just the other day, I was flipping through Rushdie's East/West, a short story collection, and was reminded that he wrote a novella-length short story that is basically set in an Indianized Star Trek universe. It's pretty brilliant. I haven't read it yet, but the new Ishiguro novel -- Never Let Me Go -- is about cloning and (inevitably) problems of ethics and identity.
Some scifi has begun creeping onto syllabi -- less so at UW-Madison than elsewhere, but even here you will occasionally see a William Gibson novel make its way onto a 20th century fic syllabus. It's hard to tell whether Neuromancer will eventually fall into the domain of English or history, but it's clearly the sort of book that we will need to teach more often to students. Snow Crash, too, by Neal Stephenson. While we're at it, why isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on every syllabus as perhaps the key example of how the precepts of postmodern literature really work?
When I say that Middlemarch is the greatest novel in the English language, I am partly making fun of myself for having become that stodgy old English geek who really loves 800-page novels about the relationships between people in 19th century England, but I am also partly being honest: I think that George Eliot did better in Middlemarch what Tolkein tried to do in The Lord of the Rings and what Philip K. Dick tried to do in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what Robert Heinlein tried to do in Stranger in a Strange Land. She, like they, was working within the range of a fictional community, and like them she sought to give voice to the strangeness of relationships between people, and for whatever reason her insight into human relations and her metaphors of those relations strike me as not more real, but more accurate.
I only partly agree with what MOR said about The Waste Land. I wish he said something more like this: that in The Waste Land we see T. S. Eliot put an end to Victorian ideas of relationality, and reveal perhaps more evocatively than any other author of the time, that the massive social and historical rift that came with or alongside the First World War basically ended the possibility of writing about a coherent world. To argue that The Waste Land marked the end of literature, as MOR did, was a fascinating pedagogical move, and I hope he did it in that spirit.
First off, let me correct an error: I meant “if you say the last great novel is from George Eliot's time”, not T.S. Eliot's.
Secondly, thank you for such a thorough answer. I would've responded sooner, but i've had my wisdom teeth removed. Your angle on MOR’s comment is far less depressing, and I hope you’re right. In general, I’m convinced by what all you said re Middlemarch, and thanks for presenting the position. Your post also got me ruminating, and brought up old worries, which I would be interested in your opinions on.
While certainly Heinlein's Strangers (which I've been meaning to read), from what I know of it, and much other sci-fi does intend to give insight into the relationships between humanity, I think that a crucial distinction between literary fiction and much sci-fi is that a lot of sci-fi tells of humanity's relationship with technology (I, Robot, many others), and much of it tells of humanity's place in the entire universe (Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey).
This, I feel, is something literary fiction cannot do directly if it doesn't venture into science fiction, as with Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel. How can you discuss in fiction, without basing it on the idea of robots and other means of humanity being copied, the idea that we as humans are merely extremely advanced forms of "machinery", short of directly having a character in your literary novel who ponders that idea? Okay, i'll admit, there are certainly ways to do it "literarily," by way of themes and such, and personally I would love to see the relatively young field of sci-fi develop writers with more depth of literary capacity and knowledge of human psychology (Jack London was an early example). But basically, what I'm saying is, why not take the short cut of just shooting humans into the future, having the technology force us to confront that issue, and then dealing with it from there? Personally, I think it is capable of doing something different from literature, while undoubtedly the same goes vice versa. That is, each can do something the other can’t, in my opinion.
On another point, can you sympathize with how I’m frustrated by the ambiguity in which many novels end, and even if one doesn’t seem to intend to end in ambiguity, how impossible it is to ever be certain what the author is saying? It often seems that it never leads to answers where other fields, namely, scientific and sociological fields, are chiseling away toward more and more answers every day.
I suppose, then, maybe the point of literature is what you can get from it, even if you're way off from its original intent or from any particular “answer”? To find your own answers, and to improve your understanding of humanity to the end of improving your life? But I find that frustrating in the face of the utter trust I have for the results of science. Of course, science largely has that same intent of understanding humanity better, but even that aspect of its intent contributes further to its chief intent- to improve our capacity to do things and to live well.
Thus, personally, I see literature, really art itself, as a more important thing for humanity than science, but not as impacting a thing. Though of course, that’s mostly an attribute of modern times, I suppose, and perhaps literature did impact life more than science in earlier days. Either way, science, politics—I think they’re a means of securing/improving what I think life is about—passion, and literature is one very effective means of finding that. It sometimes seems that science fiction can be a great counterbalance for the ambiguous passion literature gives us, acting as a more direct examination of scientific ideas. Meh, I dunno.
I don't know quite what I'm saying... just trust that I am not trying to play devil's advocate, it's just an issue I sincerely want to reconcile within myself—my great respect for sci-fi, and the occasional feeling I have that it ponders "higher ideas" while literature deals almost with "silly" human interactions. Please don't hate me for saying that! I don't sincerely feel that way at all (I absolutely love fiction and respect the depth of its abilities) it's just a question which sometimes comes up in my mind and that I want to understand, especially when I occasionally regret majoring in English for aforementioned reasons.
Anyway, sorry, I kind of went on a ramble here—of course no need to answer this if you don’t want to, and if you do end up answering, there’s absolutely no rush.
For the record, I realized, i'm posing the ideas while having far, far less experience than you in either lit or sci-fi, and thus they are more preemptive worries and questions than anything else.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with playing devil’s advocate, or with posing ideas without having read every book ever written. If I ever come across as sounding like I know what I’m talking about it’s only because it’s easier to talk about literature if you avoid qualifying every idea with an honest acknowledgement of ignorance. In graduate lit seminars, practically every sentence seems to begin with some variation of the phrase “I have no clue what I’m talking about, but…”
And, frankly, it’s usually the students who have the good ideas. Notice that we keep discovering how horribly wrong all those ideas people had two generations ago turned out to be.
If I’m reading your remarks correctly you are pointing to two important theoretical problems you see in the way we deal with literature. One: the attention courses like 216 pay to human-human relationships ignores the human-object and human-universe relationships that make up the other half of human history. Two: science provides a more effective language than literature for describing human-human, human-object, and human-universe relationships.
You are pulling me into territory that is usually patrolled by philosophy departments, but I am going to take a few hesitant steps toward defending literature as a mode of technological and universal inquiry. I invite you not to buy this argument.
In ordinary life, I am not as obsessed with Middlemarch as I sound like I am on this blog, but it just happens to be a rich text that I know for sure that you and I have in common. In Middlemarch, we do see a little bit of discussion about technology—weaving machines, newspapers, railroads, political pamphleteering and puppeteering, etc.—but George Eliot seems to say of technology that its basic role is to provide new avenues for human-human contact. Social networks can be reshaped by technological changes, and technology matters to her only insofar as it affects the social.
You argue, I think, that technology drills past the social and reveals problems of the self: in 2001 (or I, Robot or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Neuromancer or Snow Crash or—parodically, I would argue—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Clarke et al. suggest that Dave is no different than Hal—programmed via cultural and political apparatuses to defend himself and to perform a specific job for the wellbeing of the species. But isn’t this revelation ultimately uninteresting? So Dave and I and you are all gears in the larger mechanism of humanity. What, then, is the shape of that mechanism? How does the relationship between your gear and my gear help reveal the nuances of the operation of the larger machine?
Isn’t that, in essence, George Eliot’s question?
You seem to answer that there is a difference in scope. Eliot was interested in the structure and significance of the social machine of a small town in 1830s England; Clarke is interested in the structure and significance of the universe.
I wonder, though, whether this difference is as great as it seems. If you are a humanist—as Eliot was, and as Clarke seems generally to be—then there is no inherent value in figuring out that what God wants out of you. If there is no afterlife—if the only life that matters is the one you are living right at this minute—then really the trick is to figure out how to live that life as humanely as you can. The universe is, in essence, humanity.
I remember reading the Rama books when I was a teenager. When the sex scenes paused, the books turned to meditations about how technology has made the individual more powerful than the species. Clarke seems to use stories about nonhuman sentients not literally but as a metaphor about how difficult it can be to negotiate relationships between cultures.
Okay, so that might or might not have been persuasive. Let me know what you think.
The second question I feel more comfortable answering. If sociology and engineering and, basically, all the other buildings south of University or west of Charter are dedicated to finding answers, whose job is it to find the questions? I worry sometimes that this is a matter of faith—of believing that the questions authors and their readers ask are important questions—but it wasn’t Darwin who articulated the social and philosophical questions raised by his theories: that work was done by Eliot and Clarke and their kin.
One of my college friends is working towards a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, chasing answers to some of the scientific questions Darwin raised. He is also an accomplished amateur short story writer. Of science fiction.
On this note, did you see the New York Times's 7/9 editorial on Philip K. Dick?
Hello again. No, I hadn't seen that Philip K. Dick article, thanks for pointing me to it. It's taken me a while to stop putting off responding, since I haven't really had anything to respond with. I like what you've said, and whether or not I agree entirely, it certainly made me feel better about literature.
I do have a musing or two, so I guess i'll post them.
"If you are a humanist—as Eliot was, and as Clarke seems generally to be—then there is no inherent value in figuring out that what God wants out of you. If there is no afterlife—if the only life that matters is the one you are living right at this minute—then really the trick is to figure out how to live that life as humanely as you can."
Mostly, I'm with you on this. But I think it's crucial that it does not require a belief in god to consider the possibility of far higher things than humans-- I think scientists, more than religious people (not that they're mutually exclusive positions, but whatever), place even more awe in a sort of "higher force", because they realize that as we are, that 'force' is probably [or nearly] impossible to understand (higher physical dimensions, the ostensible impossibility of either infinity or finity, regarding the universe) -- religious people, of whatever sect, claim at least some knowledge of a higher force or being.
What I mean is, Clarke was, I think, besides just humanist, also 'universalist', if I may fabricate a word, where he probably did believe that the only existence we have is this one, but he also thought that considering questions of things far more complex than us is worthwhile and very telling.
"But isn’t this revelation ultimately uninteresting?"
Uninteresting, perhaps, for entertainment, beyond the entertainment one derives from thinking about that specific idea. But it still seems incredibly relevant, and to me still casts a shadow-- if we are but 'advanced machines', there's a far more direct and certain approach to realizing how exactly humanity works than psychological interpretation, an approach which science will eventually map out precisely and provide us with.
Personally, though, I can't see that as leading to anything but a sort of sad certainty (though I think only sad, by definition, to us contemporary people)-- perhaps in this future world we can inject ourselves (without side effects, of course) with "Happiness" or "Intense Passion" or "Complete Empathy for Every Human", and we'll see old books merely as ancient and far less effective tools which strove for those ideal sentiments/understandings far less effectively.
Well, I guess I did have something to respond. But I do agree with you, that literature is a place to raise questions and to get incredibly in depth in our analysis of them. And basically, all of what I said above does not contradict the fact that right now, literature is an incredibly powerful force and an indespensible thing on a personal and public level, which asks crucial questions and illumates things in ways other methods do/can not; it's merely that the potental for [and, in my view, probable occurence of] a world like the aforementioned one looms over my head and sometimes makes so many current things seem futile.
I think it's probably that I took Childhood's End far too seriously, which I won't spoil in case you've not read, but which basically portrays us as silly children relative to more advanced universal forces. But, even in that book, Clarke does, very discreetly but very certainly, also imply that we as humans have something better than 'technical perfection' could ever achieve. It's also precisely the same thing as Huxley's BNW, except while I agree with John the Savage's embracing of Shakespeare and humanity in all its passion and lumination, I can't justify it, logically, to be better than an injected but identical-in-result version of the same thing. If I could be somehow reassured that we (you, me, Clarke and John the Savage) are correct and are not just humanistically-narcissistic, my worries would allay, and i'd take up a book with fewer reservations and even more vehemence (not that I don't currently read with full investment, haha). Logically, I don't think I can really be reassured as such.
I feel like i'm inadvertently playing devil's advocate, and really, i'm sorry. Ugh. I don't know. I'm done now, I promise.
Oh, upon looking it up, 'universalism' is a concept, which I misused above. Should have realized it would mean something... but hopefully my usage was clear in context.
“Universalism” has been used before in the sense you offer here. That it bears no relation to the Universalism espoused by, say, Unitarian Universalists (like me) is inconsequential.
Why do you need proof that Shakespeare is better than Soma? Isn’t Huxley’s point exactly that logical proof isn’t possible—that all we have is belief?
It’s been thirteen years since I’ve read Childhood’s End, so I apologize if my reading here is grounded in youthful misinterpretations. As I recall, much of CE is given over to discussions of the manipulation of belief: the alien visitor doing careful public relations work for several years in order to change humanity’s way of seeing itself in relation to the universe, etc.
While these beliefs are anchored in the evolutionary logic of the novel, Clarke suggests that the evolution of human belief is in some ways more significant than the evolution of human biology: it is how we respond to our own growing power that matters more than the power itself. I always thought that in CE Clarke was considering not evolution itself but about the social consequences of evolution. Biological evolution in CE seems to operate as a metaphor for technological evolution: What good is it to be on the verge of finding the Higgs boson at the LHC if we don’t have in place some theory by which to understand it? What good is it to have an arsenal of hydrogen bombs if we don’t have diplomatic and ethical discourses by which to negotiate their use?
I write this with uncertainty. Clarke himself is a great thinker, not least because he is willing to rigorously revise his own thoughts, allowing them to evolve. Have you read The City and the Stars? From what little I’ve read about Clarke, that seems to be the origin for many of his more recent meditations on humanity’s role in the wider universe.
Your remarks in this thread have shaped my reading for the last week. I finally got around to finishing Saturday, Ian McEwan’s meditation on the relationship between neuroscience and novels. His fiction is not speculative, but it engages directly with the relationship between scientific and literary self-knowledge. In an interview on the 6/3 New York Times Book Review podcast he has some good things to say about how fiction and the sciences can come closer together. I also just picked up Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, an explicitly speculative piece that offers a social and human approach to a scientific possibility: it seems to work as a sort of latter day Jane Eyre. Ishiguro—or at least the first 200 pages of NLMG—seems to be on my side of the debate, but McEwan’s position is a lot more ambivalent.
But yet these authors don’t see a futility in these futures: the worlds they see are not worlds in which cultural and literary histories are thrown out with the rest of the detritus of humanity’s childhood. In NLMG, just as in Brave New World and Handmaid’s Tale, literature is the means by which humanity can come to terms with the effects of scientific (or, in Clarkean terms, evolutionary) changes.
I don't mean to keep trying to have the last word in this conversation. Indeed, it might be better to end here by returning to the last three paragraphs of your post, and your articulate ambivalence about the value of language in a rapidly obsolescing world. As you suggest, your question isn't one that can be easily solved through rational conversation. All we have are precedent (we still find Homer significant, after all) and our belief that at its core humanity in 1,000 years won't be much different than humanity was 1,000 years ago.
Upon hearing your comments on CE, revisiting the book itself, and reading Wikipedia's summary, I think even thirteen years ago you must have read at a much more advanced level than I do currently.
I seemed only to take the message "man was not meant for the stars" (i.e. everything important is in the highly evolved future of humanity). Thank you for reshaping my idea of that book; this aspect of it is certainly far more hopeful.
Thanks for all the links, and book references-- my to-read list has grown even larger.
Perhaps I'll eventually fortify more strongly my belief in the value of human passions, as have you and the writers up there. I think that thus far--allowing that my perspective on the past is at all correct-- this must be one of the hardest centuries to do so. Thanks sincerely for the discourse.
Not that it really matters, but I guess I've no reason to be anonymous-- this is Brendan from 305.
hi mike, i took your advice and read the pessl novel, and i enjoyed it. thanks for the suggestion. i read the first 300 or so pages over the course of a week, because of work and various tasks that needed to be completed, but i read the last 200 pages in one sitting, and stayed up until three in the morning, and went to work at seven. i dont really have any philosophical questions to ask, i just wanted to comment that i enjoyed the book, and that it was an interesting light read.
Brendan, thank you for this absolutely splendid conversation! It is exactly this sort of discussion that I long for, especially in this long period between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of summer term. It is too damn easy to lose sight of why books might be worth reading, and to take it for granted that there is probably some reason that thousands of university students across the English-speaking world have been dragged through the 800 pages of Middlemarch. Let me know how your reading goes this summer! I'm eager to hear more from you.
Same goes for you, anonymous reader of Special Topics in Calamity Physics! I've actually got a couple questions about the premise of the book -- why would Blue want to publish it? -- that really I can't ask and you can't answer here, if we don't want to give the plot away. If you feel like chatting, shoot me an email!
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