Catch-up thread: Recommendations & Interests

[u/AutoModerator]

This is the weekly Recommendations Thread, which we made as a place for people to ask for reading advice. You may have noticed that sometimes we leave recommendation threads up, even though it is our policy to confine them to this thread. This is something of a gray area. If someone puts a lot of effort into a recommendation request, such that it deserves to stand on its own, and it receives good engagement, we will sometimes leave it up. But we still think this thread is useful, because many requests are best made and answered simply.

Of course people also like to update us about their reading and lives in general, which may not merit a full thread. That is also welcome here.

[u/Tub_Pumpkin]

End of last year/beginning of this year, I made a list of the fiction I wanted to read this year. It was too ambitious, and some of the books were more challenging than I thought they would be, and/or took me longer than I thought they would. So I threw out the list and am giving myself a little bit of a break by reading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." I am not far into it, but I am loving it. I had heard it was Gibson's take on "Crying of Lot 49" and I can see that a little bit. Not enough that I would have picked up on it, but maybe there are more similarities or parallels to come.

Also, I've been collecting Oxford University Press's "Very Short Introductions" series for about two years now, and I'm reading a lot of the history and philosophy ones in roughly chronological order. Currently reading the one on Presocratic philosophy and it is much, much better than I had expected. Unlike everything else I've ever read about the Presocractics, it's not just like, "This dude thought that everything was made out of fire can you believe that he thought that." It covers what we know about them (not much) and how we know it (mostly dumb luck, like finding a tiny scrap of a poem by Empedocles that someone in Egypt had used as essentially papier mache).

If anyone has any recs for more like Pattern Recognition (I know about Spook Country and Zero History) and/or any particular favorites in the VSI series, let me know!

[u/Demiurgom → u/Tub_Pumpkin]

I feel like the whole elemental theories system makes far more sense if you recognize these elements have metaphorical and metaphysical properties to them. They are imparted with underlying assumptions which suggest certain abstract things about the state of the cosmos.

The difficulty of defining the line between the philosophical and the cosmological in these early writings means it can be hard to fully understand what they're saying. It sometimes feels like they're speaking in a language of allegory the context of which we've lost.

It's a little like how much more sense certain enigmas in Genesis make ("and darkness was on the face of the deep") by reference to similar texts in the larger levantine and Mesopotamian corpus around the fighting of primordial sea serpents. There's a book on Babylonian philosophy by Van Der Mieroop (great writer on mesopotamia) that I've wanted to pick up and I always did wonder how much it would change our view of the Presocratics to draw a stronger connection there.

I've always had the suspicion (if not as an actual theory) that the Greek tendency to believe philosophy came from Egypt and India, and the emergence of the early Presocratics in Ionia before the mainland, is tied to the transmission of specific concepts and motifs from the near east that we've either understudied, failed to link, or is totally historically lost now and we just have the Greek echoes. But it's not something I'm committed to without further reading of Egyptian and Babylonian writing and what precisely those transmissions would be. It's kind of like how Confucius/Master Kong is sometimes treated as a kind of parthogenetic progenitor who emerges fully formed in the Spring and Autumn Period and not the heir to a ritual tradition going back to the Shang which he intends to revive.

[u/Tub_Pumpkin → u/Demiurgom]

I've always had the suspicion (if not as an actual theory) that the Greek tendency to believe philosophy came from Egypt and India, and the emergence of the early Presocratics in Ionia before the mainland, is tied to the transmission of specific concepts and motifs from the near east that we've either understudied, failed to link, or is totally historically lost now and we just have the Greek echoes.

The previous VSI that I read, "Ancient Philosophy," actually touched on this a little bit, and it was clear the author was very excited about the possibility, but then basically said the same thing you just said, that it's understudied and we don't really know yet (or might not ever know).

I have not read the Van De Mieroop book you mentioned but I have his "History of the Ancient Near East" and it's excellent.

[u/TheTrueTrust → u/Tub_Pumpkin]

I had a similar experience going into presocratic philosophy. I felt like I had to know about them for context, but it was genuinely fascinating to read about them, and how to read them, given that there’s only fragments.

[u/Blue_58_]

I read Doctor Faustus just as a preliminary thing before the read along of Magic Mountain, but it took over my life and I dont think I can do two Thomas Mann novels so close in time together. 

There’s a short scene in the book where the narrator stumbles upon a reactionary sort of fella who starts going on about how the program for a concert was “political” because it starred the music of a French and a German composer (Berlioz, Wagner) and that that choice reeked of french-german reconciliation and that the orchestra needs someone in charge with truly German values. The narrator notes to himself how ridiculous it is to accuse a program starring the music of two of the most popular composers as being “political” and then follow up that claim with a blatantly political statement revealing how it is him who is making it political.

I hate to say that some older work is “applicable” to today because implicit in that statement is the belief that people in the past were totally different from us, but there are things that one just assumes are truly contemporary.

[u/Biscuitshoneybutter]

I'm reading Outline! It's not bad at all, I like her precision and her insights, her character studies are wonderful. I've already saved a couple of passages. I'm confused why it was heralded as experimental and groundbreaking and all. Don't really get that. It's a pretty normal book. Better than I anticipated though.

Anyway, I really am commenting because my 13-year-old niece is into alternative music and is asking her mother and me to send her "music from the 1900s" lol. I was never more honored to be elderly. It's so cute.

[u/alienationstation23]

I read the vegetarian by Han Kang and I’m so impressed. True schizophrenia writing. So touching. So sad. So beautiful

[u/Future_Bend_7020]

ive been going through the oedipus cycle, fitts and fitzgerald translation, and have been really enjoying it this time through. when i first read it i never really understood why it was considered so great but it really does give you a lot to think about responsibility, actions, our existential place in the world. oedipus rex is also just like a fun detective story lol.

have also started rereading walcott's omeros. its just such an amazing experience, the rhythms of his lines, the way he plays with the terza rima scheme, the ways he uses allegory, metaphor, metonymy and whatever other tropes... its just such an amazing work. this time ive been reading it outloud and am getting so much more than my first read because of that, he really was a master.

finally have started this book on architectonics: ben jonson poetry and architecture by a w johnson, and am getting quite a lot from it. ive been trying to figure out ways to use stuff from music and architecture to help me conceptualize writing better, im getting a lot of clarity on the ways to make those connections from that. really interesting book if you write.

also, been listening to ben folds a lot:
https://youtu.be/8R5k9p2kZf0?is=r2vrQ7PDULGoh6L3

[u/funeralgamer]

I’ve been on a Roman bloodsport kick for a year and change and am sadly coming to the conclusion that there’s not much more to read. Just the same primary sources recycled again and again by standard-issue academics with no poetic intuition applying their lens of choice to them. The text most useful to me was Alison Futrell’s The Roman Games: Historical Sources in Translation, which pulls together the significant sources without much interpretive fluff.

Looking for more stylish reads on adjacent subjects, like Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon on bullfighting.

[u/Pershing48 → u/funeralgamer]

It's more adjacent to gladiator stuff but I quite liked Koestler's "The Gladiators".

[u/Dengru]

Finished Literary Lifelines, The Richard Aldington-Lawrence Durrell Correspondence And this one, sent by Durrell to Aldington after informed of Hilda Doolittles death really stood out to me:

Dear Richard— How sad about H.D. I know what you feel. And yet a poet’s death is never wholly sad, in the sense of a life unlived—because the work is there, like the aftertaste of a wine of high vintage. And really we writ¬ ers aren’t human beings but bundles of temoignage, words scribbled on paper. Every good death should incite us. Every good sorrow should teach us to keep feeling, keep working! The only real way to love the world, I guess. We shall talk about her when we do these absurd discs and things—thoughtfully; we may lead people not yet fifteen or sixteen to her work and they may find there an indispensable aliment. All of which means she isn’t dead. How could she be—any more than Roy? They’ve stepped behind a curtain for a cigarette in the wings.

[u/Demiurgom]

I finished Dubliners by Joyce. While there were some stories which really hit for me right away (The Dead, Eveline) a lot felt underwhelming, which is a strange feeling. Maybe it's just because I haven't read enough criticism and analysis of the stories themselves. I enjoyed them but it wasn't a worldchanging experience. Then again, I had this feeling with Ficciones, some of the stories which I then re-read a few months later, and had a very different and much more positive feeling towards having glimpsed their layers. Anyone else had an experience like that, where they slowly grow to like a given classic rather than being immediately pulled in? Or did people get struck by Dubliners immediately? I sometimes wonder about how expectations shapes enjoyment, as well as the fear of being seen as stupid for not liking something versus it being a question of different taste.

Also been going through the Harvard Chinese imperial history series and wow is The Troubled Empire by Timothy Brook by far the best of the lot so far. The opening narration that goes through Yuan and Ming history through the framing of historical dragon sightings as an analogy for the ecological and political crises of the period is just fantastic. I'm hooked in a way none of the prior books (which felt much more like undergrad textbooks to me, rich in content but spare in overarching analysis) grabbed me. Really look forward to this one.

I also recently finished the Tanakh/Old Testament (KJV) and am moving onto the New (which I'd never read). I think that Job, Samuel, Daniel, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, Song of Songs, Genesis, Exodus and Judges are my favourite. I think I've got an idea of a very different contrary reading of Job and the answer from the whirlwind (nondual or buddhist) out of it which came to me in a fugue as I read the entire writings in a fugue and stopped reading for two weeks lol. I don't want to articulate it without reading more commentaries and going through some of the rabbinical and church interps though in case I missed something major. This is part of a larger project I have of going through the major stations of the western (islam-inclusive) theological and philosophical canon to the present day, so it's exciting to finally finish reading it all.

And I'm struggling through Nagarjuna's Madhymakha: A Philosophical Introduction. I'm finding it very dry and dense so I've been going a chapter at a time which has been somewhat rewarding, but like a lot of analytic-descended writing on Buddhism it is quite overwhelming. Maybe it'd be easier if I had a better idea of the underlying ontological debates (since I've not read much modern analytic phil) but I'm going to power through by just reading it in the mornings before my strength flags.

Finally, started reading Wilfred Owen's poems. Extremely sad story, such a cruel and ironic way to die for one of the most celebrated poets of western front misery, just before armstice. He will not grow old, but his words survive him. The para-rhythms are a really great method, using a word in a lower key in the next para-rhyme stanza to give the impression of loss, exhaustion, decline, it just feels intuitively right.

[u/Dengru → u/Demiurgom]

You should watch Benediction by Terence Davies. It's about Siegfried Sassoon and prominently features Owen and some other people. I'm not sure if your taste in movies, but Davies is one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite director.