20 Mar 2023 (Last Modified 30 Dec 2023)
I read a lot. My list of books I’ve read, with marginalia.
-The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader by Clarence Brown (Finished 8 April 2024)
-Les chambres de bois by Anne Hébert (Finished 28 December 2023)
-Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin (Finished 12 December 2023)
-Psychonauts by Mike Jay (Finished 8 December 2023)
-The Postmortal by Drew Magary (Finished 18 October 2023)
-Ithaca by Claire North (Finished 13 October 2023)
-Ulysse from Bagdad by Éric-Emmanuel Schmidt (Finished 4 October 2023)
-The American Canon by Harold Bloom (Finished 22 September 2023)
-Mythos by Stephen Fry (Finished 21 August 2023)
-Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Finished 15 August 2023)
-The Radium Girls by Kate More (Finished 14 August 2023)
-A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom (Finished 26 July 2023)
-The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Finished 1 July 2023)
-Axiomatic by Greg Egan (Finished 18 June 2023)
-Solito by Javier Zamora (Finished 12 June 2023)
-Mythos by Stephen Fry (Finished 10 June 2023)
-The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer (Finished 27 May 2023)
-The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander (Finished 21 May 2023)
-The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Henlein (Finished 6 May 2023)
-Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur by Maurice LeBlanc (Finished 20 April 2023)
-House of Names by Colm Tóibín (Finished 9 April 2023)
-Diaspora by Greg Egan (Finished 8 April 2023)
Notes: The narrative was uneven and Mr. Egan’s use of jargon obscures his point. He explores the important idea of what it means to be human if you become a disembodied mind, and then even move to another dimension, but the exposition was much poorer than, say, Klara and the Sun.
-Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Finished 26 March 2023)
Notes: I very much liked the portrayal of Klara, as intellectualy simplistic yet trenchant and authentic. Mr. Ishiguro nicely dissociates emotional intelligence from declarative knowledge while showing that a machine could be more human in either than a human.
-Permutation City by Greg Egan (Finished 23 March 2023)
-L’événement by Annie Ernaux (Finished 10 September 2022)
Notes: I buy French books from French Books Online, not Amazon.
-Mersault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud (Finished 18 July 2022)
-When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (Finished 10 July 2022)
-The Least of us by Sam Quinones
-In the Shadow of Humanity by N. John Williams
-Heaven by Hieko Kawakami
-Babel by R.F. Kuang
-Victory City by Salman Rushdie
-Le Consentement by Vanessa Spingora