Some Great Literary Quotes

While I continue to play catch up with my work, putting this blog on hold, here are some quotes by literary figures that I have seen recently:

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Will blog again soon!

What I Am Reading and Looking at Now

Since my last update of this sort I have let my reading load spiral out of control. I have 8ish books going at the moment. Today I got closer to finishing two.

The Prague Cemetery is now done.
Living in the End Times is on stall.
Collected Poems of Yeats are amazing.
The Hidden Reality is going to be reengaged with soon.
The Odyssey is going kinda.
Building Stories needs some attention
Sandman Vol. 6 is perhaps my favorite thus far
Stories of John Cheever are always a pleasure to read in small doses

I set out to spend a good deal of the day knocking more of these out. I ended up blogging on my personal blog, writing a poem, writing in a journal type thing I keep, going for a run, and funding some kickstarters. Not all that successful.

Anyways, look as these cool paintings:

I think they are cool so I thought I would share.

Anyways, expect a review of The Prague Cemetery soon along with my thoughts on some short stories I have been reading by various authors.

Classics Club

Thanks to La Graciada - who is much better at consistently blogging than I am - I have now stumbled upon the classics club. Since she thought she was late to the party I can only assume that means I am extremely late to the party, but the idea sounded so great that I cannot pass it up.

You pick 50 "classic books" which you want to read over a set time period. I am really just listing these in the order they come to me / the order I see them on my bookshelf. I am going to make one of these for movies as well in the coming weeks.

I am really interested in finding out what other people's lists look like, so if you have made one or want to put the link in a comment or just paste the list so I can check it out.

1.     War and Peace - Tolstoy 

2.     Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man - Joyce

3.     Ulyssess - Joyce

4.     The Illiad - Homer

5.     Sir Gwain and the Green Knight

6.     Canterbury Tales - Chaucer (I've only read parts)

7.     Il Decameron - Boccaccio (I am going to read it in Italian!)

8.     The Name of the Rose - Eco (Not sure if I'll try it in Italian)

9.     If on a winters night a traveler.... - Calvino

10. Invisible Cities - Calvino

11. V - Pynchon

12. Underworld - Delillo

13. To the Lighthouse - Wolff

14. Orlando - Wolff

15. Tropic of Capricorn - Miller

16. Middlesex - Eugenides

17. Nausea - Satre

18. Waverly - Sir Walter Scott

19. Mysterious Stranger No. 44 - Twain

20. Complete Short Stories - John Cheever

21. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

22. The Invisible Man - Ellison

23. Giovanni's Room – Baldwin

24. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Cather

25. Chery Orchard - Chekhov

26. Fictions - Borges

27. House of Leaves - Danielwski

28. Leaves of Grass - Whitman (I've only read parts)

29. The Complete Poems - Philip Larkin

30. Paradise Lost - Milton

31. Great Expectations - Dickens

32. Tale of Two Cities - Dickens

33. Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky

34. Absalom, Absalom! - Faulkner

35. Light in August - Faulkner

36. Tender is the Night - Fitzgerald

37. Catch-22 - Heller

38. The Blind Assasin - Atwood

39. Love in a Time of Cholera - Marquez

40. 100 Years of Solititude - Marquez 

41. Moby Dick - Melville

42. Perdido Street Station - Mieville

43. Beloved - Morrison

44. Lolita - Nabokov

45. Interpreter of Maladies - Lahiri

46. Homage to Catalonia - Orwell

47. Ars Amartoria - Ovid (in Latin)

48. Snow - Orhan Pamuk

49. Measure for Measure - Shakespeare

50. Satanic Verses - Rushdie

51. The Inverted Forest - Salinger

52. The Importance of Being Earnest - Wilde

53. Germinal - Zola

54. Collected Poems - Yeats

55. Footnotes in Gaza – Sacco (Comic)

56. Invisibles – Morrison (Comic)

57. The Dispossessed - Ursla

58. Red Mars - Stanley Robinson

59. The Souls of Black Folk - Dubois

60. Black Reconstruction - Dubois

61. History of the Siege of Lisbon - Saramago

62. My Name is Red - Pamuk

63. This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz

64. Ubik - Dick

65. Age of Revolutions - Hobsbawm

66. Living in the End Times - Zizek

67. The Political Unconcious - Jameson

68. Metahistory - White

69. Sweet Thursday - Steinbeck

70. The Book of Daniel - Doctorow

71. Ragtime – Doctorow

72. The Autumn of the Middle Ages

73. War of the End of the World - Vargos

74. Magnus - Brown

75. Complete Plays - Euripides (In Latin)

76. Hidden Reality - Greene

77. America - Bauldrillard

78. Society of Spectacle - Debord

79.  The Age of Wire and String – Marcus

80.  2666 - Bolano

After making this list I am confronted by the fact that there are about 200 more books that easily come to mind to be added. Guess I need to get started. Also note this list does not represent everything I am going to read over the time period allotted - in my case four years - but just an idea of some of what I will definitely be reading.

New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine

I received a few new books in the mail yesterday. My excitement could not be contained. Instead of re-reading the Odyssey for a free online course I am taking I dove right into one of these new books. New York Drawings is a collection work from Adrian Tomine, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker over the last decade. I bought this book thinking I would be disappointed. I had seen some of Tomine's New Yorker covers before - I have a copy of the great Amazon delivery one somewhere - but most of my exposure to his work had been through two of his graphic novels (Shortcomings and Summer Blonde). The main thought running through my mind as I opened the book was will Tomine's themes of loneliness and alienation blend well with his love of awkward moments in a single panel?

My worries were for nothing! This collection is amazing. I want to leave it on my coffee table so everyone can marvel over the images as I have. Some of my favorites - The Lost Girl and Meditation - are not available online to show you and I am to lazy to scan them myself, but trust me they are so beautifully simple.

Tomine manages to condense complexity to one page over and over. Take the cover above. Has one image ever so subtly mocked our entire conception of reality? We are obsessed with seeing what is real on T.V. and experiencing simulated realities. Yet, the image mocks this whole concept. It seems to call for the people watching the movie to take down the screen and stare at the real existence behind it.

The image below is equally stunning and simple. Two strangers on trains heading separate directions make eye contact as they read the same book. The loneliness and sense of lost opportunity that this image conveys needs time to be properly absorbed. Perhaps this is love for Tomine - two strangers destined to be heading separate ways.

There are also a few short comic strips in here that showcase the wit and dialogue of Tomine - which is almost always great. However, if you really want to have more experiences with Tomine's comic work I would suggest picking up Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, or Optic Nerve #12 - they are all pretty amazing.

If you are looking for a coffee table book, love drawings, are a fan of Tomine, or just want something different check this book out. If you happen to see it somewhere take a few moments to browse through it. This book is worth a first and second look.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

The collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver is essential reading for short story writers. I say this because what he did seems to be the constant source of bad imitation.

You could easily say his stories are about nothing - as I have heard said before. However, this would be inaccurate. Carver's stories are simply about people and the mundane everyday. His stories are minimalist to the extreme - which is what he is known for - and yet Carver still manage to create an entire world in them. Carver's stories are filled with small holes, but the familiarity of his stories allow the reader to automatically fill in the blanks. (I am left thinking about the amazing things many verbose fantasy writers could learn from Carver's more "literary" form of world creation)

My favorite story of the bunch is "I Could See the Smallest Things." The story is a perfect example of Carver's writing. It takes place in a brief moment in time. Nothing happens except the passing of life. I would recommend you all to check it out.

Many of the other stories are equally fantastic. There are really no complete duds in the bunch. If you are at all interested in the short story, I would go read a few of these quick gems in a bookstore or online somewhere and see if its for you. Carver is not a writer I would read everyday - I enjoy things a little more out there - but I am sure I will read more of his stories and books to satisfy my sporadic reality based literary fiction cravings.