Currently reading
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
Can't and Won't: Stories
Dust
Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems
The Savage Detectives
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker
Collected Fictions
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Modern Library Paperbacks)
The History of Love
I took a star off for the beginning and the ending but that's mostly because they don't adequately represent the enormous somewhat unrealized potential of the best parts of the middle of this book.
The Fault in Our Stars
Much like HUGO (the movie) I wanted to like this but I couldn't. It felt too hard like the book was trying to make me feel things and my body refused to cooperate with all the emotional coercion.
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
Not a bad biography, just not a literary one.
To the Lighthouse
Slightly less paralysing in its perfect poetic prose than The Waves (though just as rich), To the Lighthouse delivers page upon page of Virginia Woolf's genius in a less concentrated form. It is precisely this sort of lossless 'dilution' that allows one to actually finish this book for the first time (delighted at the prospect of the eventual re-reading that this sort of book demands), in contrast to the powerful intensity of prose poetry distilled into each paragraph of The Waves which paralyzes one into a state of contemplation so sweet as one slowly savors each page that I'm not quite sure I'll ever finish it since I'm not quite ready to ever be 'done' with the book.The Waves is the sort of book one spends an entire lifetime reading. To the Lighthouse is the sort of book one reads over and over again for the rest of one's life.
Americanah
I've always felt like the sort of person who should be reading her work so I'm almost embarrassed to admit how late I am to the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie bandwagon. I'm glad I waited for Americanah. Any narrative flaws (real or imagined) are more than made up for by the honesty at the heart of the story she tells; the characters' constant struggle to re-weave the disparate strands of a tattered concept, ravaged by time into frightening fluidity, into something with the semblance of stability of the original meaning of the term, home.
The sheer amount of TRUTH overflowing from some of the pages in her book made me want to compile them into a little book and give to friends, family members and anyone else who wanted an accurate report of what it feels like to live where you're not wanted in the hope of never having to live in want.
