As a fan of Gothic literature I’ve been biased and told myself I had to read it, and of course I enjoyed it; but I’d like to know, how’d you find it?
The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Honestly, it was an enjoyable read with the recurring motifs and engaging plot. I am a huge fan of golden age sci-fi and fantasy and I think Otranto is a seminal work of this genre.
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I can’t live without audiobooks on longish commutes.
One time I got a biography of Alexander, read by the author, and it was informative. I was able to listen to her particular stances (biases) by the inflections in her voice.
When she discussed Gordian’s Knot, her opinion on the matter was quite emphatic.
There was an insistence which wouldn’t have been so clear by reading the text.
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There’s a short Czech film on the book available on Youtube, if you’re interested. They used cut out cardboard characters and decor, I liked the aesthetic and in-between interviews (fake of course) of a reporter and an archaeologist trying to prove the story’s real and happened not in Italy but in Czechoslovakia.
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The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London.
One interesting thing I learned (thanks to the preface’s translator) in this book is Pidgin English. I had never heard of it until I opened it.
It is a simplified contact language based on English. The protagonist is primarily located in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. It helps local people communicate, mixing English with their native language.
So, Pidgin English is a common phenomenon in the Melanesian and Polynesian islands. However, from what I’ve read, it is also common in some African countries—like Ghana and Nigeria, for example.
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Relations of Grace by László Krasznahorkai.
Context Changes Everything, Alicia Juarrero
Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler
Holism and Evolution, Jan Smuts
The Pyramid by Ismail Kadare.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
- Doom Painting by A. K. Blakemore
- Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson
A pidgin is any contact language and it would vary by contact, so you could have a pidgin between Chinese and English, German and French, anything. Compare it to a creole.
A Plan for Escape by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Similar to The Invention of Morel, probably @Jamal would enjoy this book.
Well, this time the island is a bleak penal colony in the context of the Dreyfus political scandal.
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I’ve added it to my list.
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I finished The Thousand and One Nights
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Homo faber, Homo sapiens: managing knowledge and intellectual capital by different Spanish authors. Coordinated by Antoni M Güell.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Anne Carson.
Honestly, I have never heard of her until today. However, it seems I am not the only one:
I wonder why this happens. Perhaps because my literary mindset is limited to just my tastes. In most cases, the result of reading these authors after being awarded the Nobel is pretty good.
I think if I read Anne Carson, she would not disappoint me, but I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t hear from her before…
Wife and I just randomly walked past Steven Pinker in NYC
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