Comments | discountsatori: Back to basics.

discountsatori

Back to basics.

Jul 09, 2006 22:43

BINFICS: a convenient acronym for my Books I Never Finished In College Series. This series encompasses more books than I'd like, seeing as college fell into a time in my life that found me spending my waking hours feeling sorry for myself* and not recognizing that I wasn't living up to my hard-wired ideals about the books and authors that English ( Read more... )

reminiscing, literature

Comments 23

azuresky July 10 2006, 02:57:44 UTC

my experience with reading on the road was that the beginning, the first 150 pages or so, were really good. i could see that sal was having fun. his adventures seemed so... innocent, in a way.

and then you get to the end, and dean is all bitchy, and it's just kind of sad. the book left me with a very sad feeling.

i hope you enjoy it - it's funny that you wrote this now, because i'm going to san francisco this weekend. when i visited city lights books (famous beat bookstore in north beach) in SF over five years ago, i remember there was one huge bookcase full of fresh copies of on the road. i enjoyed that.

steforama July 10 2006, 03:07:53 UTC

Ferlinghetti is really the only one of the Beats I can deal with.

knowthewords July 10 2006, 03:47:01 UTC

That's such beautiful snobbery.

I met him at his bookstore once.

steforama July 10 2006, 12:45:39 UTC

Snobbery schmobbery...

It just means that I was introduced to Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind" very early in life and that's the one that stuck with me. I didn't try Kerouac until I was getting to the point that Laurie describes, of wanting them all to go get jobs.

I'm not well-read enough to be able to exhibit snobbery.

davidfrazer July 10 2006, 09:31:55 UTC

The Guardian in the UK recently interviewed Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

delahk July 10 2006, 03:36:34 UTC

binfics. i like that. reminds me that i've a lot of unread books i need to jump on.

i love the beats, generally. ginsberg and corso and ferlinghetti especially. kerouac, however, who i always wanted to love...well, i couldn't finish a single one of his books. i wonder how many of my "cool" high school friends were just pretending to read those books, sitting there in math class with _on the road_ self-consciously set just so atop their pile of books.

(The comment has been removed)

discountsatori July 10 2006, 19:37:29 UTC

Oh, I definitely need to have a TINLWEICS list, too. There'd be lots of things on there about advanced Spanish grammar (that nasty present perfect subjunctive) and constructing logical arguments. And some physics I learned in one night for an astronomy final but promptly forgot after I slept off the horror of the exam the next morning.

There were so many of my textbooks I couldn't sell (blasted updated editions being released every year!), so I could, in theory, make good on my TINLWEICS list. But it'll take more motivation than just settling in with some good fiction books.

jcb9 July 10 2006, 03:50:37 UTC

Oh, man, I have a lot of those too. I've only actually gotten around to finishing one of them thus far - The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing - which I was supposed to read my last semester immediately after finish Ulysses. It's a much shorter and easier book than Ulysses, of course, but I was so burnt out that I couldn't get more than 50 pages into it. Actually, I don't think I made it through any of the other books we were supposed to read that semester.

Most of my other ones are much longer - like Middlemarch by George Elliot, which I've been meaning to get back to since 2000, or Jubilee by Margaret Walker. I wonder if I'll ever get around to most of them. And then there are the books that I can't even really remember if I finished or not, because I know the endings, but that might've just been from class discussions. D'oh.

discountsatori July 10 2006, 16:00:34 UTC

And then there are the books that I can't even really remember if I finished or not, because I know the endings, but that might've just been from class discussions. D'oh.

I totally understand that. I had a sinking feeling last night that I never read the last 20 - 30 pages of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, even though I studied that book twice and know the story by heart. Sigh. Another book on the stack!

I have wanted to read Middlemarch for a long time, but it, like Ulysses (which I've still never finished), is going to be an undertaking.

kungfufighting July 10 2006, 19:21:57 UTC

The other day, my roommate compared reading Ulysses outside of lit class to watching Citizen Kane outside of film class. Doing either of those things makes you a lil' bit crazy.

I am so stealing the BINFICS acronym, though. I mean, I've still got a year of school left and I KNOW there are books already that aren't going to get finished. Not with the damn GRE's coming up. So in the box they will go. ^-^