Comments | elgoose: 2009 Reading list

elgoose

2009 Reading list

Jan 02, 2010 23:14

I'd post this on facebook, but one of the cretins I went to high school with would feel compelled to say something "witty" about it and then my blood pressure would be sky-high the rest of the day, so fuck that ( Read more... )

books and reading

Comments 10

nesmith January 3 2010, 04:28:59 UTC

What did you think of The People of the Book? I really enjoyed that one--it was quite visually evocative.

elgoose January 3 2010, 05:31:30 UTC

It wasn't my favorite, but my attention span wasn't the best during the time I was reading it. I liked the segments set in the past best. The current day stuff to me seemed unnecessary and diverting from what was really interesting.

nesmith January 3 2010, 05:46:59 UTC

I felt the same way. It really dragged the story down but thankfully not enough to make me abandon the book; I was able to soldier past them to get to the next part. The vivid description and the reveals of each of the elements went a long way to make up for the weakness of the almost-obligatory self-discovery stuff that was put in.

elgoose January 3 2010, 22:10:26 UTC

Have you ever read anything by Arturo Perez-Reverte? I think you'd enjoy his historical novels. The Club Dumas was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp, The Ninth Gate. The book is much better, and for me has always been the standard for the literary history/mystery genre. Dan Brown and his ilk never stood a chance with me.

Thread 5

springheel_jack January 3 2010, 04:34:42 UTC

I forgot if you liked the Orhan Pamuk.

elgoose January 3 2010, 05:33:51 UTC

I really did. I learned a lot, but it wasn't a teachy book. It was all about problems of representation set in a culture with an entirely different approach to the problem than the western/(post)renaissance/christian bundle I function in. And it was a murder mystery, which is always interesting and often dismissed as valuable.

elgoose January 4 2010, 16:30:44 UTC

er, not valuable.

lolaraincoat January 4 2010, 15:26:20 UTC

What did you make of the Spence book?

elgoose January 4 2010, 16:29:53 UTC

I actually enjoyed it, but it had no place in a sophomore-level Historical Methods course. My prof hated it and nobody knew what to make of it. To me, it was very Benjaminian, in that he was doing exactly what he was writing about, if that makes any sense, constructing a memory palace of images associated with Ricci's mission. It was full of the type of interesting historical trivia, too, that I love -- the stuff about sea voyages in particular was very striking.

I think he was a little bit too in love with his Benjaminian conceit, though, to make it really work with the evidence (ie, the core images) he had at hand. He really needed a better grounding in culture theory to make it work the way he really wanted to.

Still, though, very interesting. I do like intellectual history (even though it was way too hard for this particular course). We were also assigned Leviathan and the Air-Pump which was ridiculous. I didn't even finish it. Syllabus development by committee has a lot to answer for.