Reading on Wednesday

[heliopausa]

First up: stay warm, all friends in snowy, snowy places!  :)

And ..things I've been reading, this past week

I am slogging on with My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk.  It's an interesting, but for me, distinctly not an easy read - I'm not sure how much this is because it's culturally a jump for me - it's sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, in the lives and

Comments

[wellinghall]

Thank you for those interesting book write-ups.

[heliopausa]

:) Thank you for reading - and for inspiration! It was your remarks about reading earlier this month, which inspired me to pluck the daunting ("Shakespearean in its grandeur") My Name is Red from the bookshelves, and commit to actually reading it. What news of The Space Eater, and The City and the City?

[wellinghall]

Um, this is where I feel slightly guilty at not having read any more of them Yet.

[heliopausa]

:D I'm sorry! Guilting was emphatically not my intention! (I'm glad it was only "slightly", and hope by now it's dissolved into nothingness. And cheers for reading what we jolly well want to read, when we blinking well feel like it!)

[asakiyume]

I tried one book by Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle and gave up on it. I had been curious because it was described as a story in which two people switch identities, but the style of storytelling (no dialogue) and the sensibility felt so alien (there were statements like, "Of course, in this situation, he felt X," where the notion of feeling X was so hard for me to understand that I didn't know where to go: was this just different culture? Was it Pamuk describing people at the time... who had different feelings? Was there irony? I was too lost.)

[heliopausa]

"where the notion of feeling X was so hard for me to understand that I didn't know where to go"
Yes, I've been getting a bit of this. People think things, and I just don't compute. It's made it very hard to empathise with the characters - but as I say, that mightn't be the Pamuk's plan. Just in this last seventy or so pages, I've found myself understanding where someone's coming from (the aged master-minaturist, seems to be delaying his investigations so he can look just a little longer at the precious manuscripts in the sultan's treasure-room. :) )
But... the philosophy in the book really is starting to grab. What is art for?; what makes for good art? (for any and every value of 'good'); how much is gained and how much is lost when cultures borrow from each other?; is art about ego or about humanity?; what is the right theology of art?
That and the descriptions of the manuscript illuminations are very involving.

[asakiyume]

I'm intrigued by the question what is the right theology of art? --I'm not sure I quite understand it, though. Explain?

[heliopausa]

Sorry for unclarity! Put it down to the jumbled state of my own understanding. Here goes, as best I can