The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Stories by Will Self

 

My Idea of Fun by Will Self

Brilliantly written but a bore to read, like much of Self's work. Still he appeals to me as a thinker and a philosopher, much like JG Ballard (whom Self admires). THE BOOK OF DAVE and GREAT APES were unqualified masterpieces. The rest of it I've struggled with.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

 

Long involved (if beautifully written) novel about boy born speechless growing up on a dog breeding farm in Wisconsin. How did I hear about it? I don't know. Oprah selection from 2008. It's good but don't know if I can stick with it.

10/30/24 - I cannot stick with it. Halfway through and gave up.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallce

 

Great funny essay on prose poems.

sex is never "bad," but it's also never casual. (from "Back in New Fire," his strange essay on sex in the aftermath of AIDS.)

He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty - a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. (from "Borges on the Couch."

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

Made the mistake of watching the delight THE THIN MAN 1934 film when I was halfway through reading this. It's been said that the film improves upon the novel, and I must agree. The book is good - the film is sublime.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

 

A little hard to follow the plotting and action sometimes, because of Hammett's heavy gangster 1920s vernacular, and the level of deviance and betrayal by the  criminals and police. But still a primal source for much of the crime fiction I love.

The phrase "blood simple" originated here apparently. 

“It's an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they've committed murder,” Joel Coen told Time Out. “They go 'blood simple' in the slang sense of 'simple,' meaning crazy."

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 

Good to finally (?) read this - my printed last name across the width of the pages makes me think I've had this book since high school, but never attempted it. (notes on the fly leaf below indicate it was after h.s., as i’m paying rent, or trying to calculate if i CAN pay rent.)

 Hardy attacks marriage and love and the sexes in his brilliant way - not much of a plot besides people seeing and judging people in English village society and attacking reputations, which the main characters take with deadly serious. 

I particular like Jude's son, also sort of named Jude, but known colloquially as Father Time and Time, because he seems to wise and old and disinterested in his life as a child, from his rough life being raised in Australia by his mother (for awhile), then abandoned by her there when she returns to England, and the boy is then sent by relatives for Jude to raise.

Finally finished it - quite compelling, if dense and relatively action-free. Well, Jude and Susan's children hang themselves, so that was exciting (a little too exciting). But moving in the end, by incrementedly building up the anguish and despair of Jude and Susan as they do immoral things for moral reasons (return to loveless marriages).

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union; that of having a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable. [73]

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife [77]

"Save his own soul he hath no star" - Swinburne [79]

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously. [203]

And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. [203]

He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing. [216]

But sometimes a woman's love of being love gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. [239]

A contented mind is a continual feast. [313]

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? [346]

Ah, dear Jude, that's because you are like a totally dead man observing people listening to music. You say, 'What are they regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is. [346]

When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me... [348]

Or is it that you're humbugging yourself, as so many women do about these things; and don't actually believe what you pretend to, and are only indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised by an affected belief? [383-384]

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Stories by Stephen Crane

 

I read the stories "A Girl of the Streets" and "The Open Boat" - both astonishing.