Ben Mines

Journey without Maps by Graham Greene is interesting.

I have an edition of The Confessions of S. Augustine printed in 1897.

I can't remember if I've said this already, but the modern reader has to cheat to fully understand Ulysses. This is not due to Joyce being intentionally difficult or obfuscatory, but simply because of the novel's realism. To give just one example, the novel is a very accurate linguistic portrait of the English spoken in Ireland in 1916 and therefore its characters use a lot of street cant and colloquialisms that the modern reader is unfamiliar with. Similarly, the current affairs and gossip discussed by the characters is over 100 years old. Joyce strived for a pure realism (once remarking, famously, "I have no imagination") and therefore did not allow his characters to escape even for a moment the medium of fin de si

According to Nabokov in his book of interviews, most serious Russian writers couldn't understand the English-speaking world's love affair with War and Peace. They viewed it as sordid romantic pablum spatchcocked onto a didatic and overlong journalistic screed about the Napoleonic War. In my humble opinion that's going to far. It's a wonderful book, but I agree: It's not Ulysses. You could knock it off in a leisurely two weeks without so much as a glance at endnotes.

War and Peace is light reading. The only minor difficulties a reader faces is that it is long and that the English-speaker has to get used to Russian naming conventions.

I read it in one sitting because, like pulling off a sticky plaster, I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. File under Sanctimonious Pablum.

Have you read Ollala?

There are many things I don't understand about the popular conception of the vampire. Where did all that Brilliantine come from? Was there a scene in which Stoker describes the Count lustily trowelling Brilliantine into his hair? I don't recall it. Generally speaking, Stoker's creature is far more insectile, and more interesting, than that black-caped, Brilliantined, blood-drinking and yet somehow still cultivated Transylvanian gentleman. I remember in particular a scene in which he scurries down the wall like a lizard; and how he buried himself mole-like in a crate of soil for his journey to England. I also remember the farcial Victorian gentlemen who hunt him down with thinly-disguised xenophobic zeal.

Death in Venice?

I am always amazed at how many people overlook the fairly obvious and unremarkable fact that a writer's characters do not necessarily reflect a writers character. Shakespeare is most notoriously dispoiled and abused in this way. I do not know how many times I have heard some well-meaning soul draw a moral apothegm from the sage words of Gentle Will, when, as it turns out, it was something said by Iago. Iago! Does anyone else struggle with this frustrating problem?

1. Leopold Bloom, husband of Molly, father of Milly, mayor of Bloomusalem, appreciative consumer of the inner organs of beasts and fowls, new womanly man, lovable homo domesticus, correspondent of Martha Clifford (qua Henry Flower), marker of tea, buyer of lemon soap, reader of tidbits, teetotaler, Jew, wittol, all round man. Good old Bloom! 2. Professor Kinbote, nom de guerre of Charles Xavier the II, nom de folie of Professor Botkin, who may also be the ghost of John or Hazel Shade. No, no, don't ask me to explain

I like it.

Was it Longitude by Dava Sobel? It tells the story of John Harrison, the English clockmaker. Great book.

"I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb; only one man on earth had that right, and he is dead) holding a dark passion flower in his hand and seeing it as no one has ever seen it, even if he had stared at it from the first light of dawn to the last light of evening for an entire lifetime." The opening line of Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges. For context, it is a story about a man with an infallible and unlimited memory. Shades of Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall, I think.

Try mnemonics, BookJumper. They are incredibly powerful.

The phrase "Biff through the ball for Chip" is, in my opinion, very open to interpretation.

"Singularification" is a bit over the top and therefore reminds him of Joyce?

The memorable moments for me are all moments that caused spine-tingles. There are too many to recall, so I'll just mention four--if you'll allow me to copy-paste myself. From my blog: Nabokov instructed his students to read with their spine. I believe I now understand what he means: As the insectile clicking of a Geiger counter indicates the presence of radiation, so the tingling of a reader's spine will indicate that he is in the presence of good literature. I can think of several such moments in my experience with books. The first that comes to mind is a speciously incidental parenthesis in The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Describing the polysemous nature of the texts in the infinite library, the narrator notes that, The effect of that question, at which I think I gave a slight gasp, was profound. I at once intuited, dizzyingly, a language analogous to a lenticular image or a Gestalt illusion capable of conveying two or three or perhaps innumerable meanings at once to different readers. I could not be certain that the text before me, or any text, for that matter, did not signify and radiate such a multiplicity of meanings. I could no longer be certain that the meaning I had access to was the correct or even the intended one. The book that I held in my hands was made suddenly alien. In terms of the queasy feeling of unreality that overcame me, it was much as if a hypnotist had clicked his fingers and revealed to me that the beautiful woman I was embracing was in fact a wooden hatrack. The next tingle that comes to mind occurred while I was reading A Pale View of Hills. Readers should not be deceived by the pedestrian simplicity of Ishiguro's prose style. His entire novel is transformed by a single word in the last chapter, a slip of the tongue that collapses three characters into a one. The effect is startling, even more so than those paintings by Acimboldo and Dali where the details (fruit bowl, couch, doorway) pull together into a single face. Ishiguro achieves the effect, retroactively, with the addition of a single, tiny detail. Borges describes a "teleology of words and episodes" that is the hallmark of good literature. A third moment on my list is at the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where the subtle foreshadowing of Anna's tragic fate in the dreams and symbols that recur throughout the narrative (the shuddering train and the Russian peasant's mumbled words) prepares the way for a climax that is, to borrow a journalistic cliche, shattering; an unforgettable scene that closes spine-tinglingly in an aura of coal smoke, shrieking brakes and inexorable kismet. Finally, in Nabokov's own novels there are many scenes to choose from, but one that stands out as being particularly spine-tingly is near the end of Look at the Harlequins! Anyone who has read it will remember Vadim's strange mental deficiency: He is unable, as he imagines himself walking down the street, to change directions; instead, he is required to rotate the world around the axis of his own point-of-view until where he wants to go is before him. Throughout the novel, I kept raising my eyebrows at his complicated descriptions of this mental foible and seriously wondering where he (Nabokov) was taking me. By the end of the book, I regreted mistrusting his auctorial guidance. The masterful way Nabokov sets up and then deploys this device to bring the theme of dementia to its climax (when Vadim, aphasic, probably suffering a stroke, grips with helplessly enfeebled hands a stile he is unable to climb, at the end of a country path he is unable to retrace, since, as the reader knows, doing so would require him to pick up and rotate the entire world 180 degrees) is one of the high points of the novel and of my reading. There are, of course, countless other books and scenes that might be mentioned. Ulysses alone could supply us with eight or nine galvanic screenfuls of examples, from the silver-helmeted apparition of Rudy that appears to Bloom at the end of the Nighttown episode, to the tragic cheese sandwich that that lovable homo domesticus consumes alone, with one dark eye on the clock, knowing Boylan wends his unstoppable way toward 7 Eccles Street.

At Swim-Two-Birds is woeful. The thesis of The Myth of Sisyphus is interesting, but it is presented in the most atrocious philosophical cant you will ever read. The Glass Bead Game is a mercilessly overlong and mystagogic piece of Philosophastering. Those are the three worst books I've ever read. But even so I would still apply Pliny's tolerant maxim that there is no book so bad there isn't something good in it. What? WHAT?! Your reasons, pray.

The first line of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is,

Thanks. It required an Atlantean mental and physical effort and a lot of careful and creative mnemonics. Trouble is, memorizing long texts is a lot like spinning plates: Without periodic attention, they will start to wobble.

There's something about Shakespeare that makes him oddly easy to memorize. Sonnet 130 (the pick of the crop, in my opinion) was preserved in my memory just as a result of rereading it, without any mnemonic techniques or even a conscious effort to learn it by heart. The same is true for quite a few soliloquies from Hamlet and Macbeth. I've found that the hardest thing to memorize is literature and poetry that is similar to everyday speech. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the longest poem I've memorized,was easier than Eveline, a short story from Dubliners told in plain English that I'm still struggling with. I think it's because with everyday speech there are many possible syntactical variations, whereas you're not as likely to unconsciously modify dense or archaic language. It's difficulty actually makes it easier to remember.

Though only feasible with poetry and short stories, possession by memory is, in my emphatic opinion, the best possible way to engage and experience literature. Do you agree? And what, if anything, have you committed to memory?

I would just like to lend my voice to the chorus howling down Dan Brown. The most woeful plot, cardboardy characters and hamfisted dialogue I have ever encountered. Ever. May someone beat him to death with his severed writing arm.

Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov Queer by W. S. Burroughs Junky by the same Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley The Europeans by Henry James All brilliant short novels.