Journal

Acquisitons, recent and foreseeable.

New Book Order

• Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee. My favourite Coetzee book; one day I just felt the need to get it onto my shelves, so there it is.
• Tinkers, Paul Harding. Recent Pulitzer Prize winner; I have no idea what it is about.
• Collected Poems, Philip Larkin. Hello, Mr. Larkin! Always good to see you.
• The Ruined Map, Kōbō Abe. Probably less well-known around these parts; here is a tasty article about him. [via The Millions]

Textbooks I Need

So according to the reading list of my two subjects, here are the texts that I need:

• Crick Crack Monkey, Merle Hodge.
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. As you will know I have never read this before; people always talk about it, and I’m quietly hopeful that it’ll be as good as Never Let Me Go, if not better; I was somehow quite disappointed with Nocturnes.
• In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming.
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie.
• Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee. I have this; my first reading of this was a library copy so this is brand new; it was on my waiting list; it is one of the few books that I won’t have to buy.
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. I have this too, and it is in fact one of the oldest books on my shelves; it is somewhat out of shape and very yellow, but that only adds to its charm; one of the books of my youth and therefore a personal favourite, but I’m not too sure about how it will fare with all of these years that have passed.
• Texts for nothing, Samuel Beckett. I suppose this means Stories and Texts for Nothing, though it could also mean that without the three stories.
• Contempt, Alberto Moravia.
• Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss. Ah yes, otherwise known as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
• A Woman Alone, etc., Rame and Fo. Hmm, I guess I’ll have to ask about the et cetera bit.
• A Heart So White, Javier Marías. I was actually planning to get started on Marías because I’ve read more than a few recommendations for Your Face Tomorrow; I had not quite anticipated that school would give me a helping hand of some sort.
• Crabwalk, Gűnter Grass.
• Selected poems by Zbigniew Herbert. I’ve only read one of his poems, so this is pretty much a great opportunity.

Meanwhile, Movies

Oh yes, we’re doing a few movies too:

• Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola. This is the only film I’ve watched on this list.
• Ararat, Atom Egoyan.
• Ulysses’ Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos.

Time, Mr. Freeman?

That’s actually more to cover than I thought, so I don’t know where my normal day-to-day reading will fit in, but I hope I manage to make time. Here are some of the immediate highlights from my waiting list:

• The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Macedonio Fernández. I’ve been waiting a long time to read this.
• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.
• Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud. Hello, Mr. Rimbaud! Always good to see you, too.
• The Implacable Order of Things, José Luís Peixoto.

And of course, a bunch of other things.

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t contemplate them… but these are extraordinary times.”

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© 2010 a modest odyssey.