reading
Jorge Luis Borges and #Book Suggestions
Open Culture has a post listing the top 74 books, as suggested by Jorge Luis Borges, a reader should have in their personal library.
(click on the image to be redirected to the posting at Open Culture)
Some of the items I am quite familiar with, but some I had not heard of – neither generally nor in connection with JLB.
“Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expanding stories reshaped modern fiction. He was one of the first authors to mix high culture with low, merging such popular genres as science fiction and the detective story with heady philosophical discourses on authorship, reality and existence. His story “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” which describes a novel that is also a labyrinth, presaged the hypertextuality of the internet age. His tone of ironic detachment influenced generations of Latin American authors. The BBC argued that Borges was the most important writer of the 20th century.
Of course, Borges wasn’t just an author. When not writing fiction, Borges worked as a literary critic, occasional film critic, a librarian, and, for a spell, as the director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. His tastes were famously eclectic….
1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo
36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn”(accessed 11 October 2015)
Book Club on the Radio, v. 3
Our #Radiobookclub group is doing another Book-Chat on the Radio.
The event is January 20, 2015 at 8 pm on Fairfax Public Access Radio.
We’re reading Dana Shavin’s The Body Tourist.
(cover courtesy of the author’s website, accessed 11 Jan 2015)
You can order the book directly from the publisher, Little Feather Books.
I won’t be there this time, not even as a long-distance call-in. But Jenn Lawrence of @Indiethursday and Jenn’s Bookshelves, Ellen Clair Lamb and Jill of One More Page Books will all be there to do a live-close reading, review the work as a piece of writing, and surely talk about the book’s observations on anorexia.
Listeners can call in (please do): (703)-560-8255 and maybe watch a few Tweets with the #radiobookclub hashtag.
Thank you for reading.
Jesse L.
Book Club on the Radio, v. 2
‘Tis official, were organizing the second edition of #radiobookclub – set for June 10, 2014 @ 8 PM EST.
Sponsored by the 21st Century Librarians at Metamedia Management (yours truly), the good folks at One More Page Books. Ellen Clair Lamb and Jenn Lawrence of #INDIETHURSDAY, we’re doing another book club on the radio. We spun the wheel and have chosen another good title. This one is very different from the Elmore Leonard we read before.
This time, we’re reading THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS by John Connolly.
We’ll be going live on The Radio Hotline With Dennis Price at Radio Fairfax at 8 PM (EST) on June 10.
Please call in and talk to the panel about the book, or any other John Connolly title you like.
The number to call is (703)-560-8255 and the radio show can be streamed from the web here.
We look forward to hearing from you on the radio.
Thank you for reading.
Book Club on Radio Hotline – Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch
Yep, a Book Club on the Radio – hashtag: #bookclubradio
Sponsored by the 21st Century Librarians at Metamedia Management, LLC and the kind booksellers at One More Page Books, located in Arlington, Va / I am mediating a live book chat hosted on Radio Hotline with Dennis Price of Home Improvements by Dennis Price on Radio Fairfax – Northern Virginia’s public access radio station. Thank you Dennis.
On March 4, 2014 at 8 PM – EST we will be chatting about crime writing and mystery style in Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. You can order your copy of the book at One More Page Books by calling 703 -300-9746 or your local bookstore. The novel was adapted into film by Quentin Tarantino as Jackie Brown (1997) . Leonard’s style is fun and punchy. There have been several of this books adapted into film over the years and will be really fun to talk about any & all ideas we like about the book, film adaptations, or mystery writing in general. Just bring your thoughts and questions – whatever they are.
The discussion will feature live, in the studio: myself (Jesse), Terry and Ellen of One More Page Books. Even though Jennifer of Jenn’s Bookshelves book blog and #indiethursday was formerly planning to to be there, she will be promoting the event. We expect the chat to move around as we feel – though I will come prepared with a few questions and ideas. We ask that you please call in the radio at any time during the discussion so we can add more and more to the mix. The number to call-in is: 703-560-8255. If you want to join in the discussion on Twitter, you can follow or chat with any of us above under the hashtag #bookclubradio. Our names above are each linked to our Twitter profiles. It’ll be fun. Please join us.
Thank you for reading.
Jesse L.
A German-Language Translation of a Poem (1)
“A German-Language Translation of a Poem (1)”
By Jesse A Lambertson
As an instance of self-education, I took a poem by a poet I respect and translated it into German. I do not plan to make any money on this translation. I want it to act as an educational action that adds to the greater “library” of poems by this poet. I ran several searches through OCLC’s World Cat in order to track down local copies of German language collections (in translation) by this poet. That search resulted in items found neither in local library collections nor in any library collections anywhere. Here is my translation and maybe the first time this poem has been translated into German. I used my understanding of German and two lexicons in the process. If your reading teaches you who this poet is, you are welcome to put that information into the reply box below. Enjoy.
Allein im Bibliothek, Ich war von Menschen umgeben,
Da, in der Lesesaal, allein, jede Mensch ist allein,
Es gibt eine falsche Ruhe, in der Saal, Die Luft ist Stille,
Es gibt viele Leselampen auf den Tisch,
Die spielen die Texte erkennen und lessen und verstehen schau,
Die Leselampen breitet ihre Licht auf der Bedeutungen von der Wörter aus,
Aber, die Seiten sind leer unter dem blöd unnachgiebic Blick von der Leselampen,
Die Sieten nicht sein leer gedulgic warten,
Bis ein Geist lese, die Seiten leer bleiben,
Das Geist über das schwarze Fluss schreiten,
Mit Persephone die Königin der Unterwelt unterhalten sein lessen musst
Die Königin der Unterwelt sich setzte nähe der Mann dass Sie hier von Enna deportiert,
Der stumm und taub Hades, Der König von dem Tote Buchstabe,
Sie sich in der Robe von unsere tausend Missverständnisse auf dem heilig Texte bedeckt.
I am open to discussion about the translation itself to improve my understanding of German. You can reply in the box below or at Twitter.
Thank you for reading.
Jesse L.
Library Journal Review of Herman and Weisenburger’s Gravity’s Rainbow Analysis
My newest review for Library Journal has been published. This starred review looks at Luc Herman’s and Steve Weisenburger’s analysis of Thomas Pynchon‘s Gravity’s Rainbow from the point of view of theorists and ideas prevalent in the Long Sixties. Their book is called, Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press.
I am always challenged reading Thomas Pynchon, critical approaches to his work and appreciated the opportunity to review this book. Thank you Library Journal.
(Please click on book-cover thumbnail above to get the review from Library Journal)
Library Journal Review of Ford Madox Ford
My review of Pallas Athene’s 2013 publication of Ford Madox Ford’s impressionistic memoirs, Memories of a Pre-Raphaelite Youth, has been published in the 01 October 2013 issue of Library Journal.
The memoirs in this volume have been selected from an earlier, now out-of-print, edition of Ford’s memoirs, edited by Michael Killigrew in 1971, titled Your mirror to My times: The Selected Autobiographies and Impressions of Ford Madox Ford.
