I haven’t read any detective novels except for Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Conan Doyle, and Georges Simenon.

I haven’t read any detective novels except for Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Conan Doyle, and Georges Simenon. — Jamal

I think I'll try Hammett.

Didn't impress me, but it was a long time ago.

Didn't impress me, but it was a long time ago. — Jamal

But once I've read it I'll be able to toss off an authoritative "Didn't impress me" during conversations about detective novels.

That’s the spirit.

@Noble Dust An update:

I’m more than half way through The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and I’m revising my estimation in an upward direction. It’s really great.

Crash by J. G. Ballard.

So absurdly perverted that it’s often quite funny:

The elegant aluminized air-vents in the walls of the X-ray department beckoned as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.

That filthy slot!

:grin:

Well, I finished it. I didn’t like it much, but often it’s the books I dislike that I want to talk about…

Crash by J. G. Ballard: a novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.

It’s very good in some ways. It’s bleak, alienating, repugnant and joyless, and that’s what Ballard was going for—he described it once as a “psychopathic hymn”. Occasionally the images and the similes are extraordinarily good. The psychogeography of highways, transit hotels, and multi-storey car parks is nicely done, and quite haunting. The writing is tonally flat and stylistically unshowy, but it’s strong, and it sometimes surprises you with an unusual but perfect word.

Academics like to write about this novel, and it’s easy to see why. I’m tempted to say it’s all content, no style. That would be putting it too strongly, but what seems to matter is the shock, the message, the social commentary. Thematically it’s a warning about where we’re going, or even where we are already (rubbing our faces in it).

A writer of fiction according to Nabokov can do three things: tell a story, teach, and enchant. Crash is concerned with teaching us about the evils of postmodernity, and is mostly unconcerned with storytelling and enchantment (by the way, enchantment in Nabokov’s scheme is what the greatest writers do, and it includes formal innovation, language play, and unique imagery, not only great ideas and worlds of wonder).

But that’s not quite fair. It does more than an essay could do, and it has an enchanting style of its own. The clinical descriptions of technofetishism, of sexual gratification at the “junction” (a word Ballard uses a lot) of bodies and machines—a junction marked out by injuries, wounds and scars—wouldn’t be as powerful were they rendered as non-fictional speculation and meditation. And I do admire the way that it defamiliarizes the everyday world—this again is the job of fiction.

But the fascination begins to wear off after the first couple of chapters, and it gets numbingly repetitive and pretentious, an interminable gimmick. I think that as a conceptual piece or cautionary tale it would have worked better as a short story or novella.

Although I said the book was joyless, it’s sometimes delightfully bizarre and funny. It’s not clear if any of the humour was intended, though it did feel like a satire on post-sixties sexual freedom and violence in the media, or else a parody of transgressive fiction or pornography. But judging by what the author himself has said about it, I think it’s meant to be taken very seriously indeed.

A quotation from the book can serve as a nutshell summary:

A blend of semen and engine coolant.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

The absence of myth by georges bataille. A collection of 25 articles on surrealism. Excellent work i'm taking my time with it.

A quotation from the book can serve as a nutshell summary:

A blend of semen and engine coolant. — Jamal

Sounds like many a man cave I have visited...

Have you ever read TC Boyle's Water Music? Politically incorrect, but an astonishing, enchanting use of English in the manner of Lolita (but not about young girls) also something in common with John Barth's baroque The Sot-Weed Factor but less intricate and confusing.

Thanks for the recommendation, I’d never heard of it. Looks good, so it’s now on my list :up:

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. — Jamal

I've read quite a bit about that book, but never actually read it, but it struck me as pretty important. It interests me that they make many of the same criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism as do Christian apologists, albeit from a completely different theoretical basis.

Although I said the book was joyless, it’s sometimes delightfully bizarre and funny. It’s not clear if any of the humour was intended, though it did feel like a satire on post-sixties sexual freedom and violence in the media, or else a parody of transgressive fiction or pornography. But judging by what the author himself has said about it, I think it’s meant to be taken very seriously indeed. — Jamal

I haven't read the book. I admire your efforts to give a fair evaluation of a book you didn't like. I would likely have been less generous. More likely, I wouldn't have finished it.

Kind of the same with me: I’ve only read about it and read bits of it before. So far it’s quite angry and declamatory.

I kept on reading for three reasons: (1) the absurd perversity was quite funny and I was curious how far it would go, (2) I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing, and (3) I suppose it was compelling or mesmerizing enough to draw me back in (I did actually abandon it one evening, but returned to it the next day).

So far it’s quite angry and declamatory. — Jamal

Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of being captured by the Wehrmacht, apart from all the other massive destruction that had befallen everything around them. (I have a book called Grand Hotel Abyss which is a kind of collective bio of the Frankfurt School, must get around to reading more of it.)

I was reading what i thought was a great thriller, Kolmynsky Heights, Lionel Davidson. But I found to my intense annoyance about 75% of the way through the story introduces a major plot point which I found just beyond the pale of credibility and I had to abandon it.

Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of being captured by the Wehrmacht, apart from all the other massive destruction that had befallen everything around them — Wayfarer

Yes, their outrage about it leaps off the page.

I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing — Jamal

Yes, I've always thought that if I want to say something about a book, I should finish it. I rarely write negative things about books. There are so many wonderful books out there and I want to point them out to people. There are also a bunch of well-known or popular books that are very bad - either badly written, badly argued, or filled with bad ideas. I'm generally willing to let people take their chances with them. Exceptions - "The Tao of Physics" and "The God Delusion."

I rarely write negative things about books. There are so many wonderful books out there and I want to point them out to people. — T Clark

By the same token, in writing a bad review I’m providing a service. I’m saying, it’s ok not to read this, try something wonderful instead.

The main thing is though, I find I can’t write anything interesting about books I love, or I just don’t feel motivated to do so. I seem to need some friction, something to get worked up about. Anger is an energy. In the case of Crash I was close to throwing the book across the room a few times (until I remembered I was reading on an iPad).

By the same token, in writing a bad review I’m providing a service. I’m saying, it’s ok not to read this, try something wonderful instead. — Jamal

I wasn't questioning your decision to review the book, only pointing out a difference in our approach. For what its worth, I thought your evaluation was interesting and worthwhile.

I find I can’t write anything interesting about books I love, or I just don’t feel motivated to do so. — Jamal

It's the opposite for me. It's not just that I want to tell people how much I like the book, I also want to figure out for myself why I do. The reasons I don't like books are generally simpler than reasons I do. Or if not simpler, at least more obvious. To paraphrase Tolstoy - All bad books are alike; each good book is good in its own way.

I wasn't questioning your decision to review the book, only pointing out a difference in our approach — T Clark

I know. I was describing my own approach in your terms.

Security Analysis- Benjamin Graham
The Wealth of Nations- Adam Smith

À la recherche du temps perdu #3:
The Guermantes Way
by Marcel Proust

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Jamal

My attitude going into this was that I wanted a brief palate-cleanser between heavy works of fiction, which could also neatly fill a gap in my philosophical knowledge. What a fool! I was forgetting that philosophy is quite hard.

The upshot is that I’m still on the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” reading it repeatedly and more slowly each time, and I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, among lots of other material.

It’s great though, otherwise I wouldn’t continue.

:cool: :up:

I've read bits too but not the whole thing. They are pretty direct. Typical excerpt:

"Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."

:clap:

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas.

Excellent.

Despite all that, apparently Adorno was a big fan of the TV show Daktari, starring Clarence the cross-eyed lion.

Who wouldn't be? :love:

1848: Year of Revolution
by Mike Rapport

I recently realized I know almost nothing about the wave of anti-aristocratic revolutions that swept mid-nineteenth century Europe. I hope in coming understand how and why these arose, but failed, I can help contribute to the success of the global revolution that is surely coming.

Dynamics and immobilist politics in Japan by J.A.A. Stockwin, Alan Rix, Aurelia George, James Horne, Daiichi Itō and Martin Collick.

It is my first time reading a scientific book on political and economics of Japan. For the past two years I only had read literature (what I enjoy a lot) but I am also interested in other perspectives towards this country. It is a 326 pages long and after reading the introduction looks like so interesting.