Dinesh Jayaraman

https://www.goodreads.com/dineshjayaraman

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Dinesh is Currently Reading

Dinesh Jayaraman is currently reading

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

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(page 28 of 450)
— Aug 26, 2023 01:50PM

Aug 26, 2023 01:50PM

Dinesh Jayaraman is currently reading

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman (Goodreads Author)

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Aug 05, 2023 08:59AM

Dinesh Jayaraman is currently reading

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

by Jorge Luis Borges

bookshelves: shorts, literary-fiction, classics, favorites, style, no-nonsense-prose, philosophy, plot-driven, fantasy-fiction, metafiction, postmodern, science-fiction, magical-realism, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in September 2013

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Dinesh Jayaraman said: " Jorge Luis Borges is not to be read lightly. One does not simply let the mind bounce pleasantly along the words. Borges writes concise, tight stories, dense with ideas and meaning and you had better keep on your toes so you don't miss out.

It actuall Jorge Luis Borges is not to be read lightly. One does not simply let the mind bounce pleasantly along the words. Borges writes concise, tight stories, dense with ideas and meaning and you had better keep on your toes so you don't miss out.

It actually makes sense to read these stories and essays together; the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts and that is new to me among the admittedly few short story collections I've read. Borges even makes references to fictional entities from his own other short stories, contributing all the more to our immersion into his vast labyrinthine universe.

A common Borges short fiction template that emerges in these writings is that of the expository essay of an imaginary world. (1) Start with an interesting premise (2) Sketch out some interesting consequences of this premise at breakneck speed over the next few pages, leaving the reader in their wake first chasing to catch up and then slowly feeling their way about this interesting new world you have planted inside their heads, churning over its possibilities for hours afterwards. This would apply to "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel" and "The Sect of the Phoenix", the first three of which are especially awesome.

Infinity, immortality, circularity and memory are recurring themes.

The extent of Borges' reading is impressive and includes esoteric works from all parts of the world. Borges took more pride in his reading than in his writing, and it shows, in that books and authors, real and fictional, are major plot elements in practically every story. My favorite of these are "The Secret Miracle" "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Library of Babel".

Other favorite fictions in this collection: "Funes the memorious", "The Waiting", "The Zahir".

Of the essays, "The Wall and the Books", "Kafka and his precursors" and "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" were my favorites. All of them make for great reading and "The Argentine Writer..." in particular throws some light on Borges himself and what drove his writing.

Borges thinks of authors as the product of their works rather than vice versa (This is reflected in "Tlon.." and "Kafka and his precursors", for instance.) The image of Borges that emerges from this collection is of a man who lived all his life among books, mostly reading and dreaming up ideas. When he did write, he really worked at his texts, whittling away until only the bare necessary remained, producing works chock-full of pithy, sculpted, beautiful sentences and positively dripping with possibilities.

TLDR; Read Borges for the ideas. Read Borges for the plots. Read Borges for the writing. Just plain read Borges. ...more "

progress:

(page 194 of 260)
— Sep 02, 2013 11:35AM

Aug 05, 2023 08:57AM · see review

Dinesh’s Notes & Highlights

The Promise by Silvina Ocampo

6 highlights

I don’t have a life of my own; I have only feelings. My experiences were never important—not during the course of my life nor even on the threshold of death. Instead, the lives of others have become mine.

Dinesh’s Quotes

“Languages are like those canaries that go with miners into dark paths that are full of danger. Like those canaries, they die first, long before we humans can sense that the air has begun to go bad. When languages die, it is an omen, of things to come that are still beyond our range of vision.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

1 likes

“Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Word for World Is Forest

3 likes

“Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Victory City

5 likes

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

9 likes

“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

4 likes

More of Dinesh’s quotes…