Cal Barton > Recent Status Updates

took me a bit but now i’m fully onboard … “We must find out how at last to be absolutes to each other, never to lose each other, without putting any foot wrong or spilling one drop of some brimming vessel of truth and history which was held up austerely between us.”

this is a really fantastic novel despite all those fucking commas jesus christ

he’s just so fucking good

i love that when he gets a big prize for his first piece of college writing (after he spent 20 pages of diary entries procrastinating) he says, “It was a lot of work for me to write it, and it did not seem so great to me.”

i’ve written BRILLIANT next to every other paragraph

Oh my.

On a whim, I picked this up today. Devoured half of it during my Writing Center shift. Spent all afternoon considering the claim that rainbows do not exist without an observer.

I’ll be teaching this book; first time rereading it. Keeping in mind a line from Calvino about Fitzgerald being great because he’s always unsatisfied.

I do not love this.

Proust loved this book, which makes sense. It reads like a sloppy first draft for Swann’s Way. Meaning: it’s great. I’m choosing to read it as (above all else) a book about being an only child. Volume 2 opens with Ruskin musing: “For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought…”

I can't remember envying the sheer magnitude of someone's imagination the way I envy Perec's. This book is a delight.

Getting back on Goodreads for 2025. This book is incredibly fun.

After starting other books, I’ve put them aside; Marilynne Robinson is haunting me.