David W > Recent Status Updates

The slump hits hardest in the form of multiple days gone by without a sliver of reading. But when I do pick this up: ravishing, even if the pacing is fiercely glacial.

I've been straddling, these past few weeks, what may or may not be the threat of a reading slump. So, what better way to stave that off by reading a 1200-page alternate history, sci-fi novel about epistemology, math, physics, and a million other things?

Erm.

The set-up and writing style alone is enthralling. As if Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Lem are in conversation with Wittgenstein.

May be with this one awhile.

I do my damndest to not DNF anything, but this one is threatening it. The characters are all baffling, strangely drawn, and I just... don't care about what is happening.

Move over Lispector and Bolaño, I'm in my sicko era.

Very Michael Crichton-coded, meaning low sci-fi adventure, techno-ecocatastrophe, loads of technical jargon and exposition, but surprisingly even MORE verbose. Over a third of the way into the book and nothing of note has really happened... but the central trio of characters are interesting, and the cold isolation of the Antarctic is palpable.

Pretty skeptical of this one so far. White comes from YA (this is apparently his first foray into adult horror) and it shows. Extremely inspired by Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," I'm sure.

In the running for one of the greatest titles ever? Been looking forward to this one for awhile now.

An undulating, concaving model of memory, past and present, decades apart, collapsing into each other, often in a single sentence... and still, rather impossibly, coherent. Not only crisscrossing time but voices, in a polyphonic, modernist spin on reverie as scenes and images dissolve and overlap into one another.

Read the poetry portion of this, and it's quite the treasure trove. New obsessions, I'm sure, with the work of Giovanni Pascoli and Ana Blandiana in particular.

The rest is Heaney's translations of epics and dramas (including his BEOWULF translation, of which I'm already familiar). I may be choosy from here on out rather than read all of them. We'll see.