Boy, have I been away awhile. Thanks college.
PWiz said:
I'm reading "The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" (the original one by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Absolutely brilliant at invoking the desire to deduce everything around you through astute observations and clever analysis (although I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of overestimating my limited abilities of inference). My only complaint is the repetitive usage of "singular" throughout the book, which seemed to be a tic the author developed.
Great collection of stories, and I see that your writing, like mine (and everyone's, to an extent) is malleable by whomever it is you've just been reading.
I dare say, however, that his collection of stories is the singularly most intriguing set which I have ever read
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As for my reading as of late, I took an English course over Life and Thought in America, spanning from its colonial inception, through a nascent America, and into early 19th century America. Initially I was reading the dreadful prose of Puritans and pastors; men who, while purporting to be selfless men of God, couldn't find the time to write about anything other than their own spiritual journeys. It did lend perspective to the culture of early America, though.
Then, we got into the familiar writers: Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Thoreau, etc., all of whom I'd recommend, maybe except Emerson, since he was a bit of a quack, and not in the endearing and enjoyable way that Thoreau was.
For pleasure, I started the arduous journey of Proust's
In Search of Lost Time. It's an astounding feat of literature, which I have difficulty accurately describing. I would say, imagine you were tasked with detailing the entirety of your life to the world, but, rather than it being purely autobiographical, you also wish to extrapolate towards, with as much truth as possible, a sort of biography of the aesthetic world. Yes, you were a child, and you ran and played, but what do you think it
meant when you ran to the woods? How did you
feel, and what can be said of its nurturing, regal beauty, when your mother kissed you goodnight? Sure, you read a lot outside, but you also wish to address the multifarious nature of literature: its tendency of escapism, of revealing to you previously nonexistent worlds, worlds which, perhaps, couldn't exist in our own; how literature lends itself towards paroxysms unattainable in everyday happenings, since--from page to page--you move from one set of catharsis to the next, purging and filling with contrasted combinations of emotions you've never felt before. That's a much more powerful premise for a novel, and Proust does it beautifully.
Beyond that, I'm reading Pynchon's
V. Tommy's a quirky guy, and I think his writing takes a bit getting used to, but it's ultimately worth it.
