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shrews-studies · 2 months

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Rating/reviewing my Russian lit compulsory readings (Part 1)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Евгений Замятин - Мы) 8.5/10

I had a lot of fun with this one!!! I was actually surprised by how much it pulled me in and how much I enjoyed it, I finished it in two days and I usually read really slow. If you like 1984 by Orwell, this was what inspired it so you can expect something very similar in vibe and themes. There's racism in the descriptions of one character and it really irked me so that's what made my rating drop a bit.

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (Исаак Бабель - Конармия) 6/10

It was not bad but not to my tastes, it's a short story collection and some of them I liked, some I didn't enjoy as much. It's quite gruesome at parts in the "realities of war" kinda way so if you don't take those topics well, I don't recommend.

The master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Михаил Булгаков - Мастер и Маргарита) 9.5/10

I loved it!!! I know it's a big classic and I actually read it many years ago and now that it's required for class I only leafed through it again, but still it's among my faves. It's suspenseful, the story and the characters are all great, overall just such a good read. Not giving a 10 only bc I rarely give a perfect rating to anything vsjdgskgdjd

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov (Владимир Набоков - Приглашение на казнь) 8.5/10

I read this back in high school too but it was really fun to freshen up my memories about it, it's quite a condensed and hard read if you ask me, as it's very surreal and philosophical, but it's very good! If I had to describe it in one expression, it would be fever dream.

Liompa by Yury Olesha (Юрий Олеша - Лиомпа) 7.5/10

It's just one short story but I decided I'd rate anything longer than two pages so here we go. It was fun and I really liked the atmosphere of it, it gave peace of home (other than the obvious theme of dying gdksgskdhjs).

#russian literature #russian langblr #studyblr #русская литература #the course is called 'Russian literature from avant garde to present days'#and it's my very last semester lit course!#I have a lot a lot of workload this semester so I decided to start posting again to motivate myself :')#I have a C1 Russian language exam on April 6th I'm so anxious about it #and my thesis is due on 15th April #shrews post #if you're curious about any of them or have read and wanna chat #you can message me anytime!

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meta-squash · 1 year

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Squash’s Book Roundup of 2022

This year I read 68 books. My original goal was to match what I read in 2019, which was 60, but I surpassed it with quite a bit of time to spare.

Books Read In 2022:

-The Man Who Would Be King and other stories by Rudyard Kipling -Futz by Rochelle Owens -The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht -Funeral Rites by Jean Genet -The Grip of It by Jac Jemc -Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche -Hashish, Wine, Opium by Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier -The Blacks: a clown show by Jean Genet -One, No One, One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello -Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi -The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren -Three-Line Novels (Illustrated) by Felix Feneon, Illustrated by Joanna Neborsky -Black Box Thrillers: Four Novels (They Shoot Horses Don’t They, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, No Pockets in a Shroud, I Should Have Stayed Home) by Horace McCoy -The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert -The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco -Illusions by Richard Bach -Mole People by Jennifer Toth -The Rainbow Stories by William T Vollmann -Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse -Equus by Peter Shaffer (reread) -Ghosty Men by Franz Lidz -A Happy Death by Albert Camus -Six Miles to Roadside Business by Michael Doane -Envy by Yury Olesha -The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West -Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche -The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox -The Cat Inside by William S Burroughs -Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry -Camino Real by Tennessee Williams (reread) -The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg -The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams -Comemadre by Roque Larraquy -The Zoo Story by Edward Albee -The Bridge by Hart Crane -A Likely Lad by Peter Doherty -The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel -The Law In Shambles by Thomas Geoghegan -The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzche -The Maids and Deathwatch by Jean Genet -Intimate Journals by Charles Baudelaire -The Screens by Jean Genet -Inferno by Dante Alighieri (reread) -The Quarry by Friedrich Durrenmatt -A Season In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (reread) -Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century by Jed Rasula -Pere Ubu by Alfred Jarry -Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson -Loot by Joe Orton -Julia And The Bazooka and other stories by Anna Kavan -The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Ishmael Reed -If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind by Francisco Garcia -Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters -Indelicacy by Amina Cain -Withdrawn Traces by Sara Hawys Roberts (an unfortunate but necessary reread) -Sarah by JT LeRoy (reread) -How Lucky by Will Leitch -Gyo by Junji Ito (reread) -Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore -Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau -Bakkai by Anne Carson -Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers -McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh -Moby Dick by Herman Melville -The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector -In the Forests of the Night by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (reread from childhood) -Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren -The Medium is the Massage by Malcolm McLuhan

~Superlatives And Thoughts~

Fiction books read: 48 Non-fiction books read: 20

Favorite book: This is so hard! I almost want to three-way tie it between Under The Volcano, The Quick & The Dead, and The Man With The Golden Arm, but I’m not going to. I think my favorite is Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. It’s an absolutely beautiful book with such intense descriptions. The way that it illustrates the vastly different emotional and mental states of its three main characters reminded me of another favorite, Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey. Lowry is amazing at leaving narrative breadcrumbs, letting the reader find their way through the emotional tangle he’s recording. The way he writes the erratic, confused, crumbling inner monologue of the main character as he grows more and more ill was my favorite part.

Least favorite book: I’d say Withdrawn Traces, but it’s a reread, so I think I’ll have to go with Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. I dedicated a whole long post to it already, so I’ll just say that the concept of the book is great. I loved the whole idea of it. But the execution was awful. It’s like the exact opposite of Under The Volcano. The characters didn’t feel like real people, which would have been fine if the book was one written in that kind of surreal or artistic style where characters aren’t expected to speak like everyday people. But the narrative style as well as much of the dialogue was attempting realism, so the lack of realistic humanity of the characters was a big problem. The book didn’t ever give the reader the benefit of the doubt regarding their ability to infer or empathize or figure things out for themselves. Every character’s emotion and reaction was fully explained as it happened, rather than leaving the reader some breathing space to watch characters act or talk and slowly understand what’s going on between them. Points for unique idea and queer literature about actual adults, but massive deduction for the poor execution.

Unexpected/surprising book: The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox. This is the first book about archaeology I’ve ever read. I picked it up as I was shelving at work, read the inner flap to make sure it was going to the right spot, and then ended up reading the whole thing. It was a fascinating look at the decades-long attempt to crack the ancient Linear B script, the challenges faced by people who tried and the various theories about its origin and what kind of a language/script it was. The book was really engaging, the author was clearly very passionate and emotional about her subjects and it made the whole thing both fascinating and fun to read. And I learned a bunch of new things about history and linguistics and archaeology!

Most fun book: How Lucky by Will Leitch. It was literally just a Fun Book. The main character is a quadriplegic man who witnesses what he thinks is a kidnapping. Because he a wheelchair user and also can’t talk except through typing with one hand, his attempts to figure out and relay to police what he’s seen are hindered, even with the help of his aid and his best friend. But he’s determined to find out what happened and save the victim of the kidnapping. It’s just a fun book, an adventure, the narrative voice is energetic and good-natured and it doesn’t go deeply into symbolism or philosophy or anything.

Book that taught me the most: Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula. This book probably isn’t for everyone, but I love Dadaism, so this book was absolutely for me. I had a basic knowledge of the Dadaist art movement before, but I learned so much, and gained a few new favorite artists as well as a lot of general knowledge about the Dada movement and its offshoots and members and context and all sorts of cool stuff.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I annotated my copy like crazy. I never had to read it in school, but I had a blast finally reading it now. There’s just so much going on in it, symbolically and narratively. I think I almost consider it the first Modernist novel, because it felt more Modernist than Romantic to me. I had to do so much googling while reading it because there are so many obscure biblical references that are clear symbolism, and my bible knowledge is severely lacking. This book gave me a lot of thoughts about narrative and the construction of the story, the mechanic of a narrator that’s not supposed to be omniscient but still kind of is, and so many other things. I really love Moby Dick, and I kind of already want to reread it.

Other thoughts/Books I want to mention but don’t have superlatives for: Funeral Rites was the best book by Jean Genet, which I was not expecting compared to how much I loved his other works. It would be hard for me to describe exactly why I liked this one so much to people who don’t know his style and his weird literary tics, because it really is a compounding of all those weird passions and ideals and personal symbols he had, but I really loved it. Reading The Grip Of It by Jac Jemc taught me that House Of Leaves has ruined me for any other horror novel that is specifically environmental. It wasn’t a bad book, just nothing can surpass House Of Leaves for horror novels about buildings. The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren was absolutely beautiful. I went in expecting a Maltese Falcon-type noir and instead I got a novel that was basically poetry about characters who were flawed and fucked up and sad but totally lovable. Plus it takes place only a few blocks from my workplace! The Rainbow Stories by William T Vollmann was amazing and I totally love his style. I think out of all the stories in that book my favorite was probably The Blue Yonder, the piece about the murderer with a sort of split personality. Scintillant Orange with all its biblical references and weird modernization of bible stories was a blast too. The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams was amazing and one of my favorites this year. It’s sort of surreal, a deliberately weird novel about three weird girls without mothers. I loved the way Williams plays with her characters like a cat with a mouse, introducing them just to mess with them and then tossing them away -- but always with some sort of odd symbolic intent. All the adult characters talk and act more like teens and all the teenage characters talk and act like adults. It’s a really interesting exploration of the ways to process grief and change and growing up, all with the weirdest characters. Joe Gould’s Teeth was an amazing book, totally fascinating. One of our regulars at work suggested it to me, and he was totally right in saying it was a really cool book. It’s a biography of Joe Gould, a New York author who was acquaintances with EE Cummings and Ezra Pound, among others, who said he was writing an “oral history of our time.” Lepore investigates his life, the (non)existence of said oral history, and Gould’s obsession with a Harlem artist that affected his views of race, culture, and what he said he wanted to write. McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh was so good, although I only read it because 3 out of my other 5 coworkers had read it and they convinced me to. I had read a bunch of negative reviews of Moshfegh’s other book, so I went in a bit skeptical, but I ended up really enjoying McGlue. The whole time I read it, it did feel a bit like I was reading Les Miserables fanfiction, partly from the literary style and partly just from the traits of the main character. But I did really enjoy it, and the ending was really lovely. In terms of literature that’s extremely unique in style, The Hour Of The Star by Clarice Lispector is probably top of the list this year. Her writing is amazing and so bizarre. It’s almost childlike but also so observant and philosophical, and the intellectual and metaphorical leaps she makes are so fascinating. I read her short piece The Egg And The Chicken a few months ago at the urging of my coworker, and thought it was so cool, and this little novel continues in that same vein of bizarre, charming, half-philosophical and half-mundane (but also totally not mundane at all) musings.

I'm still in the middle of reading The Commitments by Roddy Doyle (my lunch break book) and The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but I'm not going to finish either by the end of the year, so I'm leaving them off the official list.

#squash rambles #reading year in review #book list year in review #book list #reading list #book roundup #reading roundup

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jesuisgourde · 2 years

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For the first time since I was a teenager, I'm reading 5 books at once.

I'm too fast for my own good at work and end up shelving so quickly I'm left with nothing to do, so my solution is to pick a book from each room and read somewhere between 1 and 10 pages in between shelving different sections. Which means I'm slowing myself down and I'm getting multiple books read.

So right now I've got 3 "shelving" books (I haven't picked one for the last room yet) and then a lunch break book and a book I'm reading at home. (It also means I read 92 pages at work today across 4 books.)

A Happy Death by Albert Camus is my at home book, which I just started. And then at work I'm reading Envy by Yuri Olesha, Sable Island by Marq de Villier, Bitter Fame: A Life Of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, and Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York’s Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical by Franz Lidz.

#squash rambles #i'm jesuisgourde on goodreads too if anyone wants to be friends over there

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multitudecontainer420 · 2 months

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o Caledonia , Manderlay forever, willa cather, yuri olesha

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elza-grey · 1 year

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The Three Fat Men

Suok

#the three fat men #1928 #ai art #ai artwork #ai generated #lexica #suok

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vanjrsstuff · 1 year

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2022 Russian Literature Reads

Finished: 17 books

TRANSLATING GREAT RUSSIAN LITERATURE by Cathy McAteer. A look at the translators with Penguin books from the mid 1900s to about 2000.

ROADSIDE PICNIC by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky . Not sure of translator. A sci-fi classic that left me wanting more.

THE QUEUE by V Sorokin. This may have worked in Russian or it may have been good had one lived in the Soviet Union, but falls flat to me.

WOE FROM WHIT: A verse comedy in four acts by Griboyedov (translated by Betsy Hulick). A reported classic whose quips have infiltrated the Russian language. Like most poetry much is lost in translation and my lack of knowledge of Russian hinders my appreciation.

A RED FLOWER by V Garshin at least my second reading.

THE ADOLESCENT by Dostoevsky My second read of a new translation. Did it with the r/Dostoevsky reading group

MY LIFE by Leon Trotsky. Typical autobiography (ie I did nothing wrong)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by J Turnbull. Collection of short stories. I gave 4 stars on goodreads (I try to make 5 stars very rare).

TOLSTOY, RASPUTIN, OTHERS AND ME by Teffi. Meh

WHAT IS ART? by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Aylmer Maude. A one star read-finished just because who the author was.

ENVY by Yury Olesha. at best meh. At least my second read.

TIME OF TROUBLES: The Diary of Iurri Vladimirovich Got'e. Surprisingly very interesting. Four stars.

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH by Solzhenitsyn. I love Solzhenitsyn, but not this book to be honest. Second or third re-read.

A HERO OF OUR TIME by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Nabokov(s). Excellent as long as you don't try to make the parts a coherent story, but as sketches of a protagonist.

SOLZHENITSYN, TVARDOVSKY, AND NOVY MIR by Vladimir Lakshin. Background to an Solzhenitsyn and his literary battles and a testament to his larger than life ego. I got it free from a nephew who knew I like Solzhenitsyn. Not one to re-read.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: A new translation by Dostoevsky, translated by Michael Katz. Excellent. First re-read of C&P. Been 15 plus years (too long!)

Current readings/unfinished:

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? by Chernyshevsky, translated by M. Katz. Good background on the 19th century ideas and relates to or reacts to Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Half way done and I am not impressed. To be honest I am disgusted with the implications of his philosophies and may DNF this one.

MARCH 1917: THE RED WHEEL, NODE III, BOOK 3 by Solzhenitsyn, translated by Marian Schwartz. Probably will not finish before the year ends. A continuation of the excellent (IMO) Red Wheel epic on the Russian revolution. See earlier post

DOSTOEVSKY: THE SEEDS OF REVOLT, 1821-1849 by Joseph Frank. Long way to go with this one, but good through the first 100 pages or so.

#books and literature #russian literature

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