Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sorry sorry sorry have been backlogged for a bit now. Have got terrible case of baby brain: my brain has both shrunk and what little remains of it is now mainly occupied with floppy slushy thoughts about how delicious my baby is, which makes it hard to marshal coherent opinions about books. (I am also suffering from a revival of my addiction to The Office, which is eating into my reading time. but! excuses, excuses).
I did read John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor, which truth be told was a more than a little bit of a disappointment - I have fetishized his book Debt To Pleasure for so long that I think my expectations are just too high to be able to relax and enjoy anything else he writes (although because of DtP I will forever and ever be bound to read everything he writes just in case he writes another book as good). Fragrant Harbor was a bit pointless - one of those books in which random things keep happening to characters you don't really care about, and before you know about it, the book is over, and you're like, hunh, now which of those characters was I _supposed_ to care about?? Poor, dear John Lanchester.
Also I read half of Greg Carlisle's Elegant Complexity, thanks to my sister's introducing me to the SF public library's Link+ system whereby libraries ALL OVER THE COUNTRY will send you their books for free which just blows my mind. Every time I despair about the inadequacy of public institutions (lack of universal health care, long queues at the post office, the fact that the bus from Santa Rosa takes nearly three hours to get to San Francisco) I will think about the Link+ system and it will make me so so heppy. Elegant Complexity is supposed to be sort of a Cliff Notes for Infinite Jest WHICH I WILL FINISH ONE DAY YES I WILL and I read it up to the point that i had gotten into in Infinite Jest, and thought, you know, I'd enjoy it much more if I just read the damn book already rather than the stylishly unlovely and lumpy boring Cliff Notes version. so there.
But this blog entry will end on a happy note: I finished reading just now Sarah Bakewell's biography, How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer which was lots and lots of fun, even though it did take me a while to get through it, since I tend to read in bed at night and have been particularly prone to falling asleep with my face mashed into the page recently (see above comments re: baby). The chapter organizations (i.e. the twenty attempts at an answer to the question of How To Live) are a bit precious: "Be born," "Pay attention," "Live temperately," "Reflect on everything," etc) but she makes a very compelling case for Montaigne as a proto-humanist, and I think I am going to try and read Montaigne's Essays (as soon as I am done with Infinite Jest haha). He sounds a bit like Samuel Pepys - a voracious chronicler of every random thing that happens to him, a blogger ahead of his time.
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