In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Black Horse Classics, (complete set) I'm at Chapter 1, Location 28243, 55%.
The Parallax View, Location 6412 55%
, The Strange Necessity, Rebecca West Location 1804 48%
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
My mother would be 110 this year, if she were still alive. She had me when she was 35. I'll be 76 next week, on the 28th of December. I mention this as a way of calming myself after having my usual difficulty getting this Blogger account to work for me. It reminds me of when my mother tried to use the telephone answering machine. I remember hearing her first message; it was so touching. She sounded like someone trapped in an elevator and calling for help. I should hire someone to help me learn some of these computer tasks that I get stymied with over and over.
But now I'm here and I thought I'd review my reading schedule, which is very important to me, and something I approach in a sort of intuitive way. I usually read three books at a time, and that's what I'm doing now. Also, I feel that the Elves, or some unconscious drive causes me to collect three books which dovetail in interesting ways. Possibly, I arrange this approach and make it unconscious so as to amuse myself. Whatevah. But it always feels as if I stumble onto these books that are dissimilar and then find the dovetailing as I read.
I read Swann's Way last year, and recently found the complete volumes on Kindle and so am tackling the rest. I read Girls in Flower, and now I've just started Sodom and Gomorrah, Part 1, chapter 1. That's 55% into the whole thing, for what it's worth. No page numbers on Kindle, for you fellow old people. [Update; I'm now at 82% in Kindle terms]
Along with the above, I started reading Zizek's The Parallax View, which is so tough going that I may never finish it; I read it in dribs and drabs and go over things; it is about reality, and seems like a more subjective working of what is is than that of Chris Langan, whose Collected Works I have no right to even think I can understand, but which I insist on thinking that I can understand "All but the Math parts", that being a quote from me.
Somewhere along the line, before I got back to Proust, I saw that a collection of Barthelme was cheap on Kindle so I bought it and read Snow White, which I felt had a soothing affect on my mind, so within a couple of weeks, I read it again, which I thought was so clever of me, and so prophylactic of what might have been reading-confusion, as in Why am I tackling Proust? ..that I did it for a third time, and now have decided to tell a friend, if I can dig one up, that reading Snow White is a thing; or perhaps a cure-all, similar to what Tumeric seems to be for a number of people.
The Strange Necessity is a long essay by Rebecca West, which makes up more than half of a book of essays; a collection. Does it dovetail with the rest listed above? Not sure about that; it drew me in to the point where I'm reading it over more carefully. In it West insists that James Joyce is a genius but one with Bad Taste. It's hard to tell exactly where the bad taste is even though she points out what she doesn't like very carefully. It must be me. I keep thinking that she's being awfully harsh on Joyce for some ulterior motive. I will keep looking.
The essay than takes an admiring look at Pavlov and his Opus about which she made me so curious that I must look into it more carefully....at some point...........
