While You Were At School...

[i_need_the_eggs]

Now it's time for a very special "non-collegiate, Will Hunting-esque" edition of of "Stuff I've Read: October 2005"

Books I Read

A Cultural History of Absinthe by Phil Baker

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World: A Short

Comments

[vangogh86]

"a room of one's own" sucks. i'm impressed that you went through anna karenina and all the other russian lit stuff...i love russian lit. how's "magical thinking"?

[i_need_the_eggs]

"Magical Thinking" is just wonderful. Augusten Burroughs is one of my favorite modern writers and quickly becoming a master of the modern memoir. While I loved "Magical Thinking", his two other books ("Running With Scissors" and "Dry") are much better reads, "Dry" being my favorite. Sadly, books of this ilk will not be read by me for some time (maybe starting around X-mas), as I am going almost strictly to a curriculum of classic literature.

[hippie68chick]

ah, but tolstoy's a bad decision, dostoyevsky is the king!

[i_need_the_eggs]

I fully intend on reading some Dostoyevsky in the future, however, Nabokov doesn't think to highly of your favorite Russian writer. In listing the best Russian prose writers her chose 1. Tolstoy, 2. Gogol, 3. Chekov, 4. Turgenev, and didn't rank Dostoyevsky. While I normally respect Nabokov's opinion, here I think he's just a bit off his rocker. He accuses him of "false sentimentalism" and calls him a "rather mediocre [writer]-- with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between." I'm very interested to see how I myself compare the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Have you read both?

[paperispatient]

Did you love Cuckoo's Nest? Check out the movie too...

This is Jayme, by the way, I just stumbled on your LJ. Nice seeing you this weekend, come back and visit us again soon! :)

[i_need_the_eggs]

Cuckoo's nest was great. I now NEED to see the film, which I was putting off until I had read the book (God, how many movies do I say that about...far too many). Now I have no justifiable excuse, which still doesn't guarantee anything.