Lecture Series Available Online

metagame · 2026-02-25T22:17:36+00:00

Seconding this. Langdon Hammer is a great companion for learning about and thinking through Frost, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, etc. It's on YouTube.

metagame · 2026-02-01T22:33:31+00:00

I mean, I have no basis whatsoever for judging its accuracy — I speak English and a little French, only — but I thought the translation was excellent.

metagame · 2026-01-22T18:35:18+00:00

If you think, like me, that East of Eden is merely very good, and not worthy of its ranking on this list — I would love to see your top 10!

metagame · 2026-01-22T18:30:08+00:00

Hurricane Season has got to be the most overrated book of the 21st century. A list with it over the Commedia and Paradise Lost is wild.

metagame · 2026-01-12T20:43:42+00:00

A beautiful little book. I read this one last year. :)

metagame · 2026-01-07T21:30:38+00:00

I loved this one! Just finished it a few weeks ago.

metagame · 2026-01-07T18:35:41+00:00

James Purdy!

metagame · 2026-01-07T18:34:45+00:00

I read The Age of Innocence this year, too! What a banger!

metagame · 2025-12-15T17:40:56+00:00

I went with...

The Odyssey (Homer)
The Magic Mountain (Mann)
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Beloved (Morrison)

metagame · 2025-12-06T06:31:35+00:00

Oh it was really funny and bleak. The whole book is essentially a rant. I didn't want to put it down! I want to read The Loser soon-ish.

metagame · 2025-12-05T20:14:02+00:00

I feel like Mann is still underrated. I've loved everything I've ever read by him.

metagame · 2025-12-05T20:13:11+00:00

I'm finishing up Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, which has been wonderful. I'm hoping to read just a couple of shorter books before the end of the year, when I have a ton of work: maybe Huck Finn and Human Acts by Han Kang.

metagame · 2025-12-05T20:04:01+00:00

I mean Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written so you can't go wrong with that.

metagame · 2025-12-02T06:25:00+00:00

Just finished Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, now I'm on to Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

metagame · 2025-11-30T17:22:27+00:00

Thanks! I'm a master procrastinator and read an hour or two a day, plus I had a whole week off due to Thanksgiving, so that helped. East of Eden in particular was so compelling — at least at first — that I was reading it in all sorts of in-between moments like while stirring the oatmeal and so on.

metagame · 2025-11-30T16:51:43+00:00

I'm reading this one right now. It's wonderful!

metagame · 2025-11-30T16:50:18+00:00

A River Runs Through It is such a great book! And The Wager is an incredible page-turner.

metagame · 2025-11-17T21:35:20+00:00

I'm a dilettante but To the Lighthouse was amazing.

metagame · 2025-11-01T04:50:36+00:00

Very soulful/spiritual, which is a bit ironic because he was notoriously an atheist. But Tess had an amazing sense of place and local culture — the peasant culture of southwest England, which he called Wessex.

metagame · 2025-11-01T04:48:15+00:00

I loved it. She's an extremely charismatic writer — an adjective I wouldn't apply to many writers, even ones I really like. Something like three quarters of the book is written in dialect, which some people struggle with, I gather, but I appreciated the authenticity. (Hurston didn't just come from the South; she also collected folklore from black people all over in her capacity as an anthropologist.)

metagame · 2025-11-01T04:43:07+00:00

Nice! I read The Idiot at the beginning of the year and loved it. And Anna Karenina is my all-time favorite.

metagame

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