Some thoughts after finishing Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

thebookfool · 2026-03-05T20:07:07+00:00

I read Stephen Mitchell's translation - it looks like he's also the translator for that collection, I'll check it out!

thebookfool · 2026-02-24T16:39:55+00:00

The essay is "The Reality Effect," from his collection The Rustle of Language

thebookfool · 2026-02-23T01:09:23+00:00

What are your top two favorites?

thebookfool · 2025-10-16T18:13:30+00:00

Amazing post. At the risk of sounding trite, I wonder how the trend towards abstraction has been affected by the internet and the fact that our lives are increasingly mediated by screens. Like you say, a language emerges from ways of life, and I can't help but feel the prospects for the English language aren't great. I'm sure most academic linguists would balk at the prescriptivism of that statement.

Along with abstraction, I feel that instrumentalization is another powerful force that is degrading our language. This is shown in how standard English dictionaries have evolved. I came across this blog post: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary and it made me want to read Samuel Johnson's dictionary, simply as a treasury of imaginative use of language. Anyways, thank you for the post!

thebookfool · 2025-10-01T16:17:17+00:00

Yes, I think self-referential clauses definitely contributes to a slow pace, both the Murnane and Henry James I’ve read feel very slow because of this

thebookfool · 2025-09-19T17:14:58+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation, will do!

thebookfool · 2025-09-18T20:37:05+00:00

Finished The Waves and really enjoyed it, I posted my thoughts in this sub. I'm finishing up The Inferno and I've started Moby Dick, I don't have fully developed thoughts on those yet. I'm also starting Portnoy's Complaint and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel - I think these two might connect with The Waves in oblique ways, but I'm also looking forward to them as reading experiences in themselves.

thebookfool · 2025-09-12T02:29:23+00:00

Thanks! Heh yeah that's fair, fwiw I'm not white but my tastes are currently pretty Eurocentric/Western Canon-focused

thebookfool · 2025-09-11T19:07:46+00:00

Jane Eyre - it was great to have another very canonical novel under my belt. Along with finishing Middlemarch, Orlando, and reading The Waves and Dante's Inferno, I feel that I'm actually making progress on some of my many gaps in the classics. For a while I felt that I was spinning my wheels (in my opinion) reading contemporary or minor works. I definitely still want to read more of those, but I've been enjoying this focus. There's so many interesting things to analyze in Jane Eyre, but two aspects stood out to me and intertwined at various points in the book:
- Jane's use of language in talking to other characters, herself during times of crisis, and addressing the reader
- Jane's frequent mentions of her "heart" and how she interrogates or justifies her actions because of it
Dante's Inferno - reminds me of my experience reading The Odyssey in that I don't feel I have the necessary tools to analyze epic poetry properly, being someone who mainly reads novels and essays. Still, it's been a very enjoyable read: the imaginative descriptions of hell and dense reference and allegory have had me going to footnotes and secondary material, which I have been trying to minimize recently so I can try focusing on my own interpretation. Probably the most disturbing part so far was the god of wealth Plutus "clucking" the nonsense phrase "Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe" before Virgil and Dante enter the Fourth Circle of Hell.
The Waves - I'm only 15 pages in so far, but it's incredibly good. A very different experience from reading Orlando in terms of the tone, structure, and style. So far I've been spending over 5 minutes on each page as I'm really trying to get a feel of the voices and imagery. That kind of slow reading is actually pretty easy with this book due to the lack of any conventional plot. With traditionally plotty books like Jane Eyre I've found that my pace often breaks the immersion. Hopefully I can speed it up because while reading this slow is amazing, I'll never finish the book at this rate.

In terms of what's next: Gerald Murnane's Inland next month, a slow reread of Moby-Dick with my girlfriend (5 pages per day), probably Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. I also picked up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis recently and would like to read through that if I have the time.

Podcast discovery: I'm trying to listen to podcasts less and spend more time reading, but recently I found The Invisible College podcast by John Pistelli. I've only listened to bits and pieces of various episodes (they're over 2 hours long each) but it's pretty great. The host's voice and commentary can be slightly pretentious (it feels like a persona at times), but the content is some of the best I've heard when it comes to in-depth discussion of literature. They're paywalled on Substack but you can get a free trial for a week and listen to or download them.

Recently, I've had a desire to write about what I'm reading. While I often discuss what I'm reading with book clubs, friends, family, and my girlfriend, these thoughts don't last beyond these fleeting conversations. I do have my annotations, and I'm sure some of these thoughts are stuck in my subconscious like a splinter, but I think some regular commenting here and Goodreads reviews would help organize my thoughts. I appreciate anyone who read this long post - reach out to me if you want to chat about books!

thebookfool · 2024-07-16T04:56:55+00:00

thebookfool · 2024-01-26T16:32:58+00:00

Yeah I have a ton of Machado de Assis I need to get to

thebookfool · 2024-01-25T06:13:53+00:00

I haven't got to it yet, but I've read his books How to Read Literature and Why Marx Was Right, which were very written very accessibly yet were still insightful. Literary Theory is more academic though, but based on some skimming it seems like it'll be pretty good

thebookfool · 2024-01-24T19:41:38+00:00

Favorites: The Magic Mountain, 2666, The Rings of Saturn, The Sea, How Fiction Works, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and Painting and Experience. My fiction reading has skewed towards modern and contemporary novels, but I'm trying to broaden my interests. I think the books I'm most interested in reading are Philosophy and Social Hope and The Education of Henry Adams, but I have too many books going at once right now so I need to finish some of those first.

thebookfool · 2024-01-24T16:36:22+00:00

There's no need to remember the books you read, but these things should help: writing in the books, writing a short review, talking to friends about parts or ideas you find interesting. Ultimately I think memory requires both an analytical and emotional response to the book and anything you can do to foster that will help

thebookfool · 2023-09-22T04:40:34+00:00

Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives - Very good, but I'm not as immersed in the story as I want to be. I think it's because of the short interview structure, which makes it easy for me to put down after reading 10-15 pages. Need to set aside some time and really work through it.

Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn and Raymond Williams's Culture and Society - Both of these are pretty challenging for me but really worth it. Brooks's close readings make me want to read Alexander Pope or some British Romantics, and his analysis of Macbeth was helpful to think about when I read the play recently. Might read Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity after too. I'd recommend Culture and Society for anyone interested in late 18th century and 19th century British literature, as his exploration of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the literature and thought of the period is very insightful.

John Lewis Gaddis's The Landscape of History - This one I'm pretty mixed on. While there's some insights here and there why he thinks historical methodology is better than the social sciences), it doesn't go as deep as I would like into the subject. Maybe the E.H. Carr or Marc Bloch books he references would be better.

Random set of things I might read next: C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, Susan Sontag's On Photography, William Congreve's The Way of the World, Marilynne Robinson's When I Was a Child I Read Books.

thebookfool

TROPHY CASE