38 books total, which is quite a bit less than the 68 I read last year. But I have a feeling that I actually read more this year, just that more of my reading was consumed with short stories, excerpts, chapters, articles, plays (8 Shakespeare plays, for instance). I kept a partial log of all those, but it got exhausting after a while. The other part is that 19th century novels made up the largest bulk of what I read.
There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.
The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz
Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.
After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :
2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.
Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
christianity, heroism, ethics
The highest priority in Christian ethics is to be a hero, to do something extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult. This begins with the altar call, which is a conversion from cowardice to heroism, weakness to strength.
The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.
Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!
Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.
The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?
Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.
God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.
In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.
Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.
The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.
Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!
Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.
The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?
Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.
God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.
In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.
Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
representation and recollection
I've been thinking some about images and representations, especially those used in the church. For some time I've been uncomfortable hearing how an image or action represents something else. Specific parts of an image represent certain ideas or ideals.
I'm uncomfortable with this because of the distinction made between objects which represent something, and objects that do not. This extends to the interpretation of sections of scripture, when the language is looked at for metaphors and representations and symbols. This is uncomfortable to me because of the assumption made that there is language which is not metaphorical, representative, symbolic. All language functions in those ways, and trying to make a distinction between what language is metaphorical and what isn't is a waste of time.
I'm also uncomfortable because of the jumps made between the image, action, text, and what those things represent. The idea is that they really do represent something which is being discovered and pointed out, rather than a connection that is being made in the mind of the interpreter. The jump is still a jump even if the explanation and interpretation are made by the creator of the object, text, action. Meaning and object are not fixed together!
But I really do like artwork in church, I like texts and stories, I like traditional practices which supposedly represent something. But what I dislike is the explication of these phenomena.
What I would like to see is a move towards seeing all of those things as reminders, as objects which aid recollection. Being splashed with water does not represent our baptism, it reminds us of baptism. Communion bread and wine does not represent the body and blood of Christ, it reminds us of them (or actually is so). Texts dont represent reality or history, they remind us of it.
But what history are we reminding ourselves of? This is where I'm stuck, because I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that history or reality is out there just waiting to be discovered and grasped and represented as a whole instead of as fractions, which it is. Still, that's one of the benefits of thinking of these things in terms of memory rather than representation: all of us are aware of how fragmented memory is, and we dont have to pretend that our objects or texts or practices are complete.
I'm uncomfortable with this because of the distinction made between objects which represent something, and objects that do not. This extends to the interpretation of sections of scripture, when the language is looked at for metaphors and representations and symbols. This is uncomfortable to me because of the assumption made that there is language which is not metaphorical, representative, symbolic. All language functions in those ways, and trying to make a distinction between what language is metaphorical and what isn't is a waste of time.
I'm also uncomfortable because of the jumps made between the image, action, text, and what those things represent. The idea is that they really do represent something which is being discovered and pointed out, rather than a connection that is being made in the mind of the interpreter. The jump is still a jump even if the explanation and interpretation are made by the creator of the object, text, action. Meaning and object are not fixed together!
But I really do like artwork in church, I like texts and stories, I like traditional practices which supposedly represent something. But what I dislike is the explication of these phenomena.
What I would like to see is a move towards seeing all of those things as reminders, as objects which aid recollection. Being splashed with water does not represent our baptism, it reminds us of baptism. Communion bread and wine does not represent the body and blood of Christ, it reminds us of them (or actually is so). Texts dont represent reality or history, they remind us of it.
But what history are we reminding ourselves of? This is where I'm stuck, because I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that history or reality is out there just waiting to be discovered and grasped and represented as a whole instead of as fractions, which it is. Still, that's one of the benefits of thinking of these things in terms of memory rather than representation: all of us are aware of how fragmented memory is, and we dont have to pretend that our objects or texts or practices are complete.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
translation
Another to do over Christmas:
Find a copy of Haruki Murakami's first novel, in Thai, buy a good Thai dictionary. Then overtime read and translate it (disclaimer: obviously not for commercial purposes, since as far as I know that's not legal). I've been curious to read it for a long time, since Murakami wont let it be translated into English, I'm also curious to see how my translation of the translation compares to English versions (which I know are out there...). The idea of translating it is a late addition, but I'm curious enough about translation to want to give it a whirl. It will probably be a religious experience.
Find a copy of Haruki Murakami's first novel, in Thai, buy a good Thai dictionary. Then overtime read and translate it (disclaimer: obviously not for commercial purposes, since as far as I know that's not legal). I've been curious to read it for a long time, since Murakami wont let it be translated into English, I'm also curious to see how my translation of the translation compares to English versions (which I know are out there...). The idea of translating it is a late addition, but I'm curious enough about translation to want to give it a whirl. It will probably be a religious experience.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Christmas Break
Things I'm going to do this break, in no particular order.
1. Read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche and A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.
2. Make my top ten of the year list, as Luke just mentioned in a comment!
3. Watch the Sherlock Holmes movie once it comes out.
4. Gain weight by actually eating. This probably wont happen until I'm back in Thailand.
5. Revise a short story I've been working on
6. Eat fruit
7. Drive my motorbike around
1. Read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche and A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.
2. Make my top ten of the year list, as Luke just mentioned in a comment!
3. Watch the Sherlock Holmes movie once it comes out.
4. Gain weight by actually eating. This probably wont happen until I'm back in Thailand.
5. Revise a short story I've been working on
6. Eat fruit
7. Drive my motorbike around
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