Books in 2010

40 Books. Written in German, Spanish, English, Russian, French, Japanese, Portuguese. Authors from Germany, Spain, England, Russia, France, Algeria, Slovenia, Chile, USA, Japan, Canada, Portugal, Scotland. 3 books were written by women, 37 by men. 21 (just over 50%) were written within the last hundred years. 23 were fiction.

The List
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
Don Quixote (Part I) - Miguel de Cervantes
Joseph Andrews - Henry Fielding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction - Michael Tanner
The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Dust - Carolyn Steedman
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
The Plague - Albert Camus
The Orthodox Way - Kallistos Ware
Christian Doctrine - Shirlie Guthrie
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Fragile Absolute - Slavoj Zizek
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Endless Forms Most Beautiful - Sean Carroll
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
Drood - Dan Simmons
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
The Comedians - Graham Greene
2666 - Roberto Bolano
Israel Potter - Herman Melville
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Underground - Haruki Murakami
The Parallax View - Slavoj Zizek
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
The Last Day of a Condemned Man / Claude Gueux - Victor Hugo
Theory and Reality - Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Bonehunters - Steven Erikson
Fado Alexandrino - Antonio Lobo Antunes
Travels in the Interior of Africa - Mungo Park
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Thus Spoke Zarathustra isn't my favorite Nietzsche, but I am going to read every book Nietzsche wrote, eventually. Human, All Too Human is on my shelf right now, and I'll probably break that open in the next few weeks, once I finish a few of the non-fiction books I'm reading. Beyond Good and Evil, unlike Zarathustra, got under my skin, stayed on my mind for quite a while.

Reading Nietzsche and Zizek is what made me interested in Hegel, who I'd always written off as a kook, which maybe he is. The Fragile Absolute is advertized as a book by Zizek, a devout atheist, about why the "Christian legacy is worth fighting for." Most of the book has nothing to do with that, and it reads more like a group of essays than a book with a central thesis. Still, that aphoristic quality is part of what made the book, and Zizek in general, and Nietzsche, so fun to read. The Parallax View has more sustained arguments, but still had those great aphoristic qualities.

Sputnik Sweetheart is definitely not Murakami's best effort, and seems sillier when read around the same time as Underground, which is a stunning piece of journalism. Even so, Murakami's worst books are more interesting to me than a lot of other novels being published....Raymond Carver's Cathedral was great to read alongside Murakami, partly because Murakami read and translated Carver's books into Japanese and knows him extensively, partly because that attraction existed for a good reason. Both of the writers make great use of the ordinary, even though Murakami is mostly thought of in terms of magical realism.

Dust is a book that my friend Dan recommended to me, and I'm glad that he did. Among other things, it's a book about archives and waste, which I'm come to think a lot about since I've started archiving medical records.

Of all the books I read this year, I may have had the most visceral response to the ending of Origin of Species, which is a fine piece of art besides a fine work of science. Reading this at the same time as Endless Forms Most Beatiful (the title comes from a line in Origin of Species) was fascinating, reading one very famous evolutionary text from the 19th century and another evolutionary text, of lesser fame, from the 21st. At the same time, I was reading some of Stephen Gould's essays on Darwin and evolution. I wouldn't reccomend Darwin or Carroll to everyone, but I would reccomend Gould to anyone who has even a passing interest in science, especially evolution.

Therese Raquin and Madame Bovary are both 19th Century French novels about adultery. Madame Bovary is the more famous for many good reasons. Both end up feeling very judgmental in the end, especially given how clinical and objective both authors were attempting to be. Dickens has much more of a reputation for preachiness, but Dickens revels in the criminal and deviant scenes of Oliver Twist, they give all the weight to the novel.

2666 was a long, sometimes great, sometimes tedious novel. Since reading the novel I've been much more interested in Ciudad Juarez. The repetition of abduction, rape, and murder, over and over in the novel doesn't seem so excessive once you begin to read the news about Juarez, or the news about Mexico.

And that's all I'm going to write about that!


A few books I'm looking forward to finishing next year:

The Decameron, which I've been reading off and on for the last 4 years.
Das Kapital vol. 1 by Marx, which I've been reading since August. When I read the Communist Manifesto for the first time a few years ago, I wasn't that impressed. I read it again this year with some selections of the German Ideology, and couldn't get enough. North and South I read because I'd been meaning to for a while, and I'd been told it was good to read alongside Das Kapital.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I don't pick it up often, but everytime I do I think it was a good decision.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which I've been reading for almost a week now. I'm enjoying it a lot. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his MFA piece, was fun to read, and was enough for me to know I'd like reading something else of his.

What I'm most excited to read over the next year, and it will probably take me that long, is the new translation of Arabian Nights. Arabian Nights is usually advertised as stories for children, and so the stories are printed for children and heavily censored. The new translation is, as far as I know, the first complete translation since Richard Burton's in the 1880s. I've read a dozen or so of the stories in Burton's translation, which is great.

This will be the first year that I've not been assigned books for school, so it's unlikely CS Lewis or Jane Austen will show up in next year's list.

6 Years Ago

Was the tsunami in south east asia. For many thousands of people, boxing day will always be the day that everything drowned... 230,000+ dead.

more on marx

This last week, I finished reading Fado Alexandrino by Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes. Among other things, the novel is about (and structured around) a Marxist revolution in Portugal back in the 70s. Reading this alongside Capital vol. 1 by Marx, I've been thinking about Marxism's history, and how condemnations of Marxism always entail pointing towards its bloody revolutions, Soviet Russia, Stalin, Mao, etc.

I've never read a Marxist defense of these things, which I imagine would be about as interesting/boring as hearing Christian defenses against the history that is leveled against it: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials, slavery, church corruption, etc. I imagine the typical responses would be the same, "That's not real Marxism," "That's not real Christianity." And then there are the historians, "Well, that's not really what happened during the Crusades," or "Well, if you look at the Inquisition in the context of 16th century Spain..." The appeal to purity or history is always a losing argument, or at best a back-pedaling argument.

What's more interesting for me is to take things full force, to say, "Yes, let's suppose all this is true, that the church really did institutionalize murder, genocide, and torture..." A better question, but one I'm not satisfied with either, is "What about Marxist ideology was useful for revolutionaries, or fascist leaders, to appropriate?"

What I think is disappointing about this last question is that it still puts the ideology first, as the motivating factor behind genocide and torture and exploitation. What's more convincing to me is that the ideology is secondary to the torture, that the torture serves as a justification for the ideology rather than the ideology for the torture....

illness

Often when I'm sick, and I've been feeling sick off and on for the last few weeks, I think of Darwin and Nietzsche. Mostly because both of them were sick for significant portions of their adult lives, chronically sick. Part of my interest here is that they had very different responses to their illness. Darwin comments often in his autobiography about what his illness prevented him from doing: prevented him from going on hikes, from getting work done, from being in society (though he sees some good in this).

Nietzsche, on the other hand, writes some about illness in Ecce Homo: "In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough." The obstructions and difficulties caused by sickness here are the very vehicle for surmounting other obstructions and difficulties....

Well, I don't think that's quite right, or quite what Nietzsche is getting at, but it's a starting point.

beards

Scottish explorer Mungo Park lived as a prisoner in Western Africa for several months in 1795. Writing about his time among the Moors he said, "if any one circumstance excited among them favourable thoughts towards my own person it was my beard, which was now grown to an enormous length, and was always beheld with approbation or envy. I believe in my conscience they thought it too good a beard for a Christian."

At least I know that if I'm ever held captive by 18th c. Moors I'll be held in high esteem.

Capitalism, time and space

Over the last two months I've been reading the first volume of Marx's Capital. Today I was reading, among other things, about the compression of time and space in manufacturing, how divided tasks are brought together into a close space (the factory, for instance) and how the time between separate stages of an article are shortened so that the "establishment and maintenance of a connection between the isolated functions requires that the article be transported incessantly from one hand to the other, and from one process to another" (Ch. 14).

Talking about the division of labor Marx also mentions the specialiazation of instruments and tools and how in Birmigham, for instance, 500 different hammers were made for all sorts of different processes. I'm curious about how these two different issues, compression of time and space and specialization of instruments, play out in the archive.

What's curious to me here is the excessive nature of the archive, the lack of utility for all sorts of different records and collections. The factory compresses space and time while the archive expands it, constantly requiring more space for more entries, keeping things stored that will, probably, never be accessed or used. Of course criminal records are used be prospective employers, credit records or used by landlords and lenders, driving and medical records are accessed by insurance companies, but I suspect that these utilize the minority of records and statistics being kept and compiled all the time (especially taking into account, for instance, records of dead people). Part of what was interesting about working in a library was how much of the collection is never touched, the thousands of books and records that are never looked at and probably never will be looked at until someone finally decides to throw them away.

Which shows the reverse for the specialization of tools: that the specific and potential uses for an instrument disguise all the situations for which its totally useless. Prime examples just in the home are kitchen appliances and garage tools.

I'm also interested in time and space in reference to work and home, or the degree to which the workspace is identical with home. Isn't part of the point of factory work, or archiving and office work, that it cannpt take place at home? In other words, part of the point is an expansion of time and space. Not that no one works from home anymore, a lot of the shops in Thailand have either a back room or upper living quarters, and certainly there are sections of the underground economy that operate out of homes. But then there are other spheres of work that seem entirely impossible to conduct at home, like large varieties of scientific research and experimentation, the tools for which are expensive and rare enough that they won't be owned individually. A curious contrast to, say, Darwin who worked almost entirely at his own house, or to the early and mid 19th century in general, where amateur science was not equivalent to incompetent science...

the only reason I would resist the legalization of drugs...

...is that it would mean the gentrification of an entire industry. Other than that things seem good.