<   >

July

reborn: early diaries, 1947-1964 (sontag)

a favourite, I had a lot of fun reading someone's diary without them knowing. I related a lot to Sontag and I ate up what she said about journals being a creation of self rather than an expression (and it was cute that she was just intellectualizing her guilt over reading her lover's diary). I also realized the repressive function of a marriage being thought of as healthy only once you stop challenging your spouse and accept disagreement. and I loved her early thoughts on what would later become "against interpretation." this was the most excited I felt reading a book in a long time.

the sailor who fell from grace with the sea (mishima)

knew I had to read mishima at some point, but I didn't think I would actually enjoy him. I like that he hated his father so he just wrote a book about a child killing his father. (hover to view spoilers) I expected more misogyny but he seems to have held back in this one. I can't pretend like mishima's eccentricity didn't appeal to me and he writes so resonantly about resentful people in a way that I have only otherwise found in Dostoevsky and Jelinek's piano teacher. so I enjoyed.

by night in chile (bolaño)

something about the banality of fascism. I wish I remembered more of this than I do now, I'm skimming through my annotations and the prose is very smart even in translation (I'm writing two months later). I owe bolano a read of another one of his books.

l'étranger (camus)

[read in french] I can like absurdism when meaning is thought of as a repressive, totalizing narrative. I like to think of the justice system as a function of state repression through the creation of narratives. this book gave me an appreciation for the movie a clockwork orange, I watched it a month earlier but it only all clicked in my head half way through the stranger. though I disagree with murder.