Tag Archives: Steven Moore

There are Monsters Ahead

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Mostly unread fiction on these shelves, all monsters exceeding five-hundred pages; some philosophy, or philosophical anthropology in Blumenberg’s case. Tolstoy is missing as is my almost complete set of Heinemann’s Anthony Powell, and two huge Arno Schmidt editions. These are all in my future and the shelves that excite me most, rabbit-holes of discovery that hold in reserve so much promise and mystery.

There are a few novels missing that I’d like to read: William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, another attempt at Infinite Jest, Pynchon, Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, possibly Louis Armand’s The Combinations, and Cáo Xuěqín’s novel, Grossman’s Life and Fate, Lessing’s space fiction novels. Ever curious about Richardson’s Clarissa, but I don’t think I could sustain myself through its entirety.

A New Year of Reading

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It started, this new year and decade, my reading that is, with the felicitious serendipity that always characterises my Sunday-amateurish reading. Dipping into Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History 1600-1800, which I haven’t read, but tasting its acerbic opinion thought it may be a good place to begin the year.

Sampling Primo Levi’s favourite texts in The Search for Roots, led swiftly to Robert Alter’s commentary and translation of Job, which holds the right of primogeniture in Levi’s anthology. It’s been my intention to read the Bible, as literature, more deeply, so I start the year with Job.

Characteristically though there are other texts clamouring for attention: Papini’s Dante (translated by Eleanor Hammond Broadus and Anna Benedetti), J. B. Leishman’s translation of the Duino Elegies.

As always I am curious to see where the year leads and determined, as Levi puts it, ‘to undermine’ my reading patterns and tastes: ‘a woodworm can find new timbers, or new sap in old wood’. Suggestions and ideas always welcome!

Happy new year to all who read my blog.