Reading 1001 discussion

This book seemed in a very similar vein to Adjunct: an Undigest, which I also read recently. This one was a bit less novel and maybe it was also up to my mood when I read it and gave it 3 stars instead of 4. I always get apprehensive with postmodern literature as at its worst it’s a pompous attempt to show how clever you are without saying something of substance, and sometimes it seems like an attempt to be obscure and difficult just for the sake of it. Some of these books I’ve greatly loved though- this one was in the middle for me.

It is essentially just factoids and quotes about history: often famous writers and artists. Some motifs are repeated: where they died, the year they “made it” with their great work, what they thought about each other if they’d met, etc. There are not arranged chronologically, but many of the figures are revisited. One page may contain info about Diogenes, Shakespeare, Beecher-Stowe, Ginsberg, and Byron.

The framing device is that it is fundamentally about an unnamed author who is experiencing writers block and trepidation publishing his work (and nihilism about why he should bother). His feelings are interspersed with the history bites. In their side by side it portrays the fallacy of small window writers have to “make it” and that worthy writing and other art is always received to glory in its lifetime.

I got the point and some of the tidbits really were super amusing, but I decided to go with a 3 for this because of the fact that I’m now annoyed with the navel-gazey “what if I wrote about writing” books on principle to a certain extent. It seems like a philosophical ouroboros at this point that doesn’t serve to illuminate anything else- the simple answer to the “why write” question to me, made worse by the frequency to which this has been covered. In application it ends up being a few lines about writer’s anxiety and then a book of cool factoids. Neat, but not brilliant.

Rating: 4 stars


Unlike Amanda, I found this brilliant. Far better than Adjunct, which I loathed.

I really liked this book, even though it isn't much of a novel, per se. There really isn't a plot, but if you pay attention, a story unfolds between the lines, or in this case, between the anecdotes. What this really is, is a series of facts and aphorisms that the unnamed "author" has collected on a series of index cards. Some of them are very detailed, while others just consist of a word, name, or date in history. I found these very interesting, even though not all of them were true (they are at least mostly true. ex. Ivan the Terrible died in a chess match with Boris Gudunov. He died in a chess match, but it was against Bogdan Belsky, and not Gudunov). There is a connecting theme to these snippets, which also connects with the author's personal story. This is part of a quartet of books written in a similar fashion. My copy includes all four books, so I will probably read the rest.