TAGGED IN

*personal

    The Game of Favourites

    I no longer trust the urge to classify. Still, now and then, a fragment or scene from a book returns with unexpected force. I wonder whether the books that occupy this not entirely mental space are the ones we might call favourites. Recognition does not always imply affection. One looks for patterns—certainly for narratives that hesitate, or seem unsure of their own necessity. Writing that maintains a distance, even as it draws you in. This evening I found myself circling the question of favourites again. New shelves arrive tomorrow. As I removed books from storage, I felt that familiar longing to discard all but what might be essential. Just a small shelf of favourites. King Lear, always Beckett’s “Trilogy”, no The Divine Comedy, yes Herodotus, yes The Lighthouse, no Proust, maybe Pilgrimage, probably My Struggle, yes Dickinson, yes Ulysses, no Tristram Shandy, yes Septology, no What endures in a long list of other works is something more elusive. A tone, perhaps, or a current of thought that bypasses intellect and settles somewhere harder to name. A voice that feels intimate. A world built not on detail but on atmosphere. With thanks to an eudaemonist.

    Sixteen Years

    Next week marks sixteen years since I began writing on this site. While I post less often than I did at the peak in 2010, my abiding interest in exploring selfhood, aesthetics, and philosophy through fiction remains as strong as ever. I still hold that fiction provides the richest means of engaging with these themes, though poetry and essays also shape my thinking, offering alternate paths into the workings of another mind. My greatest joy lies in works that blur and blend forms, challenging traditional boundaries. Over the past year, driven by curiousity about a new technology (my inner nerd is never far from the surface), I used ChatGPT to help shape and structure several posts. These posts have since been deleted, as I now feel an unease with the lack of honesty and effort such reliance represents. I have lost any interest in trying to write or reading literary criticism, preferring instead to make my own sense—if any is to be made—of what I read. What I aim to capture here, and what I so often fail to achieve, is the experience of reading itself.

    Patiently awaiting publication

    These are the new books due to be published in 2025 that I’m hoping to add to my library. Anything you’ve got on your Much Anticipated list that I’ve missed? Samuel Beckett, German Diaries Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega Ingeborg Bachmann, The Honditsch Cross (tr. Tess Lewis) Karl-Markus Gauß, In the Forest of Metropoles (tr. Tess Lewis) Ingeborg Bachmann, Critical Writings (pbk) Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance III (tr. Joel Scott) Marlen Haushofer, Killing Stella (tr. Shaun Whiteside) Ventura Ametller, Kaotica (tr. Douglas Suttle) Aliocha Coll, Attila (tr. Katie Whittemore) Javier Serena, Attila (tr. Katie Whittemore) Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outsie the Mother Tongue (tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) Sara Whym. Dreamscapes I – Betrayals (101 & 202 nights) Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (tr. Carol Cosman) Michael Lentz, Schattenfroh (tr. Max Lawton) Marguerite Yourcenar, A Blue Tale and Other Stories (tr. Alberto Manguel) Antonio Di Benedetto, The Suicides (tr. Esther Allen) Hélène Bessette. Lili is Crying (tr. Kate Briggs) Mathias Enard. The Deserters (tr. Charlotte Mandell) Marcel Proust. In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell) John Burnside, The Empire of Forgetting Inger Christensen. The Painted Room (tr. Denise Newman) Inger Christensen. Natalja’s Stories (tr. Denise Newman) Gianni Carchia, Name and Image: An Essay of Walter Benjamin (tr. Thomas Haskell Simpson) W. G. Sebald. Silent Catastrophes: Essays on Literature, 1972-1989 (tr. Jo Catling) Pierre Guyotat. Idiocy (tr. Peter Behrman de Sinéty) Núria Perpinyà, And, Suddenly, Paradise (tr. Mara Faye Lethem)

Add a blog to Bloglovin’
Enter the full blog address (e.g. https://www.fashionsquad.com)
We're working on your request. This will take just a minute...