books, grades, projects, etc.

[ursula]

I don't have to take the linear analysis prelim, which fills me with unutterable joy.

***

I went to Lionhearts this weekend; this leaves me with ever-multiplying craft projects (and possibly a translation project, and even more documentation to write up).

***

I borrow the following from sartorias and greythistle:

1. Name a book you love no matter what anyone says.
2. Name a book you loathe no matter what anyone says.
3. Name a book you think is undeservedly obscure.
4. Name a book you think is undeservedly famous.
5. Name a book you think you ought to read.
6. Name a book you think I ought to read.

Comments

[alsoelsewhere.livejournal.com]

#. Title (Author) [comment]

1. Ring (Baxter) [Ridiculously hard sci-fi. Baxter's ambition makes up for--well, everything (and that's a lot!).]
2. Moonchild (Crowley) [this book seems to have one good line in it, unfortunately that line is horribly out of place and cribbed directly from Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat.]
3. Housekeeping (Robinson) [Dare I call it "gentle, yet firm"? This one felt a bit heavy-handed in places, but was nonetheless graceful.]
4. Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut) [I was swarmed by Vonnegut as a child and ever since have had a slight allergy.]
5. Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kundera) [I keep a long annotated list of things I plan on reading, and the order is constantly shifting. Kundera is at the moment the most highly recommended, which seems to me more in the spirit of the next question.]
6. The Cat Inside (Burroughs) [Burroughs takes a break from writing addiction, sex, ritualized murder, and any conjunctive permutation thereof to write about kittens.]

[ursula]

I read Unbearable Lightness of Being a year or so ago. It was well-written, but I got the sense that Kundera and I are temperamentally or philosophically at odds. In particular, slanted though his vision of True Love is, he's still writing about True Love, and a flavour thereof that I find essentially unappealing. I'm meaning to write this up in more detail once I force myself to finish Jonathan Carroll's White Apples, which has the same problems in higher relief.