Member: DuneSherban

CollectionsArticles (19), Samizdat (15), Katie's Books (28), Your library (485), Wishlist (4), Currently reading (2), To read (2), Read but unowned (3), Favorites (8), All collections (561)

Reviews23 reviews

TagsRussian literature (72), Comics (67), Fantasy (57), European literature (52), Poetry (49), Science Fiction (47), Terry Pratchett (36), American literature (24), History (24), 20th Century (22) — see all tags

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Recommendations5 recommendations

About me"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun"
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim


"We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers


"Alone... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown."
- Siegfried Sassoon, Alone

About my libraryI collect, borrow, beg and am gifted all sorts of books. And I like to browse bookshops, with the inevitable consequences (- money, - storage space).

"What I mean actually is the intervention of language upon you or into you. That famous line of Auden’s about Yeats: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry—” What “hurts” you into poetry or literature is language, your sense of language. Not your private philosophy or your politics, nor even the creative urge, or youth."

- Joseph Brodsky

I enjoy language, the use of language, its impact on the reader; our "sense of language". I share Terry Eagleton's - rather informal - definition of what the study of literature at least should be: "close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness". But not too serious, eh Terry?

"what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time."
- Leon Wieseltier, Voluminous ... on collecting books.

GroupsAll Things Discworldian - The Guild of Pratchett Fans, Ancient History, Archaeologists, Bookcases: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill, Cover Art, Fans of Russian authors, It's a LondonThing, Russian books and language, Science Fiction Fans, Urban Romantics

Favorite authorsNicholson Baker, Iain M. Banks, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Joseph Conrad, Lawrence Durrell, Umberto Eco, Nikolai Gogol, Stephen Jay Gould, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Hardy, Frank Herbert, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Mike Mignola, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Norfolk, Борис Пастернак, Andrey Platonov, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Pynchon, Siegfried Sassoon, Leo Tolstoy, Venedikt Vasilyevich Yerofeyev (Shared favorites)

VenuesFavorites

Favorite bookstoresFoyles, Gosh! Comics, Kirkdale Bookshop, London Review Bookshop, Orbital Comics

LocationLondon

Account typepublic, paid

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/DuneSherban (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/DuneSherban (library)

Member sinceJul 28, 2009

Currently readingRussian Thinkers (Penguin Classics) by Isaiah Berlin
The Dharma Bums (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jack Kerouac