MemberIsgodchekhov

Real Name

Iago

About My Library

My reading bio..

I have had great luck trying to be patient with some of the more 'difficult' works, trying to give the authors the benefit of my reader's doubt, 'slogging through'. Most all of the time the payoff has been worth the effort, sometimes amazingly so. The text's language becomes more transparent and lucid as I become familiar with it...in some cases the reading experience became almost transformative, reaching the level of the sublime. Examples of this for me were: Proust's In Search of Lost Time , Virginia Woolf's The Waves , and recent Nobel laureate's Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums.

My reading life in the last couple of years has shifted to primarily short fiction. IMO this form is especially pertinent in our current age of mass ADHD. Librarything is key for me to be able to track my reading of short story collections. It's a genre that requires is own reading tactics. As most short story masters will tell you, stories should be sipped, not guzzled. In a short story, each sentence is important.You CAN'T gloss. Once you learn this, it changes one's reading style.I rarely read more than 2 stories per book in a day.

I learn how to read each text from the instructions they contain. Its a premise I ALWAYS adhere to. All novels and short stories come with 'How To Read Me' instructions.

About my star ratings....

Even though I pride myself with approaching each work with as with as little cultural bias and reader-prejudices as possible, I finally look at my personal reaction to the book. The second factor is my non-qualfied amateur opinion of how I thought the work came off as a literary work of art (ie. did it fulfill its own promises).

A book has to move the heart as well as the head (not necessarily in equal measure!) to get high ratings from me.

About Me

Oldlitmajor who has a hope a few youths of the world take up the examined life , (ie the reading of world literature) in our age of touch screens.

Hoo-rah for the "1001 Books To Read before You Die"... it hopefully will at least get some folks to read the 500 or so titles on the list that are truly must reads (the rest are better watched as Blu ray entertainments imho...)

Location

Cabin in the woods in Montana (past grandma's house)

Homepage

http://windsweptfiction.wordpress.com/

Currently Reading

A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren by Robert Penn Warren

Favorite Authors

Isaac Babel, Calderon De La Barca, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Celan, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Nikolai Gogol, Günter Grass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bohumil Hrabal, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Danilo Kiš, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, W. S. Merwin, Alice Munro, Marcel Proust, Theodore Roethke, Juan José Saer, José Saramago, Bruno Schulz, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sophocles, Theodor Storm, Olga Tokarczuk, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf

Member Connections

Friends

anisoara, ateolf, babyblues47, chisme311, clawless, David_Cain, EveBrownWaite, johnbakeronline, JohnBanks, lriley, MelvinUdall, mexicangerry, Mouseear, Nick.V, PrincessPaulina, shigekuni, Smethers, StantonK, tori_alexander

Interesting Library

anisoara, fphilipp, Mouseear, PaulDalton, spllover, StantonK