As much as I try to avoid it, I have to acknowledge Christmas. I’m getting better at it, even admitting I really like things about it – scorched almonds, buttered rum, select Christmas films etc. Anyway, as I was forced to muse upon the year to date, achievements and whatnot, and gift giving, basically all I could think of was that a) I got a job working at the library which I've always wanted and very much love and b) one of my favourite things about it is that I feel like all the books in the library are mine now. I feel very connected to them. I keep tabs on them, I spend a large portion of my time with them. And my favourite sneaky pastime at the desk on quiet days is making the library buy me presents, or “suggesting a purchase” which of course any member of the general public can do, but to me still feels very special. So, here are some of the presents that the library has bought me over the past six months and that I now generously offer to you because they’re actually not mine at all but sitting on the shelves waiting for people to borrow them (actually I'm still reading two of them) xx
Dino Buzzati - Poem Strip
I found a book of Buzzati's short stories shelving in the basement and thought 'that name sounds Italian I wonder if he's like Italo Calvino' and I actually wasn't that wrong - they are apparently in the same vein, and this comic looked really pretty so I made the library buy it. It is as pretty as I expected it to be in the flesh, very psychedelic, a lot about sex and death etc (the picture sums it up quite well). His short stories are on my list of things to read in the near future.
I thought that The Blazing World was an incredible novel, and was the first of Hustvedt's that I'd read. Actually I have a sneaking suspicion that I read The Blindfold in early high school but I'm not sure. I moved on to read A Plea for Eros (quite good but also kind of a poor mans Eros the Bittersweet? but not everyone can be Anne Carson) and acquired What I Loved (still waiting to read this but have heard very positive things). As she's so widely praised I thought it was terrible that we didn't have her first novel in the catalogue, so I ordered The Enchantment of Lily Dahl. I'll only say that you can tell it's her first, but when an author piques my interest I like a good survey of their work so it's interesting to see how she's matured as a writer, and anyway - others may love it
Donna Haraway is a figure I encountered in a feminist theory paper a few years ago and always stuck with me. What I remembered is that she is a post-genderist and has some very elucidating views on the relationships between space, sciences, technologies and sociology. I didn't realize that she has a PhD in Biology from Yale, but she certainly does and this is her dissertation. I'm about 40 pages in and unsure if I'm reeaally picking up what she's putting down half the time (I do not have a scientific brain) but nonetheless: it's loosely an analysis of prevailing metaphors in developmental biology during the 19th and 20th centuries and how these metaphors interact with and shape biological theory. Aside from smiling and nodding through a lot of scientific jargon there's a lot about art and philosophy and I really am beginning to see how her scientific work made her a brilliant post structuralist and feminist critic. It is not light holiday reading, but it will make you feel very smart and while it's challenging it's also mind blowing - you can sometimes forget that truly original thinkers exist but Donna Haraway is one. I have another of hers lined up: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Twentieth Century, which I am very much looking forward to and which has this amazing artwork gracing its cover:
So yeah, Merry Christmas and all that!
No comments:
Post a Comment