Isham Cook
Witty, goofy, readable poststructuralist mini-classic, critical-semiotic reading of “Reagan” (always in quotes) and the “the Bush-thing.”
One of the greatest novels ever written; actually 3 shortish novels but which must be read together. As I write (in https://ishamcook.com/2012/06/16/multiply-cascade-explode/), Beckett “withdrew increasing amounts of ambulatory capacity from his characters until they are reduced to crawling in circles in a forest or floundering in a ditch in the mud, others stuck in urns or rubbish bins or buried up to the neck in sand. Space is reduced almost to zero and there is nothing left but time and the voice.”
One of my all-time favorite novels, and here's why: https://ishamcook.com/2012/06/16/multiply-cascade-explode/
Apart from the book's scandalous content, it's remarkable for its perfect fusion of form and content, as the chapters and episodes grow increasingly shorter and atomized as the captives' bodies are physically dismembered by the sadists-murderers lording over the mountaintop castle. As depraved as it is, one mustn't forget that it's only fiction, and it's a measure of a society's intellectual freedom that such infamous historical works are allowed to be published and preserved.
Read this when I was 19; I didn't comprehend everything but I could grasp the author's zany fervor and piercing iconoclastic intelligence.
Entertaining narrative on Timothy Leary's adventures up through his Millbrook commune.
Merged review:
Entertaining narrative on Timothy Leary's adventures up through his Millbrook commune.
This was one of the first metaphorical bombs in the form of a book that blew up in my face (in my junior year of college); the other was Wilhelm Reich's The Sexual Revolution.
Reputedly fearsomely difficult book (it's actually one of Derrida's easiest), marks one as an intellectual for having read it. Basic thesis: the invention of writing was perhaps the most profound invention ever, but we lack the vocabulary to talk objectively about it since the very act is dependent upon writing.
Detailed look at the Cultural Revolution madness, especially the crazy propaganda campaigns and the immense starvation going on behind the scenes.
A slim, pithy book in clear, elegant English, but not an easy read, as monogamy itself is not an easy matter, when we delve beneath so many couples' self-congratulatory optimism.
A great Japanese novel of perversity (just like so many Japanese movies), a structured psycho-disaster zone beautiful contained in a slim volume.
In this YA novel about a Chinese girl's initial coming of age, there is not much of a plot, nothing outright dramatic occurs (apart from the momentous results of a senior high-school entrance exam and the death of a relative), there is no romance or sexual awakening to speak of (as one might expect in a Western YA novel), no troublemaking or law-breaking, even hardly any quarrelling with parents. If this might seem to be a recipe for boredom, what we have instead is a refreshing little novel told in an unexpected way and quite unlike any other expat-authored novel set in China that I have read. The setting is a slightly dated Beijing (turn of the century). We follow the heroine Shuyuan and her lower-income family as she grapples with the most important things in her life, typical of mid-teens all over China at the time (and still today), rather humbler than what Western kids undergo in their own fraught transition to early adulthood, yet no less meaningful (or traumatic): getting through each day making the right decisions, dealing with adversity (family bickering due to lack of money), emergencies (a pet rabbit accidentally left out in the cold). As a 15-year-old, Shuyuan can't be expected to have much of a distinct personality, and she doesn't, but this serves a useful purpose. She functions as a transparent, nonjudgmental, and sympathetic eye through which the reader gets a firsthand, intimate tour of domestic Beijing life, and in Sjoquist's disciplined hands, the focus is always on the here and now, all incidents and events invested with equal meaning and conveyed in clean, spare, unsentimental prose, perfectly suited to the subject matter.
A novel that unfolds like scenes in a play, told in close conversations among a few friends or relations in private domiciles in the author's utopian setting, where the islanders have achieved a self-sustaining communist community, under imminent threat from the capitalist antagonists surrounding them. More prolix in parts than the jeweled conciseness of Brave New World, it takes a while to see the forest for the trees and understand what's going on, but the final impression is intriguing, inviting a second reading. I was especially taken with one character who makes tantalizingly brief appearances early in the novel to engage protagonist Will Farnaby in a few witty dialogues before her untimely disappearance from the narrative for good, the self-described “precocious and promiscuous” teenage Nurse Appu, “dressed in a blue skirt and a short buttonless jacket that left her midriff bare and only sometimes covered a pair of apple-round breasts”:
“What is it?” Will asked, and was told that it was an extract from a mountain plant related to valerian.
“It helps people to stop worrying,” the little nurse explained, “without making them sleepy. We give it to convalescents. It's useful, too, in mental cases.”
“Which am I? Mental or convalescent?”
“Both,” she answered without hesitation.
Will laughed aloud. “That's what comes of fishing for compliments.”
“I didn't mean to be rude,” she assured him. “All I meant was that I've never met anybody from the outside who wasn't a mental case.”
Lacan is Zizek's favorite philosopher; almost all of Zizek's books employ Lacanian analysis in some form or other. It's not always easy to grasp, but this is a good starting point.
An academic text, one of the classic intros to Communications studies, which starts with the basic question of how objects communicate.
Exhaustive, extremely detailed (down to ground plans) of ancient bath ruins, not for the general reader but those interested in Roman antiquity.
Tangled analysis on a timely topic; remembered almost nothing after finishing the book.
Merged review:
Tangled analysis on a timely topic; remembered almost nothing after finishing the book.
I find Harris' books generally compelling, but this got tangled up for me in redundancies and logical excesses, slim though the volume is.
Classic 60s psychedelic-era text with its famous acid-drenched interior design and typography, though you need to be stoned to make much sense of it.
Eye-opening as we're not usually accustomed to thinking of the Renaissance as beginning with the Norman invasion of Europe (think Romanesque churches), which makes this an essential historical text.
Major contemporary Irish dramatist and film writer whose incisive, explosive texts rely on engaging the audience by sticking it to the wall with a needle.
Anything dealing with Lacan is getting into tough material, but this delving into a single Poe short story works and is fascinating.
After reading a number of Chomsky's political books, you start forgetting which was which since they're all really about the same thing - US imperialism's latest assaults on the world at the time he was writing about them. The best place to start with Chomsky is his latest book, though he's presently no longer writing books and just giving interviews. Or go back to such classic texts as The Political Economy of Human Rights and Manufacturing Consent.
This was one of the first metaphorical bombs in the form of a book that blew up in my face (in my junior year of college); the other was the Marquis de Sade's Justine.