Frances

I started reading this 9 years ago, couldn't finish, and then again a couple of years ago - it was the much earlier edition. Though I enjoyed it as I would any Hemingway book, I was not as drawn to it as I did in the third reading. Back then I had no connection to the places and the locales he often uses as points of reference to characters and the silent developments in his inner world. This would explain why I trudged through it. I did not get to finish the book when typhoon Rai destroyed my home and most of my books.

Fast forward to last winter when I visited Paris and bought the restored edition from the Shakespeare and Company. It was a laidback trip and had no company so I had the freedom to walk around mostly in the 5th arr. I didn't realize until later that this area was Hemingway's turf and I had meandered through most of the streets he wrote about. I did not read the book until after I left Paris.

With this new element my second time reading the book hit different, almost intimate, and I think it's because of the impression the city (along with my personal affections) had on me during and after. I finished the book in two sprints. 60% of it in one afternoon.


It was a good thing i got to reread this as the restored edition - the main text was how Hemingway had prepared it for publishing. The chapters are organized differently and some post-humous revisions rolled back. It also has additional sketches/chapters and “fragments” after the main text, that are alternate versions/drafts of some sections found from his manuscript. A bulk of the chapter on Hadley and Pauline which was previously omitted were very powerful in that the reader has access to the his most vulnerable state in that “winter of murder”. All of this provide a better understanding of the author's perspective and process, and a glimpse into the fragility of the mind of the great writer who by that time was already marked for death.

Who would've thought a funny little book could put me on the edge of my seat?

This is just the second Steinbeck book that I've read and he's already starting to rub off on me. He writes about life with a microscopic lens, singling out individuals and their circumstances, all the while panning through the rest of the worldly distractions with a hazy eye, permeating into the everyday lives of his characters and inking the once-invisible thread that connects people. It will be a while before the image of Cannery Row fades into the back rows of my mind. For now, I will ride on through life in this bubble of romanticism, basking in my “hour of pearl”.

So you start out with a bunch of despicable characters who couldn't possibly have any stories worth telling as their lives are seemingly empty except when they happen to have some wine. Steinbeck proves us wrong. How many times have you seen a homeless drunkard sitting by the road staring at nothing and felt sorry for the guy? Steinbeck teaches us that there is no need to be, because that man is staring at the world in its entirety, and that man has more time than you'll ever have to tell the stories of the world.

It is difficult to stop reading this book no matter how painful it is at times, but it ended well and I wouldn't have preferred any other ending. I would say this is one of Steinbeck's best.

First of all, who made this ugly cover?

Now that that's out of the way, I'm trying to remember why I declared myself a fan of Charles Bukowski some ten or so years ago when I discovered his work and the person that he is. Other than the fact that I was depressed at that time, it must have been the way he bares all of his guts to the world, his suffering, his demons, without asking for pity, for help. Sometimes you will sense a plea for forgiveness in the subtext of his lines, but only faintly so, you could miss it entirely.

The first few poems in this collection had me seriously question how he had become such a celebrated writer, but soon enough this was answered for me. An amazing poem after another. And it's not entirely in the style of writing, but the attitude he has taken towards writing those words. As you read them, you are there, listening to him speak to himself. You will know how he felt. Really felt.

A heart of stone, a heart so soft.
He has given up, but also not really.
That must have hurt, but he has already pulled away before it could reach him.

I haven't read his work in a long time, and only remember one, my favorite thus far (Raw With Love). This is the first time I read a collection of his in one sitting. I am understanding him better now.

It takes only a matter of the mind to be unstuck in time

It's the kind of book you write in your sleep. In this fashion, Brautigan carries us through dream sequences with no mercy for the reader. Some recurring elements give the impression of fleeting moments lost, of regret, of guilt, and a difficulty in writing a straight apology. Or he could've been pulling our legs the whole time. You take what meaning you can get.

Linguistic structure aside it's a well-written book and great for fans of abstract prose.

I see how feminists would come to hate this book, and it is only because they overlooked the signature: that the book provides so much honesty in the dialogue while being a step away from reality. Yes, Catherine Barkley may have sounded so shallow; however, Frederic Henry was also presented above the machismo standard, as emphasized by his lack of feelings for the baby.

Another juxtaposition that stood out to me was of war and childbirth – both of heavily varying nature but bringing along with them the same kind of grief, suffering and death.

And as always, I am captured by the style of writing by Hemingway, which is a mix of heavily descriptive prose and blunt poetry. So many lines that brought me goosebumps.

I cried at the end.

Tristessa - the way it rolls down your tongue like a hiss, escaping like a slow death, is reminiscent of Kerouac's muse from Mexico. A long-time junky, dead eyes, dead love, dancing her way to ruins, untouchable.

One takes from this book the difficult but obvious truth, lessons greater than unrequited love. To fall in love with a junky is to step into a black hole. To live with a junky, one must become a junky. So all throughout this thing we have Jack tiptoeing around and against the void with his bottle of alcohol and notebook of poems, taking us through dizzying streets of men and women in rags, dead animals in ditches, morphine shooters in dark alleys and beloved Tristessa - sick without a shot, sick with goofballs...

It's a sad, painful, brilliant novella. A good entry to Kerouac's works, if one may ask. He is a true jazz writer, making good use of odd notes in language and still have it come out as music. Not many can achieve that. He is to be read in rhythm. In this book, Kerouac writes an ode to lost things, in the process of losing one. La tristesse durera.

Seems like a lot of people hate the author for some scandal I have never heard about and didn't bother to know about. Others are simply unimpressed with his writing style.

I, on the other hand, loved it. It was one of those books that shifted my focus and stayed with me like a bone graft.

I borrowed it from a friend when I was a senior in high school, right at the start of the most hysterical string of years in my life. I learned various forms of escapism and my state of mind matched that of the main character in the book. An ambiguous addiction, the pulverization of the self, the discovery of the Tao. The free structure of his prose matched that of my own scribblings on little journals from those years. The characters became my friends, so much so that I had to find a copy of My Friend Leonard online.

I like this mostly because it's set in Tokyo, and I guess some props to Murakami for the way it gets under your skin. But the ending got to me again. I can't believe I let him do this to me again. I'll keep figuring out how to like him, book by book, but I know enough now to detach myself from any character in his books.

Humans are pigs.

I‘be been in a reading slump, and i was pulled out of that after just the first pages of this book. This is significant - after having suffered from some kind of reading ADD for some time i somehow could read this book for hours without effort. To have discovered Patti Smith‘s world, her mind and her absolute, unpretentious mastery of prose shifted a part of me into a position that I could now appreciate and identify as, without shame. This book really changed something in me immensely. What a world, and what a life! To think this was only a part of hers in relation to Robert Mapplethorpe. For a period of time I felt as if I lived through their world. I‘m eager to read more of her work, how i hope she will continue to write, for as long as we have her around.

I picked up this book hoping to gain new insights on the belief (one that I take sides with) that time isn't a dimension, that it isn't something we traverse on, especially not in a commutative manner (i.e. time travel). Carlo Rovelli accomplishes this with his equally poetic and mathematical narrative, but not before taking me on a journey of existential romanticizing, confusion, doubt, bewilderment and sympathy, in this order.

There were some radical jumps in the definition of time which went from independent entity → human construct → gravitational field that is both subjective and independent of perception (Einstein's resolution of Aristotle time and Newtonian time) → emotions. By this point Carlo has explained elegantly the mathematics of his new notion of time and succumbs to an elegy of the beauty of all its implications.

The parts where I felt least convinced were some analogies that I felt were weak (e.g. mixing of all things = growing count of disordered configurations = collapsing mountain = crumbling structure) and similarly how some concepts were interpreted (e.g. “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration.” - the logic would have been more elegant if he had instead said “events create time”) though this could also be a liability of translation as it is originally in Italian.

I had expected something along the lines of a rationalization of the belief that time is artificial, that it is nothing but a human invention necessitated by our need for organization, to map out what we learn and understand and operate with, and that which is constructed around the regularity of phenomena (e.g. day-night cycle). While the book does lend affirmation to this, it also introduces a completely new and mind-blowing concept. The concept is a set of concepts, and because it's unintuitive and unobservable by human senses, it's naturally not easy to maintain in one's thought process (especially because he somehow uses the word “time” in colloquial phrases that contradict what he has revealed - though it could be because he is limited by conservative language, we have yet to develop the language that more accurately expresses the seemingly abstract concepts of quantum physics), thus requiring some muscle memory to be built which you will realize after it's been referred to enough times throughout the chapters. The concept needs to be learned as if learning a new grammar, but Carlo writes his book in a way that makes this easy for the reader with a kind of spaced repetition of the unfamiliar terms (or their contexts). This is the first reason why I think he is just the right spokesperson for such disruptive concepts of quantum physics.

The second reason is that by the third chapter he circles back to justifying why we perceive time the way we do despite the disruptive nature of the novel theory. This saves the readers from falling into a pit of existential dread, some possible dissociation, alarm, or even blunt rejection of the new notion of time. What the book guarantees though is a complete upheaval of perspective, and you walk away with new questions to brew, or new sensibilities to nurture.

The third reason is he writes the book for a broad audience, while still satisfying the more inquisitive readers with superscripts and optional technical chapters (he gives permission to skip two chapters but I think it's worth the pain of sludging through as a non-technical reader).

In the last section ‘Sister of Sleep' he goes off on a more personal soliloquy, waltzing us along a personal stage of his thoughts, revealing his sentiments on the finality of his life, of his experience of time and that now he is ready for death, having already “drunk deep of the bittersweet contents of this chalice.”

This is the diary of an underground man who attempts to reach out to humanity, from whom he has been detached (intentionally or not, it is hard to determine).

One can easily pass him off as a man gone sour, already out of touch with social conventions, shamelessly declaring his intellectual advantage over the rest of the flock. He describes men of action as stupid, for failing to see the pointlessness of it all. He need not mention his jealousy for their lack of fear. And this is why he must be given a chance.

The book begins with mostly ramblings that go on at great lengths with the occasional digressions (you can imagine how difficult it was for me, not to mention my discovery of the dark side of Mozart and Tchaikovsky out of necessity) but never have I encountered anyone so articulate in exposing the landscape of human nature, including the embarrassing grey areas that you sometimes catch yourself in. It is not all that dark and spiteful, though. He alternates between condescension and self-loathing, pride and humility, misery and comic relief. Towards the end, we catch a glimpse of him making valid points about love, marriage and family.

It is a love-hate relationship that we have with the underground man. He is the spokesperson for all our bitterness, disbelief, helplessness and surrender. This is the curse of a man all too aware, a man who refers to the world outside of his apartment as “real life”.

There was a time in my life when I was always so angry (it could've been at everything or nothing in particular, I just couldn't pinpoint, or maybe admit which); I wish I had read this thing back then. A powerful book, as it is a condensed transcript of all thoughts that should never be known.

Definitely something I will be revisiting.

Howl is real. But the writing doesn't carry me away. I can say the same for some of his other poems. Despite there being parallels between Ginsberg and Kerouac, this is only seemingly so, for Ginsberg's feels premeditated, with an elementary rhythm that is a ways away from jazz writing. The way he creates a vision for us, of a scene, with the choice of words and the order of the words, feel born from a template.

I am only saying that about his writing style. Like I said, Howl is real, and so were the other poems in this collection. The paths his thoughts take, his honest yearnings and madness come from nobody but him and you will know this.

The Familiar is a large body of work. With 26 more volumes coming up, I guess it makes sense that the story feels sparse for the most part. That doesn't stop me from nearly ripping my hair out with this first volume, though. I couldn't wrap myself around it the same way House of Leaves did (yeah, I'm one of those who couldn't get over that book).

Sure, the typography that comes up once in a while's fancy, maybe enough to warrant some shelf space if only as a trophy book. The cover art in each chapter was (for me) shrug-worthy. I wouldn't say MZD's got poor taste in design. It's hard to tell if the grungy-pop-eccentric-and-reminds-you-of-your-grandma kind of art was intentional or not. I can't even find a word for it. Bottomline is, it's awkward.


There were still some literary gems scattered throughout that book that kept my faith in MZD as a writer, but I couldn't help it that the only chapters I cared about were those of Xanther's and I just breezed through the rest. That means I owe it a second reading, but I can't promise that. All I know is that I won't be looking forward to the next volume. I might even be exchanging this book for a boxed set of Game of Thrones that my girlfriend has been asking for.

House of Leaves was good enough in itself to keep me as your fan, MZD. The Familiar just didn't win me over. Or hasn't yet. Who knows. At least it's not as painfully unreadable as Only Revolutions. Hence, the 3 stars.

Most of the stories here are some of his best. As usual, it is not easy to get through his writing. But it doesn't take long to run into a literary gold, over and over again. It was only the Mexico Fellaheen story that I did not enjoy, it was difficult to spend time on, and led me to dropping the book, picking it up again only months later, pushing with effort through to the end of that story. Obviously a worthy effort, as the next ones were astounding. Kerouac's writing is pure, effortless jazz.

A more than sufficient primer for Schopenhauer's school of thought.

I like his mind, I like his style. He treads in the surreal and thumps out words in the rhythm of jazz, or chaos.

I like most of the poems in this collection.

Interesting to read one of his earlier works. It reads different. I did not like the breaks where he addresses the reader. Offensive to a culture but then again one can say he a victim of his time. Also unrelated- but I am absolutely torn by the brutal fate he gave the character Diana. She did not need any more than what she already suffered.

I read some opinions of her taking after her father, and I was wrong to assume that I'd find the resemblance in their writing style. Rather, I find hers to be “simple”. Their lives couldn't be more similar though, despite the fact that they only met twice. A couple of chapters in and I had become so engrossed in her story. So much is happening and above it all, there is a muted sadness. Jan's penchant for exploration - both outside of and in herself - came at a great cost.

Her body of work should be read not solely in relation to Jack Kerouac. Although, if you are a fan of him, then knowing his role in her life might make you hate him even just a little bit.

What happens in the latter years of her short life is tragic. I've been digging through some outdated blogs for more information. I've lost most of the links but for anybody interested you can start here:

http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column22b.html

Had I reviewed this closer to when I read the bulk of it, this review would have been more insightful. But a pity it is that this was not as easy to read as his last book (The Order of Time), and so I read this intermittently over the course of nearly a year.

The challenge I faced with this book is that in some sections (particularly Chapters 4 and 6) his train of thought becomes hard to follow. Some concepts and relations are repeated, I think that was intended for this new grammar of reality offered by quantum theory to be eventually absorbed, but not so effectively. Something could be lost in translation too.

There are some very important notions he wants delivered in this book though, so it does deserve a careful reading and comprehension in supplement to his earlier work (I would recommend reading The Order of Time before this, as that sets the foundation for the key ideas he elaborates here).

Politics, literature, history and philosophy are discussed in much of this book. There is an acknowledgment of the relevance of Eastern philosophy too, although he strongly rebukes the appropriation of quantum physics by contemporary schools of metaphysics.

I was captivated and engrossed in the first 3 chapters and in the last one he ends once again in a poetic outburst on his journey of learning and relaying the knowledge and comprehension he's had thus far in this field.

That said I will want to give this a second reading when I have time.

This book is a true piece of modern-day beat literature. The ubiquity of drugs in his narrative gives it a fluid impression – the drugs make his story hard to tell, but the drugs gave him a story to tell. We are taken through a dizzying series of vignettes, in Kerouac fashion, of short-term encounters with places and people, jumping from one continent to the next, suitcase of chemicals in tow. Memory is a weak force, and there is little connecting the stories to each other. There is a recurring half-memory of a woman. Everything may have started after her, but if she was indeed what the memory erasers were supposed to kill, then it is amusing how almost everything but her was lost.

Amidst the flurry of images is a blanket of dry contemplation, and I am reminded of Palahniuk. It reads like romantic nihilism. Like the detached sentimentality of a man who remembers nothing, or rather, only one thing.

10 stars out of 5.

I'm writing this review without having read Part III yet (just skimmed it), only because I intend to revisit it (and I feel it was meant to be read) when I have started studying/reviewing the subjects themselves. The main agenda of the book though is found in the chapters before and after it (which I finished in one afternoon, as I found the book was an easy read and for me an enjoyable one). I am reading this as a former physics major who dropped out in the middle of the bachelors program 11 years ago and now wish to pursue it again.

The book could very well be called “How the Study of Physics Ought to Be”.

Not only does the author attempt to democratize physics with non-elitist language, he also bravely exposes the futility, in some ways, of conventional routes of education, something you are inevitably subjected to by pursuing a university degree. Furthermore, he provides some insider information from the scientific field.

In no way does he discourage university, but he does offer a roadmap for anybody who wishes to study physics not only in pursuit of a career “trophy” but also to help expand what is currently illuminated in the field. The latter not necessarily as an alternative but also as a supplement to the former.

In some parts I felt the author is suggesting that the alternative route outside of the former could help you achieve the latter, but here we have the paradox that actually putting a place for your own findings is near impossible without the credentials of university.

Also in some chapters a lot of what he wants to teach you are in external resources, offered through direct URLs provided in the margins. Sociology was one chapter where he does a better job at teaching the reader without making eternal references, because here he teaches his own methods and describes his own experience with specific examples.

A reader with zero background in the subject might also find themselves lost in chapters such as The Structure of Physics where some jargon is suddenly thrown at you, but don't let this discourage you from perusing the rest of the book.

Though I don't find this as eloquent/poetic a read as other democratizing texts (such as those by Rovelli), all in all it was a pleasant read, and I will definitely check out his other, subject-specific books.