.webp?h=8 "Top Hat (black) - Traditional. Classy. Elegant.")
To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm in part 5 of "Crime & Punishment", I'm currently doing a re-reading. The first time I read that book was 9 years ago, I remember the general plot but I had forgotten many details and there's a lot to the story I didn't understand on my first reading. I know Dostoevsky sometimes gets derided as a book for edgy young men but that's quite unfair considering how much influence he had on writers like Kafka, James Joyce, García Márquez, Mishima, Camus. And I think many miss the point that Dostoevsky critizes the nihilists (19th century edgelords) of his era. He can be quite a vicious satirist, there's a chapter where the proto commie Lebeziatnikov talks about how life in the commune will be and how marriage is outdated and how he's totally ok with cuckery and that he wishes being cucked if he ever gets married while Luzhin bursts in laughter while he monologues on a serious tone. Seriously, the guy vomited so many Rose twitter talking points, I guess there's nothing new under the sun.
Razumikhin is a chad just like I remembered him, he's the friend everyone wishes to have. Rodion is a pseudo-intellectual, he tries so hard to be edgy with his "extraordinary men not bounded to crime" manifesto believing himself as a sort of ubermensch, I love how Dostoevsky shreds his worldview as he suffers from guilt. I never read Brothers Karamazov but now I'm definitely going for it and add it to my reading list.
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I finally finished Blood meridian. I liked it although I'm still trying to gather my thoughts on it.
It's interesting how the narrative is actually pretty short, but its interspersed with long meditative periods of almost nothing happening, except them going from place to place and the "narrator" describing their environments with increasingly obscure English words. And than the few bits of narrative in between that are either hyper-violent war combat or descriptions of the degenerated and violent revelry.
The perspective the book has is also unusual, because it never reveals any character's internal thoughts, and you're expected to mostly infer their beliefs and motivations. While most of the band seems to be mostly indifferent to the violence, the only two people I remember having and compassion are The Kid (helping the man with the arrow) and Toadvine, when he gets angry at the Judge for murdering and scalping the kid he saved. The other exception is obviously the Judge who is a brutal sadist. I think the author intended for him to be a personification of a violent and uncaring god.
All in all, a very interesting book, with beautiful prose.
I picked up Snow Crash next (based on John Carmack mentioning it in an interview), which is much lighter and seems more genre-y and more fun all-together. I've just started it, but I'm already wondering how the the book will hold up regarding technology, considering it's 30 years old at this point.
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I really like the pacing of the book, it sells just how horrible the gang's existence is. Suffering through the desert heat, with their only breaks being violence and the rare bout of drunkenness.
The ex-priest was also anti-violence iirc. I think he was an interesting foil to the Judge when they talked.
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