More books

Visited the new National Library in Bugis yesterday and came back with Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (so far, very, very good - compelling, and with some exquisite passages) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I've been meaning to read forever - perhaps a 3-week deadline would help force the issue.

And speaking of words, I stumbled upon this extract from Borges: A Life, Edwin Williamson's biography of Jorge Luis Borges (yes, more than a year old). I liked Borges' words: "intensity is the promise of immortality" - which I presume references the Catholic "the sadness of death gives way to the bright promise of immortality", but who knows? Borges has always been on my should-read-more list - "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" was the last thing I read of his, and that was a while back...

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'd be interested to know what you think of both books after you've read them. I remember starting both with much anticipation and enjoying them greatly at the start, but then found they dragged a bit later on, especially Kavalier & Clay.
30 October 2005 at 11:09
Elia Diodati said…
Borges is teh r0xx0rz!

I :heart: his short stories.
31 October 2005 at 13:16
Daryl said…
michelle - my thoughts on Enduring Love are in this post, although clearly a lot of the book gels with my dilettante interests in psychology... but in general, I really liked it.

m & e - will tell you what I think about Kavalier and Clay once I'm done with it.

elia - not l33t enough to have read enough Borges, I should.
1 November 2005 at 23:03
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Verbal agreement

From a Grauniad Guardian article on James Dyson , inventor of the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner: He still has one major ambition. To become a verb, in the same way that Hoover - or, as he puts it, "the alternative" - has done. I suggest to him that people are already using his product but still saying they are "hoovering". He smiles. "I don't think they'll be doing that for long," he says. That struck me as unusual - it's very rare for a firm's leader to say that he wants his product to become a verb. Lots of other companies like TiVo and Google have tried desperately to avoid their name becoming a verb, for fear of the name becoming so generic that the trademark gets diluted. But then, the Languagehat archives seem to show (see comment near the bottom) that Dyson's big on turning his name into a verb. *** Sadly, due to its distinct lack of vowels, the chances of "sng" becoming a verb seem close to zero, regardless of whate...
Read more

50 Cent's crib

This New York Times article on 50 Cent's life in the sleepy suburb of Farmington, Conn. , is quite wry - But a cook at China Palace said Mr. Jackson could save 10 percent on any order over $30... Ah, the privileges of fame... 10% off Chinese takeout! For the party, Mr. Jackson ordered more than $5,000 worth of liquor, including "a lot of Baccardi," according to the owner of a Farmington liquor store who spoke on the condition of anonymity "to protect his privacy." Sipping Bacardi (ooh, caught a Times misspelling) like it's his birthday. How anonymous could a liquor store owner in a suburban town be? It's not like there're hundreds of liquor stores in the town, I'm guessing. I like how they keep referring to him as Mr. Jackson...
Read more