The equivalent of two full-year courses as an undergrad, yeah. But it was wasted on me, unfortunately.

He taught this great first-year course with two other profs - Jim Tully (who has something of a name in Canada) and James Booth (now at Vanderbilt). They'd pick three texts each term (starting with Plato and ending with Arendt) and just argue about them in front of 150 kids. Tully and Booth were comprehensible, but Taylor's mind was working several levels above where the students were. so you could see his mind whirring along quickly in these discussions and he was just grabbing little bits and pieces of it he thought we might understand. There were nuggets in there, but it could come across as a little disjointed.

Lovely man, though.

I'm getting stuck into Stephen Pinker's The Stuff Of Thought (fascinating so far) and limiting myself to one helping of What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse per day. The extract from The Clicking Of Cuthbert with the Russian novelist is my favourit so far.

PG Wodehouse not bad.

I've just finished Hot Water as it happens, one of the very best of his novels that don't belong to a series.

In parallel I've been tackling The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century story of life in and around the Japanese court written by Murasaki Shikibu. It's heavy going for a number of reasons. Though I'm reading a modern translation, it remains highly stylised. Most of the meaningful exchanges between characters centre upon allusions to Chinese poetry and contain symbolism and wordplay that seems largely lost to the reader in my situation, despite the translator's footnotes. It's also difficult to understand the characters' motivations and morals because the world of the book is so far removed from our own. It's a polygamous society, and the treatment of women both before and after they're seduced is really difficult to understand. The protocols of things like gift-giving and visiting are wholly alien to the modern. western reader. It's pretty much assumed that the reader is familiar with the structures and hierarchy of the court and surrounding society - very much an unwarranted assumption in my case. And it doesn't do enough to help me understand from this great remove the society that it depicts - I don't feel I'm learning very much at all about the way that the Japan of the time worked or what it was like to live in it.

The biggest problem of it is that it's incredibly samey. For the most part it's a litany of affairs, with pretty much the same sequence of events each time: manoevering to get into the woman's (or her relations') favour, the brief contact, and the subsequent responsibility for the taken woman.

Having said all that it remains a remarkable work. The claims made for it that it's the world's first novel are debatable; nevertheless it's an astonishingly accomplished piece of work for one with so few, if any, precedents. It's very long - nearly 1200 pages in the version I'm tackling - and covers a span of maybe seventy years, and yet the consistency with which the author handles the many characters is remarkable. They all age at exactly the same rate, for example.

Aye. Not good, but not bad.

John Dos Passos's Manhatten Transfer - I like so far.

Loving the Charles Taylor, and I've just started into William Gaddis' Carpenters' Gothic. A hell of a lot lighter than The Recognitions, but physically and (so far) in tone, but great fun.

I need to get hold of everything Raymond Chandler's ever written. The Long Goodbye is absolutely ruddy brilliant.

I'm now on Our Man In Havana in preparation for my holidays (12 days and counting), and it's quite comfortably the silliest book I've read all year. Very enjoyable indeed.

Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

Sam, you need this and this.

But what you really need is to go to Los Angeles and have Inca show you what it's all about.

Impressively obscure pick from Bruno (and one Mann that I haven't read). As much as I may decry their club allegiances, I'm genuinely thrilled that Bruno and SixMartlets are around to disprove the universal applicability of general stereotypes of Milanisti and Juventini.

ursus-
there's, like, a new translation, it is teh awesome.

did i mention it's a brisk read.

well, no, it isn't. effing great though.

Is it Stephen Mitchell? He's the Paolo Maldini of translators of German into English.

Carpenter's Gothic was dazzling, and hilarious. Much easier to follow than The Recognitions, but without the same erudite depth. I'm about to start Slaughterhouse Five.

The Taylor is utterly great. Incredibly wide-ranging, incredibly learned, incredibly provocative. It's really a major, major work of philosophy.

ursus arctos wrote:

QUOTE:
Is it Stephen Mitchell? He's the Paolo Maldini of translators of German into English.

No, it's John E. Woods, who has already done Buddenbrooks, Zauberberg and Faustus. To critical acclaim and all that. Joseph is a good 1500 tiny print pages in English, so I'm assuming it's at least 3000 pages in German.

I tried Zauberberg auf Deutsch.

I didn't make it to the first base camp . . .

I've met Germans who would rather read Mann in English.