Reading List Continued
53. How to Write - Derek Beaulieu
A series of pieces entirely cribbed and plagiarised from other works. The pieces range from the surprisingly narrative “The Editor” in which Beaulieu uses sentences from another book that include the words “the editor” to a cheeky series that offers a bunch of interrogative questions on Tristram Shandy that could be applied to pretty much any book. The underpinning idea here is that any text becomes meta once you take it out of its context and say it’s meta.
54. Come Thou, Tortoise - Jessica Grant
One of the best books I’ve read this year. I took it with me to India and Jani and I took turns reading it. The novel, following a heroine named Oddly (Audrey) and her tortoise is at turns funny, sad, insightful - and correctly uses and astonishing array of proper exceptions to grammatical rules. Buy this book and give it to everyone.
55. Expiditions of a Chimaera - Moure and Avasilichioaei
A number of writers we know and don’t know, who exist and don’t, appear in this text. On the one hand, we have Elisa Sampedrin translating the work of Nichita Stanescu while Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei translate each other and the extant poems of Stanescu and Sampedrin (who only writes film review, after all). The book challenges ideas of authorship, translation, authority in text in a lighthearted playtime dwelling somewhere between English, Romanian and Reader.
56. [sic] Nikki Reimer
Lots of people have blogged on this book here already so I won’t say much except that I quite enjoyed the book and consider it a keeper and re-reader.
57. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
I think it’s particularly relevant when reading this text now to move beyond the postcolonial readings that have dominated discussion of the book for the last 50 years or so and consider how time and technology get used by Defoe to create the identity of the solitary Crusoe. He thinks nothing of taking months or years to complete tasks and engages frequently with the theories behind how things get made and work - mind sets very much at odds with our contemporary positions so aptly communicated by our tweets and other aspects of our asinine schizophrenia. I wonder, given that, how much our technological isolations actually works to instil in us the sort of xenophobia exhibited by Crusoe.
58. Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
This text both spoofs Crusoe while also offering a scathing sendup of British and European society that ultimately undermines Swift’s basic misanthropy - and his acute awareness of the misanthropy of his society, so obviously typified by the response to Crusoe’s novel (they loved it).
~ Colin
