Literature: Recently Popular Faves

Lost in the Meritocracy

misaacs — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:28:46 GMT

Now a book of the same title.

Quoted:As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Quoted: We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate ... we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place

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Wendell Berry - Wikipedia

petersigrist — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:00:41 GMT

Quoted: academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays.

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Out of Panic, Self-Reliance

seregine — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:52:59 GMT

Great language.

Quoted: How financial panic influenced the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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Commencement Speech by a recently deceased writer

misaacs — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 03:45:45 GMT

David Foster Wallace, best known for his 1996 novel ''Infinite Jest,'' was found dead in his home, according to police. Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home Friday.

Quoted: how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed... Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

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David Foster Wallace

misaacs — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:28:16 GMT

Short stories & essays by Wallace; videos, interviews, reviews...

Quoted: used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

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e m p t i n e s s by: jonathan safran foer

etcetera — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 01:01:33 GMT

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LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

misaacs — Sun, 18 May 2008 03:59:29 GMT

Quoted: Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

From hknapp's faves.

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Nam Le’s Book of Short Stories, ‘The Boat,’ Is Published - New York Times

misaacs — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:47:59 GMT

Quoted: The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

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1001 List

eric — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:18:27 GMT

A list of 1,001 books to read before you die.

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J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz: Welcome to Rhinotimes.com Greensboro

splackity — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:37:43 GMT

Orson Scott Card reflects on J.K. Rowling and her lawsuit.. in a rather scathing way - complete with his comparison of the Harry Potter stories to his own Ender's Game.

Quoted: A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader.

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