That‘s culture for you, I thought: it‘s a bit of a pain in the butt, which is fine, and ultimately everyone is returned to his original nothingness.

Sometimes he cycles cross-country, pedaling as hard as he can, filling his lungs with a taste of the infinite. He doesn‘t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief. The countryside streams past.

A beautiful, mind bending merging of genres to create this masterpiece: bold; insightful; unapologetically ambitious. This book elevates and elevates. There‘s one particular section describing the breakdown in the chain of duties that leads to a disaster—it‘s one of the most powerful, brilliantly laid out scenarios I‘ve ever read.

Did it matter … which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomach it had gone to fill?

The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag‘s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat.

You see … people don‘t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they‘ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength—then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I‘ll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you‘ll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation…I want you—and may I be damned for it!

Her feeling for the railroad was the same: worship of the skill that had gone to make it, of the ingenuity of someone‘s clean, reasoning mind, worship with a secret smile that said she would know how to make it better some day. She hung around the tracks and the round-houses like a humble student, but the humility had a touch of future pride, a pride to be earned.

Cool book that starts out basic and easy, but gets complex (and often mind-bendy) as it goes on.

It covers important topics that will continue to grow more pertinent. With a way of putting one at ease about technology (for me anyway), this is totally worth tackling, and is written with love—a heady, intellectually stimulating kind of love.

While I don‘t like this nearly as much as “Taipei,” it still has a lot to offer. There are many mundane scenes throughout the first three-fourths of the novel, but big payoffs come toward the end—it ties things together and makes me appreciate much of what came before, largely because of Lin‘s mastery of meta elements.

The final section is gorgeous; he‘s writing in a new way that doesn‘t feel like him, which I think was kind of his goal.

The grandiosity and impact of this narrative is stunning. Charles Dickens vibes.

Don‘t let the stigma of this book scare you—live some and take it on. The deep research and planning that plainly went into it has to be admired. I guess she spent like a year working in an architect‘s office. This novel brings you somewhere else completely. It‘s hypnotic, a movement, a signal from beyond. Like watching a movie and reading a book at the same time.

In bed at 2:30 a.m., Li reminded himself to merge with nature‘s experimental creation of portentously ambitious art, scalarly tunneling through matter on the surface of planets, toward the unknown other side, because what else was he going to do?

It was a joy to read these poems that pulse with life, that pay the closest attention to the small stuff as well as grand questions, that pull these subjects together so that it veers from one to the other, always surprising, going this way and that with punctuation and line breaks.

This read is delightfully fast, you can run your eyes down the page at any pace you like. Such a pleasurable experience.

Cool book but it leans hard into a certain idea, and you have to be all in on this idea to really have the story resonate with you.

Some of the prose is exceptionally outstanding, and fresh. It‘s like a prose poem much of the time, and she does a good job of not letting the prose-poetics get overly long.

Again: a lot of it is unpacking something she went through. I could see how if your view aligns with hers, this would be super meaningful.

I loved this. It‘s extremely readable yet uncannily intellectual. Captures attitudes and styles/trains of thought I‘ve never seen before.

It‘s also somehow emotional…I cared about what was going to happen to the characters. I was totally invested in the story, as I generally appreciate unusual stuff like this, the type of stuff that can easily be off-putting to others.

Playful, lighthearted, often not taking itself too seriously.

Really fun poems…innovative with a cool tone to them.

I love how modern it feels.

Read it twice, to get a full grip on it. This is an interesting book by an interesting poet, and I‘ll read another book of his.

I‘m glad I spent time with this.

An engrossing, addictive page turner. When I tell you I spent nights tearing through this, devouring large chunks of the novel at a time….

It gives Sally Rooney but also Hanya Yanagihara‘s “A Little Life” a little bit, a contemporary romance and drama—(covering so many topics I could tell this must have taken forever to write)—with expertly crafted POV shifts.

Heavily recommended if you like spicy dramatics and relationship stories.

you are my :: war with loneliness : 30-day trial : rubber duckie in alligator-infested waters : undeserving love : made in china : love 1994 : per-my-last-email : cat‘s paw : beast of burden : little nap : long bath : second favorite : pure love idiot : brainwashed little prince : daily forbidden fruit : not-necessarily : winner-takes-all : better-than-you : eureka moment : hand of god : lucky draw : moonless night : moonlit pool

Pretty fire. It drags in parts, but also has a tendency to get REALLY GOOD at times, and laugh out loud funny.

I definitely liked it more than “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” for what that‘s worth. Lots of risky moves in the story, and a nice sort of darkness. This is like an A24 film in novel form.

I feel like I could read this epic every year and never tire of it. I always learn something new. I love the way he writes, I love the way he writes, I love it! This was a reread, and I had forgot how rich it is, but I didn‘t forget how much soul it has…. It‘s challenging in all the right ways…you have to go back and unpack it, many sections, but it‘s worth it.

Longer than I expected, and dry for many pages, but overall I‘m incredibly glad I read it, grateful really.

This book is enlightening, and I came to certain revelations that have me charged up.

My only quibble is it‘s overly science focused, I suspect because the author is a physicist, so he loves it. There‘s really just a chapter on Shakespeare and then some talk about him at the end.

Poems filled with heart and spirit, the language moves me and makes me happy. I looked up some videos of her reading her work out loud and I love the attitude…. She‘s kind of cynical, always interesting, the verse ranging in topic, never being formulaic.

Great stuff.

We have learned to understand the universe through science and not through art, or religion. In the case of science and religion, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould summarized the nonoverlapping magisteria of the two cultures: “Science gets the age of rocks, religion gets the rock of ages … Science explains how the heavens go, religion tells you how to get to heaven.”

That‘s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events

I loved this. A thriller (or at least it has the mood of a thriller) that interrogates language and the practice of interpreting. It‘s one of those books where to be honest not much happens, but it‘s written in a way that manages to maintain tension, and crafted idiosyncratically, unafraid of making classic grammatical errors.

I wish more stuff was this free and risky…. Kitamura is unique!

Really good.

A story about being a woman, bodies, being a human, and the interrelationships between many concepts I‘m interested in but which I don‘t feel like getting into.

The writing purls, lifts, and dives. The prose is sharp and overbearing—looms over you. This is filled with dread, and also edgy and cool somehow. I‘m into the form, and appreciate the linearity. I love how short it is too.

A nice collection about all sorts of existential and global crises. You have to not worry about if you accept the worldview to enjoy it, because it‘s ideological.

It‘s cool in terms of the forms used…inspirational really. I could feel Choi pushing herself to come up with new ways of writing.

It also has a great balance between experimental and more accessible. Way to go!

Lots of cool stories here. Also some gorgeous insights about love, and trying to make it work.

The dialogue is great too, and I appreciate the long sections of it. Zablah is always a good writer. One or two stories didn't do it for me but other than that there were nice takeaways.

Phenomenal ending to an unreal work.

Mind-bendy, ultra-reflective and fascinating, feels like something written in the future.... Pretty often I'd say to myself "Yeah this is wild stuff," especially in the second half. Somehow he managed to end this thing without letting me down at all. I love it.

There were a bunch of good takeaways in this....

Much of it is a relaxing read, while giving instructions for a certain way of life (ideas I'm not sure I want to follow), I guess containing many answers.

I'd never read Buddhist stuff before so I'm hoping this was a good introduction.

I admire it, even though I doubt I'll walk that path. It's interesting though, and I love some of the grand concepts.

It seems now therefore that there is no humiliation so great that one should not put up with it easily, in the knowledge that after a few years our buried faults will be no more than an invisible dust over which will smile the smiling and blossoming peace of nature.

not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred
it‘s not my place to try to decipher it,
phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious
as the names we give to animals, or words
we know only in prayer

I noted the hell out of this, marked it with stickies and read it twice. The language is melancholic and mournful, yet also fierce and pointed, as though directing the reader to do I‘m not sure what…commanding me to pay attention. It‘s avant garde and can be impenetrable, which I don‘t mind. I got lost in it and enjoyed myself. Any messages seem smeared over and I like it that way….

Throughout our life we produce energy. We say things and do things, and every thought, every word, and every act carries our signature. What we produce as thoughts, as speech, as action, continues to influence the world, and that is our continuation body. Our actions carry us into the future. We are like stars whose light energy continues to radiate across the cosmos millions of years after they become extinct.

I loved it, but I had to read it like a possessed person to get through it.... Actually that‘s how it has been for me with all of Proust.

As usual with these editions, the translator's intro in the beginning is excellent.

Some of this installment is like a fever dream; a new type of Proust. Fantasies and dreams and memories flood the reader. The prose is incredible as always, the observations revelatory. I also gasped audibly at one part.

For old age removes the ability to act, but not to desire. It is only in a third phase that those who live to a great age renounce desire, after being obliged to abandon action. They no longer stand for such petty elections as that of President of the Republic, where they so often formerly strove to succeed. They are content merely to go out, to eat, and to read the newspapers. They have outlived themselves.

I‘m halfway through this!

Really liking it so far. It‘s somewhat easy to follow and, like the previous volume, not crammed with characters to keep track of.

I can‘t believe I‘ve come this far in Proust…. The prose is filled with revelations (which I‘ve grown used to but is still heavily impressive), and I‘m fully in his world. I‘m reading this like a person possessed.

This was the easiest Proust volume to follow for me, with far fewer characters being presented, and the referring to my notes that that comes with.

It‘s filled with uniquely profound prose, as it took me through a psychological journey reminding me of many contemporary novels I‘ve read. The shift in setting and happenings was so needed. Our narrator is pretty messed up here but you gotta love him (or at least find the material fascinating).

Cool collection. Very modern and interested in interacting with what we‘re all going through, whether we do or do not want to admit it (technology).

I love the juxtaposition between the border—which is not relatable to me—pressed against the software and hardware, which so is. Many readers will have to deal with that contrast.

The prose stuff dragged for me, but the poems are fun, and they get better and better as you near the end.

I felt, but did not believe, that I controlled the future, because I knew that my feeling came from the fact that the future did not yet exist and that I could not therefore be subject to its inevitability.

I‘m a pile of judgment days
crossing the border. I tried to organize the hours
waiting in line on the bridge but days travel
over days and erase them.

Spent most of last year reading Proust, it felt like…. Seems like I‘m gonna be spending much of this year reading him too. I‘ll get through it though. (I‘m liking it!)

Customs portaled in and shot my friend
and said: “They were never really your friend.
Follow me into this portal
if you want to glove,
I mean love,
I mean live.”

The flag of the border is its fence!
It‘s the longest flag you‘ve ever seen,
rippling across the border.

Where do all your fences live?

All my fences live in Texas.

Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love. 🥵

This one seems like a smoother read compared to the others, despite an odd stylistic choice going on….

The smell of the twigs in the icy air was like a piece of the past, an invisible ice-floe broken off from a distant winter and floating into my room, striated here and there with a perfume or a light as if by different years into which I found myself plunged once again, swept away even before I had recognized them by the lightheartedness of hopes long since abandoned.

“The Intermittences of the Heart”—that‘s the name of a section here, and it was almost the name of the entire novel…. We‘re talking how time affects our feelings about events, as well as our view of individuals; how hurt springs up seemingly out of nowhere; how someone can feel so indifferently distant and then suddenly it‘s as though they live inside us, a part of us. Incisive, cutting prose is the standard with Proust. His wisdom pierces.

Memories of powerful language and imagery…this volume takes us through the whole of the poet‘s life, reflecting on what has changed and how she has grown, with profound, slippery themes—rapidly shifting within one single poem—and narratives that are sometimes difficult to follow but still graspable.

You can feel how she set the tone for what popular poetry would go on to become. Oftentimes dense, I find it overwhelming as well as inspiring….

The life of a seaside resort removed from an introduction the consequences for the future that might have been dreaded in Paris.