No rating just yet, not until I read Schopenhauer…
Provisional rating: 4/5
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Dee's books
2024 Reading Goal
54% complete! Dee has read 41 of 75 books.
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Dee started reading Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze
Dee finished reading Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (German: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für …
Dee reviewed Religio medici by Thomas Browne
5/5
5 stars
‘As for those wingy Mysteries in Divinity, and airy subtleties in Religion, which have unhing'd the brains of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine.‘
This 17th century anatomically-informed humblebrag might be my favourite sentence read this year.
Browne’s writing reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character ‘John Smith.’ Particularly due to the playful and curious approach to the world/god/nature, paired with the writing style of a rambling (but sagacious) old man… A worthwhile read.
Dee reviewed The Devil by Leo Tolstoy
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, …
Imagine the Kreutzer Sonata, but this time he gets it right.
5 stars
I’m left with an inexplicable feeling of (second-hand) self-disgust and discomfort from something so simply written…
Dee started reading The Devil by Leo Tolstoy
The Devil by Leo Tolstoy
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such …
In the course of a lively drinking party, a group of Athenian intellectuals exchange views …
5/5
5 stars
Dee reviewed Also sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch …
4/5
4 stars
Dee started reading Also sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Also sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, also …
Dee reviewed Velkom to Inklandt by Sophie Herxheimer
Awful
2 stars
Possibly one of the worst books I’ve read this year. Poems make up less than half the book’s pages, some with gargantuan fonts that just so coincidentally add a few pages numbers…
A lot of these poems also completely rely on the broken English format to save them from being instantly labelled as bland/rejected. There’s not much substance.
Dee reviewed Insane by Rainald Goetz
An lengthy exercise of asyndetic paraxism
5 stars
Jarring but captivating read.
Dee finished reading Insane by Rainald Goetz
Dee started reading Insane by Rainald Goetz
Dee reviewed The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that …
5/5
5 stars
Uncertain where to start with this one. I could copy paste a synopsis of the Book of Job and then claim the bible would have been better if written by Dostoevsky, but perhaps I shall instead attempt a review (except really it is an informal microessay on his reused themes…..)
This is one of the few books left in the ‘vesky corpus as first reads… I do not enjoy this fact and have been rereading each chapter of this for months and have morphed into the Pepe Silvia image.
In a way, this book was a quilt of the major themes of most of Dostoevsky’s preceding works—amplified. Childhood feels more potent a theme here than in ‘A Raw Youth/The Adolescent,’ which itself continued on from Dostoevsky’s experimentation with this in demons and Stavrogin’s upbringing—i.e., the Q of what shapes a man’s morals before he can even be considered a man? …
Uncertain where to start with this one. I could copy paste a synopsis of the Book of Job and then claim the bible would have been better if written by Dostoevsky, but perhaps I shall instead attempt a review (except really it is an informal microessay on his reused themes…..)
This is one of the few books left in the ‘vesky corpus as first reads… I do not enjoy this fact and have been rereading each chapter of this for months and have morphed into the Pepe Silvia image.
In a way, this book was a quilt of the major themes of most of Dostoevsky’s preceding works—amplified. Childhood feels more potent a theme here than in ‘A Raw Youth/The Adolescent,’ which itself continued on from Dostoevsky’s experimentation with this in demons and Stavrogin’s upbringing—i.e., the Q of what shapes a man’s morals before he can even be considered a man? The Demons parallels extend to Kolya’s relationship with God, a relationship which only reads as a better developed version of Shatov’s relationship with God…
My favourite parallel, however, is the reappearance of idolatrous relationships like the one seen between Kolya and Alyosha, which mirrors Verkhovensky and Stavrogin to the extent I had to double check I was reading the right book.
“Hurrah! You are a prophet. Oh, we shall get on together, Karamazov! What delights me most is that you treat me quite like an equal. We aren’t equals, you are better! But we shall get on. All this last month, I’ve been saying to myself, ‘Either we shall be friends at once, forever, or we shall part enemies to the grave!” (TBK)
“…They just don’t love idols, but I love an idol! You are my idol! You insult no one, yet everyone hates you; you have the air of being everyone’s equal, yet everyone is afraid of you—this is good…You are precisely what’s needed. I, I need precisely such a man as you. I know no one but you. You are a leader, you are a sun, and I am your worm…” (Demons)
He has this tendency (and unmatched execution) to embody ideologies into characters who are worshipped by his weaker, more meek archetypes that appear in almost every major piece of his. In the end, meek or assertive everyone loses themselves for an idea (Adolescent, Demons, TBK…).
Oh and not to mention the reemergence of brain fevers (Stavrogin - Demoms / Ivan - TBK).