debsbooks

Finished Dragonslippers (poor fascimile of Persepolis, etc.)

I bought and read Dragonslippers: This is What An Abusive Relationship Looks Like. Interesting cartoon diary of a woman who descends into one of these relationships and then manages to get out. It was ok, but doesn't bear comparison with something like Persepolis or Maus.

Anal fixations, castration complexes, and ratmen, oh my!

Reading a bunch of stuff for my "Modernism and Masculinity" class:

• My Own Private Germany by Eric Santner
• The Schreber Case by Sigmund Freud
• The Wolfman and Other Cases by Sigmund Freud
• Freud, Race, and Gender by Sander Gilman

Librarything.com is pretty cool!

I just found this new website which is ALMOST everything I want in terms of book categorization. I was able to import most of my collection from Readerware, with a couple of issues:

• The import only accepts 2 MB files so I basically had to chunk up my Readerware export into about 50 files. I literally had to search (I did it by location) and then save out that search. Problem with Readerware is it should have let me just select a set of rows and export, vs. explicitly having to do a search.
• The import only sucks in the ISBN numbers and then executes a search against Amazon, Library of Congress, etc., so a) none of my custom properties came through and b) none of my entries w/out ISBN numbers (about 1,000) came through. So now I have to enter all the thousand titles into librarything search (which luckily is more comprehensive than Readerware's search)
• I like the community aspect where you can share out your library with everyone (check mine out right here), and I like that it's online, but I also don't really like the idea of having some of the comments about inscriptions and also locations in my home out there. It would be great to have the ability to only show certain properties.

But also librarything does some pretty cool stuff like show you a random list of books from your library, which not only is (ostensibly) interesting to other people but also interesting to me! They also let you create a blog widget, which I'm displaying on the page now.

So what I will likely do is work to get librarything to the point where it matches my local readerware database, then just enter in readerware and then do periodic imports to librarything. Not perfect yet, but maybe someday.

Wow, haven't posted in a few months

So much stuff to list. Here are a few, will remember more later.

Recently when I was procrastinating about something I read The Valley of Fear and Selected Cases by Arthur Conan Doyle (one of my Penguin Classics!). I've never read any Sherlock Holmes cases, but one year in high school I read 81 Agatha Christies in a row until I wanted to throw up. (Yeah, there are more than 81). Sherlock Holmes is much better.

Other stuff I've been reading for this "Modernism and Masculinity" course:

• Modernism and Masculinity
• The Gender of Masculinity
• Read Death and Venice again in a new translation (Michael Henry Heim)
• Confusions of Young Toerless by Robert Musil

Finished Plays Unpleasant

by George Bernard Shaw. My dad's name was Steven Bernard Weissman and a long, long time ago my grandmother told me (I think) that the Bernard was after George Bernard Shaw. GBS was also a progressive socialist so I think that's why the family liked him. I thought these plays would be good, but I also thought I wouldn't get too much out of them, especially since I already knew what "Mrs. Warren's Profession" was, but they were brilliant. Especially The Philanderer. So I have officially finished another Dad book. More later on the next one I will read.

Penguin Classics!!!!

Ok, my wonderful husband got me my dream, the ENTIRE Penguin Classics Collection, for my birthday! This includes the Twentieth Century Classics, which are great. I have to say, I do like the "old-style" Penguin covers (the ones with most of the space taken up by the pictures and the white-on-black "faceplate") better than the plain black with small pic that they have today, but it is still wonderful to have these in my house. Here are the statistics:

• 1037 total books
• 80 exact duplicates with my collection (I of course have about a hundred or so more where I have the same book but in an edition by another publisher, but I'm not counting those)
• After entering these in the database, I now have 7,118 books (although that's probably off by about 25 or so, I'm behind in my entering.)

Anyway, I am ecstatic, and starting to dig into some old favorites (like Diary of a Madman and other Stories by Gogol.)

Finally started another Dad book; finished The House of Paper and the Peneloppiad

Haven't posted in a while. Been spending all my time on reading for class (Comparative Colonialisms), with a couple additional diversions.

Books for Class

• The Lover by Marguerite Duras
• Phantasmatic Indochina by Pavinong Norindr
• Colonizer and Colonized by Albert Memmi
• Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Others:

• The House of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez. This is a great novel about books. I won't give away the plot but something happens to a person's book collection and I have to say I was more distressed than in hearing most tales of actual people getting hurt. I must warn you, it has more than a few touches of "magical realism," which I hate (although based on an NYRB review I do think I will have to pick up Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the latest novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). This is another Reader's Subscription book. It's amazing that I read so many book reviews, etc., and then I still find brand new stuff I've never heard of on Reader's Subscription and it's great!
• The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood. I am a sucker for books that give the point of view of some relatively minor character in a classic book. This one is self-explanatory. I am not in general a fan of Margaret Atwood, but I thought The Handmaid's Tale was stunning, and I always at least look at her new stuff. I found this one in Powell's, again, I hadn't heard of it before, and I was pretty amazed that I hadn't. I also picked up the new Kurt Vonnegut (one of my all-time favorite authors) book, A Man Without a Country, which I also didn't know existed until I went to Powell's.

And I've started to read Plays Unpleasant (one of my Penguin Classics!) which includes Mrs. Warren's Profession and The Philanderer by George Bernard Shaw. This is a Dad book.

Finished Shop Talk

This was a nice little book I didn't know existed. Philip Roth interviewing a bunch of Jewish authors in the 80s and early 90s. Enough fun--onward to a Dad book (GBS maybe?) and Inventing Eastern Europe--have to start compiling my list of books for exams. I might actually graduate soon!

Finished A Hole in the Heart of the World

Now I need to get back to the books I am supposed to be reading.

More Jewish Books in progress

From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism is another book I finished over the past few weeks. Also in progress:

• Still have not finished War and the Iliad
• Robert Pinsky's The Life of David
• A Hole in the Heart of the World, that traces a set of Jewish families and how they survived being Jewish in Eastern Europe
• Reading the preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion by Leo Strauss, which is kind of a meditation on Jewish history.