If you were stuck in a library with only one writer to read...

for three months of going in 9-5, who would it be? You can read critical work on that writer as well,just to flesh things out.

might finally read/finish ulysses, so joyce i guess

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers

Gibbon

James.

ditto

Faulkner

Shakespeare

Three months of 9-5 is a very long time, there aren't many writers who could fill that. If I were able to read critical work as well, and able to read deeply into all the allusions and subject matter, then I'd probably take up the opportunity to really dig deep into Pynchon. You could probably fill a while month with each of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against The Day on their own.

This is cheating a bit because it would involve a lot of reading other writers on nuclear physics/Balkan politics/quarternions/astronomy.

Faulkner is a good one as well.

was v much considering pynchon too

yes, was gonna nominate james, too - p prolific, p high quality control, gd non-fiction by him, and abt him, and his fiction seem to invite and reward re-reading.

This is just PhD research, dude, some of us have had to do this irl.

pynchon is a terrible answer, you could read everything in a fortnight or so and then it would just be reading shitty phd theses

xp

right i was going to say I basically did this with Dryden. But anyway there are a few others I'd really enjoy doing this for – Milton, Swift, Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Dickens – and lots more where I'd be ok, sure, why not, three months reading Coleridge, it'll be interesting.

agree strongly with nakh.

I just got James' two memoirs out of the library, which I've never read -- the dude wrote so much

Faulkner is a good choice. Hardy too.

this is probably going to be someone like hume or goethe

do Germans still read Goethe? Outside Faust he's this undiscovered country for me, maybe because he hasn't been translated well?

yeah i think they still read goethe

Yeah Pynchon doesn't stand up unless you can follow through into the other subject matter, which is cheating.

There's a v enjoyable Auden/Mayer translation of Goethe's Italian Journey

nb woof you have reminded me of this risible tryhard in yesterday's evening standard

Let me reiterate: anyone who tries to run onto a football pitch and attack a player needs to be hauled off to the local nick and chucked down the stairs, or issued with a community order, or whatever they do to you these days. And civilised, modern society has no place for racism.

But part of the pleasure of football is what William Hazlitt called “the pleasure of hating”. Hazlitt wrote that “life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men,” and this drills down to the point of the ‘beautiful’ game. It is theatre for men.

Last line is the killer.

ikr

Theatre for Men is the new fragrance from Hugo Boss iirc

ha. hacks love hazlitt.

particularly when fearlessly articulating difficult truths.

Balzac

de quincey is another who has enough minority interest bibliography to last a few months but the challops could get overwhelming

hegel probably

yeah, de quincey is the right sort of shape to be good for three months, but I think the bad stuff really really drags, don't think I'd be happy if I landed him as a reading project.

Could you wring three months out of Thomas Mann if you include all the essays etc?

simenon would be fun! or wodehouse. i was looking at a bunch of trollope books the other day and i wanna read some. that would be a good opportunity. or balzac.

blyton

I love Wodehouse but I think I'd go a bit batty after month one.

Trollope would be cool, i walk in to the magic three month library prison knowing nothing, come out as a mad over-informed Barchester enthusiast.

Ruskin.

Kerouac then Denton Welsh

the internet

freud

I'd want a writer who wrote at a very high level, because if you're going to be stuck on a diet of only one writer's books, it had better be a varied nourishing diet with a lot of detail and complexity, depth and interest, breadth of scene and action. I would look for a versatile writer who didn't confine himself (herself) to the laborious working out of a few themes that are returned to over and over with minimal variations. Someone with humor as well as seriousness. I would want a large corpus of work, so that after I'd run through it once, I could return to the start with a keen interest to see what I'd forgotten or missed the previous time through.

Given that checklist, Shakespeare fits that profile better than anyone else and does so by a very considerable margin.

Some serious contenders he beat: Tolstoy, Henry James, Gibbon, Joyce, William James, Chaucer, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Proust.

u would blast through tolstoy in waaay under a month though

i can only imagine myself ever reading a substantial fraction of trollope or balzac in a situation like this

cd spend 3 months 9-5 trying to parse just 1 page of hegel

Aimless otm, except that my list of contenders are more lightweight. Maybe for era I'd pick Hemingway - I imagine there'd be a lot of crit that'd be fun to read, because it wouldn't be all metatextual, it'd be about Meaning! and Action!

Or one of the big Russians

i am kinda tempted to actually try this, except i have permanent reader's ADD and it's nearly impossible for me to only read one book at a time.

gibbon is actually a great choice. maybe montaigne. lincoln's collected works would be great to peruse for a while.

Cosign on Faulkner & James.

This would be a good way for me to make headway with Doris Lessing, tbh.

Isherwood, maybe? If all his drafts and unpublished works were included.

this is one really fucked up library that only has the one author

agree pynchon would be dull as. zola maybe? someone with that sort of project.

derrida if you could read the texts he was commenting on. yes, this is cheating.

wait n/m, definitely plato

the other advantage to shakespeare is you get the best criticism.

current desire is Kant, actual life is Deleuze. Taking fiction into consideration would be difficult cuz there aren't many people I'd like to read with that intensity, so the scholarship would be important, and then there aren't many people I'm interested in enough for three months of scholarship to seem like a good idea. But someone like Sophocles could be fun.

Nietzsche

cosign james and balzac.

Kerouac then Denton Welsh

― *tera, Friday, December 14, 2012 5:31 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

an ex gave me a sheaf of photocopies of denton welsh to read and it was truly amazing.

"I felt nothing but all the sadness and parting and dying and diseases in the world. All the accidents and hate and the long everlasting going on-ness of it all" -- "everlasting going on-ness of it all" is astonishing, beautiful.

& then, a few pages later....

"We got up to go, leaving the egg-shells on the ground. I think of those terribly sad egg-shells lying in the wood now. I feel that I shall go back to visit them."

i mean, "terribly sad egg-shells" ..."I feel that I shall go back to visit them."

just perfect.

Robert A. Caro

RL Stevenson, Browning, yes Coleridge, no de Quincey... wait, at station, brb.

Robert Shields. You could keep a diary.