Today: Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness. Malarial, violent, sardonic. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this book. The narration by Marlow (enclosed by the other narration) tends to editorialize, which is sometimes annoying.

The mostly short, Saxon words make the text flow well, so I found the brisk (allegro) version fine. [More »]

I’m still managing to watch a book per weekday/evening; uploading the movies is another matter. Without the benefit of an upload client, getting a series of movies corresponding to a 400-page book onto Revver’s server is an …um… ordeal. So I apologize for falling behind in posting the books. I’ll use the weekend to catch up—but next week I may begin blogging each book as soon as I’ve read it, even if I’ve only uploaded the first couple of movies for the book. Anyway, you can always subscribe to a book’s feed and you’ll receive all the parts as they appear!

Today: Oscar Wilde’s contribution to the Gothic genre, The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s an allegory of moral corruption, as you probably already know. The cover art is Narcissus by Gyula Benczúr. [More »]

Today: Siddhartha: An Indian Tale. I’ve read it twice now: first to edit the grammar in the Project Gutenberg version, then for pleasure and enlightenment on my iPod.

As pretentious as it might sound—OK, as pretentious as it does sound—there are some books that one ‘has to’ read again every ten years. For me, there’s Moby-Dick (if only because, like a Simpsons rerun, it eventually seems brilliantly witty again). Siddhartha, thanks to its seven-ages-of-man structure, might be another.

While the Gutenberg version is fairly good, I had to administer coups de grâce, in the form of semicolons, to some of its endlessly appositional clauses. The resulting version is 95 per cent proper English. But the writing style, full of long sentences, is still hard to parse. Therefore I highly recommend the adagio version. [More »]

Stumbled across a beautiful track from The Mountain Goats:

Raskolnikov felt sick
But he couldn’t say why
When he saw his face reflected
In his victim’s twinkling eye.
Some things you’ll do for money
And some you’ll do for fun
But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one.

Of course, Raskolnikov did it for a number of reasons…

Today’s book is the Gothic classic by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.” [More »]

You’ve seen Match Point, now watch the book.

As in most Russian literature, the patronymics and cute-names can be confusing. So here’s a guide to understanding Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece: ‘Rodion Romanovitch’ and ‘Rodya’ refer to the same person, the protagonist Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. ‘Dounia’ refers to his sister, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikov. Their middle names indicate that their father was called Roman. It’s downhill from there! [More »]

Every day, I read a book on my iPod. Or rather, I watch one—that is, watch a video of the book’s words in motion.

All the videos will be posted on this blog, so you can watch a book a day too! Read online or (if you have a video iPod) on the bus or in bed.

Good books ask us to engage with new ideas, which is mentally demanding in its own right. But reading is physically demanding as well. This project arose from my belief that it shouldn’t be.

It takes hundreds of optical jumps (”saccades”) to read a single page of traditional text. This is probably why we refer to “getting through” a book as a kind of achievement. But what if the words came to the reader’s eyes and not vice versa? In other words, what if books could be played like videos, films and songs? Welcome to bliterature.com.

This project is dedicated to everyone who never “got through” War and Peace.