'To write a beautiful ya' / Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 12

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Books I've actually finished (again) lately: 59

I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it.

- Ludo, aged 11

On Oxford

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Facebooks - I

So, this thing is going round that you name ten books that had a major impact on you.

Ten books is not enough.

--

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann
One of the many biographies of The Doors [I will endeavour to recall         the particular volume]
The New English Hymnal - various
Tintin [all of] - Hergé
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields
The Collected Stories of... - Lydia Davis

--

Notes / Self-imposed Rules:

1) No particular order of importance.
2) Links are to editions read, where possible.
3) One book per author.
4) -ish. Book stipulated is either first read or first enjoyed.

Two classic comments on (the writings of) Helen DeWitt

Joe has found that if you want to sleep with a woman you have to spend a lot of time talking to her about her interests.

- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details. 

- Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Sunday Book Review

Witt

The problem is not that I am speaking from a position of ignorance. I am speaking from a position of knowledge to people who don't know what knowledge would look like.

- Helen DeWitt, 'Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon'

Books begun - quarter ending October 16th

The Fermata - Nicholson Baker
Samuel Johnson - Walter Jackson Bate
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
The Emperor of Scent - Chandler Burr
The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Last Samurai* - Helen DeWitt
The Inheritors - William Golding
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms - Stephen Jay Gould
The Love-Adept - LP Hartley
I Am Not Jackson Pollock - John Haskell
The Gift - Lewis Hyde
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
The Interrogation - JMG le Clézio
The Washing of the Spears - Donald R Morris
The Blind Eye - Don Paterson
Timoleon Vieta Come Home - Dan Rhodes
A Book of Liszts - John Spurling
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
The Village in the Jungle - Leonard Woolf

* already read