61-65/150

[potted_music]

Title: The Secret History of Moscow
Author: Ekaterina Sedia
Genre: urban fantasy
Book Number/Goal: 61/150

I expected to like this book (a step away from the cliched pseudo-western-European mythological creatures permeating most urban fantasies is always a good thing), but was disheartened by the victim discourse the first ~70 pages are so rich in: I can only observe the author wallowing in self-pity & pity for his compatriots for so long. Good thing I had not put down the book though, for the second half of it is AWESOME (so awesome in fact that its' awesomeness requires capslock, yes :) ).

It tells a story of a the city below the city, the Moscow of pagan deities, but also the Moscow of the Decembrists, the Jews, the dissidents, etc. - the nooks & crannies where all the marginalized or ignored histories are stored and relived, forever & ever. This plays based on popular history & historiography made me fall for this book, and fall hard at that.


Title: The Devil's Dictionary
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Genre: satire
Book Number/Goal: 62/150

The Devil's Dictionary is a collection of aphoristic definitions of various words & concepts that are supposed to be cynical, cutting and funny, but which I found hopelessly, painfully didactic. Some were indeed funny though. One example: APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

Title: Poetics
Author: Aristotle
Genre: classic literature
Book Number/Goal: 63/150

I have a feeling that there's nothing in it that one doesn't get through simple cultural osmosis :( Our culture & vocabulary for discussing texts is too influenced by him for it to be any different, but that's also the reason why returning to the roots, so to speak, is not particularly enlightening.

Title: The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America [read in Ukrainian translation]
Author: Daniel Belgrad
Genre: cultural history
Book Number/Goal: 64/150

Most everything I know about cultural history, the complex analysis of culture, and explicating ideological meanings from visual texts, I learned from Prof.Belgrad's courses, so, while I find some of his ideas (like the division of culture into the high, the low, and the spontaneous) a little too far-fetched, this book still feels me with nostalgic glee. He connects abstract art, jazz, several trends in dances, the beatniks' poetry and many more artifacts of culture into one grander scheme of opposition to the dominant ideology, and one simply cannot help marveling at the scope.

Title: Війна і слово. Мілітарна парадигма літератури соціалістичного реалізму [War and Word. The Military Paradign in Socialist Realism Literature - in Ukrainian]
Author: Iryna Zakharchuk [Ірина Захарчук]
Genre: litcrit
Book Number/Goal: 65/150

This is definitely one of the best works of lit.analysis published in Ukrainian in the last couple of years. A postcolonial reading of the classical socialist realism novels & dramas provides a deconstruction of founding Soviet myths (the demonized close other, the ways said other was constructed, etc.).